Hearts got in a flutter at the discovery of this ‘marginalia’. Amongst other non-starters, one of the names endorsed as a possible suspect by Swanson was the aforementioned Kosminski, who, according to the later Assistant Commissioner Sir Melville Macnaghten, was a prime candidate due to his addiction to ‘solitary vices’ – in other words, jerking off.
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.’