6 Awesome Torture Techniques (You Haven't Heard Of)

What’s with me and parentheses these days? (What the heck, though??)

Since the dawn of time men have absolutely hated each other. Throughout history, this mutual disgust has led to the discovery of one putrid torture technique after another.

Of course mankind has had other concerns too, namely a Conscience. Coupled with a matchless talent for heroic underachievement this sense of right and wrong led to the creation of the United Nations.

The United Nations, or the UN, or the UriNal, as it is respectfully known in North Korea (yeah, what can I say, Kim Jong-il and his primitive jokes) has in its typical bureaucratic elegance defined torture as –

“any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a male or female person for such purposes as obtaining from him, or a third person, information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in, or incidental to, lawful sanctions.”

Continuous recitation or written reproduction of the above paragraph for only a few minutes is now a certified form of highly potent and severely unbearable psychological torture.

Of course it’s too soft a method (c’mon UN, will ya stop being so gay, like all the time??) to make it to the following, legendary, Hall of Pain.

1. Boiling is to torture, what the missionary position is to a good night’s rest. Quick, crude, lazy, yet highly effective, to the point, and will never be out of fashion. Of course, you won’t get full marks for imagination, but what the fuck?

Don't try this at home!!

It is unclear when boiling evolved from what we did to tea leaves to what we did to one another.

But I guess it all started when in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the slave girl killed those thirty-seven thieves by pouring boiling oil into their hiding-jars.

Then the Romans were known to boil all slaves brought in for interrogation. Apparently a slave was not to be trusted until his brains were sufficiently cooked. Of course, the English took boiling to the next level. They experimented with medium, using oil, tar, tallow and even molten lead.

Cookie: *gasp*

What’s with pirates and torture? Cat o’ nine tails, caning, birching, walking the plank?? It’s like they do such things for fun!

Oh.

2. Keelhauling So one day you are being a normal, good-for-nothing, syphilis infested pirate with stale rum pouring out of most of your orifices and minding your own business. Then all of a sudden it’s your day to make up for the lack of TV, years without women and those cowardly Navy Seals shooting you with sniper rifles.

So what do your buddies do?

They tie you to a rope that loops beneath the vessel, throw you overboard from one side and drag you under the ship’s keel to the other side, very quickly.

Sound’s like a bit of drunken revelry eh? Not much torturing huh? Go back to your Pirates of the Caribbean; you’ll recall that the hull was basically covered with those darn barnacles! Our good friend would return with some super serious cuts.

Sometimes to make it more interesting, they’d pull slowly. The weight would lower the pirate below the barnacles, but then there was always the little technicality, of drowning.

Some guys have all the luck! (all the time!!)

And now dear reader, ancient Greece.

3. The Brazen Bull. A hollow bull cast of pure bronze. The poor criminal would be shut inside and a fire would be lit under it.

Before you could count to 33,000 the bull would be white hot, and the inmate completely roasted.

The Greeks weren’t really into getting the criminal to divulge stuff. All they wanted was a little torture before murdering the poor fellow. (In your face, Amnesty International!!!!)

Sketch from private [stolen {not by me (seriously)}] diary of a guard at Abu Gharib

So what makes this so sick eh?

Well the Greeks stuffed the nose of the bull with incense, so that the death gave off a pleasant smell. Then they engineered a series of locks and tubes into the head, so that all screams were translated into furious bull snarls. So, all in all, The Brazen Bull was fully Euro V and Bharat VIII compliant.

Oh and to, to finance all this tomfoolery, they sold the charred bones as bracelets!!!!!

Cookie: *shriek*

4. The Scold’s Bridle was an iron cage for the head with an iron spike projecting into the mouth and resting precariously atop the tongue. So as to cruelly torture the tongue if it dared stir.

It was inflicted on women who spoke too much. And so heavy was its demand that at one time it was believed to have singlehandedly driven the industrial revolution.

The French Version - Haute-Couture, but misses the basic premise of torture. (No tongue spike!!)

But then the fad died a natural death, probably because it started to kill the concept of impromptu oral sex. (Which, by the way, was pretty big in the Middle Ages, and then again, only in the 70s.)

5. Stocks were used to torture man through public humiliation since forever. I am talking about –

In modern times, with minor changes, these are BIG in the pornographic industry (Source: Wikipedia)

My interest in the above, is of course only scholarly, I hope you are with me on this one, dear reader? (Oh yeah?)

Anyway, the Brits used this by leaving people strapped in a Stock, in public, for days. Barefeet. Because apparently being caught without footwear was like the worst possible humiliation and all.

It is one of the reasons the Brits found the Stock to be completely ineffective on Indians during their rule. The other is that we totally eat a lot of garlic.

For my final entry dear reader, I leave you with a mental image.

6. The Punishment of the Picquet.

Imagine a stake in the ground with one sharpened end facing upward. The malefactor is, with one thumb suspended from a tree, while the opposite naked foot is balanced atop the stake.

The point of the stake on which the foot rests is sufficiently sharp to cause considerable discomfort but not enough to penetrate the flesh or separate bones.

By relieving pressure from his foot, the prisoner places all of his weight on the suspended thumb, whereas, by relieving tension from his thumb, the prisoner exposes his foot to the full effect of the Picquet…

A real situation dear reader, a real Catch. Catch 22. (The biggest there is, the only worth mentioning.) Eh?