Libel as Old as Time

from New Republic

Lately, I’ve been thinking of blood libel, how stories of groups who secretly coordinate to steal children and drink blood persist. There is some alluring about the dark stories. The accusations of human sacrifice have lasted for centuries. The accusation of such is made to demonstrate the evil and antisocial nature of the accused. The Romans looked at the early Christians’ rituals of “eating flesh and drinking blood” and thought them cannibals. A group that kills for flesh—more animal than man, set apart from society, worthy of shunning or persecution. The claim of blood sacrifice makes attacks against the group justified. For it’s good to stop killing, isn’t it? Even if you kill to do it.

For centuries, Jews were accused of stealing children to use their blood in ritual sacrifice or to bake matza. (In Jewish tradition, sacrifice can only happen at the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem and blood is not allowed in cooking. So it’s not even possible in Jewish belief, like the misunderstanding of Eucharist.) The rumors of Jews stealing and sacrificing children led to pogroms against Jewish communities in order to “save the children.” These rumors existed even before Christianity, but Christians (and later Muslims) spread these rumors, greatly increasing around the time of the Crusades.

One version stated that the Jews picked one country every year and ritually killed a child during Passover/Easter. This version shows how the blood libel often mixed with the idea of a coordinated, international cabal.

Often, the accusations were attempts at giving a solution to a local murder. But other times they were specifically used to get rid of a Jewish community or a particular person. In what is now Slovakia, it was claimed boy had been tortured and bled to death. Thirty Jews confessed to the crime and were publicly burned. Later, the child was found alive in Vienna. He had been taken there by the accuser as a means of getting rid of his Jewish creditors.

Blood libel against Jews continued into the twentieth century. In Iran in 1910, an entire Jewish neighborhood was pillaged after Jews were blamed for the death of a young Muslim girl. Nazi publications in Germany often spread rumors of Jewish blood rituals. After Israel gained statehood, blood libel spread in Middle Eastern countries.

While accusations often take on emotional, frantic momentum, blood libel is a thought-out strategy, a way of creating distrust of others, attacking enemies, and rallying violence under the guise of justice.

While blood libel certainly has anti-Semitic history and undertones, the theme does not always name Jews as the perpetrators. Witch hunts carry the same tones of unprovable accusations, dark magic, community frenzy, and attacks on an outsider labeled justice. In more recent times, blood libel has rebranded itself in the conspiracy world of global elite cults—Satanic Panic, Pizzagate, Q.

In 1985, rumors of child abuse in a daycare sparked the Satanic Panic, the idea that Satanists were ritually abusing and killing children in secret gatherings. The idea of repressed memories sparked a lot of untrained psychologists helping people suddenly “reclaim” memories of dark, complicated rituals involving sex and blood. The preschoolers at the initial daycare first were questioned about fondling from one employee; after months of questioning, the story had developed into all the employees engaging in orgies with children, animal sacrifice, demonic flying, goat-men, drinking blood, and a vast basement tunnel system where these things took place (the daycare had no basement).

Child abuse had only begun to be taken seriously in the past decade, so people were reluctant to disbelieve the children’s stories, no matter how outrageous. “Believe the children” and “protect the children” kept the Satanic Panic in motion for years. People knew Satanic cults were out there sacrificing children, although there was never quite actual evidence.

In 2017, Q (named after a security clearance level in the Dept. of Energy) began amassing a following. The cult believes that a group of elites engage in demonic child rape and murder. Their rumors also claim that the elites drink children’s blood to stay young. The cult’s power comes from its vagueness, able to adapt and encompass whatever gains the most emotion and momentum. Along with international cabals and blood libel, there’s room for aliens, microchips in vaccines, and lizard people.

We like to think we are beyond the ages that raided Jewish conclaves or hanged Goody Bishop. We’re more reasonable. We’re civilized. But the blood libel lives on, saying, “Use only emotion. These people are animals.” There are horrible people in the world, doing truly horrible things. Dark, shocking things. But when stories of those evil things sound highly coordinated, lack physical evidence, and seamlessly align with existing prejudices, then they are probably not true. It’s the same old lie, updated and rebranded, trying to get us to clutch our pearls and pitchforks.

In buying into blood libel, we become the ones committing human sacrifice, offering up innocent victims in the name of saving other non-existent victims. The dark stories appeal to our own dark natures. We want all the gory details in order to vilify someone else. We ignore the real evils of the day for the scandalous, shiny conspiracies. We lose our reason and compassion. We are not the knight riding into save the day but a pawn in a calculated, prejudiced game.