A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

city, with its impersonality and overcrowding, is already a basic violation of natural instinct. So
when Lieutenant Galley told the man to shoot women and children, he did what civilisation had
taught him to do since childhood - allowed his mind to overrule his instinct.
The rape of Nanking illustrates the same point. Rhodes Farmer wrote in Shanghai Harvest, A Diary
of Three Years in the China War (published in 1945): ‘To the Japanese soldiers at the end of four
months of hard fighting, Nanking promised a last fling of debauchery before they returned to their
highly disciplined lives back home in Japan.’ But this shows a failure to understand the Japanese
character. The Japanese Yearbook for 1946 comes closer when it says: ‘By 7 December, the outer
defences of Nanking were under attack, and a week later, Japanese anger at the stubborn Chinese
defence of Shanghai burst upon Nanking in an appalling reign of terror.’ In fact, the Chinese
resistance - ever since their unexpected stand at Lukouchiao in July 1937 - had caused the Japanese
to ‘lose face’, and they were in a hard and unforgiving mood when they entered Nanking. But then,
we also need to understand why this loss of face mattered so much, and this involves understanding
the deep religious traditionalism of the Japanese character. The historian Arnold Toynbee has
pointed out, in East to West (pp. 69-71) that if the town of Bromsgrove had happened to be in
Japan, the Japanese would know exactly why it was so named, because they would have
maintained a sacred grove to the memory of the war-god Bron. And there would probably be a
Buddhist temple next door to the pagan shrine, and the priest and the parson of the temple would be
on excellent terms. When, in the nineteenth century, the Japanese decided to ‘Westernise’, they
poured all this religious emotion into the cult of the Emperor, who was worshipped as a god. The
war that began in 1937, and ended in 1945 with the dropping of two atom bombs, was an upsurge
of intense patriotic feeling similar to the Nazi upsurge in Germany. The outnumbered Japanese
troops felt they were fighting for their Emperor-God, and that their cause was just. This is why the
stubborn Chinese resistance placed them in such an unforgiving frame of mind. Like Milgram’s
subjects, they felt they were administering a salutary shock-treatment; but in this case, anger turned
insensitivity into cruelty.
Wells, oddly enough, failed to grasp this curiously impersonal element in human cruelty. Having
seized upon the notion that slum conditions produce frustration, he continues with a lengthy
analysis of human cruelty and sadism, citing as typical the case of Marshal Gilles de Rais, who
killed over two hundred children in sexual orgies in the fifteenth century. In fact, de Rais’s
perversions throw very little light on the nature of ordinary human beings, whose sexual tastes are
more straightforward. The Japanese who burnt Nanking, the Germans who destroyed Oradour,
were not sexual perverts; they had probably never done anything of the sort before, and would
never do anything of the sort again. They were simply releasing their aggression in obedience to
authority.
Fromm is inclined to make the same mistake. He recognises ‘conformist aggression’ - aggression
under orders - but feels that human destructiveness is better explained by what he calls ‘malignant
aggression’ - that is, by sadism. Sadism he defines as the desire to have absolute power over a
living being, to have a god-like control. He cites both Himmler and Stalin as examples of sadism,
pointing out that both could, at times, show great kindness and consideration. They became ruthless
only when their absolute authority was questioned. But this hardly explains the human tendency to
destroy their fellows in war. So Fromm is forced to postulate another kind of ‘malignant
aggression’, which he calls ‘necrophilia’. By this, he meant roughly what Freud meant by
‘thanatos’ or the death-urge - the human urge to self-destruction. Freud had invented the ‘death
wish’ at the time of the First World War in an attempt to explain the slaughter. It was not one of his