WHERE THE OCCULT & PAGAN COMMUNITY LOST THE PLOT

The occult community is doomed to be hijacked by right-wing nut-jobs and other idiots because it has become paralysed by its own desire to be “spiritual.”

Yesterday I was involved in a spat with a Golden Dawn troll in the Nova Roma group on Facebook.  Not the occult Golden Dawn, I mean the Nazi group which has effectively taken over the use of the name in the EU.  The troll was flooding he site with bogus historical claims about how the Jews wrecked Greece and how homosexuality in Ancient Greece was a dreadful rumour put about by the Jews where intimated by Greek masculinity. Ignoring him did not help.  He kept reposting because he believed he was right.

As I thought the Golden Dawn was anti-Turk (and this was a Roman group) so I made a few gags about how the Romans were Troyian refugees and therefore Turkish.  I was wasting my time, the troll had about as much of a sense of humour as his alt.magick counterparts in the 1990s.

The point was that the Nova Roma group seemed unable to do anything about him.  If a troll like that appeared in one of my Facebook groups he would have been banned. Scarlet Magdalene reports that similar trolls are the bane of her existence in Greek religious re-enactment groups but no one is taking them down either.

In all cases the neo-pagan movement is ignoring one of the primary lessons that the Jews learnt in the 1940s. The only way to deal with these thugs is to chase them off the streets.  In Germany the population was in fear of the brown shirts and the result was that they ended up being accepted.  In the UK though Mosley’s Black shirts were literally chased from the streets by gangs of pissed off Jews. The grass roots of the Nazi movement failed.  Then, as in now, the Far Right claimed their views are being censored and that you are trespassing on their rights to free speech.  

So fucking what!

Rights of free speech are intimately coupled with a right not-to-listen.  You have a right to call me name, but in law you cannot control my reaction.  So if you insult my ancestors it is not interfering with your free speech if I curse you never to have any off-spring or you get a terminal illness.  If you post hate-speech on a Facebook group that is your right, it is equally my right to take you down.

Yet in the occult community there is a fear that people are somehow doing the wrong thing. That they are not appearing spiritual enough in their dealing with these people.  If we are all One Thing then surely these people are just as much God as the rest of us.  That might be true but a sun and a black hole are part of the same universe, but you would not want them in the same solar system – one is very bad for the other.

My reaction to the Nova Roma troll was to leave the group, because I don’t want to read that shit and I did not want to appear bad taking him on. Occult leaders in particular have this problem.  There is a mistaken belief that being spiritual is being tolerant when in fact a closer connection to the flow of the universe makes you less tolerant of those who are closer to the trees and not familiar with their opposable thumbs. 

But then I thought fuck it… why should neo-nazis close down occult groups and chase working occultists out of them.  Alt.magick in the 1990s was a case in point.  When it started it was full of really cool people – Pat Zalewski, Poke Runyon, Adam McLean, Aaron Lietch, different groups, OTO, GD, etc.  Then it went to shit because a couple of bullies tried to assert control over it and defamed everyone who did not do their bidding.  Since it was impossible for you to kick someone out of alt.magick everyone just left and that level of egalitarianism has not returned in one place again.

Instead of trying to work with these morons, and “being tolerant” it is really time that occultists showed that this sort of behaviour should not be allowed.  It is time that real occultists started taking back groups from these backward types in whatever form they manifest.  Rather than defending the criminals and their rights to be arseholes, we should be defending ourselves from the contamination that this particular thinking breeds.   Rather than providing platforms for Neo-nazi thought, we should be closing it down at its first opportunely before it contaminates Adam Kadmon any further.

In short, you get the sort of community you deserve. If you do not stand up to bullies they will continue to steal your lunch money.    

UPDATE

The administrator at Nova Roma has banned two Nazi’s from the group including the one who inspired this blog. Well done guys…..
THe admin has also posted that will be the fate of any one who tries to post fascist propaganda in the group. This sort of zero tolerance is exactly the sort of approach we need.