Austrian
Atrocity Horrifies
But Media Ignore US, UK
And Australian Mass Infanticide
By Dr Gideon Polya
06 May,
2008
Countercurrents.org
We have all been utterly shocked by the story from Austria about Josef Fritzl who repeatedly raped his own daughter (now 42), and imprisoned her plus 3 children by him (now 19, 18 and 5 years old) in a windowless dungeon over 24 years while 3 further children by this poor woman lived upstairs (present ages 16, 14 and 12 years; a further child died shortly after birth) (for relevant reports see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7370208.stm , http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7370889.stm, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7373172.stm , http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2007/s2232100.htm and http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23629538-2,00.html ).
In an interview
with a top Australian ABC TV “Lateline” journalist, the
London Times Berlin bureau chief Roger Boyes responded to her comment
that “There must have been neighbours and other people who saw
some puzzling behaviour yet also didn't raise any questions”
with the following (see: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/
content/2007/s2232100.htm ) :
“ROGER BOYES: Well, not only that, there were actually people, other people living in the house as sub-tenants. And they, as a condition of signing their rent contract were told not to go down to the cellar and they, and they complied. You know, it was - it is a very strange society. I call it a "look away society" because whenever there's something, there's some potential of embarrassment or complication, they immediately look away.”
And in response to the further question from the Lateline” journalist - “This is not the first case of its type in Austria and you mention the issue of Austria being a "look away society". We also had the case recently there of Natascha Kampusch, the woman, the girl who was kidnapped and kept in captivity for eight years. Every society, of course, has its inexplicable cruelties, but you've written that Austria in particular is a society that nurtures its secrets, that suppresses its history, that blocks out uncomfortable biographies. What do you mean by that?” - Roger Boyes responded thus:
“ROGER BOYES: Well, um, you know, you can't say on the basis of this case that Austrians have a natural inclination to lock people in their cellars, yeah? This is obviously not the case. We've had lots of horrific crimes across the world and I remember covering even Marc Detrow in Belgium years ago… But, what you can say is that there is - Austria has grown up with concealment, in a way. It was, it was a very difficult society after the war here. There were indeed a lot of Nazis. And these Nazis were indeed integrated into the mainstream political establishment. They became Social Democrats, even. They did a complete turnover. They joined the elite. There was a famous psychoanalyst here who - or a neurologist here who had experimented on babies in a baby clinic for euthanasia program of the Nazis. And yet he emerged after the war as an upstanding doctor, an expert witness in courts. These kind of cover ups are part of this society. They haven't quite got used to and grappling with the past in the way, for example, that the Germans have.”
Well, how does this “national character assassination” of Austria actually stack up in relation to the child abuse and media responsibility track record of the US, Australia and the UK?
Simple quantitative assessment of the “Fritzl horror” with child abuse horrors being perpetrated by the US, the UK, NATO and Australia in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan tell us that this is a very serious and obscenely exaggerated case of “the Pot calling the Kettle black”.
The relevant bottom line measure is “annual death rate” of the subject children in the situations being compared – “the “Fritzl horror house” on the one hand and on the other the US-, UK, Australia- and NATO-occupied territories of Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan.
For the “Fritzl horror house” we can determine that the “average incarceration time” for Fritzl’s 8 offspring was 11.25 years. Accordingly, the “annual death rate”
for these children was 1 death out of 8 children over 11.25 years, this yielding a value of 1.1%.
Inspection of the latest data from the UN Population Division (see: http://esa.un.org/unpp/ ) we can determine that the “annual death rate” (2007) for under-5 year old infants is 2.3% in Occupied Iraq and 6.2% for Occupied Afghanistan.
As reported recently by the Shanghai Daily (see: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2008/
200804/20080417/article_356139.htm ) but certainly not by Western
media : “the ''annual under-five-year-old infant death rate"
is about the same (about 0.6 percent) in Tibet and China as a whole
as compared to 6.2 percent for US- and Australia-occupied Afghanistan,
0.12 percent for occupier Australia and 0.16 percent for occupier
United States. The annual infant death rate in occupied Afghanistan
(6.2 percent) is 51 times that in occupier Australia, 38 times that
in occupier US and similar to the ''annual death rate" of 10.2
percent for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in World War
II - a war crime for which key Japanese leaders were tried and hanged.”
While the “Fritzl horror” killed 1 child and horribly traumatized his 7 surviving children, post-invasion under-5 infant deaths in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories total 0.6 million and 2.3 million, respectively (see: “Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, Biofuel and Climate Genocides – Silence Kills and Silence is Complicity”: http://www.liberalati.com/?q=node/261 ). Yet the latter horrendous statistics are simply NOT reported by racist, lying, holocaust-ignoring Mainstream media in the Western Murdochracies while the same media are having a field day over the Austrian Fritzl atrocity.
This goes well beyond the “Pot calling the Kettle Black” – in horrible reality it is the war criminal, mass paedocidal US, UK, NATO and Australian “look away” cultures refusing to see the “Elephant in the room” of horrendous Allied passive child killing in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories. Indeed this is an Anglo-American Pol Pot calling the Austrian Kettle black
The countries of the US Alliance – the US, White Australia, the UK, and NATO – are involved in holocaust commission, genocide commission, holocaust denial and genocide denial in relation to the ongoing Iraqi Genocide and Afghan Genocide (see: http://www.liberalati.com/?q=node/261 ).
It is salutory to note that there is also an appalling DOMESTIC child abuse epidemic in the US and Australia. Thus in the United States 25% of females and 10% of males experience childhood sexual abuse (Finkelhor, D. (1994), Current information on the scope and nature of child sexual abuse”, Future of Children, 4(2), pp31-53) and in Australia 34% of females and 16% of males experience non-penetrative abuse as children with 12% females and 4% of males reporting penetrative child sexual abuse (Dunne, M.P., Purdie, D.M., Cook, M.D., Boyle, F.M. & Najman, J.M.(2003), Is child sexual abuse declining? Evidence from a population-based survey of men and women in Australia, Child Abuse & Neglect, vol. 27 (2), pp141-152; see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15140/42/ ).
Yet, for example, the recent “Australia 2020 Summit” of “Australia’s 1,000 best and brightest” utterly ignored the horrendous child abuse epidemic in Australia (see “Australia 2020 Summit Ignores Genocide & Child Abuse, Bush-ite Rudd Australia Denial”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/21894/42/ ).
Anyone denying or minimizing the Jewish Holocaust faces 10 years in prison in Austria and lengthy custodial punishment in some other European countries. Indeed the denial of the Armenian Genocide (1915-1923, 1.5 million Armenian murdered) has been criminalized in France and Belgium and Germany has suggested widening genocide- and holocaust-denial legislation in the EU to include denial of recent holocausts and genocides (see: “Genocide Denial. No-penalty Criminalization Required Now”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/12483/26/ ).
Fritzl is behind bars and will no doubt be arraigned, tried and punished. However the World must insist that, as demanded by Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter (see: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html ), the war criminal mass murderers of the US Alliance are arraigned before the International Criminal Court.
Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade
scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference
text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds"
(CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003). He
has just published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since
1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/
and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/
); see also his contribution “Australian complicity in Iraq
mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics”
(edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007): http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm
). He is currently preparing a revised and updated version of his
1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History”
(see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/
) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price
increases threaten a possibly 100-fold greater famine catastrophe
(see: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya310308.htm
) than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7
million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal
Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel
Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot
/bengalfamine_programme.html ).
