A Life, Atrophied
An utterly deranged megalomaniac lives behind the facade of a paterfamilias, the stuff of which horror fantasies are derived from.Fiction, it is so often said, is stranger, more peculiar, more odious, more unbelievable than much that happens in life. But not always. Society does breed its social monsters. People so utterly without empathy for others, so deeply wedded to themselves they are incapable of resisting their black, bleak urges to destroy the lives of others.
There are some breeds of fish where the males, upon the birth of offspring, will immediately set about devouring their own. There are some breeds of men so lacking in compassion, and bereft of the ability to care for others, so emotionally dead to the humanity of other human beings that they are capable of the most heinous acts of bestiality, one could never ascribe to sentient beings.
On the other hand, they are legion, they inhabit their own very special place in this shared world of the raptors and the victims, the self-enablers and the vulnerable, the vicious demanders the the innocent. Interspersed between the hunter and the hunted there is sprinkled a shambling element of non-interferers, those who might take the initiative to protect the victims, but who choose not to.
In Austria, Elizabeth Fritzel's older brother Harald, was one of those. True, he was only two years her senior, but she trusted him and they were emotionally close as siblings. She informed him of the horrors that their father was imposing upon her from the age of eleven, and he knew of the dreadful abuse his sister was suffering.
There's a big difference, both in chronological age and in physical capabilities between eleven and thirteen, female and male.
Why would a child whose father violated her repeatedly not approach her mother and plead for her help? This was a stern man who would brook no opposition to his dictates as head of family. What kind of woman would live with such a man? What kind of woman might it be who could contrive ignorance of what occurs between her husband and their children?
What measure of fear and foreboding could be sufficient to ensure that a mother would assent to a father abusing, tormenting, threatening and raping their children? The girl that Elizabeth Fritzel was, was utterly abandoned by anyone who might save her from the predations of her father. She ran away from home at 16, was found by authorities and returned to the security of her loving family.
She had earned her father's relentless enmity by defying his wish to maintain her as a child sex-slave. There was nowhere she could turn to for help to deliver her from her living nightmare. And when he finally entombed her two years later so he could control her with no possibility of intervention, a life already drenched in misery and horror sank even lower into the mire of humiliation and despair.
She was forced to endure as a sex slave to a depraved lunatic, with no opportunity to escape, no one to share her torment with, living in her dank cellar with no hope. Forced to carry out one pregnancy after another, to self-deliver in that stinking dungeon, reliant only on her singular will to live. It's truly a pity that hate alone is an insufficient weapon with which to kill a tormentor.
With all the psychiatric assistance she and her children - forced to endure their relentlessly-fearful incarceration in an foetid underground cavern of cement and rats - may now be dependent on to help them try to adjust to a human life, nothing can expunge the memory of their unending ordeal of fear, control and physical and psychic deprivation.
The pity of it is, there is no punishment suitable for this father and grandfather; architect-monster of a sordid tale so unbelievable that it defies human credulity.
Labels: Human Fallibility, Justice, Social-Cultural Deviations
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, March 18, 2009
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