Goya's Ghosts

                                                                                       Promotional Poster fro Goya's Ghosts

I have just finished watching “Goya’s Ghosts” starring Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman and I shall say “what a great film and how superb all the actors are in it”.

The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Spain was one of the the regimes that exterminated most lives in human history.... and all in the name of “God” !! It lasted close to 350 years since it was established and I am so glad I was not born during that time since I would’ve been tortured and eventually burnt on a stick or brought to the Gallows Pole as soon as I learnt how to speak a word and opened my mouth regarding any matter that concerns religion or the Vatican as a religious business. Ooops....here comes the Pope to get me ! 

                                             Inquisition Torture Chamber- Bernard Picard- 1716

Anyhow, the film presents in a magnificent artistic way a vignette of the atrocities committed during those years by the Spanish Inquisition, and yet almost two centuries after it was dismantled we still see regimes around the World conducting the same inquisitorial practices with their citizens. Human race has always been obsessed with controlling the masses, inferring fear and perpetrating the so called in Spanish “Crimenes de Lesa Humanidad” or “Crimes Against Humanity” and yet supposedly nowadays these are punished in such tribunals as the international criminal court and the international court of justice in Hague, but how many of our contemporary history leaders shall be brought in front of such tribunal? How many of them should be brought to the same Gallows Pole.... And how many have been brought in actuality? I hear silence-

                                                                                     The Tribunal of the Inquisition - Francisco de Goya

On a positive note, the film mentions and reminded me of Voltaire; I used to read Voltaire as a teen in high school and then studied some of his work in Law School, and back then  I was able to see the influence that his writing had with still today’s stage acts such as Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden; dark and dense as his writing was, their music evokes pain, fear and sorrow in their lyrics as only “The dark Prince of the darkest principles” could’ve written... (I’m talking about Voltaire not Ozzy by the way)

Watch the film if you haven’t done so, regardless of your beliefs, it is our human history after all and we still have not learnt from it, and the way things are going it seems that we never will! Here is the preview

Cheers!