According to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, humans possess an intrinsic evil by nature.
We are the villains before the court of life and the evidence is overwhelming,
because we not only attack our own species, but also the fauna and flora,
against the entire planet ... in the end, we ourselves will cause our own extinction.
"I have seen death in all its forms, but never anything to equal this man's end." This is how
a witness described one of the most grotesque executions engineered by human beings. It was
created by the Mughal Empire in the 16th century and used in some parts of the world
until the late 20th century, it is known as "Gun blowing" and was popularized by the
British Empire in order to make suffering extend beyond death for their enemies of
Hindu origin for leaving them without what they needed to perform their funeral rites.
Today we will witness one of the most ruthless executions
ever created by the human race, Welcome to Copernicus’s Galaxy.
What problems could arise from using this method of execution?
Gun blowing was a method of execution where the prisoner was tied to the muzzle of a
cannon and uncomfortably twisted around it, so you can probably imagine what happened
once the fuse was lit. He was usually left tied up for hours or even days,
which ended up making the man lose his mind, even begging for his life to be ended once and for all.
When the projectile shot out of the cannon,
its power caused the body to explode, spewing flesh, viscera and pieces of
bone in all directions. Many times it ended up causing injuries to spectators who were
not at an adequate distance. The prisoner's head would rise up to 15 meters in the air,
the arms would fly to the left and right, while the legs would collapse right under the cannon.
The grotesque spectacle attracted flocks of birds of prey that swooped down to grab the
pieces of meat in the air as soon as the roar of the cannon was heard. Dogs ran
up to devour the remains of the executed man scattered on the ground. These scenes
caused nausea in the spectators who, of course, could not contain their vomit.
On other occasions not everything went as planned,
such was the case of a mass execution carried out in the city of Firozpur in 1857,
where the soldiers in charge made the mistake of loading the cannons with normal cannonballs
instead of blanks, which resulted in several civilian injuries, and quite a few amputations.
They also came to have executions where the condemned man was accidentally loosened from
his bonds seconds before the shot was fired leaving them agonizing and suffering immense
pain while waiting for their executioners to end their misfortune. One witness expressed the ordeal
explaining how unpleasant it was: "One miserable fellow slipped from the rope by which he was tied
to the guns just before the explosion, and his arm was almost set on fire. As he hung in his agony
under the gun, a sergeant applied a shot to his head, the man each time dodging the shot by moving
his body. Finally, a rifle was fired into the back of his neck, and blood poured from his nose and
mouth like water from a pump opened briskly. This was the most horrible sight of all..."
The British Empire was the country that made most use of this method of execution.
The East India Company, a British joint stock company founded in 1600 with the intention of
trading in the Indian Ocean region and which you will surely remember for being one of Captain
Jack Sparrow's many sworn enemies, dominated much of the Indian subcontinent since 1757,
its actions having a strong impact on the balance of global trade,
accounting for half of world trade by the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
They exerted military and political pressure, even assuming administrative functions,
with an army of approximately 260,000 soldiers. They colonized parts of Southeast Asia and
Hong Kong, maintaining trading posts and colonies in the Persian Gulf residences.
Knowing a little about the nature of this company it is easier to understand their
long tradition of silencing Indian soldiers found guilty of initiating or participating
in mutinies with this method of execution, as they considered it more dissuasive, public and,
according to their logic, more "humane" than the capital punishment commonly used in India,
which consisted of flogging the condemned to death.
By 1761, the order had been given by the British company to execute the leader of the robbers who
was taken prisoner by “Gun blowing”, so that others would be deterred. In 1764,
a native senior non-commissioned officer who secretly planned to persuade several
soldiers to desert to an enemy force was discovered and blown to pieces in
front of his troops. In the same year, 24 to 25 "ringleaders" who caused an entire
battalion to desert were executed in a single month by Major Hector Munro.
The use of cannons to execute their convicts continued to be seen every few years, highlighting
one in 1775 where a commander named Muctoom Sahib refused to follow British orders, and was executed
in this way in front of his subordinates who after such a demonstration obeyed without complaints.
In 1784, after a mutiny, 12 rebels were captured and sentenced to be killed by a cannon.
The last rebel was pardoned because the cannon’s fuse did not work and
he cunningly asked his lieutenant general if it was really his destiny to die like that.
But what really makes gun blowing associated with the British Empire was the Indian rebellion
of May 10, 1857, provoked by discontent over encroaching social reforms, excessive land
taxes and the summary treatment of some wealthy landowners and princes by British rule. In rebuke
to these insurrections, the British Empire showed no mercy, executing 44 of the 523 men from May to
September of the same year, and 21 of the 393 were blown to pieces in the city of Indore.
However, this type of execution continued to be used even after peace came, since,
in 1871, for example, the entrails of 65 members
of the "Sikh Kukas" or "Namdhari" sect were scattered by cannon executions.
According to some accounts, they were used by Portuguese colonialists.
Although the Mughal Empire created "Gun blowing" and the British Empire was the
one who gave it a greater use, it was not only them who practiced it, there are stories from
different nations where being blown to pieces tied to a cannon was not just a nightmare.
It is said that the Portuguese colonialists also tried this method of execution in many of their
colonies. For example, explorer Francisco de Almeida blew up many people in the island
country of southern Asia Ceylon, now called Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka
around the year 1509. In the same country in 1656 during the Dutch siege of its capital Colombo,
the famine caused by this event made a mother decide to kill her baby and devour it.
Once the Portuguese general realized this, he ordered her execution with
a cannon, but the clergy and the main citizens convinced him not to do it.
The explorer Francisco Barreto imprisoned 50 Muslim individuals in Monomotapa and
sentenced them to death in different ways, which of course included "Gun Blowing".
In the 18th century, the slaves in the capital of Mozambique called Tete, used this method of
execution as a capital punishment, while, in the 19th century, a hardened robber
chief was captured by the Portuguese and blown into a thousand pieces by a cannon.
In 1618, the Portuguese colonialists were having serious problems facing the native resistance in
Brazil, which was unyielding to their troops, however, they managed to capture one of their
leaders named Amaro, whom they used to take out their frustration on by executing him in this way.
It was the traditional method of execution in Afghanistan in the 19th century.
In the long, bloody history of Afghanistan, there was a time in the early 19th century
and until 1930 where "Gun blowing" was traditionally used as capital punishment,
either as a method of instilling terror in the hearts of the people
they ruled or out of revenge. Hundreds of people were destroyed, literally.
We have testimony of this in 1802, when the Ghilzai tribe suffered a humiliating defeat
against the forces of Mahmud Shah Durrani, ruler of the Durrani Empire at that time. He decided
to end any idea of rebellion by spreading the entrails of one of the Ghilzai leaders
and his two sons, and ordered the building of a small tower with skulls of their victims.
Only a year later, Shah Shujah Durrani expelled his brother from power and took
revenge on one of his allies named Ashik by this method of execution for having betrayed
and captured his half-brother Zaman Shah Durrani, former king of the Durrani Empire,
a story of power, betrayal and pieces of flesh flying through the air.
Several decades later, specifically in 1880, Abdur Rahman Khan would become emir of Afghanistan,
earning the nickname "the iron emir", because during his 20 years on the throne
he demonstrated an iron hand and exemplary brutality, carrying out an average of 5
thousand executions a year, one of his favorites being the "Gun Blowing". In December 1889 alone,
he executed 24 people in this way, while many others were executed using different methods.
One of the many cycles of extreme violence that broke out in Afghanistan was in January 1929,
when the "Tajik" Habibullah Kalakani came to power. In the words of British official
Humphreys: "No one was safe, houses were looted indiscriminately, women were ravaged and a reign
of terror unprecedented in bloody Afghan history was established". While in the United States, a
New York Times article of April 6, 1930 announced how eleven Afghans were blown to bits in Kabul.
What is mankind's drive to cause so much pain and agony? Weapons of mass destruction,
deadly chemicals, diseases designed to exterminate people... it seems that we
enjoy carrying out such atrocities, we use our intelligence and creativity to develop new and
better ways to harm our fellow man, we feel we are the owners of everything that exists
and superior to our peers. Is there a possibility that in the future we will create a utopia where
we see in all its splendor the values of life and justice? Or are we better off preparing ourselves
for a worse future?... When the time comes we will tell you about it, at Copernicus's Galaxy.