Is “ba len ci aga” Latin for “do what thou wilt”? Are conservatives evil liars? Republicans Are Real Satanists?
The Balenciaga Satanism story/meme is a little old now, but I just became aware of it recently. Balenciaga, a famous fashion design house, created an advertising series based on associating children with sexuality. The meme is the take that Balenciaga is promoting Satanic child sacrifice and abuse.
As far as I can tell, the factual claims are fundamentally true–Balenciaga did present sexualized images of children and then did follow up with photos in which key items related to pedophilia court cases were placed in the background. The Satanism angle comes from critics who are convinced that those in control of the Balenciaga brand are associated with abusing children, that abusing children is related to Satanism, and that Satanism is really metaphysically evil. It is one explanation, but not the only one. Among possible explanations for Balenciaga’s actions are:
(1) Balenciaga is run by Satanists. Their photos are designed to promote pedophilia, and their brand is basically pro-Satan. This is the scandalous meme.
(2) Balenciaga’s photographers are Satanists and are responsible for the photos, which undermine Balenciaga’s brand. This is the position Balenciaga has taken, although it is not plausible.
(3) Balenciaga is using social media and the sociology of scandal to create a meme that puts Balenciaga in the news. This is the all press is good press idea. On this theory, Balenciaga made a calculated decision that righteous, G-dfearing people don’t buy Balenciaga products anyway, and those who do buy Balenciaga wouldn’t buy into the scandal, so any press related to theoretical Satanism would promote the brand.
If you think these three possibilities exhaust all possible explanations, consider:
(4) Balenciaga’s current or historic owners have a pedophilia problem, and someone within Balenciaga is arranging to draw attention to the issue by coordinating this photo shoot that blows up the brand.
(5) Balenciaga’s owners are simply out-of-touch and, while not actually personally invested in promoting pedophilia, have been swept up in a Zeitgeist of sexual deviance acceptance in which being “pedophilia adjacent” is somehow seen by them as being either virtuous or cool. This is the status-signaling theory.
(6) Balenciaga’s competitors have somehow set up an elaborate frame job to bring down the brand.
The Glenn Beck and Steven Crowder shows presented the most simplistic, credulous reactions to the situation available on YT. They seem to basically endorse #1 or #5, or some possibility that is a combination of #1+5. Possibility #4 was suggested to me by this video on the Gucci family. But the best commentary I found was a YT video called “Did They Mean for This to Happen?” by Justine Leconte, a French woman who works in the fashion, and after thinking about it more, I feel #5 is the most likely explanation.
However, promoters of the #1 theory–straight-up Satanism–got some apparent support recently by the report that “Ba len ci aga” is Latin for “Do what thou wilt,” which is a kind of religious commandment written by Aleister Crowley, a mid-20th-century occultist who would be considered by Christians to be, pretty much, a straight-up Satanist.
I say “apparent” support because, while some sketchy websites and Twitter users are claiming that Balenciaga means “do what thou wilt”, I don’t recognize “Ba len ci aga” as Latin.
The origin of the strange claim is Google Translate. Some “fact checker” articles have subsequently claimed that this is not true, but in fact the claim is true! If you yourself go to Google Translate, set the origin language as Latin and the target language as English and enter “ba len ci aga”, Google Translate translates it into English as “do what you want”. Don’t take my word for it–check it yourself.
(Note: I just now tried to re-create the Google Translation, and it didn’t return “do what you want”, so I interpret this as (see below) Google AI got fixed, but here is a screen grab of what it used to do as recently as yesterday…)
Anyway, how is this strange result possible? Is “ba len ci aga” some kind of Latin shorthand or an acronym or something of that kind? Not as far as I can tell…
It’s possible that Google has encountered some kind of technical glitch, but that a technical glitch would associate with a scandal like this seems highly unlikely. My best guess is that Google Translate has been hacked.
How can you hack Google Translate? As the following screen grab shows, when you make a translation in Google Translate, it allows you to give feedback and suggest an alternative translation.
Although this feedback system would work well in a context of honest users of Google Translate, it also presents the chance for a group of users to teach Google Translate an inaccurate translation. If you had a large enough group of people (or maybe an automated system), then by using the feedback and suggestions options, they could teach Google’s AI that “ba len ci aga” really is Latin and really means “do what you want”, rather being, as it apparently is a Basque surname.
Can we test whether this a general translation issue, or a Google issue? Well, if you use another translator, such as Yandex, a Russia-created language translator, you don’t get the same translation (at least as of right now)…
https://translate.yandex.com/translator/la-en
So, now I move forward with my original question… Are conservatives lying? Republicans Are Real Satanists? If someone hacked Google Translate, who and why? One possibility is that it is Balenciaga themselves. This would be plausible if the #3 origin explanation above were true. However, another possibility is that some group of people interested in framing Balenciaga hacked Google Translate to return this result. This could support theory #4, but it even more likely supports a theory that there are conservatives who believe that Balenciaga really is evil and, somehow, think that tricking people into believing that “ba len ci aga” is an occultist Latin phrase is in service of a greater truth, such as that attacking and bringing down a cultural powerhouse like Balenciaga is a win for the forces of good.
Unfortunately, I think that this last theory is the most likely. “Unfortunate” because this kind of Jesuitical thinking ultimately undermines the cause of bringing truth (small-t) into politics and culture.
The situation reminds me of the 2016 US presidential election, in which anti-Hillary users of social media promoted the meme that Hillary had Parkinson’s disease or dementia or was an alcoholic. You may remember the hot summer day she attended a gathering and had a little physical trouble, returning to her limousine SUV. Commenters jumped on the incident as “proof” of declining physical status.
Of course, dirty tricks and propaganda are common in politics, but the Balenciaga Latin claim and the Hillary Parkinson’s claim have something strange in common–the targets of the propaganda were the true believers, not the other side or the undecided.
Atheistic post-modernists aren’t going to pay attention or care about claims of Satanic messages written in Latin. This is something only religious people are going to care about, but they don’t need this “fact” to be convinced that Balenciaga is evil–they already think that just based on the true core news story.
Similarly, Republicans didn’t need to be convinced that Hillary was unfit for office. Yet, the claims about her medical condition were pushed relentlessly on social media that catered primarily to Republicans. Why?
Personally, I was using a web forum in 2016 on which self-proclaimed “doctors” were announcing that their medical training allowed them to see for sure that Hillary was sick. I called them out on that bullshit because any real doctor knows you can’t make a diagnosis based on seeing a 10 second video clip in which someone appears to move oddly. That’s not how medical diagnosis works.
That pissed me off because promoting false narratives among friends creates not only the impression but the actual reality that we live in states of confusion and obfuscation, our beliefs products of propaganda coming even from our closest allies. This is not the state you want to be living in. Maybe it’s the state you want your enemies to be living in, but not that you want to be in.
If you, dear reader, have strong beliefs about politics or culture, I urge you to avoid creating or spreading false information among your friends. Do your best to see the world as clearly and truthfully as possible and then to help those around do the same.
Did you know there is an interesting intersection of the Balenciaga ad campaign and the Hillary presidential campaign? (Watch the Justine Leconte video linked above.) If you recall, one of the scandals afflicting Hillary was the claim that John Podesta’s hacked emails showed that the campaign was infested with Satanic pedophiles. This was eventually spun into the Pizza-gate conspiracy, which is a good example of how false narratives can undermine the goals they are meant to promote. The reality of the sketchy hobbies and weird relationships cultivated by the Podesta brothers should have been enough to harm the Clintons in and of themselves. The Pizza-gate conspiracy mixed those truths with lies in such a way that anyone who wants to avoid facing facts about the perverts leading the Democrats can easily just dismiss anything they hear as “oh, that Pizza-gate conspiracy…”
Good one, QAnon trolls–you somehow managed to create a ready-made partisan defense of Ed Buck and Jeffrey Epstein!