There’s no way around it, except to say that the former commander of Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Trenton, Col. Russell Williams is a very unwell individual. The Crown (the DA in Americanese) has listed the particulars of the 88 charges that Williams has pled guilty to and the particulars are revolting.
If you feel obligated here’s the link, but we’ll caution you now, the specifics are disturbing in so many ways at so deep a level that we’re not sure we ever want to read them again. If you don’t get into the particulars, you can still keep up with the posting, as we’re not really into the specifics of his crimes.
The question, and this posting, is more about the Monsters Among Us. There have always been, for the lack of a better term, Monsters in our society. One could argue that Vlad The Impaler, or Vlad Dracula, was one of the first recorded, historical Monsters, whose predilection for over-the-top savagery were recorded for all time. Even deducting half for distortion through the lens of oral history and various colourations of friends or foes recording events, Vlad Dracula was a Monster.
The list can include participants in the Crusades, various wars, police actions, insurrections, invasions, political machinations, purges, pogroms and punishments, meted out since we started recording history. Usually that list of Monsters includes those who are called war criminals, or who commit crimes against humanity.
Then there are the lone Monsters, like Ed Gein, Ted Bundy or the Green River Killer. The ones who slip through the cracks, who when caught, we see their neighbour on TV saying “He was a quiet guy who kept to himself, but he was always friendly.” Those are the real Monsters who elicit our real fear because they have lived among us, hiding in plain sight.
We can’t actually know all the reasons someone becomes a Monster. Even though the best minds in psychiatry have studied their crimes, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, we still come up without a good answer.
Straight up crazies, we can figure out: Voices in their head said kill Brian because the particular perpetrator had serious neurochemical imbalances that produced the craziness that let someone step over that line from merely hearing voices to acting on the things the voices were saying. We’re not going to condemn the legitimately unwell, as it isn’t actually their fault. The Monsters though?
The test is; does the perpetrator know what they are doing is wrong? Are they consciously breaking significant societal taboos because they want to, need to, or like to? Another aspect of the Monster test is their attitude to their actions: Is it a game of Catch me if you can, with the highest possible stakes? That was a goodly piece of Ted Bundy: He thought he was smarter than everyone else, especially the police.
Here’s where things get murky. What is the philosophical difference between someone who kills people for the power dynamic thrill of taking a life and someone who kills people because their victims are worthless and the killer has been assured that he will get a reward in the afterlife? One is a thrill-seeker and one is a religious zealot. Both are killers. One ran a pig farm in British Columbia and one flew a plane full of passengers into the World Trade Center. Is the motivation, or the timeline a defining factor in making the determination of a Monster?
We do know that with our highly interconnected, hypernews-immersed society, we hear about the Monsters faster, with more detail and more depth than we want. This is a price we pay for being more connected.
We’ll postulate a theory here: The percentage of Monsters through time is a constant number per capita, from hunter-gatherer days in the trees, to today. There have always been that one out of several hundred thousand who, to use a colloquialism; “Just ain’t right.”
Col. Russell Williams looks like he’s going to join that list.
RoadDave 