A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

most convincing ideas, and many of his disciples received it with reservations - after all, anyone
can see that most suicides are committed in a state of muddle and confusion, in which a person
feels that life is not worth living; so the underlying instinct is for more life, not less. Even a
romantic like Keats, who feels he is ‘half in love with easeful death’, is in truth confusing the idea
of extinction with that of sleep and rest. If human beings really have an urge to self-destruction,
they manage to conceal it very well.
Fromm nevertheless adopts the Freudian death-wish. He cites a Spanish Civil War general, one of
whose favourite slogans was ‘Long live death!’ The same man once shouted at a liberal
intellectual: ‘Down with intelligence!’ From this, Fromm argues that militarism has an anti-life
element that might be termed necrophilia. But he demolishes his own case by citing two genuine
examples of necrophilia from a medical textbook on sexual perversion: both morgue attendants
who enjoyed violating female corpses. One of them described how, from the time of adolescence,
he masturbated while caressing the bodies of attractive females, then graduated to having
intercourse with them. Which raises the question: is this genuinely a case of necrophilia, which
means sexual desire directed towards death? Many highly-sexed teenage boys might do the same,
given the opportunity. It is not an interest in death as such, but in sex. A genuine necrophile would
be one who preferred corpses because they were dead. One of the best known cases of necrophilia,
Sergeant Bertrand (whom I discussed in Chapter 6 of my Origins of the Sexual Impulse} was not,
in this sense, a true necrophile; for although he dug up and violated newly buried corpses, he also
had mistresses who testified to his sexual potency. He is simply an example of a virile man who
needed more sex than he could get.
So Fromm’s whole argument about ‘necrophilia’, and his lengthy demonstration that Hitler was a
necrophiliac, collapses under closer analysis. The Spanish general was certainly not a necrophile by
any common definition: he was using death in a rather special sense, meaning idealistic selfsacrifice
for the good of one’s country. He certainly has nothing whatever in common with a
morgue attendant violating female corpses. Hitler was undoubtedly destructive, but there is no
evidence that he was self-destructive or had a secret death wish. On the contrary, he was a romantic
dreamer who believed that his thousand-year Reich was an expression of health, vitality and sanity.
Fromm’s ‘necrophilia’, like Wells’s notion of cruelty, fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of
human cruelty; it is not universal enough.
The notion of ‘losing face’ suggests an interesting alternative line of thought. It is obviously
connected, for example, with the cruelty of Himmler and Stalin when their absolute authority was
questioned. They were both men with a touchy sense of self-esteem, so that their response to any
suspected insult was vindictive rage. Another characteristic of both men was a conviction that they
were always right, and a total inability to admit that they might ever be wrong.
Himmlers and Stalins are, fortunately, rare; but the type is surprisingly common. The credit for
recognising this goes to A. E. Van Vogt, a writer of science fiction who is also the author of a
number of brilliant psychological studies. Van Vogt’s concept of the ‘Right Man’ or ‘violent man’
is so important to the understanding of criminality that it deserves to be considered at length, and in
this connection I am indebted to Van Vogt for providing me with a series of five talks broadcast on
KPFK radio in 1965. Like his earlier pamphlet A Report on the Violent Male, these have never been
printed in book form.
In 1954, Van Vogt began work on a war novel called The Violent Man, which was set in a Chinese
prison camp. The commandant of the camp is one of those savagely authoritarian figures who