Adolf Eichmann was a loving father who was late off the bus the night he was kidnapped by the Israelis because he had stopped to get a special birthday cake he couldn’t afford for his youngest child; he also sent millions of people to their death with seemingly a complete lack of conscience. Erwin Rommel’s last known words were telling his housekeeper to put his beloved dachshund into another room so she wouldn’t be upset at seeing him led out, and he also was responsible for countless violent deaths of enemies and his own soldiers.
A story from the Civil War that’s always stuck with me is of a teenaged girl from a well to do family who’d been sheltered and pampered most of her life and whose house was requisitioned for use as a field hospital (I don’t remember which side used the house or what side her family was on [Tennessee was fiercely divided], not that it matters). The first time she saw a bloody soldier on their property she fainted; within a couple of days she and her little brother and the household servants were tossing water onto the floors to get the blood up and calmly picking up severed limbs, putting them into wheelbarrows and taking them to be burned.
There’s a tendency on these boards by otherwise intelligent posters to view all people of a group as inhuman monsters- Nazis, slaveowners, Fundamentalists, Klansmen, whatever, when the truth is they weren’t. Their leaders perhaps were psychopaths- Manson almost certainly is- but psychopaths aren’t magnets who attract other psychopaths to work for them- in fact they probably get along less with their fellow psychopaths than we would since their ability to prey on emotions is their stock in trade. The most horrifying thing about Leslie Van Houten is that I DON’T think she was a monster- she was a girl from an unhappy but not horrible family who wanted to be a nun and she grew up to take part in one of the most famous senseless horrible crimes in U.S. history.
I’d love to read Van Houten’s book because it’s fascinating to me how non-horrible people can willingly do horrible things. It’s fascinating to me how hundreds of people killed themselves at Jonestown- many not willingly but many of them were, and almost all of them followed this madman to this hellhole willingly- and I don’t think it’s because they were all retarded sheep- in fact they ran the gamut (ex-cons, law abiding, black, white, poor, well-to-do, educated, illiterate, etc.). It’s also fascinating which ones didn’t commit suicide- some young and able bodied people drank the Flavor Ade and one old lady with cancer successfully hid- she wasn’t going to die like that. Also interesting how society picks and chooses: religious zealots choosing mass suicide at Jonestown: fanatical mass Darwin Award, religious zealots choosing mass suicide at Masada: national heroes- some see John Brown as a hero and some compare him with Timothy McVeigh.
While the Mansons have never been heroes to any save the extremely disaffected (and most of them probably poseurs) LVH and Patricia Krenwinkel (who I know much less about) and even Tex Watson (who had some troubles in his past but NOTHING that would imply he would do the things he did) all have stories that need to be told. They’re alive anyway so we shouldn’t waste the opportunity to learn all we can about them.
To what extent was it the psychadelic drugs? When did they realize the gravity of what they had done? Was it harder to stab somebody the first time or was it all about the same? Were they in fear of their life at the time?
I’d definitely read anything she wrote. Atkins and Watson put out some born-again “God loves me” stuff but it’s largely about how they’re forgiven, I would love to read something more cerebral. Perhaps Waters will cook something up.
