Weekend-Engagement #276: If you could throw a live hand grenade into any room on the planet, who would you want to be in that room? People from history and the present are eligible. Explain who and why.

If I could throw a grenade into a room with people from the present or the past, who would I want inside... well, first of all, I would avoid naming the obvious and boring people like Hitler and the various Nazis, Stalin, Mao, and all the most famous bloodthirsty dictators. Those should rot in hell for eternity, end of story. In this post, I’d propose letting some less popular and lesser-known figures experience a live grenade explosion, but that doesn’t mean they’re any less bastard than the others, and we’ll see if you agree with the nominations.

1. Shirō Ishii, the director of Japan’s Unit 731 during World War II. Unit 731 became infamous for inhuman human experiments, experiments that made my hair stand on end when I read about them, and I won’t write them here to avoid upsetting more sensitive readers. This man decided what experiments to conduct, on whom and how, established infection protocols, which pathogens to study (plague, anthrax, cholera, etc.), the testing techniques, and personally monitored many of the experiments. Shirō Ishii and many of his collaborators were captured by US forces at the end of the war, but the hateful and infuriating part is that none were ever tried for war crimes: the United States offered immunity to Ishii and his scientists in exchange for the biological weapon research data. I don’t think I need to say anything more about why he deserves a grenade after getting away with it.

1. Tamerlane, Turkish-Mongol conqueror from the 1300s, with 17 million deaths (many of them innocent) is one of the bloodiest in history. Just think that among other things, in one day he had 100,000 Indian prisoners massacred or also decapitated over 90,000 people in a single episode to build towers of heads, all gratuitous violence just to use fear as a psychological weapon. He lived way too long too, a full 69 years, he deserves a grenade.

1. Joseph Kony, leader of a Ugandan rebel group, the infamous man kidnapped over 30,000 children to turn them into child soldiers, porters, or sex slaves. The children were forced to kill members of their own families, to take part in violence and abuse against civilians. Of course, there’s also mutilation, civilian massacres, and rape. This one definitely deserves a grenade also because he’s still alive and well, hiding somewhere despite a conviction for crimes against humanity. After all the filth he did, he’s still free...

This concludes my top 3 of people who deserve a grenade to the face, maybe dying not instantly but slowly and painfully.

Random photos taken this weekend
Post in response to @galenkp Weekend-Engagement topics: WEEK276