Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will soon collapses inwards under its own largeness and lack of substance. Scene after scene of columns of soldiers marching, or standing in massed formation on parade grounds. The viewer gets bored, and starts trying to see signs of humanity intruding on the edge of the celluloid.

Wow, that sure is a lot of soldiers. Are some of them uncomfortable? Do they have itches they aren’t allowed to scratch? Where are they billeted and fed? Were there latrine pits dug somewhere? Where did Hitler go to the toilet? I would have liked a film made about these topics, and in a way, Riefenstahl made a film about the most boring aspect of Hitler’s rise to power.

I feel this way about many films: where the camera all but twists and cavorts to avoid capturing things that might be exciting. For example, although I don’t like the James Bond films, many things in their background are absolutely fascinating.

For example, the man called Ross Heilman.

He was a Jew from Florida who moved to Jamaica, renamed himself “Ross Kananga”, claimed Seminole heritage, and opened a crocodile farm. Some people have biographies that seem to be written by a random word generator, and he was one of them. At the height of his success Ross had more than a thousand crocodiles, and he would harvest their skins. In those days, crocodile skin sold for $2 a pound, and $450 for a reasonably good entire skin.

One day, location scouts for the film Live and Let Die discovered the farm, and wanted to use it as the fictional nation of San Monique. Ross obviously made quite an impression on the cast and crew, because they named the villain of the film “Kananga”. Ross doubled for Roger Moore in the infamous scene where he jumps across a river on the backs of living crocodiles, something that was hazardous to his health.

Something like that is almost impossible to do. So, I had to do it six times before I got it right. I fell five times. The film company kept sending to London for more clothes. The crocs were chewing off everything when I hit the water, including shoes. I received 193 stitches on my leg and face.”

Ross never became a film star, and he did not have long to live. In 1978, he died of cardiac arrest while spearfishing in the Everglades. Or so some stories say. There is a conspiracy.

This is from the autobiography of inventor, businessman, and filmmaker Arthur Jones.

“Later, he had so many people after him that he decided the only way out was to fake his own death, so that people would stop looking for him; so he took his grandmother out in a small boat in the Everglades in order to have a witness to his death. The plan being to turn over the boat in a spot where she could easily escape, but where he could get away; leaving the impression that he had drowned, even though his body was never supposed to be found.

“I was after him for having done one of the cruelest things I ever witnessed; he tied a bunch of crocodiles very tightly, packed them in a big trailer and then left them there for weeks. When their legs were untied their feet were already rotting off, even though they were still alive. I figured tit for tat, nit for shit, and had similar plans for him; but he was dead before I could find him. Several other people had plans for him as a result of some of his other stunts.”

It sounds implausible and hard to believe (and might have pleased Ross Heilman in this regard), but I wonder if it’s common for a man to suffer cardiac arrest at the age of 32.

“One” by Metallica has a famous section at 4:32 where Lars Ulrich plays a syncopated sextuplets on the kick drums (6 beats on, 2 beats off)…and then James Hetfield doubles it on guitar. The effect is dramatic: the guitar sounds like a machine gun.

The effect wouldn’t have worked if he’d played the cello. There’s something natural about the pairing of electric guitars and automatic guns. Although not a full rhyme, they’re at least a slant rhyme for each other. The force. The percussion. The volume. The way they harness bolts, pins, voltage, and steel to amplify something in the human condition.

But there are many guns, and if you’re drawing a comparison with high-gain metal, there’s only one gun that fits the bill. The most famous gun.

In 22 June 1941, the Wehrmacht tide overflowed Russia’s borders. Millions of Russians were killed, and millions more were wounded. In the latter category was a mechanically-inclined man called Mikhail Kalashnikov, who spent his convalescence studying mechanics and firearm design. After a few false starts and setbacks, he created his masterpiece: a gas-powered imitation of German assault rifles called the Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947 – more famously known as the AK-47.

In doing so, he joined the ranks of men like Samuel Colt, Hiriam Maxim, John Browning, and Richard Gatling – men with names that have become death. The classical Greeks believed that a society grows great when old men plant trees. Kalashnikov and his ilk are the second sort: the ones who provide fertilizer for the trees. I wonder if Mr Kalashnikov ever stayed awake at night, thinking of the bodies. All the millions and millions of them.

The AK-47 is a pragmatic weapon, easy to use, even easier to die from. Despite being ergonomically uncomfortable (and not particularly accurate), they’re cheap, can be mass produced, and function even when clogged with dust, mud, blood, sweat, and unburnt propellant. At one point, they killed 250,000 people per year. They adorn the Mozambique flag. They are simple enough for a child to use. Children often have.

Functionally, they are similar to the WW2-era German MP42 Sturmgewehr (lit: “Storm-Rifle”). I haven’t found any sources to indicate that Kalashnikov was wounded by an MP42, but it would be funny if he had. In any case, the Germans lost. The world was changing, and superior rifles no longer won wars. Truthfully, by the time Kalashnikov arrived on the scene, they didn’t even win battles.

But the world no longer has battles. Now, almost all fighting is irregular, conducted by some flavour of guerilla forces. Afghanistan. Vietnam. Sudan. The Clauswitzian ideals of battle are over, and now being a soldier means you’re crouched in a jungle, motionless, made of matter almost indifferentiate from the the mud and leaves on the ground, so fascinated by what’s beyond your gunsight that you don’t even move when a mosquito lands on your lip. In this new era of undeclared wars and uniformless fighters, the AK-47 thrives. It’s the embodiment of a Communist weapon, a different, louder voice for the proletariat.

But what about guitars? What’s the connection?

Once, music was entertainment for the rich – formal, stultified, encased in tradition. A symphony orchestra contains four rigid groups of musicians – woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings – with other subdivisions within. Everyone has a role to play, and roles that they cannot. What was that Heinlein quote about specialisation being for insects? Symphonies have always sounded cold to me, and maybe that’s why. They remind me of a hive.

Guitars are very much a common person’s instrument. They’re easy to make, easy to learn, and versatile. You can play them standing up or sitting down (evocative of the marksman’s choice of firing from the hip or the shoulder), you can play them while singing, and you can play them any way you want. There are no rules with guitar. You can change from strumming chords to playing lead melodies on the higher frets. If the guitar has a hollow body, you can slap it with your palm for percussion.

You can play a guitar sloppily and still sound good. For some styles of music (eg, grunge and shoegaze), it’s almost mandatory that you play sloppily. If a guitar goes out of tune, you can retune them in the middle of a performance. And they can take massive amounts of abuse. Ask any rock musician just how hard it is to smash a guitar on stage.

But guitars are quiet, and need amplification. The Beatles famously quit touring because they couldn’t hear their instruments over the sounds of screaming fans. Through the sixties and seventies, the wattage of stage equipment kept rising, and soon artists could impose their visions at literally deafening volumes.

In short, the guitar is to instruments what the AK-47 is to guns: a multi-purpose tool. They’re a transition from a world where maps dictate territories (the limitations of classical instruments and classical weaponry were both defining factors in the character of early war and music), to a place where the tool is servant and slave to the master’s voice.

Is there some link between the mutating forms of music and guns? Does it reflect some deeper change in the currents of the world? Biologically, evolution can follow two routes: divergence (where a species splits into two dissimilar lifeforms), and convergence (where two dissimilar species evolve to look like each other). A good example of convergence is the thylacine, which looked and acted rather like a fox despite belonging to the marsupial class. The stripes give the game away, but the skeletons are so close that it takes an expert eye to separate them.

Small arms and musical instruments almost seem to be following convergent evolution: fast, efficient, interchangeable, and they even look similar. Roy Orbison starred in a terrible movie called Fastest Guitar Alive, about a man who has a gun inside a guitar case. Maybe that’s generic, and every guitar is halfway to a gun (or vice versa). Guitars are sometimes called “axes”. We should update our terminology.

(For an earlier example of machine gun drumming, listen to “Darkness Descends” by Dark Angel at 0:53.)

Jesus proclaimed himself the light of the world. Light obtained by burning heretics on pyres is not what he had in mind. Simon Whitechapel’s Flesh Inferno is the third (or second (or who gives a fuck)) book in Creation’s Blood History series, and deals with the Spanish Inquisition. Where did it come from? What lessons should we learn from it?

Abolished in 1834, the Inquisition lives on as a symbol of unchecked power and religious tyranny. It’s a universal grindstone that sharpens any ax: religious vs secular, Catholic vs Protestant, Catholic vs Jew, authoritarian vs libertarian.

Whitechapel writes from a secular background (the first sentence contains the words “I despise the Catholic church”), and doesn’t try to be fair, because the facts (as he sees them) are prima facie unfair. The Inquisition was extremely bad, and an inevitable consequence of a worldview that denies the value of doubt. Torquemada burnt and rent flesh because he knew it was right to do so. He never questioned his own deeds: he already knew the answer.

“Am I going too far?” doesn’t even decode as a sensible question to a zealot. He was carrying out God’s will. Can you breathe too much air? Live too much life? Although nonreligious authorities can (and have) been equally brutal, but usually it’s to accomplish a goal. Religions (and there are atheistic religions) have a unique ability to commit atrocities even when it’s impractical, lacks a payoff, and causes harm to their own adherents. As CS Lewis said:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.”

The book itself is confusingly marketed. The back cover reads like a horror movie (“…during his reign of terror the dungeons of Castile were drenched in blood and it’s streets sooted with human ashes”),  and most people probably picked it up because they wanted gruesome descriptions of torture. But the book spends far more time on psychology, linguistic analysis of words and Biblical exegesis. If anything, Flesh Inferno falls between two stools (or pews): too short and polemical for an academic resource, too dry to entertain the Hardcore History crowd.

But maybe history itself is drier than commonly supposed. Although the cover blurb states that “nearly some 9,000 perished in [autos-da-fe] – and nearly 100,000 in the dungeons – during Torquemada’s reign alone” the actual book states that Torquemada was probably responsible for only around 2,000 direct executions. Is that a lot? Perhaps. It’s also the number of homicides reported in the United States of America every two weeks during the crack epidemic. Museums often feature elaborate and diabolical medieval torture equipment, but most of these are artifacts from the Victorian period. If you were tortured by the Inquisition, it would probably be with something cheap and easy to hand. A rope. A whip. Hunger and thirst. Your own body. Bad but boring.

Whitechapel is good at connecting different ideas from apparently unrelated fields. The reciting of Psalms during torture is contrasted with Pavlovian conditioning. The smell of roasting human flesh (evocative of pork) is suggested as a possible inspiration for a Spanish anti-Semitic slur “marrano” (filthy pig). I didn’t like the editorial decision to have every translated passage matched with its untranslated Spanish, regardless of length or relevance. On page 75 there’s a block of uninterrupted Spanish that spans across four straight pages. There’s simply no need for this, and it comes across as a strategy to push the book’s page count as high as possible.

Comparisons between the Inquisition and Nazism are inevitable and obvious, but Whitechapel gets something out of it: the similarities between the Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre (“cleanliness of blood”) and the Nazi concept of Blutschande (“blood defilement”). This is something I’ve always wondered – why has Christianity, a faith with overt universalist literature (Romans 5:1, among many others) so often associated with ethnic concerns of blood? Is this a universal impulse that finds its way into all human affairs? Or is there something in the religion itself that enables this thinking?

No clear answer is forthcoming. History is an Ouija board, and when you imagine the past, you are also (at least in part, sometimes in whole) imagining the present. Facts are facts, but our interpretation of them changes with the weather. Joan of Arc was a nationalist figure until that went out of fashion, an ecclesiastical figure until that went out of fashion, and now exists as a cross between a Disney princess and a “grrl power” feminist icon. Christopher Columbus has been an explorer, a pioneer, a symbol of Italian pride, and is now a disreputable villain. Soon he’ll be alchemized into something else. Time’s crucible spares nobody except the obscure and forgotten, and when we are dead our descendants will imagine inaccurate things about us.

In particular, there’s often a bias to depict the past as more violent, lurid, and gruesome than it actually was. Maybe this is to exculpate our current society – a failing civilisation can appear successful by rewriting history to be worse. Or maybe it comes from a need to create interesting stories. Romantic 19th century woodcuts of the Barbary wars depict dramatic swordfights on crowded decks, gunsmoke swirling around scimitars and turbans. The actual diaries of the soldiers involved in these battles recall lots of boredom and pipe smoking, with occasional pauses to fire a cannon. The past doesn’t complain when we revise it. Nobody’s ever been sued for libel by a historical figure. But one can’t escape the impression that historians are like those Jewish POWs who swallowed the family jewelry so it wouldn’t be discovered. Yeah, there’s a pearl in there somewhere. Are you ready to go searching through shit to find it?

The book is out of print now, and used copies might be hard to find. If you’re looking for a history book, there are surely better options available, but Flesh Inferno asks a number of interesting questions about the past, and finds an angle that probably would have been impossible within the confines of straight history. It’s difficult to study a pile of ashes and discern the causes and reasons, but it’s a worthy task, and perhaps a necessary one. Someday, fires might burn again.