字幕表 動画を再生する
-
Let's imagine you were around in the late 16th in the Kingdom of Hungary.
-
You're not exactly from a family with wealth and so when your parents receive a letter
-
from a grand noblewoman by the name of Elizabeth Báthory they feel extremely honored.
-
What could such a well-respected and rich woman want from your peasant family your parents
-
wonder at first, and then on reading the letter they discover that Elizabeth is looking out
-
for the poor and just wants to teach you, their son, some etiquette.
-
Overjoyed by this incredible offer, your parents send you off to the great Čachtice Castle.
-
What you and your parents don't know is that they've just sent you to a castle we
-
can rightly call one of the most evil places in the world.
-
5.
-
Čachtice Castle After hearing what happened there you might
-
think nothing tops it in the realms of evil, but we can assure you that there have been
-
worse places.
-
Elizabeth Báthory didn't have a very nice childhood and when she was young she was around
-
a lot of violence.
-
Another matter that made her life hard was the fact she had seizures.
-
Back then no one knew anything about neurons misfiring in the brain, so epileptic fits
-
were a bit of mystery.
-
During the days of witch hunts if a person had a seizure some holy people might have
-
put it down to the devil being inside them, but Elizabeth- being nobility and all- did
-
not suffer the terrible burden of experiencing a witch trial.
-
One thing doctors back then sometimes did to try and cure seizures was giving sufferers
-
a dose of a healthy person's blood to drink, and if that happened to Elizabeth as a child,
-
it might account for her utterly depraved behavior as an adult.
-
We're not going to recount everything that woman did in her castle, but let's just
-
say that if you'd have accepted that invite you wouldn't have been taking any lessons
-
on good manners.
-
You'd have been tortured in the most despicable ways, perhaps burned, frozen, or even covered
-
in honey and live ants.
-
You might also have lost some body parts before your death, and that's why Elizabeth eventually
-
got the nicknames “The Blood Countess” and “Countess Dracula.”
-
What happened in the castle stayed in the castle for quite some time, but a lot of people
-
working for the noblewoman knew what was going on.
-
In fact, some of her staff helped her to find the people that would become her victims.
-
Elizabeth was eventually arrested and charged, but unbelievably she wasn't handed a death
-
sentence.
-
Her punishment was that she had to stay confined in the castle, her actual home.
-
You could say she got off lightly considering that she had killed hundreds of young people.
-
The exact figure is not known, but some historians put the number at 650.
-
That alone is mind-blowing, but if you care to research what she actually did to those
-
victims you will no doubt agree that the castle in her hands became an evil place.
-
The reason we're not going to tell you what happened is it's just too gory…and…err…YouTube
-
doesn't like that kind of thing.
-
4.
-
Camp 22 We're now going to talk about the gruesome
-
topic of human experimentation.
-
Here at the Infographics Show we always like to give you something new.
-
While Japan's horrific wartime human experimentation at its “Unit 731” is nothing short of
-
horrific, and all the ghastly things Nazi doctor Josef Mengele did can bring tears to
-
your eyes, we're going to talk about a place we haven't featured much.
-
Camp 22 was a place in North Korea where someone might have ended up if they'd been accused
-
of the crime of “wrong-thought.”
-
They might also have committed any number of crimes.
-
We only know about the prison camp because defectors who'd spent some time there let
-
the cat out of the bag, so to speak.
-
Conditions in the prison camp were bad enough without human experimentation.
-
One defector said when he was in the camp around 25 percent of the prison population
-
died each year from starvation.
-
The place was reportedly closed in 2012, but in the 1990s something like 50,000 people
-
were sent there.
-
It was always a life sentence, and so no one ever left the camp alive.
-
Former guards and prisoners have said that the guards tortured the prisoners to the extent
-
of inmates missing eyes or other parts, with some of them looking like living skeletons.
-
The human rights violations that happened there could fill a book, so we'll concentrate
-
on the medical experiments only.
-
One former prisoner named Lee Soon-ok said at one point the camp wanted to test a new
-
poison to see just how effective it was, and the officers at the camp didn't bother with
-
animal trials and went straight to human trials.
-
Lee said this involved 50 women, most of whom were at Camp 22 for merely criticizing the
-
government.
-
They were told to eat some cabbage and were also told it contained poison.
-
If they didn't eat it, those women were told their families on the outside would suffer.
-
Lee said soon after the women ate the stuff they started vomiting and all of them died
-
within 20 minutes.
-
Other experiments included using gas chambers, and sometimes the people that entered those
-
chambers were entire families.
-
The outcome was of course the death of everyone.
-
A scientist who defected in 2015 said chemical weapons were also tested on subjects.
-
On other occasions prisoners would be rounded up and sent for surgery, surgery they didn't
-
need of course, and the awful procedures would be done without any kind of anesthesia.
-
What's really scary is that when prisoners were chosen for such experiments, they would
-
first see a van driving around the prison complex.
-
That van would take them to their certain death.
-
The vehicle was nicknamed “the crow” and it would turn up once or twice a month where
-
the prisoners lived.
-
3.
-
The Raft of Medusa Here's the story of the raft of Medusa.
-
In June 1816, a French ship called the Méduse left France for Africa.
-
The short story is it didn't get there, and that's because it hit a sand bank.
-
There were around 400 people on board, and many of those folks managed to get on to small
-
boats.
-
The people left were in quite a fix, so some of them quickly built a raft.
-
151 men and one woman got onto that raft, and the French officers in the boats said
-
they would tow it….
-
They didn't.
-
That's the first evil part of this story.
-
After a few miles they just cut the raft loose and all those people were left floating in
-
the ocean.
-
Between them they had a bag of biscuits that they hastily ate on the first day, and they
-
had about six casks of wine.
-
They had some fresh water, too, but much of that was lost overboard when the men fought
-
over it.
-
As you can probably tell already, things then went from bad to worse.
-
With no food and no water what happened next was a survival of the fittest.
-
On the first night alone, some 20 people were dead from either fighting or being washed
-
overboard.
-
Some accounts say that some people were just thrown overboard.
-
By day four, of the 152 people only 67 of them were left.
-
Many had died in fights, some had died from dehydration, and some had taken their own
-
lives.
-
Seeing what was going on they just threw themselves off the raft.
-
This is how one survivor later explained that scene:
-
“Two young sailors and one baker were not afraid to jump into the sea, thereby bringing
-
their lives to an end.
-
This was after bidding farewell to their friends.”
-
By day eight, some of those that were weak or wounded were killed, but since the fittest
-
of the bunch were literally starving, they ate their victims.
-
This is how that survivor described one of those nights:
-
“The unfortunates who had been spared by death during that terrible night fell upon
-
the bodies that covered the raft, cut them into pieces or devoured them as they were.”
-
He said some men refused to eat the dead at first, and instead feasted on fabric from
-
clothes and hats.
-
But when they saw how much better the men looked who had eaten the dead, they joined
-
in, if not somewhat less inhibited by the wine they had drunk.
-
It was by sheer luck on the 13th day that a ship called the Argus saw the raft floating
-
in the ocean.
-
We say by luck, because the French authorities hadn't even sent out a search party.
-
Let's remember that those who were left on the raft at the start were deemed less
-
important people.
-
That's why this story is even more horrific.
-
As one historian once wrote, “It actually exposed things as they were – you save the
-
elite, and too bad if there is no more room for the others.”
-
That's not to say there weren't many good people on the raft.
-
Some ate their dead friends, some men were buried in the sea, and it was only out of
-
sheer desperation that they turned to cannibalism.
-
On the other hand, when they saw that some men were pretty much half dead, rather than
-
share meat or wine with them or eat them, they just threw them overboard.
-
For years after, a lot of people criticized the men not for eating the dead, but for throwing
-
the dying into the sea.
-
When they were finally rescued there were 15 men still alive, although five of them
-
would die shortly after being picked up by the Argus.
-
What the men had been through has become one of the most talked about horrors in the history
-
of mankind.
-
We'll give you a happy-ish ending, though.
-
This is how one of the survivors described the feeling on the raft when the men saw the
-
approaching rescue ship: “We embraced one another and rejoiced in
-
a manner bordering on insanity.
-
Tears of happiness rolled down our dried up cheeks.”
-
You can call this event a tragedy more than an evil, but sometimes human desperation can
-
be an evil in itself.
-
2.
-
The Papacy under Pope John XII Ok, so there have been more evil places and
-
people, but if you're a religious person then you might argue that the evilest you
-
could get would be if you were a degenerate religious leader.
-
There have been quite a few 'bad popes' but perhaps the worst of them all was the
-
man that headed the Christian church from 955 until his death in 964.
-
It's not a question of what Pope John XII did, but what he didn't do.
-
He didn't do any good things that's for sure, and he committed a long list of crimes.
-
This leader of the church it's said shocked even the worst offenders of immorality in
-
Rome, a man whose total depravity seemed to know no end.
-
He surrounded himself with women and turned his holy house into a kind of house of ill-repute.
-
He took his many lovers, some not exactly willing to go with him, and fornicated with
-
them at holy sites and also in the papal palace.
-
That pope has been accused of defiling the tombs of saints, of borrowing money from pilgrims
-
to finance his bad gambling habit, and has even been accused of blinding someone he didn't
-
like.
-
On one occasion it's said he tortured and murdered a cardinal.
-
If that's not bad enough, this man who should have been a devout Christian, was said to
-
have tried to call upon demons.
-
One historian wrote that “he had toasted to the devil with wine.”
-
If you're religious, you can't really get more evil than that.
-
Another historian wrote that John XII was, “a robber, a murderer, and incestuous person,
-
unworthy to represent Christ upon the pontifical throne.
-
This abominable priest soiled the chair of St. Peter for nine entire years and deserved
-
to be called the most wicked of popes.”
-
We should note that some people that wrote bad things about this man might have had a
-
reason to dislike him, or even dislike Catholicism, but Catholics themselves have criticized this
-
man and so have many other historians.
-
1.
-
Wherever witch hunts took place There were many witch hunts around Europe
-
in the 16th and 17th centuries, and many innocent women were tortured and executed.
-
Those witch hunts, supposedly in the name of goodness, are up there with the most shameful
-
things humans have ever done to each other.
-
There were lots of witch hunters, but we'll look at a person named Matthew Hopkins
-
He came from East Anglia in England and had the title of Witchfinder General.
-
We certainly don't want to upset our viewers from East Anglia, and we are not saying your
-
wonderful part of England is evil, but back in the day some pretty awful things went down
-
there.
-
As many as 300 alleged witches were executed in East Anglia and close by after being investigated
-
by Hopkins from 1644 to 1646.
-
How did he know they were witches you might ask?
-
Well, sometimes the women might have been accused of being abnormal by someone who just
-
didn't like them.
-
It was as simple as that at times, but often they might have had a mental illness or neurological
-
condition that wasn't understood at the time.
-
As we already said, seizures to some crazy folks were the work of the devil.
-
There was a famous book called Malleus Maleficarum, which translates from Latin as “The Hammer
-
of the Witches”, and after the printing press was invented that sold a lot of copies
-
and had 30 editions printed over the course of a century.
-
Hopkins no doubt had his own copy of this book.
-
His investigations would often include hurting the women and trying to make them confess.
-
Sometimes he'd deprive them of sleep until they confessed.
-
Other times he tied them to a chair and threw them into a river.
-
If they floated that meant they were witches, since if they had been baptized they'd have
-
sunk.
-
The problem then of course was trying to pull the innocent woman out of the water before
-
she drowned.
-
Then he had the “devil's spot” test, which meant pricking the woman with a pointed
-
object at various points on her body.
-
Of course that hurt, but if one point on the body seemed less painful to the woman, that
-
meant the devil had entered her body at that point.
-
If the woman bled and an animal licked that blood, her witchiness was to the interrogator
-
a certainty.
-
There was also the tear test.
-
This involved telling the accused the story of Jesus Christ's crucifixion.
-
If she didn't break down in tears, she was in league with the devil.
-
Again, we should tell you that some women who were accused of being witches were mentally
-
ill, or suffered from mental retardation.
-
That story might not have meant much to those women.
-
Human evil has perhaps never been so personified than in the face of Matthew Hopkins and others
-
like him.
-
They spread like a plague all over Europe, North America and the rest of the world, and
-
we at the Infographics Show are going to say they were absolutely evil, if indeed evil
-
exists.
-
Sources don't always agree on how many women were persecuted, but it could have been as
-
many as one million.