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Chinese Death Van
This is just too freaking strange to be true, and yet it comes right off an AOL news page (found courtesy of JK)
What is that fine looking vehicle, you ask? Why, it is part of “China’s new fleet of mobile execution chambers.”
Makers of the death vans say the vehicles and injections are a civilized alternative to the firing squad, ending the life of the condemned more quickly, clinically and safely. The switch from gunshots to injections is a sign that China “promotes human rights now,” says Kang Zhongwen, who designed the Jinguan Automobile death van
What a crazy world we live in where people can say that the state murdering people in a nice clean vehicle is humane. Fucking perverse sadistic shit:
“I’m most proud of the bed. It’s very humane, like an ambulance,” Kang says.
Yes, it’s exactly like an ambulance - except the opposite! But otherwise, very much like an ambulance.
I also like how they have a poll on the site which asks the profound question of “What do you think of the idea of a mobile execution chamber?” And your only options for answering are “It seems humane” and “It’s a bad idea.” Uh, that doesn’t BEGIN to describe what I think about this. Note: only 52% of the 62,123 polled thought this was a “bad idea,” so maybe we’ll be lucky enough to see this come to the US pretty soon? Hope so!
June 18th, 2006 at 4:15 pm
OMFG.
Wow, China is really striking a blow for human rights!
Disturbing as it is, the results of the poll are even more disturbing. 48% of the internet viewing public thinks that mobile death vans are A-OK?
Fuck. We are DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMed.
June 18th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
I don’t really undertand why the trucks are mobile. Are they gonnah just pull up to your house, grab you, and execute you then and there? Or do they take you out of a prison, drive to to a nice scenic location, and then kill you.
The death penalty is ridiculous. No sane person could seriously advocte killing civilians. I don’t get why we still have it in America. Wait, yeah, I do. We love killin. It’s a national tradition.
;-) it is funny how welcoming and toy-like the death-mobile is, isn’t it?
June 18th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
I’ve seen the vans being reported here in Germany several years ago. Since then I’ve stopped buying chinese goods. I regard China as one of the most perverse countries out there. Instead of the rest of the world doing big business deals with China, any time one of the Chinese officials leaves that country, he or she should be taken into custody immediately and then shipped to Den Haag.
June 18th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
i guess the human rights policy manual got translated by the babel fish. but they are only executing each other though.
June 18th, 2006 at 8:38 pm
Actually, that’s one of the reactions I had.
I mean, like, this isn’t the same thing as getting tested for STDs or spaying your cat.
June 19th, 2006 at 4:29 am
Just read to the bottom of the article on AOL. The vans are mobile to enable organ harvesting for transplants, a “cash crop” for China. Often the recipient of the organs are in southeast Asia just outside China, living in places where people that need organ transplants have trouble finding donors. Some of the trade is open, much of it is “semi-transparent,” and much is under the table. China is also a large country with underdeveloped infrastructure, so a mobile execution chamber opens up possiblities of ensuring “freshness” despite the limits of distance, availability of people ready to be executed, and the timing factors of when the organs are necessary.
It is the ultimate horror of a country that has embraced dialectical materialism run mad: atheism as the mandatory “religion,” utilitarianism devoid of humanistic consideration, efficiency of market adaption and control mechanisms, science minus ethics, and machine logic without soul. When the Chinese lady was screaming at Bush and President Hu when Hu visited the White House recently, this is one of the big things she was screaming about. The entire concept of the death van is Nazi perfection, no wonder it took a Communist regime to pefect it.
This is, pardon me, a rather naive statement. If you look around your home or office, you will not see Chinese brand names on any of your things, because it is not made completely in China. The parts made in China are the components. The computor and cell phone you are now using probably have components made in China inside. I would also be surprised if you were even able to distinguish which clothing items were made in China — the label or brand may be non Chinese, but it was probably made in a factory in China.
This is probably something like what Hitler or some other Nazi said when Stalin was conducting the purges in the Soviet Union. Actually, Chinese are not killing Chinese. Chinese leaders have given the green light to the bureaucracy that controls its prison systems to execute people who control very little. Actually, we have relatively little information as to who among the executed are actual criminals, and who are political prisoners. Also, many of the criminals are probably not just murderers. I would look up who might qualify to be executed (small time bribery? homosexual? some loosely defined form of ‘trouble making’?) but my horror quotient is just too full for right now…
June 19th, 2006 at 10:51 am
From the USA Today article:
June 20th, 2006 at 8:38 am
Sadly, wally4media, this IS a Nazi thing. In fact, the Nazi’s themselves did use and experiment with portable execution vehicles during their reign. The undesirables would be loaded into the back of the van, which was of course separated off from the driver’s area. The drivers would then pump poison gas into the back of the van to kill their wards. In later models, they even built the floor of the poisoning area of the van at a slight decline with a drain in it to capture the blood that previously would pool in the back of the van ( from gassed people going nuts clawing each other and the doors and everything else in their desperate death throes’ attempts to get out) and cause sanitary, clean-up issues, not to mention psychological discomfort to those who had to do the cleaning up. And ultimately, like the gas chambers at the concentration camps, partially the design and aim of this shit was and remains, I suspect, in good ol’ China, the same. Before the “showers” existed, Nazi soldiers had to gun down the so-called “untermensch” in their possession and, it was noted, suffered all the psychological turmoil, breakdown and terror resulting from these acts–these faceless Nazi foot soldiers were, after all, still humans and being exposed so viscerally to the consequences of their actions had certain undesirable results in terms of military morale and fight readiness, which, ultimately is a break down, in the machine logic of the soul-dead organization–a breakdown in efficiency (perhaps the greatest sin in the lifeless eyes of such institutions). Thus the showers. Thus the experimentation with the death vans, where their could be a built-in level of psychological dissociation and abstraction to save those carrying out the orders from the all-too-human pains of conscience over their actions, which could, perhaps lead people to stop “doing their job(s).” And because this same fucked up machine logic is part and parcel of our increasingly identical economic structures worldwide, and the logic of hierarchical/ authoritarian control structures, it does feel like only a matter of time before these vans make it stateside–in the “war against the terror of being human.”
Just like those happy pills reported in the Village Voice a few years back as being given to troops in Afghanistan to disensitize them from the brutality of war. If you “feel” that brutality too much, it becomes all too clear that it must be stopped. In a more subtle, though by no means conscious level, I feel this also drives the increased frequency of prescriptions of Ritalin and other head fucking drugs to school kids–the all-too natural and human responses they have to the overall coercion and psychological violence done them by our “educational system” (depression, agression, self-defensive distraction, disobedience)–are simply too inconvenient for the smooth operation of the machine.