RIP JAMES

Equally moronic statements have been made by Michael Morland, the awful and inept judge overseeing the trial (who made the crucial and foolish decision to allow T and V’s true names and faces to be made public), Laurence Lee, Venables’ idiotic solicitor, Albert Kirby, and countless journalists and columnists. The Bulger case will go down in history as one of the most ridiculous moral panics and instances of mass hysteria since the Satanic witchcraft scare that spread throughout U.K. and the U.S. in the 1980s. The one common denominator is that all of these individuals – Kirby, Roberts etc. – seem to lack basic critical thinking skills – and to derive all their ideas about childhood evil and crime from schlock like THE EXORCIST, THE OMEN, THE BAD SEED and bad television soap operas.

There’s simply nothing to indicate Thompson would’ve behaved violently at all if he’d not been in Venables’ company – despite attempts to portray him as diabolical ringleader and Pied Piper – and likewise, nothing to indicate Venables would’ve behaved so violently if a single responsible adult – parent, social worker, schoolteacher, administrator – had lifted a finger to come to the aid of an obviously traumatized and disturbed child. This was not a psychopathic crime (Venables is hardly the second coming of Graham Young) – it was not a unique crime – it was not at all an unforeseeable or unpreventable crime.

The Bulger case was an all-around disgrace and travesty of justice – but not for any of the reasons Roberts, Morland, Lee, Denise Fergus, or Ralph Bulger think.

Oh please… enough with this old canard! Are you aware that the large majority of nation states have a higher age of criminal responsibility, which necessarily means that Venables and Thompson couldn’t have been prosecuted under their laws? Enough with this nonsense about a “lack of support by the government.” On the contrary, politicians quite callously exploited the Bulger case for their own ends.

There aren’t many countries in the world these two boys would’ve gotten a harsher sentence than the one they did receive – and in most places, they wouldn’t even have been prosecuted at all. So the complaints about lack of government support are really just stemming from ignorance not just of English law, but of law the world over.

Does Lee not know how to read? It is simply impossible to read Smith’s book THE SLEEP OF REASON and come to anything like that conclusion. Lee also insists that Thompson was the Pied Piper who led Venables astray. Yet Smith shows that it Venables, not Thompson, who manifested violence long before he killed James – he was into self-harming and tried to throttle a classmate with a ruler, and had to be pried off him. And when offered – free of charge – therapy and counselling for their obviously disturbed and damaged son, Venables’ parents turned it down! What the hell is so “normal” and “lovely” about parents who stubbornly, sickeningly, refuse to avail themselves of available resources and treatments for their damaged child even after being informed they won’t have to pay for it themselves? Furthermore, Smith claims that relatives of Susan Venables took him aside and recounted some “hair-raising” stories of the “carnage” that could result from family get-togethers. Violence WAS a part of the family dynamic: so much for Lee’s hare-brained understanding of the case (no wonder his defence of Venables was so incompetent – the guy seems cut from the same thick plank of wood as Albert Kirby).

Furthermore, Thompson’s version of events always maintained a lot of internal consistency, no matter how many times he retold it. His version always maintains the violence started when Venables flicked paint which landed in James Bulger’s eye, and James started screaming and crying. In response to James’ crying, Venables seemed to go berserk at this point. When Smith reproduces Venables’ account, on the other hand, it’s harder to visualize what happened – and at one point Venables even says in response to a question – “How do I know? I see double vision” – which is a very peculiar statement: sounds like the statement of somebody reversing roles in his imagination, blaming on Thompson the actions that he himself committed.

Unless the reference to “double vision” has some connection to his squint and the surgery performed on it (Venables had an eye operation for his squint shortly before he killed James – such operations are now known to trauma experts to frequently trigger severe PTSD and attendant rage/violence reactions – and are even positively indicated when the child comes from a dysfunctional family background!). Did the death of James have some connection to Venables’ own panic and terror when he went under the knife? Did the paint landing in James’ eye, and James screaming, trigger a flashback to his own earlier traumas involving his lazy eye? These are questions that deserve further investigation.

The death of James Bulger was a very preventable tragedy. If we want to know why it wasn’t prevented, we need look no further than Venables’ ostensibly “lovely” parents, whose modus operandi was denial, denial, denial that any problem with their child existed – even after he throttled a classmate! “It’s nothing, it’s just his diet, we’ll change his diet a little.” And contra Laurence Lee, there is nothing “lovely” or “respectable” about such abdication of one’s parental duties.