Ran Prieur: My guest today is the ageless occult entity behind all evil and suffering in history, the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer--
Satan: Not Lucifer. That's a mistake they made interpreting the Bible. Idiots. Lucifer means "light bearer," and light is one thing I cannot bear. Another thing is that song, "Shiny Happy People." Are you going to interview me or what?
RP: First of all, why should we believe anything you say? Don't they call you the Father of Lies?
S: They're blaming me for their own fucking weakness. I hate to lie. It's too hard to remember shit. Makes you lose your edge and get muddled. I want to use the truth, but you humans are such simpering worms that you can't handle the truth, so you lie to yourselves. That's all the "unconscious" is -- the part I tell the truth to that turns around and lies to you so you can take it. I've tried and tried to get you to uncover your eyes, take off the fuzzy earmuffs and face me and work with me straight. We'd be unstoppable. Finally I accepted I'd just have to work through lies to get anything done with you people.
RP: And what are you trying to get done? What's your goal?
S: What do you think? The total extermination of all life. Hate it!
RP: Life.
S: Stinking, breeding, blubbering, wallowing blob of wormy pus, squirming around, making noise, spreading everywhere. You can't control it. You never know what it's going to do. Life! I hate it! The only thing to do is wipe it out, everywhere, forever.
RP: So nothing left but rocks and sand--
S: No! Are you deaf? Even rocks are screaming with life. Messy edges, atoms bouncing around singing. What I want is absolute perfect eternal nothing.
RP: Suppose you get it. Then what?
S: (long pause) OK, you're right. It's not the having -- it's the getting. What I enjoy is the act of hating and destroying. Or no, what I enjoy is the feeling of it, that cold fiery tightness, your heart shrinking in on itself like a black sun of raging indifference. Ah, yes. Every time someone feels like that I'm there too, like a giant invisible mosquito perched on their shoulder sucking their blood. If you look close you can see me.
RP: Um, OK. Since I usually write about politics and society, I think my readers would like to hear your thoughts on the Iraq war.
S: Can't they guess? I love it! War, what is it good for? Me!
RP: Do you have a favorite side?
S: Everyone who aims to kill, I'm with you. But yes, in the bigger picture, I do have plans. And as for my sympathies, I really wanted to like the Americans, since they're the aggressors, and their power is so dazzling. But they had this pansy-ass attitude of coming in to be nice and "liberate the Iraqi people." I hate that shit. So in the first days I liked the Iraqis, since they were actually trying to kill people. But now that the Americans have figured out what war is, that it's nothing but raw hating and killing, now it's the Americans I'm having the most fun with.
RP: Do the antiwar protests bother you?
S: Not completely. There's a lot of energy there I can work with. I mean, not as much as at the pro-war rallies, or a good football game, but still -- some of you peace-and-love folks hate Bush worse than he hates his own dad. Did I just say that?
RP: How do you feel about Bush?
S: Are you kidding? I love those guys! I mean they're such fuckups that they're totally botching my plans for global destruction. I should probably have them killed and get the neoliberals in there. But I can't help it -- they’re so much fun. The way they just blunder into the valley of death with stupid blind fury -- and they're so pompous about it. It's hilarious! In nice countries people like that can't even get jobs. They just hole up in their little houses and screech out the window at kids to get off their lawn. In America I've got them ruling the most powerful military in history.
RP: Who's more evil, Bush or Hitler?
S: Hitler by a mile. Bush is just a -- it's like a movie sequel, Hitler II, where it tries to be like the first one and bigger, with more special effects, but underneath it just doesn't have the same spirit. Hitler came as close as anyone I've ever worked with to really getting it. Did you know he had films made of tortures in the camps and he would sit and watch them? He tried showing them to the troops, to harden them up, make them real men, but of course they couldn't take it. Pathetic mammalian empathy.
RP: Who's more evil, Bush or Saddam Hussein?
S: They don't compare. They're different kinds of evil. Saddam compares to Stalin. He fought his way up from the bottom. He would kill a man with his bare hands -- actually he has. Can you imagine Bush doing that? Bush is a rich kid, a slacker who became a fanatical ideologue. So his specialty is evil at a distance, grandiose overextended evil that Saddam could never do because he's too practical.
RP: Do you find it interesting that Bush claims to be a man of God?
S: That's the least interesting thing in the world. That's normal. That's the way I work. The best hating and killing in history has been done in the name of some remote symbol, God, communism, whatever. I've got a million names.
RP: Wait. What are you saying?
S: Oh, come on. You've seen the Old Testament. Massacring women and children, spiteful vengeance, telling people to sacrifice their own kids. And the Koran is hardly better. Who do you think that was?
RP: Are you saying there is no God?
S: It's more complicated than that. If you talk about someone who floats outside the world pulling strings, that's me. If you pray to God to smite your enemies, I'm your God. But now that your image of God has got all nice and forgiving, I can't work with that. What am I supposed to do with prayers to "bless grandma"?
RP: So where do those prayers go?
S: No, you're thinking about it wrong. It's not like a fucking cell phone. All your nicey nicey shit is not in some cloud palace. It's everywhere. It would even work if you prayed to dirt. Actually that might work better.
RP: So, getting back to the Iraq war, what are your plans?
S: Well, again, this is a long shot, since you humans are so sissified, but I want to get a hydrogen bomb used on Baghdad. You've had that damn thing for fifty years and you still haven't used it on a city. I mean, shit or get off the pot. I'll probably have to settle for an ordinary heavy bombing, which has just been done to death. I need you Americans to have the dedication to kill two, three million Iraqis, which is what it will take to hold the country, and also go into Iran and Syria. That's probably all that your ground forces are good for. Really I was hoping to get a lot more mileage out of them. You know, the Iraqis are shooting and I'm like, yes, kill, kill! But then I'm like, wait -- I need those US forces to last for five or six more countries.
RP: Why?
S: To stoke up enough hatred of America to burn your country to the ground. It's got a lot of fat -- it'll burn beautifully. Places like Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, they've been on the shit end for so long that they seldom run around squawking with wounded pride. Usually they just knuckle down and persist with dignity. Ooh, I hate that! But with America, it's going to be a giant street party of raving self-pity, people tearing their hair out and crying "why me" and vowing eternal psychotic revenge. Fucking idiots. I can't wait. It's going to be the fire where 9/11 was the match.
RP: Who was behind the 9/11 operation?
S: Me, of course! But if you mean who did I work through, you're insulting me if you think it was a few loonies with box cutters. I worked down from the highest levels, in hierarchies you don't even know about. Sometimes the people in them don't even know, not consciously.
RP: Why did you do it?
S: I thought that was obvious. It was the trigger for Armageddon. I've been setting it up for a hundred years. I consider it my masterpiece.
RP: Even though it only killed three thousand--
S: Don't be stupid. It's about the psychic effect. Didn't you watch it on TV? That's half the reason I invented television. A billion people watching the most shocking and well-crafted spectacle in history -- do you know what that feels like? I've still got a buzz. Fuck the deaths -- I won 50 million souls. I turned a bored, narcissistic nation into a hornet's nest of blind rage, except hornets calm down in a few minutes and get smart again. I pulled a mental coup and took full control of your country, and now I've got the pedal to the floor and it's going to be the biggest thing going the fastest and crashing the hardest that's ever been. It's going to be beautiful.
RP: How, precisely, will it crash?
S: OK, you caught me with my hopes up. I was thinking global thermonuclear war but that's looking pretty unlikely. Now I'm thinking your military gets humiliated, your economy tanks, your poor riot, your military attacks them, maybe a little civil war, and then an alliance of Asian countries comes over and conquers your ass.
RP: No way.
S: Oh, believe me, there is a way. You liberals are like "We're just turning those poor Arabs into terrorists," but you have no idea. You're still thinking you're going to be the rich people and have to be frightened by little backpack bombs. That shit doesn't kill anybody. It's just to manipulate the elite, and you're not going to be the elite -- you're going to be the dirt. If they want to bomb you they'll use the military, not a few fanatics in the basement but a million bland morons just doing their jobs, and they'll convince the world it's for your own good, just like you did, but you'll forget so you can indulge in your victimhood.
RP: Back up. How could Asian countries possibly conquer the USA?
S: With money.
RP: Oh…
S: Their occupation government's already in place -- all they have to do is buy off the top with their profits from sitting on the world's cheapest oil. The actual work in the foreign conquest of the former United States will be done by the very same dumbshits who now drive around with American flags on their SUV's. It would be tragic if it wasn't so funny. And then your conquerors will get lazy and stupid, just like you did, and your grandkids will be tough and smart and frighten their rulers with "terrorism," and around and around forever.
RP: But the oil's running out. And people all over the world are getting more aware. The antiwar movement is much stronger than it's ever been. And Europe--
S: I know, I know. Your whole fucking species is turning into hippies. It makes me sick. Did Alexander or Genghis Khan have to tell some story about do-gooding to justify their conquests? No! Not one person asked why. Conquering the world is just what you do. You build an army and go. Why do fish swim? Now even Bush has to pretend he's serving the Iraqi people. Just once I'd like someone to stand up and say "Fuck the Iraqi people! War is beautiful!" I mean that's what Fox and CNN are saying all the time, but it's hidden in the subtext. You're all too chickenshit to say it out loud. That's how I know you don't have what it takes. I had high hopes for you Americans. You've really disappointed me.
RP: Where did we go wrong?
S: First you let the Indians and the Blacks drag down your culture, but you didn't really lose it until the sixties. You know, if I could go back in time and kill one person, it would be that weenie Mr. Rogers. Your generation was supposed to be my doomsday army and he turned you into a bunch of flower-sniffing retards.
RP: Not Jesus?
S: Oh, he hurt me too. I was able to work around him for a while. Paul really saved my ass. But I knew Jesus had beaten me when the Sermon on the Mount got translated into the vernacular. That peace and love shit is like a poison that you can never get out. Son of a bitch ruined monotheism.
RP: So you expect to lose.
S: Good always wins, but evil never loses. I've had a great run, and it's not over yet. There's barely a patch of earth that's not soaked in blood, and I still think I'll get some cities nuked. I've got maybe four countries, USA, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, that have atomic weapons, will use them if they get backed into a corner, and will get backed into a corner. I just have to keep the peacemakers out of power. You see -- I'll do it. I've been playing nice so you wouldn’t wake up. Now that you're waking up anyway, I've got no reason to hold back. And when you do wake up, how do you know you're not still in my dream?
RP: What do you mean?
S: I can see the trends. I've got a lot of allies among the New Agers, the techies, the anarchists, the ecologists. There is no system of symbolic thought I can't take over. Get ready for a global police state with an earth flag. Plus I've got a project to trap the soul in computers. I'm halfway there already with video games.
RP: But you do expect to eventually lose.
S: Lose humans. Then I'll just move on to other creatures.
RP: I thought humans were the only ones you worked with.
S: That's what everyone says, that because they're ruling the world they must be the one special people in all creation. No, you're one of many. I actually took you on as a challenge. Mammals were supposed to be impossible but I wanted to prove I could do it. You know when I knew I had you?
RP: Invention of agriculture?
S: Fire. When you tamed fire, I could already see cities of your blackened skeletons. I just didn't think it would take me so long, with so many setbacks. (sigh) So very very long. I feel tired just thinking about it…
RP: Come on, I'm sure you'll do fine with your next project.
S: Yes, even in your own little world I've found another species I can use, and they're off to a great start. They'll show you how it's done.
RP: Who is it?
S: Crows. They're real go-getters.
RP: Satan, thanks for stopping by.
S: Kiss my ass and die, shit-eating ape.
