To be honest he's not on his own here. Half the British media have been embarrassing themselves by going on about Austria's "post-Nazi" culture and trying to pin the blame for this on the entire country and it's Nazi past.

If he's going for an insanity plea he's doing a good job.

I think it's Bush's fault.

Well we all know that Bush=Hitler.

What Eamon said.

Leaving alone the current monster, here is an interesting question:
Does the appearance of Hitler have some root in Austrian culture, mentality, education ?
Should the Austrian nation's reputation be tarnished by the fact that it produced Hitler ?
Is it possible to ever shed this stain ?

Na this one was an evil bastard
not a madman!

He was 10 in 1946.
What did he know of Nazism?
Very little I suspect.

Much more will be written about this we can be sure.

But please dont let's cop a plea of insanity on this one!

For all those generations of kids who suffered in that house,
I want the bastard incarcerated in the very same dungeon he kept his growing "family" in.
For Life!
Guarded by a chapter of the Gay Bikers from Hell!
Cheesecutter hats with chains a speciality dude!

Official visits to see if he has been "Rehabilitated at all"
about every twenty years....

Was chatting about this with my sister today, and we both agreed that there just isn't a punishment sufficient for what he's done. A woman who had her life taken away, years that can never be given back; who has born 7 children (one dead) as the result of constant incestual rape in the dungeon; 6 children who have to live with being the product of that, 3 of whom spent their formative years incarcerated (the 5 year old at least didn't have to grow up in there) with their normal development denied them- the other 3 who have suddenly found out that they're the product of this barbarity and through apparently a whim escaped being locked in the dungeon for their entire lives so far. A wife who has to live with what went on literally beneath her feet, what happened to her daughter, the 3 "new" children and the knowledge of where the 3 "known" ones came from. It's beyond comprehending.

The history books are full of monstrosities- Genghis Khan, the Holocaust, the socialist death toll in their tens of millions, the Burma railway and on and on. But somehow the shock of this is for me and I'm sure many other people far greater; perhaps because this was such a personal monstrosity inflicted by this monstrous man on his own flesh and blood. It's easier to read about a genocide of thousands or millions than about this awful thing.

It's also a testament to Elisabeth Fritzl that she managed to somehow survive this. It's hard to imagine how anybody could. It makes any and all hardships one may moan about suddenly seem utterly trivial.

To Jacob...I don't know if you have some sort of personal grudge against Austrians, but I don't know how you can accuse Austrians of being particularly culpable because one evil man was born there more than a century ago. The fact that you ask those rhetorical questions would suggest you'd answer yes to all. This being an individualist blog and all, Hitler was *individually* responsible for who he was and the actions he took. And while we're on the subject Hitler so self-identified himself as being German that plenty of people even today aren't aware he wasn't German, hardly a bastion of Austrian national identity. Further, why should Austria have some sort of "stain" because of his actions? Cambodia produced Pol Pot, the Chinese produced Mao yet those nations are regarded as *victims* of the men they produced, why the double standard? Anyhow, to answer your questions Jacob, No, No, and No.

If Hitler was to blame for the recent Austrian obscenity, who did Fred West, Dennis Neilsen, Myra Hindley, Peter Sutcliffe, etc, blame? It shows that no matter which country a person may be born into, lying just beneath the veneer of respectability is cruelty, evil and vicious greed. It is only the self discipline of each individual which guides the path we all take. People ask how this can happen in a civilised society? They should be asking what makes us think that we live in a civilised society? We will only be in such a situation when the strong stop taking advantage of the weak but begin helping them. For instance, just look how we treat our elderly in the UK - many of whom die without dignity (and that is in government controlled circumstances). For the present there is no answer to these situations occurring and there is no punishment strong enough for the evil carried out.

Who is to blame for Hitler and where does it end? Is it the lass with the forbidden apple fetish?

Ian B, as a genocidal monster once said:
"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic."

What this man did is horrific, there is no doubt in my mind that he is a sick individual. It doesn't take a psychologist to see that. Give him a gun, one bullet, and leave him alone for a while. If he has any humanity left he'll do the decent thing.

There is nothing that can be done to him that can make up for what he has done. His crime is so abhorrent that there is no punishment that fits. Better he just dies, without fuss or fanfare, and lets those he maimed get on with pulling together the shattered pieces of their lives.

Horrendous as this case is, I don't think it has anything to do with Austria, and I don't think it proves very much. Humanity produces monsters from time to time. Confusedofessex produces a list of a few of them. These cases are so extreme that I think looking for cause and effect just about misses the point.

Hitler is also to blame for Australia's former Prime Minister, John Howard. I heard a writer say that writing a biography of Howard would be like writing Hitler's. So Hitler must be Howard's role model. An author said so, somewhere, so there.

That's all very well and good, Nick, but if Hitler hadn't been the kind of guy he was, Howard would have just found some other murderous fascist to emulate.

You're right, Bod! Let's just be grateful Howard didn't model himself on Fraser! Then he'd have been a closet socialist! 'Fabian' Fraser has been veering leftward for years!

Well the man did talk about "gassing" them if they tried to escape. I was not surprised to hear that Hitler came up in regards to this guy however.

I call Godwin.

Hitler is also to blame for Australia's former Prime Minister, John Howard.

Ye gods. Some Australians really need to get out more. Howard a suburban solicitor who through a truly astonishing amount of gut cunning and a very ambitious wife rose to be one of Australia's many mediocre but not actually terrible Prime Ministers, certainly.

Hitler, not so much.

Andrew: I don't think Godwin applies here. This conversation started with Hitler. Godwin's law is when someone brings him up half way through, I think.

Well, to be picky, Godwin's Law is just a prediction that in a heated internet argument, as time progresses somebody will accuse the other person (or their side of the argument) as being "like a Nazi/like Nazis". The corrollary of the Law is that when that happens the argument is over and the name caller has lost; but it's not a regulation that says at that point the argument is obligated to cease, merely an observation that this is a strong indicator that the argument has run out of steam and descended into heat without light, in effect, and that the name caller has resorted to name calling because their arguments are exhausted. Godwin's Law is an observation regarding human behaviour, in the same sense as Murphy's Law. It's like saying "a person who resorts to violence has lost the argument". So it's interesting how over time it has become interpreted as a regulation "if somebody calls somebody or something a Nazi, the argument must cease".

I actually personally feel that this evolution of Godwin's Law is indicative of the authoritarian mindset in our society, which particularly reveals itself on the internets™, often among those who one would be expect to be anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment. The kind of people who think themselves free thinkers but won't use table tags in HTML "because the w3c say we shouldn't". Which is very indicative of the mindset of socialists (liberals, for American readers) and statist conservatives, both of whom talk a great deal about freedom but are rules junkies with a fear of genuinely informal situations. The effect is probably worsened significantly by the spread of college education taught by left-statists, which indoctrinates students with a powerful hierarchical/formalised mindset, while flattering them that believing in this is proof of their free minds.

(I say "statist conservatives" because IMV a significant minority of self-identified conservatives are on the cusp of libertarianism, but haven't quite got there yet.)

Sorry, just a couple more thoughts.

Of course, it's also yet another tool in the left's language toolkit with great utility in silencing opponents; since of course when the left act like nazis, which they frequently do, their opponents find that any attempt to point this out invokes Godwin's Law and they are thus silenced. It's like banning the word "genocide", thus leaving opponents of mass political killing with no potent description at their disposal. The Left are very good at this manipulation of language. They enforce it because they now control the cultural hegemony and by inculcating the masses with this false consciou...

*hook appears from stage left and drags off ranting loon Ian B by the neck*

The other thing I find interesting about Godwin's Law, as a Brit, is that of course since the war we've had a general cultural acceptance of nazi analogies, particularly to ridicule power-crazed low ranking officials, either in verbally or somatically (finger under nose, other arm raised in a mockery of Hitler). Such analogies were based not on "genocidal anti-semitism" but by the reasonable characterisation of nazis as officious and intractable authoritarians, and portrayed them as ridiculous. Over the past few years, the (particularly American "liberal") Left have successfully promoted a new hegemonic consciousness that any reference to Nazism is a reference to genocidalism and the Holocaust which, since that's a grotesque thing to accuse anyone of, has obliterated this conversational use of the term "nazi" which even in America was still used until quite recently, even by Jewish people (see Seinfeld, "soup nazi"). It's a fine example of the Left's manipulation of language via reduction of vocabulary (just as Orwell showed in 1984 how NewSpeak constantly reduced the available vocabulary to a vocabulary which could only express that which is politically correct (literally)).

We could at this point say that the Left's opponents should use a similar strategy (obliterating our opponent's terminology by a strategy of chronic offense) but the situation isn't symmetrical; reduction of vocabulary works against us, since we seek a broadening, not narrowing, of speech. We would hurt ourselves more than we hurt them.

They're a cunning bunch, so they are.

The term "nazi" is still commonly used to mean a petty bureaucrat or control freak. I just got called that a few hours ago, actually. Apparently, the difference between a misdemeanor booking for drunk driving, and being packed into a cattle car is not as much as I had originally thought.

Actually, I've used the term myself. I'm guilty. I threw the word "safety nazi" around in the context of helmet laws for motorcyclists and snowboarders.

My bad.

My bad.

It is ridiculous to blame it on the Nazis.

We all know that the real culprit is global warming . . . those rising temperatures, the fate of the penguins, those poor polar bears, the melting of the ice on the Alps, it was all too, too much for a poor Austrian to take . . .

Jennings- where do you get the idea that Jan Howard is overly ambitious? It's not like she's a Hillary! Mrs. Howard has never occupied any political positions, and I don't think she's going into politics in the future. Her Fascist husband wouldn't let her.... (joke!)
Indeed, I was having fun at the 'blame it all on the war/Hitler' mentality, and laughing at writers who can't see the good side of anyone but lefty politicians.