Cannibalism in the Modern World...

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 28^th 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 22^nd 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 6^th 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...