LCP Channel - "Beware of the Gurus"

LCP Channel - “Beware of the Gurus”

LCP - L’Echo des lois - Dérives sectaires: beware of the gurus (October 2011)

The parliamentary channel pursues without flagging its enterprise of disinformation and propaganda on the question of “cults”. In October 2011, in the series “L’Echo des lois”, a report was broadcast entitled “dérives sectaires: beware of the gurus”, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the About-Picard law (the law punishing abuse of weakness through “psychological subjection” and allowing the dissolution of “cult movements”), so important does it seem to the anti-cult lobby to celebrate the anniversaries of liberticidal laws. Let us recall, for whatever purpose it may serve, that the parliamentary channel has a partnership agreement with the MIVILUDES, in plain terms that it is one of its mouthpieces in complete “dependence”. We comment on this dismaying programme below.

Journalist: “This month let us project ourselves into the little-known world of the cults, a word that frightens and awakens the greatest fears; simple spiritualities or indoctrination, guides towards new faiths or manipulative gurus, it is difficult to determine where and when the danger begins”.

[Cicns]: The danger, in the public’s mind, assuredly begins when such an introduction is hammered home, surfing on a psychosis maintained for thirty years, which the journalist does not question. From the first minute, then, the discourse is biased and slanted. There will be talk only of people or situations presented as dangerous, a journalistic technique that makes it possible to suck the “simple spiritualities” and the “guides” into the great sack of the cults, as the MIVILUDES habitually does. At no moment will the journalist show herself capable of questioning these amalgams.

There follow a few images of the Mandarom, a “cult” of which nothing has been heard for years, but why deprive oneself of out-of-context images when they serve to prop up a fallacious argument; then a few images of the police forces’ assault on the buildings of the Davidians, of which there is no longer any doubt (hypocrisy aside, that is) that they were responsible for the deaths of that movement’s followers, a “disturbing” fact which the journalist has evidently not taken the trouble to study; then a few images of Raël explaining that there is no illicit sexual activity in his movement. The editing is thus perfect: after the images of the massacre of the Davidians, for which the voice-over commentary seems to blame them for the deaths of women and children, the words of any spiritual leader whatsoever can only fall flat.

Journalist: “According to an Ipsos poll, there are said to be 600 cult movements (…) meaning 15 million people are said to have been approached by these small groups”.

[Cicns]: One example among many illustrating the journalist’s total ignorance of the subject she is commenting on. Ipsos is certainly not the origin of this figure, which emanates directly from the MIVILUDES, which commissioned the polling institute.

Journalist: ”(…) There is no definition of the cults. They are not prohibited, but not everything is permitted in the name of freedom of belief and religion, a law frames these dérives sectaires, it is the About-Picard law passed in 2001 (…). Ten years on, where do we stand, have we given ourselves the means to fight these deviances (…)?”.

There follow a few images of the massacre of the Solar Temple, of which the voice-over commentary specifies: “The Vercors has not yielded all the secrets of all those who came to die here”. The Vercors has nothing to do with the failure of the police investigation; moreover, the disguised suggestion of a collective suicide in the expression “came to die here” runs contrary to the facts, but no matter. Fifteen years on, and despite Yves Boisset’s film distinctly evoking the politico-mafia lead, this tragedy still serves as a steamroller and a justification for the anti-cult doxa.

Journalist: “The [About-Picard] law introduces the notion of psychological subjection, it condemns the techniques that distort judgement and lead to prejudicial acts, the follower becomes a consenting victim if he proves the mental hold”.

[Cicns]: This gibberish seems to convince the report’s authors, who forget to specify that the notions of “psychological subjection” and “mental hold” are not defined and are pseudo-scientific concepts.

A few images of shamans follow, out of context, to feed the viewer’s dread.

Journalist: “The new weapon against dérives sectaires is the offence of psychological subjection, that is to say the enslavement of another. The former follower can henceforth prove that he was manipulated, so he becomes a victim. (…) Thirty-five convictions have been pronounced thanks to the About-Picard law”.

[Cicns]: Did the journalist ask herself how it is possible to prove anything at all with an undefined notion? Or rather, can she not see that it is possible to assert anything whatsoever given a sufficient media and legal balance of power (anti-cult associations/MIVILUDES versus alleged “cults”)? The situation is as follows: today no serious magistrate can claim to master the dishonest notion of mental hold. The magistrate must therefore go through experts, and these experts all belong to the anti-cult movement. It is therefore not a matter of scientific expertise but of lobbying disguised as science, which, most fortunately, does not convince all magistrates.

There follows a long sequence on the Lorenzato couple, in litigation with Robert Lé Dinh. The bias of a medium in favour of one party to an ongoing trial is detestable. It is an instrumentalisation of the legal process, all the more problematic in an assize trial (the case of Robert Lé Dinh), with jurors who are potentially viewers and open to influence (we expressed the same indignation about the programme “Toute une histoire” presented by Sophie Davant). To create the appearance of a semblance of balance, the authors leave the last word to Robert Lé Dinh proclaiming his innocence. But after such an edit, these words come across as pathetic and turn against him, the evident objective of this sequence.

Where the voice-over commentary speaks of a “mental prison” and of a “mental hold”, it is interesting to note the way the husband speaks of his relationship with Lé Dinh: “There is created in that way, if you like, a relationship of authority to subordinate between him and us, and we become his subjects”. For this common vocabulary describing a relationship of authority, even a strong one, in terms that could be heard in any human structure whatsoever, the anti-cult activists have substituted an artificial and pseudo-scientific vocabulary. It is not for us to assess whether or not there was a crime in this case, but to observe that this vocabulary “reserved” for the cults is a pernicious construction for removing these groups or persons from the ordinary law. To think that they use particular techniques of enslavement absent from the other sectors of society is absurd.

Journalist: “In these delicate cases, the police and the magistrates must bring to light that invisible limit between consent and manipulation, but to help them, since 2009 a special unit has been charged with the fight against dérives sectaires, it is the CAIMADES. It is here that these investigators specialised in the tracking of gurus work in the shadows; for the first time, they have accepted the presence of a camera. It was born after the [About-Picard] law to respond to the specificities of these deviances.”

CAIMADES investigator: “What we do is relatively simple, but when behind it we have to demonstrate a mental manipulation, that calls on very precise, very technical notions which require particular training”.

[Cicns]: There is no specificity to dérives sectaires. The criteria of dérives sectaires are a collection of opinions on vague behaviours judged worrying, a collection broad and evasive enough to allow any group whatsoever to be accused of a dérive sectaire. But of course only the movements labelled cults (spiritual, educational and therapeutic minorities) are targeted. These criteria are therefore an unanswerable tool of discrimination.

The use of the notion of mental manipulation (i.e. the equivalent of the American brainwashing, according to Georges Fenech’s own translation during a lecture he gave in Australia, a notion abandoned across the Atlantic as pseudo-scientific and inapplicable), which supposedly characterises a dérive sectaire and is peculiar to the “cults”, is an indignity for which France will surely have to answer one day before international jurisdictions (the ECHR, for example), so far does it cross the yellow line of a pseudo-science applied to a law that no longer has anything ordinary about it. And it is literally frightening to hear a CAIMADES investigator claim that such a notion calls on “very precise, very technical” notions, criteria established, according to a second investigator, by the “expert psychiatrists”, meaning: those commissioned by the MIVILUDES. The sociologist Arnaud Esquerré describes the use of the concept of mental manipulation against the “cults” in terms of “apparatuses of power over the psyche [which] are more worrying than others, because they touch us more deeply still than the others. And because, more than other apparatuses of power, they leave to those who master them a greater margin of arbitrariness”. One is then forced to observe that the State is seeking to do exactly what it reproaches the “gurus” with.

Journalist: “One of the Trojan horses of dérives sectaires is the field of health. Behind certain alternative medicines hide charlatans and gurus. (…) These new therapies are disseminated on the Internet. They promise the cure of AIDS treated with essential oils. (…) Others promise to cure cancer”.

[Cicns] There follows a full-dress critique of Doctor Hamer’s technique.

The journalist has probably not seen the documentary “House of Numbers” (an incendiary work that runs no risk of being broadcast on the French mass media) in which Professor Luc Montagnier, Nobel laureate in medicine for his discovery of HIV, explains that the best way for African populations to get rid of the HIV virus is to live in satisfactory sanitary and nutritional conditions; are we so far from the “essential oils” mocked in the report, is Professor Montagnier a dangerous “guru”?

Concerning cancer, everyone today has known several people close to them who died from a cancer treated but not cured by conventional medicine, and sometimes in great suffering. The statistics of anti-cancer therapies are not good (indeed disastrous), one need only look around oneself to see it, which seriously calls into question their proclaimed scientific character (see notably a constructed opinion on Agoravox) and makes it possible to understand certain patients’ requests for other types of treatment. In these conditions, to consider a death subsequent to a classical therapy as “falling within the statistics”, and a death following an alternative therapy as an offence or indeed a crime, is dishonest and tramples underfoot the Kouchner law on freedom of therapeutic choice.

Medicine has been sacralised in France (see Jean Baubérot and Raphaël Liogier, Sacrée médecine - Histoire et devenir d’un sanctuaire de la raison, Entrelacs) since the creation in 1803 of the offence of illegal practice of medicine to fight the “charlatans”, at a period when medicine had not yet proved itself and was therefore essentially made up of “official charlatans”. The medical and pharmaceutical world thus has a long habit of being able to assert anything whatsoever with impunity, but perhaps not for much longer.

[Cicns] After the “alternative therapies” sequence, the report attacks the case of Scientology against the backdrop of the French Church’s appeal trial. Curiously, this is the best-balanced sequence, since it gives the floor to Scientologists twice, and without limiting their expression to a subject/verb/object. The floor is also given to Me Jean-Marc Florand, lawyer of the Church of Scientology. The report’s authors seem to have counted on the “scarecrow” status conferred on Scientology, sufficient to obtain a movement of rejection from the public. And then, Scientology has the “unfortunate habit” of using the judicial channel every time it judges itself the victim of a defamation, so it is better to take out one’s frustrations on the small “cults”; Robert Lé Dinh will therefore have to put up with the media lynching in his defendant’s box.

[Cicns] The Scientology sequence is followed by the “end of the world”, “Bugarach” sequence, with a text that is a carbon copy of Georges Fenech’s during his helicopter flight over the region. The authors then take up the case of those “gurus” who publish their “methods and their trances” on the Internet with sites hosted abroad: “a gap in the tracking of dérives sectaires”.

Journalist: “Hopes were born with the [About-Picard] law, but has it kept all its promises?”

[Cicns] The About-Picard law is a summit of the parliamentary and governmental hypocrisy of which France holds the secret. This law, specifically worded against the “cults” during the first part of the parliamentary work, was reformulated by certain parliamentarians who could not let through a text so flagrantly opposed to the rule of ordinary law. The term “cult” was therefore replaced by the general term “legal entity”. This did not fail to worry certain deputies about the potential use of this law against religions, political parties and trade unions. Catherine Picard, rapporteur of the law and today president of the UNADFI, sitting on the Orientation Council of the MIVILUDES, reassured them by affirming that it would not be used against that type of structure. To do things properly, it was specified in the title of the law that it concerns the “repression of cult movements”: the title of a law not being applicable, it is therefore not opposable for breach of the rules of ordinary law, for example.

Questioned in the report, Catherine Picard specifies: “The advantage of this text is that it was very symbolic at a given moment”. Although little used, this text is not at all symbolic for those who have suffered a conviction on the basis of the fraudulent accusation of “mental manipulation”. Georges Fenech, also interviewed, remains astonishingly reserved on the mention of this law, whose anniversary at the National Assembly he nevertheless helped to organise. As for Maître Daniel Picotin, a notorious anti-cult lawyer, he considers that the About-Picard law does not go far enough…

Journalist: “A law accomplished for some, unfinished for others. Difficult to legislate on such a subject without attacking individual liberties, a delicate balance seems to have been found by this law. (…) Thanks to this law, France is a pioneer in the fight against dérives sectaires, we have even inspired our Belgian neighbour. Freedom of conscience has been preserved, everyone can practise their spirituality, their religion, only offences are condemned thanks to this fundamental notion of “psychological subjection”. This text, this law, as we have seen, makes it possible to distinguish manipulation from consent. But this law is experiencing some difficulties, it is still little known, the police and the magistrates are reluctant to handle these notions of “subjection” and “mental manipulation”, which are nevertheless essential to the recognition of the status of victim of cults. This edition of L’Echo des lois is drawing to a close, I hope it has helped you see more clearly into the law, its stakes, its limits”.

[Cicns]: It is particularly pathetic to witness such a misapprehension on a subject which visibly exceeds by far the competence and the capacity for curiosity of the journalists who authored this report, going so far as to suggest that what they think they have “understood”, certain reluctant police officers or magistrates ought to understand more quickly. This misapprehension is all the more glaring on the particular subject of “mental manipulation”, since the authors operate inside the most sophisticated machine for manipulating opinion ever invented by man: the mass media. A sorry display of anti-journalism, one more.

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