They Just Don’t Make Satanic Panics Like They Used To
Why struggle with mere political issues when you can wage digital warfare against principalities, powers, & satanic panics?
Back in the sixties, the 1860s, a French feller named Baudelaire wrote a story for the Parisian paper “Le Figaro” that contained a witticism that would be used over and over again to various degrees. Where he got it from we aren’t too sure, but near as we can tell everyone since then got it from him.
Elle ne se plaignit en aucune façon de la mauvaise réputation dont elle jouit dans toutes les parties du monde, m’assura qu’elle était, elle-même, la personne la plus intéressée à la destruction de la superstition, et m’avoua qu’elle n’avait eu peur, relativement à son propre pouvoir, qu’une seule fois, c’était le jour où elle avait entendu un prédicateur, plus subtil que le reste du troupeau humain, s’écrier en chaire: “ Mes chers frères, n’oubliez jamais, quand vous entendrez vanter le progrès des lumières, que la plus belle des ruses du Diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas!
Here is the same excerpt from a translation by Arthur Symons published in 1918 in “The English Review”. Baudelaire referred to the Devil using the feminine pronoun “elle” and the masculine pronoun “il” in different sections of the story. Within the excerpt above Baudelaire primarily employed “elle”, but English translators have used “he” instead of “her”. The original text contained the mistaken phrase “your hear” instead of “you hear”
He complained in no way of the evil reputation under which he lived, indeed, all over the world, and he assured me that he himself was of all living beings the most interested in the destruction of Superstition, and he avowed to me that he had been afraid, relatively as to his proper power, once only, and that was on the day when he had heard a preacher, more subtle than the rest of the human herd, cry in his pulpit: “My dear brethren, do not ever forget, when your hear the progress of lights praised, that the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that they don’t exist!”
Or as the mastermind villain Keyser Söze put it in one of the pivotal scenes of The Usual Suspects “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled…
