This part of Cyrano's rant stood out for me:
". His voters long for those grotesque historic eras known as "The Crusades," "The Inquisition," and the "Salem Witch Trials.""
1. That is a libelous accusation to make, openly accusing them of seeking bloody genocide. It would be on par with implying that Black Lives Matter activists long for the Crown Heights Riots, or that Occupy Wall Street types long for the French Revolution/ Reign of Terror.
2. It demonstrates his ignorance of history. He implies that it's religious fanatics eager to spill a little "Unbeliever" blood and advance the faith, but in real life, with each of those atrocities, while religious motives were given by those in charge as the public face/ justification for the massacres, in real life the people at their heads secretly sought goals that were blatantly contradictory to the Christian faith. The Crusades were really about expanding the king's political authority with corrupt church leaders being offered substantial benefits for providing it with religious backing. The Spanish Inquisition was similar to this, just with slightly different dressing. The Salem Witch Trials were driven largely by greed (Many wealthy and unethical landowners such as Thomas Putnam accused their neighbors in order to acquire their property at auction when the neighbors were executed), petty spite (Many other people were accused because their accusers held past grudges against them), and a desire for attention/ admiration on the part of those doing the accusing.
3. On the subject of historical ignorance, nearly all of the people accused/ persecuted in the Salem Witch Trials (Including an ancestor of mine who was a defendant in the Trials) were CHRISTIANS who were mainly accused for the reasons listed in my previous point. One of the people executed during the Salem Witch Trials was a Puritan minister named George Burroughs who had served as a pastor in Salem for a while, and was accused partly because of grudges held against him by members of his former congregation, with the only real basis being that he possessed slightly abnormal physical strength. Right before he was hanged (Contrary to popular belief, none of the twenty people executed in the Salem Witch Trials were burned at the stake), he loudly and fully recited the Lord's Prayer, which according to the superstition back then, witches were physically incapable of reciting all the way through, but they hanged him anyway.
