How British Intelligence manufactured a Satanic Panic in Northern Ireland

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Originally published at: How British Intelligence manufactured a Satanic Panic in Northern Ireland | Boing Boing

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Let me guess: the story ends with an MI5 officer reading some lines aloud from an old book by John Dee, and Boris Johnson appears.

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I think they are called “radio programmes” or “radio programs” or something…

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The BBC has made podcasts that haven’t been broadcast, but I admit this wasn’t one of them.

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Mon 22 Mar 2010 20:00

BBC Radio 4

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…okay fair.

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Is a podcast of a radio program still a pipe radio program?

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So…throwing silly parties was more of a concern to the public than blowing people up and being blown up?

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Never underestimate the fear some have of devil worshippers. Or of fictitious pedophiles (unlike the real ones in the Church).

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Yeah as much as this was a wild British tactic, it’s even more frustrating that it probably did a decent job of scaring some people.

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This sort of thing sticks too. There are still people who think that the Texas day care was a front for satanic pedophiles in the 90s, even though the case has been thoroughly debunked for decades now.

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Q must have listened to this podcast.

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Of all the nasty, underhanded things that the British have ever done in Northern Ireland, this one…actually isn’t as bad as a lot of the others.

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Yes, if we’d stuck to things like this (rather than, say, Guantanamo-Baying a quarter of a per cent of the male population), things might not have turned out so bad or for so long.

But I don’t think this one took. I grew up during the Troubles (though not in Northern Ireland), and I’ve never heard this story before: if it had grown legs, I’m sure it would have featured more heavily in the British press.

I had heard about the Soviet weapons, and I’m surprised to learn it’s not true, because (a) the IRA was a revolutionary Marxist group (at least nominally, and at least in its Official incarnation – I’m not so sure about the Provisionals) and (b) great powers have a long established practice of stirring up shit in each others’ backyards.

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Basically the split was because the OIRA were Marxist-Leninist and the PIRA weren’t, but were still socialist (This might include Marxists, but probably not the M-L Marxists). This led to disagreements about what they should be doing and how they should be doing it.

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I knew I recognized those production values!

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