Here’s what a Victorian expert on jerking off has to say:
The sin of Onanism is one of the most destructive evils ever practised by fallen man. It excites the power of nature to undue action, and produces violent secretions which necessarily and speedily exhaust the vital principles. Nutrition fails; tremors, fears and terrors are generated; and thus the wretched victim drags out a miserable existence, till superannuated, even before he has time to arrive at man’s estate, with a mind often debilitated, even to a state of idiotism, his worthless body tumbles into the grave, and his guilty soul (guilty of self-murder) is hurried into the presence of his Judge.21
To give credibility to Macnaghten (and Swanson too), one must give credibility to this. Kosminski may have been a local imbecile, but if he was creating pathological history by masturbating himself into a froth of homicidal lunacy, surely these sessions would have taxed his imagination to something beyond a bunch of toothless, half-drunk hags? We can’t know what Kosminski was tossing off about, but I can’t believe it was over Annie Chapman in her underwear.
More often than not, sexual killers seek to destroy the object of their attraction, a phenomenon corroborated by some notable contemporary criminologists. ‘I only shoot pretty girls,’ said David Berkowitz, a.k.a. ‘the Son of Sam’. By any modern understanding, the Ripper wasn’t a masturbator. It was hate rather than sex that attracted him to whores. As a matter of fact, we might question whether he was any more sexually motivated than Jane Caputi’s charmer. What he unequivocally was, was a powerful, cunning, intelligent man, attributes confirmed by one of the more objective voices of the time, police surgeon Dr Thomas Bond, who wrote: ‘The murderer must have been a man of physical strength and great coolness and daring.’22
In Kosminski’s case, I imagine the tossing arm must have been highly developed, engendering a formidable bicep, and this speaks in his favour. But other than fitting the loony Yid stereotype, Kosminski is just about as likely a Ripper as the man with the involuntary spasmodic contractions exposing his canine teeth.
If the Ripper got hold of you, you were dead. He overwhelmed an entire society, let alone his victims. Apart perhaps from Mary Jane Kelly (and that’s a big perhaps) there were no defensive injuries, not even a moment to hurl a scream at the night. He owned you. You were dead. This nineteenth-century psychopath could have snuffed anyone he liked, anywhere he liked – men, women and children – and indeed he did kill all three.
Kosminski was a ninety-eight-pound simpleton, living off crusts in the gutter, with the physique of an underfed ten-year-old. How do we know this? Because people watched the sad little idiot: the police watched him, he was a face in the East End, as was that other maligned Israelite John Pizer, who incidentally successfully sued at least one newspaper for defamation.
In respect of suspects, the opinions of Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten are not to be taken too seriously; any more than are those of his governor, the notable anti-Semite Sir Robert Anderson, or for that matter the man at the coalface of this débâcle (the washer-off of the so-called ‘graffito’), the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Sir Charles Warren.
These individuals’ peculiar judgements and selective certainties were designed for the Victorian mob. They are opinions from the world of banjo-playing niggers and patent medicines, where the same sugar-coated dose of chalk and arsenic cured asthma, cancer, tuberculosis and piles.
And that’s my tiff with the Ripperologists. They think like Victorians, and they think like each other. If a supposed ‘authority’ said it, irrespective of any possible agenda, they gobble it up like the universal quack remedy Fowler’s Solution.23 (Written on a wall, it’s ‘graffito’, written by a copper, it’s ‘Grail’.) I can only speak for myself, but I decline to swallow such nostrums. The baseline for me is simple: if some greased unguent ‘for coughs, colds, sore holes and pimples on your dick’ is now considered obsolete, and if masturbation doesn’t drive you screaming to the grave, why cling to this hotchpotch of Victorian propaganda and misinformation, when today we’re dealing with something we can discover something about? I’m frankly not interested in what some ludicrous copper has to say about ‘solitary vices’. The Victorians’ hypocrisy was like a self-induced blackmail of their own intelligence, and that was how the proles were conditioned into deference: work your arse off, wave a flag, and go to heaven. Are we to suppose that we are to function at the discretion of such fictions today?
The Jew myth takes a close second to the most preposterous Ripper assumption of them all, the ‘no Englishman could commit such a crime’ myth.24 Very popular in its day. From whence this quaint homily originated it is hard to tell, but it was commonly agreed amongst the newspapers, and the Empress herself was known to share it. Anyone with sufficient IQ to get out of bed should decline to give it a moment of credibility.
Jack the Ripper was a killer in a killer state, and in my view more likely to have been an Englishman than a citizen of any other nation on earth.
Between 1870 and 1900, the British were involved in 130 wars. ‘Pax Britannica’ was an oxymoron. The only Pax was in Britannica; the rest got the blade. Englishmen were killing foreigners to the limits of their maps; barging into Australasia, Afghanistan, Africa, slaughtering them in Mashonaland, Nyasaland, Matabeleland. They were wading through swamps to kill them in Burma, climbing mountains to kill them in Tibet. So rank was the avarice, so organised the homicide, they had to put a user-friendly label on it. ‘Bring Christianity and Civilisation to the poor savage,’ said the Great White Queen. And that’s what they got, although not in that order. Bullets first, Bibles delayed. British imperialism was an enormous bulldozer of Christian murder, its participants wringing goodness out of genocide. It could find excuses to kill people in places it had never heard of, to pick fights with Hottentot, Watusi, Zulu, Masai, find justification to wreak vengeance on Maori at the opposite ends of the earth. Hundreds of thousands were murdered as the Christian soldiers marched on, their insatiable God barking to the fore.
In South Africa the starvation of women and children became British government policy. It was here during the Boer War that the British invented the concentration camp – literally a camp in which to concentrate your enemies: in this case the families of the Boer army whom the Brits were having some difficulty trying to defeat in battle. So they went for the wives and kids. Thousands died like the child in the snap below. Meanwhile, Boss Officer Field Marshal Lord Roberts ordered the destruction of all animals and the burning of all crops and farms within ten miles on either side of any railway line the enemy had attacked.
I include this picture because it is as shocking as anything our ‘mystery man’ in Whitechapel ever did, and for me it pretty much sums up the calling card of nineteenth-century Christian imperialism. Such hideous cruelties did not receive the press coverage or the public notoriety of Jack’s atrocities, even though by imperial standards he was barely an amateur.
Nowhere was the imperial narrative more wretched than in the maintenance of England’s first overseas conquest: Ireland.
Salisbury called the Irish ‘Hottentots’ in response to their aspirations for Home Rule. ‘I decline,’ he lathered, ‘to place confidence in a people who are in the habit of using knives and slugs.’ No filthier cant ever came out of a human mouth. The English had been unwelcome occupiers of Ireland for seven bloody centuries, their tenure secured only by indiscriminate use of the bullet and the blade. Generations took English lead, and thousands more their bayonets.
In 1649 the mother of them all had arrived. He was the fifty-year-old commander of the New Model Army, Oliver Cromwell. Ugly as a tortoise and clad like one in a corset of steel, he brought his God with him and shipped into Dublin with a zealous commitment to the Almighty’s work: ‘The sword without, the terror within.’ Intoxicated with Biblical fervour and high on his own juice, Cromwell took his Protestant militia from city to town, town to village, exterminating Catholics as he went.
Like
the Victorians after him, this monster purported to believe that his colonial enterprise was ordained by God, and it was a God ‘who would not permit His wrath to be turned aside’.
The massacres were fêtes of blood, down to the last innocent baby. Those who weren’t immediately put to the sword were stripped and left to starve. Some women had their hands and arms cut off, ‘yea, jointed alive’, wrote one contemporary observer, ‘to make them confess where their money was’ (my emphasis).
Those who were spared were shipped out in bondage, 50,000 of them in all. The first slaves in the British West Indies, at Barbados, were Irish men, women and children.
According to Victorian academic James Allanson Picton, the most effective piece of artillery in the English army was the name ‘Oliver Cromwell’: ‘He made it a terror, and it has remained a curse.’ A curse it was, a damnation visited upon Ireland that would endure for another 272 years.25
‘Without exception’, wrote Her Majesty’s most despised journalist, Henry Labouchère MP, the British were ‘the greatest robbers and marauders that ever existed’. Their plunder, said he, was ‘hypocritical’, because ‘they always pretended it was for other people’s good’.
One exponent of this benevolence (and never mind the bollocks) was Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, Commander in Chief of the British Army. ‘War,’ he opined, ‘is good for humanity’:
Wherever we hoist our flag, there we honestly strive – not always, I confess, with complete success – to establish those immutable principles of even-handed justice, and of improved morality … As a nation, we can point with pride to territories once barbarous but now civilised, in every corner of the globe. The wars which extend our frontiers bring new territory under the influence of missionary work, of our laws, and civilisation.26
An alternative view of this ‘missionary work’ was recorded by a Swedish cleric called Charles Lumholtz in Victoria in 1888: ‘To kill a native of Australia is the same as killing a dog in the eyes of the British colonist.’ Expanding his critique, Lumholtz writes: ‘Your men made a point of hunting the Blacks, every Sunday [presumably after church] in the neighbourhood of their cities … systematically passing the whole day in that sport, simply for pleasure’s sake [his emphasis].’
And what a pleasure it must have been: ‘A party of four or five horsemen prepare traps, or driving the savages into a narrow pass, force them to seek refuge on precipitous cliffs, and while the unfortunate wretches are climbing at their life’s peril, one bullet after another is fired at them, making even the slightly wounded lose their hold, and falling down, break and tear themselves into shreds on the sharp rocks below.’27
Cracking shot, Johnny! Thank you, sir!
‘Although local law (on paper) punishes murder,’ continues Lumholtz, ‘it is in reality only the killing of a white man which is called murder’ (again, his emphasis).
Just who did these Christian civilisers think they were kidding? From which of their Ten Commandments did they consider themselves exempt? You can stuff all that twaddle, old boy. They’re infidels with a different god.
Which unquestionably was true. All tanned foreigners in receipt of British lead were subject to the delusion of a different god (it was only their gold that was real). In India they had one god with three heads, and in England we had three gods with one head: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Consequently, it’s quite likely that God looked more like a British officer with half a bear on his head than a man with a bone through his nose.
Twenty-five thousand black bears a year were slaughtered to make hats for the British Army, and fashionable London ladies liked their hummingbirds skinned alive, a technique which apparently added lustre to the chapeau.28
Meanwhile, back in Africa, where the degraded races wore fur and feathers, white men were endlessly hacking at jungle to get at the loot. This was dark and dangerous territory; the continent was still largely unexplored. It was therefore always possible to face sudden confrontation with wild and dangerous men. There was a high chance, for example, of Sir Cecil Rhodes, or Major R.S. Baden-Powell, suddenly springing upon you from the thicket.
Baden-Powell was one of Wolseley’s breed of chaps, ‘an ambitious little man’ who on the side ‘enjoyed dressing up at concert parties and singing in a falsetto voice’. He was also known to enjoy the company of Boy Scouts.
Powell marched his column of fighting men from the beaches of the Gold Coast into deep up-country, his task once again ‘to bring back the gold’ and to destroy the religious practices of the Ashanti. When they got to their destination, a town called Kumasi, the King of the Wogs was asked to produce 50,000 ounces of gold, and spare us the mumbo-jumbo. Only six hundred ounces were forthcoming, creating a bit of a letdown amongst the visitors, who were already half-dead from the march. Baden-Powell concluded that the King and his mother should be taken back to the coast in default.
No one in Kumasi liked the idea of this, because ‘The Queen Mother, as with many African peoples, was an extremely important figure in the hierarchy.’ Obviously a peculiar lot. Notwithstanding that, Baden-Powell and his boys set about the business of teaching these heathens a history lesson of the type untaught in British schools. In their rage for gold they battered their way through temples and sacred mausoleums, pillaging anything of value in an ‘orgy of destruction that horrified the Ashanti who witnessed it’.
With their royal family as prisoners, the Africans stood by ‘like a flock of sheep’. There was not much for the civilisers to do before bidding their farewells except to ‘set fire to the holiest buildings in town’. ‘The feeling against the niggers was very intense,’ wrote Powell, ‘and the whites intended to give them a lesson they would not forget.’29
Some of them haven’t.
The other side of the continent was of no less colonial interest, but here things weren’t going so well. All the ingredients of a major imperial cock-up were in situ, focusing on a city in the southern Sudan called Khartoum. The Sudan had been annexed by the British, but now they wanted out. On paper this looked relatively easy: bring in the camels, evacuate all the people on our side, get them back to Egypt, and we’ll sort out the details later.
George Eliot’s brilliant aphorism, ‘Consequences are without pity’ – or words to that effect – proved its fidelity here. Before anyone knew it, Khartoum was under a siege that was to last 317 days. An army of 30,000 religious fanatics under the messianic Mahdi, a sort of Osama bin Laden of his day, wanted to kill everyone in Khartoum and take the city back into the bosom of Mohammed. But unhappily, they faced the indomitable might of the British Empire, which in this case was one man. His name was Major General Charles George Gordon.
From time to time I agree with the dead, even with a reactionary conservative politician. After Gordon’s death amid the disaster of Khartoum, Sir Stafford Northcote got on his feet in the House of Commons and told nothing less than the truth. ‘General Gordon,’ he said, ‘was a hero among heroes.’ I find nothing to contradict that. Gordon was a hero, no messing with the word. ‘If you take,’ continued Northcote, ‘the case of this man, pursue him into privacy, investigate his heart and mind, you will find that he proposed to himself not any idea of wealth and power, or even fame, but to do good was the object he proposed to himself in his whole life.’
Gordon’s government betrayed him. As far as the Conservatives were concerned – and again they were probably right – the villain in the whole affair was an irascible old Liberal the serfs had made the mistake of re-electing. Prime Minister William Gladstone was a man of compassion and large mind, but he couldn’t make it up over the Sudan. ‘God must be very angry with England when he sends us back Mr Gladstone as first minister,’ wrote Lord Wolseley. ‘Nothing is talked of or cared for at this moment but this appalling calamity.’30
Wolseley doubtless felt his share of guilt. It was he who had sent Gordon, at the age of fifty, to sort out the problem of the southern Sudan. Throughout the searing heat of that dreadful autumn
of 1884 Gordon wrote frequently to London: send us food, send us help, send us hope. Despite the headlines and the Hansards full of unction, the dispatches went unheeded, and Gladstone’s vacillations became the tragedy of Khartoum.
The infidel was closing in, at least to the opposite bank of the Nile. This didn’t cost Gordon any sleep: he had a better God than theirs, and more balls than the lot of them put together. ‘If your God’s so clever,’ he taunted, ‘let’s see you walk across the Nile.’ Three thousand tried it, and three thousand drowned. The rest kept an edge on their scimitars, waiting for the word of the Almighty via the Mahdi. They were a particularly fearsome, in fact atrociously fearsome, mob. According to British propagandists they didn’t give a toss about death, because heaven was its reward. They apparently believed that saucy virgins were going to greet them in Paradise, handing out the wine and honey. I have to say, it doesn’t sound much different from the Christian facility, although our corpses don’t get the girls.
January 1885 baked like a pot. The 14,000 inhabitants left in Khartoum had eaten their last donkey, and then their last rat. Nothing was left to constitute hope but relief from the British, and failing that, death.
‘I shall do my duty,’ wrote Gordon. And he did. There are various accounts of his death, and though this one’s untrue, it’s the first I ever read, in the Boy’s Own Paper fifty years ago. He deserved so romantic an obituary. Death came on the night of 26 January, when thousands of infidels breached the city walls. Upstairs in the palace that was serving as government house, Gordon changed into his dress uniform, combed his hair and donned polished boots. With a revolver in one hand and a sword in the other, he came downstairs to meet them.
They All Love Jack Page 3
