psychiatrists that the lust to murder and inflict acute suffering is often an all-dominating motive in the conduct of a very large number of pathological individuals. That is to say that murdering, torturing and raping have been indulged in and systematically organised to a very great extent in both the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Among the conscious or unconscious motives in the scoundrels who perpetrate these crimes there exists in many of them the satisfaction afforded by indulging their perverted and diabolical tastes.[1]
Such an individual was Jean Baptiste Carrier, a wholesale executioner in the French Revolution, and the willing tool of Marat, whom this little misshapen, hideous dwarf resembled in many ways.
Carrier enrolled companies of criminals, negroes and mulattos, one of which was called "The Company of Marat," just as Trotsky & Co. formed Terrorist Troop and Chinese gangs in Russia, and just as the troops of "Lenin Boys," under a homicidal Jew maniac called Szamuelly, were formed during the Communistic Terror in Hungary. These companies were used by Carrier to butcher men, women and children, chiefly of the peasant
- ↑ Many authorities hold that this instinct to inflict or to suffer pain lies hidden in every man's subconsciousness, but only finds expression in normal and healthy individuals in harmless and useful "sublimated" forms, as in artistic work, poetry, games, sports, etc. The perverted and pathological manifestations of the instinct are more likely to appear in those individuals or races whose normal outlets for free expression have suffered unduly from a long course of "repression." For these, religion or alcohol, by supplying the mechanism of "sublimation," may act as compensation, and preserve the sanity of many, who, when both are withheld and the "Reign of Reason" is proclaimed, must fall a prey to madness.
