Men were dying because they would not abandon their true beliefs. Naturally
all the glory belonged to the victim and all the shame to the Inquisitor
who burned him. Later, in the twentieth century, there were the
totalitarians, as they were called. There were the German Nazis and the
Russian Communists. The Russians persecuted heresy more cruelly than the
Inquisition had done. And they imagined that they had learned from the
mistakes of the past; they knew, at any rate, that one must not make
martyrs. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they
deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity. They wore them down
by torture and solitude until they were despicable, cringing wretches,
confessing whatever was put into their mouths, covering themselves with
abuse, accusing and sheltering behind one another, whimpering for mercy.
And yet after only a few years the same thing had happened over again. The
dead men had become