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 âe¦ 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.