One of my favorite books
Spiked looks back, and notes that the Right and the Left were to blame:
his reflects, in part, the extent to which in the UK, the Satanic panic was framed less by anxious Christians than it was by elements of a decadent and decomposing left.
This is why the publications in which British proponents of the Satanic panic made their mark were not journals of the cloth; they were the rags of the left.
It was publications like the New Statesman and Marxism Today which carried tales of ‘a culture of sexual terrorism, power and sacrifice’, …
For certain elements of the British left, with feminist theorising prominent and a sense of defeat writ large in the Miners’ Strike, the fall of the USSR and the electoral success of Margaret Thatcher, the Satanic panic touched a nerve. It revealed to sections of a disillusioned left the reason for their failure to realise socialism: a working class corrupted by patriarchy, and fucked up by the family.
