Post by Teddy Bear on Oct 31, 2010 16:36:29 GMT
While no mention of Catholicism by the BBC can escape without including the indictment of paedophilia, Paganism however is given honoured coverage, as Damian Thompson of the Telegraph relates.
The BBC sucks up to Pagans
By Damian Thompson
Utterly fawning coverage from the BBC of the pagan festival of Halloween or “Samhain”, including an interview with a chief pagan in a sheepskin. “We’ll be continuing with our coverage throughout the day, watching the celebration of the most important festival of the pagan year,” we’re promised.
Robert Piggott, the BBC’s bien pensant religious affairs correspondent, seems enchanted by paganism.
“Indeed modern Paganism is a reinvented religion, whose members seek the divine in nature,” he gushes.
“It originated among ancient Celts for whom the natural world was a wilderness that brought them death and danger as well as sustaining life. In contemporary Britain its members are more worried about the destruction of the natural world.”
There’s an interview with members of a coven “composed entirely of women” – not a problem for the BBC in the way that the all-male priesthood of the Catholic Church seems to be. And one witch works for the NHS!
There’s even a page on the BBC website devoted to paganism – or, rather, devoted to its propaganda. The Beeb acknowledges that modern paganism only dates back a hundred years or so, but it happily reproduces an intellectual history of the movement that, absurdly, presents the Renaissance as a stepping stone to the “rediscovery” of the wisdom of white witchcraft.
Even worse, it lends credence to the notion that today’s paganism has revived the beliefs and practices of the Druids – about which we known virtually nothing – and mentions the belief that the Druids built Stonehenge without telling us that this is a historical fantasy as ludicrous as the proposition that the ancient Egyptians built the Aztec temples.
You can see why the BBC approves of paganism. As it tells us:
But this potted history of paganism is very heavily sanitised. There’s no mention at all of the overlap between paganism and various forms of Satanism – or the much broader overlap with the far Right. In northern Europe, some pagan movements have celebrated Aryan cultural and racial purity for the best part of a century. In the words of the historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, author of a brilliant study of the Neo-Nazi movement entitled Black Sun, Nordic racial paganism or Odinism is a “spiritual rediscovery of the Aryan ancestral gods … intended to embed the white races in a sacred worldview that supports their tribal feeling”, and expressed in “imaginative forms of ritual magic and ceremonial forms of fraternal fellowship”.
Needless to say, the white witches of Weymouth celebrated by the BBC are deeply opposed to this variety of paganism. But over the years there have been ferocious ideological battles between Lefty, feminist pagans and their racially obsessed but equally Green Odinist rivals, and there has been more contact between the two camps than the official representatives of British paganism would care to acknowledge.
Fortunately, they can rely on their friends in the BBC to sanitise the image of this religious movement and to turn a blind eye to the more obviously bogus pseudohistorical claims it makes. Happy Samhain, everyone!
The BBC sucks up to Pagans
By Damian Thompson
Utterly fawning coverage from the BBC of the pagan festival of Halloween or “Samhain”, including an interview with a chief pagan in a sheepskin. “We’ll be continuing with our coverage throughout the day, watching the celebration of the most important festival of the pagan year,” we’re promised.
Robert Piggott, the BBC’s bien pensant religious affairs correspondent, seems enchanted by paganism.
“Indeed modern Paganism is a reinvented religion, whose members seek the divine in nature,” he gushes.
“It originated among ancient Celts for whom the natural world was a wilderness that brought them death and danger as well as sustaining life. In contemporary Britain its members are more worried about the destruction of the natural world.”
There’s an interview with members of a coven “composed entirely of women” – not a problem for the BBC in the way that the all-male priesthood of the Catholic Church seems to be. And one witch works for the NHS!
There’s even a page on the BBC website devoted to paganism – or, rather, devoted to its propaganda. The Beeb acknowledges that modern paganism only dates back a hundred years or so, but it happily reproduces an intellectual history of the movement that, absurdly, presents the Renaissance as a stepping stone to the “rediscovery” of the wisdom of white witchcraft.
Even worse, it lends credence to the notion that today’s paganism has revived the beliefs and practices of the Druids – about which we known virtually nothing – and mentions the belief that the Druids built Stonehenge without telling us that this is a historical fantasy as ludicrous as the proposition that the ancient Egyptians built the Aztec temples.
You can see why the BBC approves of paganism. As it tells us:
Paganism found an ally in the ecological and feminist movements of the 1960s. Pagan philosophies appealed to many eco-activists, who also saw Nature as sacred and recognised the Great Goddess as Mother Nature. The image of the witch was taken up by feminists as a role-model of the independent powerful woman, and the single Great Goddess as the archetype of women’s inner strength and dignity.
But this potted history of paganism is very heavily sanitised. There’s no mention at all of the overlap between paganism and various forms of Satanism – or the much broader overlap with the far Right. In northern Europe, some pagan movements have celebrated Aryan cultural and racial purity for the best part of a century. In the words of the historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, author of a brilliant study of the Neo-Nazi movement entitled Black Sun, Nordic racial paganism or Odinism is a “spiritual rediscovery of the Aryan ancestral gods … intended to embed the white races in a sacred worldview that supports their tribal feeling”, and expressed in “imaginative forms of ritual magic and ceremonial forms of fraternal fellowship”.
Needless to say, the white witches of Weymouth celebrated by the BBC are deeply opposed to this variety of paganism. But over the years there have been ferocious ideological battles between Lefty, feminist pagans and their racially obsessed but equally Green Odinist rivals, and there has been more contact between the two camps than the official representatives of British paganism would care to acknowledge.
Fortunately, they can rely on their friends in the BBC to sanitise the image of this religious movement and to turn a blind eye to the more obviously bogus pseudohistorical claims it makes. Happy Samhain, everyone!