A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

suicide and crime. The most amazing realisation that emerges from the study of hypnosis is that our
sense of reality is so easily undermined. In chickens it can be done with a chalk line or a bent piece
of wood on the beak; in frogs, with a few taps on the stomach. In human beings that process is
slightly more complicated, but not much. Völgyesi talks about the ‘law of point reflexes’, which
states that any monotonously repeated stimulus of the same point in the cerebral cortex produces
compulsive sleepiness. Similarly, our eyes cannot focus for long on unmoving objects; they keep
de-focusing. It takes a sudden movement to shake the ‘controlling ego’ awake again, to ‘restore us
to reality’.
It is this sense of reality that makes the difference between suicide or non-suicide. Durkheim was
therefore mistaken. The ‘social currents’ certainly exist; but they are only the secondary cause of
crime or suicide. The primary cause must be sought in the psychology of the individual.
Does this mean that Durkheim’s opponents were right? No, for they argued that suicide can only be
understood in psychological terms, and Durkheim proved them wrong. It must be understood in
social and psychological terms. And if we are to understand the basic patterns of criminal
behaviour - and therefore how to combat it - the search for patterns must be continued on both
levels.
A REPORT ON THE VIOLENT MAN
On 13 December 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army marched into Nanking, in Central China, and
began what has been described as ‘one of the most savage acts of mass terror in modern times’ - a
campaign of murder, rape and torture that lasted for two months. Chinese soldiers had divested
themselves of their uniforms and mixed with the civilian population, in the belief that the Japanese
would spare them if they were unarmed. The Japanese began rounding them up and shooting them
in huge numbers, using machine-guns. The bodies - some twenty thousand of them - were thrown
into heaps, dowsed with petrol, and set alight; hundreds who were still alive died in the flames.
Because they were indistinguishable from the soldiers, male civilians were also massacred. Women
were herded into pens which became virtually brothels for the Japanese soldiers; more than twenty
thousand women between the ages of eleven and eighty were raped, and many disembowelled.
Many who were left alive committed ritual suicide, the traditional response of Chinese women to
violation. Boys of school age were suspended by their hands for days, and then used for bayonet
practice. Rhodes Farmer, a journalist who worked in Shanghai came into possession of photographs
of mass executions of boys by beheading, of rapes of women by Japanese soldiers, and of
‘slaughter pits’ in which soldiers were encouraged to develop their killer-instinct by bayoneting
tied prisoners. When published in the American magazine Look, they caused worldwide
condemnation, and the Japanese commander was recalled to Tokyo. The odd thing was that these
photographs were taken by the Japanese themselves; for they regarded the atrocities as simply acts
of revenge. In two months, more than fifty thousand people died in Nanking, and towards two
hundred thousand in the surrounding countryside. (In 1982 - when the Chinese were quarrelling
with the Japanese about their ‘rewriting’ of history - the official Chinese figure was three hundred
and forty thousand.)
Some six hundred miles to the north-west of Nanking, the city of Peking was already in
Japanese hands. But the village of Chou-kou-tien, thirty miles to the south-west, was still held by
Chinese Nationalists, and there a team of international scientists were collaborating on a project
that had created immense excitement in archaeological circles. In 1929, a young palaeontologist
named Pie Wen-Chung had discovered in the caves near Chou-kou-tien the petrified skull of one of