On October 23rd the anti-war front group for several Communist activists and their affiliated groups posted a year-old press release on their website citing a court case involving the publications of pictures of gang rapes and child molestation from Abu Ghraib. They then posted a clip about it on a forum at Democratic Underground which created a frenzy of condemnation of America, the military, and Republicans, even though the supposed pictures of these atrocities have never materialized. In fact, the charges of child sexual abuse and gang rapes of women are not only false, but are recycled conspiracy theories from the late ’90s satanic abuse scare.

The idea that there are photos of American G.I.’s gang raping women started in May of 2004 when local Boston politician Chuck Turner was able to convince The Boston Globe to run a story about Americans raping women in Iraq and posting the images on the Internet. The evidence Turner used, supposedly undisclosed to the reporters, was images downloaded from a rape fetish site. Once this came to light, it created quite a scandal.

But while the actual documentation of abuse at Abu Ghraib is considered shocking enough by any civilized person, rabid anti-government activists needed more horrendous abuse by Americans to prove their point, so every few months the allegations are recycled by those who are invested in the belief that America and all who support her are evil.

The D.U. posters, and AfterDowningStreet.org, are accepting the image of America propagated by the likes “Joe Vialls“, who believes the debunking of the gang rape photos was part of a Cointelpro operation or the racist reconquista organization La Voz de Aztlan who continue to use the debunked photos. This image is of blood thirsty Americans, controlled by satanic cults, who are more likely to rape, murder and commit war crimes than either Saddam’s Baathists or Al Qaeda. The question is why do rational people want to be duped into believing the worst about their fellow citizens?

I say because it makes things easier. If the world’s problems are all caused by Americans, then solving the world’s problems is as simple as changing governments. If our soldiers are more brutal than the terrorists we fight, then being against “Bush’s war” is morally justified, and what’s more those who support the war needn’t be taken seriously (after all they support raping children), and the suspect claims that Iraqis were better off under Saddam becomes true. If the enemy you fight will only argue with you, and not cut your head off, “heroic resistance” becomes infinitely easier than if these same people stood up to Communists, Baathists or radical Islamists.

Just as it was once easier for people to believe that their cows were sick because of the malevolence of witches and demons, and not their poor farming or bad luck, just as it is easier for some people even today to believe the unseemly impulses that shame them are actually put into their minds by the devil, it is easier to for many on the left to believe that a shadowy, out-of-control government is causing the strife in the world. It is the left’s demonology, their explanation for evil. Like the old demonology of medieval Christianity, it condemns the innocent, and puts the responsibility for events outside our control onto a group that can be punished.

Burning witches didn’t stop plague or famine in the those burning times, and criminalizing our military won’t stop the coming war in our time. It would be nice if it weren’t so, but the truth is that the demons of the left are our only hope to survive the onslaught of armies gathering to end the American experiment once and for all. Let us all hope that the exorcists at Democratic Underground don’t succeed in banishing them by the time we need them the most.