Philosopher David Livingstone Smith (New England), something of an expert on the consequences of dehumanizing brutality by our species, shared this excerpt from the book he is currently working on and which he kindly gave permission to share (the bit below the fold is beyond ghastly, be forewarned, but it helps explain why the "American" approach was too much even for Hitler):
Claude Neal was a twenty-three-year-old Black man who lived in Marianna, on the Florida panhandle. On October 19, 1934, Neal was arrested and charged the murder of a nineteen-year-old White woman. In the wee hours of October 26, a group of men burst into the jail where Neal was being held and took him away to a remote spot in the North Florida pine woods, where they tortured and killed him. The NAACP sent a representative named Howard Kester to Marianna to investigate. Perhaps because he was a White man, Kester found a member of the mob who was willing to tell him what happened that night. Here’s an excerpt from Kester’s report:
"After taking the nigger to the woods about four miles from Greenwood, they cut off his penis. He was made to eat it. Then they cut off his testicles and made him eat them and say he liked it…. Then they sliced his sides and stomach with knives and every now and then somebody would cut off a finger or two. Red hot irons were used on the nigger to burn him from top to bottom.” From time to time during the torture a rope would be tied around Neal’s neck and he was pulled up over a limb and held there until he almost choked to death when he would be let down and the torture begin all over again. After several hours of this unspeakable torture, “they decided just to kill him."'
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