The abduction of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman should finally confirm that we have arrived in a cyberworld of evil, for which we are hopelessly unequipped. We have not created the social or cultural norms to cope with this place and its threats, the most poisonous of which comes from paederasts, writes Kevin Myers.
Unlike earlier evils which mankind faced in the past century, such as communism or Naziism, the paederastic movement fights no elections, launches no coups, controls no police, subverts no armies. Paederasty simply follows the fault-lines of liberty, and its numerous victories are usually private, publicly undetected, politically almost without consequence. Even rape is concealable, as we of all people know: and we have the Catholic Church to thank for that.
The adult desire to have sex with children is not new. But two other things are. One is the ideology that such activity is entirely proper; and the other is the technology which not merely enables these men - and it is overwhelmingly a male form of wickedness - to contact one another, and transmit pornography but worst of all, to contact and seduce children who would seem to be in the safety of their own homes.
For paederasty has now grown into an -ism, its current ideologue being the Irishman Thomas O'Carroll. Like the leaders of other ideologies, he unblushingly says the unsayable. Lenin casually talked about the extermination of entire classes, and Hitler talked equably about the extermination of races. O'Carroll campaigns for any adult right to have sex with whatever children he wants.
Before the computer entered our lives, he would have been laughed off as a madman, thrown into a cell and left there. But O'Carroll now leads a worldwide movement which is shameless in its appetites. When he was imprisoned for the possession of child-pornography in England last week, fellow-paederasts stood in the court to publicly support him. Thus did fellow Nazis gather at Hitler's side during his trial after the Munich beer-hall putsch.
The difference is that paederasts don't want power. They want freedom. They want the right to express themselves sexually - a perfectly legitimate aspiration, they declare. And there lies their danger, because their words do not mean the same as ours.
For only fools enter their bizarre world of inverted logic and subverted semantics. They are sick people about an evil project, and they must be thwarted wherever they appear; moreover, they are numerous, as the vast child-pornography rings indicate.
And thanks to new technology, they are now everywhere, in every house in Ireland, and in every child's bedroom which has a computer.
Dangerous machine
Get it out of the bedroom. Get it out now. Children should never have unhindered access to computers. We do not let children near farm-machinery, or plutonium, or live electricity: so why allow them to wander unaccompanied around that vast cyber-concourse of pornography and child-abusers? Only fools or devils would allow such liberty.
The tragedy is that the computer industry didn't create in-built hardware and software obstacles between the keyboard and pornography or the chatroom. But unintended consequences invariably accompany new technologies, as those allied soldiers wandering around the still-smoking ruins of Hiroshima were to discover.
Presumably, the geeks running the computer industry either didn't know or didn't care about the paederastic opportunities, which would result from their electronic advances. It's too late now: the technology is at large and cannot now be uninvented.
But we can devise new mores to cope with the culture and the consequences of new technology. Railways did not operate according to the rules of the canal, the airliner with the habits of the steamship, the nuclear power station with the guidelines of a fireplace.
The computer-age is providing us with the greatest social, intellectual and moral challenge since the invention of the printing press; and we must invent new social and family conventions to curb its powers. We must control it; not it us.
And the first rule should be that children must absolutely never use computers alone. Nor should they be allowed to visit homes where there is unmonitored access to computers. For would you allow your children to visit a house with pornography everywhere, and a paederast sitting in the armchair? But that is exactly what you are doing when you permit your children alone on to the Internet. It is all there, the lot: a Fourth Reich of unimaginable depravity where childhood perishes, and where monsters leave lures for children to be abducted and even killed, in ways too terrible for contemplation.
This now is the world we live in and, naturally, those most determined to oppose any restriction to the Internet will be its potential victims. Your children will be the ones to shriek, It's not fair, so-and-so over the road can get onto the Internet whenever he likes.
Ignore such entreaties, and simply tell so-and-so's parents that your child will never, ever be allowed into any house where computers are not kept under lock and key. For this we know: computers can easily become the gateway into an abominable hell. Access to that gateway must be controlled, even though the demand for unfettered freedom from control is from those for whom the gateway offers the most danger.
For it is the childish instinct to put oneself at risk; equally, it is the absolute duty of individual adults, and of society generally, to prevent children from doing so. We don't let children drink whiskey or fool with matches or throw knives or drive cars. Nor should we let them play alone on the computer.
KEVIN MYERS