ABSTRACT
Every social group, large or small, has its enemies and its friends, always portrays its friends with affection, and, at some level of intensity, always portray that enemy as a danger. With the inquisitorial pattern well established, starting in 1478 the Christian secular powers of Spain proceeded to eradicate Jews and Muslims from their territory. It is only because the power of the Spanish empire was a threat to British and other empires that the world knows so much about the Spanish Inquisition and so little about the French, Italian, and British Inquisitions. The twentieth-century rhetoric of fear engineered to gain the loyalty of populations for the protection of the powerful began much earlier in history than the rise of the Soviet Union as a world power; it went back to the American and French Revolutions and the declaration of rights for all men.
