His Majesty occasionally assigns me some instructional reading. To improve my moral character, as he supposes.   

From the book:

With sixty or seventy men at sick call, the Japanese gave Doc half an hour to examine and diagnose the lot. If he did not classify enough men as fit to work, he got a beating. There never was a morning when his numbers came up to the Japanese quota, so they beat him every day.

The same guards who would kick him in the crotch before breakfast wanted him to treat them. They came to him on the quiet, after dark, with VD. The Japanese Army did what most armies did to men with the pox or the clap — fined them and busted them. So the sorry guards would buy an ampoule of black-market Salvarsan and bring it to Doc to inject them. Doc had his own use for Salvarsan; it was good for certain kinds of malaria. Getting ready to inject his first syphilitic guard, Doc told him what was true; The ampoule held 900 milligrams, the standard dose for syphilis was 450, and once the ampoule was broken the drug was only good for another half hour; it spoiled in air, actually turned to poison. Considering that, would the guard mind if Doc used the leftover for his malarias, 150 milligrams each for three of them? The moment Doc finished giving the shot, the guard grabbed the ampoule, threw it down, and stamped on it.

The recycled post title is to remind the reader that hellcraft is practiced among all peoples, except Zion peoples, of which we have had precious few historical examples.

His Majesty has occasionally practiced a bit of hellcraft himself. Naturally, he is not a believer in God, just in Power. Even the Force is to him just another source of Power. I have privately wondered at his lack of vision, but I imagine he feels the same way about me. He has said that you don’t know exhilaration if you’ve never shot lightning bolts out your fingers, and regrettably, I have no living fingers out of which to shoot lightning bolts. (Though I must add that Force-choking the living sin out of jerks who desperately need choking never gets old.)

Anyway, I once had the temerity to ask Palpatine if bringing order to the galaxy really required the occasional atrocity. He simply pulled a book off his shelf, handed it to me, and said, “You tell me.” It was a copy of Inferno. Palpatine’s point was clear: If God Himself finds it necessary to practice hellcraft, how in hell is a mere Galactic Emperor supposed to maintain order without it?

I have a feeling His Majesty hasn’t bothered to read the occasional LDS tract I’ve left on his desk, or he might have known that the Mormon concept of hell is a bit different from Dante’s. Still, this business of suffering sufficient to cause Christ Himself to tremble with pain and bleed at every pore is a bit unsettling, even if it’s only for a limited period of time and even if, in the end, the damned soul is better off for the experience.