20. When a Mob of Citizens Killed and Ate Their Ruler
As anybody who keeps with current news – or anybody who has not been in a coma, for that matter – is aware, tempers have gotten quite heated the past few years in American politics. Still, for all the aroused passions, things have not gotten anywhere close to as bad as that time a century and a half ago when Americans went hammer and tongs at each other in the Civil War. By the time the dust settled after that conflict, anywhere from 650,000 to a million people had lost their lives.
Those casualty numbers would be the equivalent of up to nine million or ten million dead Americans if prorated to 2021 population figures. But hot as tempers have recently gotten, they never got so heated that an American mob lynched an unpopular head of government, then proceeded to cook and eat him. Not so with the good people of the Netherlands. Despite their national reputation for orderliness and politeness, a Dutch mob once seized the country’s prime minister and did a macabre number on him in 1672.
