Devil worship links to mystery man (Guardian)

[Joe Hillshoist]

Good point HH they are hardly loyal to Ireland.

You're one microscopic cog
in his catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by
his red right hand

[Jeff]

Bumping this story back up because I've found nothing new, and there had to have been a follow-up somewhere. I mean, right?

Anyone fluent in Italian?

[philipacentaur]

I wonder if we'll hear anything more about this at all. I'm not betting we'll see much more, but I've been surprised before...

It's a weird one, isn't it? And I'd put money on this being all we hear about it.

Too bad nobody wanted to take our bets, Jeff.

[jingofever]

An "update", from a month ago. Seems the boy has a last name: Zamboni. The link has images of Zamboni and a wall painted with blood (mostly his but apparently someone else's too).

[Fixx]

Are they resisting Satanic Ritual Abuse? Seems far out, but who knows?

I doubt it, more likely to be an Italian Anarchist/Anti-Globalisation group or something.

[yesferatu]

Are they resisting Satanic Ritual Abuse? Seems far out, but who knows?

I doubt it, more likely to be an Italian Anarchist/Anti-Globalisation group or something.

Isolated losers. Isolated crimes. Crimes, yes, but that is all.
Oh wait, no, Jack Chick's Satan is responsible.
It's straight out of Rosemary's Baby I tell ya!!

[biaothanatoi]

If you actually ... I don't know ... bothered to read something (try something offline - you know, a book, a journal article) on organised child sexual abuse you might get a sense of why people here raise red flags over articles about Satanism.

Or you could just keep going on, and on, and on about a religious extremist who is your sole point of reference on the topic. Gee. I wonder which option you'll pick.

[LilyPatToo]

biaothanatoi, what we're seeing here is, to me, exactly what happens when the average intelligent person reads a story like this one--an kneejerk flip into programmed amused disbelief/skepticism. This, of course, allows the person to ignore the information and to feel no responsibility for doing anything about Ritual Abuse.

I watch my husband (aptly nicknamed The Skeptic) do this little mental dance at least a couple of times a week. He seems to have hit his inner limit on things about which he can become an activist--he's on the board of one environmentalist group and volunteers for several others. When something as "far out" (in his uninformed opinion) as this surfaces, he quickly sinks it.

Drives me nuts

LilyPat

[biaothanatoi]

biaothanatoi, what we're seeing here is, to me, exactly what happens when the average intelligent person reads a story like this one--an kneejerk flip into programmed amused disbelief/skepticism. This, of course, allows the person to ignore the information and to feel no responsibility for doing anything about Ritual Abuse.

This conversation as been had before with Yesferatu, and he just runs around in circles yipping "Jack Chick! Jack Chick! Jack Chick!" like a terrier.

Quickly followed up by the old hat trick of "Ritualistic child abuse doesn't happen, and, if it does, it's no more significant then any other form of child abuse, so let's not talk about it anymore or give it a name or pay any more attention to it (and then maybe it will go away)."

Come on, Yes. Give us another yipping.

[LilyPatToo]

I've got to admit that I have a degree of skepticism about SRA, but not the sort that denies that it exists--I know too many survivors for that to be possible for me anymore. My problem is with the astounding amount of disinformation, confabulation and confusion around it. After all, it involves mind control, which automatically makes accurate reporting of it problematical. And it's said to have been used in government mind control programs (see Col. Michael Aquino), which makes it an automatic disinformational topic.

It's so horrific that it's dead easy to disinform around--simply exaggerate a detail or three and you have something so repulsive and profoundly unnatural that most people are going to be unpleasantly shocked. Shock them again and the knee-jerk reaction will begin and build with each sighting of a news story involving it.

I'd love to find evidence for it that is so solid and unassailable that I could send the naysayers to it and save myself the grief of trying to get them to look at links that may be corrupted with disinfo. One of the most frustrating parts of it for me is that some of the survivors have (not unnaturally!) obsessed on it and are so deeply paranoid that they believe every single thing they read about it, completely uncritically.

Their own memories are never questioned, despite the fact that most of them were brainwashed by the cult or Cult, making the accuracy of the memories questionable. But if anyone brings that up, the damaged survivors are likely to be triggered into defensive rage.

And their defensiveness is often, I suspect, played upon by COINTELPRO types who egg them on, hoping that a rabid survivor will turn off most reputable researchers that they encounter, not to mention much larger numbers of members of the public.

LilyPat

[biaothanatoi]

My problem is with the astounding amount of disinformation, confabulation and confusion around it.

I think that the confusion around RA is inevitable given that survivors have had to try and make sense of what's going on without much help from researchers, policy-makers and law enforcement. Trying to get to the bottom of an abusive situation is challenging enough to anyone's mental health, let alone people who have been tortured, abused and manipulated since childhood. When we look at the consensus that's built up online around RA, I think we see a lot of survivors reproducing the claustrophobia and paranoia of the abusive subculture as they attempt to construct an understanding of their abuse.

It doesn't help that RA, organised abuse and child abuse in general is so marginal within the courts and the justice system. We can't use the courts as a forum to establish the array of crimes that are committed against children, from 'mundane' forms of abuse all the way to RA and organsed offences. Research demonstrates that the majority of reported sexual offences against children never make it to committal, the majority of those that do don't get prosecutions, and most child complainants are profoundly harmed in the process.

In the early days, social workers and psychs were naive about the criminal justice system - they thought that they could push RA cases through the courts. The RA cases of Jordan and McMartin were the first time in legal history that very young children took the stand, and they were the first to find out that the adversarial court room destroys kids pretty quickly. Those cases didn't collapse due to lack of evidence (as the denialists want us to believe) but because the justice system discriminates against children. This means that child abuse is easily contested by perpetrators both in the courts and in the media.

Interestingly, when organised and ritualistic child abuse occurs in black communities and developing (read: black) nations, it gets recognition and attention from the authorities. It's only when the same allegations arise in urban, white communities (e.g. under our noses) that the media and policy-makers start getting sceptical.

I'd love to find evidence for it that is so solid and unassailable that I could send the naysayers to it and save myself the grief of trying to get them to look at links that may be corrupted with disinfo.

But it's there. One of the most frustrating things about the RA debate is that unequivocable convictions for ritual abuse, like those of Paul Ingram, are not used by people like us to establish the reality of the crime.

Bizarrely enough, the denialists use Paul Ingram to "prove" that confession and convictions for ritual abuse are proof that ritual abuse doesn't exist. It's ridiculous. He confessed to it, and Richard Ofshe's contention that he was innocent but "self-hypnotised" himself is so far-fetched that the judge rejected it point-blank. Ingram's own son showed up at his appeal in 1996 to insist that his father was a very dangerous man that needed to stay in jail! And yet the FMSFers and their ilk continue to claim he is innocent. The same strategy has been used to destabilise the conviction of Peter Ellis in New Zealand for the same crime, although the probity of the origina investigatino and conviction has been upheld multiple times.

And then, where undeniable evidence of organised and ritual abuse surfaces, like the Dutroux case in Belgium and the West case in Britain, the denialists just ignore it ... but we haven't done a good job at joining the dots either.

One of the most frustrating parts of it for me is that some of the survivors have (not unnaturally!) obsessed on it and are so deeply paranoid that they believe every single thing they read about it, completely uncritically.

The internet has been both a life-saver for survivors, as well as a massive dissemination vehicle for all kinds of bizarre theories. But, like I said before, if you've been sadistically abused since childhood, the notion that there's a secret global satanic government probably makes sense.

[LilyPatToo]

You just gave me what amounts to a huge homework assignment for tomorrow, biaothanatoi--thank you! (and I only mean that to sound half sarcastic )

I watched horrified years ago as a woman I knew went to prison partly becasuse she insisted on testifying in court that her wealthy husband and his family had sexually abused her baby daughter in a Satanic Cult in the L. A. area. I now realize that she was almost certainly a MC program victim/handler who'd stage-managed our move out here a few years before her arrest, delivering me into the hands of the govt. scientist who I suspect was handler to both of us, sequentially.

To me, if she was willing to give up a plush lifestyle and all hope of ever resuming her high-level career in IT just to make her point in open court about something that was almost certain to be disbelieved, then she had to be telling the truth. And I very much doubt if she'd breached her own programmed memory barriers to the extent that she even knew what she herself was.

So I have personal reason to believe that there is *something* to *some* of the accusations, but some sound to me like a COINTELPRO disinfo agent's wet dream. Spun correctly, they turn people off so quickly that the story can be basically buried from then on, relegated to an interior page if it's mentioned at all. Most people with an IQ over room temperature are quickly conditioned to snicker the next time the words Satanist and ritual and abuse are uttered publically.

I've tried for years to trace my unfortunate friend, but she did what a lot of thwarted whistleblowers do after they end up in jail, framed and forgotten. They get out of prison and vanish quietly into the criminal underground. The only trace I've found of the woman I knew was a criminal charge made against her as part of a NA casino investigation in one of the Pacific Northwest states--maybe Northern CA, I'm not sure anymore.

It's likely that she herself was exposed to cult abuse as a child, but her memory barriers may still be strong enough to conceal that from her. I agree with what you say above about the almost total lack of help from authorities. One exception I came across last year was a law professor named Hal Pepinsky -- http://members.aol.com/smartnews/hp99.html -- That gave me hope that someday we'll get more of the real story of Satanism in the so-called "First World."

LilyPat

[biaothanatoi]

You just gave me what amounts to a huge homework assignment for tomorrow, biaothanatoi--thank you! (and I only mean that to sound half sarcastic )

There's an entire body of psuedo-academic literature written by the FMSFers designed to "explain" confessions/convictions for ritual abuse.

Wright, Kassin, Leo, Ofshe, Loftus, Wakefield, Underwager and others have all written books and journal articles about "coerced-internalized false confessions" - usually based around the Ingram case - to incorporate successful investigations and prosecutions of ritualistic child sexual abuse into the proposition that such allegations are fabrications.

Can you think of any other social issues where a confession and conviction is evidence that a crime has not been committed?

Spun correctly, they turn people off so quickly that the story can be basically buried from then on, relegated to an interior page if it's mentioned at all.

The other thing to think about is that the same impulses to denial and silence that motivate bystanders to ignore an atrocity are active in people who are victims of that atrocity. So when severely traumatised people speak out, they are often undermined by their own desire to deny what happened to them even as they attest to it.

For many survivors, the end result of this internal struggle is a story which says what happens to them, but in such a way that nobody would believe it.

Most people with an IQ over room temperature are quickly conditioned to snicker the next time the words Satanist and ritual and abuse are uttered publically.

Yeah. They are called "know-it-alls". I eat them for breakfast.

One exception I came across last year was a law professor named Hal Pepinsky -- http://members.aol.com/smartnews/hp99.html --

I've read Pepinsky's stuff. My personal experience is that people whose profession puts them into some proximity to crime and sickness generally have well developed circuit breakers - they hit a ceiling beyond which they can't deal with and they move away. The idea of a criminologist listening to RA and MC survivors is quite radical, let alone bringing them to speak to an undergrad class!

[blanc]

what the sniggering people should be asking themselves is what exactly they don't believe and why they don't believe it.
only in ra/mc cases does this blanket denial response surface. why is that?

I have heard credible reports of ra. I can't confirm from much in the way of direct experience exaggeration or fabrication. This has only happened once in the group I am with, and in that case the victim dropped contact when it became obvious that parts of the testimony which should have been checkable were being checked. In that instance there is more than one explanation for this seeming fabrication- and no way of knowing which is the right one. Those who scoff have rarely, if ever, come up against direct victim/survivor testimony I think.

[LilyPatToo]

blanc said,

Those who scoff have rarely, if ever, come up against direct victim/survivor testimony I think.

Or they've come up against it and it overwhelmed their ability to tolerate "high strangeness" or ability to empathize with people who've experienced it--like my husband when he heard that the woman who'd hired him years before was testifying under oath that she'd witnessed Satanic rites. He was aghast. He liked and respected her, but he's a person with an annoying tendency to dismiss unheard any claim to any high strangeness experience.

To me, this shows a very regrettable form of knee-jerk skepticism that protects an ego that's far more fragile than it first appears to be. The same automatic naysaying also occurs around reports of UFOs or psy phenomena in such individuals. And isn't it interesting that all of these fields are ones in which the intel community has meddled extensively? My personal theory is that a lot of folks who see themselves as well-informed and empathic are in fact neither (unless you allow a high degree of selectivity, which I do not) and that their blind spots are directly due to professionally-designed disinformation (which most of the ones I know also deny exists in any quantity).

And baiothanol said,

Can you think of any other social issues where a confession and conviction is evidence that a crime has not been committed?

I cannot, which makes this a case that I need to look into. Any issue that the FMSF has its filthy fingers in is likely to be one where the pro disinfo boys and girls are at (covertly-sanctioned) play. And one that anyone who has MC or cult stuff in their history needs to study very closely, since they might one day find themselves fighting the same playground bullies.

LilyPat