depravity in a moral environment

Over here:

A 73-year-old Austrian today confessed to imprisoning, beating and sexually abusing his daughter in a windowless cellar for 24 years, during which time he fathered her seven children.

Josef Fritzl admitted to forcing his daughter Elisabeth into the basement of the family's home in Amstetten, north-west Austria, on August 24 1984, when she was 18.

Today, the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard said in an editorial: "The whole country must ask itself just what is really, fundamentally going wrong."

This is the kind of thing it’s easier to do in a society fundamentally convinced it’s going right, where a man’s home is his castle and everybody minds their own business: where the unimaginable is necessarily the possible, for those with the right imagination.

Back in 2004 I wrote about my mother’s encounter with something very similar.