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whitehotharlots · 3 years ago

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The point is control

Whenever we think or talk about censorship, we usually conceptualize it as certain types of speech being somehow disallowed: maybe (rarely) it's made formally illegal by the government, maybe it's banned in certain venues, maybe the FCC will fine you if you broadcast it, maybe your boss will fire you if she learns of it, maybe your friends will stop talking to you if they see what you've written, etc. etc.

This understanding engenders a lot of mostly worthless discussion precisely because it's so broad. Pedants--usually arguing in favor of banning a certain work or idea--will often argue that speech protections only apply to direct, government bans. These bans, when they exist, are fairly narrow and apply only to those rare speech acts in which other people are put in danger by speech (yelling the N-word in a crowded theater, for example). This pedantry isn't correct even within its own terms, however, because plenty of people get in trouble for making threats. The FBI has an entire entrapment program dedicated to getting mentally ill muslims and rednecks to post stuff like "Death 2 the Super bowl!!" on twitter, arresting them, and the doing a press conference about how they heroically saved the world from terrorism.

Another, more recent pedant's trend is claiming that, actually, you do have freedom of speech; you just don't have freedom from the consequences of speech. This logic is eerily dictatorial and ignores the entire purpose of speech protections. Like, even in the history's most repressive regimes, people still technically had freedom of speech but not from consequences. Those leftist kids who the nazis beheaded for speaking out against the war were, by this logic, merely being held accountable.

The two conceptualizations of censorship I described above are, 99% of the time, deployed by people who are arguing in favor of a certain act of censorship but trying to exempt themselves from the moral implications of doing so. Censorship is rad when they get to do it, but they realize such a solipsism seems kinda icky so they need to explain how, actually, they're not censoring anybody, what they're doing is an act of righteous silencing that's a totally different matter. Maybe they associate censorship with groups they don't like, such as nazis or religious zealots. Maybe they have a vague dedication toward Enlightenment principles and don't want to be regarded as incurious dullards. Most typically, they're just afraid of the axe slicing both ways, and they want to make sure that the precedent they're establishing for others will not be applied to themselves.

Anyone who engages with this honestly for more than a few minutes will realize that censorship is much more complicated, especially in regards to its informal and social dimensions. We can all agree that society simply would not function if everyone said whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. You might think your boss is a moron or your wife's dress doesn't look flattering, but you realize that such tidbits are probably best kept to yourself.

Again, this is a two-way proposition that everyone is seeking to balance. Do you really want people to verbalize every time they dislike or disagree with you? I sure as hell don't. And so, as part of a social compact, we learn to self-censor. Sometimes this is to the detriment of ourselves and our communities. Most often, however, it's just a price we have to pay in order to keep things from collapsing.

But as systems, large and small, grow increasingly more insane and untenable, so do the comportment standards of speech. The disconnect between America's reality and the image Americans have of themselves has never been more plainly obvious, and so striving for situational equanimity is no longer good enough. We can't just pretend cops aren't racist and the economy isn't run by venal retards or that the government places any value on the life of its citizens. There's too much evidence that contradicts all that, and the evidence is too omnipresent. There's too many damn internet videos, and only so many of them can be cast as Russian disinformation. So, sadly, we must abandon our old ways of communicating and embrace instead systems that are even more unstable, repressive, and insane than the ones that were previously in place.

Until very, very recently, nuance and big-picture, balanced thinking were considered signs of seriousness, if not intelligence. Such considerations were always exploited by shitheads to obfuscate things that otherwise would have seemed much less ambiguous, yes, but this fact alone does not mitigate the potential value of such an approach to understanding the world--especially since the stuff that's been offered up to replace it is, by every worthwhile metric, even worse.

So let's not pretend I'm Malcolm Gladwell or some similarly slimy asshole seeking to "both sides" a clearcut moral issue. Let's pretend I am me. Flash back to about a year ago, when there was real, widespread, and sustained support for police reform. Remember that? Seems like forever ago, man, but it was just last year... anyhow, now, remember what happened? Direct, issues-focused attempts to reform policing were knocked down. Blotted out. Instead, we were told two things: 1) we had to repeat the slogan ABOLISH THE POLICE, and 2) we had to say it was actually very good and beautiful and nonviolent and valid when rioters burned down poor neighborhoods.

Now, in a relatively healthy discourse, it might have been possible for someone to say something like "while I agree that American policing is heavily violent and racist and requires substantial reforms, I worry that taking such an absolutist point of demanding abolition and cheering on the destruction of city blocks will be a political non-starter." This statement would have been, in retrospect, 100000000% correct. But could you have said it, in any worthwhile manner? If you had said something along those lines, what would the fallout had been? Would you have lost friends? Your job? Would you have suffered something more minor, like getting yelled at, told your opinion did not matter? Would your acquaintances still now--a year later, after their political project has failed beyond all dispute--would they still defame you in "whisper networks," never quite articulating your verbal sins but nonetheless informing others that you are a dangerous and bad person because one time you tried to tell them how utterly fucking self-destructive they were being? It is undeniably clear that last year's most-elevated voices were demanding not reform but catharsis. I hope they really had fun watching those immigrant-owned bodegas burn down, because that’s it, that will forever be remembered as the most palpable and consequential aspect of their shitty, selfish movement. We ain't reforming shit. Instead, we gave everyone who's already in power a blank check to fortify that power to a degree you and I cannot fully fathom.

But, oh, these people knew what they were doing. They were good little boys and girls. They have been rewarded with near-total control of the national discourse, and they are all either too guilt-ridden or too stupid to realize how badly they played into the hands of the structures they were supposedly trying to upend.

And so left-liberalism is now controlled by people whose worldview is equal parts superficial and incoherent. This was the only possible outcome that would have let the system continue to sustain itself in light of such immense evidence of its unsustainability without resulting in reform, so that's what has happened.

But... okay, let's take a step back. Let's focus on what I wanted to talk about when I started this.

I came across a post today from a young man who claimed that his high school English department head had been removed from his position and had his tenure revoked for refusing to remove three books from classrooms. This was, of course, fallout from the ongoing debate about Critical Race Theory. Two of those books were Marjane Satropi's Persepolis and, oh boy, The Diary of Anne Frank. Fuck. Jesus christ, fuck.

Now, here's the thing... When Persepolis was named, I assumed the bannors were anti-CRT. The graphic novel does not deal with racism all that much, at least not as its discussed contemporarily, but it centers an Iranian girl protagonist and maybe that upset Republican types. But Anne Frank? I'm sorry, but the most likely censors there are liberal identiarians who believe that teaching her diary amounts to centering the suffering of a white woman instead of talking about the One Real Racism, which must always be understood in an American context. The super woke cult group Black Hammer made waves recently with their #FuckAnneFrank campaign... you'd be hard pressed to find anyone associated with the GOP taking a firm stance against the diary since, oh, about 1975 or so.

So which side was it? That doesn't matter. What matters is, I cannot find out.

Now, pro-CRT people always accuse anti-CRT people of not knowing what CRT is, and then after making such accusations they always define CRT in a way that absolutely is not what CRT is. Pro-CRTers default to "they don't want students to read about slavery or racism." This is absolutely not true, and absolutely not what actual CRT concerns itself with. Slavery and racism have been mainstays of American history curriucla since before I was born. Even people who barely paid attention in school would admit this, if there were any more desire for honesty in our discourse.

My high school history teacher was a southern "lost causer" who took the south's side in the Civil War but nonetheless provided us with the most descriptive and unapologetic understandings of slavery's brutalities I had heard up until that point. He also unambiguously referred to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshmia and Nagasaki as "genocidal." Why? Because most people's politics are idiosyncratic, and because you cannot genuinely infer a person to believe one thing based on their opinion of another, tangentially related thing. The totality of human understanding used to be something open-minded people prided themselves on being aware of, believe it or not...

This is the problem with CRT. This is is the motivation behind the majority of people who wish to ban it. It’s not because they are necessarily racist themselves. It’s because they recognize, correctly, that the now-ascendant frames for understanding social issues boils everything down to a superficial patina that denies not only the realities of the systems they seek to upend but the very humanity of the people who exist within them. There is no humanity without depth and nuance and complexities and contradictions. When you argue otherwise, people will get mad and fight back.

And this is the most bitter irony of this idiotic debate: it was never about not wanting to teach the sinful or embarrassing parts of our history. That was a different debate, one that was settled and won long ago. It is instead an immense, embarrassing overreach on behalf of people who have bullied their way to complete dominance of their spheres of influence within media and academe assuming they could do the same to everyone else. Some of its purveyors may have convinced themselves that getting students to admit complicity in privilege will prevent police shootings, sure. But I know these people. I’ve spoken to them at length. I’ve read their work. The vast, vast majority of them aren’t that stupid. The point is to exert control. The point is to make sure they stay in charge and that nothing changes. The point is failure.

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thehundredplusone · 5 years ago

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Infodump: The Satanic Panic & Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA)

GRAPHIC CONTENT AHEAD! STRONG CONTENT WARNINGS FOR THE FOLLOWING:

Child abuse

Murder

Police abuse

Satanism

Mental illness

Cannibalism

TL;DR at the bottom.

I'm autistic and my "focus" or specialist subject is extreme religion, cults, and religious abuse. The subset I've been most interested in for several years is the satanic panic of America in the 1980s and 90s. This is the period of time which the idea of satanic ritual abuse comes out of. For those who don’t know, satanic ritual abuse or SRA is purported to be an organized form of child abuse and murder conducted by underground rings of “satanists”.

An important bit of context around these events: it was around this time that the fact that child abuse existed first entered the public consciousness. It's weird to think that child abuse wasn't considered a 'thing' at any point because we're so aware of it today but up until the 1970s, at least in the USA, no one really considered it. People ignored physical, mental, and sexual abuse in the home, considering it a private matter. "We believe the children" was such an important mantra during this time and so key to the SRA movement precisely because they were coming out of a period in which children were never believed about abuse at home and there was a major push to be aware of the symptoms of abuse.

The first ideas of SRA initially came from a book called Michelle Remembers, which is purportedly true account of a woman surfacing memories of SRA with her therapist. The book was a cultural hit and spread like wildfire, leading the authors, Dr. Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith (soon to be Dr and Mrs Pazder, as they both left their spouses and got married), to go touring the country to speak at psychology conferences, to newspapers, and on TV shows. They claimed that there were underground rings of satanists going around abusing children.

Interestingly, as people dug into Michelle's history to make sense of how this horrible abuse had happened to her, some inconsistencies showed up, like the fact that she had perfect attendance at school during the periods which she was supposedly being held captive by satanists. Michelle also claimed to have been directly healed by religious figures like Mary and the Archangel Michael, which was why she bore no physical marks from her abuse. Some have speculated that Michelle’s trauma was actually related to repeated miscarriages and the medical procedures she went through surrounding them. There are a number of elements which make the story suspect but they were brushed aside during that time.

Soon enough self-titled experts on SRA with no real qualifications other than attending a conference began to offer training sessions about recognizing the signs of satanic activity and abuse to police departments and teachers. Among their claimed signs that satanism was active in a community was one particularly dangerous suggestion. These experts, who often had little training in child psychology, claimed that while children never lie about being abused, children who were victims of SRA may lie and claim that they weren't abused. It was important, they said, to keep asking and make it clear that they didn't have to protect their abusers.

If you know anything about about psychology, your red flags might be going up right now, and with very good reason. Children are highly susceptible to suggestion and pressure. If they are asked a question over and over again by an adult who is pushing them to give a certain answer, they generally will. Adults are susceptible to this as well but to a lesser degree, which is part of why you see people confessing to crimes they never committed. Hold a person in a room for hours and hours, asking them constantly about something they want you to confess to and many people will eventually confess falsely just to get out of the room.

This is exactly what happened once things really took off. If you ask Americans about the satanic panic, those who know of it will often point to one key trial set right in the midst of the most frantic part of this cultural hysteria. That would be the McMartin preschool trial. So the McMartin preschool was a daycare in California run by a family, the McMartins. They were well regarded in the community and had quite a few kids attending their center. One day, a mother noticed an odd mark on her son's bottom and became concerned that he was being abused. After questioning him repeatedly, he finally said that his father, who was a teacher at his preschool, had hurt him. She contacted the police, and the police, seemingly knowing exactly what would send the community into a fervor, sent a letter to every parent at the preschool urging them to talk with their children and find out if they were being abused. More parents insistently questioned their children until they too confessed to abuse of all stripes. Another interesting note here: The mother who initially made the complaint had a history of mental illness and of suspecting others of abusing her son. She checked him for marks regularly and questioned him about possible abuse. While we can't say for certain this is what led to his confession, knowing that he'd had this line of questioning before makes it more likely he could have been coerced into a false confession.

The daycare teachers were arrested and all of the children were brought in to be questioned by social workers and police. They used the same tactics as described above, holding children in rooms for extended periods of time, asking them over and over about the same things until they agreed, telling them that other children had confessed to acts which they hadn't confessed to, and describing explicit, leading scenarios. The children questioned were very young, as young as two in some cases, and they were being prompted to agree with trained adults.

The adults also took any fantastical statement the child made as fact, going on the premise that they should believe the children. Claims taken seriously included dozens of babies being butchered and eaten, being flushed down a toilet into a secret room, and flying through the air. The daycare's entire building and property were dismantled and searched for hidden compartments or rooms and remains of the children supposedly killed. Nothing was ever found. The parents and children also met with Dr Pazder and Michelle in the run-up to the trial and it's believed that this influenced their testimony. SRA claims were also heavy in the medial around this time through a number of other cases and it's likely that children picked up on the stories and them subconsciously used what they'd heard from the TV or their parents in their own accounts. Ultimately, most of the charges were dismissed due to a lack of evidence. The few which went forward were eventually reversed, in some cases after the defendant served time in jail.

That's not the end of the story on SRA though. Remember the kids going through this? The kids who were trapped in rooms, separated from their families, forced to confess to graphic details of abuse which no child should ever have to hear, not allowed to leave until they told the police or psychologists what they wanted? That is scarring for a child. While some kids had enough of a sense of self to realize that none of it happened, many others had their very fragile sense of self ripped to shreds and tainted with the ideas people pushed onto them. They developed false memories of their childhoods. Normal scenes of happy families, playing with friends, going to preschool, were tainted by the anxiety and fear they were put through by people who should have been protecting them.

One story highlighted in a podcast I listened to highlighted a young man named J and his father, M. M was accused of satanic abuse by his ex-wife and ended up in jail. J and his siblings were sent to a therapist who convinced them that they were abused. The therapist told him he'd never be able to hold down a job, that he'd be stalked all his life by the satanic cult, and if he tried to be normal, he'd wind up abusing children the way his father did. J wound up depressed and involved in drugs but did eventually stop therapy and managed to pull together a life for himself.

When he was in his 30s, still fully believing that his father had abused him, his younger brother made contact with their dad. M sent the brother a long letter explaining what he remembered of the events and apologizing for them, which was forwarded to J. The letter ultimately helped J find cracks in the abuse memories which his mother and therapist had created and he began to question everything. He had been traumatized as a very young child into believing he was abused, but that itself was ultimately the abuse. Nothing had happened to him but a mentally ill mother and a manipulative, unethical therapist, but those were enough to leave him with years of scars and problems to work through.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to discredit or harm people who have memories of SRA. While the acts never happened in nearly every case, the pain and trauma inflicted by being made to agree to graphic descriptions of abuse is very real. Their suffering is real. The blame for that suffering should be placed where it belongs. The only way we prevent something like this from happening again is to have accurate accounts of how it happened the first time. If you believe yourself to be an SRA victim, my heart goes out to you. I hope you’re able to heal in time and piece yourself back together.

TL;DR: SRA came out of a weird period of botched child psychology and hysteria. It's not likely anyone was ever ritualistically abused by satanists. People with memories from SRA cases have had false memories imprinted on them through repeated questioning by police, social workers, therapists, and parents. These people were their abusers, not satanists. They are abuse victims and they may have very real mental illnesses due to trauma.

If you want more info about this topic, I recommend checking out the podcasts "Conviction" (Season 2), "You're Wrong About" (Michelle Remembers episodes) and "The Satanic Panic".

#sra #satanic ritual abuse #cw child abuse #cw murder #cw police abuse #cw mental heath #graphic #michelle remembers #ritual abuse #infodump

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