The matter arises because SM Stirling's and David Drake's Raj Whitehall has a group of looters and rapists not shot but crucified as an example. He says that he had to do this. He did not. Center seems to have warned Raj against summarily slaughtering the criminals but what would have been wrong with a simple firing squad?
In Poul Anderson's The Rebel Worlds, crucifixion victims on Shalmu are innocent of any crime but their population is being oppressed for a political purpose. Even worse. Or is it? Is the torture of a rapist less reprehensible than any other torture?
14 comments:
Paul:
Death by slow torture is seen (I'm not judging whether or not this perception is accurate for most people) as more of a deterrent than a quick, relatively easy death. Also, he only executed those rapists who were civilian servants, not actually military personnel of the unit he didn't command but had to work with. He in fact pretended, not at all convincingly, to believe those soldiers had captured the villains.
That gave them an out: if they threw their servants to the dogs, they needn't openly oppose the man whom the Vice-Governor had put in charge of the expedition. So, Whitehall made his gruesome demonstration of what happens to those who loot and rape within their own country, and he didn't have to duel the other unit's commander over it.
And he was sickened by what he'd done.
I had an idea once for a scene in a historical-fiction context. A decurion in Romano-British service on the western coast ordered his troops to crucify an Irish pirate chieftain, while burning some lower-ranking pirates at the stake. Several of the decurion's subordinates were Christians, and the thought of crucifying villains made them uneasy. He overrode them, saying this was the proper function of a cross....
Kaor, Paul and DAVID!
The complicated thing is I agree with both of you. I sympathize with Paul's distaste with crucifixion as a method of execution for these looters and rapists--with my first thought being hanging or shooting with have been better. However, David's explanation of the political complications involved because of Gerrin Staenbridge being not WHOLLY under Raj's command and the pull he had with Barholm Clerett made the straight forward solution risky. To say nothing of how Center showed Raj the likely bad results following from other scenarios.
Sean
David,
Thank you. I did not quite understand what was going on with Raj's pretense.
Paul.
Of course torture is a greater deterrent but I still find it morally unacceptable. Maybe, if our side captured a torturer, then he should be put through the mental anguish of thinking that he was going to be physically tortured but no more than that.
Kaor, Paul!
Given those hard and brutal times on Bellevue, I doubt anything so subtle would work. Think of the Ardazirho in Anderson's WE CLAIM THESE STARS. Their psychological configuration SEEMS to be such that they EXPECT to be tortured if captured by enemies. And to take pride in defying and resisting "torture" as long as possible. I used quote marks in the preceding sentence because of remembering how LONG Flandry's Ardazirho prisoner resisted so relatively gentle a means of interrogation as sensory deprivation before he finally cracked.
Sean
Societies tend to have the moral codes they can afford. Attitudes towards pain and death change, too.
Until fairly recently -- and of course on Bellevue in Raj's time -- anyone could die at any age; most often through disease, but frequently by violence.
Murder and assault were astonishingly frequent by our standards, something like thirty or more times more common.
And pain was ubiquitous; nobody could avoid it, because there's nothing corresponding to modern medicine or painkiller in that setting. So a bad tooth means days at least often weeks or months of agony, and the only "treatment" was extraction with nothing but whisky as an analgesic, if that, and often it didn't work and you were left with festering splinters. That's just one example. Any minor cut or injury could get infected and either kill you painfully, or leave you debilitated for life, or inflict weeks or months of illness.
Living into old age and dying without much suffering were rare and extraordinary strokes of luck; people wanted them, but didn't -expect- them. They were just tougher and more callous.
Giving 21st-century sensibilities to someone from that social setting would be grossly a-historical and unrealistic.
Incidentally, one major reason for antislavery sentiment in modern Western society, growing from the late 18th century onward, was not that slaves were so badly treated but that their treatment became something unusual.
In the 17th century, for example, actual chattel slavery had died out of Western Europe and most of the rest of the continent centuries before -- it was legally unknown. It lingered longest in the Mediterranean parts of Europe, where stronger Classical traditions and raiding and counter-raiding with Islamic societies across the sea maintained it longer, but by the Enlightenment era it was moribund even there.
But general casual brutality remained common; servants, soldiers, and the lower classes were flogged all the time, so were children, and social superiors (husbands, for example) was commonly expected to discipline others by beating. Judicial torture was common, execution by gruesomely slow means ditto, the corpses of felons were exhibited at crossroads, and people starving or dying of other things were ubiquitous. There weren't many restrictions on what soldiers did to civilians in war, either -- war captives in the English civil wars were commonly sold into indentured service int he colonies, for instance.
So the African slave trade, while an extreme example even by the standards of the day, didn't -stand out- the way it did later. Ditto colonial slavery -- in the context of say 1700, it was harsh but on the same sort of continuum people would be used to at home. It became increasingly anomalous later.
Note the story of the Buddha's upbringing; not only was he a prince, but his parents decided to shield him from any sight of poverty, age, sickness or death, so when he was finally exposed to these things they struck him as extraordinary novelties.
And the moral code he preached, while it did stress not causing suffering, mainly focused on the unavoidable nature of it in life as it actually had to be lived.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you for all these comments, which immeasurably enrich the blog.
Paul.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I second what Paul said! And I agree life for most people in Europe and the American colonies, down to about 1760, was nasty, brutish, and short (to be Hobbesian!). Not much different from what we see in THE GENERAL books.
Sean
There are vast differences to preindustrial societies, but also certain commonalities -- something Poul noted very acutely.
In THERE WILL BE TIME the time-traveler, Paul, notes the "Asiatic" quality that's always present in the past, or "maybe it's just that Asia has changed less".
Nearly all the time travelers he meets from the past (or his girlfriend from the rebarbarbarized post-apocalyptic future) consider him to be extremely squeamish -- she thinks he's sweet and kind, the rest consider him an absurd wimp. To his 20th-century Western sensibilities, they're a bunch of brutal sadists and thugs.
In low-productivity societies like that, for one person to have more means that someone else has less; and since the overall average is so low, someone else having less pushes them right to the edge, or over it. So social relations tend to be nakedly predatory.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree with the distinctions you made between what was possible or likely to be seen in high or low productivity societies, with many people in the latter often being harsh, brutal, predatory, etc. And people in such societies who were NOT like that tended to be saints, or revered as saints (as I recalled seeing in St. Gregory of Tours' THE HISTORY OF THE FRANKS).
Apologies, the hero of THERE WILL BE TIME was Jack Havig.
Sean
Sean: Yup, Jack.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
It was just a slip of the fingers as you typed! (Smiles)
Sean
Post a Comment