https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2025/04/02/but-what-is-mad/ Despite setting out the – entirely rational, if ultimately self-defeating – reasons why the Nazis went to Stalingrad in the previous article, I still received comments (from people who should know better) that, no, it was because Hitler was mad! This triggered a memory from around fifteen years ago, back in the days when I used to teach the Mental Health First Aid course.
I had been asked to deliver the course to Post Office union reps who were facing a rising number of workers taking sick leave due to common mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression. The course took place just days after one of Britain’s worst and most publicised killing sprees by Raoul Moat, a former panel beater who had just been released from jail after assaulting a child. In a conversation during a break, the Post Office reps were unanimous in their belief that “Moat was mental… he had to be!” Although, as I explained to them, this was at odds with both the legal and medical definitions of insanity, which are far less generous than they were being to Moat.
In the end, Moat turned his gun on himself, at least sparing the expense of a murder trial. But if he hadn’t, it is highly unlikely that an insanity defence would have succeeded. This is because the legal test of insanity is incredibly tight. Simply carrying out an act which no reasonable person would consider, wouldn’t cut it. Rather, any defendant using an insanity defence must meet the long-standing McNaughton rules – developed during a case against Daniel McNaughton in 1834:
Everyone is presumed to be sane – and so a defendant must prove otherwise Everyone is assumed to know the law of the land, and to know when they are breaking it To prove insanity, a defendant must (at the time of the crime) have been suffering a disease of mind so severe that they did not know the nature and quality of their acts, or that they did not know that what there were doing was legally wrong.
In recent years, concern has grown over the “disease of mind” condition, since there may be instances when a physical illness might render someone incapable of distinguishing between right or wrong. This aside, the fact that the rules have remained largely unchallenged for 190 years (and that there is no political will to amend them) demonstrates that, in law at least, very few people turn out to be insane.
What Raoul Moat did might have been pure evil in colloquial terms. But he knew what he was doing, and he had set out (albeit twisted) reasons for his actions. It is also clear that Britain’s most prolific serial killer also knew exactly what he was doing, and was under no illusion that it was against the law. Indeed, had he not been let off with a slap on the wrist for acquiring deadly drugs without licence early in his career, the name Harold Shipman might never have become so notorious. In the course of his medical career, Shipman is believed to have murdered 215 of his patients, with evidence suggesting that another 45 might also have been murdered. What we don’t have is the reason why he did it, although experts have speculated that it was a form of necrophilia in which someone derives pleasure from watching the moment of death.
These two examples above, point to a deep form of denial at the heart of our cultural psyche. Raoul Moat, Brutish, physically strong, poorly educated, and working class, is almost an archetype of how we might imagine a deranged killer. Harold Shipman, the apparently caring, upper-middle-class medical professional simply does not fit our imagined profile of a killer. So much so, of course, that in the decades that Shipman was busy knocking off his patients – in his busiest year, killing a patient every ten days! – police and health service managers chose to turn a blind eye to the growing mountain of evidence pointing to something being very wrong. Indeed, if anyone inside the NHS had bothered to compare the death rate at Shipman’s practice to similar practices in the area, it would have been impossible not to conclude that someone had decided to shorten local waiting lists in the worst possible manner.
To believe that medical doctors might also be mass killers is to undermine one’s trust in healthcare as a whole. And so, most of us recoil from the very possibility. Nor does this form of denial stop with clinicians. I have written several posts concerning the outbreak of war in August 1914. For many years, historians sought to link the outbreak to a certain mental fragility on the part of Kaiser Wilhelm II – not quite a full-on “madman Hitler” attack, but sufficient to add to the view that it was all Germany’s fault… except that there is a growing mountain of evidence pointing to failure on the part of all of the European powers. In Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clarke gives a detailed account of how the Europeans blundered into war. In Thirteen Days, Clive Ponting blames the slow speed of diplomatic communications allowing events to get ahead of the diplomacy. In July 1914: Countdown to War, Sean McMeekin adds to Ponting’s work, drawing on documents made available in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union… McMeekin falling back upon gross incompetence to account for the diplomatic failures in the weeks leading up to the conflict. As with more establishment historians, these authors maintain the unconscious starting point that all of the statesmen and diplomats involved in the July crisis were good people who were at least trying to avert war. But the same evidence can be – and has been – used to suggest complicity and perfidy… what, exactly, was agreed in those July meetings between the Russian Tsar and the French president? We will never know because someone accidentally – cough – set fire to them soon after. Might Britain’s ambassador to Saint Petersburg have chosen to look the other way – rather than being the idiot portrayed by McMeekin – when mobilised Russian troops were marching past his office on their way to the railway station? Could it be that Sir Edward Grey went fishing the weekend before war broke out because he wanted not to know about the Russian mobilisation? We will never know. But certainly, once we drop the automatic assumption that these people were as good as we would hope we are, then the possibility that all of the European powers had reason to – and may have colluded to – go to war in August 1914, then the same evidence paints a very different picture.
Other than the – not particularly credible – questioning of the fragility of the Kaiser’s personality or the slow-wittedness of Tsar Nicholas II, madness has never been seriously entertained as a cause of the First World War. And yet few, one would hope, would deny the evil of the slaughter that followed. Close to a million people died in the first six weeks of the conflict… following the entirely rational and logistically calculated plans drawn up by the respective militaries. It was horrific but – and here is where the denial kicks in – it wasn’t insane. Everyone involved knew what they were doing and why they were doing it.
Dismissing Hitler as mad, in addition to providing cover for those who collaborated with him, serves only to let him off the hook. It is to suggest that he wasn’t responsible for the war he unleashed, for the millions of war casualties, and for the organised mass murder of the death camps. And yet, had he lived and been captured, he would have stood trial alongside all of the other Nazi leaders, whose own attempts to justify their actions served to condemn them. Certainly, none of those who sat in judgement at Nuremberg – and who had to endure the uncensored footage of the horrors of the camps – ever suggested that the Nazi leadership did not know what they were doing or that they did not realise that it was wrong. That is, those who witnessed the evil that was perpetrated never once considered that those behind it were mad… and neither should you.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Re: But what is mad?
Posted by Keith-264 on April 3, 2025, 1:54 pm, in reply to "But what is mad?"
He needs to look at Tooze again for an explanation of Nazi strategic thinking and the way that fantasies of 'Jewish-Bolshevik' world conspirators served to explain foreign resistance to nazi ambitions. Rational strategic-economic reasoning showed that Germany could never beat the coalition that begin to form in 1938 between the British empire, the USSR and the USSA.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
on April 3, 2025, 1:01 pm