Connect/Eddie Holt: It seems too crazy, too outlandish, too grotesque for words. A 42-year-old German computer expert, Armin Meiwes, has confessed to killing and eating another computer expert, a 43-year-old man named Bernd Brandes.
The victim was allegedly willing to be killed and eaten. Meiwes, known as "The Cannibal of Rotenburg", is claiming it was simply consensual cannibalism.
The details of the killing, which took place in March 2001, are sheer depravity. They can be found elsewhere. In one sense, the singularity of the barbarity makes it uniquely chilling. In another however, the fact that investigator Wilfried Fehl said this week that the case was not an isolated one, is far more horrifying. Armin Meiwes, it seems, is just one of many cannibals among us.
Fehl claims that in investigating the case he discovered a flourishing cannibal scene in Germany. "We are talking about dentists, teachers, cooks, government officials and handymen," he told the court trying Meiwes for murder. In Fehl's account, dentists - note the plural, even if the number is unspecified - appear to be disproportionately prominent and well-represented.
You could speculate that dentists, who work on people's teeth everyday, are occasionally propelled to forms of extreme oral revenge. After all, millions of office workers, forced to stare at computer screens for hours on end, are often vengefully glad when their computers break down. They can grow to hate the infernal machines dominating so much of their lives.
Certainly, familiarity often breeds contempt and there appears to be no other conceivable explanation for the prominence of dentists on Fehl's list. There are, after all, far more teachers, cooks, government officials and handymen than there are dentists. Anyway, Meiwes's estimate of about 800 cannibals in Germany suggests there's around 50 of the breed on the island of Ireland.
He has claimed there are "hundreds, thousands" of people seeking to fulfil their desires to eat humans or be eaten. They use Internet advertisements. The ads appear in forums with names like "Cannibal Cafe", "Guy Cannibals" and "Torturenet". Such sites, along with others - paedophile, racist and bomb-making ones, for instance - are forcing people to reconsider the worth of the Internet.
It's telling that both Meiwes and his victim Brandes worked with computers. They linked up through the Internet and proceeded to perpetrate a barbarism that, with notable exceptions, is generally believed to be practised only by primitive peoples. There they were, using a technology hardly heard of 15 years ago, to facilitate a practice presumed to be from the primeval past.
But the case has contemporary echoes too. As the September 11th, 2001, attacks on New York's World Trade Centre reminded aghast viewers of Hollywood "disaster" movies, Armin Meiwes reminded people of Hannibal Lecter. An ostensibly cultured cannibal, Lecter really seems like an inflated version - well, he is a fictional character - of the ostensibly urbane Meiwes.
Yet again, it's the apparent banality of such people that's striking. Stereotypical images of cannibals usually involve dark skin, filed teeth and bones through noses. These can be true but such images were mostly concocted and disseminated to demonise other peoples and show the necessity for "civilising" them.
The reality though is that white computer experts and, apparently, dentists, teachers, cooks, government officials and handymen of unspecified colour, are killing people to eat them. Like paedophiles - another and much more populous category of Internet nasties - cannibals, it seems, are typically sober and mundane-looking people.
The stereotypical image of the instantly identifiable sleazeball is clearly inadequate to depict child molesters. Stereotypes are equally deficient to portray cannibals. Like paedophiles, many cannibals appear bemused that most people react to their aberrant behaviour with utter disgust. Yet it does appear that the urges driving paedophilia and cannibalism are so deep-rooted, so primal and so determining that many who experience them simply cannot resist. Psychiatrists and psychotherapists regularly report that they cannot change such people. The law can lock them up, of course, and in countries with the death penalty, even kill them.
But cannibalism - ritualistic, survival or consensual (in Meiwes's perspective, practically "recreational") - probably has a sexual root. An overwhelming majority of people do not become fixated on eating human flesh. The very thought is too repulsive. Yet the thought of others doing so clearly sparks a frisson in normal people. Hence the popularity of Hannibal Lecter books and films.
Anyway, the sheer depravity of cannibalism - even consensual cannibalism - means that it's impossible to pacify public disgust. Nonetheless, what ought to be done with such degenerates? They too, despite their inhuman behaviour, are human. The Internet, believed to facilitate the consumer society, is facilitating forms of sex-based consumption beyond nightmares.
Pandering to the darkest recesses of the most depraved psyches wasn't supposed to be the Internet's function. Like so much technology, however, it's driving forward a consumer society that, with the case of Armin Meiwes, has become horrifically literal.