Technology has been used to recreate the head and voice of the king Richard III, a protagonist of Shakespeares plays.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/18/richard-iii-voice-is-recreated-yorkshire-accent/
In Act 3, Richard gives an awesome soliloguy on the mysterious, powerful, unsleeping voice of our conscience when we act in a way antithetical to God s laws.
He expresses the truth that "hafeful deeds" done to others most harm ourselves, our eternal soul, our relationship with Jesus Christ, the source of all life, our real life, our spiritual life.
Vietnam war vet Karl Marlantes expresses a similar idea when he talks about how the souls of the people he killed in the Vietnam war came to him and how he was attacked by a demon when he began to examine his conscience and consider all the people he had killed during the war as his fellow human beings.
https://billmoyers.com/segment/karl-marlantes-on-what-its-like-to-go-to-war/
The value of human life is such to God that he instituted the death penalty for all those who casually and carelessly kill their fellow human beings to deter the mass murders and genocides we see in the covid jab campaign and in the Gaza right now.
Richard
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue; it is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no. Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie; I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.
Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree;
Murder, stern murder, in the direst degree;
All several sins, all used in each degree,
Throng to the bar, crying all “Guilty, guilty!”
I shall despair. There is no creature loves me,
And if I die no soul will pity me.
And wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?
Methought the souls of all that I had murdered
Came to my tent, and every one did threat
Tomorrow’s vengeance on the head of Richard.
Shakespeare
Richard iii, Act 3
From the transcript of Karl Marlantes interivew with Bill Moyes
I had an experience with it that was pretty profound for me. I had gone to a mass for the dead with a Capuchin monk, talking to my friends that had died and talking to the enemies that I had killed. It was a very moving experience. When that was done, I went back home. That night, there was a presence that came into the room that absolutely terrified me. I mean, it was beyond anything I had ever encountered in my life. It was the archetype of all shadow.
It was-- it felt like it filled the room. And it was going to get me. And I did everything I could. I mean, I reverted to a five year old. I had a crucifix. And I was like, "Don't get me." You know, I was going to, you know, strike his heart with a wooden stake. I mean, I didn't know what was going on. But it was something that I felt that was absolutely real.
Now some people could say, "Oh, well, you were just projecting your own darkness out on the--" I don't care which way it happened. It was a very real event. And so it is there. It's waiting.
BILL MOYERS: What came of that experience that night?
KARL MARLANTES: Well, this was fascinating. I went back to the Capuchin monk. And I said-- and he said, "Whoa, I think we've been messing with something that might be bigger than we are." And he called a guy up from his order, who was in the Vatican someplace, who was more familiar with the particular ceremony. And he said that, you know, "If you're going to break evil's hold on someone's soul, evil's going to fight back."
And he said "This is probably what's happening." In other words, I had gone through this ceremony where I was beginning to distance myself. And I was beginning to understand. And I was no longer acting in this unconscious way, like, jumping on people's-- you know, hoods of their cars and kicking their windshields in. And it was sort of like he used this metaphorical language. Evil was fighting back.
And what was so funny about it is that I was in a veterans' group at the time. And was a Chumash Indian named Bear who was in the group with us. And he was a long-range patrol veteran from the Army. And I was a little bit shaky, you know? And so Bear comes up to me after the meeting. He says, "What's the matter with you today? You're jumpy as hell."
And I start telling him about this experience I had. Then he looked at me and said, "Oh, evil spirits. We know what to do with that." So we went to his uncle, or great uncle, who was a shaman. And he came back with a bowl, I mean, this was, you know, took a few hours. He said, "Just wait here."
And he came back and he had a little tape recording. His uncle had made a little tape recording. And he had some sage and stuff like this. He goes, "My uncle says just go back to your house and light this stuff on fire and play these chants and sing along with it. And the evil spirits are going to be taken care of."
So I went back and I did that. And it all evened out. And I was like, "What is this all about? It's just this symbolic, ritual stuff that we ignore in our current culture. That gets into some very deep parts of our soul that the Chumash Indians did understand. And I'll tell you a funny ending to this is that actually, after this experience, I joined the Catholic Church. And I told a friend about it. And he said, "Marlantes!" He said, "Why didn't you become a Chumash?"
BILL MOYERS: The paradox to me is this side of you that you've just described versus the other Karl Marlantes, who not only killed in Vietnam, but as you say in the book, burned men with napalm, spewed burning white phosphorous that burned deep holes right through their bodies. And then you go on to say, but this was not like killing humans. This was like killing animals.
KARL MARLANTES: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: It was when I finally killed one very young fellow that I realized I had killed the enemy.
KARL MARLANTES: Right. Again, if you are raised not to kill another human being, how you psychologically get around that -- I use the word "pseudo-speciation." It's a large word, but it means you basically turn someone else not into a human, but into an animal. And we're very good at this, in our culture. We have all kinds of names that dehumanize people. "Kraut, nigger, gook--" you know, you can name them, "towelhead, haji."
And what that does is that that suddenly makes that person not human anymore. It makes that person an animal who's not only trying to kill you, he's trying to kill your friends. Well, it's way easier to kill an animal than a human. And so there's this sort of thing where you just slip into it. They aren't human anymore. And you get the job done.
The trick is to come back. And we don't deal with that a lot in military training. There was none when I was in the military. This idea of slipping into the point where you're killing an animal and then saying you've got to come back. And a couple of things happened to me. One is kid who broke through that. But there were some guys that had cut off the ears, I mean we had been fighting for days. And their friends had been killed. And the dead bodies laying around the hole. So they cut some ears off.
BILL MOYERS: Of the corpses of the enemy?
KARL MARLANTES: The corpses of the enemy. And they stuck them to their helmets. And like I said, these are 18-year-olds. So it's like a high school letter. "Hey, look, I shot these two guys." You know? And I said, you know, "You can't do this." You know? And so I punished these two kids. And I said, "You're going to bury those bodies."
And this is not trivial, because we were still being shot at. There was a sniper around, who kept, you know, dinging at us. And so they had to go down below the lines and dig a hole. And they both started crying. And I went, "This restored--" I didn't know that, at the time. Twenty years later, I'm remembering it. That restored their humanity. They realized they were burying another person. And they felt sadness.
Again, I don't think the word is guilt. Those people were trying to kill us. But the sadness that those people were there just like we were. They were 18. We were 19, 18. And there we are killing each other. That broke through for that moment. And that's how you get around it is that you kill them when they're animals. And then you have to try to come back. If you don't, then the atrocities can start. I mean, you think of My Lai. You think of any of the atrocities, whichever enemy has contributed to them. It's because you're no longer seeing humans.
BILL MOYERS What did you think when you read that story back in the early part of this year? Sergeant Bales in Afghanistan went on a rampage and killed, I think 17--
KARL MARLANTES: Seventeen.
BILL MOYERS: --civilians, many of them were kids or children. Did anything flash through your--
KARL MARLANTES: Oh yeah. The first thing that flashed through my mind is, "What in the world is that guy doing over there on his fourth tour?" I mean--
BILL MOYERS: Fourth tour?
KARL MARLANTES: Fourth tour. And he had been wounded. And he was from the Stryker Brigade, which is at Fort Lewis, near where I live.
https://billmoyers.com/segment/karl-marlantes-on-what-its-like-to-go-to-war/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/18/richard-iii-voice-is-recreated-yorkshire-accent/
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