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A Good Read: Book Suggestions & Recommendations

I managed to pick up a great Kindle book for 99p and have just finished it: The Exorcist 50 Years Of Fear by Nat Segaloff, a great read, it is now £11.99 on Kindle.

Being brought up Catholic (but not been to church for decades) the concept of evil and Satan is still very much with me, which made the film scary to me personally. I nearly bought Father Amorth & The Devil but some reviews lead me to keep my £14.

But I did find the free to download academic paper but haven't got round to reading it yet:

The Devils Habits and Exorcism in the Catholic Church Father Amorth's Account: https://www.researchgate.net/public...n_the_Catholic_Church_Father_Amorth's_Account
 
My review of Under the Eye of Power is in FT442.

Under the Eye of Power
How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy
Colin Dickey
Viking 2023 Hb, 368pp, £23.74, ISBN 9780593299456

In Under the Eye of Power Colin Dickey argues that QAnon is not an outlier, rather it is part of a long
established Nativist narrative which runs through American history. Harking back to the writings of Karl
Popper, Dickey perceives conspiracy theories as “a secularised version of religion” and contends they
must be resisted if a free and fair democratic system is to prevail. Even the Founding Fathers do not
escape the taint, or so says Colin Dickey. Take George Washington: his transition “from an uneducated
plantation owner to the head of a new nation cannot be entirely disentangled from his involvement in
Masonry”. And yes, this book also examines the role of Freemasonry in everyday American life and
politics.

It’s more fruitful however to look at more arcane conspiracies through the last 300 years rather than the
well-trodden paths of Freemasonry or QAnon. During the 1692 Salem Witch Trials Puritan Preacher
Cotton Mather literally feared an invasion from Hell, warning of: “A PLOT of the Devil against New
England”. The War of Independence was seen by loyalists as a French plot to sap Britain’s military
strength and put the Mother Country at risk. Even George Washington in his farewell address at the end of
his presidency warned of alien forces which would use “Many artifices ... to weaken Democracy ... often
covertly and insidiously”. An admonition echoed by Dwight Eisenhower almost 200 years later when he
cautioned against the rise of the military–industrial complex.

The supposed plot by enslaved Americans to set all of New York City on fire in 1741 resulted in the
lynching and judicial execution of hundreds of slaves and free people of colour. There was no secret
society, no preparations for an uprising. At most a few people made idle boasts in taverns.

Attacks on Catholics in the 19th century were driven by a prejudice among Protestant that they were loyal
only to a foreign pope and could not act as fully enlightened American citizens. Near Boston in 1834 a
convent was burned to the ground by people who assumed that the priests were using the confessional as
a blackmail/mind control device to imprison and sexually enslave women against their will, that there
were babies being produced that were then being murdered and buried in the catacombs beneath the
ground. This is similar to the contemporary conspiracy theory around Pizzagate. The idea of the cabal of
sexual abusers, which was being used against Catholics in the 1830s, with just a few of the key details
changed but more or less the same narrative.

There is even a question as to whether the Molly Maguires, supposedly a secret society, ever existed as an
organised force. Small groups of striking miners struck back against the mining companies’ bosses and
their goons. The companies used vigilantes and the Pinkerton Detective Agency to murder union members
and their families. Not just miners but members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (an echo of Anti-
Catholic bias) were also railroaded in show trials, A total of 20 men were hanged on the basis of flimsy or
non-existent evidence. This led on to the Haymarket trial (covered in this book) which resulted in the
hanging of four innocent men.

Mistrust of the Federal Reserve Bank fed into Anti-Semitism, a trope encouraged by Henry Ford in the
Dearborn Independent. He saw Jews as alien invaders undermining US culture, banking and business. He
even serialised The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper. When Ford had an automobile
accident it was portrayed as a Jewish plot to silence him.

The rise of the Invisible Empire (Ku Klux Klan) has a well deserved chapter on its rebirth, rise and fall in
the 1920s. It was essentially a Ponzi scheme using racism to make a few people into millionaires. Their
targets were Catholic and Jews as well as people of colour.

Yes, the CIA originated Subliminal Advertising, organised clandestine truth drugs and mind control drugs
tests on unwitting participants. Sex workers on the CIA’s payroll would bring johns back to a CIA pad in
Telegraph Hill, San Francisco. There they slipped their clients an LSD tab and the reactions would be
filmed by CIA operatives through two-way mirrors. The origins of MKUltra and its subsequent
development are outlined in detail, especially its successes (few) and failures (many). But the drugs tests
came from a Manchurian Candidate-style fear that the Russians and Chinese had perfected such methods.

Other fascinating conspiracy theories examined include Fluoride, but was it a Communist, Fascist or just
a Liberal plot? The John Birch Society looks a bit crazy with covert fears of “Negros” setting up a “Negro
soviet nation”, even thought that communists were ritually murdering members of their families.
COINTELPRO is revealed in all of its glory of murders, smears and burglaries.

This is a well written and finely researched book which is eminently accessible and mostly steers away
from postmodern jargon. My one criticism is that Colin Dickey has to some extent fallen victim to the cult
of identity politics but that might just be my conspiracy theory.

Páiric Ó Corráin
4 Stars
 
Not a Fortean book, as such, but one likely to be of interest to us lot.
Great Pubs of London by George Dailey.
Out of print, apparently, but looks like a lovely volume.

3791383957.jpg
 
It’s one thing to go to hell by way of an accident, by a nonchalant shrug of God,
it is another to venture there of one’s own accord, but it is something else
entirely to return time and time again, to test if the flame still seers as much as
before. I purchased a season ticket to the abyss and my team always lost.

A Methodology of Possession
On the Philosophy of Nick Land
James Ellis
 
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