File talk:Lisbon1755hangingdetail.JPG

message: *Regarding your summary statement on the editing of this image:
Since I can't seem to get this comment to show up in the edit summary, I will state it here.   I find  odd indeed your edit summary statement "there is no evidence that these are 'looters' being hanged" considering the caption of the Kozak collection you cite for the image states:  "Lisbon a few days after the earthquake. Camping outside the damaged town, executions of robbers and looters." Also,  fyi, I have several sources, cited in the article discussion page, that give evidence for the hanging of 34 looters by civil authorities. If you want to get "technical" that maybe these were robbers or murderers or arsonists, not looters, that is fine.  But then where is your evidence that priests were "supervising" when no source I have found states that it was anyone other than civil authorities that ordered the executions? And why, if they are "supervising," is one holding up a crucifix, the other reading from a book, the articles necessary and the actions of priests administering sacramental last rites?  (NB The about.com caption is unattributed, and is rather less credible than the Kozak collection's caption, since it lacks proof that was what the priests were doing.  Especially when it is not uncommon at all for priests, ministers, rabbi's, etc. to be present at state sanctioned executions - for spiritual purposes, not in supervisory capacities - and the Lisbon hangings were state ordered, not church ordered). I am sorry if these facts lead me wonder if your unattributed caption is a poor attempt to continue to implicate these priests, without evidence, in the hanging of earthquake survivors. Polycarp7 21:51, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)

message: Polycarp7, I have turned to my nearest dictionary (Webster's Second Edition, 1934).  I find that the word "supervise" is defined as "To oversee for direction; to superintend; to inspect with authority; as, to supervise the printing of a book; also, to exercise supervision over; as, to supervise a department in a school or business."  In its intransitive usage, the word means "To exercise supervision; to serve as supervisor."  When we turn to the word "supervisor," we find multiple definitions and contexts, including (principally) "One who supervises; an overseer; inspector; superintendent; as, a supervisor in a factory; specif., on some U.S. railroads, a roadmaster," and a secondary definition of the word as "A spectator; a looker-on."  
This, in fact, was the way Shakespeare used the word, and it remains current usage in my own household.  Perhaps you think it a bit antique of me to use the word "supervision" in that way (just as it is antique of me, perhaps, to use the word "constabulary"), but I believe the word is accurate here.  Again, if you don't like it, you are welcome to change it yourself.  
I appreciate, and am sympathetic to, your interpretation of the engraving as one showing priests delivering last rites.  I think it is obvious that at least one of them is doing so, though I can't make out the book you are talking about.  What's curious here, perhaps, is why it takes at least two priests to do a job that one priest normally performs alone.  It seems to me that at least one of those priests is there for some other reason, perhaps as a spectator or looker-on (yes, a supervisor) of the hanging.  The priests are not shown performing the hanging, nor attempting to stop it; they are present, and engaged to the event (i.e., not looking away).  No we don't know what the people are being hanged for -- and we really can't fairly extrapolate from other sources, because we only have this image before us to caption.  (Despite the Kozak caption, there is nothing on this image that says anything about looters, or murderers, or criminals.  The title of the engraving is "The Ruins of Lisbon."  That's it, and that's all we have to work with.  I'm not the editor of Kozak.)  I could ask you: why are the priests, and the constables, seemingly indifferent to the mayhem and crime that's going on before their eyes?  If they are hanging criminals, why aren't they stopping other people from doing the same thing? Is this image itself a sham, an example of anti-Catholic or anti-clerical bias in Germany in 1755?  I don't know.  All I have tried to do is caption it fairly, accurately, and responsibly. I am describing what's in the image.
There's nothing in the caption about "roaming priests" or any other such thing.   You may have lost sight of this, but I was the Wikipedia user who deleted that Wikipedia reference to "roaming priests."  I thought it was a slur.  I am sensitive to anti-clerical and anti-Catholic bias, and yes, I have a fair bit of frontline experience with it (see below).  You've explained your reasons, but that doesn't change the simple truth at the heart of the matter -- you left that anti-Catholic "roaming priests" slur in the Wikipedia article when you could have removed it yourself, and you neglected to say as much in your own reporting. You have quite disingenuously insisted -- after the fact -- that you are "not a contributer [sic], just a user" of Wikipedia.  That's untrue.  There's plenty of evidence that you edited the main page of the entry, and did not remove the slur when you could have done so.  As for your discussion page editing, you are prolific indeed (see Internet troll).
While I think you made a fair complaint about the Washington Post, you misrepresented the Wikipedia process in your article by not pointing out explicitly that you could have removed the slur yourself, and that you were invited to do so.  That omission unfortunately undermined your larger and more important case, and alienated this particular Wikipedia user, who might otherwise have been an ally.  (By the way, I was also offended by your inflammatory use of the word "claimed", as in the phrase "the person with whom I was corresponding claimed [emphasis added] not to have written the line."  Just think about it for a minute, in light of the copy you have now restored to the Talk page.  You were well aware that Muriel had not authored the original slur, and were well aware that she was not defending something she had written in the first place. So that's just an awful insinuation.)
Yes, there is horrible anti-Catholic prejudice in the world.  It exists, and it is a terrible thing.  I was in Northern Burma (Myanmar) in early 1992, travelling as a tourist, when -- to my considerable surprise -- I found myself for the first time in nearly two weeks without my official "guide" (a presumed government spy, one of whom was assigned to supervise every English-speaking tourist at that time).  Rather ingeniously, I was whisked aside for several hours by individuals who told me they had information of great import that needed to be delivered to the West.  In recent days and weeks a number of towns and villages had been destroyed, razed, simply because they were Catholic (to be specific, they were ethnic Karen villages). Tens of thousands of people had been made homeless.  The anti-Catholic pogrom was not new, but the extent and degree of this persecution seemed to be increasing at an alarming rate.  On tiny sheets of paper, accounts of recent atrocities had been spelled out: towns, names, dates, excruciating details.  "Give these to the Pope," I was told.  
When you are told to give something to the Pope, and particularly something of this nature, you simply do what you are told.  No one, by the way, ever asked if I was Catholic (I am not).  Yes, smuggling out that information came at some personal risk, and there was a very harrowing multi-hour search at the airport in Rangoon (they went through everything, obviously having been tipped off to some irregularity in our normal tourist itinerary).  But whatever the risk to me, it was nothing like the risk to the people who gave me the information in the first place, who in effect were trusting their own lives to the hope that I and my travelling companion could leave the country safely with the information intact.  Yes, we were successful.  And I am pleased to report that within just a few hours of my arrival in Bangkok, with no prior exposure to Vatican back channels, the information was delivered.  (That, too, was an adventure!  I did not literally get the papers to the Pope, which was obviously impossible, but passed them to a vetted church emissary.  The news was reported widely within a short period of time.)  
I don't write all this to pat myself on the back -- what happened simply happened.  If there's any lesson to be drawn from it, it's that I would ask anyone who ever reads this, whatever their faith (or lack of it), that they would simply do the same thing, the right thing, in a similar circumstance.  Bias and persecution, motivated by religion or against someone's religion, is simply unacceptable in this world.  Persecution is particularly egregious when it is justified in the name of wrongs committed centuries ago.  While the Catholic Church has been slow to recognize many of its past mistakes, to its credit, it has acknowledged them (to wit, the Inquisitions, which continued in Portugal against suspected heretics -- marranos or crypto-Jews -- through and beyond the time of these hangings in 1755). To my mind, no discussion of this "roaming priest" controversy is really accurate without mentioning the wider context of the Portuguese Inquisition, which began long before the earthquake and which continued long afterwards. Unfortunately, there are many examples in 18th century Portugal of Catholic priests supervising the arbitrary execution of suspected heretics, who, by the way, were customarily burned at the stake (note that dry firewood was in short supply after the earthquake and tsunami... as Voltaire put it, perhaps facetiously, "hanging was not customary" for presumed heretics).  Yes, Voltaire, and the historical reality of the long-running Portuguese Inquisition, are probably at the origin of this "roaming priests" slur.  But if we want to understand what happened, we need to look at all the facts with open eyes, and acknowledge all the facts.  
As Gandhi wrote, an eye for an eye only makes the world go blind.  For my part, I apologize for the distress obviously caused to you by my posts on the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake Feature Article Nomination page. 
A final word, and I don't mean to preach:  can we both take a step back from this, perhaps meditate on the bigger issues raised here, on the real everyday victims of bias (both pro-Catholic and anti-Catholic), and perhaps find the way to draw, in your own words, a positive lesson from the 1755 Lisbon earthquake?  That would make a great Part Three article, I think. Sandover 01:11, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: [[User:Sandover|Sandover]] responds

message: Polycarp7: How about using what you wrote as a draft for the forthcoming entry for the Portuguese Inquisition?  If you don't, I will.  I really didn’t know any of this, so thank you for taking the time to spell out, in particular, the procedural details of the Inquisition (for the understanding really does come from knowing the details).  Of course the “roaming priests” slur isn’t “reasonable”-sounding at all in light of all this information.  I’m looking forward to reading your Part Three.  You’re a good and persuasive writer, and I’m sure you will make the points effectively.  
I’m a little short of time this evening — so can’t reply at great length — but of course you have permission to use what I wrote about Burma (Myanmar) in Part Three or in a future article.  The issue is important, and it makes sense to treat it separately in its own right.  Perhaps you can offer a teaser in Part Three, promising a future Part Four? 
I’m glad you are interested in this, and wish I could have written myself long ago when it could perhaps have made a more direct impact in stopping some of the ongoing atrocities. But it was obvious then that if my name were public, some very unwanted attention could potentially come not only to the person or persons who facilitated the drop, but to everyone else whom I spoke with over the course of two weeks in the country.  The government would go around looking for someone to blame.  As I said, we were officially on a “tour” (although we picked our own itinerary) and therefore had a series of government escorts with us at nearly every waking moment in the country.  No doubt a record was made of everyone we met or spoke with over the course of our two week visit.  Even after 13 years, I don’t think going public is something I want to risk, since I’m sure there’s still a record of my trip. 
If you write this, two requests:  one, that it doesn’t become a guessing game, as in, who is this “Sandover” guy who was in Burma in early 1992, who ferried out that stuff.  I'm just not important. I would hate for people to speculate about my identity based on my online writing style or (even worse!) articles I’ve edited in the past. Or for someone to triangulate backwards from Rome. All I have said online is that I’m a teacher in California, and that’s all there is. I would rather this be an Everyman story.  Second, while the mechanics of how the information exited the country are actually quite interesting, I would prefer to deflect any attention away from those logistics.  No, this didn’t involve body cavities.  We’ll leave it at that.  But it was incredibly ingenious, this idea cooked up by the woman I was travelling with, and we pulled it off. Unfortunately, I’ve found that when I’ve told the story to friends (a handful over the years), they are much more interested in the drama of those few hours in the Rangoon airport than anything else.  I always feel a little deflated by this, because it misses the big picture — obviously, you see the big picture. (Friends just chalk this all up as a “human rights abuse” committed against an “ethnic minority,” and the Pope as some sort of exotic offstage peripheral figure in it.  Well, that hardly tells the story, does it?)  
I know I used the word “adventure,” but that word doesn’t really apply until we got to Bangkok.  Everything in Burma felt incredibly one-pointed, as if we were watching a movie happen that we were part of, too. There was nothing dramatic, in the sense of emotionally dramatic, about the request to take out information, the hand-off, etc. In fact, there wasn’t any debate at all between me and the woman I was travelling with about whether we would or would not take the material out of the country.  We just knew we would do it, and we did it.  No heroics.  Then and now, it all felt like a lucid dream – and I say that because it really was an unusual feeling, that feeling of intense calm, which reigned over the transfer of the materials and over every minute until we were safe in Thailand.  
However, Bangkok was a different story!  From the moment we landed and passed Thai customs we were absolutely giddy – again, until then we didn’t know who was working for whom and how the Thai and Burmese governments communicated, and so couldn’t trust anyone, and therefore treated the arrival and customs in Thailand with the same seriousness as our departure from Bangkok.  Getting through customs in Thailand was a breeze, but even so was a tremendous release.  The scramble to get the information into the right hands was incredibly intense, since some of the information we were given was time-sensitive (but again, I don’t think I can speak about that).  Fortunately, there are a lot of friendly people in Thailand who speak excellent English, and the people in the church were terrific. They had to figure out whether we were spies, too.  It's all very funny in retrospect.  
I have to sign off.  But one final note about that Lisbon aftermath engraving: I agree that the events are probably a composite of time schemes, much like in medieval or early Renaissance painting. I’ll try to add a line to caption it appropriately.  Do you think some of those uniformed men (constables) are also committing crimes?  I can’t be sure.  All best with your writing — Sandover 02:45, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Sandover replies again