From Hal PEPINSKY@IUBACS.BITNET, or PEPINSKY@UCS.INDIANA.EDU
Feminist Justice--November 16, 1993
Dear People,
Now I believe it: RITUAL MURDER, CANNIBALISM, ETC. IS ALL AROUND ME
Digest
This promises to be a long letter. A lot has happened to my understanding
of the nature of the violence of my people in a matter of days. I want to
ease the reader into this, although bolder, more curious readers may look
straight ahead to the nitty gritty on the picture of ritual murder in my
part of the world I'm getting. I'll start by explaining what it feels
like to go through what amounts in Thomas Kuhn's terms to a paradigm
shift, then describe the three independent sources (my "data") which have
effectively refuted my working hypothesis that ritual murder is at most an
isolated problem in this or that nuclear family. I often get charged with
failing to state propositions which are empirically testable. This fall
I've set myself up to test my hypothesis that ritual murder is a
negligible problem, and my goodness how my data have just smacked me
upside the head. I laid the burden of proof heavily on those who might
show me the remains of ritual murder sacrifices, and I'm here to tell you
now that my burden has shifted dramatically. Then I'll address how this
new "finding" of mine fills in a major gap in my understanding this fall
of response to child abuse--why do so many people walk away so hard from
this issue? As Rick Doninger from Evansville put it in class last night,
my belief in the routineness of ritual murder (and so forth) puts the
state of my people--"Americans" at the close of the twentieth century--in
a new and horrifying light. Finally, I'll discuss religious issues
presented, which Rick and I talked a lot about until late into the night
after class was over.
The letter follows as an e-mail posting. I look forward to comment from
any interested recipients.
PARADIGM SHIFT
I have never given up my criminological quest to know the connection
between what police say crime is and what is actually happening on the
streets. Over time I have added first the suites, then the bedroom, to
the settings in which I seek to understand violence. My shift to
believing in the rampancy of ritual murder in my part of the world brings
my understanding full circle, as I shall explain in the course of this
letter.
My earliest memory of paradigm shift is when I went home telling my
parents that I liked Ike, and my Mama took me straight down to Vets
Memorial in downtown Columbus, Ohio, to hear Eleanor Roosevelt speak for
Adlai Stevenson in 1956. By now, I am accustomed to the experience; it
has happened to me repeatedly since. Kuhn writes that he cannot explain
paradigm shift. I think I can explain how to invite it to happen, and
that I can describe how it feels. By now paradigm shift has lost its
terror for me. I find it exciting. I am also prepared that my enthusiasm
for proclaiming the shift in my understanding of violence and peacemaking
will, as routinely has been, will to many who even bother to notice it be
a further sign that I'm out of control.
You invite refutation by proclaiming skepticism, and then pausing to
listen hard to any offers of evidence. I do so by announcing my
skepticism. As many know I am confrontative as a matter of principle--
annoyingly, irritatingly, offensively...confrontative.
Then I pause to listen.
As a listening strategy I try to tune in to the softest voice from the
most formally powerless people I happen to be proclaiming my skepticism
to, or my conviction for that matter (same difference logically). By now
I have learned to trust that a voice will come forward. The more powerful
voices tend to be, at the outset, women. I entrust personal investment in
inviting this source to be my guide, to show me what she knows.
In this case my mother-guides have been Sandy Bell and Mary Cunningham.
I want to stress that my selection of them as guides has by now become a
very conscious decision on my part. Note that I made them and Debbie
Williams the sources of a major revision of this seminar. I keep writing
and saying that peacemaking is an eminently practical process. It pays me
to ask for mother-guidance. I seek it out, and accept guidance from many
men as well. I do so in order to control my own social destiny. The
academic in me does so in order to increase my understanding of the nature
of my social existence. I have been trying hard to explain to perceptual
control theorists on their net that the process in which I select mother-
guides is for me a matter of attaining control. Some of my friends have
heard me unload my frustration at the gap between the perception of myself
that I am never angry, always laid back, and even reckless, against my
inner perception that I am constantly on guard, engaging in the self-
discipline of making my own decisions even about how to hold my body when
I am talking with anyone. It is only as far as I can see and feel a
matter of confidence, built I believe of the love others have given me,
that leads me to be able to engage in self-control rather than other-
oriented control (when I feel in control, my direction comes from my
heart, not from the boss or the text), which for me makes all the
difference in the world in my power to understand the reality of the
violence I live in. My sense of being in control is defined by this
referent.
Sometime last fall I recall Mary beginning to mention to me, not pressing
the issue, that she knows ritual murder is rampant. She allowed me my
reply that I was willing to listen, but I didn't believe it. Meanwhile,
we always seemed to have more pressing business than helping me learn
about satanic cults.
Early this fall, when Sandy was talking about her caseload as a guardian
ad litem, she mentioned how she had intervened on behalf of a teenaged
cult survivor. Sandy and I have seemed to have an understanding from the
outset. We can tell each other we think we're full of shit about
something as long as we say it politely and with a smile. And I did. I
announced to the class I didn't believe it yet at least myself, and
invited Sandy to show me what she knows. I made this move on reflex, but
again, confrontation--putting conflict in your face--is by now for me a
highly trusted tool for increasing my understanding and capacity to live
and let live with my fellow humans. I might add that it is very common
for Europeans to discuss with me and Jill how threatened white Americans
are by open political argument on issues that matter. The gap between the
us and others I have met all over the world is symbolized to me by the
fact that the husband of the Norwegian Labor prime minister is a
Conservative Party elder. Mind you, Norwegians seldom even mention the
fact. Imagine if Hillary Clinton were a leading Republican...
I've learned to trust that my guides will present me with evidence that is
somehow solid to them. Either I continue my skepticism and let it
continue to pass or wham bam, I come across a bit of evidence that I
cannot explain away. This time, as happens on occasion, the evidence hit
me from several directions all at once. I weakened, and before Rick even
began last night, had given way to believing that Sandy is right. I also
made a point of thanking her for her gift of hanging in there with me. I
don't think she was too surprised. She trusted I would listen honestly,
and the evidence she had carefully weighed for herself eventually came
through in its own way to me of its own weight.
Resistance to paradigm shift boils down to me to an attitude problem.
Psychologists call that attitude denial. Denial is born of fear, fear of
confirming in public discourse that a problem or conflict exists (in
academese has become scientifically established fact). Paradigm shift
will happen to those who let it. Once you define your Popperian capacity
for refutation in this manner, you become your own best judge of what
makes you shy away from accepting someone else's reality. When for
instance people criticize my work by telling me what I should do before it
becomes useful to them, I see denial--of responsibility for doing that
work for oneself. It was never Mary or Sandy's responsibility to prove to
me that ritual murder is prevalent and highly organized. It was, and
remains, my own responsibility to put myself in a state which feels close
to alpha-rhythm meditation and let the evidence into my consciousness--to
invite and seek it out.
The attitude that makes way for continuing paradigm shift requires, or so
my theory of controlling my understanding of the world goes, that at the
point of shift I state my new conclusions baldly, flatly, in principle
rather than as a matter of character assassination, and as publicly as I
can manage. That's my way of inviting further enlightenment on how I'm
still full of shit, just new shit. I feel gratified when I can convey
what I feel--that I want people who know I'm full of shit to tell me how
shitty it is. This to me is literally what personal "accountability"
requires. Personal accountability gives me a sense of control.
Personal accountability is also my political life insurance. Last night
Rick offered the message I often find myself giving to grievants,
survivors, people in the closet about all manner of things: Get it out,
share it. Rick described how some cult survivors gain freedom and
personal integration by--in GLB parlance--outing themselves. Once your
information is out, there's no secrecy to be gained by taking you out.
And the more people hear your information, the more likely someone will
notice if you get taken down or out. That makes you less vulnerable to
harassment, or as many of my friends these days fear also, assassination.
I have no intention of getting into naming unpublished names of ritual
murderers without their permission. (By now Rick Doninger and his wife
have led many survivors to become eager for this purpose to describe their
experiences for themselves. If anyone wants a referral to survivors who
are willing to speak publicly or in class about the lives they have led,
including the ritual sacrifices they themselves have conducted, I ought to
be able to help you find volunteers in your locale, at least in the US.)
I don't even care about who the murderers are; the important thing is to
describe the world we live in in which ritual murder occurs. Giving my
best shot at stating my new findings just raises the price on messing with
me--threatening me in any way. Isn't good science (i.e., tightly
controlled data collection and analysis, with published results)
practical?
DATA
I have gotten detailed evidence from three independent sources. The first
has been the friend of a friend in an IU dorm who at last hearing had
tried to slit her wrists, and was seriously thinking of giving up and
moving back to her adoptive cult parents in Fort Wayne. She has been
brought back from Italy already. Several weeks ago she reports having
been called out of her dorm, drugged, raped, and left to wander. My
friend has seen a stalker on the floor. The IU police are watching the
dorm, apparently. My friend is watching too. MY FRIEND, IS ASK YOU TO
PASS THIS WORD TO YOUR SURVIVOR FRIEND: I will before I post this message
have sent you the name and phone number of a therapist who has helped Rick
Doninger and can be trusted to help her. Please show her this letter as
well. And now I ask her directly: please call this number and talk to
this therapist. And I ask her: Explore your options. Rick asked me to
pass on his assurance that survivors in your position can and in growing
numbers do become safe and heal (which of course is a lifelong process,
not an event). Rick and I agree implicitly that finding more people safe
to talk to is your ticket to safety. Your safety rests on finding people
you can trust to shelter you, listen to you, and offer you help in making
your situation as public as you yourself feel comfortable and safe doing.
No one experienced in helping survivors expects you to make any sudden,
dramatic moves. Healing and safety takes time, they know. I'd encourage
you to make the call, collect if need be, from a pay phone if you wish
(although your line is certainly tapped by now anyway, as is the
therapist's, but at least a pay phone will let you speak more freely),
tell the therapist your story, listen to the response, and do what you
will. I pray you find safety.
I learned to say what I have just said from Rick last night. He described
the insight he gained when someone pointed out the difference between
talking about "those" survivors and "us." Odds are good that in a seminar
our size there will be several closet survivors among us. Rick takes
pains to encourage survivors to find safe people to disclose to, and to
grant them their right to leave if the session becomes too uncomfortable.
Several people indeed appeared to exercise that option last night. The
closer one approaches the problem, the closer one gets to home.
In the window-washing business by family tradition, Rick Doninger and his
wife had returned to Evansville to carry on their own Christian
ministries. Rick tells me he was doing among other things jail ministry
in Florida before they returned to Evansville. He readily agreed with me
that the abuse and murder of prisoners is the equivalent horror for men in
public institutions that ritual abuse and murder of children (and adults)
is in our realms of privacy. About four years ago, a woman came to him
with a child. The mother had been ordered to give custody of the child to
her abusive father. Rick gave her sanctuary and ended up taking mother
and child to Faye Yager in Atlanta. Three years later Rick and his wife
became the first people prosecuted in Indiana prosecuted for A misdemeanor
interference with a child custody order. They spent three months in jail
apiece. Not long thereafter, Debbie Williams served her 90+ days in our
local jail for the same crime, in trying to get her children to safety at
the Kempe Center in Denver. That's how Debbie and Mary met Rick. Sandy
was referred to Rick for help with her survivor ward. Now Rick is brought
into my circle.
Rick and his wife have trained repeatedly with Joan Pennington at her
child abuse treatment training center in Huntsville, Alabama. A "Current
Affair" segment on Rick and his wife's evidence of ritual abuse led
survivors to flood them with calls. Rick brought panels of pictures
survivors have drawn for him of the rituals. He has been complimented and
consulted by therapists for his breakthroughs in helping survivors
integrate multiple personalities. He has gathered and videotaped all
manner of testimony and material evidence.
A year ago he finally burned out, and with a sympathetic therapist's
diagnosis and help, has taken time out from being with survivors,
including the support groups he has organized, to gather his own strength.
Understand that Rick held back from becoming graphic about what he has
heard and seen, but he did at one point, to explain his own horror,
describe a fleeing survivor who in the safety of a clinic threw up human
remains at his feet.
Rick, then, has been my second personal source of evidence about ritual
murder and all that goes with it.
My third source is the book I referred to last week, which Mary had
recalled to the library in my name. I read it through last week and
passed it on to Mary last night. It is for the most part an edited
collection of sworn testimony and recitation of corroborative evidence
which the author, first as Nebraska state senator, then as Nebraska senate
investigator, and now as pro bono counsel to survivors, has compiled for
the reader's evaluation. The book, which I encourage all those interested
in child abuse to read, is John W. DeCamp, THE FRANKLIN COVER-UP: CHILD
ABUSE, SATANISM, AND MURDER IN NEBRASKA, Lincoln, Nebr.: AWT Inc. (1992)-
-paper, ISBN 0-9632158-0-9, LC library catalogue no. JK6645, .D43, 1992.
The book also contains pretty enlightening commentary on Bob Kerrey's
political expedience by the author who rose as a co-Vietnam combat hero
young state politician as Kerrey's Republican friend and supporter.
DeCamp writes in his introduction that his "friend" Bill Colby, ex-CIA
director, warned him at Colby's home privately to drop his investigation
of ritual murder, drug running, and organized crime and corruption rising
to the top of the Republican hierarchy. DeCamp tells us he decided
instead not to give up his effort to get the word out, and to write the
book as his own life insurance policy. Check it out.
I don't propose to write a brief here representing all the evidence I have
lately heard and read. I'd just predict that no half-openminded reader of
THE FRANKLIN COVER-UP can fail to believe the reality Rick only confirmed
and extended for us last night. I can also report my belief by now that
not only have cult murderers been successfully prosecuted (and I'll bet
Jeffrey Dahmer is one of them!), but that virtually every kind of
supporting evidence one could ask for has repeatedly been obtained by
various parents, survivors and supportive activists at least several well
known places around the country by now. Evidence is not the problem.
Failure to attend to the evidence remains an overwhelming reality,
however. Rick has at one point consulted John DeCamp by the way. Says
he's a nice guy...
FINDINGS
I'll offer one sample of the available evidence. The McMartin Daycare
Center case in Southern California drew wide media attention. Ultimately,
the cases went away with no evidence found supporting children's
allegations of ritual abuse. Last night I read a report Rick has of the
findings a concerned group of parents has gotten from an archeological
firm they hired to excavate the daycare site. The tunnels have been
filled in but have easily been traced and mapped. There is ample physical
evidence of occult ritual animal sacrifice at least.
Imagine in your worst nightmare what a child could be made to do and
endure--being drugged, raped, killing cats, babies and friends, cutting
off and eating genitals, drinking blood and urine drained from the
deceased and then engaging in sexual acts with the corpse, being sent all
over the world in some cases as child prostitutes and drug couriers. It
happens in groups. It happened at a gala party thrown for the high and
mighty at the Republican National Convention by Larry King, the up-and-
coming black community bank president, at the ranch of "Dallas" fame. It
happens in schools. It involves ritual group activity among school
principals and superintendents, daycare directors, school and daycare
workers, police, prosecutors, judges, police chiefs and FBI ranking
agents, bankers, lawyers, powerful newspaper owners, doctors, workers and
directors at medical, mental health and correctional facilities both
public and private, and elected officials probably at every imaginable
level. In some of its manifestations the child-victims become couriers in
Iran-Contra ferrying of money, drugs and arms. It has a strong element in
the military and in the CIA as well as the FBI. A focal point of power is
33rd degree Freemasonry in and around the Skull and Bones at Yale.
Rituals regularly are reported to occur in Masonic lodges. But the
activity, traceable at least five generations in families in my region of
the country, by now reaching across networks of silence and complicity in
virtually any public and private arena one can imagine, right down to the
privacy of the nuclear-family home. Through organized labor channels,
some of the products of the rituals are even reported to end up on chain
grocery meat shelves, as ground and cut beef and pork and as chicken fat.
I am brought full circle, from the political to the personal. Already I
believe that virtually every vice we fight wars against is at its most
rampant in law enforcement circles, and among others we pay to care for
our children and our criminals especially. Already I believe that state-
sponsored murder of US prisoners is epidemic across the country. Now I
add the personal--notably child pornography and sado-masochistic,
homicidal, suicidal, cannibalism--to the activity supported, condoned and
protected with organized crime, media and government circles. Bodies are
disposed of, ground up, cremated, etc., in every conceivable fashion.
Still, bones are also a highly prized (dangerous!) cult product even for
sale; the skeptics have human remains to see if they wish. Rick points
out that the FBI reported the finding of 5,000 unaccounted-for bodies only
last year. Of course they are not all cult victims. The point is that
nobody prepared to do anything much about it much cares one way or the
other. Children, driven out of homes by abuse and poverty, are ever more
available to disappear from our streets unnoticed. Opportunity and
impunity are clear on their face. I believe we are paying a highly
predictable, divinely inspired retribution or price if you will for our
indifference to our neighbors, particularly to our children (and our
prisoners). I now anticipate that in any community I might live in or
visit in my home country, hardly a week goes by without children in the
community being made to kill, eat and rape one another. And to serve
survivors who have decided the reality of satanism is inescapable.
I'm reminded of a line from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "The
horror! The horror!"
There are those who participate directly in the slaughter, and their
friends, family and colleagues who help keep the secrets. In the
structure of the beast it doesn't matter a lot pinning down who is which.
Altogether, when power becomes as absolute as we have allowed adult power
over our children to become, and when we allow our politicians to define
our enemies and devils for us, I am in retrospect not surprised to
discover at last that we have over two centuries of expanding imperial
statehood become rife with the worst forms of depravity, with a level of
denial--a collective multiple personality disorder--to match.
After class Mary worried about whether we have overloaded students. I
think considerable care and gentleness is called for, but I think the
victims and survivors cry out for us of all ages to talk openly about the
problem as it confronts us. Ultimately, I am led to believe our original
sin lies in trusting any hierarchical system or boss to dictate our
decisions for us. Here in the US at this historical moment, we have
carried the logic of hierarchical co-dependence to a historically
unprecedented scale. We are generally aware and afraid that our era of
global military dominance has peaked. Questions, criticism, distrust of
a president are all ways--typically rather timid ways--of facing what we
have become. By the end of last night I had suddenly made sense of my
relationship to two women. All in all, I can now see a very real and
material foundation for the mystery that so many initiatives to rescue
abused children are aborted by human indifference and intransigence. I
feel I understand the reality of the violence I live in more personally,
more concretely, than ever before.
RELIGIOUS ISSUES
For Rick and others I know, his personal witness and hope for healing
rests on Christ's personal power of love. I agree with the love, and I
too find that as in paradigm shift, risking my fate to love seems to draw
the most remarkable displays of security and power into my life that I
have experienced. Unlike Rick, I don't feel able to describe much of who
or what that force is; I can only see its effects in its path, and as
Buddhists would say, capture some of that power through inner powers of
compassion. Rick felt safe enough to goad me a little, and to assure me
that invoking Christ (and his blood) held a power to heal and reintegrate
survivors unlike any other tool he has at his disposal. I replied that I
would expect that in his own largely Christian community. Here Satan is
explicitly an Anti-Christ, or as the Lucifer 33rd-degree Grand Masons
swear to serve. (Rick notes that the best-kept secret about Freemasonry
is that virtually all the rituals and secrets are amply described in
shelvesful of books at local libraries across the country.) The spirit as
I know it is capable of taking on the cultural form most familiar and
appealing to those it meets. I'm becoming aware of the thousands of
tribesful of ways the spirit of love and compassion manifests itself to
aboriginal peoples worldwide. Introducing Christ--except as a symbol of
foreign oppression--would get in the way of communicating with Indian
children I imagine. But on this Rick and I agree:
industrial/Enlightenment reasoning describes the world in violent terms;
it is a devil manifesting itself in all our lives with depressing
regularity. For survivors to feel safe and begin to heal, they need to be
invited into a world of love, compassion and empowerment quite apart from
the world of retribution in which they have been raised. That way of
relating is an act of faith in a higher power of love. It allows one to
listen to the pain of others before categorizing it and disposing of
cases. I have been party to that healing myself. I am in my own way a
nomad, all the more ecumenical and agnostic for it. I marvel at at
seemingly miraculous healing when I feel it or see it. Rick ended up
laughing and telling me he is not as fundamentalist as I take him to be.
Our comfort together comes from a shared sense of humility and
inspiration, a shared recognition that one's spiritual attitude is at much
at issue in violence and peacemaking as one's material deeds.
I've written more than enough for now.
Once again, I'll pause to listen... Love and peace, Hal