The Anti-Cult Fight: a Black Mark on Our National Identity

The Anti-Cult Fight: a Black Mark on Our National Identity

By Éric Bouzou of CICNS (December 2009)

The anti-cult offensive unleashed by Georges Fenech since his accession to the presidency of the MIVILUDES continues. On 25 November 2009 in LyonMag, on the sidelines of a colloquium organised by the mission, he specified: “It is the 10th anniversary of the creation of the MILS, so it is the moment to draw up a first great balance sheet of our activity”.

That the president of the MIVILUDES (Interministerial mission of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires) should think of celebrating the anniversary of the MILS (Interministerial Mission for the Fight against the Cults), a mission dissolved because of its excesses precisely in order to be replaced by the MIVILUDES in 2002, says much about his intentions. Who can still doubt that France is still engaged in a fight “against the cults”?

Unsurprisingly, the boss of the OCRVP (the central Office for the repression of violence against persons), Frédéric Malon, feeds this confusion. Under his authority is placed the Caimades: Cell for assistance and intervention in matters of dérives sectaires, a service just created within the central Directorate of the judicial police (DCPJ). Frédéric Malon informs us that “One must be vigilant, and not confuse cults and dérives sectaires: an offence is not necessarily committed in every cult”. To claim that offences are not necessarily committed in the “cults”, a term synonymous in public opinion (and probably in the mouth of the senior official) with “dangerous and criminal groups”, is a fine specimen of oxymoron, but nobody is obliged to be taken in by these façade discourses

(France Soir).

The anti-cult doxa and the media’s servility towards this discourse

The anti-cult discourse has become a propaganda and possesses all its characteristics: repetition of a simplified and alarmist headline message, the thesis of the social scourge (“the cults are everywhere and dangerous”); diffusion of quantitative data without foundation but supporting the idea of a pressing danger – 500,000 people victims of dérives sectaires, themselves compared to mutant viruses; 80,000 children in danger in cult groups; a third of psychotherapists members of cults, 3,000 health practitioners suspected of dérives sectaires, etc. –; the highlighting of a supposed practice of these groups that is particularly frightening and will be evoked at every opportunity: mental manipulation.

This propaganda is effective, since even within spiritual minorities designated as cults by the public authorities, many people point the finger at the “real cults”, those which, unlike their own group, would endanger the Republic, practise mental manipulation and regiment children.

For a propaganda to work, it must have the support of the media. Questioned on the policy of fighting the cults (and not on the policy of fighting dérives sectaires), deputy Jean-Pierre Brard specifies: “I think we have progressed a great deal, notably thanks to the media and to public opinion. People today are fairly well informed and in a state to detect the danger by themselves. That is essential, for we have never sought to frighten but indeed to appeal to the intelligence of our fellow citizens” (Reversus). “Appealing to the intelligence of citizens” supposes establishing an adversarial debate and adopting an approach of knowledge, the very opposite of what the deputies have offered their fellow citizens over the years on the question of the “cults”. Jean-Pierre Brard being one of the most virulent anti-cult actors (he has been convicted several times for defamation), the cynicism and self-satisfaction he shows in these statements are not surprising.

He is nevertheless right in evoking the role of the media in the diffusion of the anti-cult doxa. Most subjects of society are now treated using the “buzz” format, a guaranteed antidote to any deep reflection, and the question of the cults does not escape it. But unlike most subjects, this one does not benefit from even a semblance of the adversarial. Recently, Béatrice Schönberg distinguished herself on the programme Prise Directe of Tuesday 17 November 2009, which she hosts (see our video commentary on a part of the programme concerning Doctor Guéniot). In the same way, in a recently mediatised affair, that of the “recluses of Monflanquin”, many journalists gave themselves over to their favourite activity: the indiscriminate copy-paste of dispatches and unquestioned assertions, provided they produce buzz.

Europe 1 contacted CICNS to speak on the Monflanquin affair, following the dispatch of our press communiqué on the subject. One minute: that is what was offered us to climb back up a slope of 30 years of pensée unique, disinformation and amalgams on the cult problematic. We of course refused to take part in this simulacrum of adversarial debate. The contact with the journalist in charge of the panel of contributors having nevertheless been positive, we measure the distance between the “off the record” and the result broadcast on the airwaves. The journalists who take part in these programmes of communication of lapidary opinions, passing them off as information, will sooner or later have to take their responsibility, without continually hiding behind the editorial line and the editorial management, or they will have nothing left to do but cross out the mention “journalist” on their badge and replace it with “presenter” (see our various commentaries on the media’s treatment of the theme of the cults and more particularly part 3 of our documentary “120 minutes for spiritual liberty”).

The MIVILUDES “infiltrates” every sphere of society

If it was possible to reproach the MIVILUDES, since its creation, with letting itself be pulled downwards by the anti-cult associations (ADFI, CCMM principally), one is forced to note that its new president has transformed it into the spearhead of the anti-cult combat.

Georges Fenech claims that: “The cults touch every milieu: economic, institutional, medical, sporting, cultural, educational, academic, religious… There is no domain that escapes these attempts at recuperation, at infiltration, with the aim of a seizure of power and profit” (LyonMag). Let us note again that the president of the MIVILUDES speaks indeed of “cults” and not of “dérives sectaires”. The mandate given to the interministerial mission and the zeal of its president thus allow it to extend its intrusive and brutal action to every domain of society. Until now, the mission has contented itself with a discriminatory action targeting alleged “infiltrating” groups (spiritual minorities, alternative therapies). However, will politicians not be tempted, in time, to extend its power of investigation to the organisation of every type of structure or human group?

Let us give two significant and very different examples from recent news, which ought logically to fall into the MIVILUDES’s basket.

The subject treated by the parliamentary information mission on the full veil is one. Most of the hearings made public led one or another of the contributors to qualify the wearing of the full veil as a dérive sectaire. Among other examples, Dounia Bouzar, anthropologist, interviewed in Le Monde and heard by the information mission, thinks, concerning the Salafist groups promoting the wearing of the full veil, that: “opening a debate to limit religious liberty would amount to considering them a Muslim current and not a simple cult (…) According to these gurus, to respect Islam, society is supposed to accept them” (Le Monde). In a debate with the academic Mohammed Moussaoui, who worried that “voices are already being raised to treat Islam as a cult”, deputy Jacques Myard, a member of the information mission, answers: ”(…) the law will always stigmatise, and rightly, the cults. Those of whom we speak belong to that domain” (Le Figaro). Let us note in passing the unambiguous meaning of Jacques Myard’s statement: the term “cult” being without legal or sociological definition, he recognises wanting to stigmatise groups he will only be able to designate arbitrarily. Monique Crinon, member of the Collectif des féministes pour l’égalité, at her hearing, specifies: “One of two things: either the groups advocating the wearing of the full veil are cults, and we have the tools to identify what a cult is and to fight that cult (…) or else they are groups practising a proselytism, and that proselytism must be fought by a form of action which is not necessarily of the order of repression”. Asking whether the wearing of the veil is a cult practice, she adds: “We have the capacities in this country to say whether it is a cult or not and to act”. To Jacques Myard, who answers her “No” (sic!), she continues: “Then in that case we must think about having a legislative arsenal a little more muscular than the one we have for fighting the cults; because if that is the problem, that is where we must strike”.

Since numerous contributors evoked the action of a cult and the self-evidence of a dérive sectaire, why was the MIVILUDES not invited to take part in the information mission? Why do the mission’s deputies not advocate the use of the About-Picard law against certain Muslim associations supposed to practise mental manipulation on fragilised women?

The second example concerns France Télécom and the tragedy of the numerous suicides occurring on the company’s premises or in connection with it (one could equally mention Peugeot and Renault). Does the very number of these suicides (25 at the date of writing of this article, Le Monde) within a single organisation deserve the term “collective suicides”? There is no doubt that such a tragedy in a spiritual minority would have been qualified thus, and that a few suicides of this type, even remotely linked to the group, would have sufficed to trigger a collective hysteria and its condemnation without appeal. Again, why is the About-Picard law not mentioned concerning France Telecom? When shall we witness a “descent” by Georges Fenech, accompanied by journalists, into a CAC40 company to denounce there the “mental hold” methods of a management driving employees to suicide? (see a documentary made by a theatre troupe in collaboration with the France Telecom Ile de France Works Council (Mediapart),

see in the NouvelObs a few extracts from the audit report of the Technologia firm which mentions a “fragilisation of physical and mental health” for certain categories of France Telecom personnel; see also our documentary on the MIVILUDES “descent” into the community of the Moulin des Vallées).

The political leaders have well understood the limit that must not be crossed. They therefore avoided involving the MIVILUDES and its simplistic reasonings in these two affairs (simplistic reasonings did not for all that desert the information mission on the wearing of the full veil, nor the commentaries on the France Télécom tragedy). In so doing, they highlight, if it were needed, the non-pertinence of the interministerial mission and the flagrantly discriminatory aspect of its action.

The inertia of the “intelligentsia” before this deplorable situation would perhaps be shaken if the MIVILUDES deployed its excesses in domains where it is precisely not invited. Must one wish for the worst to obtain in the end the best?

What is a cult for the anti-cult militants?

The anti-cult paradigm can be summed up as follows: “A cult is a group whose gurus practise mental manipulation to defraud their followers and abuse them sexually”.

The notion of mental manipulation is intrinsically linked to the contemporary notion of the “cult”. The sociologist Arnaud Esquerré writes in his book La manipulation mentale – Sociologie des sectes en France, Editions Fayard: “The ‘cult’ as a totalitarian organisation, with a therapeutic, spiritual, philosophical or religious aim, and in which the followers are mentally manipulated, is a French and collective invention of the 1970s and 1980s”. The sociologist Patrice Rolland, in an article describing the genesis of the About-Picard law, specifies: “The legislator’s intention is thus indeed to delimit what constitutes the essence of the cult, that is to say essentially mental manipulation”.

The observation of these two sociologists makes it possible to understand why the notion of mental manipulation is systematically evoked in the anti-cult discourse at every level: Georges Fenech at the MIVILUDES, Catherine Picard at UNADFI, Maître Picotin in the Monflanquin affair, the deputies who are members of the study group on the cults, etc. The media, having abandoned their mission of informing their listeners correctly on a question which is, it is true, complex and delicate, offer a free platform, without critical spirit, to these discourses.

The anti-cult actors seek to diffuse the false idea that the means of persuasion possibly used within a “cult” would be of a different nature from those used in the rest of society. David Bromley (Misunderstanding cults, article by David Bromley) rightly points out that: “There are many institutional domains in the social order where a high level of control, an encapsulation and a transformation of identity appear, without any appeal being made to the notion of brainwashing. These regulatory frameworks are considered ‘adapted’ to the social order, and the evaluation of the participation of individuals is measured on a scale going from rehabilitation to honorific appreciations. In each case, there is a considerable body of research which discusses these organisational practices and their impact on the individual in neutral or favourable terms. Among other examples: military training (…), convents and monasteries (…), secular and religious communities (…), medical training (…), psychiatric hospitals (…) and prisons (…). Even when the results have perverted legitimate institutional objectives, as for example in the case of police methods extorting false confessions, coercive procedures have been tolerated until very recently without being attributed the designation of ‘brainwashing’ (…)”.

The notion of mental manipulation used in France in anti-cult discourse, and its legal counterpart “psychological subjection”, created out of whole cloth in the About-Picard law, are derived from the concept of “brainwashing”, of which several scientific formalisations have been attempted. The scientific label has its usefulness. As David Bromley explains (ibid.): “As the principal system of legitimation through knowledge of the contemporary social order, science is a major source of power”. It is therefore important for the anti-cult protagonists to give at least a scientific colouring to their principal argument.

Brainwashing

The theme of brainwashing (information extracted from Le lavage de cerveau, mythe ou réalité, Dick Anthony, Massimo Introvigne) developed when the Americans believed that some of their prisoners of war had been “converted” to communism following what they named a “brainwashing”. There were, in brief, two currents of research on this concept.

One is that developed by the CIA, inspired by behaviourism, in which the human brain behaves more or less analogously to a computer hard disk that can be emptied by means of appropriate techniques (sleep deprivation, drugs, electroshocks, etc.) and then reformatted according to the experimenter’s choice, so as to transform the “patient” into a “deployable agent”. The first stage worked very well - transforming human guinea pigs into “vegetables” - but never the second. When the number of guinea pigs transformed into “vegetables” was sufficiently eloquent, the CIA published its results and this theory was scientifically invalidated, the agency putting an end, at least officially, to its experiments.

The other current of research, relying on the psychoanalytic and psychological corpus of knowledge, sought to understand what could explain in an individual a tendency to submission or, on the contrary, to domination. From these various hypotheses and their research work, scientists like Schein and Lifton showed that there had been no brainwashing of the prisoners of war, who on their liberation reaffirmed their own vision of the world. The brainwashing thesis was thus invalidated by these researchers, whose work is the reference.

Despite these results, the theme of brainwashing reappeared when a significant legal dispute developed in the 1970s in the United States between spiritual minorities and civil-party plaintiffs, relying, among other things, on the theses of the psychiatrist Margaret Singer. The psychologist Dick Anthony invalidated before the American courts (his work on one trial set a precedent) this new disguised brainwashing theory, by showing that it wrongly claimed the authority of the theses developed by Schein and Lifton.

A certain number of researchers, like Benjamin Zablocki (Misunderstanding Cults, article by Benjamin Zablocki), nevertheless still wish to rehabilitate the concept. Dick Anthony (Misunderstanding Cults, article by Dick Anthony) considers that: “the paradigm developed by Zablocki, and the CIA brainwashing paradigm from which it is derived, are primarily intended to demonstrate the loss of free will in the victims of this brainwashing”. For the American psychologist, a French psychiatrist like Jean-Marie Abgrall, an expert before the French courts, has done nothing but take up the brainwashing theses, renaming them and presenting them differently.

The propensity of the anti-cult actors to claim to rely on recognised scientific research, when they in fact defend theses equivalent to that of brainwashing, which are not recognised, is found among those who practise “thought reform consultation”, or exit counseling. This practice is allegedly a legal version of deprogramming (the latter practice having been declared illegal in American courts), and one waits to learn which official bodies in France will validate its lawfulness. Maître Picotin, lawyer for the civil parties in the “Monflanquin” affair, reveals to the newspaper Sud-Ouest, no more no less, that he has himself created “a cell of ‘exit councellors’” (sic) in Aquitaine (see our communiqué on this subject). Where does the term “thought reform” come from? Among other places, from the work of Schein and Lifton. Dick Anthony specifies (ibid.): “The practices of forced indoctrination into communist thought (sometimes called ‘thought reform’ or ‘coercive persuasion’) were not effective in producing a commitment to the communist vision of the world in people who were not previously attracted to it”. With the aim of convincing them to leave their chosen group, these “consultants” thus claim to explain to their “clients” how they lost their free will in a “cult” by being exposed to a “thought reform”, when, according to the results of recognised scientific work, it is impossible to conclude that such a practice can lead to a perversion of free will.

Mental manipulation and psychological subjection

What of the concepts of mental manipulation and psychological subjection? Arnaud Esquerré (ibid.) presents, in his book, an analysis of the impasses to which these notions lead:

”(…) At the heart of the parliamentarians’ approach, a certain type of bond between human beings is targeted, which is a mode of organisation and a relation of power. This psychic relation, whether it is named mental manipulation or psychological subjection, is awkward to describe. Its bounds are vague, whether one comes to consider it in its continuity or over a long time, or envisages it in an open environment, with a great number of human beings concerned. By reason of this difficulty in situating frontiers, the terms chosen to fix psychological subjection are themselves vague. So the interpretation given of the assembly of these terms leaves an important part of the arbitrary to the one who has the charge of stating it; it could concern relations other than the bonds between the members of a ‘cult’ alone.

The parliamentarians had the will to condemn a particular practice, which they attached to the ‘cults’, their objective being to prohibit the latter, but they did something quite other than merely attending to the ‘cults’: they created a state of psychological subjection.

For this psychological subjection, like mental manipulation, to work, one must pass over the definition of human liberty. The use of the terms ‘mental’ and ‘psychological’ entails in fact an elision of liberty: their character is such that it can allow an arbitrary power to be exercised. For the proof of the existence of the psychological element does not exist; the existence of this element depends on the arbitrariness of the judges who will apply article 223-15-2 of the Penal Code.

(…) A person in a state of psychological subjection is a person whose causality of acts is considered as coming from another person. What is at the heart of article 223-15-2 of the Penal Code is the recognition or not of a certain type of causality recognised by the State. The introduction of psychological subjection poses the question of knowing what the liberty of a subject is: a ‘free’ subject is one who has the right submissions, submissions recognised by the State, from the point of view of the one for whom the State is legitimate. For another point of view, which considers that the State deprives of liberty, the free being is the one without a State”.

Two conclusions emerge from these brief overviews of the notions of brainwashing, mental manipulation and psychological subjection. They are the object of no consensus in the scientific community; the great majority of researchers consider these concepts pseudo-scientific and inapplicable (in particular because they prove non-”falsifiable”, in reference to the theses of the philosopher of science Karl Popper).

In these conditions, it ought logically to be excluded to use them in the Penal Code of a State of law.

The About-Picard law

That is however what the French State did.

The About-Picard law, voted on 12 June 2001, has as its objective, as Arnaud Esquerré recalls, “to prohibit the ‘cults’”. All the debates during the elaboration of this law explicitly targeted the groups thus labelled. A certain number of parliamentarians however refused to make a law that would target a particular category of persons; they therefore removed from the body of the text every reference to the “cults” and extended the application of the law to every legal person (See Patrice Rolland, ibid.). Nevertheless, the title of the law: “Law no. 2001-504 of 12 June 2001 tending to reinforce the prevention and repression of cult movements infringing human rights and fundamental liberties” refers explicitly to the “cults”. The title of a law is not applicable; it is there, in this case, to remind the magistrates that only the groups designated as “cults” are concerned, as Catherine Picard, rapporteur of the law, recalled orally during the debates. It goes without saying that a law can be considered non-discriminatory if and only if its text and its modalities of application respect that commitment. That is not the case of the About-Picard law which, even if very little used, is invoked only against certain groups arbitrarily designated as “cults”. The parliamentarians’ avowed hypocrisy is dismaying.

The sociologist Patrice Rolland (ibid.) points out that an initial version of the law had planned to prohibit the installation of a “cult” within a certain distance of certain public buildings (schools, etc.). This measure amounted purely and simply to prohibiting the “cults” in the towns: “It was the Senate that refused the measure, but it did so not for reasons of principle or of respect for liberties but out of an entirely pragmatic prudence”. This “detail” among others makes it possible to measure the anti-cult phobia reigning among the parliamentarians.

The “offence of mental manipulation” was introduced into the first version of the law by Catherine Picard. However, this expression, unusual in our Law and the object of numerous criticisms, made the parliamentarians retreat, and they returned to an “offence of abuse of weakness”. Maître Pérollier offers an analysis of the two texts of these offences and shows that, a few differences apart, they are identical in their impact on the groups targeted. Moreover, the notion of “psychological subjection”, an extension of the notion of mental manipulation as Arnaud Esquerré shows (see above), was introduced into the offence of abuse of weakness. Patrice Rolland (ibid.) arrives at the same conclusions: “The final text, which results in particular from the critique of the consultative Commission, abandons the idea of mental manipulation for the notion of abuse of weakness. But the essence of the initial notion subsists, and one may think that objectively the abandonment of mental manipulation remains purely verbal”.

Another anti-cult law?

Why, then, does an anti-cult actor like Me Daniel Picotin seek to have another law on mental manipulation voted? “We need an offence, indeed a crime, of mental manipulation, (…) so that mental manipulation becomes a vice of consent” (Café crimes, 25/11/2009, Europe 1). He cannot be unaware of the convergent analysis of numerous sociologists and lawyers.

The reason is that those who fight the “cults” have been confronted with the same problem since the beginning of their combat. Apart from a few apostates who turn against their movement after passing, for the majority of them, under the Caudine Forks of an anti-cult association or indeed of an exit counseling consultant, most of those who leave “cults”, as numerous studies have shown, leave their movement without clashes. If one adds together those who stay and those who have left a movement normally, the offence of abuse of weakness, besides its arbitrary character, does not seem flagrant to many magistrates. There exists a single precedent under the About-Picard law, in the Néophare affair. The former head of the Bureau of Religions at the Ministry of the Interior, Didier Leschi, interviewed by Arnaud Esquerré (ibid.), comments in his own way on the anti-cult hunt: “One can control. In any case, this ministry loves control, by nature. If it is told it does not control enough, it will control more. But one must still try to determine what must be controlled. What must be controlled? The Republic guarantees the free exercise of worship and, moreover, worship must be public. I do not know what must be controlled. We are searching! We must search! The argument of all these people is to say: ‘If you do not find, it is because you are not searching. If you searched, you would find!’ That is what they tell you. In every region of France, there are officials of the renseignements généraux who are specialised in the cults, who produce white notes… White notes which always tell the same stories…”.

This situation cannot satisfy the anti-cult activists. An important element was set aside when the offence of mental manipulation was replaced by the offence of abuse of weakness in the About-Picard law: “The fact that a human being might have given his agreement to the installation of a relation of exploitation designated as such by a third party was taken into account by the parliamentarians: despite that agreement, the offence of mental manipulation could be identified. ‘Against his will or not’ meant that the liberty of the beings designated as manipulated, whatever they might say or do, was from the outset and without appeal suspended by others in the name of a superior principle” (Arnaud Esquerré, ibid.).

Now, when Me Daniel Picotin asks for a new law against mental manipulation, he is doing nothing other than demanding a law sanctioning the loss of free will. Whether an individual agrees to join and stay within a group, or turns against it afterwards, his consent could be declared inoperative; there would be a “vice of consent”. And thereby the small number of apostates could find itself augmented by the number of all those who made a choice in conscience but will be declared manipulated without their knowledge. Patrice Rolland (ibid.) reminds us that: “The principle, in private-law relations or in the law of liberties, is that the value of an adult’s consent can be set aside only for exceptional reasons”. Where the “cults” are concerned, this principle is swept aside in the framework of the About-Picard law and in the projects of jurists like Me Daniel Picotin, who demands the legal formalisation of the globalising discourse on the “‘cult’ mentally manipulating its followers”, hammered ad nauseam across all the media by the anti-cult actors. And if this new law is slow in coming, claiming that the available tools are not sufficient may prompt the magistrates to use at least the About-Picard law. Georges Fenech’s frenzied lobbying within the magistracy has no other objective.

Legislative cacophony and the cacophony of expertises

“François Fillon acceded on Wednesday 25 November to a demand carried for years by a number of feminist associations by announcing the creation of an offence of ‘psychological violence within the couple’ (…). ‘The creation of this offence will make it possible to take into account the most insidious situations, those situations which leave no traces visible to the naked eye, but which mutilate the inner being of the victims,’ underlined the occupant of Matignon, who wishes a vote of Parliament on this subject before the summer of 2010” (La Croix). The couple is indeed an environment where emotional and financial dependence, and relations of force and authority, can take shape. By what oddity of the human psyche would a “psychological violence” in the case of a couple transform itself into “mental manipulation” in a “cult” (insofar, of course, as a real offence has been established)?

In a dramatic incest case treated by the Assize Court of the Corrèze, the advocate general “relied on the work of the interministerial Mission of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires (Miviludes). A charismatic leader, truth held by the cult, isolation of the follower, exclusion of those who do not adhere, and mental manipulations for economic and sexual ends constituting the bedrock of a cult, the advocate general found ‘a perfect concordance’ with the accused” (LePopulaire). What is the pertinence of invoking mental manipulation and the cult phenomenon in an obvious offence as old as the world? Should one not then institute proceedings for mental manipulation against the Catholic Churches of France and Ireland (and elsewhere) for mental manipulations of the child victims of paedophilia?

In a Mediapart article entitled “Psychological autopsy, or how to clear oneself thanks to the psychiatrists”, the journalist writes: “The pressure is too strong: the company can no longer merely plead the private life of its employees to explain the cases of suicide. Renault and others thus seem to be sketching a new strategy: referring to a ‘psychological autopsy’ carried out by psychiatrists after death, which underlines the fragility of the deceased employees. The method is causing scandal in the world of medicine and of labour”. What justifications allow the invocation of mental manipulation in the case of a suicide within a group considered a “cult” (even when the deceased person left the group long ago), when it seems possible to choose experts who know how to put the problems “in perspective”, to “step back”, in the case of serial suicides within CAC40 companies?

The legislative cacophony and that of the experts, on the theme of the mental manipulation allegedly used in the “cults”, express the waywardness of a society at a loss, ignorant, in its foundations and its functioning, of any deep knowledge of the human person, and which wants pathetically to make believe that it masters that knowledge when it is a matter of repressing persons aspiring to other choices of life.

The silence of the commentators

The official words of the government, notably through the secretary of State for justice Jean-Marie Bockel, are meant to be reassuring: “The existing legal apparatus thus appears sufficient and it is not envisaged, as things stand, to put in place specific legislation relating to the cults” (source). Translation of the official double language, in the light of what has been set out: “the About-Picard anti-cult law, worded so as to keep up appearances, but nevertheless reserved for the ‘cults’ in its application, whence its title, is judged sufficient for the moment, and it is not envisaged at present to introduce a new anti-cult law on mental manipulation”.

Those who let themselves be fooled by this type of statement are making a bad bet. A so-called State of law, capable of concocting the About-Picard law, leaves the domain of law for that of the arbitrary, and that slope is slippery. In a context of victim-centred and repressive politics, keyed to the event, the slightest news item adequately mediatised can relaunch the legislative hysteria against the “cults”, and the label of “cult” can now extend to every domain of society.

France isolated

During our exchanges within the OSCE, in the framework of the human dimension implementation meetings at which CICNS intervened, we were able to measure the gap between the French position and that of most Western European countries. In diplomatic language, our neighbours speak of the “incongruity” of the French anti-cult policy

(see in particular Nathalie Luca’s work, Individus et pouvoirs face aux sectes, which places this policy back in the European context).

That does not prevent a certain number of French officials from wanting to present our country as the “Guide” of the democratic states in the domain of the anti-cult fight (France also accommodates itself very well to cooperation with countries more questionable on the plane of respect for human rights, like China). Jean-Marie Bockel, secretary of State for justice, and Georges Fenech thus dream of a European Observatory of dérives sectaires (source). The only “follower” France can truly claim in the domain of the anti-cult fight is Belgium. France is thus a not very effective “guru” for diffusing its anti-cult doctrine, and that ought to make our governors think. A clear and uncensored exposition of the French theses allowed our European neighbours to form an opinion in full knowledge of the facts, and they have until now, with discernment, rejected the French approach. In the same way, if the spiritual minorities were studied in the framework of an approach of knowledge within an independent Observatory of the spiritual minorities, the public would know how to make informed choices. We invite the reader to take cognisance of our ten-point critique of the French anti-cult policy, presented to the OSCE.

CICNS asked the panel of experts and advisers, the “Advisory Council” of the ODIHR (in charge, within the OSCE, of producing Guidelines for the respect, in the different legislations, of freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief), to include a clause in the Guidelines asking that States abstain from using pseudo-scientific notions to discredit minorities, in particular in laws like the About-Picard law. The panel’s answer was positive and this clause will be studied.

The anti-cult fight, a black mark on our national identity

The theme of the cults is recurrent in France (see for example Arnaud Esquerré’s work, ibid.). The capacity of the public authorities (executive and legislative), the media and public opinion to seize on it and transform it into a national psychosis deserves reflection. In its modern version - excessive, violent, discriminatory, stupid - the anti-cult fight expresses our country’s historical difficulty in accepting religious and spiritual diversity, in the name, today, of an exacerbated, sacralised and therefore intolerant version of laïcité.

The current debate on our national identity, launched by Nicolas Sarkozy and his Minister of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Solidarity Development, Eric Besson, seeks to define what unites us (we choose to ignore the possible underlying politicking intentions). This definition cannot pass over an unsparing analysis of what disunites us, in order to attempt, through this approach of intellectual honesty, to empty it of its substance. The anti-cult reflex is a component of our national identity that disunites us, a black mark on that identity. A debate on national identity that passes over the excesses of the French anti-cult policy will pass over forces that undermine our “living together”.