I’m not attempting to be inflamatory here. I legitimately want to understand exactly what is it about certain types of killing and behavior regarding killing that make them worse than other types.
Specifically, why is it worse for a man to be beheaded than for another man to die in a random truck bombing or shooting? The results are the same, the victim is dead, his family and friends have lost a loved one, an innocent non-combatant has fallen victim to a seriously messed up situation.
Yet, certain behaviors are met with more outrage than others. Would the execution have been less offensive if the man had been shot or hung or injected with lethal poisons? Why? The result would be the same.
Suppose he had been held hostage, and died slowly of disease and malnutrition over a course of weeks or months. That would seem to me to be a worse way to go than the relatively quick way this man died. Yet, I think it might not have provoked the outrage that beheading did.
I don’t mean to minimize the horror of what happened here. My point is that the execution of an innocent non-combatant is terrible regardless of the method used, and that emphasizing the unusual method is just sensationalizing it, which seems to be exactly what the murderers wanted.
I think any sort of decapitation is thought of as extremely brutal. Whether it’s a car accident, or some kind of accident in a manufacturing plant, it seems like a horrific way to die. Aren’t there ways that you might think of as a preferable way of dying? Perhaps you’d want to die in your sleep, from old age, rather than hit by a bus and dragged to death. The same goes for beheading. It doesn’t seem like it’s “over” very quickly, as opposed to a gunshot to the head, which might at least give others the perception that death is almost instantaneous (whether it really is or not).
Yes, the execution of a innocent, non-combatant is terrible regardless of the method of execution. However, a terrorist’s objective is to get people riled up, and create fear; an especially brutal execution, such as a beheading, is more effective than shooting someone. It’s the same reason terrorists beheaded Daniel Pearl, to make sure the target takes notice.
Most people don’t want to die, and they certainly don’t want to die in pain. I would guess they would hope for the same for their loved ones.
I think it’s a more personal way of killing. The killers have to be in close proximaty to the victim and kill with their own hands. The head is also the area of the body responsible for our personalities, who we are. Sawing off a head and holding it up like a trophy is something you’d do with a deer, to do it to a human being is extremly degrading.
I can remember seeing somewhere that people were actually glad when the guillotine (if that was spelled right) was created. The guillotine made head decaptation quick and easy. Just one swack and…“SHING”… all done. Before this method was used, they used to hire the old executioners ( you know, the big guys with the mask over their heads and the double sided ax). When they decapitated someones head, sometimes due to either a dull blade, or the executioner not being strong enough to do the job with a single swing, they would have to chop and whack maybe a good 4 or 5 times before the head finally came all the way off :eek:
At the risk of getting flamed, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that decapitation is one of the best all around methods of execution. First, if a guillotine is used, death is all but instantanious, and practically no physical pain would be felt. Second, it is (as long as the machine is properly maintained) 100 percent effective. If we executed death row inmates be decapitation, we wouldn’t have their heads catching on fire from botched electrocutions; there is no chance of survival from the guillotine. Third, it seems, at least to me, to be a much more sane method of execution than pluging someone into an exectrical outlet and watching them fry. Just my $0.02.
Nope, not quite true. According to the article below, the average person remains alive about 13 seconds. When I visited the touring torture exhibit here a few years back, I remember reading that it could be as long as 45 seconds. And as the article further mentions - when does awareness disappear? Must be an interesting feeling, literally losing your head. I can imagine myself saying “oh shit, shit, shit”.
You know, thats sort of strange. What you say is definitely true, but at the same time, do you notice how we squeam at the very thought of seeing someone being executed regardless of the method used, but at the same time we will all flock to the movies in mass numbers, and pay good money to see the same things being acted out in Scary Horror movies :dubious:
That’s because the movie stuff rarely looks realistic, and we know it is a movie. I’ve long thought that if movies and TV really showed what it was like to get shot or knifed (and no, I’m only going by what I’ve read), violence would be a lot less attractive to many people. Make the guy bleed all over the place, linger on the pain rather than cut away, make people get sick. They can do amazing things with CGI now, so we don’t really have to kill any of the actors.
(Bolding mine) I know you didn’t mean for that to be funny, but I’m laughing anyway.
And you beat me to what I was going to post. It is a “One Way Only” injury. There is no chance of “getting to the victim in time” and saving him, like there is with gunshot, stabbing, drowning, and a host of other ways to die.
Yes, that is kinda odd.
Maybe we like those because we know it isn’t real.
Then again there is certainly also a curiousity to see the real thing, what death looks like.
IMHO, the reward for seeing real life death is not that pleasant, you always wish you hadn’t seen it. It is very confronting wr to your own vulnerability and fleeting existance.
In movies we can safely feed the curiosity without the confronting bit, maybe.
Here’s Cecil’s take on the subject when confrounted with the evidence of the Antoine Lavoisier “experiment.” Lavoisier was a victim of the French Revolution, who it is claimed, agreed to blink after his beheading -
Beheading is associated with the “old way” of executing people. It’s associated with medieval executions and barbarians. It is mainly a social stigma, as far as violence/pain, there are many ways that are more painful to die than beheading.
Although as another poster already mentioned, in the middle ages beheadings often took far more than one swing of the axe.
Interesting little anectdotal, when Henry VIII had Anne Boleyn executed he hired a professional swordsman from Spain who was a considered a master at the blade. Mainly because he was certain he could sever her head in one fell swoop, and he did.
Henry wanted to make sure she didn’t die in the same manner as common peasants.
You may have a point, but assuming this question was inspired by the murder of Nick Berg, none of the above apply. He wasn’t guillotined; in the words of the NY Times, his head was “sawed off” while he lay on the floor. There’s definitely something dehumanizing about chopping off a head in that way. It’s a somewhat prolonged method of death that had to involve some pain, probably horrific pain if he wasn’t doped up. It’s just gross on a visceral level.
Thanks for the replies and for keeping the discussion civil. I suppose I understand a bit better why people seem to be reacting the way they are. I do think that the media coverage created the reaction almost as much as the act itself. I don’t mean to say that we should blame the media, just that by choosing to focus so much attention on this one story, its importance has been magnified beyond that of other killings in Iraq, which seems to have been the desire of the people doing it.
How exactly else is the media going to cover a story like this? He was killed in this way to produce shock and horror, and there’s really no other possible reaction.
I can imagine myself saying “oh shit, shit, shit”.