The devil’s best trick, people sometimes say, was to convince us he doesn’t exist. They always say it with a smile because they don’t believe it for a minute. Belief in Satan is not possible in the contemporary world. In those marginal places where religious faith persists, reference to the devil, if it occurs at all, usually accompanies ignorance, bigotry, and charlatanism. Satan doesn’t even qualify anymore as a symbol or suggestive metaphor. It now sounds comically quaint or -- if you have no sense of humour -- lurid to suggest the possibility of an invisible power leading us into moral and intellectual confusion and hoodwinking us into joining with it to destroy all of God’s creation. “Come on,” the sceptics say, “total confusion and universal destruction? Where’s the empirical evidence?”
Once the devil disappeared from sight, some three centuries ago, we found no one but ourselves to credit for his absence. It was at that time that we congratulated ourselves for at long last leaving our childhood and becoming adults able to think for ourselves and to put aside fables about cosmic conflicts and a malevolent supernatural power beyond our control. In the Gospels, Jesus calls Satan the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning. We were embarrassed for the poor man, who, after all, meant well. Now that we were enlightened humanists, we liked our Jesus meek and mild and teaching us to be kind to one another, but the uplifting message had to be separated from what was seen as Biblical superstition. Thomas Jefferson enthusiastically carried out the task; he went at the Gospels with a razor, scissors, and pot of glue, and produced the Jefferson Bible, touching and generous moral sentiments preserved, all “superstitions, fanaticisms, and fabrications” expunged.
Satan was a hypothesis of which, it seemed, we no longer had need. Having outgrown biblical revelation, which was equated with primitive thought and authoritarianism, the fables of Holy Scripture were committed to the flames. We were responsible for dealing with our own problems, and anything supernatural had no business being a problem of ours. We were thoroughly scientific and rational; unaided reason would replace faith and tradition. Free from the restraints of authority and superstition, we would solve our problems with human means, using only the evidence of our eyes and our own common sense, no hell below us or heaven above. Swaggering with confidence, we set out to make, we declared with unintended irony, a truly human world. Rationalists even now see progress all around them. Others, of a different viewpoint, claim we’ve made so much progress that they can see the end of the road.
THE WORLD AS WE FOUND IT
On July 10, 1970, more than two hours after sunrise, three young Cape Bretoners, completely covered under sleeping bags, were run over by a train on a track in Aroostook County, Maine. Almost all the circumstances surrounding the incident were mysterious; there was good reason to believe that the three were dead before the train ran over them. Yet the Aroostook County Sheriff’s office immediately declared the deaths the result of an accident. Without delay, the bodies were shipped back to Canada. There was never an investigation.
No one ever publicly questioned the official narrative.The media repeated without question the Sheriff’s nonexplanation of the deaths as “an unfortunate mishap.” Sheriff Crandall was an authority. The media were authorities. The community of Cape Breton played its sorry part and accepted the story of an inexplicable accident, and the matter was forgotten after a couple of weeks. Not another word was heard about the tragedy until I began to write about it forty-seven years later. (The articles include “Sleeping Victims” on this site, and “A Mysterious Summer Tragedy” at the Cape Breton Spectator.)
I first wrote about the deaths because I was haunted by what had happened that summer. And what haunted me, I came to realize, was not the tragedy itself or the unsolved mystery of how the three actually died, but Cape Breton’s response to what amounted to, without an investigation of the deaths, a de facto cover-up of a likely triple murder by the Aroostook County's Sheriff’s Office. It was a cover-up that our institutions in Cape Breton were complicit in by their propagation of the official narrative, but -- as we now know -- institutional collusion in crime is standard practice. What I could never forgive was the people of my community not seeing that the mysterious deaths of three of their own youths warranted an investigation. No one -- not once, not ever -- had publicly challenged the preposterous official narrative. How could we have so quickly forgotten Kenny Novak, David Burrows, and Terry Burt? They were very young: Kenny was fifteen, David was seventeen, and Terry was twenty that summer.
I kept returning to the past, trying to understand our mindless deference to authority and what it says about us. Did the acceptance of the official lies and the forgetting of the three by Cape Bretoners amounted to indifference? Of course many young people didn’t believe the official story and the families of the victims were never indifferent and have never forgotten. But Cape Bretoner agreed to a whitewashing narrative from Maine of what was quite likely the murder of three of our own.
Were we bad people? Or were we just weak and backward, a working-class community easy to deceive? In my next article, I will write about what I think might really have happened that night, in the United States, when the three were killed. But for one last time I want to try to understand something about what kind of people we were and what kind of world the “real world” was a half-century ago.
EDUCATED TO REALITY
In the Sixties, authority was challenged by massive protests in the streets and institutions were criticised in best-selling books by social critics, and yet society carried on as always, with the powerful free to commit the most horrific crimes without fear of retribution. Unknown to us, our institutions -- churches, governments, hospitals, law enforcement agencies, media -- harboured psychopathic criminals, including mass murderers and serial rapists, and those institutions were fully committed to protecting their own. And a trusting general public -- known as the crowd in Scripture -- was easily kept in the dark.
That rebellious spirit of the Sixties, born of a search for a new transcendence and moral outrage on behalf of the oppressed, was always limited and quickly dissipated: our natural state of human conformity easily returned. And somehow even the most radical critics couldn’t see just how malevolent and corrupt our institutions were. The general public’s absolute faith in its organizations and rulers back then is, after so many scandals, difficult in 2020 to comprehend. In 1970, Cape Bretoners were not alone in accepting preposterous lies as the simple truth.
The idea, back then, that our institutions were places where evil ruled and serial killers and rapists were given free rein to commit their crimes belonged in cheap fiction and the pamphlets of paranoid cranks. Back then, you see, people prided themselves on their critical thinking. Everyone considered the facts and looked reality in the face. To question authorities and institutions would be fanciful. People knew there was only one reality, one where our institutions were there to protect and serve us; our police and doctors were there to save lives, not take them. “Have you ever heard otherwise?” people would say to a young naysayer. Everywhere our world told us our world was good.To declare that our institutions bred and protected, say, police officers and doctors who were blood-crazed butchers, would have been taken as a sign of madness. Unless speaking of those Russians (the more things change. . . ) to speak of “corrupt institutions” would have been received as not a lie, but a nonsense phrase, like “corrupt clouds.”
To hear authority challenged at all was somehow shameful, like witnessing an act of exhibitionism -- a bit of taboo-breaking to gain attention by troubled adolescents or professional troublemakers. Why couldn’t malcontents, people asked, calm their feverish imaginations and just look at the world as it is? In primitive times people saw through a glass darkly; we moderns, we knew, using reason and science, know what we know clearly, and what we don’t know is just as clearly demarcated and will eventually be known using the same methods of reason and science.
Crimes in those days were almost always committed by social misfits and the derelict. Watch out for the drifters! And one did hear, on occasion, of upstart minorities and escaped mental patients. Murderers? Only the stupid or insane killed, because the police always got their man. And sure enough the culprit would turn out to be a member of a minority group or some marginal white person, poor and without any connections, or maybe a pervert, anyway always some miserable loser. Funny how it worked. And funny, as well, how often the least privileged did themselves in, always jumping out of windows or doing crazy things like swimming in cold water at night or sleeping in ditches in winter.
Sex crimes were never committed by the wealthy or educated professionals or ordinary, decent people who went to church. Sex crimes were committed by creeps jumping out of bushes. Females were advised by the sage to walk on the outside of the sidewalk. Children were told not to take candy from strangers. Using common sense you could never go wrong. Still confused? Go to church on Sunday and do what the priest tells you. The order of things worked pretty well. It was safe, it was good, and there weren’t any problems.
RATIONALISM
It stood to reason that the stretch of track in Aroostook County where police found Terry, Kenny, and David that July morning was most likely a crime scene, the deaths the result of a triple murder, and that a thorough investigation would be automatic and immediate. Well, that’s reason working in hindsight, as it always does at its glorious best. In 1970 reason dictated that the three deaths, though inexplicable and raising many baffling questions, were the result of an accident and that an investigation was unnecessary. This, in those days, was rational because the authorities said so, and they could be relied on since they were the representatives of reliable institutions, and anyway what the hell else do you think could have happened? Why do some people always want to make problems when there aren’t any? As it usually is, the truth was simple, apparent, and obvious. If there wasn’t an investigation of the three deaths -- well, of course no one called for an investigation, except for two teenage girls who started to circulate a silly petition for an inquiry, but were quickly put in their place by their more mature friends.
Not one member of the general public questioned the official narrative because it was never in doubt. Reason never doubts its own narrative. And the general public are properly educated and rational, and thus capable of seeing the world clearly. Just as it would indeed have sounded absurd if someone held up his or her hand that summer of 1970 and said, “I don’t doubt this is my hand,” it would have been just as silly for someone to have said, referring to a newspaper report on the deaths, “I don’t doubt the official narrative.” There is never anything to see but the one clear and apparent reality we happen to live in. The gatekeepers of reality work hard at keeping it so, and anyway it's natural enough to believe what everyone else believes.
By 1970 the culture of Enlightenment had reached even working-class Cape Breton. There probably wasn’t a tavern on the island where you couldn’t hear a patron or two sharing the wisdom of what is now called New Atheism, though without the present-day bigotry dressed up as liberal tolerance. They were called village atheists in those days, and most people didn’t like their talk because it upset the old people. But we were all educated enough to be faithful believers in rationalism and to kowtow in obedience before the one reality. We still went to church, but we were wised-up, and our religious beliefs were vague and modern.
The few who read Scripture didn’t do so to learn about human nature and how the world worked. We were leaving the golden age of television and the social sciences, but they still gave us the only picture of how things were we needed. Subjects of the Enlightenment, no longer able to understand the language of the Bible, we were ignorant and defenseless before institutional lies and murder. The bourgeois order we lived in was at its most confident and strongest since the late nineteenth century. It is easy now to judge our attitude to authority as naive. The news of scandals that began to ooze from our institutions in the late 1980s, now grown to a steady cascade, have forced the general public to question at least some aspects of our society. And those scandals along with the rise of a sceptical postmodernism, also beginning in the late ‘80s, have shattered the foundations of the Enlightenment order once and for all. But back then the rationalist faith was strong and we’d believe anything.
SATAN’S CARNIVAL
We no longer have a living religious language for speaking of what we cannot see; we don’t believe in what is hidden and know nothing about it. For example, we liberal Catholics once thought that the Catholic Church, while much too slow to change and no doubt containing a few bad apples, was ultimately sincere and good and loved children above all else. That the Church was in fact the world’s biggest international pedophile crime ring was not, you can be damned sure, part of the one reality we lived in. Not only would no one, Catholic or not, have dared to suggest the truth about the world’s largest Christian institution, no one among the general public could have imagined what turned out to be the truth. When young victims of the Church reported abuse, they were told to shut-up and called liars by their own parents. There is only one reality and there is nothing else to see or imagine.
The world, the Gospels tell us, belongs to Satan and is his to bestow. His recipients, in turn, give the sincerest thanks there is by making joyous use of his gift. They have lost their souls, but are always laughing: the world is at their feet. They display an insouciant charisma that charms all; audiences, voters, parishioners, unobservant parents of victims, colleagues, and investors love them. They dispense their art, charity, talents, and favours widely and generously. The general public -- the crowd -- adore them, often screaming their hosannas in the street.
We all proudly exclude ourselves from this deception, because aren’t we, at least, individuals, and too perceptive to be found standing with the crowd? But the world that we believe we know, since it is presented to us by its owner, the father of lies, is never the world as it really is. The very last thing we all believe is any truth that matters. The predators are safe from us, at least for as long as they choose the right victims, and there are multitudes of those to select from.
On the grand scale, think, for example, of Henry Kissinger, an out-and-out war criminal and genocidist, now at ninety-seven still lionized in elite circles, feted at conferences, and celebrated as a brilliant elder statesman in scholarly journals. Hilary Clinton sings his praise and, as if in homage to her mentor, blew up a country of her own, turning a prosperous Libya into a hell. Liberals adore Hilary Clinton: “Well, Libya had it coming,” they imagine. Karl Rove, one of the architects of the Iraq war, stole a line from Kissinger when he said to a reporter, “We [imperialists] create our own reality.”
When they carry out their crimes it is a festive celebration. A laughing Hilary Clinton can be seen, in an interview clip, joking about the the death of the Libyan dictator: “We came, we saw, he died.” The festive spirit is captured brilliantly in “Triumph of the Will,” Leni Riefensthal’s classic documentation of the Nuremberg Rally, or in the famous line from “Apocalypse Now”: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” The small-time predators celebrate locally the same carnival of murder and lies as the German Nazis and American anti-communist warriors celebrated globally.
Repellant figures, who have failed as human beings, are able, once the deal is done, to present themselves to the world as they wish to be seen. The career and life of Jimmy Savile is an illustrative example. In 2011, after a long career as one of his country’s most beloved celebrities, Savile, a British television host and philanthropist, died at home a couple of days before his eighty-fifth birthday. He had been seen by the general public as a free spirit, a bit outrageous, but with a heart of gold, a secular saint who was not only an adored children’s entertainer but a big-hearted humanitarian raising tens of millions of pounds for hospitals. Savile was knighted by the Queen and knighted at the Vatican. He hobnobbed with the best people and was a close friend of entertainers, members of the Royal Family, and major political figures like Prime Minister Thatcher, who campaigned fervently for his knighthood. He was close with Prince Charles, and both were friends with the Bishop of Gloucester, who would eventually do time for sexual offenses, as plain old Peter Ball. Savile could be seen driving around town in a Rolls Royce, and he liked to brag about his success with women. As well, Savile was sexually abusing hundreds of people across England for more than four decades.
Savile abused children and women of all ages; his victims were as young as two and old as seventy-five. He invited fans he met in the street back to his hotel room, where he raped them. He abused victims in his dressing rooms at BBC television studios. He slyly groped guests on air before the cameras and applauding audiences. He molested young relatives at family gatherings. He visited the dozens of hospitals he raised money for and assaulted the patients, including the mentally ill, people in comas, the old, and the paralyzed. He took the hospital keys they always gave him down to the mortuary where he committed sex acts on corpses.
Jimmy Savile belonged to the school of thought that says if it isn’t fun, it isn’t worth doing. Jimmy had a blast and, as far as he was concerned, he did it all and did it with verve and a laugh. He gallivanted around town, full of mischief and one-liners. He waved his cigar up and down and chatted up the ladies; he thought he was Groucho Marx. He joked and hinted about what he was up to. One of Savile’s favourite gags was, “But she told me she was over sixteen!” He had his final one-liner engraved on his tombstone, addressed to his victims and the general public he had made a fool of for half a century: “It was fun while it lasted.” Jimmy created his own reality right up to the end.
There were always rumours and complaints and eye-witness accounts and police interviews. Savile’s crimes were known from the beginning, as these things usually are. The first police investigation was in 1958; the last was in 2008. After a complaint, the police had to go through the formalities, but they didn’t really want to bother Jimmy -- and Jimmy really did not like to be bothered.
After Savile’s death, a couple of journalists at the BBC prepared a story on his crimes, but the top brass killed the show. Instead that year the BBC broadcast two tribute shows to the great man. No newspapers would print the truth about Savile. Eventually some maverick editor at a little senior’s publication, called “The Oldies,” published the story and everyone, of course, was outraged. Somebody resigned at the BBC.
POWERS AND PRINCIPALITIES
Rationalism, though now just another discredited creed, remains by default our dominant ideology. We continue to use the reason that the Bible over many centuries has painfully instilled in us, but reason without truth leads to nothing but increasing confusion and destruction. We can’t quite see what our problems are; all we know about humanity and how the world works we learned from Scripture, but, unable anymore to understand the meaning of Biblical language, the knowledge is partial and easily twisted or lost.
We believe in the minions of the devil we don’t believe in, and they keep finding new ways to tell us old lies. We hear rumours and see signs, but they have no meaning for us. We lurch from one catastrophic crisis to another, lambs before the universal slaughter we all see coming and can do nothing about. Having forgotten the meaning of Biblical language, we remain ignorant and ineffectual, able, at best, to admonish one another to remain optimistic.
Every day there are new reports of powerful individuals, long protected by our institutions, exposed after years of criminal depravity. One institution after another is discredited, but they remain on their own path, and we are chained to them and hurtling with them towards global annihilation. We keep saying that the Doomsday Clock is getting closer to midnight; we never say -- fundamentalist madness! -- that the Apocalypse has begun.
There are destructive mechanisms and forces acting everywhere in the world according to their own logic and independent of us, though they rely on human participation. When they are exposed and discredited, they reassemble and put on a new appearance. But they remain the same in function and structure, and liars and murderers find new places to carry on their socially sanctioned destruction. Saint Paul, in his Letter to the Ephesians, speaks of “powers and principalities,” and these powers and principalities include both a supernatural element and a natural one that can be studied and understood.
In the highest offices of government and business, they plan for wars and massive violence, scheme to pillage and lay waste to the planet. However, the powers and principalities are also at work in those everyday places where desolate souls given over to sin are able to prey on the innocent with impunity. In 1970 three Cape Breton youths in Aroostook County, Maine, were sacrificed to these powers and we didn’t know and weren’t able to care.
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