The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

And this murderous violence also brings about a change in the pattern of history. The pendulum now swings between savage oppression and the equally savage destruction of the oppressors. The twentieth century has seen this pattern in the rise and fall of the Nazis. And it emerged for the first time in the first millennium B.C. in the story of the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians had played an important part in the history of Mesopotamia for more than a thousand years. The murder of Tiglath-Pileser in 1077 B.C. brought its first great epoch to an end. For more than a century, during what George Roux calls (in chapter 17 of Ancient Iraq)’the dark age in Mesopotamia’, Assyria was in eclipse. In 911 B.C. it began to hack its way back to greatness; Jaynes writes: ‘… the Assyrians [began] their reconquest of the world with unprecedented sadistic ferocity, butchering and terroring their way back to their former empire and then beyond and all the way to Egypt and up the fertile Nile to the holy sun-god himself, even as Pizarro was to take the divine Inca captive two and a half millennia later on the opposite side of the earth. And by this time, the great transilience in mentality had occurred. Man had become conscious of himself and his world.’ And from then until their final downfall in 610 B.C., they ruled and conquered with a ferocity that makes the Nazis seem almost benevolent by comparison. In the British Museum can be seen the tablets of Assurakbal III, depicting the torture of captives who are stretched naked on the ground and tied to pegs; some are being skinned alive, others are having their tongues and ears ripped off with pincers. (Some of the more hair-raising tablets are hidden away in the basement of the Museum.) When Sennacherib invaded Babylon in 689 B.C. he carried out the systematic slaughter of all its inhabitants until the street was piled high with corpses; then he razed the city to the ground and diverted a canal through it to wash away the ruins. (Eight years later, he was assassinated by his sons as he was praying in the temple at Nineveh.) By the middle of the seventh century B.C., the Assyrian war machine was the most efficient and brutal the world had ever known. Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727 B.C.) invented a new method of crushing revolt – mass deportation to distant places; he was indifferent to the number who died of starvation and exhaustion en route. In one year (744), sixty-five thousand people were deported.

Many powerful nations have collapsed because they became lazy and effete – like the Romans and Persians of later times. The Assyrians never made that mistake. They were prepared to smite hard and brutally to maintain their grip on their subjects. And it was this very efficiency that brought about their downfall. The Semitic peoples have never been notable for co-operation; they are too much inclined to squabble amongst themselves. But the brutality of the Assyrians finally drove their enemies to unite. Around 654 B.C., Assurbanipal was faced by a hostile coalition of 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.

It is appropriate that the scene of the realisation should have been above the plain of Sparta. For the Spartans, like the Assyrians, are an example of the futility of sheer ruthlessness. In the eighth century B.C., the Lacedemonians (Sparta is the capital of Lacedemon) found their own land too small for the growing population, so they invaded the territory of their neighbours, the Messenians. For sixteen years the Messenians fought like tigers, but the Spartans finally conquered. However the Messenians detested the invaders, and a century later they made a desperate and tremendous attempt to throw off the foreign yoke. This war was even bloodier, and it lasted twenty years. At the end of it, both sides were exhausted; but the Spartans were the winners, and they took murderous reprisals. And now they took the step that would eventually turn Sparta into a living fossil. The sheer agony of that long battle made the Spartans determined never to allow it to happen again. So they turned Lacedemon into one vast army camp. They thought and ate and drank nothing but military discipline. Messenia had to be held in an iron grip, so they set out to transform themselves into iron men.

The land of Messenia was divided into equal allotments, each of which was handed over to a Spartan ‘peer’; the natives became slaves – helots – whose business was to support him. If any child of a helot showed the least sign of talent or brilliance, he was promptly murdered; the Spartans were determined to save themselves trouble in the next generation. All their own children – girls as well as boys – were destined for military training from birth. (Weak children were condemned to die of exposure.) At the age of seven, Spartan children left their homes and went into training camps. Girls received the same military training as boys; in athletics, they competed with them on equal terms, even wrestling naked with them in front of a male audience. The highest virtue in Spartan life was sheer toughness, ability to endure pain and hardship. In due course, the males entered the army. There was no family life for them; they lived in a barracks and ate in the mess. On a girl’s wedding night, she surrendered her virginity, then her husband left her and went back to barracks. To show she was a soldier’s wife she cut her hair short and wore male clothes. If her husband seemed unable to produce healthy children, he was expected to find a better man to occupy his bed; if he was unwilling, then his wife had to arrange it. A man who ate poorly at mess was likely to be penalised; it was evidence that he had been indulging himself in the debilitating pleasantness of family life.