Text/Fast Wind
A rumor repeated a thousand times becomes the truth. On the foreign Zhihu Quora website, there is a question: "What is the most cruel, painful and violent way to die?" Of the answers, the one with the highest praise is: waterboarding in China.
The respondent described it this way: "Imagine you are tied to a horizontal position, and small drops of water drip on your forehead. Doesn't it hurt? Just water, right? But the truth is much more complicated. Chinese waterboarding is a process of slowly dripping water on a person's forehead, cold water and the anxiety of "not knowing when the next drop will come" is maddening, and after a while, a hollow wound will form in the center of the forehead, and eventually the person will die of insanity. This was the punishment of prisoners in China around the 1900s. I can't think of a worse way to die than losing my mind and going crazy. ”
Such a serious and absurd answer, received 9.1K high praise, ranking first in all answers, "Chinese waterboarding" far exceeds many western tortures, such as column punishment, cattle punishment, pear punishment and so on.
However, the "Chinese water punishment" that slowly kills people is the imagination of Westerners from beginning to end, and there is no such punishment in Chinese history.
The inventor of "Chinese waterboarding" was a 16th-century Italian lawyer and physician, Hippolytus de Marsiliis, who was keen to "document" some rare torture, and Chinese waterboarding was the most famous of them. In his writings, he described that water droplets constantly fell on the victim's forehead, enough to cause the victim to go crazy.
Westerner 17th century "Chinese waterboarding" illustration
By 1913, a Hungarian-American magician, Harry Houdini, had made "Chinese waterboarding" famous all over the world. He was a well-known escape artist of the time, able to unthinkably escape from ropes, handcuffs and shackles, and in the circus, his most popular show was called "Escape from China's Waterboarding Cell".
Houdini performs Chinese waterboarding cell escape techniques
In fact, the so-called "Chinese waterboarding" is nothing more than hanging a sheep's head and selling dog meat. Some sober people in the West have long pointed out that the invention of the term "Chinese waterboarding" is only to give this punishment an ominous sense of mystery.
Because, in the eyes of Westerners of that era, China was a mysterious country in the Far East, synonymous with backwardness, barbarism and cruelty. Therefore, Western society has created many cultural symbols that scandalize China out of thin air, such as the British novelist Romer who created an image of a Chinese villain "Fu Manchu" out of thin air, which has been widely poisoned around the world for decades.
In the end, Westerners are reluctant to pursue the truth about "China's waterboarding" and "Fu Manchu", as long as it conforms to their imagination, the lie is equivalent to the truth.
A replica of the "Chinese waterboarding apparatus" at the Hohenschhausen Memorial in Berlin
Back to Waterboarding in China. The old saying goes that a small drop of water continues to drip on a person's forehead, theoretically, as long as the time is long enough, it will indeed drip through the skull of a person, but the tortured person may first be starved to death or die of old age.
In 2003, the Australian-American entertainment show "Rumor Busters" aired on the Discovery Channel, and one episode was about testing the effects of "China's waterboarding." The results of the experiment showed that it was quite effective, and the participants could not bear it in the end, but the program pointed out that what the subjects could not tolerate was the restraint of the device itself (limbs bound and bound), not dripping. In turn, when testing drips alone on a relaxed, unconstrained object, it is almost negligible.
Come to think of it, it's similar to forgetting to bring an umbrella on a rainy day, have you ever heard of someone going crazy because of a long period of rain?