Out, Demons, Out!

Berlin, Museum Island

Is it just me, or has the level of madness tolerated in the world gone up several notches in recent times?

One of the highlights of my visit to Berlin in March 2018 was, as usual, visiting the museums, as I reported at the time. In particular, I was impressed by those situated on the Museumsinsel ("Museum Island"), and of those the Pergamon Museum made the biggest impression. It is simply awesome. It hadn't struck me, though, as an essentially evil place; far from it.

It seems others disagree. Recently, artwork and artefacts in three museums on Museum Island have been vandalised, sprayed with an "oily substance", presumably the same apotropaic or demonicide mix of oil and myrrh used in a similar incident by two Bulgarian women in Athens. Why? Well, at least according to the Guardian, certain coronavirus deniers and QAnon fantasists believe that the Pergamon Museum is the centre of the "global satanism scene" because it holds a reconstruction of the ancient Greek Pergamon Altar. Well, of course! How could I not have noticed this? What a fool I 've been.

It gets worse. Apparently, "Attila Hildmann, a former vegan celebrity chef who has become one of Germany’s best-known proponents of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, posted messages on Telegram in August and September in which he suggested that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, was using the altar for 'human sacrifices'". Uh, WTF?... How is it that such people are not in confinement somewhere secure for the criminally insane? And I'm not talking about Angela Merkel.

It explains so much. Not the human sacrifices, obviously, but the toleration of widespread asylum-grade insanity in public discourse, as if allegations of satanic practices by public figures were just, you know, a valid opinion, with no consequences in real life. Remember "pizzagate"? At least one man actually believed there were children imprisoned by Hillary Clinton for sex-trafficking purposes in a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. ... A man with an actual gun, which he actually fired. Now, it's never clear to me how far the propagators of such transparent nonsense actually believe what they say, or simply enjoy the mischief they can unleash; doubtless, they belong to the same tragic subspecies of humanity that releases malware into the internet for no better reason than adolescent malevolence. Is there anything more despicable than someone who enjoys causing real harm by cynically exploiting the stupidity and gullibility of others?

One hope for us might be that such sad cases are highly unlikely to find opportunities to breed but, unfortunately, a witless attraction to demonic malice and elaborate conspiracy theories does seem to be a basic setting of the human genome. And exploiting those inbuilt vulnerabilities – whether by means of religious hysteria or authoritarian politics – has certainly been Route One to power for millennia. Trump and his like are not exactly a new phenomenon.

Although it does suddenly occur to me: has anyone tried dousing the White House with oil and myrrh? It's been tried before, of course, back in 1967: Out, demons, out! But, in the end, simply voting always seems so much more effective; with the proviso, however, that it has to be done in the right way, of course. Which is precisely what these lunatics are trying to prevent.

Bow down before Nebuchadnezzar's Golden Image (or else...)