The story of Josef Fritzl, the 73-year-old Austrian who was found to have kept his abused 42-year-old daughter Elisabeth in a dungeon under his house, impregnating her with seven children in her 24 years of imprisonment … I cannot end the sentence. His actions swell so much in both awfulness and number that reciting them could fill this column space.

But I want to fling hate his way while defending his country. The xenophobia I'm finding in the coverage of this case is troubling.

When you work online, you spend so much time searching the internet — it's different from surfing, which I take it is fun — that only extended psychoanalysis could identify the object of the search. What secrets might the internet hold?

I think I'm looking for the upper and lower limits of humanity, the best that people can do and the worst. The Austrian dungeon story is one of the worst of modern times: the three incarcerated children who had never seen the sun, living in a basement of that huge squat house shaped like a fist. This makes the videos of Fritzl's three-week sex tourism trip to Thailand particularly painful to watch. He is wearing a barely-there swimming strip; his skin is deeply tanned and he is massaged on a beach towel by a deferential young woman to whom he offers a polite "Thank you." The old man is happy as a clam; it chills the blood to see him grinning and joking as he mockingly sinks his healthy white teeth into a haunch of roasted meat in the hotel restaurant. His daughter's and grandchildren's teeth have fallen out from Vitamin D deprivation. He so relishes everything his young prisoners have never had.

The five-year-old squealed with delight when he felt the sun's rays on his face, police said, and clapped his hands with joy when he saw a cow in a field. Their mother had told them that heaven was "up there," meaning out of the cellar, and the children concluded that they were in heaven when they touched ground in Amstetten, which is not what Amstetten is feeling about itself right now.

Reputation

It's fascinating to watch Austrians worry that their reputation has been permanently damaged by the two recent cases of young women being imprisoned in cellars, the other case being that of Natascha Kampusch in a Vienna suburb. Even if you ignore Austria's wild enthusiasm for Hitler and the energy with which they went about organizing the killing of Jews during the Second World War, this is the country that elected Kurt Waldheim in 1986 despite his Nazi past, and the Nazi apologist Jorg Haider as governor in the state of Corinthia. Studies repeatedly show that Austrians are still deeply anti-Semitic, even more than the Swiss are, which is quite something. Nearly half of them would not wish to live next door to a Jew (not that they're going to have to, Austria's Jews having almost been wiped out during the war). That's a moral blot.

But I admire Austrians for their genuine anguish over the Amstetten case. These people are lacerating themselves over their failure to notice anything dodgy going on at Fritzl's house for decades. In other words, they feel as pointlessly guilty as did Paul Bernardo's neighbours in St. Catharines and the mindlessly drunk people who partied at Robert Pickton's farm.

Compared to Austria

Canadian anti-Semitism is alive and well. Austrians have basements, as do Canadians. Basements aren't sinister, just sensible. They are famously not a gregarious friendly nation. Neither is Canada. Both we and Germans have a reputation for a rigid and authoritarian family life. But Germans have an admirable fondness for relaxed public nudity; they make everyone else in the women's change room feel prissy and unattractive. And they elected Angela Merkel; we have never elected a female prime minister.

Californians don't usually build basements. Yet they have spectacular murders, rampages of cruelty and small private tortures: Manson, the Hillside Strangler, the Zodiac killer etc. But no one accuses California of in-built moral flaws; it's just as absurd to blame Austrians. Furthermore, Americans are a fantastically friendly people; it is the best aspect of them and can't be linked to their style of murder any more than British standoffishness explains why their murderers bury their victims in their tiny gardens despite the proximity of the neighbours, or why American killers prefer the outdoors.

What all these cases have in common is the idiocy of police, and that's universal. Any more self-blame over Austrian-built structures and unfriendliness and Austrians might as well be describing us.

Or the Scots.

The Scottish BBC journalist Alan Johnston told a CBC-hosted on-stage interview this week that he was sustained during his four-month captivity in Gaza last year by the thought that so many had suffered infinitely worse than he. He thought of Auschwitz. He thought of the Congolese woman Zawadi Mongane who watched her children hacked to death by rebels, was gang raped and was forced to hang her baby (she did it because she had one last child to protect) and of Brian Keenan in captivity in Beirut for four years (his memoir An Evil Cradling is a classic of misery and endurance). He meticulously re-enacted the Shackleton Expedition in his mind, one of the loneliest stories ever told.

In other words, he hauled the worst agonies of others into his brain to desensitize it to his own immediate suffering. Remembering good things would have finished him off. This is a Scottish technique that has helped the Scots retain their crown of stoicism. I sometimes think they seek out misery; it justifies their existence. I owe my Scottish mother a debt for her teachings. When I fall ill, I clean the house before I collapse into bed. A wee infection is no justification for laziness and laxity. Do you see why I'm not lecturing Austrians for being tight-assed?

'People are people'

I don't like national stereotypes. The fact that they might have a germ of truth in them means nothing; practically everything has a germ of truth in it, but it's not an operative germ, just a sign of the randomness and multiplicity of human nature. The fact that the leader of Western Australia's opposition Liberals has confessed to sniffing a female colleague's chair after she stood up says nothing about Australians. Although my friend in Western Australia is horrified, as is almost everyone.

But the current prime minister of Australia was elected even after being caught on video in Parliament eating his own earwax, I hear you say.

And I say it's the exception that proves the rule. Aussies are great. So are Austrians, I would imagine. So is everyone really. "People are people" no matter where you are, Alan Johnston told the audience. This calm, gentle-natured Scot who loves the Palestinian people, if not one tiny gang in Gaza, had it exactly right.

This Week

I don't know what to make of Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century. He's a fine journalist, but I'll be able to make more sense of his meticulous history of the CIA, Ghost Wars, than I will of Mohamed bin Laden, the one-eyed Yemeni bricklayer who began the dynasty that spawned Osama. One thing is certain: it is a bad idea to marry dozens of women and have 54 children. If you die in a plane crash, as bin Ladens tend to, no one's in charge. And the odds of those children going wrong? Overwhelming.

Especially those resentful neglected middle children.

Letters

Ms. Mallick's story is not founded on any rational premise. The effort to weave xenophobia concerning Austrians as an outcome of this horrible case misses every mark.

I visited Vienna in March; this case was a matter of interest among the people I met, just as the Paul Bernardo case galvanized public attention here 10 years ago. Like the Canadians who saw Bernardo as a monster that transcended ethnic or national boundaries, the Viennese I met expressed revulsion for the alleged crimes here, and a sense of gratitude that albeit at a late date, an apparent monster had been detected and brought to justice.

Weird, awful, sociopathic animals are not a product of nationalism or race. They exist....and their country of origin plays no role.

– Bryan Davies | Whitby, Ontraio

Once again Heather Mallick asks us to try to think! Indeed, we have this 'good crime', 'bad crime' contradition; the Austrians must be 'bad' because of their ethnocentric preferences and glaring crimes of perversion.

This is as opposed to the 'good' people of the world who bomb cities to dust - but have the best of intentions in mind. Maybe it's time to ask ourselves if we really have the right to cast the first stone.

Let's compare our own collective values to what we find objectionable abroad. Do we hold up the residential schools as a shining example of Canadian values? While demeaning the moral shortcomings of others is pretty refreshing, it doesn't really help anyone.

Thanks to Heather Mallick for trying the usual thought-provoking commentary.

– Barry Weir | Lima, Peru

Although I agree, Heather did tend to wander, I still found what she was saying compelling and I understood what she was getting at. There is a potential ear wax eater and rapist or serial killer in all of us, in every country. We see and hear about them too often to ignore.

Horror exists everywhere in all forms in all races. Its part of our DNA. Fortunately, most of us either don't have the urge to act out those impulses, or have taken that negative energy and redirected it towards something healthier.

Either way it comes down to the fact that people are indeed just people. We are not pure spirit as some would have us believe.

– Jan F | Burnaby,B.C.

It is wonderful to read Heather Mallick's column on Josef Fritzl, a man who abused and kept locked up his children/grandchildren. She starts off in disgust with Frtzl's actions, rightly so I might add, and then she begins to wander....

First she starts off ranting about how the Swiss and Austrians hate Jews, and how Canadians have things in common with Californians and how the Scots can always think of a worse situation than the one they are in so that they can survive anything. After paragraphs of that, she then states that she doesn't like national stereotypes. Did she get sudden amnesia or does she bother to read her own writing?

Heather also blames the police in Frtzl's horrifying ordeal. Did the police have some sort of x-ray vision in Austria that we don't know about? How would they know what is going on unless someone told them? Austria is not a police state anymore and the police can't just come by and rummage through your place looking for any possible problems. This is a freedom they have in Austria and one we have here too.

Lastly, no Canadian Prime Minister has ever been elected into office. The individual party members get elected, not the office of Prime Minister. A Prime Minister could technically be unelected and still be Prime Minister.

– Paul Morris | Winnipeg

Intriguing though creepy, Ms Mallick, those national character descriptions you’ve chosen to cut a swath across the planet. You’ve allowed for the fact that most citizens live in a rightful state of innocence until proven otherwise but that there is a snippet of consistency in a culture that defines a stereotype.

You might have pointed out that a nation’s self-love is boundless. That it can forgive itself of any missteps while in pursuit of its bigger dreams. That while pruning the garden the heads of severed flowers will pile up. So when a citizen or two of such a nation looks into his soul and sees a void that he can fill with the salacious images of abandonment and then act on them, it’s not the nation’s fault. Not really.

It’s just that, you know, he knew that eyes seem to turn away when unpleasantness was happening; that the cloying smell coming with the wind could mean something else.

– Les H | Toronto

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