Can you hear them, the clickety-click-click of the needles of the wicked old crones sitting beside the guillotine, sometimes cackling, sometimes shrieking, and always thirsting for more blood? The social mechanics are always the same, no matter the victim, as if they are hard-wired into the DNA of our species: find a victim, isolate him or her, reduce their human characteristics to a self-accusing parody, conduct a mock trial and then gloriously destroy your victim, with howls of approval of the mob, a word that comes from the Latin, mobile vulgas, essentially, “the mood of the common people.”
These lynchings are of course seldom confined to the common people: why should they get all the fun? The mob soon attracts the attention of those well-educated homicidalists who will happily join the murderous throng. Writ large, liberated in their sanctimonious murderousness, mobs revelled in Krystallnacht and the Nazis’ final solution, Pol Pot’s hecatomb and Rwanda’s pangacide, this final feat being done with cold steel and much pleasure. No species is immune to the allure of righteous murder, even the most persecuted people on earth, for were not a handful of Jewish revolutionaries – Sverdlov, Goloshchyokin, Yurovsky – involved in the Bolshevik butcher-gang that slaughtered the Tsarist royal family at Ekaterinburg? One of the murderers – Nikulin, an Orthodox Christian – in old age happily reminisced about the murders: “All was done consciously, without doubts. I did understand all the responsibility. I welcomed the decision of Ural Regional Soviet.. And even more, if one is allowed to say, I considered it as an honour.”
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