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skull as a punishment; one of them had been tied up naked and confined in a narrow space below the floor, another tied to a pillar for several days until she died. Her crime was wearing earrings.
    In prison and under interrogation, Hiroko Nagata at firstremained arrogant, ordering the investigators around, demanding coffee, turning her back on them. But as police pointed out the various mistakes that had led to her arrest, she suddenly admitted: ‘We’ve been licked’; thereafter she began combing her hair, which until then she had kept in a ‘revolutionary’ state of untidiness.
    In January 1973, Tsuneo Mori hanged himself in prison. Hiroko Nagata was sentenced to life imprisonment.
    In retrospect, the most incomprehensible thing about the murders is that the other members of the group permitted them. This may be due partly to the natural obedience to authority that characterises the Japanese (one of the survivors described how all used to listen, with averted eyes, as Mori and Nagata harangued them). But it also seems clear that the group were totally dominated by their leaders, just as the Manson family was dominated by its father figure, and Myra Hindley by Ian Brady. In effect, they were brainwashed – and this again seems to be a phenomenon that is often associated with revolutionary movements. When heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped at gunpoint by a group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army on 5 February 1974, it was as a ‘capitalist’ hostage; the ‘Army’s’ motto was ‘Death to the Fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people’. After her father had distributed two million dollars’ worth of food to the poor – on the orders of the ‘Army’ – Patty Hearst sent her parents a tape stating that she had been converted to the revolutionary ideology, and denouncing the food distribution as a sham; shortly afterwards she took part in the armed robbery of a bank. In May, the ‘Army’s’ Los Angeles hideout was surrounded by police; in the battle and the fire that followed, the leaders of the movement were killed. Yet Patty Hearst continued ‘on the run’ with the remaining members of the gang until her arrest in September 1975. Her trial led to a sentence of seven years’ imprisonment but she was released on probation after eight months and quickly returned to the non-revolutionary views of her early days.
    In the Red Army Faction case, perhaps the most striking thing is the degeneration of Tsuneo Mori and Hiroko Nagata as they realised that they possessed absolute power over their followers. For Hiroko Nagata at any rate, murder became a pleasure. This is again something that can be observed in the majority of serial killers. Killing and inflicting torture become an addiction. Yet perhaps this is hardly surprising when we consider that de Sade’s attitude towards society is also ‘revolutionary’, and that there is a definite link between his political views and his ‘sadism’. He takes it for granted that all authority is unutterably corrupt, and bases his philosophy of murder and torture on this completely negative attitude. Since the masters are vile, and the slaves little better than maggots, both deserve utter contempt. In Nagata and Mori, the same attitude led to torture and executions. In other Marxist revolutionary groups it has often led to a kind of ruthlessness that springs out of paranoia – as when, on 21 June 1977, Italian ‘Red Army’ terrorists burst into the room where Remo Cacciafesta, dean of Rome University’s School of Economics, was lecturing, and shot him in the legs, shouting that he was teaching his students to adapt to a fundamentally immoral society. The common denominator of political revolutionaries and serial killers is resentment and ‘magical thinking’.
    What is responsible for this increase in ‘magical thinking’ that has led to the increase in serial murder and political violence? In 1935, the philosopher Edmund Husserl suggested a