Anti-Cultism Is a Decoy

Anti-Cultism Is a Decoy

By Guy Delaunay

“Courage is to seek the truth and to speak it; it is not to submit to the law of the triumphant lie passing by, and not to echo, with our soul, our mouth and our hands, imbecile applause and fanatical jeering[1].”

Jean Jaurès (1903)

The “cult” object

Where does this preoccupation of our elites in French society come from, verging on an obsession, to assert, like an incantation, that minority groups (therapeutic, spiritual, ecological…) are potentially cults, and their leaders dangerous gurus or terrorist chiefs?

Let us start from the reflection of Julien Coupat, in the interview given to the newspaper Le Monde on Tuesday 26 May last, two days before his release. Here is what the journalists reported:

“Antiterrorism, contrary to what the term would insinuate, is not a means of fighting terrorism, it is the method by which the political enemy is positively produced as a terrorist. It is a matter, through a whole luxury of provocations, infiltrations, surveillance, intimidation and propaganda, through a whole science of media manipulation, of ‘psychological action’, of the fabrication of evidence and crimes, and through the fusion of police and judiciary, of annihilating the ‘subversive menace’ by associating, within the population, the internal enemy, the political enemy, with the affect of terror.”

These terms can be taken up word for word concerning the anti-cult fight in France.

The anti-cult associations, orchestrated by the Miviludes[2], supported and marshalled by the ADFIs and other CCMMs or Info-sectes, justify their existence (and therefore their public subsidies) only by asserting that there are cults. It is the fact that they exist that suddenly leads to cataloguing groups or communities as cults; more than that, “anti-cultism” is not the means of fighting the cults, it is the means of constructing the cult object. Financed by the State and the local authorities, it is necessary for these associations’ stock-in-trade and survival to find an enemy. An example? “Let us recall that for a year, the ADFI Île-de-France has been receiving a subsidy of €35,000 per year for 3 years (DDASS: €10,000, Region: €17,000, City of Paris: €8,000),”

to draw up the list “of the gurus, disguised as therapists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, teachers of Zen or Yoga, mediums and clairvoyants…” because “ignorance of these tools does not allow a vulnerable public to tell the difference between the charlatanism of the cults and medical professionalism.[3]” “Will a new ‘black’ list see the light of day?[4]”

The sociologist Antoine Garapon writes in the review Esprit of July 2009[5]: “Enlistment is a way of isolating […] The objective is to disconnect the suspects and therefore to neutralise them: it is thus deliberately preventive; hence a certain confusion, indeed a mystification, for the decision to inscribe on a list does not require a level of proof identical to what would be needed to convict. Listing thus belongs to those so-called preventive measures which consume the punishment even before the conviction - outside any trial; prevention and punishment collide until they become one, evacuating the moment of justice […] All the more so as the list concerns not acts but persons […]. The centre of gravity of this logic is no longer an identification of acts but a targeting of persons, with the aim of introducing a segregation between pariahs and partners, to the exclusion of any third position.”

This very fine analysis, applied to the study of the world of the “web”, can be taken up word for word in the attempts to isolate minorities and to eliminate from our policed-police world, through a generalised suspicion, recourse to the third party, to the reference, to the law, to justice. We learn in passing, in this article, that certain hitherto preserved “sanctuaries” such as lawyers’ chambers are disappearing, the latter being required to denounce any suspicious operation without “having the right to inform their client!”

It is true that acts of manipulation or perversion can take place in a group, but is that not common to every human gathering? From secondary school to the political party by way of the family, there is no anti-manipulation vaccine. The confusion - in France - is to accuse minority groups (those not recognised by the powers in place, political or religious) of being dangerous, without prior enquiries or research, and to consider them, a priori, an internal enemy.

How many minority groups, spiritual or therapeutic, or simply at the margin of this present order that people want to impose on us at all costs, find themselves catalogued as a “cultic or terrorist group”, often on the sole ground that former followers claim to be their victims, or else because they disturb. But whom do they trouble, what order do they imperil? The arguments advanced by these upholders of the Defence of the Family and the Individual (ADFI) appeal to the basest instincts of distrust, of suspicion against the “stranger” who does not behave “normally”, that is to say as the “politically correct” wills it. The apostates, those who change their minds, are not only always considered victims, poor defenceless people who have been abused, but they are systematically right in the eyes of the police and judicial apparatus. Why this “victim-centred” legislation tailor-made for the complainants? So many questions that are never answered.

In the lines that follow, we shall pause on a particular case, the anti-cult fight, to try to understand and, if possible, to show its mechanisms.

From the victim to the management of the masses

No normally constituted adult can call himself a victim of his own commitments, with the corollary that no one other than himself can be held responsible for them; and even if one changes one’s mind; and even if one thinks one was seduced or indoctrinated, the fact remains that one must, out of concern for the truth or simply out of honesty, ask oneself: what personal questions, what affective demands did we transfer onto someone, through an inability to face them, through fear or lack of confidence? Why did we set someone up in the place of “knowing-for-us”? We can, without risk of error, assert that human relationships, in a couple or a family, indeed between friends, are built of this kind of exchange and influence, and as a sociologist remarked, sentimental relationships make one vulnerable and sometimes a little foolish, and yet no one condemns “lovers” for it[6].

There may come a moment when one emancipates oneself from a system, or from a group, when one may even think one ought not to have stayed there, or entered at all, a normal and understandable attitude. What is less so is the disowning of that group; in doing so, it is the forgetting of one’s own history, of one’s singular journey, that is at issue. To cry manipulation, influence, the impossibility of freeing oneself from a fearsome hold… is to find an echo in the denials of the Nazi dignitaries at Nuremberg, who employed these same arguments in their defence, only the form changing: “they did not know, they had only obeyed, everyone did the same…”. It is always easier to find a scapegoat than to assume one’s acts and recognise oneself a participant.

From that moment on, as in a divorce that goes badly, every argument is used: a slap given to a child transforms itself into daily brutality, quarrels into abuses of weakness, sharings of money into misuse of corporate assets…

Declaring oneself a “victim” becomes a privileged way of making oneself heard by the courts, at the risk of a dangerous perversion. To convert a citizen into a victim, absolving his conduct in advance, is to place him outside the law; he is no longer a subject of justice or of the law. In this process he is certainly a victim, but of the process he sets off: without identity or history, he finds himself like a “prisoner”, without the walls or the bars. He is no longer a person, since he is cut off, detached from his acts and his responsibilities. Which suits a police state very well, for it is easier to manage “victims” who hand themselves over to its directives, who expect everything from it, than citizens who question and rise up. Etymology brings us a dazzling confirmation: “victim, man or animal offered to the divinity. From the Latin victima: victim immolated by the hand of the victor, or again, sacrificial animal expiating its own faults and those of others.” It is of course useless to ask what the divinity in question is. The faults to be expiated have multiple names: reflection, autonomy, dissidence, disobedience, the refusal of “ready-made thinking”…

It is true that every exchange, every appeal, every question addressed to someone includes a risk. The risk of being mistaken, of investing a person with an “affective demand” - a feeling often at the start of a personal or spiritual path, or more simply of life as a couple - but it is not the multiplication of controls, of repression, that can govern life, dictate choices, prevent errors. Let us not forget what Benjamin Franklin declared around 1780: “He who is ready to sacrifice a little liberty to obtain a little security deserves neither the one nor the other.” It is established that all the governments that made security an electoral slogan, to hide and eliminate the real problems - unemployment (particularly of the young), policy towards the elderly, the treatment inflicted on workers, the destruction of natural resources, the state of the prisons, the universities, the hospitals, notably psychiatric ones… - restricted the liberty of their fellow citizens without bringing them an ounce of additional security.

Let us cite a few authors who have taken an interest in the question. Three citations to illustrate different moments of the human journey: - the construction of the subject (the unconscious) - the role of society or of social groups (the social) - dependence on power (the law)

“The paradox of the human condition is that one can only become oneself under the influence of others.”

Boris Cyrulnik (Les nourritures affectives)

“There is in literature only one absolutely stupid feeling: the fear of being influenced.”

Jean Paulhan,

“Influence-peddling constitutes the daily bread of power.” Jacques Attali (Verbatim III)

If these three aspects interpenetrate and function simultaneously, let us pause on the last. It brings an additional dimension: “influence-peddling” as the privileged instrument of power. It serves power to perpetuate itself, better, to subject each citizen to a single discourse, that of progress and of the “good-it-wants-to-put-in-place-for-everyone”. It is evident that it cannot accept competition, a breach in this monopoly. It is forbidden to think otherwise, to aspire to another ideal than simply consuming according to the imposed norms. Two questions remain open: what good is at issue, and for whose profit?

That certain movements like the Order of the Solar Temple could be dangerous, perhaps, but that question is largely superseded at the present hour. This foregrounding serves the government to manipulate fears and to arrange an internal repression against its own citizens by elaborating iniquitous laws. France has suddenly become a soil where innumerable “cults” flourish like weeds in spring. The habitual laws of the Republic are said to prove insufficient to condemn any breach of the social and republican order, and Parliament concocts for us laws and decrees of exception, like the one that bears the sad name of its promoters, the About-Picard law of 2001.

As a counter-example, let us admire the response of the Swiss authorities when 48 members of the Order of the Solar Temple were found dead in two peaceful cantons of the Valais and Fribourg in 1994. “As one can imagine, the emotion is great throughout the country and revives the question of the dangerousness of the spiritual minorities […] What is reassuring is that ten years later, one can observe that the only proposal (at the request of the Department of Justice and Police) that came to fruition is the creation of an Inter-Cantonal Centre on Beliefs, and to this day there exists no regulation, either at the federal level or at the cantonal level, on the cults, some deploring it, the majority satisfied with it.”

A few years later, in 1999, the Swiss Parliament worried that “the country is the most affected - with Great Britain - by the multiplication of movements of a religious character”. A media campaign even unfolded on this “promising” theme, in the media and on the airwaves. Despite this pressure, the federal government replied, curtly, that the law in force was entirely sufficient[7].

“Truth on this side of the Alps, error beyond!…”

Since then, the “homeland of human rights” has done better and continues ever further in repression; in the line of sight are all the therapeutic movements and even simply the psy professionals without the official stamp[8]… They are going to have to “register” with the Prefectures to have the right “republican label”, the psy who heals in conformity with the laws of the Republic, but to what end? Moreover, the institutes that will train them must be approved by the Republic! No more escape, only good, conforming, docile citizens, in their anguish or their unease and even in their healing! The republican order has disappeared from our ballot boxes and even from Parliament. How else to explain that a legislative text rejected[9] by the deputies, that is to say the representatives of the people, is presented again because the result of the vote displeased the power in place? Julien Coupat spoke of the fusion between the judiciary and the police; that between the legislative and the executive is just as worrying. The deputies of the opposition, lacking honour (they had only to boycott the National Assembly!), missed the occasion to become truly our representatives again.

French legislation too is sufficient - as in Switzerland - to repress any breach of the social order, so why construct - at the legislative as at the repressive level - a machinery to crush a danger that remains first of all of the order of fantasy? We are obliged to ask ourselves: to what end?

It is no longer a question of law or justice, only of the management of the masses, so that they remain silent, or more exactly so that they continue to believe there are no solutions other than in the proposed model. It is symptomatic that most of the financial “remedies” brought to the current crisis consist in support for the polluting industries called into question by the state of the planet, such as the oil or car companies for example… Everything is deployed for a deadly “make-believe” and a headlong flight. The “ecological” plans that were to be put in place to try to preserve our planet, our future, that of our children and grandchildren, risk being suspended or even abolished on account of the crisis - those, at least, that had received a beginning of application.

But where does this dichotomy come from, between the fundamental texts of the Republic, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen… and the banal, daily, stifling repression that shuts us in a little more each day?

Happiness is the satisfaction of all

Jacques Lacan wrote in 1986: “The matter is not otherwise made easier by the fact that happiness has become a factor of politics […] There can be no satisfaction of any one, outside the satisfaction of all.”[10] Alexis de Tocqueville had already noted, in 1840, that the republican motto - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - left no room for doubt as to its evolution. Liberty is difficult to attain, fraternity impossible to put into practice; there remains equality, towards which men will rush with all the deviations and perverse effects we see developing more and more before our eyes. Indeed, as equality is never entirely realised, citizens derive from it a frustration that drives them to demand ever… more equality. Tocqueville then asks whether this love of equality will not destroy liberty. Democratic peoples “have for equality an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion; they want equality in liberty and, if they cannot obtain it, they want it still in slavery”[11]. How to explain that equality can become liberticidal? The uniformisation of the conditions of existence leads to materialism and individualism. This withdrawal into one’s private sphere is dangerous for “the durability of the democratic fact”. Occupied with settling their affairs, the “individuals of democratic times” fall into an “intellectual softness” and neglect public debate. They are ready to hand themselves over to an “immense and tutelary” State. Tocqueville continues by asserting that the forgetting of civic virtues can allow a despot to install himself in power. The race for equality leads to the “tyranny of the majority” and reduces liberty… He discovers poverty and exploitation, including of very young children, in the factories of the most industrialised nation of the period, Great Britain, and concludes that equality can end in the creation of a “social monster”.

All alike, all consumers, each citizen must have the same chances to live. We know that this is impossible; more than two centuries after the French Revolution, there have never been so many differences: more and more French people, even with a job, are sliding into poverty. The utopian grandeur of the republican motto rested on an impossible equilibrium of its three elements. To put the accent solely on equality authorises every exaction, “the tyranny of the majority”, with as corollary the elimination of everything that is different, the fear of the stranger, of what we do not understand and which serves as alibi, mask and scapegoat for deferring impossible equality to the “singing tomorrows”.

In the seminar on Ethics, Lacan demonstrates that the search for happiness draws us today more and more towards subjection to the service of goods. “One part of the world has resolutely oriented itself into the service of goods, rejecting everything that concerns man’s relationship to desire - this is what is called the post-revolutionary perspective. The only thing one can say is that people do not seem to realise that by formulating things this way, one merely perpetuates the eternal tradition of power, namely - Let us keep working, and as for desire, come back later […] In other terms, this operation is only justified insofar as we have on the horizon the universal State.”[12]

Let us replace this State cited by Lacan with Globalisation and there we are, with the exclusive accents of commerce and finance, the “social monster” becomes planetary. Personal life is regimented and subjected to profit with, on the horizon, a globalised ultra-security society. What is sacrificed on the altar of this “modernity” is the human subject, man with his desires, his aspirations, and even his elementary needs[13].

The “god profit” devours its children so thoroughly that in Africa 30 million hectares of arable land are ceded at knock-down prices by governments that despoil their own inhabitants, profiting from the fact that these rarely have duly registered property titles. 30 million: the equivalent of the fertile lands of France!, bought by foreign countries (USA, China, South Africa…) for intensive crops (tea, cotton, coffee…) whose despoiled peasants will not see the profits. In 1980 the African peasantry was self-sufficient in food in most countries; since 2006, hunger riots have taken place regularly and the aid promised by the rich countries arrives in dribs and drabs. If in Africa (and in other countries of the South) the monster devours its children in “broad daylight” - hunger riots, wars between ethnic groups or between confessions… - how does our polished West react? It does not go without collisions; all proportion kept, it too requires its share of victims, of scapegoats, to divert the wave of hatreds and fears generated by such a massacre and to conceal the operation under way. Our politicians and other backstage manipulators, some perfectly conscious, others servants of a structure that escapes them, show great inventiveness.

Any number of researchers demonstrate it: faced with the insurmountable problems of our age, to keep up appearances, each State invents itself an “internal enemy” that serves to channel the resentments and frustrations of its citizens. In the USA, terrorism does the job; it led that country, on the basis of lies and concealments, to the invasion of Iraq and to the creation of a special prison: Guantanamo. First, it is located outside national territory; then, its functioning implies a double negation of the law concerning not only the detainees but also the guards. The former are outside the law first because of their terrorist acts, real or presumed, but also because they are not answerable to the common law but to measures of exception. Likewise the guards do not apply the habitual law of the States of the Union, and moreover they are exonerated from all prosecution despite acts of torture, of barbarity…

We observe the same perversion: with an “internal enemy” come “laws of exception” and immunity for those who apply them.

And in France?

“Ordinary” State manipulation French-style

Let us examine, with the help of an example, the functioning of this crude manipulation and how, starting from a lie, the State fabricates a truth. Let us not forget that the first Ministry of Propaganda was invented by the Nazis; it is the ancestor (the model?) of our Ministries of Information.

Let us briefly summarise the facts, duly recorded by the very official parliamentary television channel (LCP Assemblée Nationale).[14]

The Parliamentary Commission on the Cults, directed by Mr Fenech[15], questions, in October 2006, senior civil servants of various ministries - Inspectors General, Directors of Services, the Head of the Bureau of Worship at the Ministry of the Interior… - to learn the number of files they have to deal with on children who are “victims of the cults”, in order to protect our dear little ones who are said to be in danger.

Extracts from the dialogue between the Parliamentary Commission and the civil servants:

Mr Fenech: “We have been cited the figure of 80,000 children said to be in danger…”

1 - Reply of the Judicial Authority: “Yes, except that in 2002, 2003, 2004, when we conducted this enquiry, we counted 192 direct or indirect reports and not one more.” The civil servant has to insist under the pressure of the Commission’s members: “…for a certain number of files the problem is indirect, that is to say we are not even sure of it!”

2 - Reply of the Inspectors General of National Education: “We questioned the Academy Inspectors, the parents of pupils; among these children in danger, we asked the number of those who were in danger because of the cult movements, they answered us that there were 8!”

Mr Fenech, troubled, returns to the charge: “Out of the 19,000 reports to the prosecutors’ offices of children in danger, you tell me that only 8 concern the cultic phenomenon. There, one is entitled to ask questions: why this insignificant figure?”

Let us risk an answer: might the 18,992 missing children not be in danger because of their family or social circle? What is clear in this footage is that at no moment does the Commission want to look reality in the face and acknowledge the rigorous work of the civil servants. The only honest question to ask, faced with the insistence of the facts, would be: “And what if we were mistaken?” Faced with this impossibility of rectitude in our elected representatives, we, for our part, are entitled to ask: to what end, with what aim, this twisting of reality?

The replies of the senior civil servants of the Republic, which are on film, all go in the same direction: they resist firmly the manipulative intention of the elected officials.

The members of the Commission nevertheless insist, they go after the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the habitual scapegoats. Reply of the Inspectors General of National Education: “Never do we have reports from parents of pupils, from elected officials, on the behaviour of the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Question from Mr Fenech, who takes offence: “Why?” A small smile from his interlocutor: “They are not really in danger…”

3 - Let us pause, to close this sample of dishonest deafness, on the deposition of Mr Didier Leschi, at the time Head of the Bureau of Worship at the Ministry of the Interior. The Commission runs up against his rectitude; he replies: “If the administrative authorities put together a sufficiently substantial file, we will examine that file. For the moment, I have not seen it. I am not entitled to substitute myself for this absence of proof.”[16]

Absence of proof! All this work by hundreds of civil servants of the Republic is flouted, denied, rejected, for in the report registered at the National Assembly on 19/12/2006 under number 3507, Mr Fenech announces without batting an eyelid - and he repeats it on the various television news bulletins of the period -: “60,000 to 80,000 children are in danger, in France, because of the cults.” The bigger the lie, the less proof is necessary. It is an intellectual swindle, a deliberate manipulation!

The current pursuit of minorities - understand: all the groups that do not accept the “official truth”, whether they are catalogued as spiritual or therapeutic groups or indeed terrorist ones, like the Tarnac group, or others - rests on nothing but a State lie.

If a few voices in recent months, and not the least of them - those of Mesdames Mignon and Alliot-Marie, among others (adviser to the President of the Republic and Minister of the Interior) - attempted to say that the cults were not a problem in France, they were smothered and quickly fell back into line. “The tyranny of the majority”, denounced by Tocqueville, serves to manipulate knowingly and to control the wants and aspirations of that same majority, which understands nothing of it, which does not want to look at reality or hear the truth.

From intellectual softness to the new religion and its heretics

The vagueness surrounding the definition of the word “terrorism”, as Julien Coupat also recalls, is found again around the word cult. The employees of “anti-cultism” have varied in their appellations; from cult movements one passed to dérives sectaires, now to groupings… With “cult”, the word itself would have obliged its user to some semantic precision, but with vague expressions like deviances or cultic groups, whose object cannot be clearly defined, one remains in conjecture, in extrapolation. The advantage is that any disturbing minority whatsoever can thus be qualified as deviant!

During a recent television programme on FR3 (May 2009), a sociologist who had resigned from the Scientific Committee of the Miviludes stated his reasons before the cameras: “First, a lack of definition concerning the object the Miviludes attacks; then, a defect of methodology for treating that object; and finally, the total absence of validation tools for measuring the results of the work.” In short, he was asserting that he could not do the sociologist’s job he was being paid for. The reply of Mr Fenech, present on the set, is revealing; first he washes his hands of it, answering that “it is people like his contradictor who define the policy of the Miviludes” (try to grasp such hypocrisy)! That manifestly not sufficing, he strikes up the well-known refrain: “You have not seen the tragedy of those parents who have a child in a cult…” etc. The sociologist can no longer explain himself, speech is mobilised, the other guests present and the journalist become foils. It is symptomatic: when one of these propagandists is in difficulty, he strikes up, with tremolos in his voice, the antiphon on the tragedy of the poor “victims”, and not one participant dares to reply! And the loop closes. What justice can function on such foundations? For facts are substituted the complaint, fantasies, hearsay, emotions, sensations… And that leading lights of the bar, lawyers, magistrates or a former minister should rise up, on a radio programme broadcast by France Culture, against this “victim-centred” justice serves no purpose; only the contempt of the politicians answers.

Another sign of this denial of the truth by these sectarian propagandists is the systematic refusal of the results of all scientific work on the subject. For example, Raphaël LIOGIER, Director of the Observatory of the Religious at the University of Aix-en-Provence, writes in Le Monde of 3 March 2008: “All the researchers, without exception, I do mean all, whatever their partisan allegiance or their political opinions, all the specialists of the religious have agreed for thirty years in saying that the listings drawn up by the parliamentary commissions, as well as the supposed enquiries of the interministerial missions, are fanciful.”

Thirty years - but what does that change in the official discourse: nothing! Maurice DUVAL, ethnologist, head of a laboratory at the CNRS, advises his young colleagues to abandon studies on religious movements, so as not to ruin their careers. For four years, while the various media spoke of the turpitudes and offences committed by the Mandarom “cult”, without any verification or enquiry, he observed, immersed himself in that group. At the end of his work, twenty-seven journalists (written and spoken press, television…) were to report on it. Following pressure on these “independent” media, there was not one interview, not one article! He was even suspected of having been influenced and of speaking for the “cult”.

All this is corroborated, verified, by a researcher, Susan PALMER, sociologist, who teaches the Science of Religions at Concordia University in Montreal and is a recognised figure in the study of religious movements in Quebec. In 2001 she obtains from the Canadian Federal Government a grant for three years of study on “the public management of religious minorities in France”. What is her surprise to discover the taboo surrounding these groups, “as in no other country in the world”, recognising that “the (French) researchers cannot work” […] All these minority groups are considered “criminal groups, a little like the mafia.” She states that she “had the impression that the bureaucrats were just paid to fight the cults, but they did not take the trouble to read anything whatsoever and were certainly not going to visit these groups.” She continues by examining the documents and literature of the MILS[17], written by members of the anti-cult movements, and admits herself “surprised to see how little information they had and the way they had neglected to undertake even the most elementary research.” In other words, these upholders of the ADFIs and other fanatical groups, supposedly charged with the fight against dérives sectaires, display an ignorance and a frenzied intolerance which they project onto the groups they combat.

Coming from North America, she makes the same observation as Vladimir BUKOVSKY, sociologist and Russian dissident, who was astonished, in the 1970s, at the naive belief of the French in their media. In the USSR, he wrote, a periodical need only give an opinion for people to hear the opposite by reading between the lines; and Susan PALMER adds that in America “the awareness exists (on the part of readers) that the government attempts to manipulate people with the help of the press[18].”

Where does this blindness come from; worse, these repeated lies? Susan PALMER joins the work of Jean BAUBÉROT[19] when she asserts that the new French spiritual groups are seen and heard as the “heretics of laïcité.” The latter asserted from the platform of the CICNS Congress in Paris in September 2007: “French laïcité has taken over, in good part, that Gallican tradition of surveillance, of domination of religion by politics, and at the same time of the officialisation of a certain religion - laïcité - as national religion.”

There exist French researchers and scientists who attempt to denounce these amalgams but, as Raphaël LIOGIER writes in the article cited above, the researchers of the CNRS or the universities, sociologists or jurists, “are excluded from all discussion, and finally accused of betraying the Republic”. Why? The answer is evident: they betray - they, who are paid by the various ministries - because they do not endorse, from their positions as scientists, the lie and the manipulation of the State!! To fear is added generalised censorship. The press and the media in general must toe the line, not deviate from the habitual make-believe, and serve as foils, as Susan PALMER also reports following her contacts with French journalists.

Let us listen, one last time, to Mr FENECH, for whom the lie is the truth. Questioned on the airwaves of FR3, in December 2006, he declares, concerning the Parliamentary Commission on the Cults, in a soothing and condescending tone[20]:

“We totally respected the adversarial principle, we sent questionnaires to all the communities concerned, they had every opportunity to answer us, everything is quite clear.”

Question from the journalist: “So, concerning the Jehovah’s Witnesses, contrary to what they say, you discussed with them, you heard them?”

Reply: “But one does not discuss with cultic communities, one takes note of their acts, and when they cross the yellow line, that is to say the republican law…”

The presenter did not pick up the contradiction and the lie. But as for invoking a so-called republican model as a rampart, that model no longer exists, it is disappearing before our eyes. What do we weigh before such a perversion, faced with such a betrayal of office? For of course he takes good care not to correct the record: since his intervention, the European Court of Justice has found for the Jehovah’s Witnesses and ruled against the French State.

The law “sullied”:

When Mr Fenech speaks, on FR3, of “crossing the yellow line, that is to say the republican law”, it is certainly not the law which affirms that:

(…) Unanimity and clarity reign when it is a matter for the judge of affirming that the religious belongs to the individual’s inner forum. Recalling that “in France, the principle of freedom of conscience and worship must prevail”, “that the freedoms of religion, belief, opinion and expression are constitutionally guaranteed”, the judge specifies on many occasions that “belief is part of the individual sphere”, that “this is a private domain pertaining to freedom of conscience”. As such, the judge cannot “issue any opinion whatsoever as to a parent’s membership of a religious group, even one habitually qualified as a cult”[21].

(…) The judges forbid themselves to let the religious produce any legal consequences whatsoever: thus, “the mother’s membership of a spiritual association” (of which the judge specifies moreover that it is listed as a cult movement by the parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults) “cannot on its own justify the transfer of the children’s habitual residence to the father”; the judge must not “take any decision whatsoever that would amount to sanctioning that parent for that membership” (of a cult). Or again, it must “be admitted in principle that a religious belief, whatever it may be, cannot in itself be constitutive of faulty behaviour”. According to Vincente Fortier, research director at the University of Montpellier. Extract from “The judge, guardian of confessional pluralism”.[22]

Is the republican law then flouted? For the hypocritical lackeys of the State, certainly not: it applies, but only for right-thinking citizens, within the norm, or those who do not want to know; it is not intended for the enemies of the Republic. And French legislation has created, with the support of associations recognised as being of Public Utility, laws of exception that designate an internal enemy among its own citizens. Let us cite, among others, Roger IKOR, founder of the CCMM[23]: “We must strike, destroy these cults that swarm over our rot. When enough people go and ransack the cults’ premises, they [the public authorities] will doubtless stir.” That article 20 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of 10 December 1948, stipulates that “Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association” does not prevent him from asserting: “If we listened to ourselves, we would put an end to all this nonsense, that of the cults, but also that of the great religions.” Answering a common-sense remark from a journalist who asks: “I would like to understand why one tries to remove a person from his beliefs?”, Alexandra SCHMIDT, ex-spokeswoman of the ADFI, replies: “The whole ADFI was based on that.”

Let us stop there this anthology of stupidity and daily hatred… The aim pursued is always the same: to restrict individual liberties, to designate an internal enemy, and to leave to a State entity the task of deciding in the place of individuals, in the name of equality. The “social monster” strengthens its hold!

This kind of behaviour and reflex spreads like an oil stain and escapes even its propagandists, invading all social behaviour. The illustration is the escalation, in means, of the treatment of disputes between citizens. From minority groups, so-called (alleged?) “cultic and dangerous”, we pass to the school playground. It is symptomatic that the only recourse invoked by parents, in a case of racketeering at primary school “implicating children of 7 or 8”, is recourse to the gendarmerie, to armed repression! Social relations and the functions of parents, teachers… are collapsing before our eyes in favour of the police sanction alone.

But the example comes from on high, from the President of the Republic. The figure charged with representing the symbolic register, which gives body to the bond between citizens, flouts it a little more each day. Under the mouldy rags of the Republican Order there now hides a police, repressive Order which skilfully chooses itself scapegoats in order to put in place its methods, its manipulation, its tribunals, its agents. And whether these scapegoats are called the “Tarnac Group”, catalogued as a “criminal conspiracy”, or the community of La Balme, qualified as a “cult”, no matter, anything will do. Let us note, with sadness, that already in 1992 a few of us were sentenced to 3 months’ suspended imprisonment under this same charge of “criminal conspiracy with a view to the preparation of a crime”, and that for a ridiculous scuffle between a few educators, the whole accompanied by a fine payable to the Public Treasury of 234 francs (35 euros!). Note the size of the sum for so grave an offence, which without any doubt put the French State in danger! At the time we preferred to laugh about it; we were blind and we were wrong, we had not wanted to understand; it was the prelude, a rehearsal. We had to be silenced, reduced to silence, for having committed the unspeakable crime not only of saying that it was possible to heal the mentally ill, but of putting it into practice while refusing the habitual treatment methods of psychiatry. Twenty-five years of assiduous work to build an unprecedented and exemplary institution of care, with reference to institutional psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. With such success that an investigator from the I.G.A.S.S. confided to us (outside the official report) that if our methods of care were applied, the whole of official French psychiatry would have to be called into question! How can a power, and particularly the French bureaucratic State, tolerate those who prevent it from thinking and manipulating in circles, and any touching, be it only with the tip of a treatment or a pill, of its hold?

Twenty years later, in his open letter to Nicolas Sarkozy, Doctor Michaël Guyader brings a similar and dramatic illustration. A murder, unacceptable as all acts of this nature are, serves to discriminate against an entire population on the pretext that it was committed by a mentally ill person. Addressing the President of the Republic, he writes: ”[…] You have thus, under the appearance of a discourse of order, contributed to creating a major disorder, thereby harming national cohesion by designating, to those who ask for nothing better, scapegoats of whom my years of practice have shown me that precisely, they cannot defend themselves […]”[24] Must we create special laws for bakers, plumbers, teachers or any other corporation because one of their members might have killed a passer-by?

The President of the French Republic appeals to the basest instincts of each of us to stigmatise the other, the weakest, the stranger, the mad. Let us remember that the Nazis began their massacres with the mentally ill of the German hospitals!

How to conclude?

Are we so far from the Nazi or Bolshevik ideology, when the lie and falsification set themselves up as the norm and transformed ordinary people, decent people, into informers and sometimes into torturers?

We are not there yet? Are you sure? Nazism and communism have left our world, the current ideology seems kinder, inoffensive, it does not take the same paths, it does not dress itself in the same rags, it wants our “good”, our “security”, but what is the price to pay? It manages to make us believe that this is what we want, that it is essential to our existence. Alexis de Tocqueville spoke of our search for equality up to and including in slavery. With “globalisation”, our destiny, our life, escape us and seem handed over to a tutelary monster that will decide everything.

The urgency is real: to oppose the era of diffuse and generalised control, which will have attained its goal “when it has been sufficiently interiorised to make each person the controller of himself.[25]”

Let us be watchmen, so that the lie and falsification do not pass through us. And “if it is not necessary to hope in order to undertake, nor to succeed in order to persevere”, without any illusion, let us take that sentence as the definition and measure of human action. Let us act without waiting for our neighbour, or for any recognition or gratification.

Doctor Michaël GUYADER, at the gathering on the Glières Plateau[26] of 17 May 2009, commemorating with resistance fighters the first open-faced battle between the Army of Free France and the Vichy militias backed by a Nazi army corps, declared:

“To resist: an ardent obligation in psychiatry today […]

“On 2 November 2008, Nicolas SARKOZY, of whom one might have expected the office to elevate him, wallowed in the worst of the expected discourse, vulgar decisions, short-sighted accusations […]”

“In this constant struggle to work for the destigmatisation of those who suffer psychically and whom one no longer dares call the mad, one honest man would have sufficed; once more it was found wanting, and the ardent obligation to resist the worst of the dominant discourse remains an imperious necessity.”

René Char writes: “Slaves need slaves to display the authority of tyrants.”

“We will naturally do nothing of the sort, and will continue to resist!

It is not a matter for us of taking up arms, but ethics requires us not to apply villainous laws. Mr Alain Refalo[27] has given us all a path to follow, that of civic disobedience which says no to the application of dishonourable laws.

André Malraux, inaugurating the Gigioli monument in 1973, said: “The unknown shadows that jostled at Les Glières in a night of Last Judgement were nothing more than the men of No, but that No of the obscure maquisard, pressed to the earth for his first night of death, suffices to make of that poor lad the companion of Joan and of Antigone. The slave always says yes.”

“Let us continue, then, we have work to do before the bounded absurdity of the dominant discourse, we have to invent the world of tomorrow, where it would not be forbidden to cry ‘long live hope!’.

Let us continue, then.”

Guy Delaunay (June-July 2009)

[1] Citation reported by Doctor Michaël GUYADER, Hospital Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst - Address at the Glières Plateau, in memory of the French Resistance, 17 May 2009

[2] Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Combat against Cultic Deviances (answering to the Prime Minister).

[3] According to CAPLC (CAP for Freedom of Conscience - Freedom of Religion - Freedom of Conviction). 26/02/08.

[4] An allusion to a first list, at the initiative of the ADFI and the Paris City Hall, aiming to catalogue all the places “liable” to shelter “dangerous” minority groups in the capital. So many places designated to public vindictiveness!

[5] The article is entitled: “The pirate imaginary of globalisation”, p. 154 ff.

[6] See Marcela Iacub’s article at www2.cnrs.fr:80/presse/journal/1236.htm.

[7] Facts reported by pastor Jean-Claude Basset, at the CICNS Congress in September 2007 in Paris

[8] Cf. the Bachelot bill of May 2009, passed in the Senate.

[9] That this rejection of the Hadopi law was the result of an opposition manoeuvre changes nothing.

[10] Seminar Book VII, Ethics, p. 338

[11] Democracy in America, Vol. 2, p. 103

[12] Seminar Book VII cited, p. 367.

[13] At the scale of a continent, look at the pillage of Africa by the international companies; until 1980, the African countries were self-sufficient in food!

[14] This information is accessible on the site www.cicns.net or on Dailymotion

[15] A former magistrate, convicted of “racial insults” in 1998. Deputy for the Rhône since 2002, re-elected in 2007, his election was invalidated by the Constitutional Council; ineligible for one year for infractions in his campaign accounts. Which did not prevent Mr FILLON, on whom he depends, from appointing him, at the end of 2008, president of the Miviludes.

[16] All this noted, as any investigative journalist could have done, on the Parliamentary Channel LCP Info in October 2006! Cf. the site www.cicns.net

[17] The commission preceding the Miviludes (Mils: Interministerial Mission for the Fight against the Cults). An appellation abandoned because - oh paradox! - the word cult is too precise and embarrassing, one cannot make it say just anything.

[18] CICNS interview of July 2009.

[19] French specialist in the study of laïcité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études.

[20] Cf. the CICNS’s work, already cited.

[21] In an interview of 07/07/2009 on France-Info, Raphaël LIOGIER takes the opposite view to the majority of Internet users questioned, who want the wearing of the burqa to be prohibited by legislation. He asserts that it is a matter of personal belief, that we must not stop at our personal opinions or rejections before such a manifestation and that, so long as the law is respected, the State has no business interfering. He adds that recent sociological studies even show that cultivated young women wish to wear this veil by personal choice while contemplating careers as lawyers or doctors… Once again, he says, if the wearing of this burqa harms social peace or the laws of the Republic, the current laws amply suffice.

[22] Cited by the CICNS - November 2007

[23] Centre Against Mental Manipulations

[24] Open letter from Doctor Michaël Guyader to the President of the Republic, 8 December 2008.

[25] After Antoine Garapon, review Esprit - July 2009, p. 165. On this subject one must read “L’amour du Censeur” by Pierre Legendre, which brings essential light. Éditions du Seuil - Paris 1974

[26] First place of confrontation and symbol of the armed struggle between the French Resistance (March 1944) and the German and Vichy troops.

[27] A primary-school teacher of the Haute-Garonne who, with others, refuses to apply villainous laws that wreck the idea of the school and of teaching as elaborated over many years. He fights against a “logic of enterprise and liberalisation” to try to preserve for the pupil his status as subject. He wrote to the Academy inspector, on 06/11/2008, a documented letter: “In conscience, I refuse to obey… If today I decide to enter into resistance and at the same time into disobedience, it is out of necessity…”. He is currently exposed, along with his friends, to disciplinary sanctions, loss of salary, etc.