A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Babylonians, Elamites, Chaldeans and half a dozen other peoples, led by his own brother, the king
of Babylon. The Assyrian war machine ground into action; Babylon, now rebuilt, was starved into
submission; the king escaped being tortured to death by burning himself alive in his own palace.
Then Assurbanipal went about ‘pacifying’ the various rebels with his usual sadistic brutality. By
639 B.C. all his enemies had been smashed into submission and the land of Elam had been erased
from the map. From his magnificent palace in Nineveh, Assurbanipal contemplated the whole
world prostrate at his feet, and savoured his victory. But it was at the cost of inflaming the whole
Mediterranean world with a frenzied and impotent hatred. And when Assurbanipal died, they rose
up again; and this time they succeeded. The Assyrians received no more mercy than they had given.
Their enemies - led by king Nabopolassar of Babylon - set out to exterminate them as if they were
plague rats. They were so thorough that they left no Assyrians to recall the story of their greatness.
Two centuries later, the Greek mercenaries of Cyrus were retreating up the Tigris valley - the
famous story is told by Xenophon - when they passed the gigantic ruins of Nineveh and Kalah.
They were baffled by the mystery of these great empty cities, whose immense fortifications made
them look impregnable. All Xenophon could find out - from local peasants - was that the cities had
been miraculously depopulated by direct intervention of the gods. The conquerors who had
terrorised the Middle East for so many years were no longer even a legend.
There is a baffling paradox involved in all this. The Assyrians responded to the challenge of
disaster and chaos by becoming the most ruthlessly efficient conquerors the world had ever seen.
They were undoubtedly the ‘fittest’, and according to the Darwinian principle, they should have
survived. Yet, for some reason, human history contradicts the Darwinian principle - not once, but
again and again.
From the time of the Assyrians to the time of the Nazis, history has been full of ruthlessly efficient
men who ended in failure. And it is of central importance to understand why this is so; for we are
now dealing with the essence of crime. The criminal is basically a person who sees no reason why
he should not get what he wants by stealth, or by force, or both. Confronted by a difficult knot, his
first impulse is to take a knife and cut it. In the short run, this is usually successful; but even in the
moderately short run, things usually begin to go wrong. In the case of the individual criminal - like
Carl Panzram - the reason is obvious enough. In the case of nations - like the Assyrians, the Huns
or the Vandals - it may be rather more complicated, but it amounts finally to the same thing. The
real objection to criminal violence is not the harm it inflicts on society - although this can be
horrific enough - but the fact that, in the long run, it invariably fails to achieve the criminal’s
objective. It is basically a miscalculation. For crime is essentially a left-brain way of achieving
objectives. It refuses to recognise any value but the achievement of the objective. And somehow,
the objective gets lost in the process.
It was this paradox that fascinated the historian Arnold Toynbee, who has described how he
became aware of it on a May evening in 1912. Toynbee had spent the day in the deserted citadel of
Mistra, which looks out over the plain of Sparta. For six hundred years, Mistra had been a
flourishing town, until one morning in 1821 a horde of wild invaders had massacred its inhabitants
and left it a ruin. Pondering on this completely pointless slaughter and destruction, Toynbee was
overwhelmed by ‘a horrifying sense of the sin manifest in human affairs’, and of ‘the cruel riddle of
mankind’s crimes and follies’. Why is man the only animal who takes pleasure in destruction for its
own sake? This is the question that runs through the eight thousand or so pages of Toynbee’s Study
of History.