oh, the inhumanity
A macabre encyclopedia of humanity’s most creative cruelties
Public Flogging
Public flogging was never meant to kill. It was designed to instruct — a measured violence calibrated for survival, spectacle, and memory. Each counted lash turned the human body into a public document, teaching obedience not through death, but through endurance witnessed by all.
Public Hanging
They called it justice. It looked like carpentry elevated into theology. The rope creaked, the crowd murmured, and the scaffold waited with the patience of a tool that knew its work. In every civilization that raised a beam and tied a knot, hanging became less a method than a message — a lesson written on a human body at the highest point in town.
Mutilation & Amputation
Across empires and eras, mutilation turned the human body into a ledger of authority — a hand for defiance, an ear for disobedience, a tongue for truth spoken at the wrong moment. Justice claimed the blade was impartial; history shows otherwise.
Burning at the Stake
They called it purification, but the stake was really a sermon written in smoke.