Painfotainment

Hardcore History 61 – (BLITZ) Painfotainment

"[On the Middle Ages] It talks about one of these breaking on the wheels that happens, and the original source is talking about how as the condemned is being killed, as they're being broken on the wheel, they are singing or shouting religious verses, and the crowd is picking up where the condemned leaves off. So he'll do the first verse, they'll do the second in unison. He'll do the third, they'll do the fourth, it's a call and response while he's being killed.

What's more, according to the source, he's talking to the guy who's killing him - the executioner. And I guess the only way to put it is he's making requests. Tell the crowd, I want the next verse in Latin and all this kind of stuff. It's completely bizarre to the modern mind, but as Freedland says, this is the kind of thing that the people in that era would have seen as potentially beautiful, a wonderful lesson for the kids, right? A morality lesson here.

Here's what could happen to you, if you go wrong, but if you continue to believe in God and you sincerely seek redemption through repentance, you too can make it to heaven... the people in the crowd very well may have seen the violence being done to the malefactor's body as necessary to get to the heavenly goal. And if that's the case, that what was being done to that malefactor's body was a good thing...

Spectators did so largely out of a sincere desire to participate in the ceremony that held profound personal meaning for them and not because they wanted to gawk from a distance at the suffering of others. These were less spectacles, he writes, in the way that we understand the words today, than they were rituals in which those who attended saw themselves as full participants rather than onlookers, when was as usually the case, the condemned participated fully in the ritual of repentance, seeking forgiveness from divine and earthly authorities... the public transformation of the condemned criminal into a repentant sinner enabled the entire community to undergo a kind of healing...

When they will finally do away with the public execution here, some of the people who were critical of that said that you're depriving the condemned of the only support they have in this moment where they're going to die, the crowd's on their side. But sometimes it's not...

The executioner is at hand. And this person shows up... in his best robes of office, came with a drink and shared the famous last drink with the condemned. There's also in many places, was a famous last meal, sometimes called the hangman's meal. And this is supremely weird, I think it was Richard Evans who pointed out for a lot of these poor convicted German criminals during this era, this lavish meal that they gave them right before they died was probably the greatest meal that they'd ever had and far above anything that they'd ever even seen. And oftentimes the people who judged you and the religious figures, and even the executioner will eat with you at this meal and you might be required to wear your own burial shroud so the whole thing's not weird, not at all, right? It's part of the psychological breakdown...

But if a guy with 394 kills on his record comes to me and says, listen, I know what I'm doing here, I've done this a lot of times, let me tell you how it's gonna go easiest for you and easiest for me, I think I'm gonna listen to him. After all If I squirm around too much and don't do what this guy wants, he's gonna take more than one shot at my head if this is a decapitation... these people are under enough pressure anyway, they have a reputation not totally without reason of drinking too much... violence against executioners who botch the job, well, the sources are abundant"