Santorum's Satan Obsession May Not Be As Insane As It Sounds At First-- Although It Probably Is

In other countries people are wondering if the U.S. has cracked up. They're following the Republican political debate with jaws agape. A friend from Amsterdam called me last night and asked me if it's a reality show or if they're all just trying to outdo Geert Wilders. Santorum's recently unearthed "Satan stalks America speech" has been great fodder for Europe's popular press. "This is not a political war at all, this is not a culture war at all, this is a spiritual war," Mr Santorum told students at Ave Maria University in Naples. "And the father of lies has his sights on what you think the father of lies, Satan, would have his sights on. A good, decent, powerful, influential country, the United States of America." The Independent concludes that this kind of psycho-babble-- coded acknowledgment to far right religious fanatics far even from the mainstream of GOP politics.

[I]n the longer term Mr Santorum may be sabotaging his chances of winning over moderate voters for whom religion and politics do not necessarily belong in the same sentence.

Well, yes, one might conclude that... if one lived in England or almost any Western European country. But this is America and many Republican voters can't see past Santorum's sweater vest and his prehistoric conflating of political leaders with magic men and shaman who could persuade the tree gods and the rock gods and the wind gods and the sun gods to smile benignly on his people-- or at least they could persuade their people they could.



I'm reading a book by Cheri Seymour right now, The Last Circle, an investigation into the death of a journalist. He had stumbled into some pretty heady information about biological warfare being developed by criminal elements inside the CIA. But "criminal" barely begins to describe these folks. And "right-wing" is just the tip of the iceberg. I don't know if Santorum and Major Michael Aquino, a U.S. military PsyOps expert, ever had a relationship or not but I want to republish some of Seymour's findings on him:

After his retirement from the Army, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino, an exGreen Beret, was later written up in the San Francisco Chronicle as the head of the Temple of Set, a satanic, devil-worshipping church. The November 1987 headlines read as follows: "Army Says Constitution Lets Satanist Hold TopSecret Job," by reporters John Whittinger and Bill Wallace. The story went on to say that "the high priest of a San Fancisco based satanic church is able to keep his topsecret security clearance because his activities are constitutionally protected, Army officials said yesterday. 

"Lieutenant Colonel Michael A. Aquino, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, is the founder and president of Temple of Set, a satanic church headquartered in Aquino's Russian Hill home ...

"Aquino, a psychological warfare officer who has worked in military intelligence, holds a top secret security clearance that allows him to handle information whose release would gravely damage U.S. security, according to Defense Department regulations.

"He maintains the clearance even though he has performed Nazi occult rites and has described himself as the 'AntiChrist' in literature published by the Temple of Set ..."

Temple of Set literature described a coming apocalypse in which only followers of Satan would be saved. Readers were encouraged to read such works as Mein Kampf, Hitler: The Occult Messiah, and The Occult Roots of Nazism.

Aquino conducted occult rituals patterned on ceremonies performed by Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler in a German castle once used by the Nazi SS for black magic ceremonies during the Third Reich. Nazis considered the black arts and satanic worship part of an ancient Germanic tradition.

Aquino, in his book, Crystal Tablet of Set, wrote that he performed the rituals to recreate an order of Knighthood for followers of Satan. He even encouraged his followers to study the beliefs of the Nazi terrorist group, the Vehm, the Thule Gesselschaft, and the Ahnenerbe, two fanatic rightwing Aryan groups that existed before and during Hitler's reign.

When the two reporters from the Chronicle inquired about Aquino's security clearances, Major Rixon declared that "to the best of his knowledge, there was no part of the liturgy of his church that caused any (security) problem." Aquino admitted to being involved in devil worship for 22 years.

If you've been following the Republican campaign for the presidential nomination, this may sound very familiar: "... as part of a concerted effort to control large numbers of people and to destabilize the centers of constitutional and legal authority, both here in the United States and in other nations. This methodology is part of a concerted plan that spans several generations... [C]ults and mainstream organizations are closed systems with their own belief systems that are insular and separate from the reality that most people take for granted. These closed systems allow large numbers of people to be manipulated into performing anti-social acts that most members of the greater society would not contemplate."