FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Brady & Evil

Rant Number 502       21 August 2012

Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. Do the names make your flesh creep? Amongst the most hated names in Britain. An evil, murderous pair. But that does not mean the State that keeps Brady caged is quite innocent, either.

Death is what Brady should have got in 1966. No other punishment fits his horrendous crimes – serial killing of five children. But the ‘compassionate’ British Parliament had banned capital punishment a few months before. Brady and his accomplice, Myra Hindley, got life without parole instead. Brady, now 74, is held in the notorious Ashworth Psychiatric Hospital for mad criminals and wants to die. The State forces him to stay alive – just.

A Channel 4 documentary on Brady last night – ‘Endgames of a Psychopath’ – was a disgrace. A smug exercise in sadism and inhumanity. It made me think of little boys enjoying tearing off flies’ wings. ‘Control, control, control’ was the constant buzzword. ‘From his cell, Brady is obsessed with control’, that’s the idea. Bit peculiar. It seems rather control is the State’s obsession. Force-fed by nasal tube for the last 12 years, Brady has seen no open air for 32 long years. He receives no social visit or phone calls. Drugged, his cataracts untreated, incarcerated in a cell 12 feet by 8, permanently watched by guards – that, and worse, has been his life inside. ‘Good!’ you, a right-thinking, law-abiding fellow, approve. ‘It serves the monster right. Should be worse.’ Fine. Feed Brady to red ants, if you like, but don’t call his caged, drugged situation ‘being in control’. It is not.

I spent last night devouring an insightful book, ‘Face to face with Evil’, by psychologist Chris Cowley. Powerful, dark, disturbing stuff. Cowley has interviewed Brady at Ashworth, written to him, studied him for years. His book kept me awake nearly till dawn. Could not put it down. I learnt a lot about serial killers, criminal profiling and Ian Brady. It persuaded me how objectionable and wrong-headed the Channel 4 programme was.

Some ‘experts’ pontificated on TV. Such as hospital psychiatrists. ‘Psychopath, control, control, control...’ No, it was not New Labour, it meant Brady. It so happens, the prisoner loathes the doctors who have him in their power. ‘Failures, not good enough to find better employment in the private sector, inflicting their professional superiority complex on helpless inmates.’ Brady’s snarling opinion. Having listened to the shrinks, it is not easy to disagree with their patient...

Is Brady a psychopath? Cowley examines him in the light of nine behavioural and psychological criteria. He actually finds that Brady ‘score very low on most of them’. Don’t get uptight. No reason why this should be bad news for justice. Brady was initially sent to prison, like any ‘normal’ murderer. Allegedly, it was Lord Longford, the eccentric Catholic reformer, who campaigned to have him reclassified as insane. Someone called Lord Longford ‘the biggest fool in England’. Quite likely.

Like Hindley, Brady became an icon of evil. His serial killing of children branded him as beyond the pale. (Abominable of course to slay the little ones but...would murdering frail old people be less bad?) An outsider and outcast from the human race. Still, I recall an old sermon of mine on God’s love. It began: ‘God loves Myra Hindley, Idi Amin and Heinrich Himmler more than Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Padre Pio.’ A simple point. Christ came on earth to save the lost. He came to summon not the righteous but sinners to repentance. Yes, many shunned Christ’s appeal - he still died for them, for all of them. For Hindley and Brady, too. All humanity needed redemption – sinful, wicked humanity, especially.

The language of ‘evil’ is misleading. No one, no created being is purely, ontologically evil, not even the Devil. Christianity is not dualistic – there is no Ormuzd-Ahriman clash, good and evil having comparable metaphysical status. An essentially evil creature is theologically impossible – its existence would contradict the nature of the good Creator. Brady’s God-created nature therefore is not evil, his will is. His crimes originated in his perverted will. To understand what inclined that will – any human will – to evil, that is the challenge.

Brady scoffs at belief in God. God is totally discredited now, he says. Taken culturally, not an unreasonable point of view. Modern Britain shows its implicit contempt for the Deity by no longer giving a damn for its laws and precepts, indeed by flouting them. The media don’t do God. Intellectuals snigger at religion. Atheist ethicist Julian Baggini in a Timesarticle on the right to die simply dismissed God-based arguments as lacking in ‘sophistication’. The British masses also have turned their backs on the God of their ancestors. Serial murderer Brady is in good company. Still, God never stops to care, even for the most rotten among the rotten.

What Brady seems to believe in is the superman. He boasts he experienced the ‘Nietzschean dance of laughter and delight’. (That is perhaps what led a Channel 4 moron to impute to the broken-down, dying ghost of a man Brady now is a final ‘victory dance’ over his victims.) Fred Nietzsche meant the dancing Greek Dionysus. The god of sex, wine and wildest orgy. His festivals included savage animal sacrifices, where live victims were torn to pieces and eaten raw. Nietzsche exalted the passionate Dionysian spirit over against the Apollonian, the rational, ordered and disciplined. Later in life, however, he advocated a synthesis between the two. The philosopher certainly never envisioned his uebermensch as a vulgar child-killer. That said, Nietzsche’s difficult writings often invite tragic misunderstandings. Brady proves it.

Ashworth Hospital is a kind of hell. That comes through reading Cowley’s book. Two public inquiries have recommended its closure. Yet, it continues. The State that keeps it going – is it evil too? Discuss.

Brady will soon be dead. (It will not bring closure. Those who hate will still hate – they will find new bogeys.) Never mind he does not believe in him, he will still have to face the awesome Judge. Like each one of us.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli