“The bourgeoisie turns everything into a commodity, hence also the writing of history. It is part of [the bourgeoisie’s] being, of its condition for existence, to falsify all goods: it falsified the writing of history. And the best-paid historiography is that which is best falsified for the purposes of the bourgeoisie.”

— Friedrich Engels, “Notes for the ‘History of Ireland’”

The concern of The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction” with spreading the “moral panic of the 1980s and ’90s” and “witch-hunt” memes under the label of “Satanic Panic” throughout mass media (often shallowly buried under the pretext of leading a “separation of church and state” fight) has as much to do with trying to harass the medical community into altering science to match the group’s pseudo-rationalistic religious beliefs (e.g., by revising positions on the existence, prevalence, and/or treatment of various mental disorders, implying the ultimate negation of the medical model of mental health care) as it does with sowing doubt in the public mind about matters of 20th century history which continue to have important political implications today. In this way, it is possible to speak of the problem of gaslighting not only in terms of pushing individual victims of abuse to question how sound the perception of their atomized personal experience is, but also in terms of a broader phenomenon of collective or cultural gaslighting, pushing society at large to question the sanity of its members who perceive politics counter-hegemonically and question the falsified historiographies of the ruling class.

A linchpin of this societal gaslighting is formed by mechanisms which trigger the attribution of the “conspiracist ideation” label to certain discourses and by efforts to cause certain discourses to become dominated by or associated with faulty conspiracist ideational reasoning. Much like the labelling of an historical episode as “moral panic,” the labelling of the interpretation of an historical episode as “conspiracy theory” has taken on pejorative connotations, despite the phrase “conspiracy theory” having, just like the phrase “moral panic,” no intrinsic sense of being “based on fantasy, hysteria, delusion and illusion” (Cohen vii). In other words, the allegation that someone is a “conspiracy theorist” is almost always a figurative way to charge them with faulty reasoning or, at the very least, to imply skepticism of their claims.

In examining the links between the anti-psychiatry activism of The Satanic Temple and the Process Church and their roots in the conspiracy theories of the Church of Scientology about Judeo-Bolshevik “psychs,” we have been led to the CIA’s “Project MK Ultra,” which, we have seen, can be supposed to have benefited from the Church of Scientology’s anti-psychiatry discourse because the latter disseminated a false motive for the widespread psychiatric abuse occurring under the aegis of “Project MK Ultra” (i.e., they aided CIA blame-shifting operations by attributing responsibility for psychiatric abuse to Communists—the enemies of the CIA—rather than the actual culprits: the CIA and US imperialism). Any semi-deductive discourse relating to “MK Ultra” (which all “MK Ultra” discourse necessarily is, due to the level of secrecy surrounding the program and the cover-up evinced by the destruction of records) appears to run a high risk of being subjected to gaslighting. Indeed, we have seen that Misicko often ridicules his opponents as believers in conspiracy theories related to “MK Ultra,” comparing them to believers in “UFO’s” and “Past Life Regression” (3.1). This is a transparent attempt at discrediting anyone who highlights the reactionary character of modern Satanism, a magnet for neo-fascists and white supremacists, a weapon of psychological warfare employed by the militaries and intelligence agencies of Western imperialist powers. In this endeavor, Misicko has been aided by pseudo-oppositional figures such as the (“ex-”)COINTELPRO agent Ted Gunderson and his ideological successors, who rather than bringing credibility to the link between modern Satanism and “Project MK Ultra” by unpacking the nuts and bolts of neo-fascism, militarism, and misogyny, do their best to conflate Satanism and “MK Ultra” with the “Illuminati” and Judeo-Bolshevik “psychs,” misdirecting their followers to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics. With so many bad actors playing “both sides” (one to discredit, the other to misdirect and be discredited), it is a wonder that we are still able to untangle the mess and decrypt the fascist sympathies on either side of this disgraceful spectacle.

Whereas we have seen that there is a sound basis upon which to infer that the Church of Scientology effectively helped to cover up “Project MK Ultra” during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s by making itself—insofar as it prominently positioned itself as an “opponent” of “psychiatric abuse”—likely to attract and recruit victims of “MK Ultra” experiments while nevertheless aligning itself with the same Red Scare politics which were (and still are) quintessential to the whole CIA enterprise, we now see that it is equally reasonable to affirm that The Satanic Temple does the same thing today, playing its part in the covering up of not only the full historical significance of the CIA’s “Project MK Ultra” (i.e., its connections to religiously-inclined psychological operations making use of, besides drugs, many semiotic trappings of Satanism, such as witchcraft and ritual sacrifice [6.3.1]) but also its subsequent and ongoing legacy, including, for example, the so-called “enhanced interrogation” program of CIA torture and human experimentation (PHR, Soldz).

With the confirmation, under Donald Trump (a vocally pro-torture US president), of Gina Haspel (a known criminal who has openly disputed the unethicality and illegality of torture) as head of the CIA in May 2018 and the subsequent calls made by members of the US ruling class to openly reinstitute torture as official government policy (Okun), it is more relevant now than ever to draw attention to the fact that Satanism remains one of the common threads running between the CIA’s more recent program of so-called “Rendition, Detention, and [Enhanced] Interrogation” (torture and human experimentation) and its earlier “Project MK Ultra.” Indeed, it has already been established that the CIA’s “MK Ultra” program, besides involving the funding of research on quintessential elements of Satanism, such as witchcraft and ritual sacrifice (which [as illustrated in 6.3.1] was closely related to practical CIA efforts to directly control human behavior), partially coincided with the period in which the memberships of the US intelligence community and the Church of Satan overlapped. Additionally, we have seen (in 3.2.1.1) that, in the post-9/11 era, the CIA employed Satanic cultural artifacts to inflict intense psychological stress on detainees, which is effectively tantamount to using Satanism as an instrument of torture. Those artifacts were the “songs” of the band Skinny Puppy, at least one of whose members belongs to The Satanic Temple (Greaves) and three of whom have taken part in TST rituals (de la Garza) and who have based their work on the Satanist sect known as the Process Church (a group whose swastika logo Satanic Temple co-founder Misicko has tattooed on his left arm [3.1]), in addition to capitalizing on the association of their music with CIA torture by putting an album called Weapon on sale, originally slated to include “an instruction manual […] on how to use the album to torture people” (Yücel).

Critics of torture have noted that the post-9/11 CIA torture and human experimentation program employed (or employs) “techniques […] based on the CIA’s Kubark Interrogation Manual,” also known as KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, the first CIA torture manual, which was published in 1963 and based on the results of “MK Ultra” research (Gibney; Pincus; Hilal; Price, Cold War Anthropology 195–199). In light of these facts, it must be admitted that when Satanic Temple spokesman Douglas Misicko “jokingly”(?) claims to run “a propaganda site for […] the Central Intelligence Agency’s continued MK-ULTRA research programme,” (“What It is”), he is insulting and ridiculing victims and critics of torture. While members of his crypto-fascist sect campaign against psychiatrists and the existence of dissociative and attention deficit disorders, US militarists continue to practice torture (Miles, Boumediene, Gordon).

The tendency within psychoanalysis to dismiss childhood trauma as primarily rooted in fantasy (associated with Freud’s apparent abandonment of the “seduction theory”), which feminist psychiatric social worker Florence Rush highlighted and criticized, has a parallel in the cultural gaslighting phenomenon surrounding “MK Ultra” and ongoing CIA/US military torture programs. Whereas Oedipal theory can be seen to help facilitate the idea that a psychologically troubled adult need not confront their childhood trauma in order to heal, since the trauma is posited to have never actually occurred, being instead the product of “phantasizing,” we see that the American ruling class applies the same principle on the collective, cultural level. Starting from the inauguration of President Obama in 2009, the citizens of the USA have been told that the nation, troubled by steadily forthcoming revelations that the CIA and US military kidnapped, tortured, and murdered innocent people after 9/11 (in addition to having contracted torture to third parties), need not confront war criminals and violators of international human rights law and hold them to account for their actions. The ruling consensus was succinctly summed up by Barack Obama, who, when speaking on CIA torture, claimed, “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past,” (Mazzetti and Shane). In other words, perpetrators of heinous crimes should go utterly unpunished. The nation need not confront its traumatic legacy of war crimes and crimes against humanity, which may as well be regarded as the “phantasy” of a few disloyal radicals.

Degradation of the will of political activists to address this legacy and connect post-9/11 era CIA and US military war crimes and crimes against humanity to their historical roots in “Project MK Ultra” is achieved by the propagation of narratives associated with The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction,” which, as we have seen, falsifies history and attempts to smear opponents as irrational conspiracist lunatics. Their narrative pushes the start of the so-called “Satanic Panic” into the 1980s in order to separate it from the documented use of Satanism as a weapon of psychological warfare during the early 1970s (during the era of the CIA’s “Project MK Ultra”), which coincided with the emergence of the Church of Satan-inspired, human sacrifice-advocating Order of Nine Angles, at a time in which there also existed direct liaisons between the Church of Satan and US military intelligence, one of whose operatives authored the eponymous “Ceremony of Nine Angles” text. With this false start, the establishment of direct ties between the British “Order of Nine Angles” and the American “Temple of Set” in the 1970s is obscured, and the fact that members of these groups, whose membership overlapped, advocated ritualistic human sacrifice and pedophilia during the 1980s and 1990s becomes impossible to properly contextualize, thus making the allegations and phenomena which have come to be associated with the phrase “the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s” seem much more fantastical and “outlandish” than they otherwise would.

Ironically, the historical negationists’ invariable delimitation of the “Satanic Panic” to the decades of “the 1980s and 1990s” is indicative of the fact that it is this “moral panic” narrative itself which is apt to be viewed as an attempt to implant false memories. By getting enough major media outlets to repetitively broadcast enough times that steady refrain of Satanic Temple spokesman Douglas Misicko (i.e., “the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s”), the public may thus begin to falsely “remember” that the “Satanic Panic” began in the 1980s. Of course, we have seen documented proof that it actually began at least a decade earlier, with the efforts of British military intelligence to intentionally foment “Satanic Panic” or “Black Magic Fear” in Northern Ireland during the early 1970s (6.1.1), which was in turn foreshadowed by the US intelligence community’s authorization of “black magic” psychological warfare operations against the New Left in 1968–69 (6.3.1), as well as by the entrance of US military intelligence officer Michael Aquino into a leadership position inside the Church of Satan in the same years, all of which ultimately show signs of continuity with programs initiated as early as the 1950s, when the CIA began funding research on witchcraft, rituals of sacrifice, “behavioral modifications” resulting from cultic experiences, and drugs used in religious contexts (6.3.1). We thus observe another example of cultural gaslighting and psychological projection; The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction” accuses psychiatrists, particularly those working with dissociative patients, of implanting “false memories” into their patients, although it is the “Grey Faction” which attempts to do exactly this to the public at large by continually repeating the historical negationist phrase “Satanic Panic of the 1980s (and ’90s).” Moreover, if “False Memory Syndrome” is, as the “Grey Faction”-linked False Memory Syndrome Action Network claims, “appropriately descriptive terminology” for individuals who “[come] to believe an untrue memory and re-structur[e their lives] around that false memory,” then we are absolutely justified in saying that, if Douglas Misicko and other individuals caught up in the “Grey Faction” operation believe their own falsified historical narrative, then it is they who suffer from “False Memory Syndrome.” When history and collective memory are falsified and gaslighting is applied to entire cultures and societies, bringing physical, mental, and emotional harm to their members, it may be possible to speak of a “Falsified History Syndrome,” or perhaps a “False Ideology Syndrome.”

Furthermore, by virtue of The Satanic Temple adopting an ostensibly “politically progressive” and “scientific rationalist” façade and having its “anti-conspiracist” message propagated far and wide by ruling class mass media, “Project MK Ultra” is covered up from “both sides”: historical and political. In the past, it was covered by the right-wing, anti-psychiatry Red Scare politics of the Church of Scientology, which were picked up by Ralph Underwager and used to concoct the “1980s moral panic” narrative of feminist psychiatrists using “Communist brainwashing techniques” to implant “false memories” of ritualistic abuse in children. Underwager’s insane ultra-right-wing conspiracy theories then morphed into the present day Satanist narrative of “the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s,” which is now able to posit itself as “anti-conspiracist” and politically “left-leaning” by virtue of contrast with the discourse epitomized by “retired” COINTELPRO agent Ted Gunderson’s ravings about the “Illuminati” (founded on a “Communist holiday”) and the “Learned Elders of Zion.” By covering “Project MK Ultra” with negationism from both ends of the political spectrum, it happens that no matter which side of the political spectrum a person comes to identify with or derive their ideas from, they are likely to dismiss many of the themes now under discussion as products of far-fetched conspiracist ideation. This is how historical negationism and falsified history predominate.

We might do better to consider The Satanic Temple and its “Grey Faction” not as religious or even political bodies, but as psychological warfare operations. In US militarist terms, we could say that “Project SATANIC TEMPLE” and “Operation GREY FACTION” appear to be doing a rather good job of influencing the “Information Domain” in such a way that discursive linking of the US military industrial complex to Satanism (or even of ongoing post-9/11 torture and human experimentation programs to “MK Ultra”) is likely to be rejected within the “Cognitive Domain” of many, if not most, individuals. Not only does this atomize our historical outlook, preventing us from having a holistic view of US imperialism, but it also helps ward off the notion that militarism and war are evil, thereby fostering instead the idea that militarism and “defense” are good. With The Satanic Temple, words have “no inherent meaning.” “Satan” means whatever Douglas Misicko wants it to mean; anyway, an antisemitic Frenchman (see: Chapter 8) thought it meant something similar a century ago, so it must mean what he wants it to mean. War and torture are not demonic, and a sophomoric understanding of moral relativism is very clever. In reality, this is the theological equivalent of the “Opposite Day” game played by elementary and preschool children. “Don’t you know,” the infantile Satanist seems to say, “it’s Opposite Day? Yes means no and no means yes!” One intent seems to be to foster a kind of concern with respectability politics on the Left, where invocations of language with strong connotations of moral condemnation (think of words like: evil, demonic, satanic, wicked, cult, sect, etc.) become off limits, because, after all, “modern Satanism,” a bullshit thing made up by imperialist militarists, neo-Nazis, and serial killers and rapists, is a real religion now, complete with copyrighted logos, and those words don’t mean what you think they mean (and by the way, neo-Nazism and “Esoteric Hitlerism” are Real Religions™ now too). You wouldn’t want to “morally panic” and violate Freedom of Religion™, would you?

Of course, this is pretty ironic, and a sign of psychological projection on the part of those involved in operations such as The Satanic Temple’s “Grey Faction,” which aims to influence the so-called “Information Domain” with “anti-conspiracist,” “rationalist,” and “skeptic” memes about “Satanic Panic,” given that their prime concerns (namely, anti-psychiatry activism and memetic reinforcement of the narrative that the “Satanic Panic” was a 1980s “hoax” or “moral panic”) are both rooted in hardcore conspiracist ideation, namely (1) the Church of Scientology’s Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook of Psychopolitics, which rivals the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in its conspiracist ambition, and (2) the 1980s Red Scare backlash against “radical feminist” psychiatric social workers who were accused, absurdly, of using “Red Chinese brainwashing” techniques to implant “false memories” of “Satanic ritual abuse” in women and children in order to dismantle the “traditional” model of “the family” and thus advance the cause of Communism, all because, according to one False Memory Syndrome Foundation leader, they were “jealous” of “men [who] say that maleness can include the intimacy and closeness of [‘male bonding’] and [‘paedophile sex’]” (3.1). Indeed, we can see clearly that it is often those who are the most vocal in their opposition to “anti-Satanist conspiracy theories” and the most concerned about the looming dangers of “moral panic” who are themselves caught up in conspiracist thinking, oblivious to the fact that it is they who participate in moral panicking, applying the label of “moral panic” to historical episodes associated with false allegations of child sexual abuse approximately 6300% more often than they apply it to historical episodes associated with mass mobilization against the “Communist” folk devil (which have killed millions upon millions of people, whereas the former may have resulted, at worst, in a handful of individuals being wrongfully convicted of crimes) (recall 6.2).

 

 

CONTINUE READING… 6.3.3 On the Psychological Projection of Antisemitism by Satanists

OR RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS (Anatomy of a Crypto-Fascist Sect: The Unauthorized Guide to “The Satanic Temple”)

 

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