Public executions

Public executions have a history of thousands of years. Unlike human sacrifice, which was also public and frequently required a state of innocence or purity in the victim, the victims of public executions were war captives, deserters or those who were conardly in battle, violators of customs and traditions, and criminals in the conventional sense. The guillotine was the instrument of the French Revolution during which the executions were considered a festive event. Otherwise, the hangman's noose was employed frequently everywhere until the invention of the rifle made firing squads possible. The ancient Romans practicised cruxifixion and the Hebrews lapidation. In the twentieth century death by exposure and hardship among Siberian exiles in Russia, and death in concentration camp gas chambres added to the horrors of the techniques of mass or public execution. Warfare with all the gory of the battlefield as now shown on television is a new form of the mass spectacle of death.