Peace and war
Bob Johnson considers ‘distorted revenge’
On Saturday 1 August 1914 the German kaiser telegraphed his cousin George V: ‘The troops on my frontier are in the act of being stopped by telephone and telegraph from crossing into France.’
Helmuth Johann Ludwig von Moltke, chief of general staff of the German army and Otto von Bismarck’s favourite general, witnessing the collapse of his entire war strategy, was ‘crushed’. ‘Your majesty, it cannot be done,’ he pleaded, ‘the deployment of millions cannot be improvised.’
Helmuth von Moltke went back to general staff headquarters and ‘burst into tears of abject despair… I thought my heart would break… I never recovered from the shock of this incident. Something in me broke and I was never the same thereafter.’
So, what was going on inside the mind of kaiser Wilhelm? What pressed him to think this way? Unless we better understand this twentieth century cataclysm of violence, psychopathy and war, we’ve no chance of preventing the next one – it’ll be worse.
First, Wilhelm orders his army not to invade Luxembourg and later France – a move we would now profoundly welcome. But then, just as whimsically, he reverses it. As Helmut von Moltke all too dramatically confirmed, such a cancellation of the first world war was well within Wilhelm’s power. Indeed, as Robert K Massie, the historian, notes in his book Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War, the kaiser had already ‘without consulting Moltke… commanded his own military aide to telephone the headquarters of the Sixteenth Division and halt the operation’.
While there are many and varied antecedents to this mass destruction of Europe’s wealth and civilisation, here, clearly, was one man who not only could, but actually did, cancel world war one – if only too briefly.
This type of illogical self-destruct occurs widely, so it is instructive to see how it played out inside the minds of sixty UK murderers. What emerged was a clear model of ‘distorted revenge’, together with a practicable pathway to eliminate it, which, though simple enough, is far from easy.
A serial killer in the making could not have put it more succinctly: ‘Having a tantrum aged four means stamping your foot on the floor. Have one aged twenty-four and somebody dies.’ Or, in the case of kaiser Wilhelm, who was then aged fifty-five, uncounted millions die.
Clarity is the first essential for human understanding. Children, I would argue, are powerless and entirely impressionable, so obviously they can become enraged . That is clear enough. What is less obvious is the impact this ‘bottled rage’ can have in later life.
I once worked in Parkhurst, then the UK’s flagship prison, from 1991 to 1996. Once a serial killer in the making, who I treated, had clarified his childhood, he rescinded his entirely believable plan to murder someone every two years (including me) – and since 1993 he has never again expressed any desire to pursue such a course of action.
In Parkhurst I spent time convincing murderers that their wounded childhoods were over and could heal. I filmed, on video, 700 hours that I spent coaxing crushed people to blossom. They responded by eliminating violence. No alarm bells were rung in the prison for three years, down from twenty a year previously. It became obvious, to me, that all violence (including war) is ‘distorted revenge’ – and also curable. Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom: ‘Free lunches stop wars.’ So: ‘Drop white goods, not bombs.’ It would be cheaper. How about that?
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