#simon webb

Yeah so, here’s the thing, torture is bad. There’s a perception that it was never exactly legal here in England, but that’s both not quite true and doesn’t take into account the legality of it in British colonies or in countries like Scotland, where we just slipped prisoners north of the border so we could torture them. The book holds back no details on the brutality of torments that people were subjected to, in a clinical and detached voice so the reader can distance themselves. Still, some of this book’s contents made me feel physically nauseous, not least the descriptions of harm done to enslaved people in the Americas. The book also contains within it execution methods which involved large amounts of physical pain (such as hanging, drawing, and quartering, possibly the worst punishment England ever inflicted on people) which I thought was interesting as I’d never thought to conflate the two before.

Another thing about this book that I found to be really interesting was that it didn’t stop in the Past, but carried on to the 1970s, where the police were torturing captive members of the IRA with sleep deprivation and similar tactics to get them to talk. It doesn’t take much to extrapolate these methods into the present day. Which is interesting, because it brings the subject matter up to date, showing that no matter how much we try to pretend we’re the best in the world or whatever, the government’s methods of dealing with people whose humanity it denies are fundamentally the same as back in the medieval period when we’d make people hold white-hot iron bars to prove their innocence or whatever.