The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

The war was the tsar’s downfall. His troops fought bravely, but they lacked ammunition and proper clothing. Food intended for the army rotted in railway sidings. As the Russians suffered defeats and heavy casualties, the tsar sacked his commander-in-chief and took over that position himself. It made no difference. Russians starved and the war fever evaporated. In December 1916, Rasputin was murdered by a group of liberal conspirators, and his body was found under the ice of the river Neva. The tsar returned from the front and seemed to become curiously apathetic. The government was obviously disintegrating, and the country was paralysed by strikes. On 8 March 1917, disorders broke out in St Petersburg (then called Petrograd) to protest about the lack of bread. Policemen fired on crowds. Regiments began to mutiny. And the parliament decided that it had to step in and form a provisional government. The tsar watched his fantasies disintegrating around him. His own soldiers ordered him back into the palace when he tried to leave.

The Germans were delighted with the news, and sent the revolutionary Lenin back to Russia by sealed train. He was greeted by huge crowds and a brass band. But his own party, the Bolshevists, were not in power, and Lenin had to flee temporarily to Finland. He came back in disguise, and planned a coup d’état. In November 1917, the Bolshevists seized key buildings in Petrograd.

The tsar’s family were already in exile in Siberia, in Tobolsk. The tsar himself turned down a plan of escape, hoping to recover his throne. When the Bolshevists took over, they transferred the family to Ekaterinburg, in the Urals. As loyal troops were not far away, the Bolshevists ordered their execution. On 16 July 1918, the tsar and his family – the tsarina, four daughters and his thirteen-year-old son – were taken down to the cellar and shot with revolvers. They were thrown down a mineshaft. The next day, the tsar’s brother, the tsarina’s sister and four nephews were taken to the same mineshaft and thrown down alive; dynamite was tossed in after them. In the rest of the country, the civil war between loyalists and communists continued, with appalling atrocities on both sides. The whole of Russia was paying for the tsar’s delusion that he could rule like his father.

If humankind were capable of learning from history, the First World War would have taught them that war had become an absurdity.

The German general von Schlieffen had devised a plan that should have overwhelmed the allies within months. It was to hurl a huge German force into France, big enough to overrun the country within weeks, then to turn his attention to destroying the Russians. Unfortunately for the Kaiser, von Schlieffen died, and his successor, von Moltke, failed to grasp the importance of the time element. He nervously divided his forces between Russia and France, with the result that the German offensive bogged down along the Marne river. Both sides then dug trenches, and slugged away at one another for the rest of the war – four years of it – killing millions on both sides, but each failing to dislodge the other. Churchill, the British lord of the admiralty, tried to break the deadlock by launching an attack on Turkey from the Dardanelles, to open a new supply route to Russia; this also bogged down, with tremendous loss of life.

We find it hard to understand how two enormous armies could sit down opposite each other for four years, launch offensives and counter-offensives which lost and gained the same piece of ground, and kill one another by the million. When the British launched an attack in north-eastern France in 1915, they lost a quarter of a million men and gained three miles. When the Germans attacked Verdun in 1916, there were two million men engaged on both sides, and half of these were killed; Verdun was left a ruin but the Germans failed to take it.

Then why did they go on? Why did the leaders of both sides not open peace negotiations, since the failure of the Schlieffen plan had made all the Kaiser’s other aims irrelevant? Because both sides were dominated by their emotions, and national pride demanded some kind of victory to make up for the suffering. It came, eventually, only because the Germans made a second incredible blunder, and began sinking American shipping to prevent supplies reaching Britain. Sensibly, America had been determined to keep out of the war; but when American ships were sunk by German U-boats (the U standing for ‘undersea’), their national pride also demanded revenge. A telegram – probably forged – purporting to be from the German foreign secretary Zimmerman and offering Mexico large slices of American territory when Germany won the war, supplied the necessary element of indignation and outrage; America entered the war in 1917. Her weight turned the scales. The Kaiser was shocked and distressed when his generals told him there was no alternative to surrender.

Europe was a wreck. Half its young men had been killed, hundreds of its towns devastated. Three major dynasties had collapsed: the Romanovs in Russia, the Hapsburgs in Austria and the Hohenzollerns in Germany – the Kaiser was forced to abdicate, and went to live in Holland (where he died in 1942). As the world took stock of its losses, it was perhaps the most traumatic moment in the history of the human race. It was also clear evidence that there was something badly wrong with mankind. Ever since civilisation had arisen in Mesopotamia, man had been fighting his own kind about territory. Now the latest quarrel about territory had led to this shattering devastation. The situation could be compared to a household whose members constantly get drunk and squabble; then one day, the disagreements become so violent that every window is smashed, several walls are demolished, and the garden is trampled into a morass. In these circumstances, the most drunken family would recognise that something drastic has to be done. But the human problem is rather more complicated than drunkenness. The simple animal need for territory cannot be easily reconciled with civilisation. Animals merely snarl at one another at their boundaries; but armies cannot restrict their activities to snarling. The war problem is fundamentally a territorial problem, and can probably only be solved when the last vestige of the empire-building mentality disappears.

The American president, Woodrow Wilson, recognised this intuitively when he suggested the foundation of the League of Nations to deal with future ‘boundary disputes’. Europe accepted his suggestion with relief. Yet the victors failed to grasp how far these boundary disputes – ‘territory’ – had been responsible for the Great War – in fact, for all wars in history. So they proceeded to redraw the map of Europe in a way that would almost certainly guarantee another war within decades.

THE MAFIA

War is a deliberate release of the aggressions of society. Unfortunately, it is easier to let the genie out of the bottle than to induce him to go back again. This is why every war in history has been followed by an outbreak of crime. The crime wave that followed the First World War was – like the catastrophe that caused it – the most violent in history. It differed from all previous outbreaks in one ominous respect: instead of quietly receding, it gathered strength, and became the most organised system of corruption since the days of Rodrigo Borgia.

Organised crime had, of course, been a feature of civilisation since the days of the Greek pirates. But compared to the forces of law and order, the criminals lacked efficiency and foresight – which is why Pompey was able to destroy the pirates in a matter of weeks. In the London of Shakespeare and Jonathan Wild, or in the Paris of Vidocq, organised crime managed to maintain a precarious existence by keeping a ‘low profile’. This meant chiefly that violence had to be kept to a minimum; for it was violence that outraged the citizens and forced authority to take action. In countries where banditry was an accepted fact of life, it existed with the aid and approval of most citizens. That could only happen in places – such as nineteenth century Greece and Sicily – where the citizens detested their rulers and regarded the bandits as ‘freedom fighters’. Even so, violence could produce a ferocious backlash. In 1870, Greek brigands – led by the notorious Arvanitakis brothers – captured a party of distinguished English tourists near Marathon and demanded a ransom of £50,000 or, alternatively, an amnesty. (They had grown rich on banditry and wanted to return to society.) The Greek government categorically refused, and soldiers advanced on the bandit hideout. The four captives were promptly murdered as the brigands fled towards the village of Dilessi. Seven brigands were killed and six captured. The British government was outraged and threatened to invade Greece; the Russians threatened to fight on the side of the Greeks. The Greek government fell; most of the bandits who had escaped were finally killed or captured. And in Greece, kidnapping ceased to be a more-or-less acceptable custom.