Witches around the world castspells against President Trump once again last night, attempting to #BindTrump on the summer solstice.

The witches have been waging spiritual warfare against the president since Trump took office, but now even Jewish leaders in Israel are expressing concerns about it.

"Witchcraft, or its real name, Satanism, is explicitly a power struggle, which is why it is so readily dragged into politics. Satanism, in its essence, pits the adversary against God," Rabbi DanielAsore explained to Breaking Israel News.

Asoreinvestigates the dangers of modern Satanism as part of his role as a Jewish leader. He says the witches' spells are just part of a broader growth in Satanism.

"The politicians who believe that man can control all aspects of the world are coming from a belief system based in Satanism, whether knowingly or not."

The witches communicate with each other through a Facebook page called Bind Trump.

One user says June 21st, the summer solstice will be the "most powerful" binding yet.

They plan to cast more spells against President Trump on July 21, August 19, and so on, until he leaves office.

Their spell calls for demonic help to bind Trump and cause him to fail. It later calls for spirits to bind "all those who enable his wickedness" as well.

Evangelical Trump supporters are encouraging prayers for the president to counteract the spell.

"We ask you to join us in praying for the strength of our nation, our elected representatives and for the souls of the lost who would take up Satanic arms against us," reads a post on the Christian Nationalist Alliance website. Other Christians are countering the forces of the enemy with non-stop prayer and worship at places like David's Tent in Washington D.C.

"Our desire is to make a statement to our generation that Jesus is Lord and should be enthroned above every area of our lives and nation," the group says in a statement on their website.

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Christians and Jews Combat Witches' Summer Solstice Satanic ... - CBN News

Years ago, a Wiccan leader by the name of Jason Pitzl-Waters spoke in my world religions class. One of the things he said that stood out to me was the level of consternation many American Christians face when witnessing the rise of modern Paganism. They thought Christianity had triumphed over Paganism, and that it was extinct. To their chagrin, it has risen from the ash heap.

I raised this topic with another Pagan leader, Annika Mongan, who spoke in my world religions class today. Annika comes from an Evangelical background. In fact, she is a graduate of the university where I teach and attended a well-known Evangelical church in Portland. We have since met and become friends. The last time we crossed paths in person was at the Parliament of the Worlds Religions in Salt Lake City, Utah back in 2015.

I have addressed the subject of modern or contemporary Paganism in various contexts, including here at my blog, as well as in my book, Connecting Christ: How to Discuss Jesus in a World of Diverse Paths (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012). Pagan leader Gus DiZerega provided the response to the chapter on contemporary Paganism. In what follows, I will not engage key differences and possible similarities between Christianity and Paganism old and new (For a discussion on modern Paganism, refer here: Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Rather, I wish to engage the theme of Christian privilege, and how we should navigate redemptively as we cross paths with our Pagan neighbors. Crossing paths with Pagans should never entail viewing them through the crosshairs of Christian triumphalism. Here I am reminded of what a Jewish rabbi of a Hassidic tradition said to my class the other day. Evangelicals need to light a candle in engaging the diverse religious and cultural other in America today rather than hit them with a broom (whether ours or theirs). So, what might lighting a candle entail when engaging Pagans today?

According to Annika, it is important for Christians to listen to Pagans. She stated in class that a lot of Pagans have not experienced Christians listening to them. It would be very healing if Christians would listen to learn rather than stereotype and categorize modern Pagans falsely. I would add that we dont need to sacrifice our biblical convictions as Evangelicals to come to terms with the fact that Pagans dont sacrifice or eat children. We dont need to agree with Pagans to listen to them, and we should not listen to them in a bait-and-switch manner so thatand only thatthey will listen to us.

There is concern for many Pagans that with the rising tide (once again) of Christian triumphalism in America today there will be a new Satanic Panic wave, where Christians confuse Paganism with Satanism. All too often, Christian triumphalism rises when Christians in America feel that we are a persecuted minority. In actual fact, we are still the religiousif not moralmajority. What we take for persecution is often a degree of loss of Christian privilege. However, even if some of the privilege has dissipated, Christian privilege is still very much present. So, in addition to listening, Annika would encourage us as Christians to come to terms with Christian forms of privilege.

As Annika indicated, many Pagans dont believe there are Christians who understand Christian privilege and that it is alive and well in America today. It would be easier in many circles to get a job if the boss knew you were a Christian, though not a Pagan, or to wear a cross than a pentagram at work. It would be far more readily acceptable to offer a Christian prayer in a public gathering than a pagan invocation. Pagans get Christian holidays off, but not Pagan ones, such as todaythe Summer Solstice.

So, now that Pagans are back, what are we American and Western Christians going to do? Listen to them tell their story and discuss with them Christian privilege. The benefits of doing so will include the possibility of gaining new friends and being Christian witnesses who light candles of hope, truth and love, as the Rabbi said, rather than bonfires of hate to burn others. And just maybe, well get a few more days off from work, such as the Summer Solstice today.

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Paganism Is Back! Now What Are We Christians Going to Do? - Patheos (blog)

In the Paris of the early eighteen-nineties, at the height of the Decadence, the man of the moment was the novelist, art critic, and would-be guru Josphin Pladan, who named himself Le Sr, after the ancient Akkadian word for king. He went about in a flowing white cloak, an azure jacket, a lace ruff, and an Astrakhan hat, which, in conjunction with his bushy head of hair and double-pointed beard, gave him the aspect of a Middle Eastern potentate. He was in the midst of writing a twenty-one-volume cycle of novels, titled La Dcadence Latine, which follows the fantastical adventures of various enchanters, adepts, femmes fatales, androgynes, and other enemies of the ordinary. His bibliography also includes literary tracts, explications of Wagnerian mythology, and a self-help tome called How One Becomes a Magus. He let it be known that he had completed the syllabus. He informed Flix Faure, the President of the Republic, that he had the gift of seeing and hearing at the greatest distances, useful in controlling enemy councils and suppressing espionage. He began one lecture by saying, People of Nmes, I have only to pronounce a certain formula for the earth to open and swallow you all. In 1890, he established the Order of the Catholic Rose + Croix of the Temple and the Grail, one of a number of end-of-century sects that purported to revive lost arts of magic. The peak of his fame arrived in 1892, when he launched an annual art exhibition called the Salon de la Rose + Croix, which embraced the Symbolist movement, with an emphasis on its more eldritch guises. Thousands of visitors passed through, uncertain whether they were witnessing a colossal breakthrough or a monumental joke.

The spell wore off quickly. At the time of Pladans death, in 1918, he was already seen as an absurd relic of a receding age. He is now known mainly to scholars of Symbolism, connoisseurs of the occult, and devotees of the music of Erik Satie. (I first encountered Pladan in connection with Saties unearthly 1891 score Le Fils des toiles, or The Son of the Stars; it was written for Pladans play of that title, which is set in Chaldea in 3500 B.C.) His contemporary Joris-Karl Huysmans remains a cult figureAgainst the Grain, Huysmanss 1884 novel, is still read as a primer of the Decadent aestheticbut none of Pladans novels have been translated into English. So when an exhibition entitled Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose + Croix in Paris, 1892-1897 opens at the Guggenheim Museum, on June 30th, most visitors will be entering unknown territory. The show occupies one of the tower galleries, in rooms painted oxblood red, with furniture of midnight-blue velvet. On the walls, the Holy Grail glows, demonic angels hover, women radiate saintliness or lust. The dark kitsch of the fin de sicle beckons.

For all the faded creepiness, the moment is worth revisiting, because mystics like Pladan prepared the ground for the modernist revolution of the early twentieth century. John Bramble, in his 2015 book, Modernism and the Occult, writes that the Salon de la Rose + Croix was the first attempt at a (semi-)internationalist religion of modern artan aesthetic order with Pladan as high priest. In the years that followed, radical artistic thinking and obscure spiritual strivings intersected in everything from Kandinskys abstractions to Eliots The Waste Land and the atonal music of Schoenberg. In Yeatss The Second Coming, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem, half man and half lion, is no metaphor. Classic accounts of modernism tended to repress such influences, often out of intellectual discomfort. In recent decades, though, fin-de-sicle mysticism has returned to scholarly vogue. In 1917, Max Weber said that the rationalization of Western society had brought about the disenchantment of the world. Pladan, and those who took up his mantle, wished to enchant it once again.

The occult mania that crested in the decades before the First World War had been intensifying throughout the nineteenth century. Its manifestations included Theosophy, Spiritism, Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, Martinism, and Kabbalismelaborations of arcane rituals that had been cast aside in a secular, materialist age. Reinventions or fabrications of medieval sects proliferated: the Knights Templar, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (the habitat of Yeats), and various Rosicrucian orders. Pladan belonged to the Rosicrucians, who, following sixteenth-century tracts of dubious authenticity, believed in alchemy, necromancy, and other dark arts. The more lite these groups became, the more they were prone to furious doctrinal disputes. In 1887, a feud broke out in Paris between Stanislas de Guata, of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose + Croix, and Joseph Boullan, a defrocked priest who was rumored to have sacrificed his own child during a Black Mass. When Boullan died, in 1893, Huysmans accused Guata and Pladan of having killed him with black magic. In Huysmanss 1891 novel, L-bas, a character observes, From exalted mysticism to raging Satanism is but a step.

Pladan was born in Lyon, in 1858, into a family steeped in esoteric tendencies. His father, Louis-Adrien, was a conservative Catholic writer who tried to start a Cult of the Wound of the Left Shoulder of Our Saviour Jesus Christ. Pladans older brother, Adrien, was the author of a medical text proposing that the brain subsists on unused sperm that takes the form of vital fluid. When Adrien died prematurely, of accidental strychnine poisoning, his brother perpetuated his ideas, suggesting that the intellect can thrive only when the sexual impulse is suppressed. The political views of the Pladans were thoroughly reactionary; they disdained democracy and called for the restoration of the monarchy. Pladan differed from many other occultists in insisting that his Rosicrucian rhetoric was an extension of authentic Catholic doctrine, which Church institutions had neglected.

He made his name first as an art critic, railing against naturalism and Impressionism, both of which he considered banal. I believe in the Ideal, in Tradition, in Hierarchy, he declared. His model artist was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who rendered neoclassical subjects in a self-consciously archaic style, flattening perspectives and whitening colors. What he paints has neither place nor time, Pladan wrote. It is from everywhere and always. Yet he also had a taste for lurid, graphic imagery: the eerily glittering Salom pictures of Gustave Moreau, the diabolical caricatures of Flicien Rops. Pladan singled out for praise Ropss Les Sataniques, a series of etchings depicting visibly aroused demons penetrating and killing women. Pladans pendulum swings between piety and depravity were characteristic of his milieu, although in his case the oscillation was particularly extreme.

Rops provided frontispieces for several of the Dcadence Latine novels, which began appearing in 1884. The Victory of the Husband, from 1889, is typical of the cycle, alternating between the lascivious and the ludicrous. The novel recounts the love of Izel and Adar: she, the adopted daughter of a wealthy Avignon priest; he, a young genius who defies the stupidity of the age. They are married, and honeymoon at the Wagner festival in Bayreuth. (Pladan had gone there in 1888, and was overwhelmed.) At a performance of Tristan und Isolde, Izel and Adar cannot restrain themselves and begin making lovea feat that will impress anyone who has endured Bayreuths hard-backed seats. Tristan! Isolde! the lovers cry onstage. Adar! Izel! the lovers murmur in the audience, possibly to the irritation of their neighbors. But they clash on the question of Parsifal, Wagners final opera. For Izel, it is too chaste, sweet, and calm; for Adar, it opens the door to a new mystic consciousness, to the realm of the Holy Grail. He goes to study with a sinister Nuremberg sorcerer named Doctor Sexthental, and drifts away from his bride. Sexthental, sensing an opportunity, projects himself astrally into Izels chambers, in the form of an incubus. The initiate defeats this incursion, but marital strife persists. Adar must renounce his powersI resign the august pentacle of the macrocosmto regain Izels love.

That tale is tame next to The Androgyne and The Gynander, both from 1891, in which Pladan delves into the world of same-sex love. The first depicts the coming-of-age of a feminine boy who seems destined to be gaymale classmates vie for himbut who escapes those desires by engaging in bouts of mutual exhibitionism with a mannish maiden. In the second novel, another androgyne, Tammuz, explores the lesbian underworld. He converts dozens of gynandersPladans preferred term for lesbiansto heterosexuality after he magically generates replicas of himself. As an orchestra plays Wagner, the women fall to worshipping a giant phallus. Even as gender roles are subverted, the dominance of the male is maintained: like so many male artists of his day, Pladan was profoundly misogynist. Man puppet of woman, woman puppet of the devil was one of his most widely quoted slogans.

In any other society, such material would have been unpublishable, but Pladan sparked little outrage in an environment that had assimilated Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Huysmans. Among impressionable youth, he had an appeal somewhat comparable to that of H. P. Lovecraft. Writers as various as Paul Valry, Andr Gide, Andr Breton, and Louis-Ferdinand Cline read him with fascination, as did Le Corbusier. Verlaine generously summarized him as a man of considerable talent, eloquent, often profound... bizarre but of great distinction. Max Nordau, in his 1892 book, Degeneration, a mocking survey of fin-de-sicle culture, shows a soft spot for Pladan, declaring that the conscious factor in him knows that [mysticism] is all nonsense, but it finds artistic pleasure in it, and permits the unconscious life to do as it pleases. This is probably as strong a defense of Pladans writing as can be mounted.

The catalogue for the Guggenheims Mystical Symbolism show, which was curated by Vivien Greene, spends little time on Pladans literary career, focussing instead on his activities as an impresario. In the lead essay, Greene argues that Pladans flamboyant manifestos and mixed-media happenings anticipated avant-garde trends of the following centurynotably, the conception of the exhibition venue as a space for multidisciplinary performance and as an immersive aesthetic environment. The Salons de la Rose + Croix, which unfolded in various galleries and halls around Paris, were designed less to present a coherent group of artists than to demonstrate arts ability to transform the daily world. What Pladan took from Wagner, above all, was the idea that art could assume the functions of religion. The artist is a priest, a king, a magus, he proclaimed.

Pladan complicated his task by freighting the salons with often nonsensical regulations. He forbade history paintings, still-lifes, seascapes, all humorous things, and all representations of contemporary life, private or public. (Lest anyone miss the ban on naturalism, one poster for the salons showed a Perseus-like hero holding up the severed head of Zola.) Female artists were ostensibly excluded, following Magical law, although at least five women exhibited under pseudonymsamong them the poet and novelist Judith Gautier, who contributed a relief sculpture entitled Kundry, Rose of Hell. Furthermore, Pladan alienated several leading figures, including Puvis de Chavannes, by prematurely announcing their participation.

Still, a number of significant Symbolists joined Pladans solemn circus, because many of his principles accorded with their own. Back in the mid-eighteen-eighties, the Greek-born poet Jean Moras, who coined the term Symbolism, had renounced the depiction of concrete phenomena; Symbolist writers, he declared, gestured instead toward a primordial Idea, which could be conjured by pure sounds, densely convoluted sentences, and knowingly organized disorder. Michelle Facos and Thor Mednick, in their recent anthology The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art, observe that the Symbolists undermined conventional modes of representation in an effort to access the divine directly.

The most renowned member of the Rose + Croix group was the Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff, whom Pladan hailed as the great argument of my thesis, in defense of the ideal. Khnopff was an artist of exacting technique who emulated the severity of the old Flemish masters and the cool sensualism of the Pre-Raphaelites. In the eighties, he fell under Pladans sway and gravitated toward Symbolist fantasy. His best-known work, The Caresses, is inspired by Pladans play Oedipus and the Sphinx: a lithe, androgynous lad snuggles with a creature who has a Pre-Raphaelite head and a cheetahs body. The Sphinx clearly is in control, yet her domination is gentle: femme-fatale imagery is edging into a more nuanced mode.

The Guggenheim is displaying Khnopffs I Lock My Door Upon Myself, which takes its title from Christina Rossettis poem Who Shall Deliver Me? A pale, auburn-haired woman gazes fixedly at the viewer, surrounded by a proto-Surrealist array of objects: stalks of orange daylilies in the foreground; an arrow resting on a draped table; a bust of Hypnos on a shelf; a window giving a view of a black-shrouded figure on an empty streetan image that could itself be mistaken for a painting. At first glance, the work gives a feeling of confinement: the woman appears to be trapped in the artists cluster of symbols. But Khnopff seems more sympathetic to his female subject than is usually the case in Symbolist art. This cryptic space may be a room of her own, a private world of the imagination.

Pladan also deserves credit for giving early attention to the great Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler. The Disappointed Souls, a Hodler canvas included in the Guggenheim show, is a study in male dejection: five weathered, barefoot men stare downward, two with their heads buried in their hands, the middle one with his emaciated upper body exposed. The hieratic manner and pale color scheme recall Puvis de Chavannes, yet the imagery is rougher and starker, hinting at the interior desolation of Expressionism.

Perhaps the ultimate Rose + Croix painter is another Belgian, Jean Delville, who shared the diseased opulence of Pladans aesthetic. A drawing titled The Idol of Perversity offers a narrow-eyed Medusa-like woman with a snake writhing out of her breasts. In The Death of Orpheus, the musicians severed head rests on his lyre, floating down a greenish river in which the twinkling of stars is reflected. When I first saw this canvas, on a visit to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in Brussels, it sent me into an uncomfortable trance: the serenity of the painted surface pulled me in as the horror of the subject pushed me away. Precisely because so much Symbolist art seems dated at first glance, it retains its capacity to shock.

Music was integral to the multimedia conception of the Rose + Croix, although several performances that Pladan planned in conjunction with the inaugural salon ran into difficulties. The opening ceremonies were to have included a Solemn Mass of the Holy Spirit, at St.-Germain lAuxerrois, with excerpts from Parsifal on the organ. Wary clerics withheld permission, on the ground that Wagner was Protestant. A later Wagner concert fell victim to a fracas between Pladan and his former financial supporter, Antoine de La Rochefoucauld. While an orchestra was playing the Siegfried Idyll, an ally of Pladans, ineffectively disguised by a fake beard, shouted that La Rochefoucauld was a felon, a coward, a thief. The heckler was ejected, causing a glass door to shatter and the musicians to fall silent.

Pladans collaboration with Satie, who was then in his twenties, was rooted in the bohemia of Montmartre, where both men cut vivid profiles. Satie was best known as a pianist at the Chat Noir and the Auberge de Clou cabarets; in 1888, he composed his trio of pensively dancing Gymnopdies. He heralded a new simplicitymusic without sauerkrautin defiance of Wagnerian grandeur. He was also an incorrigible ironist who festooned his scores with unperformable instructions. (Arm yourself with clairvoyance, Open your head.) Such exquisite pranks seem far removed from the dark-velvet world of Pladan, yet Satie, too, shared in the mystical preoccupations of his generation. His unadorned sonic textures, often based on Greek modes and Gregorian chant, can have the quality of cryptic icons.

The play Le Fils des toiles, which elicited Saties most striking Rosicrucian score, follows a young shepherd-poet as he is initiated as a magus. The prelude to Act I begins with an astonishing sequence of six-note chords, consisting of stacked intervals of the fourth, with a tritone thrown in for good measure. Although these chords are built on a simple chantlike melody, they are essentially atonal. Saties score, written more than fifteen years in advance of Schoenbergs first atonal works, subsequently reverts to a more conventional language, but the fabric of harmony has been rent. This time, the composer gives no sign that he is joking: the opening is marked white and motionless.

The Dawn of Labor (LAurore du Travail), by Charles Maurin, circa 1891.

After the first salon, Satie broke with Pladan and, in the schismatic fashion of the day, established a private cult, the Metropolitan Church of the Art of Jsus Conducteur, from whose pulpit he issued edicts and anathemas in an apparent parody of Pladans style. (I must raise My hand to overthrow the oppressors of the Church and the Art.) The reasons for the split are unknown; perhaps Saties score for Le Fils des toiles was too peculiar even for Pladans recondite taste, or, possibly, Satie decided that his reputation would be better served if he suspended ties with such a controversial figure. Whatever Saties calculations, he soon sank back into obscurity; only in the second decade of the twentieth century would Maurice Ravel spark a Satie revival by hailing him as a model of anti-Romantic style.

In the mid-twentieth century, Saties music mesmerized John Cage, who saw it as a challenge not merely to extant harmony but to the very idea of musical form. Cage took a special liking to a short, gnomic, harmonically directionless 1893 piece called Vexations, at the beginning of which Satie wrote, To play this motif eight hundred forty times in a row, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, through serious immobilities. In 1963, Cage took that instruction at face value, organizing an epic performance in which a rotating team of pianists repeated Vexations for nearly nineteen hours. Because Vexations belongs to Saties Rosicrucian period, the Guggenheim will stage its own daylong marathon, in September. Having attended a Vexations event some years back, I can advise prospective listeners that they may experience hallucinations of the Sphinx before the performance is done.

Before Pladan vanished from cultural memory, he received a couple of respectful nods from rising giants of modernism. In 1906, Ezra Pound embraced Pladans idea that the medieval troubadour tradition was a repository of hermetic wisdom. And in 1910 Vasily Kandinsky cited Pladan in his manifesto On the Spiritual in Art: The artist is a king, as Pladan says, not only because he has great power, but also because his responsibility is great. That sentence, oddly prophetic of the Spider-Man comic books, is evidence of occultisms lingering reverberations. Kenneth Silver expands on the connection in a thought-provoking essay in the Mystical Symbolism catalogue, entitled Afterlife: The Important and Sometimes Embarrassing Links between Occultism and the Development of Abstract Art, ca. 1909-13. The word embarrassing is taken from the art theorist Rosalind Krauss, who wrote, in 1979, that now we find it indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence. Yet in the early twentieth century Kandinsky, Pound, and other modernists absorbed what Silver calls an amalgam of spiritual sourcesChristian, Hindu, Buddhist, kabbalistic, alchemical, and just plain wacky. Assuming the pose of a sorcerer or guru emboldened more than a few artists and writers in their quest to explode tradition and create a new order.

Pladan had little direct impact on early modernism: instead, the dominant force was Theosophy, the half-visionary, half-spurious movement that Helena Blavatsky and others launched in New York in 1875. Blavatsky devoured Rosicrucian texts and related Christian esoterica, and combined their ideas with influences from the East. She notoriously claimed to be communicating with eternal Indian Masters. Such hocus-pocus did not prevent the likes of Kandinsky from appreciating the vigor of Theosophys assault on materialism in the name of higher truth. Kandinskys controlled explosions of color bear a striking resemblance to images that appear in Thought-Forms, a standard Theosophical text. His paintings can be viewed as opaque sacred emblems, conduits of spiritual revolution. Silver sees similar tendencies in the work of Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, Hilma af Klint, and Piet Mondrian. I got everything from the Secret Doctrine (Blavatsky), Mondrian wrote, in 1918.

Although Yeats is the exemplary case among occult-oriented modernist writers, T. S. Eliot also deserves a glance. After Eliot converted to Anglo-Catholicism, in the late twenties, he chastised Yeats for having resorted to a highly sophisticated lower mythology of supernatural lore. Yet The Waste Land begins with a clutter of Decadent elements: quotations from Tristan und Isolde, allusions to Verlaine and Mallarm, chatter about tarot cards and sances, intimations of vegetation cults. The poem ends with an Easternized version of a Grail Quest, culminating in a final chant of shantih shantih shantih . Latter-day readings of the poem tend to see Eliots intent as satirical, but, as Leon Surette has suggested, the poem has the feeling of an initiation ritual, in the course of which the poet attains mastery of all religious traditions.

Fin-de-sicle spiritualism also had a radicalizing effect on music: Le Fils des toiles was only the beginning. In the first decade of the century, Alexander Scriabin reached the border of atonality under the influence of Theosophy; he devised an ear-burning, six-note mystic chord that voices a hitherto ineffable divine presence. Jean Delville supplied an image of a sun deity for the cover of Scriabins sumptuously dissonant score Prometheus, Poem of Fire. As for Schoenberg, he was immersed in mystical texts at the time of his atonal leap: in terminology reminiscent of Pladan, he explained that whereas conventional major and minor chords resembled the opposition of the two genders his new chords could be compared to androgynous angels. Even the cool intellect of Igor Stravinsky was touched by theurgic energies: the neo-pagan scenario of The Rite of Spring was co-created by the Russian Symbolist painter Nicholas Roerich, who went on to have a spectacularly strange career as a Theosophical sage.

In the wake of two catastrophic world wars, mysticism lost its lustre. The ecstatic liturgies of the fin de sicle rang false, and a rite of objectivity took hold. The supernatural was all but expunged from modernisms origin story: the great Irish-literature scholar Richard Ellmann insisted that Yeats employed arcane symbols for their artistic, not their occult, utility. In the narrative that so many of us learned in school, the upheavals of the modernist epoch were, above all, formal developments, autonomous events within each discipline. Clement Greenberg spoke of paintings progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium; Theodor W. Adorno, of the inherent tendency of the musical material. Such sober formulas fail to capture the roiling transcendental longings of a Kandinsky or a Schoenberg.

Hence the disreputable allure of Pladan, who dared to speak aloud what usually remains implicit in the aesthetic sphere: belief in the artists alchemical power, in the godlike nature of creation, in the oracular quality of genius. (Think of how often prewar Expressionism is said to have anticipated the horrors to come, as if artists were clairvoyant.) The question we want to ask a figure like Pladan is whether or not he meant what he saidwhether, in essence, he was a lunatic or a charlatan. Robert Duncan wrote a poem about the relationship between Satie and the silly old man Pladan, in which he imagines the composer asking:

Is there a place for such posing

to be containd? for even

fakes of God to touch

some youthful trembling at the edge of God?

Such questions presuppose a clean line of demarcation between the real and the fake, and in matters of the spirit that line can never be fixed. In a sublimely daft portrait by Delville, Pladan hovers before us in priestly white garb, his eyes rolled back, his index finger pointing heavenward. He is the failed prophet of a nonexistent faith. Nonetheless, his conviction is unnerving. Entire religions, entire empires, have been founded on much less.

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The Occult Roots of Modernism - The New Yorker

In 1966, Anton LaVey introduced to the world the Church of Satan, an atheistic religion devoted to the philosophy of individualism and pitilessness often associated with Satan. Modern Satanism offers a comprehensive survey and analysis of the church that LaVey built. Satanism has been an open religion for forty years now and operates successfully in its self-created countercultural niche. Given the provocative nature of its name, contemporary Satanism is only superficially understood as an alternative religion/ideology, and all-too-frequently seen as a medieval superstition and associated with rumors of obscure rituals, perverse hedonism, cult-like behavior, and tales of ritual abuse and murder. These may be misconceptions, but the truth behind the unenviable reputation is no less dramatic. Satanism generally eschews supernatural beliefs and embodies a staunchly individualistic, pitiless, anti-egalitarian creed. If there is anything fundamentally diabolical about modern Satanism, it stems more from the echoes of Nazism in its theories than from its horror-comic trappings.

"Modern Satanism" covers the history, ideology, personalities, and practices of the decentralized international movement that contemporary Satanism has become. The work addresses the various beliefs and practices espoused by those who follow it: the ideal of Satan as a rebellious emblem; Satanism's occult, literary, and philosophical influences; the history of the Church of Satan and other Satanic organizations; the ideology of Satanism; Satanism's frequent flirtations and strong parallels with neo-Nazism and other forms of extremism; Satanism in the media and popular culture; and the reasons for Satanism's continuing attractiveness to new converts. Though the tone of the work attempts to remain neutral when discussing historical matters, it is by necessity critical of the subculture's extremist rhetoric and recurring associations with the far right and racialist extremism.

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Modern Satanism: Anatomy of a Radical Subculture - Chris ...

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons

Followingthe first part of this series, where the historical origins of modern white supremacy were explored in depth, and asubsequent essaythatexamined the ways white supremacy has influenced mainstream American politics, here are three of the nations foremost scholars on white supremacy, discussing similar issues at length.

Jeffrey Kaplanis associate professor of religion at the University of WisconsinOshkosh. His books include Radical Religion in America: MillenarianMovements From the Far Right to theChildren of Noah; Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture(co-edited with Tore Bjrgo);and The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right(with Leonard Weinberg).

George J. Michaelis associate professor in the criminal justice faculty at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. He is the author of Confronting Right-Wing Extremism and Terrorism in the USA; The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right; Willis Carto and the American Far Right; and Theology of Hate: A History of the World Church of the Creator.

Michael Barkunis professor emeritus of political science in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His books include A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America; Religion and the Racist Right:The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement; and Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11.

1. What is thealt-right?

Is the contemporary alt-right a continuation of late 20th-century American white supremacist movements, or are there new components? Besides the new use of technology, are there ideological elements to the alt-right that we should take notice of? What happened to some of the exotic ideas floating around in the 1980s and 90s, such as occult Nazism and pagan religions? Did they become assimilated into the alt-right, or did those more esoteric veins fade out?

Jeffrey Kaplan:The so-called alt-right seemed to descend from the ether in the fading twilight of the Obama administration. The alt-right quickly seized the stage as the acceptable face of the radical right, which since the violence of the 1980s had been demonized and banished from the American public square. The process is common enough in American extremism. In 1963 the racist fringe was banished from the anti-communist fervor of theJohn Birch Society,just as the 19th-century Know Nothings came to be excluded from the politer society of American nativism. America, after all, is a vast smorgasbord in which individuals, religions and political movements may pick and choose among the tropes on offer.

The alt-right follows this pattern to a T. Picking and choosing from a variety of established conspiratorial, racist and outright paranoid ideas, leavened with a catchy jargon like deep state which is far more PC thanZOGor Zionist Occupation Government, which held primacy in the American radical right since the 1970s the alt-right was tailor-made for the discontented and dispossessed faithful of the far right.

Following British sociologist Colin Campbell in the 1960s, scholars have borrowed the term cultic milieu to describe the process by which oppositional individuals sample ideas, theories and wild suppositions that are the stuff of which movements are born, flourish and, most often, perish in anonymity, completely unknown to the dominant culture. This is the origin of the alt-right, and will most likely be its fate as well.

The occult and esoteric racist movements from the fringes of National Socialism to elements of explicit Satanism still exist in the wilderness of the cultic milieu, but their numbers are much diminished. The peregrinations ofDavid Myattare a case in point. Myatt, who drifted from Buddhist beliefs to National Socialism under the spell ofColin Jordanin Britain, went on to found theOrder of Nine Angles, the most successful racist esoteric organization combining Satanism and National Socialism in the 1980s and 90s. Tiring of the scene and despairing of the quality of the recruits, he took his shahadaand converted to radical Islam in the shadow of 9/11 and 7/7. In this he moved from the most distant fringes of the cultic milieu to a more potent global system of belief. Lately, however, he has taken on the cross, converting to Orthodox Christianity and embracing a message of universal love and reconciliation. Myatt is the cultic milieu personified and living proof that the esoteric white supremacist ideas of the 1980s live on, albeit on life support.

The alt-right is, however, different in significant ways from its predecessors. For one, it is not simply an American made-for-export idea, as was the racialism that American intellectuals marketed internationally in the 19th century as racist anthropology or that which the anti-communist zealots spread with much less success in the 1950s.

Rather, it mixed American nativist tropes with the growing fears of immigration and Islamization that have become acute in the European Union. More remarkable still, it fell easily under the spell of Vladimir Putins Russia, whose hybrid warfare campaign against the West and the world is simply a 21st-century update of the Soviet disinformation campaigns that were calledActive Measuresin the Cold War. Putins Russia now caters to the far right globally, and as the Trump scandals now unfolding in Washington indicate, found in the alt-right perfect rubes who, for a few dollars and a grand delusion of power and global glory, would gladly ignore logic and history in pursuit of a dream of an America relatively untroubled by such putative enemies as Black Lives Matter; immigrants bent on rape, rapine and terrorism; and the dread legions of the politically correct.

George J. Michael:There is some continuity between the alt-right and extreme-right groups from the late 20th century. David Duke, for example, has long been a prominent spokesman of the white nationalist movement. In fact, he in some ways spearheaded a change in the ideological direction away from a supremacist/hate orientation to a more identitarian orientation.

The exotic ideas, including occult Nazism and pagan religions, continue to inform the movement. Mostly, their influence can be found in the forms of iconography informing white nationalist websites and assorted insignia. Norse neo-paganism is often seen as a more suitable religion for white nationalists, insofar as contemporary Christianity is seen as philo-Semitic and pro-multiculturalism.

Michael Barkun:The sudden public emergence of the alt-right during the 2016 presidential campaign raises the question of whether it is simply the continuation of a long-standing white supremacist movement or constitutes a completely new development. That is not an easy question to answer, since the alt-right is not itself a cohesive movement. Rather, it is best understood as a set of groups and individuals that share a family resemblance, knit together by an intense hostility to immigration and a fear that the white population and what the alt-right conceives as Western culture will be submerged in a non-white sea. The alt-right is dominated by white nationalists and contains anti-Semites as well as some neo-Nazis, but also others of a less reprehensible stripe.

The more interesting and disturbing issue is the alt-rights rising visibility. Whatever people mean by the alt-right, it is an element of right-wing extremism that suddenly became a factor in Donald Trumps campaign. Its highly vocal support for Trump was widely covered by the media, the attitude of the campaign toward it was analyzed, and its possible electoral effect was discussed, even though its numbers appeared minuscule and no figure of any political stature was known to be associated with it. That so seemingly marginal a group of political actors should have attracted so much attention is itself odd indeed, in hindsight, now that the campaign is over, it seems stranger still.

Yet the public emergence of the alt-right is on reflection a manifestation of a larger transformation in American culture namely, the gradual penetration of the fringe into the mainstream. This is a development that transcends politics, although it has important political implications. It began in the early 1990s and has thus been underway for about a quarter of a century. Conspicuous examples have appeared in popular culture, includingDan Browns best-selling novels with occult and conspiracist themes, as well as The X-Filestelevision program, and it has been critically accelerated by the internet and such social media as Facebook and Twitter. Without the traditional barriers of editorial gatekeepers, fringe material could now access and command mass audiences. Just as fringe themes could penetrate popular culture, so fringe politics is no longer shut up in segregated subcultures.

We see this, too, in the avid popular consumption of conspiracy theories, and there has been no greater consumer of them than Donald Trump himself. Trump, after all, was the first high-visibility proponent of the Obama birther legend. During the campaign he gave a half-hour interview toAlex Jones, the countrys leading purveyor of conspiracy theories. Trumps constant campaign refrain of immigrant wrongdoing smacks of a plot by foreigners to destroy America.

It is scarcely surprising that against this background the alt-rights appearance acquired a certain quasi-legitimacy, despite its white supremacist credentials. It seemed to be simply a slightly more strident set of outsider anti-immigrant propagandists, in a campaign that already had an outsider candidate.

The role of the alt-right in the 2016 campaign, alongside the broader movement of fringe motifs into the mainstream, suggests a political future that once seemed inconceivable: the potential public re-emergence of a white supremacist organization, something not seen in America since the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. While still unlikely, the 2016 trajectory of the alt-right may prefigure more extreme open white supremacist political forays in the future.

2. The strength and leadership of the white supremacist movement

How strong is white supremacy in this country? Is it getting stronger, is it a declining movement or has it remained stable from when you first began your research? Was the 1990s Patriot movement the heyday of white supremacy? Are there things people label white supremacy that we should more properly put outside that framework? Which white supremacist group(s) do you find most intriguing today from a scholarly viewpoint?

Kaplan:White supremacy, like the poor, will be with us always. It is the nagging voice in even the most racially enlightened among us when they find themselves walking at night in Hyde Park in Chicago or contemplating a trip to Detroit. Once, it was a mainstream idea as many of the most idealistic young American men, fired by the racial threat depicted in D.W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation, sent their money to the mail-order Klan in exchange for a newsletter, a bizarre lexicon and a copy of the Kloran. With the legislative victories of the civil rights movement and a concerted push from Hollywood, it faded from polite society and the movements that held true to the racist call were banished to the most distant fringes of the cultic milieu.

This is where I found them when I began my research among their number in the late 1980s. They were a battered and demoralized lot.Identity Christiansheld fast to their esoteric interpretations of the Bible; National Socialists treasured their SS-inspired regalia and propitiated the shade of Adolf Hitler as if the Second World War were merely on hiatus; andOdinistsdrank bloats, rode motorcycles and formed prison gangs. ThePatriot movementwas never really among their number. Like the Birch Society of the 1960s, race for them was a distraction from the more important work of decoding the manifold conspiracies which, in the words of the iconic (and African-American!)Last Poets, Keep the people asleep and the truth from being told.

Early in the new millennium, I left the world of participant/observer research into the radical right in search of new and more potent oppositional ideas. None of the white supremacist constellation were intriguing simply because no new ideas, fresh movements or visionary leaders were on the horizon. I would argue, perhaps alone in this forum, that white supremacy as we have known it remains for the moment moribund. What we see today, the red meat of the alt-right and the popular fears that led to the election of Donald Trump, speaks to broader dreads Islamophobia, immigration and the ever-present other rather than an appeal for White Power. Racism is a powerful ingredient in the stew, but it is no more the leitmotif of what we are seeing today than is traditional America First nativism.

Michael:That is really the $64,000 question. It is very difficult to quantify the size of the white nationalist movement in America. There is no viable political party that advocates for its interest, unlike far-right parties in Europe.

The movement seemed to have gone into decline during the 2000s. The movement suffered a number of casualties as several leaders died (e.g.,William L. Pierce,Sam Francis,Richard Girnt ButlerandWillis Carto) and a number of others were arrested and incarcerated (Matt Hale,Chester Doles,Kevin Alfred Strom).

The Patriot movement differed quite a bit from the white nationalist movement over ideology, to wit, on the issue of race. The Patriot movement began a steep decline not long after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (as measured by the number of groups compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center). However, in recent years, the movement seems to have reinvented itself under the label of preppers and once again is gaining momentum.

The late 1990s seemed to be the heyday for the white nationalist movement in America. The movement had not suffered any major repression from the federal government since theFort Smith sedition trial of 1988. During the 1990s, the movement took advantage of the fledging medium of the internet to get its message out to a larger audience. But after 9/11, the movement experienced quite a few prosecutions from the federal government. Moreover, after 9/11, the American public did not seem receptive to the white nationalist movements message of white racial solidarity. After 9/11, there was an upsurge of American patriotism. Conservative-leaning Americans were not amenable to white separatism; instead, a new form of patriotism gained currency that viewed the country as under attack from anti-democratic, religious extremists in the form of militant Islam. The extreme rights critique of the U.S. governments pro-Israel foreign policy seemed unpatriotic. As a result, the extreme right languished for quite some time during the 2000s.

In recent years, however, issues involving race have gained great salience, including immigration, the ideology of multiculturalism and the prominence of language policing under the rubric of political correctness. The white nationalist movement was well-prepared to provide commentary on these issues. As a result, the movement seems to be gaining relevance once again.

Are there things people label white supremacy that we should more properly put outside that framework? Yes, for example, immigration. People who do not consider themselves to be white nationalists are nevertheless concerned about immigration because of its costs to taxpayers, as well as its impact on employment prospects for native-born Americans, the cost of health care, etc. Furthermore, many ordinary people are rejecting the restrictiveness of political correctness on the discourse in America.

Barkun:The present strength of the white supremacist movement has always been notoriously difficult to measure. The movement I use the word advisedly, as a term of art has always been riven by factionalism, and no group wants to divulge membership numbers except in the most grossly inflated forms. It is fair to say that right-wing extremism probably peaked in the early 1990s, when the Christian Identity movement was still vibrant and before paramilitary organizations had attracted the full attention of the federal government after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1993.

There are clearly still militia groups active, some with apparently aggressive agendas. TheHutaree Militiain the Midwest was one such case, although despite substantial evidence of an impending attack, its principal leaders were acquitted of the most serious charges in a 2012 trial. TheAryan Strikeforceleaders in the mid-Atlantic states were recently indicted before their plans could unfold. However, there is no evidence that these or other recent paramilitary activities have been linked or coordinated.

The conceptual difficulty lies in separating out the white supremacist element from other beliefs that are often associated with it. For example, virtually everyone on the extreme right is a conspiracist, buying into ideas about what is termed the New World Order the belief that there is an overarching conspiracy seeking to establish a global dictatorship. There are numerous variations on this theme: religious and secular, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Masonic, anti-capitalist and so on. In some versions of the New World Order, there is also the claim that the aim of the conspirators is to enslave or destroy the white race. Some conspiracists, in other words, are racial supremacists, and some are not.

The same is true of another frequently overlapping theme, anti-immigration. As has been true during other periods when anti-immigrant sentiment has been strong the 1890s, for example, or the 1920s it can be more or less racist. Not everyone seeking to limit or even ban immigration is a white supremacist, although some are. The mere presence of opposition to immigration is not, without further inquiry, evidence of white supremacist beliefs.

In light of the increasing migration of fringe themes into the mainstream, mentioned above, the real danger is that forms of white supremacism will insinuate themselves into mainstream American culture. There have already been attempts to do this in the South in the form of the so-called neo-Confederate movement, with its disingenuous claim that it is simply celebrating history and heritage. Something similar may appear elsewhere using such labels as Western civilization, Christian civilization or even Judeo-Christian civilization. Thus white supremacy may begin using code words that seem on the surface to be innocuous or even positive but in the eyes of the knowing are read through a racist lens.

3. The leadership of the white supremacist movement

The founders of most of the leading white supremacist organizations have died in the last decade or two: William L. Pierce,Ben Klassen, Richard Girnt Butler, Willis Carto and others. Who are the new leaders we should know about? Is there a difference in leadership style between the deceased older generation and the newer generation? Is there a leadership vacuum? If leaderless resistance was the reigning philosophy in the 1990s, are we still operating under that or have we moved on to other forms of organization?

Kaplan:The leaders of the white supremacist organizations of the 1980s have passed from the scene. Their dysfunctional compounds likeAryan Nationsor theCovenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord(CSA) are gone too, victims of civil suits, government suppression or simple ennui. The mail-order faiths, KlassensCreativityor PiercesCosmotheism, are down to a small handful of true believers. Battle-scarred remnants of the time, such as National SocialistHarold Covington, struggle to adapt to new times with ideas like his idyllicNorthwest migration initiativeseeking a white homeland in America and really quite good apocalyptic literature in his Northwest Trilogy Hill of the Ravens(2003), A Distant Thunder(2004), A Mighty Fortress(2005) as well as The Brigade(2007).

What remains is more potent overseas than in the United States. White power music, pioneered in the late 1970s byIan Stuart DonaldsonsSkrewdriver, flourishes throughout the world, including such decidedly non-Aryan redoubts as Jakarta. The skinhead movement is perhaps stronger than ever, especially where it benefits from a measure of government support and protection in places like Russia.

Evolutionary change is most dynamic outside the confines of white supremacy. In Europe a new generation of leaders has emerged to mainstream formerly explicitly National Socialist, racist or primitively nativist political parties. Groups like theSweden Democrats, theTrue Finnsor the FrenchNational Fronthave gone from the wilderness to contenders for power, just as the alt-right has emerged in the U.S. But none are explicitly white supremacist, even as they borrow heavily from traditional white supremacist ideas.

Like the leaders of the far right, the humble leaderless resistance idea has given way to a more dynamic successor in lone-wolf attacks. Leaderless resistance as posited originally by Texas KlansmanLouis Beamwas an expression of helplessness and despair. It was the equivalent of tilting at windmills, which succeeded primarily in the incarceration of a generation of skinheads, would-bePhineas Priests, bikers and simple sociopaths. While William L. Pierce could lionize serial killerJoseph Paul Franklinfrom the safe remove of anom de guerrein his novel Hunter, the current generation of lone wolves serve terrorist groups who are more than the state of mind organizations of the white supremacist world, enjoying considerable material and other support in the process.

It is a new day in the world of self-propelled violence. There are successes on occasion abroad.Anders Breivikcertainly comes to mind. But in America?

Michael:In my estimation, the most important leader isMatthew Heimbach, the leader of theTraditionalist Youth Network. He first gained notoriety in 2012, when he founded a White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland. Although he is only in his mid-20s, he is already an accomplished orator. He is also a very effective interlocutor when he gives interviews to the media. He evinces the hallmarks of what Eric Hoffer once called the True Believer. Heimbach does not flinch from street activism, despite the strident opposition he faces from various antifa counterprotesters. Furthermore, he advances a leftish white nationalist ideology which could potentially resonate with many disaffected young people. Finally, he has established ties with like-minded activists overseas includingAlexander Duginfrom Russia which gives his organization the semblance of an international movement. He reaches out to separatists from all racial and ethnic groups. At the present time, this might all seem inconsequential, but separatism seems to slowly be creeping into the national discourse, as evidenced by the push for Calexit.

Barkun:The first and even the second generation of white supremacist leadership has now virtually all died out, figures like William L. Pierce of the National Alliance and Richard Girnt Butler of the Aryan Nations. Not surprisingly, their organizations, small to begin with, collapsed shortly after their deaths. Neither they nor others in their cohort were succeeded by figures of comparable strength. OnlyDavid Dukeremains, a strange relic of the past. Even in white supremacys heyday, none of its leaders could command more than small followings. Like the extreme left, those at the other end of the ideological spectrum often spent as much time fighting one another as combating their supposed enemies. Small points of ideology and tactics counted heavily in these duels. Those who had dreams of uniting racialists under a single banner quickly learned that such ambitions were destined to founder.

At the moment, three figures seem of more than passing importance, although given the movements history, they may pass quickly into obscurity:Richard B. Spencerof theNational Policy Institute, prominent on the alt-right; Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Youth Network; and Andrew Anglin of the onlineDaily Stormerwebsite. But there is no reason to believe that they will drive the white supremacist right over the longer term.

It is easy to concentrate on organizations, websites and the people associated with them, because they are visible and easy to identify. However, the danger of violence by individuals acting alone so-called lone wolf attacks remains and, in my view, is far more serious than the threat posed by organizations. The danger is high precisely because, absent unusually good intelligence, they normally become known only after the fact, as in the infamous 2011 attacks in Norway by Anders Breivik.

In that connection, attention needs to be paid to those known as sovereign citizens, who are potential lone wolves. Sovereign citizens do not constitute a movement. Rather, they represent a stream of anti-government thought and activity, built around the belief that traditional conceptions of American citizenship, law and institutions are invalid and that, consequently, no individual has any obligation to obey the law. This idea is based on a radically variant reading of the Constitution and the common law that makes each person, in effect, a law unto him- or herself. While the sovereign citizen idea is not in itself based on white supremacy, the two overlap. Some sovereign citizens have also been white supremacists, and the very nature of sovereign citizen thought deprives civil rights protections of any legitimacy. It follows, too, that the failure of sovereign citizens to accept any legal obligations inevitably involves them in conflicts with the government and, not infrequently, in violent and sometimes deadly incidents.

Next week: How do we deal with organized white supremacy? What do we get wrong about it?

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The Alt-Right Is the Modern, Hideous Face of White Supremacy - AlterNet

Inquistion in Egypt, image courtesy of Nader Sadek

"Satanist", to them, equals homosexuality; killing cats and drinking their blood "

"Suddenly, in front of me, hell broke loose. It was bad. So bad They are hitting you everywhere and they are pushing you in every direction and they had dogs People started to faint and I thought it to be wise to throw yourself under a pile of fainting people. Play dead! Play dead!"

'Omar', speaking to the writer Benjamin Harbert about his internment as a "Satanist" in 1998.

EGYPT 1996/1997

At 4am on 22 January 1997 armed Egyptian state police forcibly entered the homes of about 100 young people, including - according to one source - a 13-year-old girl, and arrested them. They were imprisoned for up to two weeks. According to one, who wishes to remain anonymous, they were beaten, sexually abused, attacked by dogs, and left isolated for extended periods. Their crime? They were accused of Satanism, of "dead cat blood drinking, sex orgies, insane drug use."

A group of Islamist extremists who were also being held were informed they would be sharing their quarters with the "Satanists". That caused a riot so severe that the "Satanists" were transferred to another jail. "We started to hear shouts from far away. Shouts, screams from a faraway place " one victim remembered, speaking under the pseudonym Omar to the writer Benjamin Harbert for his essay on the events, Noise And Its Formless Shadows, compiled in the book The Arab Avant-Garde. "We realised that the sounds of the screams of the night were because the Islamists of the same prison were told that the Satanists were in the same prison as them, and they decided to revolt they wanted to kill us."

Omar's real crime, and the crime of nearly 100 of his friends, was not Satanism. It was a love of heavy metal. Egypt's metal scene had been in rude health the previous year. Metal in Egypt had been no more than a cult in its infancy, sustained by bootleg culture until the advent of satellite TV. By 1996 metal had become a mainstream force in the nation's musical fabric, with all manner of satellite, experimental scenes. Young fans would congregate in bars like Khaled Madani's Doom Club, and at the Qsar al-Barun ("The Baron's Place"), an abandoned villa in Heliopolis.

In November 1996, however, the Egyptian tabloid Ruz al-Yusuf, received an anonymous fax, detailing supposed 'satanic rituals' on the outskirts of Cairo and Alexandria, sparking media outrage and prompting a hysterical fear of metal culture in Egypt. On 9 December, Ruz al-Yusufprinted a 'call to action' against metal, which led to the arrests a month later. As one fan tells tQ anonymously: "The stories - whether real or not - did shock society (and our mothers). Unlike South-East Asia and South America, Egypt had no rock history, so no one knew anything about rock & roll traditions and excesses. Facepaint, blood and Satan was quite shocking for society. The crackdown happened and that was what all the media spoke about for two weeks. I still think it was ridiculous, though I'm not denying how traumatising it must have been to whoever was arrested."

One particularly melodramatic newspaper account, cited in The Arab Avant-Garde read: "Children had swapped beer and whisky for the blood of cats and pigeons and been tattooed with skills and other symbols of the occult Hard rock was played as the fans dug through the graves in search of human bones that could be 'gifted' to the devil."

There were other, more sinister reasons for the crackdown. As Harbert explained: "It was a political strategy that had nothing to do with metal or even Satanism directly. The government needed a distraction from two issues: the rapid privatisation of the public sector (initiated by Mubarak's sweeping cabinet changes) and the intensifying criticism from exiled and imprisoned Islamic extremists accusing Egypt of being anti-Islam. Interior minister Hassan El Alfy became a national hero through his involvement with this crackdown on metal, though none of those arrested were ever convicted of a crime

"The government's brutal crackdown, informed by its high stakes wrangling with radical Islamic groups, was a calculated strategy that held up this group of 'practising Satanists' as a straw man against which to redefine its defence of Islam. It also provided a welcome distraction from the radical privatisation of the public sector. The practice of persecuting the metal communities then spread across the Arab world to Morocco, Bahrain and Jordan."

LEBANON BLAAKYUM

The leader of Lebanese thrash metal outliers Blaakyum, Bassem Deaibess, sees parallels between the events in Egypt and in his own career. His band have flown the flag for the nation's fertile metal scene for more than 20 years, during which he has twice been detained by the authorities, first in 1998 and again in 2002, caught in the wake of a similar anti-metal witch hunt. Just as in Egypt, metal fans were demonised by the authorities, and scapegoated to distract the population.

Speaking to tQ before participating in a discussion at Chatham House in London under the title 'Art As Defiance In The Middle East', he explains that the health of the metal scene in his home country has its peaks and troughs. "It goes up and down. Before 96 metal was huge; in the 80s during the civil war there were bands - I'd see the pictures, they had massive audiences, metal was just a regular thing you played in clubs. But then in 96 the first witch hunt happened, the whole Satanism and backward messaging stuff."

As in Egypt, these witch hunts coincided with political scandals that needed to be buried. "Every time there's something going on and you need to distract from what the institution is facing, you need to say 'oh look at these people'," Deaibess says. "The headlines were 'Hard rock music and backwards messaging is threatening the safety of our children', 'heavy metal and Satanism is infecting our society', such ridiculous stories. You'd turn on the TV and half of the news would be talking about metal and showing reports about how bad and horrible the music is. They incite mass hysteria and mass fear. When you're scared of your child being infected by this disease, you don't pay attention to what laws are being passed. Metal is a good scapegoat because it has all the elements that scare society. Politicians and religious institutions rule by striking fear. You need something that would scare people, and what's better than people who look strange, with long hair and earrings and headbanging and moshing? It's so alien in a conservative country like Lebanon. The people are extremely conservative, extremely religious, and extremely superstitious. The problem is not just the authorities, it's the mentality of the society, the prejudice and the discrimination against anyone that doesn't look like a regular Lebanese person."

'Alien' is certainly the word. When Deaibess was arrested in 1998, the questions he was asked would have seemed comical were it not for the gravity of what was at stake. "This guy with a big moustache sits down and says: 'So! What do you do when you see a black cat?' And I said: 'Well, I pet the cat.' They would say: 'But how do you pet the cat?' and then ask: 'Do you read The Koran upside down?' You could make a sitcom out of it." Deaibess got off relatively lightly; he says the band Kaoteon were beaten, stuffed in the boot of a car and faced nine days' imprisonment after their gig was raided because police believed their then name, Chaotaeon, translated into Arabic as "devils".

But what of the Lebanese metal scene in the years since? The years 2005 to 2010 saw a golden age of sorts, with 50 active metal bands selling out 2,000-capacity venues - not bad for a country with a population of around 4 million. In the years since, the scene has shrunk, but Deaibess says it remains stable, although prejudice still remains. "The worst thing is when you're walking the street, you see a mother who drags her child away from you and crosses the road - you're seen as this disgusting person."

That said, as a metal musician in Lebanon today, the scene is relatively fertile. "I like to think we have the best metal scene in the Middle East." There is still ignorance, of course - finding a sound person with the requisite knowledge of the genre to know that the distortion is in fact intentional can be a struggle when it comes to touring - but Deaibess says the metal community is as tolerant as can be in Lebanon's multi-faith, multi-ethnic society.

"It's very rare that anyone would ask your religion at a metal event. Of course it has its flaws, but the metal scene in Lebanon is the least sexist, the most tolerant when it comes to religion, it's one of the very few communities in Lebanon that's tolerant to atheists, any sexual orientation, no problem. No one would ever ask you. We did have at a certain point in time a segregation between communities, because areas in Lebanon are separated by religion, but not any more. Our community is very diverse, you have the really religious Christians and the really religious Muslims, the atheists, they're all together having fun, and arguing too."

SAUDI ARABIA AL NAMROOD

It is a different story in Saudi Arabia. Al Namrood, whose utterly uncompromising and utterly brilliant new album Enkar was released in May, are the country's only black metal band, one of the most intense musical forces in the world, let alone the Middle East, but must remain anonymous for their own safety. Their music takes a fearless stance against the country's authoritarian regime, and were they to be identified they would be stoned to death or beheaded for apostasy; CDs had to be smuggled into the country as contraband. When guitarsneed to be repaired, they have to be smuggled out.

A member of the band known only as 'Mephisto' spoke to tQ via email. "Metal is a good way of expression in this wretched world," he says, when asked just what keeps him motivated to continue despite the risks. He began playing guitar in 2006, having been directed to the genre online by "anger, hate and aggression" and a need for "intense, meaningful music with a strong vibe". Two years later, Al Namrood began.

"We look at the world as a free hub, where every human being is entitled to choose their way of life," Mephisto says, outlining the group's philosophy. "This is strongly defied in our society, [because they] fear that freedom is going to break religion. Most importantly, we do not tolerate any ideology to be forcefully shoved into our throat. The prospective is simple: just don't stay in our way and we won't stay in yours."

Yet the consequences of pursuing that ideology could be fatal. "Of course we worry, we can never guarantee that we will be safe," he says. They do not face day to day problems and prejudices as metal fans, simply because to give any indication of their allegiances would be a compromise of their life or death insistence on total anonymity. This extends to playing live. "We dont know if we ever will play [live] or just keep Al Namrood as studio project. We have to balance our wishes with the reality, if playing live will take us to execution, then we won't do it." It goes without saying that there is no visible metal 'scene' in the country. If there are any other bands in addition to Al Namrood, they remain utterly isolated from each other. "We keep hearing there are other black metal bands in the area, but we've seen none. When we started in the beginning we tried to get close to some various local bands but they rejected us due to our message and context of music."

Despite all of this, Al Namrood's music remains totally defiant. The video for 'Nabth' (which translates as 'Ostracised') is a ferocious case in point. The clip makes use of violent, difficult footage, of protests, riots and police brutality from across the Middle East, coupled with close-up shots of their own album artwork where Satanic, bearded figures wield knives and snakes under a sky painted an apocalyptic red, while a caged populace despairs.

Thanks to support from outside the country, Al Namrood have managed to reach a relatively wide audience globally, but to leave the country would be nearly impossible. "Immigration [is] very tight nowadays and the nationalists and conservative parties are becoming more lunatic toward immigrants. The political tension is this world is miserable and as a result, people became more xenophobic at some level. But say it loudly: this earth doesn't belong to anyone. Wherever we reside we will survive and do what we want, regardless of any obstacles."

ISRAEL MELECHESH

Melechesh come from Jerusalem, but they are now based in Germany. They are not Israeli or Palestinian, but from a "a small diaspora in Jerusalem of Armenians and Syrians, a very unique situation," as their formidable guitarist and frontman Ashmedi puts it. However with band members all over the world, and a high profile in the world of metal - they are signed to Nuclear Blast and play to crowds of tens of thousands they prefer to think of themselves as being from planet earth; Jerusalem is merely a point of origin.

That said, the region still bears its influence in his work. The mythology of Mesopotamia, in particular, though appropriated often by other bands, makes its presence felt - stories of the occult, the beginnings of man, and even pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories of ancient aliens revered in the region as gods, reinterpreted within the genre. "We are Armenians and Syrians," Ashmedi says. "A lot of the mythology from the region, the Sumerian, Babylonian, that is our mythology. A lot of bands around the world always toy with those kind of ideas or use a band names from a deity. We have our great, rich culture, and we might as well dive into it and represent it musically."

That's not to say that Melechesh want their background to be used as a mere promotional device. "We want to be responsible and make sure it's quality [music]. We don't want to be relying on it as a gimmick. We also want to have a credible approach to your music that is accessible to people: they don't know why they like it, it just sounds good, and not a one-trick pony. That's what we set about doing, and now we're an internationally recognised band with good sales, and insane concerts and festivals and tours, and I've made my living off it basically for the last 11 years."

The popularity of metal in Israel, and the fertile ground in which Melechesh made their name (they were the first non-Jewish group to get signed there) is also down in part to collapse of the Soviet Union, which saw a mass migration of around a million Russian Jews to the country as they were finally granted permission to leave Russia and the other former Soviet republics.

As for the modern politics of the region, there might be allusions and parallels drawn between the myths they delve into and the present day - 'Lost Tribes', for example, on the band's 2015 record Enki, can be read to have "a lot to do with Isis." However, Ashmedi is keen to point out: "Until [the West] find a new great villain away from the Middle East, it's going to still have negative connotations. Maybe 20-30 years it's going to be the nicest place for them to go make movies where they are the allies, not the villains.We don't play the game of politics, we transcend it. As a self-thinking person I have my opinions but I do not discuss them. The band Melechesh transcend that. We talk about the cosmic stuff, we show the beauty, the magic, the spice of the Middle East. All you see on TV is women's abuse, religion and war, and oil. Always negative stories, from the cradle of civilisation. There's so much more good than bad there, so I want to show that with the art."

On occasion, however, Ashmedi has been been caught up in the familiar cycle of sensationalised Satanism. In 1995, when they were still based in their home city, the demo release that saw them make waves in Israel's metal scene, As Jerusalem Burns (also the title of their debut album the following year), caught the eyes of the tabloid press. "We were approached by a big newspaper, and they used the headline 'A Satanic cult is existing is Jerusalem.' We were shocked. The authorities were suddenly interested in meeting me, but Ashmedi is my stage name so they couldn't find us. The newspaper at least did say 'They didn't kill anyone, we're not giving you their information.' However, the police then started arresting a lot of metalheads, so we kind of laid low. I left the country for a little bit, for two months. When I came back, they had much bigger problems - they forgot about us."

Once or twice the band have found themselves caught in the edge of the region's conflicts. Ashmedi remembers a bus exploding above the band's basement studio. They were playing so loud that they didn't hear it, only to emerge four hours later to dark, empty streets and worried families. "It was the 90s, lots of buses had been blowing up," Ashmedi says. "It was 50 metres away from us that the bus blew up, and my mum had seen it on TV. All our parents were freaking out, because they closed the road, and there's no phone, nothing, we were busy playing music. We went out four hours later and it was dark. We just saw a couple of police cars and they're cleaning the street, as if nothing happened."

In 1998 Melechesh relocated to Europe, first to the Netherlands, and then to Germany, although Israel for the most part was not an intolerant place to be a metal fan. "Israel is quite liberal to the Israelis, and to the Westerners," Ashmedi says. "Tel Aviv is one of the most liberal places in the world, and in Jerusalem there's a liberals as well as the religious people. In West Jerusalem where the Israeli and Jewish communities are, if they see a headbanger they don't care about it. They see anyone who's not a Hasidic Jew as not a Hasidic Jew, they don't see it as headbanger or not headbanger. And the liberals, they don't give a shit. In East Jerusalem, in the Arabic side, [metal] was new because there wasn't any headbangers there, so when I walked there with long hair with spikes and stuff they looked at me weirdly. But then [also] they knew I'm the foreign guy, the Armenian-Turkish guy."

Things have improved further still, and an underground metal band can draw a healthy crowd of 100 or so depending on their network, which this in part is thanks to Melechesh's status as trailblazers of the genre. "People are now actually proud of us, and in a Palestinian Time Out magazine Melechesh was the first artist of the month to have been been black metal." That said, as Ashmedi points out, Israel is "a very controversial, unique place, and I'm not a spokesperson or an ambassador for Israel. There's multiple societies in one country, and it differs [from one society to another]. If you're in East Jerusalem there's a few rockers but not one CD in the shops or anyone playing any rock songs, it just doesn't exist. If you're in West Jerusalem, it's still a niche but there are one or two rock bars that occasionally play metal. In Tel Aviv there's a couple of international bands playing there."

It was the practical benefits of moving to Europe rather than any drawbacks in Israeli society that prompted their relocation. "It's more fun being in Israel, like in Tel Aviv or something, because people are more social and there's a buzz there, but also there's less facilities. In Germany it's the metal centre of the world, it's part of their DNA, you see metal music on commercials. In Germany it's part of the culture; in Israel it's just a unique subculture."

IRAN AKVAN

In Iran, a musician known as Vizaresa wants to alter unfair perceptions of his country through his singular project Akvan. His focus is on the pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian Iran, using traditional instruments as part of a claustrophobic, uncompromising breed of genuinely terrifying black metal, drawing on the rich landscapes and deep Persian mythology of the area. The name Akvan comes from the name of a demon in the Shahnameh, the national epic poem of Iran, the antagonist of the god of Zoroastrianism, Ahura Mazda.

Before the Islamic revolution of 1979, Vizaresa's parents left Iran for the United States, where he spent a childhood enraptured by the power of heavy metal. "It moves me in a way nothing else can. For me, listening to metal is a very visceral and emotional experience. I am inspired by other forms of music, but metal is something different altogether. In the same vein as classical Western or [traditional Iranian] Sonati music, it's just so much more epic and intense. It's difficult to express in words. The lyrical content often deals with confrontational topics that require and encourage individual thought."

For the last few years he has been based in Iran, "to gain a better understanding of my ancestral home", and he releases his music via Bandcamp, on a tremendous series of EPs that take on themes like the ancient Persian hero Cyrus the Great. Speaking via email, he expresses a deep love for his country. "I hope to inspire fans and curious passers-by to conduct their own research into the ancient and epic history of Iran. Hopefully, they will come away with a more positive outlook in regard to this beautiful country. They will probably find that the Iran they hear about on their television set is nothing like the real thing," he says. "I would like them to see Iran as it is - an ancient, captivating and ecologically diverse land filled with romance, adventure, amazing people, exquisite cuisine, gorgeous art, a lustrous history, and a culture that has influenced every corner of the globe. For some odd reason, we are taught to judge nations based on their leaders and governments, and we lose sight of the actual people who live there. It's a shame, really. We have so much to gain from embracing one another, and so much to lose when we reject the opportunity to do so. And I hope my music, a mix of East and West, will serve as a model of what can be achieved when two different and seemingly unrelated elements are joined as one."

However hearfelt his love for Iran, however, in his approach to the ancient past Vizaresa takes a direct stance against the current Iranian regime, and although the stakes are not quite as high as in Saudi Arabia, like Al Namrood he has chosen to remain largely anonymous for the sake of his art. "As any scholar of history would know, Islam is not the original religion of Iran. Just like Christianity in Norway, Islam was forced on the Zoroastrian population through conquest and war. And as a result, our original culture faded, sort of. Although Islam was adopted, the Iranian culture largely survived. Since the thematic and lyrical elements of Akvan promote a return to pre-Islamic Iran, many of my songs are intended as opposition anthems."

He says he has to "play it safe", to avoid repercussions. Being a musician is not a crime in Iran, but "underground musicians, especially practitioners of metal, are automatically associated with devil-worship, blasphemy, apostasy, and expressing anti-regime sentiment. The punishment for these charges if found guilty: death." Working in his public life as a behavioural analyst, helping children and adults with autism, he says he looks like "the last person you'd suspect" of being a black metal musician. "I don't really talk about my music or personal beliefs outside of trusted circles and refrain from making a public spectacle of myself," Vizaresa continues. "I don't wear band T-shirts with overt themes of blasphemy and the occult in public. I think it also has a lot to do with my personality and my professional career. Regardless of where I am in the world, I have to maintain a professional appearance."

In Iran, social media websites are blocked. Circumnavigating that with a VPN slows internet speeds to the point where uploading a song onto YouTube becomes an ordeal. Meanwhile any "Western" music has to be acquired from underground bootleg shops, which mostly sell pop and rarely metal. As such, any developing Iranian metal scene is somewhat scattered and stilted. "No bands tour here, local or international. Merch? Forget about it. So yeah, not a real happening place for metal fans," says Vizaresa, who has never played or even attended a live show. The only option for gigs are taken at bands' own risks in secluded locations - a house party beyond the city limits, for example. "I've heard that in the past, certain venues allowed bands to perform without vocals for a few limited shows, although audience members were required to remain seated throughout the performance. This obviously didn't last long."

As a US citizen, Vizaresa has the option to return to the States and avail himself of regular shows, self-expression, and a chance to capitalise on the waves his work has made in the West. Given the metal scene in Iran is, as he puts it, so "scattered and isolated", it does raise the question of why exactly he remains. "I actually like it here," he says. "I mean, life here certainly has its issues and there are things I see everyday that I am completely opposed to, but the same could be said of the US and most anywhere in the world. The general population, the people of Iran, not the government, are very modern, sophisticated, and hospitable. The culture here is infinitely rich and the streets have a very vibrant feel to them. It also helps that the local cuisine is absolutely delicious. Almost everywhere you turn, there is some historical landmark accompanied by its own myths and legends."

Vizaresa's is a different Iran, a country defined not by the images of tyranny and repression we're often shown, but by its ordinary culture and rich history. "It's actually quite sad and frustrating, because here you have this amazing place, filled to the brim with breathtaking landscapes, culture, history, and a noble people, and on the other hand you have this stuff that completely ruins it. I guess that's why I do what I do. I try to invoke a sense of return to the majesty, to the Iran that was and still can be."

EGYPT TWENTY YEARS ON

Inquisition, live in Cairo, 2016

In Egypt today, though many remain wary because of the events of the past, for the most part the nation's metal scene has largely re-emerged. As an anonymous fan puts it: "I really think the state and authorities also have matured and on the contrary would rather have kids busy with riffs, Satan and drugs than politics, no?"

In 2015, however, one member of the scene, Nader Sadek, found himself facing trouble after booking the legendary American black metal band Inquisition for a show. "People watched with jaws on the floor," he tells tQ. "Four hundred people came to the show - it was amazing." He'd had successful shows in the past that had gone without a hitch, both as a performer and promoting bands such as Aborted and Alkaloid, but two days after the Inquisition show there were claims from the country's Musicians Syndicate about the gig that echoed the sensationalised events of 1997. "[It was claimed we were] all cloaked in stars of David, with a Qatari DJ performing, and together we were worshipping the devil. Of course it was all nonsense." The head of the Syndicate, Hany Shaker, said Satanic music was being brought to Egypt as part of a Western conspiracy to spread "chaos and immorality".

The Syndicate later claimed it was merely concerned that the bands playing did not have the correct permits, but Sadek scored a victory when he appeared with one of its representatives on Egyptian national television. "The hostess was educated and we basically exposed the Syndicate: uneducated, uncultured and inconsistent in their lies," he says. "In an attempt to salvage themselves they said it was a case of missing permits, which made them look worse, as they basically admitted to lying."

Yet in a key progression from the reaction that metal fans received 20 years ago, there was far less public hysteria. "Something quite amazing happened," he says. "The intellectual media came to my defence, and so did [high-profile Egyptian billionaire businessman] Naguib Sawiris. The Syndicate was ridiculed." His battle for what he sees as freedom of expression within heavy metal is far from over, however. Last year, his plans to bring Brazilian metal legends Sepultura to the country were shut down, and Sadek was arrested. He is currently involved in a legal battle with Hany Shaker, the head of the Musician's Union, whom he is suing for defamation and libel. Worrying, too, is the fact that in 2015 the Egyptian government granted the Syndicate powers of arrest, though some Egyptian musicians believe the practical effect of that is simply to make it easier for the Syndicate to extort bribes in order to let shows go ahead.

Heavy Metal in the Middle East

Fans enjoy Inquisition, live in Cairo, 2016

These interviews cover just five countries, and comprise just snapshots of Middle Eastern heavy metal. It would be impossible to surmise its place among host of nations, each with its own cultural, religious and geographical pecularities. There is no such single definition of a Middle Eastern metalhead some have endured torture and imprisonment, others risk their lives on a daily basis and must isolate themselves in the extreme for the love of their art, while others lead the way for diverse, accepting creative communities.

The common thread between them all, however, is of utter devotion to their craft, whatever the consequences. There is something about metal as a genre, so often the refuge of music's true outsiders, that has always bred an extra edge to the dedication of its fans. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Al-Namrood's insistence to keep risking death for their cause, in the persistence of a band like Blaakyum, for whom another witch hunt could begin at any moment, in Akvan and Melechesh's defiant promotion of the region's beauty, history, and above all, people.

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Witch Hunts, Resurgence and Defiance: Heavy Metal In The Middle East - The Quietus

Following the first part of this series, where the historical origins of modern white supremacy were explored in depth, and asubsequent essaythatexamined the ways white supremacy has influenced mainstream American politics, here are three of the nations foremost scholars on white supremacy, discussing similar issues at length.

Jeffrey Kaplan is associate professor of religion at the University of WisconsinOshkosh. His books include Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements From the Far Right to the Children of Noah; Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture (co-edited with Tore Bjrgo); and The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (with Leonard Weinberg).

George J. Michael is associate professor in the criminal justice faculty at Westfield State University in Massachusetts. He is the author of Confronting Right-Wing Extremism and Terrorism in the USA; The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam and the Extreme Right; Willis Carto and the American Far Right; and Theology of Hate: A History of the World Church of the Creator.

Michael Barkun is professor emeritus of political science in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His books include A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America; Religion and the Racist Right:The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement; and Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11.

1. What is the alt-right?

Is the contemporary alt-right a continuation of late 20th-century American white supremacist movements, or are there new components? Besides the new use of technology, are there ideological elements to the alt-right that we should take notice of? What happened to some of the exotic ideas floating around in the 1980s and 90s, such as occult Nazism and pagan religions? Did they become assimilated into the alt-right, or did those more esoteric veins fade out?

Jeffrey Kaplan: The so-called alt-right seemed to descend from the ether in the fading twilight of the Obama administration. The alt-right quickly seized the stage as the acceptable face of the radical right, which since the violence of the 1980s had been demonized and banished from the American public square. The process is common enough in American extremism. In 1963 the racist fringe was banished from the anti-communist fervor of the John Birch Society, just as the 19th-century Know Nothings came to be excluded from the politer society of American nativism. America, after all, is a vast smorgasbord in which individuals, religions and political movements may pick and choose among the tropes on offer.

The alt-right follows this pattern to a T. Picking and choosing from a variety of established conspiratorial, racist and outright paranoid ideas, leavened with a catchy jargon like deep state which is far more PC than ZOG or Zionist Occupation Government, which held primacy in the American radical right since the 1970s the alt-right was tailor-made for the discontented and dispossessed faithful of the far right.

Following British sociologist Colin Campbell in the 1960s, scholars have borrowed the term cultic milieu to describe the process by which oppositional individuals sample ideas, theories and wild suppositions that are the stuff of which movements are born, flourish and, most often, perish in anonymity, completely unknown to the dominant culture. This is the origin of the alt-right, and will most likely be its fate as well.

The occult and esoteric racist movements from the fringes of National Socialism to elements of explicit Satanism still exist in the wilderness of the cultic milieu, but their numbers are much diminished. The peregrinations of David Myatt are a case in point. Myatt, who drifted from Buddhist beliefs to National Socialism under the spell of Colin Jordan in Britain, went on to found the Order of Nine Angles, the most successful racist esoteric organization combining Satanism and National Socialism in the 1980s and 90s. Tiring of the scene and despairing of the quality of the recruits, he took his shahada and converted to radical Islam in the shadow of 9/11 and 7/7. In this he moved from the most distant fringes of the cultic milieu to a more potent global system of belief. Lately, however, he has taken on the cross, converting to Orthodox Christianity and embracing a message of universal love and reconciliation. Myatt is the cultic milieu personified and living proof that the esoteric white supremacist ideas of the 1980s live on, albeit on life support.

The alt-right is, however, different in significant ways from its predecessors. For one, it is not simply an American made-for-export idea, as was the racialism that American intellectuals marketed internationally in the 19th century as racist anthropology or that which the anti-communist zealots spread with much less success in the 1950s.

Rather, it mixed American nativist tropes with the growing fears of immigration and Islamization that have become acute in the European Union. More remarkable still, it fell easily under the spell of Vladimir Putins Russia, whose hybrid warfare campaign against the West and the world is simply a 21st-century update of the Soviet disinformation campaigns that were called Active Measuresin the Cold War. Putins Russia now caters to the far right globally, and as the Trump scandals now unfolding in Washington indicate, found in the alt-right perfect rubes who, for a few dollars and a grand delusion of power and global glory, would gladly ignore logic and history in pursuit of a dream of an America relatively untroubled by such putative enemies as Black Lives Matter; immigrants bent on rape, rapine and terrorism; and the dread legions of the politically correct.

George J. Michael: There is some continuity between the alt-right and extreme-right groups from the late 20th century. David Duke, for example, has long been a prominent spokesman of the white nationalist movement. In fact, he in some ways spearheaded a change in the ideological direction away from a supremacist/hate orientation to a more identitarian orientation.

The exotic ideas, including occult Nazism and pagan religions, continue to inform the movement. Mostly, their influence can be found in the forms of iconography informing white nationalist websites and assorted insignia. Norse neo-paganism is often seen as a more suitable religion for white nationalists, insofar as contemporary Christianity is seen as philo-Semitic and pro-multiculturalism.

Michael Barkun: The sudden public emergence of the alt-right during the 2016 presidential campaign raises the question of whether it is simply the continuation of a long-standing white supremacist movement or constitutes a completely new development. That is not an easy question to answer, since the alt-right is not itself a cohesive movement. Rather, it is best understood as a set of groups and individuals that share a family resemblance, knit together by an intense hostility to immigration and a fear that the white population and what the alt-right conceives as Western culture will be submerged in a non-white sea. The alt-right is dominated by white nationalists and contains anti-Semites as well as some neo-Nazis, but also others of a less reprehensible stripe.

The more interesting and disturbing issue is the alt-rights rising visibility. Whatever people mean by the alt-right, it is an element of right-wing extremism that suddenly became a factor in Donald Trumps campaign. Its highly vocal support for Trump was widely covered by the media, the attitude of the campaign toward it was analyzed, and its possible electoral effect was discussed, even though its numbers appeared minuscule and no figure of any political stature was known to be associated with it. That so seemingly marginal a group of political actors should have attracted so much attention is itself odd indeed, in hindsight, now that the campaign is over, it seems stranger still.

Yet the public emergence of the alt-right is on reflection a manifestation of a larger transformation in American culture namely, the gradual penetration of the fringe into the mainstream. This is a development that transcends politics, although it has important political implications. It began in the early 1990s and has thus been underway for about a quarter of a century. Conspicuous examples have appeared in popular culture, including Dan Browns best-selling novels with occult and conspiracist themes, as well as The X-Files television program, and it has been critically accelerated by the internet and such social media as Facebook and Twitter. Without the traditional barriers of editorial gatekeepers, fringe material could now access and command mass audiences. Just as fringe themes could penetrate popular culture, so fringe politics is no longer shut up in segregated subcultures.

We see this, too, in the avid popular consumption of conspiracy theories, and there has been no greater consumer of them than Donald Trump himself. Trump, after all, was the first high-visibility proponent of the Obama birther legend. During the campaign he gave a half-hour interview to Alex Jones, the countrys leading purveyor of conspiracy theories. Trumps constant campaign refrain of immigrant wrongdoing smacks of a plot by foreigners to destroy America.

It is scarcely surprising that against this background the alt-rights appearance acquired a certain quasi-legitimacy, despite its white supremacist credentials. It seemed to be simply a slightly more strident set of outsider anti-immigrant propagandists, in a campaign that already had an outsider candidate.

The role of the alt-right in the 2016 campaign, alongside the broader movement of fringe motifs into the mainstream, suggests a political future that once seemed inconceivable: the potential public re-emergence of a white supremacist organization, something not seen in America since the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. While still unlikely, the 2016 trajectory of the alt-right may prefigure more extreme open white supremacist political forays in the future.

2. The strength and leadership of the white supremacist movement

How strong is white supremacy in this country? Is it getting stronger, is it a declining movement or has it remained stable from when you first began your research? Was the 1990s Patriot movement the heyday of white supremacy? Are there things people label white supremacy that we should more properly put outside that framework? Which white supremacist group(s) do you find most intriguing today from a scholarly viewpoint?

Kaplan: White supremacy, like the poor, will be with us always. It is the nagging voice in even the most racially enlightened among us when they find themselves walking at night in Hyde Park in Chicago or contemplating a trip to Detroit. Once, it was a mainstream idea as many of the most idealistic young American men, fired by the racial threat depicted in D.W. Griffiths The Birth of a Nation, sent their money to the mail-order Klan in exchange for a newsletter, a bizarre lexicon and a copy of the Kloran. With the legislative victories of the civil rights movement and a concerted push from Hollywood, it faded from polite society and the movements that held true to the racist call were banished to the most distant fringes of the cultic milieu.

This is where I found them when I began my research among their number in the late 1980s. They were a battered and demoralized lot. Identity Christians held fast to their esoteric interpretations of the Bible; National Socialists treasured their SS-inspired regalia and propitiated the shade of Adolf Hitler as if the Second World War were merely on hiatus; and Odinists drank bloats, rode motorcycles and formed prison gangs. The Patriot movement was never really among their number. Like the Birch Society of the 1960s, race for them was a distraction from the more important work of decoding the manifold conspiracies which, in the words of the iconic (and African-American!) Last Poets, Keep the people asleep and the truth from being told.

Early in the new millennium, I left the world of participant/observer research into the radical right in search of new and more potent oppositional ideas. None of the white supremacist constellation were intriguing simply because no new ideas, fresh movements or visionary leaders were on the horizon. I would argue, perhaps alone in this forum, that white supremacy as we have known it remains for the moment moribund. What we see today, the red meat of the alt-right and the popular fears that led to the election of Donald Trump, speaks to broader dreads Islamophobia, immigration and the ever-present other rather than an appeal for White Power. Racism is a powerful ingredient in the stew, but it is no more the leitmotif of what we are seeing today than is traditional America First nativism.

Michael: That is really the $64,000 question. It is very difficult to quantify the size of the white nationalist movement in America. There is no viable political party that advocates for its interest, unlike far-right parties in Europe.

The movement seemed to have gone into decline during the 2000s. The movement suffered a number of casualties as several leaders died (e.g., William L. Pierce, Sam Francis, Richard Girnt Butlerand Willis Carto) and a number of others were arrested and incarcerated (Matt Hale, Chester Doles, Kevin Alfred Strom).

The Patriot movement differed quite a bit from the white nationalist movement over ideology, to wit, on the issue of race. The Patriot movement began a steep decline not long after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (as measured by the number of groups compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center). However, in recent years, the movement seems to have reinvented itself under the label of preppers and once again is gaining momentum.

The late 1990s seemed to be the heyday for the white nationalist movement in America. The movement had not suffered any major repression from the federal government since the Fort Smith sedition trial of 1988. During the 1990s, the movement took advantage of the fledging medium of the internet to get its message out to a larger audience. But after 9/11, the movement experienced quite a few prosecutions from the federal government. Moreover, after 9/11, the American public did not seem receptive to the white nationalist movements message of white racial solidarity. After 9/11, there was an upsurge of American patriotism. Conservative-leaning Americans were not amenable to white separatism; instead, a new form of patriotism gained currency that viewed the country as under attack from anti-democratic, religious extremists in the form of militant Islam. The extreme rights critique of the U.S. governments pro-Israel foreign policy seemed unpatriotic. As a result, the extreme right languished for quite some time during the 2000s.

In recent years, however, issues involving race have gained great salience, including immigration, the ideology of multiculturalism and the prominence of language policing under the rubric of political correctness. The white nationalist movement was well-prepared to provide commentary on these issues. As a result, the movement seems to be gaining relevance once again.

Are there things people label white supremacy that we should more properly put outside that framework? Yes, for example, immigration. People who do not consider themselves to be white nationalists are nevertheless concerned about immigration because of its costs to taxpayers, as well as its impact on employment prospects for native-born Americans, the cost of health care, etc. Furthermore, many ordinary people are rejecting the restrictiveness of political correctness on the discourse in America.

Barkun:The present strength of the white supremacist movement has always been notoriously difficult to measure. The movement I use the word advisedly, as a term of art has always been riven by factionalism, and no group wants to divulge membership numbers except in the most grossly inflated forms. It is fair to say that right-wing extremism probably peaked in the early 1990s, when the Christian Identity movement was still vibrant and before paramilitary organizations had attracted the full attention of the federal government after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1993.

There are clearly still militia groups active, some with apparently aggressive agendas. The Hutaree Militia in the Midwest was one such case, although despite substantial evidence of an impending attack, its principal leaders were acquitted of the most serious charges in a 2012 trial. The Aryan Strikeforce leaders in the mid-Atlantic states were recently indicted before their plans could unfold. However, there is no evidence that these or other recent paramilitary activities have been linked or coordinated.

The conceptual difficulty lies in separating out the white supremacist element from other beliefs that are often associated with it. For example, virtually everyone on the extreme right is a conspiracist, buying into ideas about what is termed the New World Order the belief that there is an overarching conspiracy seeking to establish a global dictatorship. There are numerous variations on this theme: religious and secular, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-Masonic, anti-capitalist and so on. In some versions of the New World Order, there is also the claim that the aim of the conspirators is to enslave or destroy the white race. Some conspiracists, in other words, are racial supremacists, and some are not.

The same is true of another frequently overlapping theme, anti-immigration. As has been true during other periods when anti-immigrant sentiment has been strong the 1890s, for example, or the 1920s it can be more or less racist. Not everyone seeking to limit or even ban immigration is a white supremacist, although some are. The mere presence of opposition to immigration is not, without further inquiry, evidence of white supremacist beliefs.

In light of the increasing migration of fringe themes into the mainstream, mentioned above, the real danger is that forms of white supremacism will insinuate themselves into mainstream American culture. There have already been attempts to do this in the South in the form of the so-called neo-Confederate movement, with its disingenuous claim that it is simply celebrating history and heritage. Something similar may appear elsewhere using such labels as Western civilization, Christian civilization or even Judeo-Christian civilization. Thus white supremacy may begin using code words that seem on the surface to be innocuous or even positive but in the eyes of the knowing are read through a racist lens.

3. The leadership of the white supremacist movement

The founders of most of the leading white supremacist organizations have died in the last decade or two: William L. Pierce, Ben Klassen, Richard Girnt Butler, Willis Carto and others. Who are the new leaders we should know about? Is there a difference in leadership style between the deceased older generation and the newer generation? Is there a leadership vacuum? If leaderless resistance was the reigning philosophy in the 1990s, are we still operating under that or have we moved on to other forms of organization?

Kaplan: The leaders of the white supremacist organizations of the 1980s have passed from the scene. Their dysfunctional compounds like Aryan Nations or the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA) are gone too, victims of civil suits, government suppression or simple ennui. The mail-order faiths, Klassens Creativity or Pierces Cosmotheism, are down to a small handful of true believers. Battle-scarred remnants of the time, such as National Socialist Harold Covington, struggle to adapt to new times with ideas like his idyllic Northwest migration initiative seeking a white homeland in America and really quite good apocalyptic literature in his Northwest Trilogy Hill of the Ravens (2003), A Distant Thunder (2004), A Mighty Fortress (2005) as well as The Brigade (2007).

What remains is more potent overseas than in the United States. White power music, pioneered in the late 1970s by Ian Stuart Donaldsons Skrewdriver, flourishes throughout the world, including such decidedly non-Aryan redoubts as Jakarta. The skinhead movement is perhaps stronger than ever, especially where it benefits from a measure of government support and protection in places like Russia.

Evolutionary change is most dynamic outside the confines of white supremacy. In Europe a new generation of leaders has emerged to mainstream formerly explicitly National Socialist, racist or primitively nativist political parties. Groups like the Sweden Democrats, the True Finns or the French National Front have gone from the wilderness to contenders for power, just as the alt-right has emerged in the U.S. But none are explicitly white supremacist, even as they borrow heavily from traditional white supremacist ideas.

Like the leaders of the far right, the humble leaderless resistance idea has given way to a more dynamic successor in lone-wolf attacks. Leaderless resistance as posited originally by Texas Klansman Louis Beam was an expression of helplessness and despair. It was the equivalent of tilting at windmills, which succeeded primarily in the incarceration of a generation of skinheads, would-be Phineas Priests, bikers and simple sociopaths. While William L. Pierce could lionize serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin from the safe remove of a nom de guerre in his novel Hunter, the current generation of lone wolves serve terrorist groups who are more than the state of mind organizations of the white supremacist world, enjoying considerable material and other support in the process.

It is a new day in the world of self-propelled violence. There are successes on occasion abroad. Anders Breivik certainly comes to mind. But in America?

Michael: In my estimation, the most important leader is Matthew Heimbach, the leader of the Traditionalist Youth Network. He first gained notoriety in 2012, when he founded a White Student Union at Towson University in Maryland. Although he is only in his mid-20s, he is already an accomplished orator. He is also a very effective interlocutor when he gives interviews to the media. He evinces the hallmarks of what Eric Hoffer once called the True Believer. Heimbach does not flinch from street activism, despite the strident opposition he faces from various antifa counterprotesters. Furthermore, he advances a leftish white nationalist ideology which could potentially resonate with many disaffected young people. Finally, he has established ties with like-minded activists overseas including Alexander Duginfrom Russia which gives his organization the semblance of an international movement. He reaches out to separatists from all racial and ethnic groups. At the present time, this might all seem inconsequential, but separatism seems to slowly be creeping into the national discourse, as evidenced by the push for Calexit.

Barkun: The first and even the second generation of white supremacist leadership has now virtually all died out, figures like William L. Pierce of the National Alliance and Richard Girnt Butler of the Aryan Nations. Not surprisingly, their organizations, small to begin with, collapsed shortly after their deaths. Neither they nor others in their cohort were succeeded by figures of comparable strength. Only David Duke remains, a strange relic of the past. Even in white supremacys heyday, none of its leaders could command more than small followings. Like the extreme left, those at the other end of the ideological spectrum often spent as much time fighting one another as combating their supposed enemies. Small points of ideology and tactics counted heavily in these duels. Those who had dreams of uniting racialists under a single banner quickly learned that such ambitions were destined to founder.

At the moment, three figures seem of more than passing importance, although given the movements history, they may pass quickly into obscurity: Richard B. Spencer of the National Policy Institute, prominent on the alt-right; Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Youth Network; and Andrew Anglin of the online Daily Stormer website. But there is no reason to believe that they will drive the white supremacist right over the longer term.

It is easy to concentrate on organizations, websites and the people associated with them, because they are visible and easy to identify. However, the danger of violence by individuals acting alone so-called lone wolf attacks remains and, in my view, is far more serious than the threat posed by organizations. The danger is high precisely because, absent unusually good intelligence, they normally become known only after the fact, as in the infamous 2011 attacks in Norway by Anders Breivik.

In that connection, attention needs to be paid to those known as sovereign citizens, who are potential lone wolves. Sovereign citizens do not constitute a movement. Rather, they represent a stream of anti-government thought and activity, built around the belief that traditional conceptions of American citizenship, law and institutions are invalid and that, consequently, no individual has any obligation to obey the law. This idea is based on a radically variant reading of the Constitution and the common law that makes each person, in effect, a law unto him- or herself. While the sovereign citizen idea is not in itself based on white supremacy, the two overlap. Some sovereign citizens have also been white supremacists, and the very nature of sovereign citizen thought deprives civil rights protections of any legitimacy. It follows, too, that the failure of sovereign citizens to accept any legal obligations inevitably involves them in conflicts with the government and, not infrequently, in violent and sometimes deadly incidents.

Next week: How do we deal with organized white supremacy? What do we get wrong about it?

More:

Understanding contemporary white supremacy: Is the alt-right really something new? - Salon

Veterans Memorial Park in Belle Plaine, Minnesota is home to a controversial monument featuring a kneeling soldier in front of a Christian cross.

Its been at the center of a months-long debate over whether it illegally promotes religion but since city officials voted to keep it in the park, the only way to stay on the right side of the law was to make the park an open forum that allowed other monuments to go up as well. Thats when The Satanic Temple sprung into action.

You can read the full backstory here, but the long and short of it is that the Freedom From Religion Foundation warned the city that the current Christian monument was illegal. Officials had a choice: Take it down or allow other displays in the park. They decided to allow other displays.

So the Satanists submitted a proposal for this glorious display:

Theres actually a lot of symbolism to that monument, according to artist Chris P. Andres:

The four pentagrams recall the four corners of the earth they serve as a reminder to the viewer of the soldiers that sacrificed. The empty helmet is now a Baphometic bowl of wisdom, a void, a protective vessel of the mind and intellect memories of the fallen can be psychically deposited, physical notes, names, fruit offering can be left in the monument

Its lovely, hilarious, and a perfect antidote to the promotion of Christianity by the local government.

But this week, a local Catholic priest flipped out at a city council meeting, saying that the Satanic display would invite ALL THE HORRORS.

The inverted pentagrams on the Satanic monument proposed by the Satanic Temple will prompt young people to consider Satanism for themselves and to reject the good moral behavior required for an ordered and peaceful society, said Father [Brian] Lynch in his address to the city council.

The monument may also attract pre-existing Satanists to our community as a place for theistic Satanic ritual activities that victimize our children, he said.

It could lead to a form of grooming similar to that used by pedophiles, Father Lynch said, which Satanists use to erode a childs trust in caring authority figures including their parents, teachers and police officers.

This grooming is intended to not only make children afraid to report the abuse they suffer at the hands of Satanists, but also, to feel personally responsible for the evil they have suffered as youthful victims, Father Lynch added. Most disturbing is the fact that theistic Satanic ritual activities are known to include deviant sexual acts with and among children.

Belle Plaine would be lucky to have an infusion of Satanists. Theyre good people, Brian.

Father Alex Jones sky-is-falling routine doesnt make any sense, either. As weve pointed out repeatedly on this site, the Seven Fundamental Tenets of The Satanic Temple are far more ethical than the Ten Commandments. What Lynch is repeating are the ignorant stereotypes religious people often have of Satanists decades-old rumors not based in reality. If he ever left his bubble and spoke to a member of the Temple, maybe hed realize that.

What was the reaction from the crowd at the city council meeting?

He had great legal arguments, Paul Rennerfeldt, 38, said of Father Lynchs presentation. Rennerfeldt is a parishioner of All Saints in Lakeville.

*Sigh* they werent legal and they werent even arguments. It was just vitriol spewing from the mouth of a bigot.

Ignorance just breeds more ignorance in this town.

Remember: All of this is happening because the city council insisted on promoting Christianity in a local park. The Satanists werent going to come there if that monument was up outside a church. And now that their monument will be there, it wont change the community for the worse. Hell, we should be grateful that it exposes the bigotry of the local religious leaders, unable to handle any views other than their own and only able to respond with hate.

Lucien Greaves of The Satanic Temple told me finishing touches are being put on the monument and itll be going up soon. When I asked about Lynchs comments, he was quick to note the irony of the situation.

It is unnecessary to point out the irony in seeing a representative from the Catholic Church decrying a perceived threat to children posed by religious Satanists.

Being that the bizarre conspiracy theory-based Satanic Panic libels propagated by Father Lynch that of organized Ritual Abuse engaged in by Satanists has no credible evidential foundation whatever, one might reasonably harbor suspicions of projection on the pastors part.

Father Lynchs combination of indignant unreason and projection of repressed guilt and/or desire are exactly what witch-hunts are built upon. The secondary irony in his ignorant crusade is that it effectively illustrates, to those with the wit to see, not only the need for The Satanic Temples campaigns for pluralism, but also our Grey Faction efforts to combat the works of modern witch-hunters and conspiracists.

He then added:

I would like to offer the challenge that the religion with the most (or even any) confirmed cases of organized child abuse withdraw their claim to representation in the public forum.

The gloves are on.

(Large portions of this article were published earlier)

See original here:

Catholic Priest: MN Park's New Monument Will Attract Satanists Who Want to Molest Kids - Patheos (blog)

How not to get busted for child porn

Your cheatin Pedophile heart, Will make you weep, Youll cry and cry, And try to sleep, But sleep wont come, The whole night through, Your Pedophile heart, Will tell on you; Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when the Sheriff come for you?

WND An Arizona radio station is under investigation by the local sheriff and subject to a Change.org petition calling for its broadcast license to be revoked over a long-running public-service announcement advising those possessing child pornography on how to avoid arrest and prosecution.

KAVV 97.7 FM, The Cave, broadcasts a classic-country format out of the town of Benson and bills itself as southeast Arizonas most powerful radio station. The station also prides itself on broadcasting PSAs, or public-service announcements.

One of the announcements that ran regularly late at night for the past two years criticized Arizonas tough laws against possession of child pornography and proceeded to tell how to avoid being arrested. An activist captured the audio and posted it to YouTube, bringing it to wider attention.

In many cases the penalties for possession of pictures is worse than the penalty for murder. You should understand your Internet service provider could report you to the police if they catch you looking at a website featuring naked juveniles. The police then enter your house and seize your computer, the PSA said.

If you have such material, you can save yourself and your family a ton of grief and save the taxpayers of Arizona a lot of money by never storing such pictures on the hard drive of your computer. Always use an external drive and hide it where no one will ever find it. Likewise, never keep paper pictures, tapes or films of naked juveniles where anyone else can find them. A public service message from the CAVE 97.7 FM.

Read the rest here.

Blacks may need to kill white people in self-defense

A Texas A&M professor says that some white people may have to die in order to solve racism and bring about true equality.

Professor Tommy Curry expressed his frustration during a podcast that the movie Django Unchained made killing white people look fun, when in reality it should be part of a serious discussion.

Continue reading Black Professor says: Some White People May Have to Die to Solve Racism

Stupid Idol worshipers call it a miracle. The priest of the Mexican church has a little bit of sense and stated the statues head collapsed as fur ropes holding it gave way

But thousand will flock to that demonic manifestation and worship it, advancing their decline to Hell!

The MIRROR The moment a Jesus statue apparently moved its head during a Good Friday mass has been branded a miracle. Continue reading Demon Spirit manifests in Statue of Jesus during Mass in a Synagogue of Satan

I would almost guarantee that she lured the mother to her house to kill her to get back at the ex-boyfriend. Perhaps she took a liking to the Muslim Jihadist or Mexican drug cartel tactics!

Excerpts from Wichita Eagle Rachael Hilyard charged with first-degree murder in the April 9 decapitation of 63-year-old Micki Davis [.] The day of the killing, Hilyard contacted Davis and said she was putting her sons property by the curb if it wasnt retrieved, police said in an affidavit filed with the court.

Continue reading Demon Possessed Woman chops head off Mother of ex-boyfriend

Get this sub-headline at source: It is believed that the woman might have some psychological problems, authorities have suggested

Yea I think she has some psychological problems! Its called Demon Possession!

The murder took place on Wednesday night in the colony Periodistas de Mexico, in the city of Monterrey, in the north-eastern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon.

Maria del Carmen Hernndez Hernndez, 42, was found on the roof of her house sitting in a rocking chair and holding her son Jos Alejandro Iracheta Hernndez, who was totally burned. Continue reading SATANIC SACRIFICE: Mother burned three-year-old son to death in a devil Worshiping Ritual?

Hate Crime Hoax: Homosexual Church Organist admits he Vandalized his own Church with Trump and Nazi Slogans

Breitbart News An Indiana community was shocked after a local church was vandalized with Nazi slogans and Donald Trump graffiti, but now police say it is a hate crime hoax and the church was not attacked by an outsider. They have charged the congregations own organist, a Hillary supporter and gay activist, for the crime. Continue reading Another False Flag Hate Crime Hoax by a Homosexual Democrat

Financial elite child sacrifice rituals exposed by Dutch banker

The scum doing this are the rich and powerful. They are in EVERY community. They are in the Catholic Church, the FIRST Church, and the MEGA Churches. They put on a false facade. YOU MUST be able to DISCERN these Bastards and be watchful of them!

A former Dutch banker has given a sit down interview during which he claims that he was invited by members of the financial elite to participate in child sacrifice rituals.

Ronald Bernard was a successful entrepreneur who ran a number of businesses before entering the world of finance.

Upon doing so he was told by his peers to put his conscience in the freezer.

He was found guilty of eight counts of child molestation of a young boy and girl who attended his church. He publicly ridiculed and preached against Homosexuality all the while being a Queer himself!

Hint to Preachers: Get the beam out of YOUR own eye and repent of YOUR own SIN before you come against others. God WILL expose you!

The fate of controversial pastor Kenneth Adkins has been decided. Glynn County Superior Court Judge Stephen Scarlett sentenced him to 35 years in prison for eight counts of child molestation.

Prior to becoming a pastor in Brunswick, the 57-year-old spent many years in Jacksonville as a public relations and political consultant, raising the ire of many when he called gays sinners and attacked his critics on social media with crude anti-gay rhetoric and cartoons.

At 9:35 a.m. Tuesday, Adkins walked into a courtroom a very different-looking man. Gone were his tailored suits he wore during his trial. Gone was his confident and pleasant-looking face. Instead, a handcuffed Adkins emerged in a forest green jail-issued jumpsuit. His hands clasped a Styrofoam cup of coffee. His face sullen.

Former judge and Trumps campaign chair in Kentucky arrested for child sex trafficking

We are told pedophiles come in all bi-partisan varieties, including pillars of the community such as judges, police officers, teachers, and doctors.

The recent arrest of Tim Nolan, a 70-year-old former district judge and former chair of Trumps campaign, is a case in point.

Scott Wartman reports for Cincinnati.com, April 21, 2017, that the arrest of former Kentucky Campbell County District Judge Tim Nolan on charges of human trafficking and unlawful transaction with a minor has shocked the community.

Continue reading Republicans are just as Corrupt and Perverted as Democrats

Matthew 7:20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Revelation 2:9 I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, but thou art rich and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, (Baptists) and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.

This is why the church is DEAD and God the Holy Spirit has left these buildings! Seminaries and Collages are led by UNHOLY FOOLS like this. Demon spirits have inhabited these people, classrooms and the whole campus!

They are modern day Pharisees and Sadducees and have introduced leaven into the Gospel. Matthew 16:6 Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

Paul said in Galatians 5:9 A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.

Leaven is considered to be a contaminate, a poison if you will, that will corrupt and ruin the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Satan knows he cant refute the Word of God so he tries and mix in worldly foolishness in with it. Paul says is 2nd Timothy 3:5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

If you want to be taught the REAL WORD of GOD, then go to World Evangelism Bible Collage and Seminary (WEBC). You will NOT be taught by FOOLS and Disciples of Satan. You will be taught by MEN of GOD who SPEAK and TEACH the True Gospel of Jesus Christ! There are NO HOME BOYS there!

FORT WORTH, Texas Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) has issued a public apology over a photo featuring five seminary staffers posing as gangster rappers after the image stirred controversy on social media. Continue reading Gangster Rap: The Baptist Doctrine at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

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Exposing Satanism and Witchcraft

Original post:

Modern Satanism | Prometheism.net

The Gallows Pole is a novel inspired by a real gang of criminals who lived in the Upper Calder Valley of West Yorkshire in the 18th century shortly before the industrial age reshaped the landscape and lifestyles of a nations. They were the Cragg Vale Coiners and are every bit as important to the occultist history and narrative of this country as the tails of Beowulf, King Arthur, Robin Hood or Dick Turpin, but much less widely known. Theirs is as story of survival, enterprise, community, grand folly, rich versus poor, crime and class warfare. Some early reviews have mentioned comparisons to The Wire, Deadwood and The Sopranos had they been filmed in the windswept uplands of the Pennines.

It is also a walking novel. It was conceived, research and partly written on foot, at an average of 5 miles per day through woods and across moors around West Yorkshire. The real life protagonist of The Gallows Pole is King David Hartley, a folk anti-hero who is prone to delusions of grandeur, extreme hallucinations featuring stag-headed men and supreme acts of cruelty and violence.

In the prose I hope to convey movement and drag the reader through the mud of the Pennines in the same way that film director Alan Clarke often had his characters always on the move think of The Firm, Scum, Elephant or Made In Britain. I was aiming for a steadicam-style narrative, so some of my musical choices are included for their rhythmic or repetitive qualities, or perhaps because they evoke landscape. The title for the book came quite late in the day and was inspired by the traditional folk song The Maid Freed From The Gallis Pole, which was later recorded many times over as The Gallows Pole.

This playlist was put together during a very early draft of the book.

Odetta The Gallows Pole

There are dozens of versions of this song but Odettas voice is a revelation, so dark and ominous but soothing too, and with a restraint and subtlety that Led Zeppelins more famous version lacks. The themes of the song money, poverty, betrayal, execution run alongside themes of the book too. A perfect fit.

Matt Berry Gather Up

I cant say Im particularly a fan of the over-inflated thespian routine that Matt Berry seems to employ in all his TV characters, but the tone of this song matches that whcih I was aiming to achieve in the novel a sort of haunted and ethereal earthiness, which draws on a limited vocabulary and heavy use of repetition. The Gallows Pole features the names of people and places repeated over and over again almost to absurd and annoying levels, in an attempt to induce a trance or evoke a rural reverie within the reader. Berry achieves that here by listing various indigenous plants and herbs in a song that is definitely a homage to a lot of the folk-horror films that I am also a fan of.

Donovan The Song Of The Wandering Aengus

True music snobs seem to despise Donovan, and it is a hatred that I suspect is partly based on the humiliation he suffered at the hands of Bob Dylan in the biopic Dont Look Back. But Ive always gravitated towards the bands youre not meant to like for that very reason The Doors are another example and though his hippy-dippy shtick can grate, actually Donovan did his own thing. This track was recorded for an album aimed at children and is an adaptation of a WB Yeats poem that is elemental and feverish. Set to music it is unnerving, beautiful, dream-like and stands knee-deep in the fast-flowing waters of some forgotten rural backwater: And when white moths were on the wing / And moth-like stars were flickering out / I dropped the berry in a stream / And caught a little silver trout.

Stealing Sheep Not Real

Stealing Sheep have carved a sound of their own intricate arrangements, amazing playing, perfect harmonies. Theyre a rare band who actually sound better live than on record and somehow manage to find a common ground between futurist electro-pop and traditional folk music, with shades of Scouse psychedelia in there too. The last time I saw them play a friend who happens to be an amazing guitarist in a pretty successful band was utterly baffled as to how they were achieving certain sounds. I like their entire presentation: theyre an ideas band.

Winterfylleth The Divination Of Antiquity

The musical equivalent of a raging moorland tempest, a storm twisting down a fecund gulch. Sometimes you have to unleash your inner black metal bastard.

Noel Coward The Stately Homes Of England

An unexpected inclusion perhaps, but the flipside to the story of the rise of the Cragg Cale Coiners, who were uneducated peasants, weavers and landworkers, was their downfall, which was brought about by the intervention of one Lord Rockingham, former Prime Minister, and owner of the largest and most opulent house in England. As much as anything The Gallows Pole is a story about class divide and working class insurrection. Im a big fan of Noel Coward (who was neither upper nor working class); his lyrics are acerbic, catty and often unapologetically offensive, and the way that certain songs such as Mad Dogs And Englishmen scan and flow is not a million miles away from some of todays hip-hop and grime and There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner could have been written for today.

The Stately Homes Of England perhaps encapsulates a Britain that very few of us will ever get to see though that of mad toffs, clinging to old ideas and past glories, a life preserved in aspic. Im quite fascinated by the landed gentry from an anthropological standpoint those people with old money, as opposed to the tasteless nouveau riche, who think that style and taste can be bought.

Marmaduke Duke Blunder & Haggis

This is just pure lo-fi electro malevolence, a piece of bad mood music created by Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro the side of him that his day-job probably doesnt reveal. Im quite confident that it hasnt been covered on The X-Factor.

Richard Dawson - The Ghost Of A Tree

Richard Dawson can do as much with his voice and the stamping of his feet than an entire orchestra. Theres a sense of confrontation and courage to what he does, and a timelessness to his lyrics, but also a lot of humour which is perhaps overlooked in the clamour dissect his output. Its folk music delivered with a court jesters sensibility. I often wonder who the legends of the future might be, those who transcend genre and era to stay the distance; people like Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen or John Martyn. I think Richard Dawson will one of them and The Ghost Of A Tree is the closest sound to the stories in my head, a modern gothic novel set to minimal music that digs deep into our DNA as humans who once roamed the earth in small tribes.

Various Hanging Johnny

Id not heard this old sea shanty, traditionally sung a capella, until The Futureheads did a rendition on their Rant album a few years back. Its a dark story about snapped necks, gibbets and nooses, and can I imagine it being sung as King David Hartley was lead from York Castle to Tyburn, where he was hung in front of a crowd of several thousand in 1770, and consequently hailed as a martyr by many.

The Memory Band When I Was On Horseback

I dont really know anything about The Memory Bank, nor how I even discovered their music, but their 2013 album On The Chalk (Our Navigation Of The Line Of The Downs)is another record whose feel, pace and atmospherics sits right. Its heavily topographical, a flaneurs collection that rolls along like clouds; foreboding and portentous one moment and then shot-through with blinding bursts of sunbeams the next. Also, I wanted to include a song that influenced a horseback riding scene in the novel.

Black Widow Come To The Sabbat

Ive a fascination for that period in the late 1960s and early 70s when a confluence of old and new ideas mythology, literature, folklore, drugs, paganism, Satanism, sexual liberation, black magick and other esoteric practices emerged and, for a short time, suggested a bold anything goes direction for society. Out of that period so much good music emerged, such as this mock-baroque anthem by Leicesters Black Widow. Like all good rock songs it borders on the ridiculous and with its Jethro Tull-inspired flutes and Brian Blessed-like satanic chant actually offered a gentle face of devil worship. Ah, England. What a stupid and brilliant place.

The Horse Loom Lie Here

The Gallows Pole was partly written with the big screen in mind its structure follows that of a film, and I knew that an imaginary soundtrack should include this. The Horse Loom is Steve Malley, who played guitar in a number of north-east bands including The Unit Ama, Kodiak and Crane, who were like Newcastles own Fugazi when I was a teenager. Now he plays very intricate and intimate guitar music that is part of the same lineage as Bert Jansch, John Renbourne and Nick Drake and, for me, captures something unspoken about the north of England. Its very cinematic, timeless and technically dazzling, in a very understated and humble way.

Lead Belly The Gallows Pole

Its almost embarrassing the amount of white artists who have covered Huddie Ledbetter, and almost certainly always to greater financial reward. But along with Odetta, his is the only other version of The Gallows Pole worth listening to.

The Gallows Pole is out now, published by Blue Moose

View original post here:

The Gallows Pole By Benjamin Myers: A Playlist - The Quietus

Written by Radhika Iyengar | Updated: April 5, 2017 8:52 am

The first known cow protection movement began in the 1800s when Hindus were rallied in hordes to stop the slaughter of cattle. Arya Samaj founder Swami Dayanand Saraswati emerged as an early proponent of cow protection, who first published Gokarunanidhi (http://bit.ly/2nzf6fA), a pamphlet in 1881, which circulated his concerns against cattle slaughter. In it, Saraswati stated the economic favourability of cow protection, arguing that a cow was more beneficial to people alive, as opposed to it being dead, since it gave milk and eased agricultural labour. Saraswati later on went to establish a committee for the protection of cows called Gaurakshini Sabha in 1882.

While Saraswati had given economic reasons to support his demand for cow protection, over the years, the cow gained political-religious popularity and prominence. In context to religion, the cow was looked upon as a mother gau-mata for she performed the role of a foster mother, feeding milk to each Hindu. Thus, the Hindu nationalists used the maternal metaphor to sculpt a strong Hindu identity, similar to the one evoked through the image of the country as a maternal figure, that is, Bharat Mata or Motherland. It was the job of a Hindu man therefore, to defend his mother in this case, the cow. The strength of a Hindu man therefore, became inextricably linked to his ability to protect the body of his nurturing mother goddess from non-Hindus.

Of course, the image of a cow as mother then was not useful independently. The image would only be considered functional when it worked towards rallying Hindu men to converge into an army of strong men vigilantes who could defend their gau-mata and their country. In fact, bhajans back in the day fiercely associated a Hindus manhood to his strength in defending the cow. Historian Charu Gupta observed in her paper titled, The Icon of Mother in Late Colonial North India: Bharat Mata, Matri Bhasha and Gau Mata, that bhajans like those by Swami Alaram Sanyasi, fiercely associated a Hindus manhood to his strength in defending the cow. The lyrics stated, Mard unhi ko janen hum jo rakshak hain gau mata ke (We consider as men only those who are the protectors of mother cow).

Even today, there are several bhajans that associate absolute male strength, bravery and vigour with protecting cows. A bhajan sung by Bajrangi Sonji goes like this: Veer-Pandavo kisantano phir maidano mein aao, gau-mata ke praan bacaho inn paapi gadhaaro se. (Children of Veer and Pandavas, return to the arena and protect our mother cow from these treacherous traitors!)

Dutch historian Peter van der Veer explored this relationship drawn between the image of cow and Hindu manliness and authority, in his book Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. He wrote, the image of the cow as a mother, is a crucial image, since as a mother the cow signifies the family and the community at large. She depends on the authority and protection of the male of the family. While mother cow refers to family and nation alike, her protection refers to patriarchal authority and to the Hindu state, the rightful kingdom of Rama. It is within the logic of religious discourse that the protection of the cow become the foremost symbol of the Hindu nation-state.

In the late 1800s, the accessibility of the press, too, assisted in the proliferation of the pro-cow-anti-Muslim ideology. The cow-protection propaganda gained momentum, primarily distancing the Muslims from the Hindus. At that time, handbills and pamphlets began being distributed advocating cow protection, which also pushed Hindus to boycott products sold by Muslims. A 1933 handbill, Charu Gupta noted, which was circulated at the time stated: Gaumata ka Sandesh: Gauraksharth Harek Vastu Hinduon se hi Kharid, which translates to, Message from Mother-Cow: For the Protection of the Cow, Buy Every Item from Hindus Alone.

In addition to the handbills and pamphlets that were widely circulated, newspapers such as Gausewak (in Varanasi) that were sold at railway stations and on the streets, fiercely advocated cow protection, along with bhajans like the Bhajan Gauraksha Gopal Darpan and Bhajan Gauraksha Updesh Manjari (1892), which were written to mobilise Hindu solidarity through the symbolic cow.

While the rift between Hindus and Muslims grew wider, violent riots broke out between the communities regarding cow slaughter. In response, Mahatma Gandhi pointed out the hypocrisy Hindus carried in his piece titled, Let Hindus Beware (dated 1921) where he wrote, To attempt cow protection by violence is to reduce Hinduism to Satanism, and to prostitute to a base end the grand significance of cow protection. In the same piece he said that Hindus were responsible for causing more harm to cows than Muslims, since it were the Hindus who first sheltered their cows and then sold them for export.

Along with the texts, visual images were used to ingrain Hindu fanaticism with relation to the cow. In her paper, Charu Gupta writes that during the period between 1893-1894, apart from handbills and pamphlets, pictures of the cow were also circulated and exhibited at many meetings. One depicted a cow in the act of being slaughtered by three Muslim butchers, and was headed The present state. Another exhibited a cow, in every part of whose body groups of Hindu deities and holy persons were shown. A calf was at her udder, and there was a woman sitting before the calf holding a bowl waiting for her turn. The woman was labelled The Hindu. Behind the cow was a representation of Krishna labelled Dharmraj. In front, a monster was assailing the cow with a drawn sword entitled Kaliyug, but which was largely understood as typifying the Muslim community.

Around the late 1800s, calendar art gained prominence as well. Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906) was one of the first to put the image of a cow on a calendar, painted to work in tandem with the cow protection movement.According to historian Christopher Pinney (who wrote in his book, Photos of the Gods: the Printed images and Political struggles in India) the riots of 1893 between Hindus and Muslims, which stemmed from anti-cow slaughter movement, assumed an overtly communal flavour. That reflected in the way the Hindu cow was depicted in calendars.

In a calendar that carried a painting titled Chaurasi Devata Auvali Gay (The Cow with Eighty Four Deities, 1912), for example, Hindu gods were shown to be residing within a hapless mother cow, which was being attacked by a toothed, demonic cow-slayer this monstrous matricidal figure, captioned Kaliyug (the demon Kali, personifying evil) in the Varma print, is readily identifiable with the Muslim community (Pinney 1997); or more broadly, with Muslim, Christian and Hindu low-caste beef eaters, observed historian Dilip M. Menon in Cultural History of Modern India. With reference to the same image, Pinney wrote: In the use of these images, a more discriminatory message was stressed in which the cow came to represent a Hindu identity and nationality that required the protection from non-Hindus.

Its important to note how images and text played a significant role in building the narrative of the cow as a mother whose protection by Hindu male was imperative. He was the assigned protector. In the same context, the narrative of the other with regard to the Muslims and Christians, was woven in. This, of course, is not an extensive collection of examples, but it is sufficient to offer a crucial insight.

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In literature and art from over 100 years ago, images of the cow as mother - The Indian Express

A college group reportedly planned to hold a neo-satanic ceremony at Clemson University on Saturday.

According to a flier found in Clemsons Brackett Hall, students were invited to attend the Clemson Unorthodox Neo-Satanic Temples C.U.N.T. Afterlife Party on March 11. The flier, which features two satanic symbols, promises students a lamb sacrifice and live bloodletting, a public satanic ritual in which people draw blood from a live animal.

In addition to sacrificing lambs, the flier promised students a Bible Torching Ceremony at 7 p.m. and promised the C.U.N.T. sucker who brings the most bibles wins $25!

The Clemson Unorthodox Neo-Satanic Temple claims in the flier the event was planned to help summon Baphomet, a goat-headed satanic figure with horns.

Baphomet is a popular image in modern satanism. In 2014, a satanic group in New York designed and built a one-ton statue of Baphomet and attempted in vain to have the statue placed near a statue of the Ten Commandments at the Oklahoma State Capitol. However, that attempt failed when the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled the Ten Commandments statue violated the states prohibition on using public property for religious purposes.

Its unclear whether the Clemson Unorthodox Neo-Satanic Temple truly held the event or where the event was scheduled to occur.

This isnt the first time a college group has attempted to hold a satanic ritual on or near a college campus. In 2014, a Harvard University student group, the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club, planned a large, satanic black mass on Harvards campus, but it was canceled after significant backlash from parents, students and faculty. Foxnews.com reported nearly 400 students and 100 alumni petitioned against the event.

The same organization that helped plan the event, the Satanic Temple, announced in May 2016 its plan to roll out an after-school satanic club for public elementary school students. According to a report in USA Today, the group is more interested in promoting rebellion against tyranny and authoritarian rule, as the group defines it, and places science above all religious ideas.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2001 religious groups have the right to use public school spaces as any other after-school club would.

(H/T: Campus Reform)

(Photo by Ken Lund)

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'Bible torching,' 'neo-satanic' college group planned 'lamb sacrifice' at Clemson University - TheBlaze.com

Being the 2017 Obafemi Awolowo memorial lecture delivered by Professor Banji Akintoye on March 6, in Lagos.

WE gather today, the sixth day of March 2017, as we have done unfailingly and dutifully every year for decades, to celebrate the birthday of our father and benefactor, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Each celebration is our way of thanking him for the glistering heritage which he bequeathed to us; it also a way of reminding ourselves that we possess a great heritage, and that we can achieve whatever we set our hearts and minds upon to achieve.

Todays lecture is a message to our youths in these terrible times in the life and history of Nigeria. I will try to keep it as simple and brief as possible. Indeed, I want it to be as close as possible to a university classroom lecture, because I want my chosen audience, the youths of our country, to benefit fully from it.

Our father, Obafemi Awolowo, was an unrelenting searcher for information and knowledge about his society, country and world, a philosopher, a man of consistent efficiency and steadily high ideals in his private and public life, a man of titanic courage, an accomplished development planner, an endowed nation builder, an astute administrator, a great motivator, a wonderful leader of men and, above all, an inspired and inspiring teacher. It is one of the greatest joys of my life that, in my generation of Nigerian youths, I belonged to the select group of youths who were privileged to be close to Chief Awolowo as to a father, who were fortunate to learn at his feet, and who were called upon, under his leadership, to attempt great exploits towards the improvement of the quality of the lives of our people, and towards the prosperity and greatness of our country.

Chief Awolowo remains very much alive today, because his legacy continues to impact the lives of millions of his countrymen for good. I was in a get-together of old friends some weeks ago in a town in our Southwest. In the course of the evening, we in the gathering got into recounting our memories and reminiscences about our childhood lives. The few of us who were in our eighties told stories about how, when we were children, only a few of us in our towns and villages were going to school while the vast majority of our friends, brothers and cousins were not going, mostly because their parents could not afford to send them. But most of us in the gathering who were in our seventies and below told stories of how life suddenly changed for all children in their towns and villages in 1955, the year in which Chief Awolowo introduced Free Primary Education in the Western Region. Most of the men and women who are senior professors, senior administrators, senior statesmen, senior engineers, senior architects, senior lawyers and so on in our Southwest today, are so because Chief Awolowo opened the door of schools to all children from 1955 on in our Western Region. All these senior citizens are parents of highly educated families that today occupy very important places in the life of our region, our country, and other countries in the wide world families that will, probably many centuries from now, continue to be important in the lives of our communities and of the world.

Some years ago, while traveling in some countries of Southeast Asia, I met a Yoruba man who was Dean of Technology in his university there. He told me that his place of origin was a small village in a remote part of our Southwest. I jokingly asked him how he had managed to come from his remote village to the position of Dean in a university so far across the world, and he laughed and answered in one single word, Awolowo. What he meant is that it was Chief Awolowo that had made it possible for his poor parents to send him to the small school in his small village home, and that it was Chief Awolowo that thereby opened the paths across the world before him.

Chief Awolowo changed the life, the capabilities and the prospects of the whole Yoruba nation in Nigeria, a nation that now numbers about 50 million in population. I returned home a few months ago, after many years of living and working as a professor abroad, mostly in the United States of America. America is a country of thousands of universities; and there is hardly any one of those universities that does not have some Yoruba professors. These days, since my return home from abroad, when I wake up in the morning, I love to stand at a discreet street corner and watch streams of our children going to school. Many of the children are so young that their older sisters or brothers have to hold their hands or even carry them. The one sure thing that every Yoruba mother does for a child of school age today is to send him or her to school. Unknown to those mothers, they are building the Yoruba nation into a mighty nation in the world. In all the future, whenever the story of the greatness is written or told, it will always be remembered that it all started when Obafemi Awolowo opened the door to schools to all the children of his people. Free Education in our Western Region under Chief Awolowo was the very first in all of Africa.

The gift of Free Education was the greatest single gift given by Chief Awolowo to us his people, but it was not the only gift. Under his leadership, the Western Region stood out as the number one Region, the pace setter in development, in Nigeria. The wide-ranging development achievements included many miles of solidly surfaced roads all over our Region, pipe-borne clean water to many of our towns, the first television station on the African continent, the first public-owned sports stadium, the first industrial estate, imaginative support systems for our cocoa farmers (as a result of which our cocoa farmers became the most productive African farmers on the African continent), farm centres training our youths in modern farming, technical training centres teaching modern job skills to our youths, a broad-based investment corporation with investments in industries, commerce, banking, and real estate (the largest agglomeration of African-owned investment capital in Africa). Very importantly too, our Region was the leader in Nigeria in the development of a democratic society, and a government responsive to its people. On the whole, we in the Western Region were led to dream dreams of greatness in the world, we began to see ourselves as soon able to catch up with industrial world leaders like Japan. And we gave our Region the name First in Africa.

I need to add that Chief Awolowo did not intend to limit all these to the Western Region. No. When parents from other Regions brought their children across Regional borders to our free schools, Chief Awolowos government did not try to stop them. Moreover, he made dedicated efforts to give these goods to the whole of Nigeria. First and foremost in this regard, he was the leader who promoted most clearly and most consistently the idea that a country like Nigeria, comprising many different nationalities, in order to be able to live in harmony and make progress, needs to establish a rational federal system based on respect for the various nationalities. Other Nigerian leaders resisted this, and some castigated him for it, but he never gave up. His words have proved true in the course of the nearly sixty years of Nigerias independence. By concocting Nigeria into a country with an all-controlling central government, those who reject Chief Awolowos federalist ideas have led Nigeria into evil times times so evil that Nigeria may ultimately, or may even soon, break up.

Moreover, from 1959, Chief Awolowo embarked on efforts to take his development ideas to the Nigerian federal government and thereby to the whole of Nigeria. He fought titanic election campaigns, and reached the hearts of ordinary Nigerians far and wide. But, as we all know, most elections are won in Nigeria not through the votes of the common people but through the manipulations of powerful and influential citizens, especially powerful and influential citizens holding the machinery of the Federal Government. At federal election after federal election, Chief Awolowo won the majority of votes and lost the elections.

Unfortunately, in the midst of the rubble into which Nigeria has been reduced, the quality of the education which Chief Awolowo established for us is suffering today. Our children are not learning as much or as well as they should be learning in their schools. Most of the old school environments are run down and depressing and do not inspire the children to learn. Support for schools are generally poor across Nigeria, teachers are irregularly paid their salaries and are demoralised, and many teachers are forced to seek survival in all sorts of side ventures. Therefore, our youths are graduating from our schools, colleges and universities with very low levels of educational competence. The reasons for this sad state of affairs is well known. The persons who have been controlling most of the affairs of Nigeria through the Federal Government since independence are apathetic or even downright hostile to modern education. And, unhappily, the Federal Government which these people control has been gradually turned into the controller of all of Nigeria, with power and influence to determine what states may or may not do. The United Nations agency, UNESCO, estimates that a country that would have an efficient, effective and result-yielding educational system needs to be spending at least 26 per cent of its GDP (or annual budget) on education. Nigeria spends only about eight per cent on education. Moreover, federal policies, and federal dictation of the nature, contents, and direction of education at all levels throughout Nigeria, have had disastrous effects on education in all parts of Nigeria.

But I must hurry to add that, happily, we are beginning to see welcome changes in our educational system. Some of the school premises being built today for primary schools in some of our states deserve our commendation and our gratitude. While thanking our elected public officials for these, however, we must also urge them to venture into deeper changes in the education of our children. What we Yoruba people want for ourselves is to belong in the ranks of the most educationally, scientifically and technologically advanced peoples of the world. In addition, we want our children to learn, and become proficient in, our language and our history. Chief Awolowo put our feet on the path to all these; we must now resume the journey with all the vigour at our command.

But, as we gather here today, we are living in a Nigeria that has declined to its lowest levels of societal disorder, immorality, and hopelessness. All the negative inputs that have been fed into our countrys life since independence, all the crookedness, all the hatred and vileness and viciousness, all the involvement of the darkness of the occult and of Satanism into the affairs of Nigeria, all the murderous intent and the mass murdering of the weak and vulnerable, all the religious and inter-ethnic violence, all the sub-human greed and corruption in the ranks of the political and bureaucratic elite, all the impunity in the management of Nigerian affairs all have now converged and concatenated to make Nigeria a land of utter hopelessness for the vast majority of Nigerians, a land of poverty, hunger, disease and destitution, a land of desperation, fear and terror, a land in which rivers of human blood flow day by day, a land in which human life has become pitifully discounted.

A recent report by a United Nations agency described Nigeria as one of the poorest and most unequal countries in the world. Another UN report warned that if certain situations in Nigeria were not urgently changed, as many as 140 thousand children could die in a certain part of Nigeria in the next few months. Various reports are informing Nigeria and the world that the charitable money and other items sent by international organisations and individuals from across the world for the care of Nigerians internally displaced by Boko Haram violence are being stolen and shared by Nigerian officials, and that the camps where the internally displaced persons are being kept has become a horrible place of mass starvation and mass deaths. A report in the news media about two weeks ago alerted Nigeria to the fact that instances of mental sickness have risen to frightening heights, and are rising more and more sharply, in our country, and indicated that the cause of this is the condition of our country the hopeless poverty that reigns over the lives of masses of Nigerians, and the insensitive and utterly immoral governance of our country.

Instances of the vilest and most grotesque crimes, and of the most shockingly inhuman treatments of man by man, are reported daily from various parts of our country. The whole world has been watching videos of Nigerians calmly cutting the throats of hundreds of fellow Nigerians, and of Nigerians gathering groups of other living Nigerians together, dousing them with gasoline, and setting them on fire. Nigeria is becoming a strangely barbarous and repulsive spectacle in the world.

Not surprisingly, the outside world is already showing signs of rejecting Nigeria and Nigerians. About two weeks ago, towards the end of last January, some countries of the world issued warnings and advisories to their citizens, some urging their citizens to desist from going to Nigeria, some advising their citizens who are already in Nigeria to watch out for danger, and some advising their citizens to stay clear of certain parts of Nigeria. In the Union of South Africa, a member country of the African Union, the people are showing very definitely that they no longer want Nigerians in their country. In town after town in that country, crowds of citizens are rising up, attacking Nigerians, chasing Nigerians from their communities, killing some Nigerians in the process, and destroying the businesses and properties of Nigerians. This has been going on for some time, but it has reached a peak in recent months. And similar developments have occurred in some other African countries such as Kenya. Thousands of Nigerians regularly try to reach Europe through the Sahara Desert country of Libya in North Africa, another member of the African Union. According to official reports in recent months, Libyan citizens now commonly attack the arriving Nigerians, steal their money and other belongings, and then kill them.

As we all know, it is the youths of Nigeria that suffer the most from all these rot and ruin of Nigeria. By our youths I mean those Nigerians who belong to the age bracket of 18 to 40. As I said recently in a lecture which I delivered to Igbo Youths in Enugu, the people aged 18 to 40 are always the most dynamic sector of the population of every nation in the world. People below 18 are still children, mostly still schooling or learning in some other way. People in the age bracket 18 to 40 are usually graduates of schools, colleges and universities. In Nigeria, they constitute a majority of our countrys total population they are believed to be about 55 per cent of our population. Even more importantly, they are the most educated and most skilled sector of our adult population. They produce and raise most of the children that are being born into our population. They dream up most ideas in business; and they are the starters of most business ventures. They lead in all fields of adventure, sports, and arts. In short, they bear the biggest share of the burden of pushing our country forward in economic, business, professional, intellectual, cultural, social and artistic pursuits.

But since independence, planning for the empowerment of our youths has never been a serious and sustained feature of Nigerias national development. Even the programmes for youth empowerment started in the Western Region under Chief Awolowos Regional government in the 1950s have not survived in the era of federal control and federal fiats. For decades now, the rate of unemployment among our youths has been one of the highest in the world. It has often been estimated as ranging between 54 per cent and 70 per cent among our educated youths, and even higher among the uneducated ones. For even the best university graduates, working the streets for years without a job is the common experience all over Nigeria. Most of our educated youths are unemployable partly because their basic education is grossly defective, partly because they lack modern job skills, and partly because the overwhelming majority lack acceptable job ethics. At the same time, poor infrastructures, poor public administrative services, and insensitive financial services, drastically inhibit the spirit of entrepreneurship among our youths. In most countries in the world, a youth can sit at his mothers kitchen table or in his fathers garage and put together a business idea that can develop into a big winner in the market place; he does not have to fear for lack of electricity, lack of water, lack of good roads, lack of a supportive public administration, or lack of sensitive and helpful banking services. In Nigeria, even the most creative youth is deterred by such fears from going forward with his ideas; for those who choose to go forward, failure and drop-out are the very common outcomes.

However, even in these terrible times, I bring the message that any youth who chooses to learn from Chief Awolowos legacy stands a very good chance of acquiring for himself or herself a purpose-driven life, a life of success, and a life that impacts society, country and world in very positive ways. That is the central purpose of this lecture to invite and motivate our youths to benefit from the Awolowo legacy and use it to enrich, strengthen and beautify their lives and if possible, to use it to earn for themselves an image as bright and as enviable as Chief Awolowos in the world and for a long time in the future.

First then, I urge you to learn this first thing about Chief Awolowo. He was only a youth like many of you in my audience today when he started to give his life to great exploits. The decisions he took then any of you can take today. At a tender age, he tried his hand at a business of his own, and he also gave some of his time to the emerging nationalist politics of Nigeria. His first great achievement was his founding of the pan-Yoruba organisation, Egbe Omo Oduduwa, in 1945. He was only a student in London when he did this, and he was only 37 years old. At only 37, he thus stepped boldly into greatness. Then, two years later, he published his first book proposing the best direction for the constitutional development of Nigeria.

Any youth who chooses to do something like these along lines of his or her own interest has a fair chance of achieving success. World history is copiously dotted with stories of youths who stepped out early and achieved greatness early. Develop interest in such stories and then boldly choose your own line of action, instead of just roaming the streets for job opportunities that do not exist, or following and yelling after politicians, or attaching yourself to a group of area boys, or even blindly rushing away to other countries. To your surprise, you may acquire some highly valuable skill, or become the owner of an enterprise of your own, your own kind of enterprise. Though things are tough in Nigeria today, roads to success still exist for those who would decide and launch out with serious dedication as our father, Awolowo, did.

And then, one of the most impressive features Chief Awolowoslife was his love of learning, his dedication to finding information and knowledge. His central interest in this was to find out how a country is developed, how this country called Nigeria can be best developed, how to improve the quality of the lives of his countrymen, how to make himself a better and more informed servant of his people. Of course, he gave some time to other kinds of study for instance, he engaged in some scientific researches, and he set up a small laboratory for that purpose. But the subject of development and progress was his main interest, and he always went at it with almost superhuman energy, zeal and concentration. I and others of my age were only school boys during most years of his revolutionary premiership of the Western Region in the 1950s, but when he came back from his unfair political incarceration, followed by some years of service in the federal war cabinet, and after he returned to full politics in the 1970s, we were already fairly mature intellectuals, and we were among the closest persons in his circle for the rest of his life. He relentlessly pushed himself and us in the search for knowledge and that meant that he was constantly reading, constantly demanding clearer explanations and new writings and books, constantly doing very incisive writings of his own, constantly drawing us into discussion, frequently asking us to travel to other lands where there might be development information that could help to make our plans for Nigeria better, frequently urging us to take advantage of our academic travels to acquire information about our great central charge the development and beauty of our Nigeria. It is true, as he said in one of his most famous statements, that while other men slept, he kept working into the deep hours of the night, delving deeper and deeper into knowledge about how to make Nigeria a great country. He was truly the deep calling to the deep.

I believe that Chief Awolowo knew Nigeria more comprehensively and more deeply than any other Nigerian of his time. He was not merely another Nigerian politician. He understood more of Nigerias problems, and Nigerias economic and political life and prospects, and had clearer and more constructive ideas about the development and future of Nigeria. He fully deserves the deep respect, and the gravity, that he is receiving from us his children and from generations of other Nigerians. Again, I say to my youthful audience of today: any of you can start from this moment to include in your lives a search for knowledge in some field of interest of yours. Any of you who does that stands a fair chance of acquiring at least some of the kind of respect and immortality that Chief Awolowo now enjoys.

I now direct my youthful audience to one special issue over which Chief Awolowo never stopped writing and explaining till his last days. I refer to the issue of a rational and harmonious federation for this country and the fact that a terribly warped and over-centralized structure has been gradually foisted over our federation since 1966. This over-centralization is the root of all the evils that are now wrecking Nigeria, and the root of all the sufferings of all Nigerians, especially our youths. Our youths must not leave the fight against this destructive federal structure to scattered politicians and intellectuals. You must all rise up and fight it relentlessly, until the advocates and supporters of it yield to the demands for the rational restructuring of our federation.

As part of this war, it is crucial that the nations of Nigeria must be defended by all Nigerian youths. Some people who want a more or less unitary state in this multi-ethnic country have been perversely claiming that Nigerias nations are mere myths, that there is no Igbo nation or Yoruba nation or Igala nation or Ijaw nation or Urhobo nation, etc. Some treatises written in 2000-2001 under the auspices of a federal agency (Centre for Democratic Development Research and Training) stated these things explicitly and strongly. They are wrong; and they are deliberately propagating a dangerous falsehood. The youths of Nigeria must confront them powerfully and force them to give up their falsehood.

That demands also that our youths must all begin to propagate respect for the many nations of our country, large or small. Our youths must give up old tendencies whereby persons of one nation denigrate other nations. It is true that, in the complex and confusing politics of Nigeria, some of our nations have hurt one another in some ways in the past. But we must resist the temptation to keep wallowing in the mud-pits of the past; we must give concentration to the fight for a great future for our peoples. Every one of our nations must feel respected and wanted in our country. Every nation in our country, no matter how small, must feel confident in the assurance of protection by the collective will of Nigeria. That is what Chief Awolowo lived much of his life seeking the structural environment for. The kind of genocide now going on in parts of South Kaduna and other parts of the Middle Belt should be met with stout resistance by youths who call Chief Awolowo their father.

To achieve such noble purposes, our youths must develop very strong confidence in themselves, as Chief Awolowo developed great confidence in himself. You must stop the habit of thinking that you are weak, that you are weaker than, and subordinate to, the present class of politicians. Much of Chief Awolowos success was due to his confidence that the British white rulers of Nigeria were not superior to Nigerians, and that Nigerians can indeed achieve great things that the British rulers cannot. You are much stronger than you think. Sure, you do not have the kind of money that the corrupt politicians of these days have; but if you use your head, mobilize your huge numbers and your education sensibly, and if you operate purposefully and with discipline as Chief Awolowo would do in circumstances such as these, you can change the destiny of your peoples for the better even in a country like Nigeria.

Well, at any time, I can speak about Chief Awolowo for hours on end. He means that much to us, and much more. But I must remember my promise to make this a brief speech. Therefore, I will now round this speech up by bringing the youths of my audience to this final subject which Chief Awolowo always stressed very much in our circle.

Chief Awolowo always gave emphasis to the need for leaders and rulers to respect their people. In conversations with the young ones like me, he would often say, You must always take care to respect our people. If any of you find yourself in a governing position over any part of our people, your first line of survival and success is to respect them. They may be illiterate and poor, but they are members of ancient civilizations and they are more understanding than you think. If you are arrogant and overbearing, they will find ways to stop you and those ways may hurt your further chances. You must take care to explain things to them, and you must not falsely promise them what you know you cannot do. It is disrespectful to do that. Whatever you do as ruler, do it with our people, dont merely do it for them. We are not foreigners ruling our people, we are their kith and kin. Make sure to enhance their feeling of self-respect.

Because Chief Awolowo had such respect for our people, they trusted him. In many towns and villages in Yorubaland, there were old folks whom the local people called Awolowos father or Awolowos mother. In the 1970s when some of us Awolowos children were scattered all over Nigeria putting the Unity Party of Nigeria together, we were often surprised to find friends of his in even remote places. In a village called Ankpa in the then Benue State, one such old friend of Chief Awolowo took care of me like a son; and in Uyo in the then Cross River State, another old friend of his received me the same way. Many of my friends had similar experiences in the field.

And, now, I will close this with a story about this wonderful respect of our father for our people. In 1983, in preparation for the 1983 presidential election, Chief Awolowo was doing a campaign tour of Kano State, and I was leading a small team on a special part of our campaign in the then Plateau State. Chief Awolowo sent for me to come and see him for some information he needed to pass to me. I started off that afternoon with my team and, after a night in Kaduna, we reached Kano next morning. Papa had gone out on his campaign in parts of Kano State before we arrived, and he was scheduled to return to Kano City at about 4p.m to address the people of the city. Huge crowds were already gathering by noon. But 4p.m came and Papa did not arrive; then 5p.m, 7p.m, 9p.m, and he still had not come. Finally, between 9p.m and 10p.m, he and his large entourage arrived. What had happened is that at many villages along his way, where he had not been billed to stop, the villagers had come to the road and asked him to stop and speak to them. And each time he so stopped, he took his time to speak fully to the villagers and to answer their questions. He respected them too much to do any less. But the result of such strenuous exertion is that he looked fearfully tired when he arrived in Kano City. I went to his room in the house provided for us by the governor of Kano State; but he looked so terribly weak that I quietly gave up the attempt to discuss with him. Some medical doctors were always in our group, and these were hurrying in and out to attend to him. That night, many of us feared that we were going to lose our leader and father. It was a hard and sleepless night for many of us. Mercifully, however, he revived considerably before morning and was strong enough to talk with me and my team, and to address the large cheering crowd of Kano City people.

That is our father. His life is a whole book of instructions and lessons for us his children. I urge you all to take full advantage of the lessons and instructions.

More:

The Awolowo legacy and its message for Nigerian youths - Tribune - NIGERIAN TRIBUNE (press release) (blog)

Banji Akintoye

Obafemi Awolowo

By Banji Akintoye

We gather today, the 6th day of March 2017, as we have done unfailingly and dutifully every year for decades, to celebrate the birthday of our father and benefactor, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Each celebration is our way of thanking him for the glistering heritage which he bequeathed to us; it also a way of reminding ourselves that we possess a great heritage, and that we can achieve whatever we set our hearts and minds upon to achieve.

Todays lecture is a message to our youths in these terrible times in the life and history of Nigeria. I will try to keep it as simple and brief as possible. Indeed, I want it to be as close as possible to a university classroom lecture, because I want my chosen audience, the youths of our country, to benefit fully from it.

Our father, Obafemi Awolowo, was an unrelenting searcher for information and knowledge about his society, country and world, a philosopher, a man of consistent efficiency and steadily high ideals in his private and public life, a man of titanic courage, an accomplished development planner, an endowed nation builder, an astute administrator, a great motivator, a wonderful leader of men and, above all, an inspired and inspiring teacher. It is one of the greatest joys of my life that, in my generation of Nigerian youths, I belonged to the select group of youths who were privileged to be close to Chief Awolowo as to a father, who were fortunate to learn at his feet, and who were called upon, under his leadership, to attempt great exploits towards the improvement of the quality of the lives of our people, and towards the prosperity and greatness of our country.

Chief Awolowo remains very much alive today, because his legacy continues to impact the lives of millions of his countrymen for good. I was in a get-together of old friends some weeks ago in a town in our Southwest. In the course of the evening, we in the gathering got into recounting our memories and reminiscences about our childhood lives. The few of us who were in our eighties told stories about how, when we were children, only a few of us in our towns and villages were going to school while the vast majority of our friends, brothers and cousins were not going, mostly because their parents could not afford to send them. But most of us in the gathering who were in our seventies and below told stories of how life suddenly changed for all children in their towns and villages in 1955, the year in which Chief Awolowo introduced Free Primary Education in the Western Region.

Most of the men and women who are senior professors, senior administrators, senior statesmen, senior engineers, senior architects, senior lawyers and so on in our Southwest today, are so because Chief Awolowo opened the door of schools to all children from 1955 on in our Western Region. All these senior citizens are parents of highly educated families that today occupy very important places in the life of our region, our country, and other countries in the wide world families that will, probably many centuries from now, continue to be important in the lives of our communities and of the world.

Some years ago, while traveling in some countries of Southeast Asia, I met a Yoruba man who was Dean of Technology in his university there. He told me that his place of origin was a small village in a remote part of our Southwest. I jokingly asked him how he had managed to come from his remote village to the position of Dean in a university so far across the world, and he laughed and answered in one single word, Awolowo. What he meant is that it was Chief Awolowo that had made it possible for his poor parents to send him to the small school in his small village home, and that it was Chief Awolowo that thereby opened the paths across the world before him.

Chief Awolowo changed the life, the capabilities and the prospects of the whole Yoruba nation in Nigeria, a nation that now numbers about 50 million in population. I returned home a few months ago, after many years of living and working as a professor abroad, mostly in the United States of America. America is a country of thousands of universities; and there is hardly any one of those universities that does not have some Yoruba professors. These days, since my return home from abroad, when I wake up in the morning, I love to stand at a discreet street corner and watch streams of our children going to school. Many of the children are so young that their older sisters or brothers have to hold their hands or even carry them.

The one sure thing that every Yoruba mother does for a child of school age today is to send him or her to school. Unknown to those mothers, they are building the Yoruba nation into a mighty nation in the world. In all the future, whenever the story of the greatness is written or told, it will always be remembered that it all started when Obafemi Awolowo opened the door to schools to all the children of his people. Free Education in our Western Region under Chief Awolowo was the very first in all of Africa.

The gift of Free Education was the greatest single gift given by Chief Awolowo to us his people, but it was not the only gift. Under his leadership, the Western Region stood out as the number one Region, the pace setter in development, in Nigeria. The wide-ranging development achievements included many miles of solidly surfaced roads all over our Region, pipe-borne clean water to many of our towns, the first television station on the African continent, the first public-owned sports stadium, the first industrial estate, imaginative support systems for our cocoa farmers (as a result of which our cocoa farmers became the most productive African farmers on the African continent), farm centres training our youths in modern farming, technical training centres teaching modern job skills to our youths, a broad-based investment corporation with investments in industries, commerce, banking, and real estate (the largest agglomeration of African-owned investment capital in Africa). Very importantly too, our Region was the leader in Nigeria in the development of a democratic society, and a government responsive to its people. On the whole, we in the Western Region were led to dream dreams of greatness in the world, we began to see ourselves as soon able to catch up with industrial world leaders like Japan. And we gave our Region the name First in Africa.

I need to add that Chief Awolowo did not intend to limit all these to the Western Region. No. When parents from other Regions brought their children across Regional borders to our free schools, Chief Awolowos government did not try to stop them. Moreover, he made dedicated efforts to give these goods to the whole of Nigeria. First and foremost in this regard, he was the leader who promoted most clearly and most consistently the idea that a country like Nigeria, comprising many different nationalities, in order to be able to live in harmony and make progress, needs to establish a rational federal system based on respect for the various nationalities. Other Nigerian leaders resisted this, and some castigated him for it, but he never gave up. His words have proved true in the course of the nearly sixty years of Nigerias independence. By concocting Nigeria into a country with an all-controlling central government, those who reject Chief Awolowos federalist ideas have led Nigeria into evil times times so evil that Nigeria may ultimately, or may even soon, break up.

Moreover, from 1959, Chief Awolowo embarked on efforts to take his development ideas to the Nigerian federal government and thereby to the whole of Nigeria. He fought titanic election campaigns, and reached the hearts of ordinary Nigerians far and wide. But, as we all know, most elections are won in Nigeria not through the votes of the common people but through the manipulations of powerful and influential citizens, especially powerful and influential citizens holding the machinery of the federal government. At federal election after federal election, Chief Awolowo won the majority of votes and lost the elections.

Unfortunately, in the midst of the rubble into which Nigeria has been reduced, the quality of the education which Chief Awolowo established for us is suffering today. Our children are not learning as much or as well as they should be learning in their schools. Most of the old school environments are run down and depressing and do not inspire the children to learn. Support for schools are generally poor across Nigeria, teachers are irregularly paid their salaries and are demoralized, and many teachers are forced to seek survival in all sorts of side ventures. Therefore, our youths are graduating from our schools, colleges and universities with very low levels of educational competence. The reasons for this sad state of affairs is well known. The persons who have been controlling most of the affairs of Nigeria through the Federal Government since independence are apathetic or even downright hostile to modern education. And, unhappily, the Federal Government which these people control has been gradually turned into the controller of all of Nigeria, with power and influence to determine what states may or may not do. The United Nations agency, UNESCO, estimates that a country that would have an efficient, effective and result-yielding educational system needs to be spending at least 26% of its GDP (or annual budget) on education. Nigeria spends only about 8% on education. Moreover, federal policies, and federal dictation of the nature, contents, and direction of education at all levels throughout Nigeria, have had disastrous effects on education in all parts of Nigeria.

But I must hurry to add that, happily, we are beginning to see welcome changes in our educational system. Some of the school premises being built today for primary schools in some of our states deserve our commendation and our gratitude. While thanking our elected public officials for these, however, we must also urge them to venture into deeper changes in the education of our children. What we Yoruba people want for ourselves is to belong in the ranks of the most educationally, scientifically and technologically advanced peoples of the world. In addition, we want our children to learn, and become proficient in, our language and our history. Chief Awolowo put our feet on the path to all these; we must now resume the journey with all the vigour at our command.

Obafemi Awolowo

But, as we gather here today, we are living in a Nigeria that has declined to its lowest levels of societal disorder, immorality, and hopelessness. All the negative inputs that have been fed into our countrys life since independence, all the crookedness, all the hatred and vileness and viciousness, all the involvement of the darkness of the occult and of Satanism into the affairs of Nigeria, all the murderous intent and the mass murdering of the weak and vulnerable, all the religious and inter-ethnic violence, all the sub-human greed and corruption in the ranks of the political and bureaucratic elite, all the impunity in the management of Nigerian affairs all have now converged and concatenated to make Nigeria a land of utter hopelessness for the vast majority of Nigerians, a land of poverty, hunger, disease and destitution, a land of desperation, fear and terror, a land in which rivers of human blood flow day by day, a land in which human life has become pitifully discounted.

A recent report by a United Nations agency described Nigeria as one of the poorest and most unequal countries in the world. Another UN report warned that if certain situations in Nigeria were not urgently changed, as many as 140 thousand children could die in a certain part of Nigeria in the next few months. Various reports are informing Nigeria and the world that the charitable money and other items sent by international organizations and individuals from across the world for the care of Nigerians internally displaced by Boko Haram violence are being stolen and shared by Nigerian officials, and that the camps where the internally displaced persons are being kept has become a horrible place of mass starvation and mass deaths. A report in the news media about two weeks ago alerted Nigeria to the fact that instances of mental sickness have risen to frightening heights, and are rising more and more sharply, in our country, and indicated that the cause of this is the condition of our country the hopeless poverty that reigns over the lives of masses of Nigerians, and the insensitive and utterly immoral governance of our country.

Instances of the vilest and most grotesque crimes, and of the most shockingly inhuman treatments of man by man, are reported daily from various parts of our country. The whole world has been watching videos of Nigerians calmly cutting the throats of hundreds of fellow Nigerians, and of Nigerians gathering groups of other living Nigerians together, dousing them with gasoline, and setting them on fire. Nigeria is becoming a strangely barbarous and repulsive spectacle in the world.

Not surprisingly, the outside world is already showing signs of rejecting Nigeria and Nigerians. About two weeks ago, towards the end of last January, some countries of the world issued warnings and advisories to their citizens, some urging their citizens to desist from going to Nigeria, some advising their citizens who are already in Nigeria to watch out for danger, and some advising their citizens to stay clear of certain parts of Nigeria. In the Union of South Africa, a member country of the African Union, the people are showing very definitely that they no longer want Nigerians in their country. In town after town in that country, crowds of citizens are rising up, attacking Nigerians, chasing Nigerians from their communities, killing some Nigerians in the process, and destroying the businesses and properties of Nigerians. This has been going on for some time, but it has reached a peak in recent months. And similar developments have occurred in some other African countries such as Kenya. Thousands of Nigerians regularly try to reach Europe through the Sahara Desert country of Libya in North Africa, another member of the African Union. According to official reports in recent months, Libyan citizens now commonly attack the arriving Nigerians, steal their money and other belongings, and then kill them.

As we all know, it is the youths of Nigeria that suffer the most from all these rot and ruin of Nigeria. By our youths I mean those Nigerians who belong to the age bracket of 18 to 40. As I said recently in a lecture which I delivered to Igbo Youths in Enugu, the people aged 18 to 40 are always the most dynamic sector of the population of every nation in the world. People below 18 are still children, mostly still schooling or learning in some other way. People in the age bracket 18 to 40 are usually graduates of schools, colleges and universities. In Nigeria, they constitute a majority of our countrys total population they are believed to be about 55% of our population. Even more importantly, they are the most educated and most skilled sector of our adult population. They produce and raise most of the children that are being born into our population. They dream up most ideas in business; and they are the starters of most business ventures. They lead in all fields of adventure, sports, and arts. In short, they bear the biggest share of the burden of pushing our country forward in economic, business, professional, intellectual, cultural, social and artistic pursuits.

But since independence, planning for the empowerment of our youths has never been a serious and sustained feature of Nigerias national development. Even the programmes for youth empowerment started in the Western Region under Chief Awolowos Regional government in the 1950s have not survived in the era of federal control and federal fiats. For decades now, the rate of unemployment among our youths has been one of the highest in the world. It has often been estimated as ranging between 54% and 70% among our educated youths, and even higher among the uneducated ones. For even the best university graduates, working the streets for years without a job is the common experience all over Nigeria. Most of our educated youths are unemployable partly because their basic education is grossly defective, partly because they lack modern job skills, and partly because the overwhelming majority lack acceptable job ethics.

At the same time, poor infrastructures, poor public administrative services, and insensitive financial services, drastically inhibit the spirit of entrepreneurship among our youths. In most countries in the world, a youth can sit at his mothers kitchen table or in his fathers garage and put together a business idea that can develop into a big winner in the market place; he does not have to fear for lack of electricity, lack of water, lack of good roads, lack of a supportive public administration, or lack of sensitive and helpful banking services. In Nigeria, even the most creative youth is deterred by such fears from going forward with his ideas; for those who choose to go forward, failure and drop-out are the very common outcomes.

However, even in these terrible times, I bring the message that any youth who chooses to learn from Chief Awolowos legacy stands a very good chance of acquiring for himself or herself a purpose-driven life, a life of success, and a life that impacts society, country and world in very positive ways. That is the central purpose of this lecture to invite and motivate our youths to benefit from the Awolowo legacy and use it to enrich, strengthen and beautify their lives and if possible, to use it to earn for themselves an image as bright and as enviable as Chief Awolowos in the world and for a long time in the future.

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The Awolowo Legacy And Its Message For Nigerian Youths | The ... - The News

Before Anton LaVey compiled the philosophy of Satanism and founded the Church of Satan in 1966, who upheld its values? It is always debated whether or not these people were or were not Satanists and what they would have thought of Satanism if it existed during their lives. In The Satanic Bible, Book of Lucifer 12, it name-drops many of these groups and mentions many specific people, times and dates. I do not want to quote it all here, so if youre interested in more of the specifics buy the damned book from Amazon, already. These are the unwitting potential predecessors of Satanism.

The Satanic Bible opens with a few references to groups that are associated with historical Satanism.

In eighteenth-century England a Hell-Fire Club, with connections to the American colonies through Benjamin Franklin, gained some brief notoriety. During the early part of the twentieth century, the press publicized Aleister Crowley as the wickedest man in the world. And there were hints in the 1920s and 30s of a black order in Germany.

To this seemingly old story LaVey and his organization of contemporary Faustians offered two strikingly new chapters. First, they blasphemously represented themselves as a church, a term previously confined to the branches of Christianity, instead of the traditional coven of Satanism and witchcraft lore. Second, they practiced their black magic openly instead of underground. []

[Anton LaVey] had accumulated a library of works that described the Black Mass and other infamous ceremonies conducted by groups such as the Knights Templar in fourteenth-century France, the Hell-Fire club and the Golden Dawn in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.

Burton Wolfes introduction to The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey (1969)

This page looks at some groups, some individuals, but is nowhere near a comprehensive look at the subject, just a small window into which you might see some of the rich, convoluted history of the dark, murky development of the philosophies that support Satanism.

There is a saying that history is written by the winners. The victors of a war are the ones who get to write the school books: they write that the defeated are always the enemy of mankind, the evil ones, the monsters. The victors are always fighting desperately for just causes. This trend is historically important in Satanism. As one religion takes over the ground and the demographics of a losing religion, the loser has its gods demonized and its holy places reclaimed. For example the Vatican was housed on an old Mithraist temple, and Gaelic spirits became monsters as Christianity brutalized Europe with its religious propaganda.

There are groups, therefore, that were wiped out by the Christians. The Spanish Inquisition forced, in duress and torture, many confessions out of its victims, confessions of every kind of devil worship. Likewise its larger wars against Muslims, science, freethought, etc, were all done under the guise of fighting against the devil. In cases where their victims left no records of their own we will never know what their true beliefs were. So the legacy of Christian violence has left us with many associations between various people and Devil Worship, and we know that most of these accounts are wrong, barbaric and the truth is grotesquely forced in them.

We know now that most the Christian Churches previous campaigns were unjustified. Various groups and individuals through have become called Satanists. Such claims are nearly always a result of rumours, mass paranoia and slanderous libel. The dark age victims of this kind of Christian paranoia were largely not actually Satanists, but merely those who didnt believe what the orthodox Church wanted them to believe. Thus, history can be misleading especially when you rely on the religious views of one group, who are clearly biased against competing beliefs!

The Knights Templar were founded in 1118 in the growing shadow of the Dark Ages. They were the most powerful military religious order of the Middle Ages. They built Europes most impressive ancient Cathedrals and were the bankers for practically every throne in Europe1. Some historians trace the history of all globalised multinationals to the banking practices of the Knights Templar2. They had strong presence in multiple countries; Portugal, England, Spain, Scotland, Africa (i.e. Ethiopia) and France. They were rich and powerful, with members in royal families and the highest places including Kings. King John II of Portugal was once Grand Master of the Order. They explored the oceans, built roads and trade routes and policed them, created the first banking system, sanctioned castles, built glorious buildings, and had adequate forces to protect their prized holy places and objects. Their fleet was world-faring, and their masterly knightly battle skills were invaluable to any who could befriend them or afford their mercenary services.

The Knights Templar fell into disrepute with the powerful Catholic Church and the French kingdom, and the Catholics ran a long campaign against them, accusing them of devil worship, of immorality, subversion, and accused them of practicing magic and every kind of occult art. The organisation was finally destroyed and its members burned from 1310. Nowadays, although the accusations are thoroughly discredited, they are still equated with the Occult and sometimes with Satanism, sometimes even by practitioners of those arts themselves.

The Knights Templar: 1. The Rise of the Knights Templar by Vexen Crabtree (2004)

The Satanism-for-fun-and-games fad next appeared in England in the middle 18th Century in the form of Sir Francis Dashwoods Order of the Medmanham Fanciscans, popularly called The Hell-Fire Club. While eliminating the blood, gore, and baby-fat candles of the previous centurys masses, Sir Francis managed to conduct rituals replete with good dirty fun, and certainly provided a colorful and harmless form of psychodrama for many of the leading lights of the period. An interesting sideline of Sir Francis, which lends a clue to the climate of the Hell-Fire Club, was a group called the Dilettanti Club, of which he was the founder.

The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey (1969)

The Hell-Fire Clubs conjure up images of aristocratic rakes outraging respectability at every turn, cutting a swath through the village maidens and celebrating Black Masses. While all this is true, it is not the whole story. The author of this volume has assembled an account of the Clubs and of their antecedents and descendants. At the centre of the book is the principal brotherhood, known by the Hell-Fire name Sir Francis Dashwoods notorious Monks of Medmenham, with their strange rituals and initiation rites, library of erotica and nun companions recruited from the brothels of London. From this maverick group flow such notable literary libertines as Horace Walpole and Lord Byron. Pre-dating Medmenham are the figures of Rabelais and John Dee, both expounding philosophies of do what you will or anything goes. Geoffrey Ashe traces the influence of libertarian philosophies on the world of the Enlightenment, showing how they met the need for a secular morality at a time when Christianity faced the onslaught of rationalism and empiricism. He follows the libertarian tradition through de Sade and into the 20th century, with discussions of Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson and Timothy Leary, delving below the scandals to reveal the social and political impact of doing your own thing which has roots far deeper than the post-war permissive society.

Amazon Review of The Hell-fire Clubs: A History of Anti-morality by Geoffrey Ashe

An informal network of Hellfire Clubs thrived in Britain during the eighteenth century, dedicated to debauchery and blasphemy. With members drawn from the cream of the political, artistic and literary establishments, they became sufficiently scandalous to inspire a number of Acts of Parliament aimed at their suppression. Historians have been inclined to dismiss the Hellfire Clubs as nothing more than riotous drinking societies, but the significance of many of the nations most powerful and brilliant men dedicating themselves to Satan is difficult to ignore. That they did so with laughter on their lips, and a drink in their hands, does not diminish the gesture so much as place them more firmly in the Satanic tradition.

The inspiration for the Hellfire Clubs [also] drew heavily from profane literature such as Gargantua, an unusual work combining folklore, satire, coarse humour and light-hearted philosophy written in the sixteenth century by a renegade monk named Francois Rabelais. One section of the book concerned a monk who [] has an abbey built that he names Thelema [which is] dedicated to the pleasures of the flesh. Only the brightest, most beautiful and best are permitted within its walls, and its motto is Fait Ce Que Vouldras (Do What You Will).

Lucifer Rising by Gavin Baddeley (1999)3

Gavin Baddeleys book opens with a long, fascinating and awe-inspiring chapter on histories Satanic traditions, following such trends through enlightenment, the decadents, through art, aristocracy and nobility, before concentrating the rest of the book on modern rock and roll devilry. It is a highly recommended book!

The magical and occult elements of Satanism have parallels with previous groups and teachings. Frequent references and commentary are made on certain sources. None of those listed here were Satanists except possibly Crowley:

The Knights Templar (11th-14th Centuries; France, Portugal, Europe) have contributed some symbolism and methodology but not much in the way of teachings.

Chaos Magic has contributed magical theory and psychological techniques to magical practices.

Quantum Physics has contributed high-brow theory on such areas as how consciousness may be able manipulate events.

The New Age (1900s+) has contributed some of the less respectable pop-magic aspects to Satanism such as Tarot, Divination, etc. Although Satanism was in part a reaction against the new age, some aspects of it have been generally adopted.

John Dee and Kelly (17th Century) created the Enochian system of speech used for emoting (sonic tarot) and pronounciation in any way the user sees fit. LaVey adopted the Enochian Keys for rituals and includes his translation of them in The Satanic Bible.

Aleister Crowley (1875-1947, England) was an infamous occultist and magician, and has lent a large portion of his techniques and general character to magical practice and psychology, as well as chunks of philosophy and teachings on magic and life in general.

The Kabballah, as the mother-text of nearly all the occult arts, has indirectly influenced Satanism, lending all kinds of esoteric thoughts, geometry, procedures, general ideas and some specifics to all occult practices.

See:

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844 Oct 15 1900 Aug 25, was a German philosopher who challenged the foundations of morality and promoted life affirmation and individualism. He was one of the first existentialist philosophers. Some of Nietzsches philosophies have surfaced as those upheld by Satanists.

Life: 1875 1947. Scotland, United Kingdom.

Infamous occultist and hedonist and influential on modern Satanism. Some hate him and think him a contentless, drug-addled, meaningless diabolicist with little depth except obscurantism. Others consider him an eye-opening Satanic mystic who changed the course of history. His general attitude is one found frequently amongst Satanists and his experimental, extreme, party-animal life is either stupidly self-destructive or a model of candle-burning perfection, depending on what type of Satanist you ask.

Some Satanists are quite well-read of Crowley and his groups. His magical theories, techniques and style have definitely influenced the way many Satanists think about ritual and magic.

As far as Satanism is concerned, the closest outward signs of this were the neo-Pagan rites conducted by MacGregor Mathers Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and Aleister Crowleys later Order of the Silver Star (A A Argentinum Astrum) and Order of Oriental Templars (O.T.O.), which paranoiacally denied any association with Satanism, despite Crowleys self-imposed image of the beast of revelation. Aside from some rather charming poetry and a smattering of magical bric-a-brac, when not climbing mountains Crowley spent most of his time as a poseur par excellence and worked overtime to be wicked. Like his contemporary, Rev.(?) Mantague Summers, Crowley obviously spent a large part of his life with his tongue jammed firmly into his cheek, but his followers, today, are somehow able to read esoteric meaning into his every word.

Book of Air 12 The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey (1969)

Links to other sites:

Europe has had a history of powerful indulgent groups espounding Satanic philosophies; with the occassional rich group emerging from the underground to terrorize traditionalist, stifling morals of their respective times, these groups have led progressive changes in society in the West. Satanists to this day employ shock tactics, public horror and outrage in order to blitzkreig their progressive freethought messages behind the barriers of traditionalist mental prisons.

When such movements surfaced in the USA in the guise of the Church of Satan, it was a little more commercialist than others. Previous European groups have also been successful businesses, the Knights Templar and resultant Masons, etc, being profound examples of the occassional success of left hand path commerce. The modern-day Church of Satan is a little more subdued as society has moved in a more acceptable, accepting, direction since the Hellfire Clubs. As science rules in the West, and occultism is public, there is no place for secretive initiatory Knights Templar or gnostic movements; the Church of Satan is a stable and quiet beacon rather than a reactionary explosion of decadence.

It is the first permanent non-European (but still Western) Satanic-ethos group to openly publish its pro-self doctrines, reflecting the general trends of society towards honesty and dissatisfaction with anti-science and anti-truth white light religions.

Popular press and popular opinion are the worst sources of information. This holds especially true with the case of Satanism. Especially given that the exterior of Satanism projects imagery that is almost intentionally confusing to anyone unintiated. From time to time public paranoia arises, especially in the USA, claiming some company, person or event is Satanic. The public are nearly always wrong and nearly always acting out of irrational fear, sheepish ignorance and gullibility. Public outcries are nearly always erroneous when they claim that a particular group, historical or present, are Satanic.

Similar to this is the relatively large Christian genre of writing that deals with everything unChristian. The likes of Dennis Wheatley, Eliphas Levi, etc, churn out countless books all based on the assumption that anything non-Christian is Satanic, and describe many religious practices as such. These books would be misleading if they had any plausibility, but thankfully all readers except their already-deluded Christian extremist audience cannot take them seriously. Nevertheless occasionally they contribute to public paranoia about Satanism.

In the press and sociology, the phenomenon of public paranoia about criminal activities of assumed Satanic groups is called Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) Panic. SRA claims are equal to UFO, abduction, faeries and monsters in both the character profile of the manics involved and the lack of all evidence (despite extensive searching!) to actually uncover such groups.

More:

Historical Satanism dpjs.co.uk/historical.html

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Modern Satanism | Prometheism.net - Part 2

Leonie Cooper on witches, beehives and Lana Del Rey.

Its hard out here for a witch. Well, at least it was 400-odd years ago when women were regularly hanged, drowned and burned to death after being accused of sorcery, Satanism and doing suspicious things with herbs. This fear of witchcraft was, in essence, a fear of womens power, sexuality and general awesomeness.

Thankfully, women are no longer persecuted when crops fail and odd things happen in the village theyre persecuted for their weight, their clothes and their work instead but witches seem to be firmly back in the public eye and this time theyre not going to be dragged off to the stake. Theyre going to put on a s**t-tonne of black eyeliner and sort out everything thats rubbish in the world.

This isnt simply about the fact that loads of new bands, from moody electronica trio MUNA to Manchester indie-poppers Pale Waves, look like theyve stepped out of 1996 teen witch movie The Craft. A-listers are also getting in on the sweet occult action and taking their witchy business straight to the top. Last week Lana Del Rey attempted to organise her coven of fans into using magic to get rid of Donald Trump. The high priestess of noir-pop tweeted the days of the next waning crescent moons and instructions to find a spell online, to be performed at midnight on the proposed dates. All you need to join in is an unflattering photo of Trump not difficult, to be fair a tower tarot card, an orange candle, a bowl of water and some salt. See you down the homeware aisle of Tesco, then.

But the best bit of modern magic comes in the shape of a new film called The Love Witch, which goes on general release in the UK on March 10. Directed by LA-based auteur Anna Biller, it uses the Technicolor gloss and retro style of cult and camp thriller movies like Vertigo, Rosemarys Baby, The Wicker Man and Suspiria to take a sledgehammer to the patriarchy. The film tells the story of Elaine, a woman who uses sex magic to make men fall in love with her while wearing some fabulous vintage-styled frocks also made by the multitalented Biller.

Yet beyond the beehives, it cleverly deconstructs the idea of women as marriage-obsessed hysterics with style, sass and an excellent tampon joke. Witchcraft in 2017 is about women coming together, not about being torn apart. Whether its Lana Del Rey getting her goth on or thousands coming together for the Womens March in January, the witches are rising excuse me while I go and fetch my broomstick.

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Witchcraft is the new feminism - NME.com (blog)

There has been another upgrade to the national education curriculum in Turkey. Among these changes, philosophy lessons have been reduced and the single-party rule applied to classes in the 1940s have been cut. The latest coup attempt has been added under philosophy and the social sciences.

On 16 January, the Ministry of National Education announced the new education curricula for secondary and high schools in Turkey.

The national curriculum has been a recurring topic of debate in Turkey for decades. It has always been controversial, given that all governments and political bodies have wanted to reinvent the educational system in the ideological image of the ruling party.

The number of chapters in the philosophy course books has been generally reduced, while keeping political philosophy and philosophy of science. According to the new curriculum, class hours will remain the same at 72 hours per term, while the expected learning outcome for philosophy has been slashed from 58 to 20 points on Turkeys assessment scale.

This major reduction of philosophys significance in the curriculum echoes the debate from a few years ago on the possibility of studying philosophy in the modern Turkish language. Recep Tayyip Erdoan, the prime minister at the time, said that this was inadequate, insisting that one needs to use the Ottoman Turkish, which borrows the alphabet and most of its vocabulary from Arabic and Persian, or English in order to study philosophy.

If we were to teach philosophy for 20 years, it would be a different country.

Istanbul-born philosopher and President of Philosophical Society of Turkey, Ioanna Kuuradi, said We make philosophy but he does not recognise us as philosophers. In an interview with Szc in March 2016, Kuuradi claimed that ignorance is at root of Turkeys current social and moral crises and that they could be overcome through proper philosophical education: If we were to teach philosophy for 20 years, it would be a different country.

A pro-government conservative education union, Eitim Bir-Sen, recently proposed the removal of Ataturkism, the official ideology describing the founding principles of modern Turkey, from the social sciences curriculum, and starting religious education at first grade.

While Eitim Bir-Sens proposal on compulsory religion classes for first grade students was not introduced, Ataturkism has indeed been scrapped, and the principle of encouraging the observance of religious holidays adopted. In line with the spirit of Eitim Bir-Sens proposal, Darwin & Evolution Theory was also purged from the school syllabus. It had been a controversial matter in Turkey for some time, especially since the Turkish Science Institutes prohibition of publications about evolution.

The new approach will now rely on values education, e.g. the notions of national unity & solidarity as well as national, moral and universal values. The new curriculum refers to values education as having a cultural impact, claiming that it is significant in turning these values into new norms and daily behaviours for society in the future. As part of the new elective course for secondary schools Basic Religious Teachings, jihad will be taught as part of religious values. Positivism and secularism will be categorised under the Problems of Faith chapter, dedicated to the promotion of individualism and the separation of state and religion. Also under the problems of faith heading, students will be taught about deism, agnosticism, atheism, nihilism, satanism, reincarnation and false prophets.

The coup attempt on 15 July 2016, which had a major impact on social and educational life in Turkey, has also been brought into the curriculum. Students will start learning about the coup attempt starting at sixth grade as a part of social science and philosophy classes. However, it is not certain whether previous coups will be referred to in the same classes.

At high school level, the students will now be asked to write essays on Social Resistance against the Anti-Democratic 15 July Coup Attempt within the framework of national-will, rule of law, and democratic understanding. National Will is a common reference in AKP (the ruling Justice and Development Party) campaigns, referring to the strong support behind the party in elections.

Contemporary Turkish and World History classes that focus on World War II will no longer refer to the anti-war efforts of Ismet Inonu, the president of the republic at the time and leader of the single-party CHP (Republican Peoples Party) regime. Nor will it refer to his contributions to Turkeys political and economic activities in the 1940s. Inonu was a general during Turkeys War of Independence, a friend of the founder of republic and was declared National Chief during World War II, while keeping Turkey out of the war at all costs. As Inonus efforts at neutrality are being erased from history books, the transition to a multi-party system and the history of the Democrat Party is put under the spotlight.

The class on contemporary history, which has a chapter on the Cold War Period, will now include topics on Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Developments in Turkey during the Time of the Democrat Party. This in itself was a controversial period, with the start of a multi-party system that brought about the grasp of power by the Adnan Menderes government, starting in 1946. The new topic will focus on the election systems that were initiated in this period, which was heavily criticised for authoritarian tendencies and gerrymandering, due to the Democrat Partys post-election downgrading of urban entities that did not predominantly vote for the ruling party.

The revised educational curriculum will honour Turkish citizens that have had international success. High school chemistry books will now have a topic on Prof. Dr. Aziz Sancar in the chapter on Relations between Inter Chemical Species with his Nobel Prize-winning study on DNA-repair. Contemporary History will include Galatasarays winning of the UEFA Cup in 2000, as well as the national football teams finishing third in the World Cup.

Rewriting the history books from a centre-right political perspective only replaces the existing problems with new ones.

Students will be informed about scientific and technological developments in Turkey, about its satellite programme and communications technologies.

While the new curriculum is being championed by some media outlets in Turkey as the new system that will generate geniuses and inventors, many critical eyes see the decreasing presence of philosophy in the curriculum and hostile approach to secularism and positivism as a problem.

Even though the AKPs efforts to erase ideological traces from national education may appear to modernise the education system through a more results-oriented approach, rewriting the history books from a centre-right political perspective only replaces the existing problems with new ones.

**

This piece was originally published on Katoikos.eu

Read more here:

How Does the New Turkish Curriculum Look Like? Conservative Changes Dominate - PoliticalCritique.org

I dont preach peace and love.

Voltaire famously quipped, Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Religion is the ultimate absurdity, and with the noteworthy exception of the Bolshevik genocide against Russian Orthodox Christians, the most horrific atrocities in history have been committed in the name of God. Belief in an anthropomorphic creator God who takes a keen interest in the minutiae of everyday human affairs is completely irrational and clear evidence of derangement. Unable to comprehend adult human beings praying to an invisible friend for favors and protection, I took a keen interest in religion at an early age.

Raised as an American Baptist, I began my inquiry with Christianity. I found out pretty quickly that modern Christianity was at best a very distorted series of mistranslations and selective editing of the ravings of a mad Palestinian mystic attempting to overthrow the authority of the Sanhedrin Rabbinate, and at worst a pastiche of the various regional dying god myths associated with the development of agricultural society crafted to reinforce existing social hierarchies and injustice by promising that well-behaved slaves will receive pie in the sky when they die.

I next examined the staggering complexity of Hinduism. The sacred texts read more like an alternative history than a religion. The Upanishads consist of sound straightforward philosophical ideas, but the Mahabarata reads like a science fiction novel describing a war between two highly advanced civilizations. My studies of Hinduism resulted in a lifelong fascination with the missing millennia of human history and the notion that theres a lot more to our past than the simple narrative that civilization begins at Sumer. Standing on the summit of Mount Meru, one can almost glimpse the shores of Atlantis.

Of all the sacred texts I examined, the Dhammapada made the most sense. The tenets of Buddhism are less concerned with an external deity or afterlife than the basics of living a satisfactory and rewarding life. Its a very practical set of rules that boil down to Dont be an idiot. The best modern exponent of Buddhism is Alan Watts. Lately Ive listened to his lectures on YouTube, and recommend them as an antidote to the hysteria currently raging across the globe.

By comparison, the three great Semitic traditions are insanely paranoid and relentlessly genocidal. Judaism is predicated on the idea that only the Jews are fully created in the image of God, and that gentiles are mere beasts of burden, created by God to serve the Chosen, like donkeys or cattle. The Talmud is unquestionably the most viciously racist religious text Ive read yet. You wont find it at Barnes & Noble, with very good reason. Gentiles are forbidden to study it, under penalty of death by stoning. It goes a long way toward understanding why the Jews have been expelled from 109 countries. It codifies and enshrines hypocrisy and deception as social strategies.

The Koran is merely a revised version of the Bible, with an insanely expanded set of arbitrary rules and regulations and the same twisted concept of eternal punishment for disobedience to the impostor demon at the center of it, dumbed down for the kind of semi-literate peasant that needs just one book in his life. Its aimed at men who have trouble getting laid. It takes the inherent misogyny of Judaism and Pauline Christianity several steps further, relegating women to the status of cattle.

Ive studied Satanism and its variants at great length, and can say with some authority that theres nothing of value there. Its Ayn Rand in Goth drag, an empty sales pitch for selfishness and a never-ending cottage industry of occult trinkets and books.

I used to dismiss the Wicca as a clearly synthetic invention of no greater antiquity than the incandescent light bulb, but Ive come to admire them enormously. For all of their silly delusions of antiquity, the fact remains that they worship nature, and can prove that nature exists. That works.

I can tolerate Jews, Christians, and Moslems. If they cant tolerate me, thats fine. As the old saying goes, God made men, but Colt made them equal. The Semitic religions prance around preaching peace, love and killing people. I dont preach peace and love.

Originally posted here:

Delusions of Antiquity - Splice Today

There is a gross falsehood proliferated by those whose horizons stretch no further than the end of their nose. The fallacy is that all modern music is simply repetitions of ideas and concepts from yesteryear, that there isnt a single riff, lick, chord or note that has never been played before. Apart from the fact that this is an incredibly fatuous, narrow-minded view that completely ignores essential components of music such as craft, composition, personality, chemistry, technology, instrumentation, dynamics and tone (to name but a few), it also leads perfectly rationale people to spout nonsense;how many times have we heard the ridiculous notionthatThe Beatles invented every idea found in modern music and nobody's come up with a solitary original idea since?

Unless theres an unreleased album of Black Metal mixed with African-American Slave music by Messrs McCartney, Lennon, Harrison and Starr hiding in a dusty Abbey Road vault, we can probably nip that particular falsity in the bud. Instead, this particular combination of disparate genres can be credited to songwriter Manuel Gagneux, the brainchild behind Zeal & Ardor. If you really do think youve heard every trick that modern music has to offer, you might want to listen to the stream of their debut album Devil is Fine above; its unlikely you will have heard anything quite like it before.

The genesis for Zeal & Ardor came when Gagneuxbecame frustrated workingon a different musical project, his incredibly diverse, difficult to define, alternative chamber pop projectBirdmask.Whenever Gagneux would run in to a creative stumbling block, he would go on to 4Chan, an internet bulletin board where anyone can post anonymously on a wide variety of topics, and ask people for two musical genres. He would then combine them and write a song within half an hour, purely as a means to get his creative juices flowing once again. It wasn'teven my idea to mix these two genres Gagneux says humbly I totally stole it! The first iteration of this combination was pretty horrible to be honest, but the idea stuck with me and I pursued it

Gagneuxs enthusiasm for black metal started, as it does for most fans of the genre, as a teenager. I was trying to listen to listen to the most extreme music I could find, you know how teens are. My friend introduced me to Burzum and Darkthrone and told me that they were the most evil people on the planet of course, I was intrigued! I became so enthralled by black metal because it's all enveloping sound; its very aggressive but even tender in some moments.

Chain gang music, whilst not something Gagneux listens to on a regular basis, was introduced to him as a child by his Swiss father and American mother. My parents listened to these old Lomax recordings for a while when I was growing up. They were something I'd totally forgotten about but recently re-discovered and I dove into them for this project.'

Mixing genres is all well and good but if the individual strands of the hybrid are no good, youll be falling at the first hurdle. Gagneux has efficaciously captured the essence and sentiment of African slave music; the authenticity is so convincing, accusations were made against him, saying hed stolen old Lomax recordings and sampled them without permission (he didnt, he just sang loudly into a shit microphone with too much signal to get that authentic, lo-fi recording sound of the 30s and 40s).

As Gagneux began putting the music together, images began to form in his head of African chain gangs rebelling against their Christian captors by invoking Satanism. He took this idea and ran with it as a thematic thread to pin on to the record. Devil is Fines artwork shows signs of the extensive research Gagneux put into the project; the photograph is of a real enslaved African-American, Robert Smalls, who managed to free himself and 17 other slaves during the American Civil War by commandeering a Confederate transport ship stacked with Howitzer guns and several hundred rounds of ammunition. It was a daring escape for such a young man; Smalls was just 22 when he put his perilous plan into action and he lived to the age of 75, very respectable for someone born in the 19th century. Once he was free, Smalls lived a very full life, serving as a civilian pilot and armed transport captain for the military and later got into politics as a member of the US House of Representatives.

Superimposed over the image of Smalls is The Sigil of Lucifer, sometimes referred to as the Seal of Satan. One of the lesser known symbols in modern Satanism, its believed to hold connections to a greater, supernatural power, in this case, Satan himself. I think superimposing Lucifers sigil over the image of Robert Smalls neatly sums up the intention and theme of this record to me says Gagneux. Without trying to sound too corny, its meant to represent these African slaves summoning something sinister and liberating themselves through Satan. Imagine if slaves in America had rejected the Christianity that was foisted upon them and embraced Satanism instead. Rather than being forced to accept the will of God, they choose defiance and rebellion; thats the world in which this album is rooted. Im an atheist, I dont really believe in God, but parts of modern Satanism do gel with me whilst other parts dont. Its fiction at the end of the day but it's well researched; I've put an embarrassing amount of time into reading occult books to get this stuff right!

The album artwork superimposes the Sigil of Lucifer over an image of freed slave Robert Smalls

Whilst the black metal and slave music hybridisation has got the most media attention thus far, theres actually a large pool of various genre influences that Gagneux is drawing from on Devil is Fine; elements of electronica, cradle songs, spiritual chanting, delta-blues licks and funk are all touched on throughout Devil is Fines 25minutes. Childrens Summon sounds like Dragonforce put through a Watain filter. Whats a Killer Like You Gonna Do Here? evokes a darker, more sinister Tom Waits. Given the somewhat purist attitude of a certain breed of metal fan, Zeal & Ardor have and will continue to provoke strong reactions, both positive and negative.

It's not a primary intention of mine to aggravate those people but it is funny to see some of the reactions says Gagneux. Black metal used to be the most extreme music known to man, but now, it's almost classical. It seems natural to want to evolve it and figure out alternatives and evolutions. There's been quite a few polarising opinions but actually I really appreciate them because some of them mention things where there might be room for improvement. Zeal & Ardor to me is not done, I'm still trying to figure out how it could be better and some of these negative comments are quite helpful because they point out what I could do better.

Zeal & Ardor is just the latest in a long line of developments in the world of music, an artform that continues to develop and metamorphose, despite the protestations of those stuck in the past or who fear change. Music is a force that is constantly changing and evolving; the notion that the well will run dry and that everythings already been done is an idea that says more about the person expressing it than it does about the state of modern music. Some may dismiss Zeal & Ardor as a gimmick but Gagneux is determined to not let that happen. As a live unit, the project will be expanded from just Gagneux to six musicians, including two backing singers. It's a fine line to walk because I don't ever want the music to be secondary to the show, but I have a few ideas. The record is only 25 minutes long but if we do a 25 minute set, people will kill us and will have every right to do so! So theres a few new ideas and songs for people that come to see us live. I'm in the process of distilling the project, making it more extreme in both directions and gelling the two elements together a little more precisely.

Devil is Fine is released through MVKA on 24th February on vinyl, CD and digitally. Zeal & Ardor commence a European tour in March including a date at The Underworld in Camden, London on 20th April

Excerpt from:

Zeal & Ardor Devil is Fine: Album Stream - The Independent

Mail-order brides have deep roots in American history, dating back to the colonial period.

By Marcia A. Zug February 2017

Modern mail-order brides are often stereotyped as young foreign women desperate to escape their homeland, but there was a time when mail-order brides were seen as strong pioneer women. There have been mail-order brides in America as long as there have been Europeans in America but the course of time has changed the perceptions of these women. In Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches (NYU Press, 2016) author Marcia A. Zug traces the history of mail-order brides in America from colonial times to the present.

To find more books that pique our interest, visit the Utne Reader Bookshelf.

"As Catherine looks out across the water, she wonders what her life will be like when she reaches Virginia. She knows that conditions will be hard, but life in England was also hard. At least in the colony, there is the possibility of advancement. The Virginia Company has assured her and the other women that they will have their choice of marriage partners. They have promised that the men are wealthy, or at least will be with the womens help, and that the women will have a share of this wealth. Catherine knows it is a risk, but she has been assured she can always return home if she changes her mind. Regardless, Catherine expects to stay. There is little for her back in England. She will marry a colonist and help found a nation."

The above thoughts illustrate what I believe one of the first mail-order brides might have felt as she traveled thousands of miles from England to settle in the Virginia colony. There is no actual record of the hopes and fears of these young women. Nevertheless, we do know that their arrival in 1619 was eagerly anticipated and desired.

Marriage was vital to the success of the colony. Wives were needed to create stable family units, produce and care for children, and cement Americas racial and cultural hierarchy. However, the difficulty was that few European women were interested in immigrating. In fact, female immigration to the colonies was so rare that when a group of forty women from La Fleche, France, began boarding a ship for Canada in 1659, the townspeople tried to prevent their departure because they were convinced the women were being kidnapped. Mail-order marriage helped resolve this problem. These women immigrated when others would not, and consequently, their presence was considered critically important.

The risks the early settlers faced were substantial. Most potential colonists had heard frightening accounts of disease and famine, and many of these stories seemed to indicate that women were particularly vulnerable. One horrific tale from Virginia involved a colonist who slue his wife as she slept in his bosome, cut her in pieces, powedered her & fedd upon her till he had clean devoured all her parts saveinge her heade. In the northern colonies, settlers such as the Puritans and the Quakers accepted these risks as the price of religious freedom, and as a result, these areas had little difficulty attracting large numbers of family groups. In contrast, the southern colonies, which lacked this religious draw, had a much harder time finding families willing to accept the dangers and hardships of colonial life. A handful of women came to the colonies shortly after the first male settlers arrived, but their numbers were small, and even fewer came with their children. Moreover, some families, like that of Sir Thomas Gates, sent their daughters back to England if their wives died. As early as 1609, a broadside (poster) produced by the Virginia Company of London demonstrated that the colonys governing body recognized the need to recruit women. The broadside was directed at family groups and specifically emphasized that both men and women were needed for the better strengthening of the colony. Nevertheless, despite such appeals, few families immigrated to the southern colonies. Instead, the majority of southern colonists were single men, primarily individual speculators and fortune hunters, who came to profit from Americas abundant land and natural resources and then return home. As colonial historian Julia Cherry Spruill has noted, these men were not interested in building permanent homes in Virginia or in cultivating lands to be enjoyed by future generations. They simply planned to make their fortunes and then return to England.

The transient nature of the southern population was problematic, and it quickly became clear that the lack of women was threatening the future of the fledgling colony. In 1614, the Virginia Companys lawyer, Richard Martin, spoke before the House of Lords and highlighted the threat posed by the colonys gender disparity. He informed the members, a significant number of whom had shares in the com- pany,that Virginia desperately needed honest laborers, with wives and children. He then recommended the appointment of a committee to consider ways to increase family immigration. Other members of the Virginia Company shared Martins immigration concerns. However, class politics ultimately prevented consideration of his proposal. Martin was only a lawyer and not a lord, so his requests, which went beyond legal advice, were considered presumptuous. One contemporary described his speech as the most unfitting that was ever spoken in the house. Consequently, not only were Martins appeals ignored, they resulted in punishment. The day after appearing before the House of Lords, Martin was arraigned for contempt. He was brought before Sir Randall Crew, the Speaker of the House, forced to kneel, and given following admonishment:

"The case was this a petition relative to the Virginia Company had been presented, and an order for the Council to appear, that he as their Attorney had represented himself with diverse Lords. That the House at first was disposed to listen to him with all due respect and love; that the retrospect of the Virginia Plantation was acceptable, for it had been viewed with the eyes of love. But afterwards, he has impertinently digressed, for it was not his place to censure and advise. The House had therefore brought him before them, and although many were his acquaintances, yet all now looked upon him with the eyes of judges, and not as private friends."

After Martins censure, the issue of family immigration was dropped, but the lack of women remained a significant problem. Finally, in 1619, the Virginia Companys treasurer, Sir Edwin Sandys, who now controlled the company, decided to address the issue. He warned his fellow shareholders that if immediate action was not taken, the colonys gender imbalance would soon breed a dissolucon, and so an overthrow of the Plantation. Sandys recommended sponsoring the immigration of single women because he believed their presence would make the men more setled [and] lesse moveable and decrease the number of men who, because of the dearth of women, stay [in the colony] but to gett something and then return for England. This time, the recommendation to address the colonys female immigration problem was met with approval. After hearing Sandyss suggestion, Lord Francis Bacon, a founding member of the company, immediately expressed his public support declaring it time to plant with women as well as with men; that the plantation may spread into generations, and not ever pieced from without. Shortly after Sandyss request, the company began recruiting single women to marry the Jamestown colonists.

In the spring of 1620, ninety mail-order brides arrived in Jamestown. Their arrival was considered a success, and the next year Sandys requested funds to transport an additional one hundred women. By this time, the company was in financial difficulties and no longer had the necessary money. However, because Sandys insisted that more women were absolutely essential, the company agreed to raise the money by subscription. Due to these efforts, another fifty brides were sent to Jamestown. Altogether, the Virginia Company sponsored the immigration of 140 mail-order brides. The arrival of these women was intended to reduce the number of male colonists returning to England, but this was not the only reason female immigration was considered necessary. Despite the femaleless wasteland described by Sandys, the colony did not actually lack women. America was filled with indigenous women, and relationships between the male colonists and native women occurred almost immediately.

As early as 1608, after disease and starvation wiped out nearly a third of the original Jamestown colonists, a large number of the male survivors began taking Indian wives. By 1612, the Spanish ambassador to England reported that between 40 to 50 Englishman . . . had married Indian women. He also informed the company that nearly all of these men had abandoned the colony for their wives villages. Only two years earlier, the entire population of Jamestown consisted of sixty colonists. Consequently, the number of desertions described by the ambassador was shocking. Just as concerning was the fact that these desertions seemed unstoppable. Virginia Governor Dale had already decreed that deserters were to be hanged, some burned, some to be broke upon wheels, others to be staked and some to be shot to death. This law had little effect, and colonial men continued to leave the colony.

Desertions contributed to the already declining population, while also undermining the moral justification for the entire colonial endeavor. Virginia settlers had rationalized colonization by highlighting the supposed differences between themselves and the countrys native inhabitants. Captain John Smiths 1607 report on the native population of Virginia epitomized this trend, characterizing the local Indians as cruel, irrational, vengeful, treacherous, and barbaric. He also accused these tribes of Satanism. He described the Virginia Indians as devil worshippers who prayed to idols shaped with such deformity as may well suit with such a god and claimed they practiced child sacrifice. Such accusations seemed to confirm the English colonizers belief in their moral and religious superiority. However, intermarriage threatened these distinctions.

Britains recent colonizing venture in Ireland had demonstrated that settlers were extremely likely to adopt the customs and manners of native inhabitants with whom they intermixed. One typical report from the Irish colony bewailed the number of Englishmen who in small time have grown wild in Ireland, and become in language and qualities Irish. This report also noted the paucity of Irishmen who do in exchange become civilized and English. Virginias colonial leaders worried that marriage to Indian women would lead to similar results. Specifically, they feared that intermarriage would cause European men to abandon their civility and become indistinguishable from the heathen savages. This fear was then further exacerbated by the perceived sexual availability of Indian women. In John Smiths 1612 account of life in the early Virginia colony, he wrote about his visit to one of Powhatans (Pocahontass father) villages and noted that in any of these villages, an Englishman could expect a woman freshly painted red with pocones and oil to be his bed fellow. Smith also detailed his own experience. He claimed to have been greeted by 30 young women [who] came naked out of the woods (only covered behind and before with a few greene leaves), their bodies all painted, some white, some red, some black, some partie colour, but every one different. He then described being invited back to their lodging where they more tormented him than ever, with crowding, and pressing, and hanging upon him, most tediously crying, love you not mee? Similar, although less colorful, accounts were provided by colonist and company secretary William Strachey, who declared that the local women were most voluptious and eager to embrace the acquaintance of any Straunger.

In order to prevent desertions to the native villages and lessen the attractions of native women, colonial leaders described white/Indian relationships as religiously prohibited. In his 1609 sermon, the colonial Reverend William Symonds railed against the dangers of miscegenation. Symonds cited the biblical injunction that Gods people in Canaan keepe to themselves, and not marry nor give in marriage to the heathen, that are uncircumcized, and he warned that the breaking of this rule jeopardized ones chance for eternal salvation and risked all good succese of this voyage. Symondss religious admonishment did little to stem the flow of desertions, and even within the colony, some determined men found ways around this prohibition. The most famous intermarried colonist was John Rolfe. In his letter to Governor Dale seeking permission to marry Pocahontas, Rolfe acknowledged the heavie displeasure which almightie God conceived against the sonnes of Levie and Israel for marrying strange wives. Nevertheless, he argued that this concern was inapplicable to his own relationship, because Pocahontas was converting to Christianity and, thus, their marriage would actually be furthering Gods work and assisting with Rolfes owne salvation. Rolfes arguments were persuasive and earned Dales endorsement of the marriage.

By 1619, it had become clear that neither religious prohibitions nor capital punishment was a sufficient deterrent against intermarriage. The company, therefore, concluded that the best way to reduce desertions and ensure the colony remained racially and ethnically distinct was to provide colonial men with a viable marriage alternative to native women. Understandably, the women recruited to fulfill this important task were chosen with care. They were not prostitutes, criminals, or beggars. In fact, out of the thirty-eight women whose social status is known, eight had links to the gentry. According to the company records, four of the women were the daughters of gentlefolk; two others had uncles and one cousin (once removed) who were knights; and the eighth was described as the daughter of Mr. Gervase Markham, of the Nottinghamshire gentry. In addition, the company insisted that all the women had been received . . . upon good recommendation.

Originally posted here:

Coming to America: The History of Mail-Order Brides - Utne Reader Online