Nietzsche and serial killers: Nietzsche’s view that we run on cause-and-effect railway tracks, per Spinoza, leads to the stance that it is as futile to punish a criminal as it is to chastise a stone in its fall—further, it is fruitless to suppress those instincts, however repugnant, that truly drive us and give us our power and eagle-like capacity to dominate. Secondarily, everything is on a spectrum so that, as the child-killer Ian Brady observed, it is a hypocrisy that the state napalms children and gives soldiers medals who participate in such wars while his own “healthy” instinct is considered “evil” (the deception of simple dualism, the prison of decadent resentful moralism). Hence you will often find men like Ian Brady and Richard “the Nightstalker” Ramirez use Nietzschean arguments to justify their crimes.
Flipside: progressive liberals, men like Lord Longford, use Nietzschean arguments to call for clemency for serial killers—particularly, in Longford’s case, for Brady’s accomplice Myra Hindley. The Nietzschean influence is the same—why punish a stone for falling? These men have “a condition” or “a sickness” that we need to understand (so as to prevent the same events in the future through scientific prophylactic). Although Nietzsche speaks about the weak masses who must “go down”, there is ambiguity in his statement; post-Auschwitz we assume he meant the gas chamber, but that is a retrospective projection—and Hitler was no Nietzschean.
Indeed, Nietzsche says that his enemies, the resentful, have the “spirit of the hangman” about them—and he cautions against those “in whom the desire to punish is strong”. Hence a man like Longford is Nietzschean—the lone cultivated man who “understands” the criminal is helpless before his urges stands against the beery “hang the paedo” mob suffused with the spirit of revenge, of the hangman. In this way, Nietzsche has both helped to provide serial killers with the rational justification for their acts, and also aided the wet liberals who would ultimately release said “natural beasts of prey”.