The Gates of Janus

by Ian Brady

  But, at a deeper level, evil, like its opposite, must be sustained by illusion, for it brings with it an understanding of the futility of life when all actions are permissible and equally meaningless. Emptied of forbidden desires, we still desire contrast, the illusion of meaning.

  If we fail in our attempt to create and stimulate the illusion of contrast and meaning, the psychic dynamo rusts and grinds to a halt. Why bother to exist or act if all is indeed vanity? But if we intend to persist in existing in a meaningless world, the logical extension to disillusionment is delusion, where only insanity divines meaning.

  I believe most serial killers have, consciously or subconsciously, trodden this labyrinthine course, resentfully deciding to impose personal meaning upon the world’s façade by acts of destruction which invite, or approximate, self- destruction. A reversal of Buddhist principles, attempting to purge each desire by gratification, but sharing the common goal of Nirvana. Oblivion.

  The serial killer regards both the wilful destruction of others and of himself as human/cosmic triumphs which establish mathematical equilibrium and psychic meaning.

  What gives your life meaning?

  Losers are considered fair game to mankind in general. People must have someone, anyone, to throw to the lions as a reward for their own grudging adherence to public ‘virtues’ — tiresome virtues, the observance of which infuriatingly devours most of one’s brief existence on this insignificant speck of spinning dust. Such people, unlike the serial killer, have chosen to allow other people to guide their destiny, and must pay the price of expedient subordination.

  It is perhaps comforting to realise that even those citizens who achieve the zenith of wealth and power by moral languor are still too afraid to freely enjoy its rewards, because of the public image of probity they weightily forged for themselves and are forced to maintain.

  Man is an unswerving moral hypocrite in many other fields of dishonest endeavour.

  He perversely despises imitation whilst in the very act of duplicating; claims originality in the midst of his own mediocrity; searches out opposites against his will, seeking an otherness he truly does not wish to find. He then compounds this chimerical assortment by inventing in his own image false gods to placate, fanatical dogmas to prosecute and absurd prophecies to fulfil. All this convolutional jousting is performed primarily to avoid confronting his true nature. It makes little difference, for he fretfully remains the scourge of the earth.

  On the other hand, it is mostly in the quiescent company of the atheist, the sceptic, the cynic, the nihilist, the existentialist, those self-absorbed who are content to propose and preach nothing, that we may sometimes escape the obsessive demands of synthetic morality and the jarring irritations of theological presumption. They cast aside the ridiculous banality of metaphysical minutiae striving beyond man’s feeble comprehension, and instead opt for that comfortable, sensual silence known chiefly to old friends, lovers and opium addicts, which is so often much more stimulating and inspiring.

  It is in the spiritual vagaries, the paradoxical heights of poetry and music, that we sometimes glimpse, and fleetingly believe we have reached, our true potential, almost touching the power of gods. But the descent back to sullen earth and the babble of the rabble soon depresses and enrages our sensibilities, and all seems meaningless once more.

  This profound conviction of human absurdity, in harness with an ineffable sense of eternal boredom, visits us all at times, of course, usually departing in due course as preoccupation with more demanding appetites returns.

  But to the criminal, and particularly the serial killer, the ‘ordinary’ is an emetic less to be stomached than potassium cyanide. Leaden uniformity is slowly crushing and suffocating him. Action becomes imperative. He has to prove he exists beyond the control of all. Even of himself. That self which is a programmed contamination, a synthetic conscience, arguably his own greatest enemy. He must systematically neutralise this alien intruder before it betrays or destroys him, as it surely will, on the dangerous path of extreme individualism he has chosen to pursue.

  Like Dostoevsky’s antihero Raskolnikov, the criminal not only wishes to taste the extraordinary, but also longs to know whether he possesses the will to dare reach for it. Hamlet-like, tortured by doubt and indecision, the longer the serial killer procrastinates, the greater becomes the urge to resolve matters by cathartic, homicidal action. He can ‘resist anything except temptation.’

  It would be quite natural for most people to believe that the serial killer regards murder as the ultimate crime and the greatest challenge of all. But such a generalization is too simplistic.

  Serial killers, like it or not, can possess just as many admirable facets of character as anyone else, and sometimes more than average. The majority of criminals have hidden agendas, as has practically every intelligent being. They also have their own personal code of ethics and morals, albeit eccentric to the ordinary individual.

  For instance, I regard personal disloyalty as the worst crime of all, and have killed some guilty of it without a qualm.

  Yet members of the public, in guilty self-awareness of their own criminal fantasies, and secretly envying the criminal’s ability to act them out, eagerly accept the mass media’s self-flattering, demonizing projection of criminals as an inferior species.

  Humiliating though it may be to accept, the serial killer’s leap of faith pivots primarily upon identity as an independent entity — with everyone else perceived entirely as extras. The fate of some nameless victim is secondary to his purpose, simply a means to an existential end. In the pursuit of his hidden agenda, he is as indifferent to the fate of others as others are to his in the pursuit of theirs.

  ‘It’s business. Nothing personal,’ as the Mafia would say, in concert with other honest businessmen. Whether a man dies by a bullet or the merciless decision of a bank, the result is the same. There are many men in the upper echelons of finance, industry, politics and the military who are more psychopathically ruthless than any Godfather, leaving a higher body count in their wake.

  More or less, all but the constitutionally inadequate possess the wish for power, but many lack the will. The desire to be insubordinate and autonomous, reach mercurial heights, psychically transfuse the blood of gods into the veins, is more common than the ability to do so. Conscience confounds the majority. The remainder, in my opinion, seizing whatever they wish by means legal or foul, careless of the consequences to others, are as culpable as the criminal. In brief, sanctioned by law or no, elitism is the soul of criminality.

  The spiritual best in life is perhaps conceived in silence, but the same can be true of the worst. Whatever gains are conceived in the silence will eventually be interrupted, for good or ill, by the approach of some frenzied believer in something or other, anything at all, who will not desist until he has pressed his delirious delusions upon you, no matter how fatuous.

  This species of Inquisitorial prophet would almost rather kill you than let you elude conversion to his moral/political/philosophical deformations of character, the corrosive obsessions which feverishly torment him to proselytise every person in sight.

  Your tolerant indifference, peace of mind, or independent spirit would be interpreted as a personal affront in the arrogant eyes of such religionists, who supposedly believe in original sin yet appear to consider themselves exempt. The born-again Christian (or, worse still, convert) is so zealously pleased with himself that he apparently has little time left to please anyone else.

  Such people represent in microcosm the psychological mechanisms, dogmas and fanaticisms which have helped foment ideological wars throughout the ages and to this very day. They recognise no middle ground.

  What do I believe in? I reiterate, moral relativism in all matters other than personal loyalty to chosen individuals.

  Studying humanity with the objective detachment of a spectre — my active, free participation in the human comedy now being constrained by manganese-steel bars and electronic eyes
— I have observed nothing in the social evolution of mankind to shake my lack of faith in human nature in general.

  The age of positive progress in human affairs has long gone, I conclude, and shall never return. Crime will forever increase in ratio to the escalating corruption and unbridled greed in the upper echelons of Western social order. This will inevitably lead to ever increasing brutal repression and suppression of the masses, who will react in kind.

  If you indifferently choose to isolate criminals, prepare yourself to be isolated by them. Permanently.

  The dispossessed and disadvantaged shall become progressively more nomadic, alienated and resentful. Mobile serial killers will flourish like the flowers in the field. It is happening in America and other Western countries at present. Overpopulation, once periodically diminished by wars, will mainly be regulated by famine and perhaps more ambitious man-made plagues of the AIDS variety, to which only the ruling elite shall be immune.

  If you can always remember danger when you are secure, and remember chaos in times of order, watch out for danger and chaos while they are still formless and prevent them before they happen, this is the best of all.

  — The Art of War, Sun Tzu

  The obscenely rich are already in full retreat, heavily fortifying their private domains. Even the affluent middle class of America has begun constructing whole towns for themselves, encircled by high fences and guarded by private police forces who allow no inhabitants to enter without an identity pass, and no strangers in without a written invitation from an inhabitant.

  Extreme polarisation has resulted in sporadic urban warfare in America since the sixties, of course, but it is becoming more commonplace.

  Technological advances, particularly in the field of smart computer software, are now a weekly occurrence. Cameras and electronic bugs have evolved to insect-size and are almost as ubiquitous. Equipped with heat-seeking video cameras and probing searchlights, police helicopter gunships prowl the city skies after dark like Martian invaders, whilst in all the streets and buildings below yet more video cameras pry constantly.

  The disenfranchised city populations bitterly resent their ever increasing lack of personal privacy, but no longer seem interested in fighting for civil rights through the enemy’s ‘normal channels,’ perceiving anarchic destruction as perhaps the only form of effective self-expression remaining, and, from their hopeless perspective, almost certainly the most spiritually satisfying — even to the extent of nihilistically burning down their own ghetto prisons. Cohesive social concern and consensus are rapidly being rendered extinct.

  United thoughts and counsels, equal hope,

  And hazard in the glorious enterprise.

  Yet not for those

  Nor what the potent victor in his rage

  Can else inflict do I repent or change,

  Though changed in outward lustre; that fixed mind

  And high disdain, from sense of injured merit.

  — Paradise Lost, Milton

  Though I have become used to being watched by prison security cameras, etc., both inside and outside the blocks, I can still identify with how supposedly free people should feel at constant electronic encroachment. So much so that I am certain I would not meekly tolerate it if in their position, and would oppose it by all effective means. Soon the only people left with privacy will be those behind the cameras and listening devices.

  I deem myself fortunate in the belief that the supreme individualist should not only choose his own life but also the manner and timing of his own death. This Bushido code, the kamikaze spirit, Samurai stoicism, shall, I am sure, proliferate and exact a heavy death toll amongst the wealthy and privileged classes. When one accepts, in pursuit of a chosen goal, the possibility or certainty of one’s own death as of no consequence, one has total freedom to manoeuvre and exact maximum retribution. Only by coming to terms with death do you grasp the essence of life.

  One determined, motivated individual can inflict significant psychic destruction upon a city or country. Others will note and emulate. The domino effect gathers momentum.

  Observing the human condition with a strong sense of absurdity, I appreciate the solution to man’s ills when offered by that wonderful comedian W.C. Fields, who splendidly suggested:

  ‘Instead of having wars, the world leaders should be put into a stadium to fight it out amongst themselves with socks full of horse manure.’

  In Hellenistic and medieval times many territorial disputes between warring nations were settled by king’s champion fighting king’s champion — people’s champions in the story of David and Goliath. We naturally find W.C. Fields’ solution highly amusing mainly because of his choice of weapons and the image of pompous, decrepit politicians wielding them. Conversely, the present advanced stage of ‘civilisation’ invariably demands nothing less than the total destruction of the enemy state and the flower of generations.

  Wars of vast destruction are now fought as though they were children’s computer games, by impersonal push-button heroes whose names we hide from public scrutiny and inscribe on no roles of honour. For instance, can any reader spontaneously call to mind the name of the pilots or crew who bombed Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

  The machines are now the real heroes. Their victories over enemy machines are lauded, not only for defeating the enemy but also for boosting the economy by increased weapon sales to other ‘civilised’ countries. The unavoidable war dead are brought furtively home crammed in giant freight containers, political embarrassments to be hastily buried and forgotten. The merely maimed and crippled are then cosmetically removed from the PR-managed glory of the victory parade. Nondescript politicians, mere stock clerks for the arms manufacturing industries, smile and wave airily from balconies in their lucrative brave new world. They beam and dream of high poll-ratings whilst working out the schedule for the next war, staged to test fresh weapons and use up old, envisioning future election victories soundly based on ‘patriotism,’ economic prosperity and the blood of the dead, the latter performing a final sterling service in reducing the ‘surplus population’ and future unemployment statistics. Festivities concluded, the upstaged wounded anonymously wind their way home to oblivion through drooping bunting and drunken rednecks. The politicians then begin work on their second stalwart platform, ‘law and order,’ urging the death penalty and longer sentences for less enterprising criminals than themselves.

  Those social engineers and optimists, who propose that a more widely available system of higher education in every country will lead to an equally elevated standard of global human/humane conduct and culture, are impractical dreamers who conveniently ignore the numerous lessons of modern history which illustrate the contrary: the more sophisticated the society, the more impersonal and grandiose the savagery.

  Those who rely upon ideological education and an ever increasing degree of authoritarian order to eradicate the criminal and predatory instincts of mankind, are wilfully blind. The death camps of Nazi Germany were conceived, organised and very efficiently run by highly educated men who venerated a form of conservative law and order they planned and expected to last for over a thousand years. These men, such as Reinhard Heydrich, SS founder-head of the Reichssicherheitsdienst (RSHD and SD — SS Reich Security Department and Gestapo), and prime organiser of the extermination of Jews in German-occupied territories; Dr Josef Mengele, chief selector of victims for the gas chambers, and performer of thousands of fatal eugenic and sterilisation experiments on male and female concentration camp inmates; Dr Ernst Kaltenbrunner, SS successor to the assassinated Heydrich — all had the highest university education. They were pillars of society, men of high culture, possessing aesthetic sensitivity and genuine appreciation of the classical arts. The six or seven million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, criminals, lunatics and other undesirables they enthusiastically exterminated by poison gas, shooting, hanging, medical experiment and lethal injection, which was performed perfectly legally under German law.

  In modern
-day America, criminals, per capita mostly Negroes and other ethnic minorities, are being just as legally sentenced to death by cyanide gas, lethal injection, hanging, shooting, electrocution, by similarly well educated ‘civilised’ men and women, with clergy and doctors in attendance to sanctify the ritual.

  Further, the respectable giant pharmaceutical companies in the United States are allowed to use American prisoners as human guinea pigs in medical experiments to test the possible adverse side effects of untried drugs. And it was recently exposed that eminent American medical researchers are using the captured medical records of Dr Josef Mengele, tabulating the results of his fatal medical experiments, to assist them in similar American programmes of research at present being carried out.

  Many German ‘war criminals’ were tried and sentenced to death by American judges at the Nuremberg Trials in the late 1940s for ‘crimes against humanity,’ under laws specifically invented by the victorious allies to condemn the vanquished retroactively. Amongst the listed ‘crimes against humanity’ were euthanasia, and the legal sterilisation and execution of patients in German mental hospitals.

  Those same American judges could not have been unaware of what a judicial colleague of theirs had pronounced on the subject of dealing with the mentally subnormal, many years prior to the Nazi regime in Germany. He was the eminent American Supreme Court Justice, Mr Oliver Wendell Holmes, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, former professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard University, distinguished essayist, biographer, poet and novelist, whose literary works were described by American critics as ‘kindly, humorous and sagacious.’ Perhaps ‘ironic’ should have been added. His final solution to the problem of mentally retarded American citizens reads as follows: