A few weeks ago I read Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. I read his earlier novel The Emigrants a few years ago. Both novels were difficult to read, not because the prose was complicated, but because I had to stop from time to time and sit with the overwhelming sadness of history. By obliquely showing historical events (in this case, the Holocaust) through the lives of individual people, Sebald reveals not only the deep sadness but also the deep cruelty of the events.

I was thinking about this the next morning when I started listening to The Devil You Know, a podcast by Sarah Marshall about the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s.

Podcast

About three minutes into the first episode, she says something about the satanic panic that also applies to all history at all times:

“… to see it only from the distance of the present is to not see it at all. The grand sweep of the narrative turns it into something that happened to a country or a culture. But that also means it happened to individuals”

… which was exactly what I already had on my mind that day. Coincidence? I don’t know. Her comments in episode 8 on the lessons of Jonestown are unfortunately especially relevant for Americans these days.

" … we learned the wrong lessons from Jonestown. We learned to fear cults, but we learned to believe that cults come from anything different from the mainstream. We learned that we should look out for Hari Krishna’s tambourines, hippies, and outsiders. We learned to find some “other” to blame, when in reality the cultists we should have feared were the Jim Joneses of our society. The middle class white Christian men leading groups of believers to slaughter."

I haven’t listened to the bonus episodes yet, but the main series is worth your time. And so are Austerlitz and The Emigrants.