Confessions Quotes
The Inquisition had tortured De Molay and his fellow Templars forcing them to confess to blasphemy, homosexuality and other capital crimes. Finally De Molay was sentenced to be burned at the stake. At the last moment he confessed to having lied under torture.
The Khmer Rouge were as brutal as any, regime that ever was in power. Undoubtedly he was tortured so it is hard to tell if he was confessing to something real or saying what his torturers wanted to hear.
Many cultures and nations, even after a century will not admit to the human rights violations that previous governments might have committed. Most dramatic is the Turkish government's not even allowing studies or discussions about the organized government mass murders of citizens of Armenian extraction—–the so called "Armenian Genocide ", but even in his native Poland there was and has been little admission of those Poles who collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis in the murder of millions of polish citizens and stole the residences, farms and other properties of Jews and other Poles who the Germans sent to concentration camps and even for the few who survived threatened them with death when they returned to reclaim their own property. Most modern societies have great difficulty coming to grips with police brutality and often denying that it is an endemic problem as opposed to one or two "bad apples".
Earlier in the manual, the illegality of such techniques is stated. Later there are suggestions for the use of duress. See {597790}
In 1877 Wasburn was dropped from the List of Ministers by the Unitarian Church. He had become very critical of organized and orthodox religion of all kinds.
It should be noted that at the beginning of the manual the reader is told that force is illegal. Then later, the manual tells the interrogator that headquarters approval is required for torture of use of chemicals. And still later there are instructions such as this quotation {597792}.
The “third degree” was widely used by police throughout the nation. It was in relatively progressive New York City that the practice was first widely investigate, exposed and curtailed. Most of the country followed suit, but unfortunately, the practice still exists, but is much less common than in the 1930s.
Many of the Church wanted Wycliff excommunicated, but the King and Parliament seemed to like his writing and sermons. So he was protected in his lifetime. He died at the age of 60 of a stroke. After his death the Church burned all his books that had been banned, and exhumed his body. That was burned at the stake and his ashes scattered in a river. Martin Luther did not try to reform the Church in a vacuum. There had been various critics of the Church before Luther and Wycliff was one. The last statement in this quotation was the one that really hit the then mostly corrupt clergy where it hurt.
He had been exiled to the United States.
