The British VIP pedophile scandal

For many years, we've heard rumors that the UK establishment maintains and protects a pedophile network.

The latest allegations have resulted in a full-scale police inquiry, which has been underway for roughly three years. The primary focus is on the now-defunct Elms Guest House, often used by VIPs in the 1970s and 80s. This Daily Mail story from 2014 gives the gist:

A list of famous alleged attendees, including Cabinet ministers, MPs, churchmen, pop stars, spies, judges, tycoons and members of the royal household, has been widely circulated.

While supporting evidence for the presence of most of those named remains elusive, police accept that the late Liberal MP Cyril Smith, a known child abuser, was indeed a visitor to the guest house.

New claims, and a resurgence of interest in the historic allegations, culminated in the launch last year of Operation Fernbridge, a full police investigation into what is supposed to have happened at Rocks Lane. This summer, Home Secretary Theresa May announced a wide-ranging independent inquiry into historic child sex abuse by prominent individuals.

Last week, Mrs May suggested that the allegations aired so far — including a claim of three child murders by Westminster-linked paedophiles who frequented exclusive flats in the Thames-side Dolphin Square — amounted to the ‘tip of the iceberg’.

That was 2014. The story has changed.

Four months ago, BBC's Panorama aired a documentary which revealed that the primary accusers have -- to put it mildly -- serious credibility issues. One of them has admitted to lying.

The Daily Mail, quoted above, now sings a very different song. Two years ago, the paper criticized police for not revealing the name of an accused perpetrator. In 2016, the same journal (without offering any formal apology for its previous stance) seems incensed that an innocent had his name muddied in public.

A couple of weeks ago, the Daily Mail published a piece which demolished the credibility of "Nick," the primary Elm House accuser.

The stepbrother of a man who accused a string of Establishment figures of historical sex abuse says he is a serial liar who 'jumped on the bandwagon' and may have been motivated by money.

'Nick's' stepbrother has described claims he was taken from the family home to London in order to be sexually abused by senior Whitehall figures as 'bizarre' and 'absolute nonsense'.

He says the family only visited London once, on a trip to the Natural History Museum.

Some of you may now be wondering whether Nick was a ringer all along. I cannot discount the possibility. As I've noted on a couple of previous occasions, Margaret Thatcher's friend Alistair McAlpine (also accused of being a child abuser) once wrote a book about Machiavelli which includes this passage:

First, create a situation where you are wrongly accused. Then, at a convenient moment, arrange for the false accusation to be shown to be false beyond all doubt. Those who have made accusations against both the company and its management become discredited. Further accusations will then be treated with great suspicion.

Could the testimony of "Nick" be a trick? Possibly.

And possibly not.

Yes, child abuse in the UK is very real. Yes, the list of abusers no doubt includes some celebrated names. But the Elm House accusations now look "dodgy" (to use a Britishism), and the subculture which trumpets these charges has become really, really creepy. As I learned more about the UK pedophilia scandal, I became alarmed by the antics of that country's conspiracy community. Yes, my fellow Americans, the Brits have developed their own paranoid legions -- and they can be every bit as weird and disturbing as any conclave of bucktoothed Alex Jones addicts in Alabama.

In a previous post, we took a look at a video from the UK which bears the quaint title "Papa Kills Babies." You Tube keeps removing this presentation, yet it keeps popping up. Before clicking on the "play" button, I was disposed to take this presentation seriously -- but its fraudulent nature became apparent the moment the kids began to crib lines from Dune: "Fear is the mind-killer!"

Despite this probable hoax, a growing number of people in the UK believe that the elitists who run the country not only sexually abuse children, they murder them -- all in the name of His Satanic Majesty. The proponents of this view have found a home: David Icke's website.

In case you don't know, David Icke is the former sportscaster who went mad in the early 1990s, when he warned his countrymen that Queen Elizabeth is a lizard from outer space. (Or rather, she is descended from space lizards. I don't want to be accused of hyperbole.)

A group of David Icke-ians produced the charming video embedded below, titled Was Jimmy Saville a Wizard? Saville, of course, was the late British television personality who turned out to be a genuine abuser of the underaged. Icke's followers argue that Saville was not just a pervert but an extremely powerful black magician, born to that status by virtue of being a seventh son.

I strongly urge you to watch this presentation. You will seldom see a more intoxicating mixture of truths, half-truths, anti-truths, conclusion-hopping, and speculation-presented-as-fact.

The video "proves" that the Beatles (who had a professional relationship with Saville) were also black magicians. You can probably guess the chief piece of evidence: "The Sergeant Pepper album includes an image of Aleister Crowley on the cover! AIEEEEE!!!!"

Well. That settles that.

In the end, the Icke-sters cannot demonstrate that Jimmy Saville ever participated in any occult rituals. Evil he may have been, but I doubt that the man ever performed an Enochian call or could have told you who Paracelsus was. Given the anything-goes attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s, I have to ask: If Saville really did fancy himself a mage, why wouldn't he have done so openly, as Alan Moore does?

A brief occult digression: I delved into the history of occultism when this country experienced the Satanic Panic of the 1990s. Crowley, Waite, Spare, Mathers, Agrippa -- I've read 'em all, or at least skimmed 'em all. At no point did I ever encounter any published hint that ceremonial magicians of the western tradition have used children in sexual rituals. No text known to me makes even a guarded or disguised reference to such rites.

(Believe me, someone would have written down something. Despite their reputation for secrecy, devotees of the arcane arts are usually pretty blabby. That whole subculture runs on gossip.)

Moreover, we have no evidence of such practices from any former occultists. Many of Aleister Crowley's associates turned against him -- the examples of Victor Neuberg, Leah Hirsig, J.C. Fuller and John Symonds come to mind. Yet none of them ever said anything about abusive rituals involving children.

(I suspect that some of you will now say: "Obviously, those people stayed silent because they were threatened!" First: Anyone who makes that claim obviously knows nothing about the individuals I just mentioned; Symonds, for example, became Crowley's most hostile biographer. Second: A non-falsifiable argument is no argument at all.)

They're as bad as we are. Here in America -- where Fox News and Alex Jones broadcast nonstop conspira-noia -- we like to think, or hope, that sanity still reigns in the British isles. Alas, many in the UK have caught the American disease. The primary agent of infection is David Icke, the lizard-spotter who makes Alex Jones look level-headed.

One of the more interesting denizens of the UK's paranoid underground is a fellow named Thomas Sheridan, whom I first encountered here. He thinks that Peter Sutcliffe, the infamous Yorkshire Ripper, had a partner in murder: None other than Jimmy Saville.

Well...maybe. But where's the evidence? (I don't consider this -- suggestive as it is -- to be sufficient evidence, especially given the size of the claim.)

Fascinatingly, Sheridan himself has begun to denounce the madness of the UK's fringe subculture -- a subculture defined by its love for non-falsifiable argumentation, a subculture in which anyone who asks for a higher standard of evidence is automatically dismissed as part of the conspiracy. I rather enjoyed Sheridan's critique -- or mockery -- of the UK "truth" movement, here and here: Although he refers to people and events unfamiliar to most Americans, the psychology he describes should be very recognizable.

(You'll love the way Sheridan imitates his country's devil-hunters: "Satanic pee-dophiles! Satanic pee-dophiles!")

Although I question many claims that Sheridan might consider self-evident, listening to him has taught me much -- and left me feeling rather depressed. Learning the truth about "Nick" was also educational and sad.

Let's stop hallucinating that folks are more reasonable across the pond. As it turns out, the Brits are just as dumb as we are. God help the English-speaking world!