EDIT: image above says January 2011 but my physical copy says February. American print edition is likely month "behind" UK edition?
K KONSPIRACY KORNER
PONDERS THE SPREAD OF CHILD ABUSE ALLEGATIONS IN
THE INTERNET AGE - HAVE WE BEEN HERE BEFORE?
In September 2010, six men, including Portugal's best known TV personality, Carlos Cruz, and Jorge Ritto, a former Portuguese ambassador, were convicted of sexual offences against children in state-run orphanages in Portugal. Rumours spoke of a thick slice of Portugal's political and media class being part of a vast paedophile ring centred on the orphanage.
The only one of the accused to plead guilty, Carlos Silvino, a former employee at the home, is quoted as saying: "I took some boys to these homes. I have dates and addresses where they went to make movies, attend parties or sex orgies."
The English-language reporting on the affair assumed that all of this was entirely true. But I wonder. We have been here before.
The earliest version of this in my lifetime was the Kincora boys' home affair in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Then, three gay men working there had abused the boys in their care for almost 20 years. They had survived complaints from the boys, parents and other care workers, because one of them, the late William McGrath, was not only a senior figure in the Orange Order and a friend of the Reverend Ian Paisley, but also an informant for MI5. Rumours spread of boys being taken to big country houses to be used by public figures, including Lord Mountbatten, the former head of MI6, Maurice Oldfield, and Edward Heath. These rumours are still circulating on the Internet.'
In the 1990s, we had the North Wales paedophile panic, again centred on a children's home, Bryn Estyn. The initial North Wales allegations mushroomed into a nationwide police trawling operation, offering compensation for victims of abuse in local authority care, and over 100 men were ultimately convicted. But in his wonderful analysis of the case, The Secret of Bryn Estyn (reviewed FT208:62–63), Richard Webster showed that most of the convictions were probably unsound and the result of a modern-day witch-hunt.
Currently, we have the Hollie Greig affair (referred to in this column, FT262:21), in which a Downs Syndrome woman in Scotland has apparently alleged that she was abused from the age of six by a circle of people, including her father and her uncle, a lawyer, her social worker, a policemen and a local sheriff. Once the story reached the Internet, the list of abusers began expanding – as did the list of the abused. The Scottish legal authorities' decision not to prosecute anyone – there was no useable evidence – turned the story into a Scottish-establishment-paedophile-network cover-up. The leading 'investigator', self-styled journalist and broadcaster Robert Green, was arrested in Aberdeen as he was about to distribute leaflets about the case. He then stood in Aberdeen South in the 2010 General Election as 'Scotland Against Crooked Lawyers' (but only got 138 votes).
A public campaign began: meetings are being held across Britain. The BBC was apparently (that word again) going to broadcast the story but backed off (another cover-up!). A great national scandal has been uncovered and an evil or Masonic or paedophile establishment is getting away with it! Despite the lack of evidence, the story is growing and spreading. Everybody from David Icke downwards (or upwards) is joining in – just type "Hollie Greig" into YouTube and see how many hundreds of videos you get.
In the 1970s and 80s, the cry was for 'alternative media'. I began publishing an 'alternative magazine' in 1983. The Net and YouTube mean that anyone, saying almost anything, can broadcast globally, with no initial editorial interference. So why does this type of evidence-free rumour-mongering make me so nervous?
NOTES
1 See for example http://tinyurl.com/34hig3f (indymedia.org.uk).
Tried to attach a jpg of the scan from which this was OCRd but got this...
"Sorry, the board attachment quota has been reached."
