She-Devils

Brendan O'Neill writes:

A subtle rewriting of history is taking place on the back of the Amanda Knox acquittal. Reading feminist commentary on the case, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Catholic Church and its weird obsession with Satanic cults are ultimately to blame for Knox’s sorrows. Apparently, the Church, being stuck in the fifteenth century, is still obsessed with devils, especially she-devils, and somehow its poisonous beliefs invaded the courtroom in Perugia and helped to turn everyone against Knox.

We are told that the prosecutor in the case, Giuliano Mignini, was influenced by Gabriella Carlizzi, “a wealthy Catholic dedicated to exposing Satanism” (if there’s one thing worse than an everyday Catholic, it’s a wealthy one). One salacious report tells us of the “serious practising Catholics” who influenced proceedings in the Knox case, and whose warped words helped to nurture the idea that she was a demented nympho with a penchant for Satanic sex games.

Proving that the pro-Knox lobby is just as adept at promoting sweeping prejudices as the anti-Knox lobby (only its prejudicial bile is aimed at the Italian justice system and greasy Italian men rather than at saucy American women), a piece in the New York Post pointed to the dark underbelly of Catholic Italy and how it led to Knox being found guilty of a crime she didn’t commit. The paper claims that the “occult-obsessed prosecutor” in the case was probably influenced by “Italy’s culture in general”.

Some of this weird backward culture is kind of visible to us, such as “Catholicism and the Vatican, [which] can be glimpsed through stained glass but never fully seen”. But other bits of “Italy’s culture in general” are “darker, utterly closed and locked against the prying eyes of outsiders, [in] rooms with keys that perhaps only native Italians hold”. One aspect of Italian culture that only natives, being strange, non-American creatures, have access to is the belief that the “Catholic Church still battles the forces of paganism”. Apparently these oddball beliefs brought about the imprisonment of Knox, echoing the Catholic Church’s fifteenth-century witch hunts, which also were motored by a “fear of women’s sexual power over men”.

This idea that the modern-day obsession with Satanism and crazy sexual degradation springs from somewhere within the Vatican is completely mad. It wasn’t Catholic officials or men of the cloth who in recent years rehabilitated the Middle Ages view that there are evil people out there who worship the devil and have sex while they’re doing it – no, it was radical feminists and social workers, in fact some of the same kind of people currently shedding tears over the witch-hunting of Knox. Across Western Europe and America in the 1980s and 90s, it was implacably atheistic, supposedly “Left-wing” activists who spread the idea that Satanism was making a comeback and that children were being raped and killed as a result.

It was writers like Beatrix Campbell, a feminist and contributor to the Guardian, who argued in 1990 in Marxism Today, the then bible of the chattering Left, that Satanists were “organising rituals to penetrate any available orifice in troops of little children; to cut open rabbits or cats or people and drink their blood; to shit on silver trays and make the children eat it”. It was feministic social workers who, with the help of police, kidnapped working-class children from their families on the bizarre basis that they were being ritualistically abused. It was people like Oprah Winfrey, echoing academic feminists, who hosted TV shows claiming that some families in America were involved in "human sacrifice rituals and cannibalism" – watch the clip here.

Even in Italy, that alleged hotbed of backward religious beliefs and woman-hating insanity, the Satanic scares of the past 10 to 20 years have been pushed by radical activists rather than Church officials. In fact, the Church has on many occasions told these Satan-obsessed secularists to get a grip and to stop torturing innocent families. So when in 2007, three schoolteachers, two of whom were grandmothers, were arrested in a school near Rome on suspicion of having had Satanic sex with 15 toddlers in a nearby forest, it fell to Church spokesmen to point out that the women were victims of “malicious tongues”.

Priests pleaded for people to recognise that the women were good, honest teachers and that it was bizarre to arrest them simply because some of their pupils had drawn pictures of a person wearing a black hood. There have been many Satanic scares in Italy in recent years and pretty much all of them have echoed those that rocked Britain and America in the 1980s: that is, they have been fuelled as much by warped modern-day “liberal” beliefs as by old-fashioned Catholic ones.

If there really was a propensity to believe in Satanic sects amongst some people in the Knox case, then they are far more likely to have been influenced by this powerful secular obsession with demented and mythical sex abuse, which has exercised a tight grip on various parts of Europe for the best part of two decades, rather than by crazy-eyed priests. They are more likely to have been inspired by very recent Satanic panics in Italy, which the Church actually took a stand against.

Perhaps Knox was a victim, not so much of backward Italian beliefs, but rather of the ripples still being made by the deranged Satanic panic set in motion by feminists and their fellow travellers 20 years ago.