Horrible Lessons From The Internet Dispel Romantic Thinking

The internet has made so much available that was previously hidden from easy access that you can stumble across some of the most disturbing images and facts by accident.  That happened to me a couple of days ago and I'm going to write about it.  I will warn you that, while I won't go into detail, if you follow up online you will see some horrible photographs and read some horrific accounts of the murders of real people.  

By coincidence I had a spat with one of those atheists who make the incompetent though often repeated claim that morals precede religion in human history during the same week that I noticed the phrase "death by a thousand cuts" in something I read.  The atheist argument used an old and incompetently cited example of morality atheists often and wrongly claim is divorced from religion, The Analects of Confucius.  That is an argument, the incompetence, not to mention illiteracy of which I once wrote about.   I don't think I thought about that as, out of curiosity, I made the huge and disturbing mistake of looking up "death by a thousand cuts" online and found out that it wasn't some amusingly exotic cultural reference to be a throw away line delivered in a Charlie Chan accent in a B grade Hollywood movie but what must be one of the most sadistically barbarous and officially sanctioned forms of state murder ever devised.  It refers to the the slow and systematic cutting and dismemberment of a living person, mixing horrific torture with public shaming and the anguish of their loved ones with and the horrific prospect for the person being tortured to death believing that their punishment would be eternal, guaranteeing their disability into eternity.  And, it shouldn't ever be forgotten, this was a form of state torture-murder that was legal under what is considered one of the great beacons of civilization, the Chinese imperial government, apparently sanctioned by its official religion, Confucianism.  Though, apparently, there was a long standing, though ineffective, attempt to abolish the horrifically cruel and evil practice for centuries before it was officially abolished in 1905.  Unfortunately the practice lasted long enough to produce photographic documentation of executions carried out by that method which I would advise you avoid.  I wish I had.  Though facing the fact that when you hear the phrase tossed off in an awful movie that it was a real and horrible thing might be more responsible than preserving an ignorance of it.

I don't know if the stories of it being practiced by the Chinese communists in the decades after 1905 are true or if they are propaganda.  Heavens knows that they murdered tens of millions of people so some of those being sadistically killed is not out of the real of possibility.  Executioner is a profession that might be expected to attract people who would enjoy doing such things and dictatorial rulers certainly found it to their liking to keep the evil thing a legal and cultural institution in one of the most widely cited of high civilizations in human history. And the Chinese imperial system is far from the only government in the world that systematically practiced that form of sadistic terrorism.  The Romans, the passing of whose empire civilized people are supposed to regret as Europe "fell into a dark age" were among the most accomplished and systematic practitioners in state terror by sadistic execution.  And it is a pattern that repeats around the world, the Aztec and Incas, etc.  Just why we are supposed to regret the falling of empires is something I don't quite understand on that basis.  As bad as some of the things that follow can be, the systems they replace were almost never less bad. 

As a good, modern, anti-imperial lefty I grew up with a romantic view of cultures, religions and native governments that was entirely uninformed by their actual history.   In that I did exactly the same thing that some chauvinists do about their own culture and history, ignore the entire range of bad and evil that they contain.  Only, since I didn't happen to live in those other places, under other governmental and cultural evil, my romanticism about them ignored the burden that they imposed on the people who did live under them.   It's so easy to find the suffering of other people an acceptable price for them to pay, tolerating things on their behalf that we would campaign against if we had to live under it.

The very least we owe to those people who have been and may be the victims of official, legal torture and sadistic murder is to take that prospect as seriously as we would if it were a danger to us.  

After seeing those photographs and reading the history and descriptions of this form of state murder, I won't ever have quite the benign view of Chinese culture and history, just as finding out about the human sacrifices of the Druids and Norse pagans put me off of the nonsensically romantic view of pre-Christian Irish and Northern European culture.   The extent to which Christianity may have restrained the state from practicing that barbaric evil, it was superior to those religions that practiced human sacrifice and, whatever else you say about Christianity, its central figure was, himself, a victim of exactly that form of death under a religio-political imperial system and, in its scriptures, at least, opposed killing.  You can't say that for religio-political systems that sanction that kind of thing.  The biggest problem with Christians is that they don't practice what they profess nearly often enough.