In
much horror writing the notion of people eating each other is often
used as a means of generating thrills and shivers. In the “Call
of Cthulhu” roleplaying
world, whenever there’s a Tcho-tcho community around, or if there’s
a copy of the Regnum Congo
to hand, you know that the butcher knives will soon be out in force
and that the beefiest person in the room is about to be sized up and
marked with dotted lines using a magic marker. It’s an horrific
notion indeed: that someone, intelligent and otherwise cultured to
some degree, would resort to such an act. In the ubiquitous lifeboat
scenario, we often rationalise the act of eating a person in order
that the majority will survive as an unfortunate but necessary course
of desperation; so too, the Andean ‘plane crash situation, often
justified as a “waste not, want not” instance of the crime.
In
our Twenty-first Century complacency, it’s easy to feel that
instances of cannibalism are few and far between, or are the relics
of a distant and unfortunate past. Indeed, when Daisy Bates went out
amongst the Australian Aborigines in the 1800s and returned later
having penned a book citing instances of cannibalism amongst remote
tribes, the howling protest against her views led to many researchers
investigating her claims and finding them to be, in fact, baseless.
Such investigation leads to a comfortable certainty among the
population that cannibals are simply bogey-men, meant to thrill and
chill, but are not demonstrably real. In fact, for every instance of
cannibalism reported throughout the world, most are followed-up by
reports which strenuously downplay the impact of the events or
relegate them to the actions of a slight few mentally-unbalanced
individuals.
It
has to be said though, that there is not a single culture on the planet
which has not seen instances of the practise of cannibalism, or that
do not have religious, litigious, legendary or mythological views
concerning people-eating in their worldview. You can’t have a law
forbidding cannibalism in a society unless the notion has been
publically uttered at some point in time. The concept – if not the
practise – is worldwide and is often referred to as the “Great
Taboo”.
Popular
fiction is replete with explorations of the sin: the serial-killer
novel boom of the 1980s and 90s is well-known and there are probably
few people who wouldn’t know what “The
Silence of the Lambs” is all
about. But with this examination of the subject, has art imitated
life only to have life imitate art in turn? The genre launched itself
off the exploits of such villains as Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer,
starting with Robert Bloch’s bestseller Psycho.
Fast-forward past years of Patricia Cornwall and Thomas Harris
volumes cashing-in on serial killer chic, we start to see
murder-cannibalism pacts being organised by e-mail in Europe,
wholesale human consumption in outlying areas of Russia, and
largely-unchecked acts of thrill-kill murder and ingestion by
blue-collar workers in the US. It seems that, no matter how great the
taboo, there are always those who are willing to break it.
One
difficulty of pinning down widespread instances of cannibalism is
that they tend to have carry-on effects over the local populations.
In the 1920s and 30s there were several cases of cannibalism centred
in impoverished Germany in the inter-war years when the economy of
that country was running wildly out of control. As only one instance,
Peter Kurten, the “Vampire of Dusseldorf”, seduced young men back
to his apartment where he killed them, raped them and then chopped
them into pieces. He disposed of their clothes at local second-hand
clothing and rag markets; the physical remains, he minced and baked
into pies or turned into sausages. These he sold readily to the local
community who ate them and asked for more. In the investigation that
followed the discovery of his crimes, few people came forward to
claim having partaken of the smallgoods; investigators felt that, on
balance, it was unlikely that Kurten’s customers would have had no
idea about the source of the produce. The matter was allowed to rest.
It’s
these instances where the crime filters its way through the local
community that much of the detail gets swept beneath a rug of
conspiratorial silence. If one person confesses to participation,
then all suffer the light of scrutiny, and so a wall of conscious
obliviousness descends.
In
China, at the height of the Cultural
Revolution – a
state-sanctioned act of barbarism which despoiled the country from
1966 to 1976 – the residents of Wuxuan county in the province of
Guangxi became embroiled in a wholesale act of cannibalism that
stands as perhaps the worst instance of this atrocity in modern
times. In order to understand it, one needs to examine the context.
In
the late 1950s, Mao Zedong ordered the implementation of the Great
Leap Forward. It was styled as
a means of unifying primary and secondary production across China and
maximising economic output. In fact, generated as it was by Mao’s
half-baked understanding of economic theory, it was a dismal failure:
crops failed while non-metal producing areas of the country tried
desperately to meet quotas by melting nails, woks and farm tools into
unwieldy blocks of useless pig-iron. China frantically exported what
crops had been raised to bring money into the country and the people
of China starved. The results were seen as a failure attributable
directly to Mao’s leadership and his political power waned as
others – who actually understood the economy – were drafted in to
rescue the country from ruin.
In
the aftermath, Mao engineered a cunning means of destabilising those
who had replaced him as leader in all but name. Turning to
Marxist-Leninist theories, he called for a “constant revolution”,
embarked on a vicious newspaper campaign against his rivals and then
mobilised the youth of the country to attack all authority in the
name of removing the “Four Olds” (old customs, old culture, old
habits, and old ideas) from Chinese life and eradicating
counter-revolutionary agents from all governing agencies. These
youths formed into cadres known as the “Red Guards” and were
given tacit and not-so-tacit license to attack people, institutions
and places which were felt to promote non-Maoist thought. Veneration
of elders, once a mainstay of Confucian thought, gave way to young
people openly attacking and ridiculing – even killing – figures
of authority, from doctors to ministers to high-ranking members of
the military. Academics – the hated intelligentsia
- were particularly targeted.
Once
society had been effectively ruined and all hallmarks of the past had
been destroyed or defaced, Mao enacted a new decree – the “Down
To The Countryside Movement”
– which re-located the Red Guard bully-boys outside of the urban
centres, allowing Mao to re-build his political empire in their wake.
In essence, Mao unleashed a tiger in China’s cities that wiped out
his opposition for him; he allowed the chaos to last long enough to
do his dirty work before exiling his agents into the wilderness where
their efforts, it was hoped, would cause minimal damage.
So
far, so evil.
A
feature of Maoist rule was a system of keeping party members in line
with current ideology by calling out into open meeting those persons
who had been seen to lapse into “counter-revolutionary ways”.
Such people were “criticised” in open forum, their sins denounced
and appropriate punishment meted out. Oftentimes, these sessions were
based on nothing more than envy, ambition, or petty revenge for
perceived past slights. Deng Xiaoping was forced to endure such
humiliation several times before coming to power in China.
Amongst
the Zhuang people in Wuxuan County, in the southern province of
Guangxi, this procedure took a very dark turn indeed. The powers that
were engaged in many acts of petty retribution upon local authority
figures, at first calling their party adherence into question and
then by falsifying evidence against them. In time, punishments moved
from public humiliation to savage beatings, and finally, summary
execution, often by brutal assault at the hands of the audience
gathered as witnesses. At some point, things got even stranger, as
Zheng Yi explains in his book on the subject, Scarlet
Memorial:
“The
great battle [of Wuxuan, a
local engagement to purge the district of perceived
counter-revolutionaries] was
undoubtedly an important event in Wuxuan during the Cultural
Revolution. It had led to the deaths of nearly one hundred people.
Furthermore, along with the ‘meeting to blow the typhoon’ [a
community meeting to openly criticise and punish malefactors in the
district], it pushed creative
cannibalism to its climax. The hearts, livers, and flesh of four
victims had been devoured. The battle at Wuxuan, though, cannot be
explained as the key to the outbreak of cannibalism or as its basic
cause. In general, I thought I would agree with the views of the
Wuxuan locals who believed that the spread of cannibalism was
directly related to the cruelty in the battle and to the frenetic
revenge mentality it aroused. However, after analysing most of the
cases of cannibalism, I realised that they had nothing to do with the
battle or its reverberations. Besides, many of the incidents of
cannibalism cited later had occurred before, not after, the battle.”
He
goes on:
“I
personally think that the outbreak of cannibalism at Wuxuan
originated from the movement to ‘blow a twelve-degree typhoon of
class struggle’ that was promoted by the local regime of the Party,
government, and military. On March 19, 1968, the first death by
lynching occurred in Wuxuan County. Far from being punished, the
perpetrators were actually egged on. Thus, the killing quickly
spread. At the end of May and in early June a meeting to blow the
typhoon was called by the head of the Liuzhou Military Sub-District,
with Wen Longjun, concurrently the chairman of the Revolutionary
Committee and director of the local Armed Police, and Pan Zhenkuai,
the chairman of the Sanli District Revolutionary Committee, in
attendance. On June 14, the Wuxuan Revolutionary Committee held a
conference of high-level cadres from the county, district, brigade,
and production-team levels. At this gathering, the spirit of the
meeting to blow the typhoon was passed on. At the meeting Wen Longjun
advocated that ‘a twelve-degree typhoon must be blown in the
struggle against our enemies. The method employed should be: to
mobilise adequately the masses, rely on the masses to carry out the
dictatorship, and hand the policies to the masses. In engaging in
class struggle, our hands must not be soft.’ Thus, Wuxuan, which
had been quiet for a month after the great battle, all of a sudden
turned into a killing field and a hell of human-flesh consumption!”
In
effect, the local authorities ceded the identification, incarceration
and punishment of suspected anti-Communist sympathisers to the local
people. The floodgates were opened.
“The
killer barber who had cut open Zhou Shian while he was still alive
and the injured veteran volunteer soldier, Wang Chunrong, had both
been quiet for a full month. During the meeting to blow the typhoon,
called by the county Revolutionary Committee, the barber was reborn.
Picking up his five-inch knife, he resumed his special contributions
to the great enterprise of the proletarian dictatorship. At a
criticism rally held in Wuxuan, victim Tan Qiou was beaten to death
and Huang Zhenji was beaten into a coma. When Huang Zhenji regained
consciousness, he begged Wang Chunrong, ‘Comrade, forgive me!’
Bearing the shiny five-inch knife, Wang Chunrong administered a twist
of sarcasm. ‘We’ll forgive you for five minutes,’ he said. Wang
then ordered cadres to drag the victim ahead to the Zhongshan
pavilion where, once again, Wang took out his five-inch knife and
this time stepped on the victim’s chest and cut out his heart and
liver. The victim immediately died.”
After
another such incident which started an impromptu carnival during
which the flesh of the victims was handed out to the participants, a
former director of the county court approached an army official who
was looking on:
“‘Such
indiscriminate killing cannot go on
[he said]. It’s time you did
something about it.’ The army office was Yan Yulin, deputy director
of the county Armed Police and deputy director of the county
Revolutionary Committee. This patriarchal official, who now held
almighty power, simply replied, ‘This is a matter for the masses.
It is out of our control.’ Naturally, he was not about to stand up
and stop the killing and the cannibalism, since he had just come from
the meeting to blow the typhoon, where he had occupied a seat on the
podium.”
Several
appalling instances made it to the official documents, like this one:
“After
Zhang Boxun [a lower
middle-class peasant and elementary school teacher]
was beaten to death, his liver and flesh quickly disappeared, so that
only his small and large intestines were left. The ruthless killer
held up one end of Zhang’s intestines while the other end dragged
on the ground, and with a manic glee he yelled, ‘take a look at
Zhang Boxun’s intestines! How fat they are!’ Then, the killer
took the intestines home to boil and eat.”
And
it went on:
“...the
masses simply went berserk in their cannibalism, like a pack of
hungry dogs who feed on the dead after an epidemic. Every so often,
some victims would be singled out ‘to be criticised’. Each
criticism rally was followed by a beating, and each death ended in
cannibalism. Once the victim fell to the ground – whether the
victim had stopped breathing was irrelevant – the crows rushed
forward, pulled out their cutting knives and daggers, and started
cutting at whatever piece of flesh was closest to them. After the
flesh had been cut away, they targeted the large and small entrails,
along with the broken bones. I was told that a certain elderly woman,
who had heard that a diet of human eyes helped restore eyesight, used
to wander from criticism rally to criticism rally with a vegetable
basket over her arm. She would hover about for the opportune moment
to rush toward a victim. Once the victim had been beaten down onto
the ground, she would quickly pull out her sharp, pointed knife and
use it to dig out the victim’s eyes...”
Finally,
“The
very last sense of sin and humanity was swept away by the mentality
of following the crowd. The frenzied wave spread like an epidemic.
Once victims had been subjected to criticism, they were cut open
alive, and all their body parts – heart, liver, gallbladder,
kidneys, elbows, feet, tendons, intestines – were boiled,
barbecued, or stir-fried into a gourmet cuisine. On campuses, in
hospitals, in the canteens of various governmental units at the
brigade, township, district, and county levels, the smoke from
cooking pots could be seen in the air. Feasts of human flesh, at
which people celebrated by drinking and gambling, were a common
sight.”
It
must be said that Zheng Yi’s testimony of only the 120 or so cases
he was told about, or read of in official records, was howled down
after its publication, but mainly for its negative portrayal of the
Zhuang people. Some said that Zheng Yi’s reliance on unpublished
interviews calls his account into question, while others claim that,
given that Party policy and its execution in the country regions was
erratic, the instances of cannibalism in Wuxuan cannot be called
either “organised”, or “consistent”. Semantics aside, given
that some of Zheng’s accounts are taken from public records and
that many of his interviews are corroborated by the same sources, not
everything can be played down or ignored through wishful thinking. As
is usual with cases of people eating each other, the authorities are
keen to draw a veil over things...
*****
It’s
chilling to think that all this took place only about 50 years ago.
It sounds like something from the Dark Ages; but no, the very next
year, people were walking on the Moon. And, while we’re at it,
consider these other recent cases:
- Tamara Samsonova, a 68-year-old former hotel worker was arrested on the 28th of July 2015 after the partial remains of a woman she lived with were found wrapped in plastic in a local pond in St. Petersburg. She told police that she had killed the woman – Valentina Ulanova, 79 – because of an argument over unwashed coffee cups. After her arrest, a diary found in her apartment was discovered written in German, English and Russian, detailing the murders of several men who had rented rooms from her and whom she had partially eaten, claiming to have especially enjoyed the lungs.
- In a spree lasting 28 months in Belinsky in the Penza Oblast region of Russia, Alexander Bychkov, aged 24, killed and butchered nine homeless alcoholic men with a knife and hammer. He was arrested by police for shoplifting but, during questioning, he confessed to the murders: a diary of the events was later discovered in a search of his house. He told police that he had eaten the livers of several of the men and in one instance had eaten one of the dead men’s hearts. He was imprisoned for life.
- A morgue worker in Russia’s northern Yamalo-Nenets region was arrested for killing and eating his common-law wife. During his trial he confessed that he had developed a taste for human flesh after years in his chosen profession (the purpose of which role he must have critically misunderstood). He was jailed for nine years in a central Russian labour camp.
- In 2011, two Pakistani brothers were arrested for desecrating graves and stealing body parts to take home and eat. 35-year-old Mohammad Arif Ali and Mohammad Farman Ali, aged 30, were sentenced to pay a fine and to spend two years behind bars – Pakistan has no specific legislation concerning acts of cannibalism so a relatively light punishment was imposed. The two brothers spent most of their jail time in a neurophysiology hospital being subjected to tests. A protest was initiated by the people of their home town in 2013 upon their release and later, in 2015, after reports of the stench of rotting flesh emanating from their house were fielded, police discovered the skull of a two-year-old boy hidden on the premises. The brothers confessed to having dug up the child in order to make a curry. They were imprisoned for a further twelve years.
- Ouandja ”Mad Dog” Magloire of the Central African republic took part in a retributive attack upon a minibus in the country’s capital of Bangui in 2014, during which a muslim man was dragged onto the street, stabbed repeatedly and then set on fire. Video of the incident shows Ouandja slicing a large portion of flesh from the man’s leg and eating some of it. He claimed that it was in revenge for the death of his pregnant wife, his sister-in-law, and her child, who had been killed by Muslim extremists the previous year. He returned to the site of the attack the next day and ate the rest of the man’s flesh between two halves of a baguette, with a side dish of okra.
- In Longwy, on the 22nd of May 2014, an elderly French woman was arrested for having killed her 80-year-old husband by beating him to death with a heavy pestle. Police arrived to find her stewing his heart, nose and genitals in a pot and believe that they were able to prevent any consumption of the dish from taking place.
- 37-year-old Gregory Hale of Coffee County Tennessee, a self-confessed Satanist, was fired from his job in a slaughterhouse for performing rituals with dead animal parts. On the 6th of June 2014, he took 36-year-old Lisa Hyder to his home and butchered her, putting her hands and feet in separate buckets. Two days later, he asked a friend for assistance in disposing of the corpse and the police were called in. He claimed to have sampled various parts of her body in the interim.
- Joseph Oberhansley, aged 33, was pulled over for driving erratically in Jeffersonville Indiana in July 2014. He was taken into custody and his then girlfriend, 46-year-old Tammy Jo Blanton, paid the bond to have him released. After he fell off the radar for a few weeks, police raided his home to find Tammy Jo dismembered under a tarpaulin in the bath tub: Oberhansley confessed to officers that he had eaten her brain, lungs and heart. However, during his arraignment when the charges were read out to him in court, Oberhansley declared that his name was “Zeus Brown” and that they had the wrong man. That might have been the case, but they did have the right man wanted in connexion for the attempted year 2000 manslaughter of Sabrina Elder (then 17) after she had given birth to their child...
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