28. The British Plan to Link Irish Nationalist Paramilitaries With Devil Worship
On January 30th, 1972, British paratroopers shot 26 Catholic protesters in Northern Ireland, of whom fourteen died. An already tense situation known as The Troubles got orders of magnitude worse. Urban guerrilla warfare erupted, as Catholic and Irish nationalist hostility towards Britain skyrocketed. Many who until then had been content with protests and civil disobedience now flocked to join paramilitaries and shoot it up with the forces of the state. Before anybody knew it, the British military and police had their hands full trying to keep a lid on things. British military intelligence turned to psychological warfare in an attempt to lessen public support for the paramilitaries. As the violence spiked through the roof, Captain Collin Wallace, a British Army psychological warfare specialist, executed a plan to link the emerging armed groups with devil worship and black magic.
The aim was to create the idea that the paramilitaries and their violence had unleashed evil forces. Against the backdrop of newfound fears triggered by the release of movies like The Exorcist and The Devil Rides Out, Wallace and his men scattered upside-down crucifixes and black candles across war-torn Belfast. Simultaneously, the authorities leaked stories about satanic rituals and black masses and tied them to run-of-the-mill crimes. In the last four months of 1973 alone, over seventy articles about devil worship and the like were published, and panic about Satanism swept through Northern Ireland. As Wallace put it years later: “Ireland was very superstitious and all we had to do was bring it up to date“. The manufactured hysteria also helped keep kids home at night, and away from buildings used by the authorities for undercover surveillance.
