Err, well a couple of corrections.
For starters the whole "Michelle Remembers" thing tends to come down to whether you believe in regression hypnosis, the basic idea that a trained psychiatrist, can use hypnosis to access your deep memories and allow you to remember, or convey, things that you do not consciously remember without it. The idea being that pretty much everything you see, think, or experience is stored there somewhere, even if you can't always access it. There were a number of cases during this period of backlash where these techniques were used to uncover a lot of "evidence" of satanic activity, inflicted on children. This lead to questions about whether or not the whole technique works, or if it does, how many of these psychiatrists were actually accessing memories, or implanting them. There were allegations that a lot of these psychiatrists looking for fame from having a "victim patient" for the news created this, and basically tortured their victims by implanting memories that they claimed were actually recovered... and well it's a big mess, and one of the reasons why hypnosis isn't more heavily used in criminal proceedings.
For my part I believe that probably 90% of the stuff from the period is true, with a few constructions by attention seeking head shrinkers. The reason is simply that most of what is alleged doesn't really go much further than what you see in ordinary child molestation and such. What's more "Satanism" for a lot of people generally speaking comes down to fancy ways for them to justify sociopathic behavior, or just to provide trappings to add some excitement to kinky sex or other things they would likely be doing anyway. So yeah, I'd imagine there have been plenty of abusers who got organized (like we see busted in kiddie porn production rings and such) donned satanic trappings for fun/atmosphere and pretty much did their thing. Do I think it was organized on a global level? Not really, because of the simple reason that the more people that need to be involved the less practical it becomes to keep something like this under wraps. That said the whole sex tourism/slavery business which has been getting more exposure than ever, means that someone with a kid they can abuse sexually might very well sell the rights out to others. So of course if your doing your satanic child molestation thing to get your rocks off, and feel enterprising, you might very well start producing porn, and then invite regular consumers to come molest the kid(s) too the same way in exchange for money. To a victim, especially a young one, something like that might seen like an international conspiracy, especially if everyone shows up getting off on the same basic trappings and playing the same "games". Simply put with all of the things busted over the years that have been confirmed real, it actually seems even more plausible that it could have been going on as far back as the 1980s especially seeing as some of the big child-porn players were apparently active back then.
As far as the whole pagan/neo-pagan thing, one thing I have to keep reminding people of is that according to strict Christianity there are only two real forces, god and the devil. God pretty much identifies himself clearly and sets down very specific rules for him to be worshipped and guidelines for his people. The Devil to get your soul needs to turn you away from god, he doesn't necessarily need to turn you to full blown evil. As a result he can "win" by appearing as a benevolent entity who simply isn't god, and getting you to follow that instead. As a result it should be noted that the church really didn't NEED to engage in a ton of propaganda for it's hard core believers. Arguably it could justify torturing people until they "found god", and then killing them (to send them to heaven before further temptation) as being a humanitarian act by it's own standards. The argument being that your not supposed to pursue vengeance, but in the case of witches (ie anyone not following god, since any other philosophy or religion comes from The Devil in another face) your "shalt not suffer them to live", which can be interpreted as killing them before they can spread their poison and also effectively end their own earthly suffering by saving them through torture and execution.
That said, I do not doubt that many artworks showing The Devil depicted him as being similar to other non-Christian deities, but largely because to a Christian that is exactly what those deities were, The Devil in another guise or wearing a mask. The artwork simply shows him sort of "unmasked" as he is doing his thing, rather than adopting the attributes of other religions directly for purposes of propaganda.
I'm also a big believer that a lot of the pagans were generally speaking not nice people themselves. Us European barbarians wound up freaking out the Romans with the crap we got up to, and really that is what the Christians were still dealing with after the fall of Rome. Basically the situation probably wasn't helped by all the non-Christians basically killing and skinning people and wearing them like capes, building shrines out of skulls, murdering people on stone slabs, and whatever else. You generally weren't dealing with a bunch of peaceful "wise women" dancing in the moonlight and nothing else. That sells well to the new age crowd, but when you start looking back at the crap barbarians were up to back then, and understand there really wasn't a dividing line, it paints a different picture. Every once in a while you see shows on TV where they show caves full of bashed in skulls, depictions of bloody rituals, and similar things, not to mention going off about how the Vikings went around ripping people's rib cages open to make "the blood eagle" as a sign of appreciation to Odin (a pagan deity) for a long time. So really there was kind of an element of "you kill our people horribly, we kill yours" at the end of the day though the Christians by and large won, and did so by killing or converting all of their rivals.
