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make a white. Yet in private, reported the prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, Manson had allegedly confessed to thirty-five murders.
    It is tempting to dismiss all this as the confused rhetoric of drug addicts. Yet it is worth studying more closely because it is so typical of the self-justification of the serial killer. What Manson was really implying was that the laws of an unjust society deserve to be broken, and that in doing this, criminal violence is justified. Even if we accept his argument, it is difficult to see how his victims were responsible for the injustice. His attitude is based on self-pity; he told the psychiatrist Joel Norris that he saw himself as the ‘ultimate victim of society’. Manson played guitar and wrote songs, and he believed that he deserved to be as successful as Bob Dylan or the Beatles. His reasoning seemed to be that since he was not successful, then someone must be to blame, and someone deserved to suffer. Carl Panzram had written: ‘Before I left [home] I looked around and figured that one of our neighbours who was rich and had a nice home full of nice things, he had too much and I had too little.’ And punishment only made him dream of getting his own back. ‘Then I began to think that I would have my revenge . . . If I couldn’t injure those who had injured me, then I would injure someone else.’ This is what Jean Paul Sartre has called ‘magical thinking’ – which means thinking with the emotions rather than reason. And it inevitably leads to absurd results. An old joke tells of an Arab in the desert who asked another Arab why he was carrying an umbrella. ‘I bought it in England. If you want it to rain you leave it at home.’In 1959 a labourer named Patrick Byrne, who had raped and then decapitated a girl in a Birmingham hostel, told the police: ‘I was trying to get my own back [on women] for causing my nervous tension through sex.’ But then none of us is free of this tendency to irrationality. Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t swear when he stubs his toe, or feel victimised when a traffic light changes to red just before he arrives?
    Sartre himself was not free from the tendency to magical thinking; his leftism was based on a lifelong detestation of the bourgeoisie (the class to which his own family belonged), and he once declared that true political progress lies in the attempt of the coloured races to free themselves through violence. In fact, much of the extreme leftism that Sartre espoused has its roots in the kind of negative thinking that we have observed in Panzram, Brady and Manson. (The same, of course, applies to many extreme right-wing groups, such as the American Weathermen or the Italian Ordine Nero.) When we analyse the thought process that leads to crime, we see that it involves looking around for someone on whom we can lay the blame . What Panzram, Manson, Sartre, Karl Marx and the majority of serial killers in this book have in common is that they lay the blame on ‘society’. And what these people also have in common is that they have blinded themselves to the idea that they themselves might be partly to blame for their problems.
    The nearest Japanese equivalent to the Manson case involved members of a group who called themselves the United Red Army Faction, the Rengo Sigikun , an organisation formed in 1969 by radical students. Nine members of the Red Army Faction were responsible for hijacking a Japanese Air Lines jet on 31 March 1970 and were released in North Korea. After a raid on a Mooka gunshop in February 1971, members of the group escaped with large quantities of arms. Later that year, thirty-seven policemen were injured in a bomb explosion while trying to control a demonstration in the Meiji Park in Tokyo. In the autumn, the wife of a police official died when she opened a parcel bomb that arrived through the mail. In both cases, the suspects were Tsuneo Mori, leader of the Red Army Faction, and Hiroko Nagata.
    In February 1972,