A Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

Raskolnikov being slowly awakened to this realisation.
    This leads to the crucial recognition that all crime contains this element of ‘hypnosis’. In his study in modern totalitarianism, The Tower and the Abyss , Erich Kahler cites the massacre carried out in the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1944 by Hitler’s SS. In reprisal for Resistance activity in the area, the Germans rounded up all the inhabitants and made them go to the market-place. The women and children were herded into the village church. No one was alarmed at this stage - the Germans were laughing and joking, and playing with the babies. Then, at a signal from a captain, the soldiers in the square opened fire on the men and massacred them all. The church was set on fire and the women and children burned alive. The children who managed to stumble out were thrown back into the fire. A Swiss who described the massacre remarked, ‘I am convinced that these Elite Guards did not feel the slightest shade of hatred against the French children when they held them in their arms. I am equally convinced that, if a counter order had arrived ... they would have continued to play daddy.’ But the SS men were ‘under orders’, and the order had the effect of a hypnotist’s command. They ‘blocked out’ the reality of the women and children, and ‘did their duty’. A confidence trickster swindles his victims in much the same way; he may actually feel genuinely friendly towards them as he lulls them into a state of trustfulness, yet the basic intention remains unchanged. Manson’s ‘family’ killed Sharon Tate and her guests in the same ‘blocked out’ state. And Myra Hindley helped Brady to murder children yet continued to strike her family as a person who loved children. When she heard that her dog had died under anaesthetic when in the hands of the police she burst out: ‘They’re just a lot of bloody murderers.’ For practical purposes, she had become two people.
    Yet although crime - particularly violent crime - contains this element of ‘dissociation’, of ‘alienation’, there is another sense in which it is an attempt to break out of this state. The sex murderer John Christie remarked that after strangling and raping one of his victims, ‘once again I experienced that quiet, peaceful thrill. I had no regrets.’ The killing had removed the tension that kept him trapped in the vicious circle of his own emotions and desires; he was awake again.
    We can discern the same factor in the petty crimes committed by Leopold and Loeb before they killed Bobby Franks. Loeb was the one who ‘got a thrill’ from crimes; it was like a game of Russian roulette in which he experienced relaxation and relief every time he ‘won’. (After all, to be caught in a burglary would mean social disgrace.) Crime was Loeb’s way of discharging tension, of waking himself up.
    This is also quite plainly the key to the Moors case. When he murdered Edward Evans, Brady was trying to involve David Smith, with the intention of making him a part of a criminal gang; his aim was to commit bank robberies. We may assume that, since he had been planning bank robberies from the beginning, he regarded his murders as some form of training for the ‘bigger’ crime. It was Brady’s intention to become a kind of all-round enemy of society, the English equivalent of Public Enemy Number One - with the difference that, like Charlie Peace, he hoped to remain undiscovered and live happily ever after on his gains. Crime would become a way of life involving continual stimulation and excitement.
    And in this we can note another interesting aspect of the ‘pattern’. At any given level, crime contains an element that reaches towards the next level of the hierarchy. Charlie Peace’s crimes are crimes of ‘subsistence’ (to make a living), but he shows a powerful urge towards security and domesticity. Many ‘domestic’ crimes - Dr Pritchard, Constance Kent, Adelaide Bartlett -