A study of how major outlets reacted when informed that their reporting relied on compromised sources, and why some continue to resist correction.

by Massimo Introvigne

Media sensationalism in need of correction: “How the Russian Cult of Horror Fell: The Young Mother Was Rescued Together with Her Child.” This is still on the Internet, uncorrected; however, the “young mother” has clarified that she is not a victim, did not belong to any “cult,” and did not need to be “rescued.”

In the late 1990s, I witnessed a remarkable event in Italy that revealed how vulnerable the media are to manipulation when the subject is a group labeled as a “cult.” A mysterious organization called “Cosamo” began circulating fragments of a video that appeared to show masked individuals preparing to assault a bound girl. “Cosamo” sent the fragments anonymously to local media. They were presented as evidence of the activities of an esoteric and perhaps highly dangerous “cult.” The story grew until a major national television network announced it was ready to broadcast the full video. “Cosamo” replied that it could not provide the tape but could arrange a live feed. The network accepted. During the broadcast, the scene unfolded exactly as promised. The masked figures surrounded the girl. The tension rose. Before the network could interrupt the transmission, the girl stood up, removed her gag, and began dancing with the masked performers, singing a song that mocked the media’s gullibility.

“Cosamo” did not exist. The entire operation was a hoax by a group of artists and activists known as “Luther Blissett” (the name came from a notoriously inept soccer player of the 1980s). They aimed to expose how easily the media could be manipulated when the subject was a “cult.” The hoax became headline news. Italian journalists declared they had learned their lesson. They promised to be more cautious. They quickly forgot the lesson.

The academic study of new religious movements has long recognized the problem. In 2018, American scholar W. Michael Ashcraft published a comprehensive history of the field. He described how mainstream scholars reached a consensus that “cult” is not a scientific category, but a label used to stigmatize unpopular minorities; that “brainwashing” is a pseudoscientific theory employed to justify repression; and that apostate exmembers, a small minority of former adherents who become militant opponents of the groups they left, should not be treated as reliable sources. He observed that a tiny minority of scholars rejected these conclusions and created a separate field called “cultic studies,” which supports anti-cult movements and apostate narratives. Ashcraft emphasized that “cultic studies” is not recognized as mainstream scholarship. It survives as a project of a small cadre of committed activists, not endorsed by the larger academic community.

Yet Ashcraft also pointed out a paradox. While the media ignore mainstream scholars, “cultic studies” activists and apostates are quoted constantly and treated as “experts.” Their narratives dominate public discourse. Journalists rarely consult those who remain in the movements or those who study them professionally. They prefer sensational stories, accounts that confirm their expectations, and narratives that sell.

This dynamic is not limited to marginal outlets. A very recent example is a September 22 BBC podcast on AROPL, the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light, a new religious movement based in Crewe, England. An academic who has devoted years to studying the movement, Holly Folk, is given less than half a minute. Meanwhile, the podcast interviews at length an anti-cult activist, Be Scofield, who admits in her autobiographical book that some of the information guiding her to fight the “cults” comes from extraterrestrials and the spirits of the deceased. In her latest book, she exposes the ultimate “cult” leader, presented as a master of “brainwashing” and human trafficking: Jesus Christ. The problem is not Be Scofield. Individuals with a psychiatric history who create conspiracy theories based on visions have always existed. The problem is that the BBC offers Be Scofield a tribune.

Be Scofield expresses her enthusiasm at being taken seriously by the BBC.

The problem is structural. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s 2019 Policy Guidance on freedom of religion or belief recognized it. The OSCE urged media to avoid negative stereotypes about religious and spiritual minorities, to convey accurate information, and to counter prejudices. It asked journalists to contribute to a tolerant discourse. The guidance was ignored. Media bias against groups labeled as “cults” became even worse.

This background is essential to understanding how the media reacted when they learned that their reporting on the Konstantin Rudnev case relied on questionable sources. The Rudnev case is complex. It involves a Russian criminal trial that international observers widely regard as compromised; apostate testimonies that changed over time; sensational claims repeated by Russian media without verification; the anti-cult ideology that has been used to persecute minority religions in Russia; an Argentinian prosecutor called Fernando Arrigo obsessed by a personal vendetta against Rudnev; and a political context in which spiritual dissent is treated as a threat.

When Rudnev’s representatives and, independently, scholars who had produced voluminous studies of Rudnev contacted international media to request corrections, the responses varied. Some outlets reacted responsibly. Others did not respond at all. The differences reveal much about the state of contemporary journalism.

Two media outlets, “The Sun” and “NDTV,” removed their negative articles entirely. They examined the evidence, recognized that the allegations against Rudnev were unreliable, and acted swiftly. Their decision demonstrates that responsible journalism is possible. It shows that some media take their ethical obligations seriously and are willing to correct mistakes when confronted with credible information.

CNN reacted differently. It edited its article but did not remove all the challenged allegations. It acknowledged that some elements of its report were problematic. It made partial corrections. They are considering publishing a new article that reflects the facts more accurately. CNN’s response is imperfect, yet it shows a willingness to engage. The outlet recognizes the need for accuracy and is prepared to reconsider its narrative.

CNN’s article as it appears today, stating that partial corrections were made.

Other outlets did not respond at all or responded evasively. “El País,” “The Moscow Times,” “The Insider,” and “Clarín” continued to publish allegations that have been authoritatively challenged. They did not acknowledge the requests for correction or examine the evidence. Their silence raises serious concerns. It suggests they are not committed to accuracy or willing to reconsider narratives that attract readers, and that they prioritize sensationalism over truth.

The contrast between these reactions is striking. It reveals the fragility of journalistic standards when the subject is a group labeled a “cult,” how easily anti-cult activists can influence media, and how difficult it is to correct false narratives once they are published.

Why does this happen? The first explanation is simple. In 2023, “The New York Times” wrote of the “apparently bottomless appetite” of audiences for exposes of “cults.” Audience metrics drive commercial media. Audience means advertising. Advertising means revenue. Stories about “cults” featuring abuse, sex, power, and money sell. Stories about spiritual movements that are not presented as “cults” do not. Sensationalism is rewarded. Accuracy is not.

Yet this explanation is not sufficient. Media do not invent these stories on their own. They are fed by an organized anticult movement that is not respected in academia but is highly respected by journalists. Anticult activists provide endless material. They offer dramatic narratives and apostate testimonies. They cultivate relationships with reporters and shape public discourse. Even the bizarre Be Scofield can pass for an “expert.” The media either ignore who she is or do not care, as long as she can supply juicy stories.

This raises additional questions. Why do anti-cult activists spend so much time cultivating the media? Who supports, finances, and promotes these activists to help them reach an audience?

Anti-cultists are not all driven by the same motivations. Some oppose religion in general. Some oppose specific religious movements. Political agendas influence some. Some are connected to governments that seek to suppress dissent. The recent report by Anthropic on the misuse of artificial intelligence noted that China uses AI to produce massive slander campaigns against groups it labels as “evil cults” (and, while they are at it, against journalists who write for “Bitter Winter”). These campaigns are designed to destroy reputations, justify repression, and influence international media.

Pharmaceutical companies have their own interests. They oppose groups that criticize certain drugs. Scientology’s opposition to psychiatric medication has made it a target of powerful corporate actors.

Secular humanists oppose religion as a matter of principle. They also have learned how to be heard by journalists, a community where the anti-religious bias is more prevalent than in other professions.

In the case of Rudnev, the Russian regime has an interest in destroying him as a political and religious dissident. The campaign’s extremity suggests fear and that the Russian authorities remain concerned about the influence of his teachings, even though he has not had organized groups in Russia or elsewhere since he was incarcerated in 2010. The regime mobilizes its allies in the international anti-cult community. These allies, in turn, mobilize their friends in the media and in some prosecutors’ offices, as it happens in Argentina. The result is a chain of reinforcing narratives and a campaign that persists even when evidence emerges that the allegations are false.

Anthropic’s warning that China shares its skills in using AI for slander campaigns with Russia suggests that even darker tactics may be at work. Unseen operations may influence the media. Narratives may be shaped by forces that do not reveal themselves.

The media’s different reactions to requests to correct their Rudnev stories illustrate the consequences. It shows how easily media can be drawn into campaigns that serve political interests, and how difficult it is to correct false narratives once published. It also shows how responsible outlets can act ethically when confronted with the truth, while others refuse to engage.

When media are asked to correct errors, their reactions reveal their values. Those who remove false articles demonstrate integrity. Those who engage in dialogue demonstrate responsibility. Those who remain silent demonstrate indifference.

The Rudnev case is not unique. It is part of a larger pattern: a media system that rewards dramatic stories, a cultural environment that stigmatizes minority spiritual movements, a political context that treats dissent as a threat, and governments that use sophisticated technological tools to repress opposition and manipulate the media.

Correcting these narratives is difficult. It requires persistence, evidence, and engagement with responsible media.

The story of “Cosamo” and “Luther Blissett” remains relevant. It shows that media can be deceived and manipulated. They can be taught a lesson. They can forget the lesson, too.

The Rudnev case offers an opportunity to revisit that lesson, examine how media respond when confronted with the truth, defend the integrity of inquiry, protect minority spiritual movements from prejudice, and restore the honor and freedom of an innocent man.

It is an opportunity that should not be wasted.

Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of Pennsylvania Press’ Nova Religio.  From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.

CAP‑LC alerts the United Nations Human Rights Council to the dangers revealed by the conviction of Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz.

by Massimo Introvigne

Christine Mirre of CAP-LC speaks about the OneTaste case in Geneva.

The afternoon session in Geneva on September 22 had already moved through its familiar rhythm of diplomatic interventions when the accredited NGO CAP‑LC (Coordination des associations et des particuliers pour la liberté de conscience) rose to speak during the general debate under Item 3 of the sixty‑third session of the United Nations Human Rights Council. The organization addressed a development unfolding far from Europe, yet carrying implications for spiritual, therapeutic, and religious communities across continents.

It focused on the U.S. prosecution of OneTaste, a San Francisco‑based movement founded by Nicole Daedone, whose teachings on intimacy and meditation have long attracted both interest and controversy. The case has now become a symbol of a broader trend: the expanding use of trafficking laws to police forms of spiritual experience.

CAP‑LC did not mince words. It declared: “CAP‑LC expresses its grave concern about the expanding use of trafficking laws against spiritual and religious communities in the U.S. and elsewhere. In the U.S. OneTaste case, Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz were sentenced to long prison terms despite no physical coercion, with convictions based solely on psychological influence.” The organization reminded the Council that “testimonies denying harm were excluded and discredited theories of brainwashing shaped the proceedings,” confirming that broad definitions of coercion risk criminalizing ordinary forms of spiritual training.

It warned that “this precedent threatens all spiritual, therapeutic, and religious communities, enabling civil or criminal actions based on subjective reinterpretations of belief and belonging.” CAP‑LC urged the Second Circuit, which will hear the case on appeal, and the U.S. Congress, which should reauthorize the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), to “restore constitutional limits” and “to ensure that trafficking law remains focused on genuine exploitation.” It added that humanitarian considerations call for reviewing the disproportionate sentences imposed and concluded that “protecting freedom of thought, conscience, and belief requires rejecting the misuse of trafficking legislation against peaceful communities.”

The full video of the oral statement.

The case has unsettled scholars of religion, legal analysts, and observers of minority movements. The reliance on psychological influence as a basis for forced‑labor convictions echoes debates that have shaped the modern history of new religious movements. Theories of brainwashing, long dismissed by courts and academic researchers, reappear in moments of public anxiety, often amplified by media narratives. In the OneTaste proceedings, their revival created a climate in which subjective accounts of influence were treated as evidence of coercion, and excluding testimony further narrowed the field of interpretation, leaving the jury with a portrait of the organization shaped by its most critical former participants.

The implications extend beyond OneTaste. CAP‑LC’s intervention pointed to a structural risk: when trafficking law is stretched to encompass psychological persuasion, any spiritual community, meditation school, or therapeutic group becomes vulnerable to prosecution based on contested interpretations of belief and belonging. The organization’s reference to constitutional limits was a reminder that the U.S. Supreme Court, in “Kozminski,” warned against definitions of coercion so broad that they criminalize ordinary forms of influence present in religious, educational, and familial life.

The sentences imposed on Daedone and Cherwitz have also raised humanitarian concerns. CAP‑LC’s call for reconsideration hinted at the possibility of a presidential pardon, which will restore fairness to a case that was unfair from its beginning.

The intervention in Geneva carried an urgent tone. It suggested that the OneTaste case may become a precedent invoked against communities whose teachings diverge from mainstream expectations. The Human Rights Council, accustomed to examining abuses committed by states, was asked to consider how legal systems in democratic countries may also drift when public pressure, sensational narratives, and discredited theories converge.

The hall listened as CAP‑LC described a landscape in which spiritual authority is increasingly scrutinized through the lens of trafficking law. The organization’s voice was steady: protecting freedom of thought, conscience, and belief requires constant vigilance.

Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of Pennsylvania Press’ Nova Religio.  From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.

Cases from the 1990s demonstrate how “cult” rhetoric destroyed reputations and led to false accusations in Argentina. The story repeats itself in the Rudnev case.

by Alejandro Agostinelli

The article “The Invaders” (”Página/12,” August 13, 1991) used anti-cult language. In the subsequent article, “The Fiasco of the Accusations Against Valentina” (“La Maga,” May 4, 1994), the author self-criticized and retracted his earlier position.

The “common sense” that mobilizes those who label certain movements as “cults,” the scarcely or entirely unaudited power of prosecutors’ offices, the expansive use of criminal-law provisions such as human trafficking laws, the media exposure of judicial investigations through leaks, and the way the media construct guilt before a verdict is handed down are essential both in a court case and in a piece of journalism. Even so, these issues remain practically invisible to mass audiences. Not because of a lack of specialists in scientific disciplines who could shed light in the darkness, but because it is easier, corporately advantageous, and even profitable to be part of this structure, a “culture of suspicion” rooted in the mainstream. Understanding, exposing, and dismantling it will require far more energy, time, and resources.

The recent case of Konstantin Rudnev in Argentina is a textbook example of manufacturing a media-judicial moral panic. News coverage followed the same old sensationalist formula: “if it bleeds, it sells,” as Marco Respinti puts it. He adds something more uncomfortable: neutral journalists do not need to sympathize with so-called “cults” to recognize the serious abuse committed by their profession when it abandons its primary responsibility—to report without distorting the facts. Professional ethics alone should suffice. And this disproportion relative to the actual risk, together with law-enforcement operations focused on “rescuing” victims who deny being victims or simply do not exist, ends up causing more harm than the harm prosecutors, “anti-cultists,” or the media claim to prevent.

There is a basic point, which consists of identifying and becoming familiar with the group (official name, number of followers, etc.) and its historical trajectory, listening to representatives and members of the community, interviewing people who claim to have been harmed by its activities, seeking expert sources (sociologists, anthropologists, historians), lawyers for both sides, and, if the case is before the courts, obtaining testimony from the officials responsible for an ongoing investigation. But this ABC is rarely followed.

Several of Silletta’s books were bestsellers in Argentina during the 1990s.

The crimes Valentina did not commit

In 1991, an Argentine morning newspaper published a two-page article titled The Invaders, under the kicker “The Flying-Saucer Cults.” The author framed the growing popularity of the “naïve” UFO myth alongside other social trends that, in his view, led those interested in them toward these “pseudoscientific cults.” He stated as a fact that this movement constituted “a risky challenge to the mental health of mystery enthusiasts… tempted by that flying-saucer-shaped bait.” I will comment only on the opening: dissecting the entire article would provide material for a complete thesis.

“Although it may seem like harmless entertainment or a hobby that does no harm, the irrational belief in extraterrestrials who will descend from the sky to save humankind from its self-destruction not only constitutes a petty means of escaping responsibility for one’s own free will, but also offers some enthusiasts a shorter path to becoming trapped in the networks of destructive cults, so-called because they dissolve the personalities of those individuals into a body of dogmatic doctrines, eliminate every trace of reflective thought, and, sooner rather than later, completely reform their belief systems, for which they employ a series of techniques that scholars of the cultic problem do not exaggerate in calling ‘brainwashing.’” (Página/12, August 13, 1991)

The boldface is mine. And so is the text: I myself wrote the article 35 years ago.

Today, that article published in “Página/12” is a “pilot case” for understanding how the discourse of social agitation, moral panic, and the stigmatization of religious minorities was structured in Argentina in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It belongs to a pivotal moment when the debate surrounding “cults” was shifting from the “invasion” of the “electronic churches,” evangelical preachers to whom a role of “geopolitical and imperialist infiltration” was attributed (1985–1988), and the most stigmatized religious minorities (the Unification Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, Scientology, the Children of God, etc.), toward the advent of novel groups, such as those inhabiting UFO culture and other margins of religiosity. Well into the 1990s, the “social problem of cults” emerged as a threat, particularly after the arrival in the country of the North American and European model of “coercive persuasion.”

The very notion of “destructive cults that nullify the will of individuals,” which discredits the group by denying converts their autonomy and even the authority the article grants to “scholars of the cultic problem [who] do not exaggerate in calling it ‘brainwashing,’” today, at least for me, makes my skin crawl. In my mind, those “scholars” were the specialized journalists Pepe Rodríguez, author of “The Power of Cults” (El poder de las sectas, 1989), and the Argentine Alfredo Silletta, author of titles such as “Cults Invade Argentina” (Las sectas invaden la Argentina, 1986), as well as the psychologist José María Baamonde, whose close relationship with the Catholic Church I did not regard as incompatible with a balanced judgment, perhaps because, not so long ago, priests and lay members of the Church were regarded as the “owners” of the religious field.

My “Página/12” article in August 1991 functioned not as a prophecy but as a catalyst for the “cult invasion” climate that erupted the following year. In July 1992, when the police chief of Paraná, Brazil, accused Valentina de Andrade, the leader of the group Lineamento Universal Superior (LUS), of an alleged ritual crime, I, acting as a co-creator of news with my colleague Silletta, rushed to steer public debate under the stigma of the “destructive cult.”

On July 23, 1992, the author, together with anti-cult journalist Alfredo Silletta, publicly exposed the group Lineamento Universal Superior at a press conference that had a strong impact on the media in Argentina and Brazil.

My responsibility was limited because I made clear that I knew nothing about the case, but the Brazilian leader had written in her book “The Truth About God” (La verdad sobre Dios, 1989) that “children born after 1981 have a harmful energy.” Guilt by association was thereby established.

The video in which Valentina’s husband, José Teruggi, supposedly said while in a trance, “Kill the little child I asked for” (“”) caused an uproar. The correspondent for an Argentine newspaper validated this translation, and the story exploded in our country. Months later, official expert examinations demonstrated that the phrase was “But there are little children who are experienced” (“Mas tem criancinhas que são experientes.”).

“Maten la criancinha que yo pedí,” an Argentine journalist interpreted José Teruggi, a LUS medium, as having said. A later expert examination established that he had said, “Mas tem criancinhas que são experientes.”

A linguistic fantasy co-created by a journalist fed the spectacle. In September 1992, Valentina and Teruggi were acquitted. But the persecution of her and her group persisted. Between 1993 and 2003, she went through a lengthy judicial process. Because of her controversial history and her visits to Altamira, Brazil, De Andrade was accused of the kidnapping, mutilation, and murder of children between the late 1980s and early 1990s. She was acquitted in late 2003, when police arrested serial killer Francisco das Chagas Rodrigues de Brito, who confessed to committing the crimes.

“I speak on Friday and on Saturday all hell breaks loose (casino),” Silletta stated in an interview for “La Maga” (May 4, 1994).

Confessions of a repentant anti-cultist

Today I would be even more ashamed of my hasty activism were it not for the fact that three years later I wrote the article “The Fiasco of the Accusations Against Valentina” (“La Maga,” May 4, 1994). Not every journalist has the good fortune to become friends with a patient academic such as Dr. Alejandro Frigerio, who provided me with the readings that put me back on course.

In that article, I acknowledged that my earlier conclusions had served an anti-cult interpretive framework: “Far from being an objective description of the internal life of the groups, [that article was] an excellent X-ray of my prejudices, my fears, and my personal opinions.” I also wrote that brainwashing theory lacked scientific support— a “cliché that allows people to wash their hands of responsibility”—a convenient label that allows former members to evade responsibility for their own actions or families to justify ruptures and departures from home. The systematic use of such labels, I added, “serves only to stigmatize and, through media and judicial persecution, to provoke the very isolation that one seeks to prevent.” Starting from such biases, “the outcome was predetermined before the process even began”: speaking of “cults” “has more to do with ideology than with sociology,” because these groups “are more religious than dangerous.” Under that logic, social scientists, former members without grudges, and journalists seeking neutrality become “accomplices,” “cover-up agents,” or outright victims of “coercive persuasion.”

To write my “Página/12” article, I could hardly have consulted more biased sources: I relied on testimony from former adherents or disillusioned former members. I visited the group carrying a burden of prejudice that blinded me to the obvious. That was where my “investigation” began (and ended), without taking into account that the accounts of militant apostates must be handled with extreme care, since they tend to follow the pattern of “atrocity tales.” Such accounts can exaggerate or fictionalize experiences, redefining the former group as intrinsically “evil” and mobilizing public resources against it. Often, the former member resorts to rhetoric that is more creative than neutral to absolve himself of his own responsibility and justify past decisions, embracing a deterministic mystique—the role of victim of “brainwashing” or “coercive persuasion”—that downplays his previous participation and relegates him to a passive, almost zombie-like condition.

This also has to do with the readjustment of those who decide to leave a marginalized group: because society offers few avenues for reintegration, the person seeks to assimilate into mainstream morality by adopting the legitimized role of the “apostate,” which at times requires a melodramatic renunciation of one’s past to gain attention from those close to them, if not for psychological relief and social recognition.

In “The Making of a Moonie” (1984), Eileen Barker, Professor of Sociology and Professor Emerita at the London School of Economics (LSE), demonstrated that dissidents who exaggerate their accounts or deploy a menu of false accusations constitute a minority that does not represent the experiences of most former members, whose experiences are rarely given attention. Yet this does not prevent apostasy from often becoming a career, one the sensationalist press readily exploits. Eventually, the individual stages his repentance and denounces the “perversity” of the group, transforming his status as a former member into a specialty or profession—“consultant,” “expert witness,” or even “anti-cult influencer”—as a means of economic subsistence and social validation.

Eileen Barker’s “The Making of a Moonie.”

Sociologists Thomas Robbins and Alejandro Frigerio have explained how the media and anti-cult activism jointly manufacture public scandals. Robbins calls this bias “epistemological Manichaeism”: former members who make accusations are believed unquestioningly, while believers who remain in the group are dismissed or infantilized because “brainwashing”—it is claimed—has deprived them of decision-making capacity. Thus, anti-cult groups end up speaking on behalf of supposed victims without allowing them to speak for themselves, while validating the voice of the hostile former member without further scrutiny. To keep the flame alive, this activism resorts to what Joel Best calls “domain expansion”: it needs ever more former members willing to tell terrible stories and stretches the label of “dangerous cult” to include common practices such as yoga, biodanza, or ufology. This constant expansion of the threat lets it justify its existence, gain prestige, and push for harsher laws, such as criminalizing the mere “capture of consciousness.”

My own 1991 article already contained the trap in miniature. It took for granted the idea that these groups “dissolve personality,” “eliminate every trace of reflective thought,” and “reform” the belief system of their adherents; if one of them declared that they joined of their own free will, that very happiness was interpreted as proof that the brainwashing had worked. The punitive labels still applied today to a heterogeneous set of groups are enough to confirm that journalistic and judicial treatment of the issue has not improved much since then.

Barker warned that, to determine whether abuses or manipulation occur within a group, the group must be defined independently of any prejudice: placing a diverse collection of groups into the same category precludes both neutrality and any genuine empirical finding. The guilt-by-association fallacy works the same way: if groups as different as peaceful mystery enthusiasts and controversial organizations are labeled under the same category—“flying-saucer cults”—the generalization casts suspicion on every leader, doctrine, and adherent of a non-traditional movement and strips them of their particular identity.

Under that same logic, my 1991 article preceded the description of every group or figure in the Argentine contactee movement with a “negative summary of facts.” On the basis of that “thematization,” I combined fascination with extraterrestrial life, certain commercial dynamics, and police cases without judicial resolution: together, though none did so separately, they cast the shadow of an urgent social threat that justified public condemnation, state intervention, legislative reforms, and raid operations.

Some headlines from Argentine newspapers recall the moral panic that swept through Argentina in late 1992.

The moral panic that came in from the cold

The case keeping Konstantin Rudnev detained in Argentina repeats this pattern with almost millimeter-perfect precision. Prosecutor Fernando Arrigo—questioned for his careless handling of evidence and his “obsessive hostility” in other high-profile cases—pursued the accusation with a fervor that would have been admirable in a case grounded in evidence. Much of Rudnev’s public profile was built on Russian state propaganda from “RIA Novosti” (2013), which described him as the “alien from Sirius” and claimed he had 30,000 followers. A caricatured biography was used to justify his eleven-year sentence in Russia. That portrait created the climate of suspicion he arrived in Bariloche to, although he was never convicted of any crime in Argentina.

The case, initiated in 2025, accuses him of aggravated human trafficking, reduction to servitude, unlawful deprivation of liberty, ideological falsification, and transportation of narcotics; the last charge collapsed when chemical tests revealed that the allegedly seized substances were sleeping pills and ordinary cooking mushrooms. The allegation of “ritual pornography,” for its part, relates to a raid on a rented house in Žabljak, Montenegro, in October 2024, with no connection whatsoever to Rudnev, and no one was prosecuted. Nevertheless, the Argentine media recycled that narrative from the Balkan sensationalist press, which insisted on linking Rudnev to the raid.

Konstantin Rudnev.

Inventing a victim

The case file centers on one name: Elena Makarova, the sole “victim.” In her statement before a Gesell Chamber, she was unequivocal: she stated that she did not know Rudnev, moved freely around Bariloche, and had suffered neither coercion nor exploitation. After returning to Russia, she filed a criminal complaint against the prosecutors for forcing her into the status of victim.

As Argentine anthropologist María Vardé explains, this mechanism functions as a device of “guilt by association” that strips people of agency: if an independent adult woman denies having been exploited, PROTEX psychologists treat that denial as “proof” that brainwashing worked. It is the same logic as that of parlor sorcerers: if the spell “works,” the client comes back; if it does not work, the client still has to come back. The spell is too powerful. Magic—and prosecutors—never lose.

In April 2026, CESNUR published a study dismantling the case’s central pillars. In May of the same year, Rudnev’s defense sought Prosecutor Arrigo’s recusal for an “absolute lack of objectivity.” Two international NGOs with special consultative status with ECOSOC, CADD (Citoyens en action pour la démocratie et le développement) and CAP-LC (Coordination des associations et des particuliers pour la liberté de conscience), reported to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on the prosecutor’s persecution, his “special obsession” with the accused, and the case’s procedural irregularities. Since then, the case has become a “crime control theater,” in the words of Canadian sociologist and Concordia University professor Susan Palmer in Montreal.

Despite his fragile health after surgery for an inguinal hernia, the Court of Criminal Cassation lifted Rudnev’s house arrest in June 2026, sending a seriously ill man back to Rawson prison on the basis of Internet rumors and Russian propaganda. Konstantin Rudnev remains in preventive detention, without a conviction.

Alejandro Agostinelli is an Argentine journalist and editor of FactorElBlog.com. He has published “Invasores. Historias reales de extraterrestres en Argentina” (Sudamericana, Random House, 2009) and “Argentina X. Un cronista a la caza de fantasmas, alienígenas y demonios” (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2025).

CICNS - Questions and Answers (FAQs)

This paper answers some of the most frequently questions asked about the CICNS and cults, or sects, in general.

Q1. Why have another point of view on sects?

We need an open, honest and tolerant view on spiritual minorities.

Q2.According to you it seems that sects (or cults) do not exist?

The members of our association are aware of the damage that can be caused by religious fanatics or the temptation that some fanatics have to use spiritual principles to gain personal power over other individuals. However, healthy spiritual minorities exist in France and in other countries. There are many groups that have a spiritual vocation, albeit distinct from mainstream religion, that are not involved in destructive behaviour. These groups aspire to answer the essential questions that humans ask, for improving life and the society we are living in.

Some tragic events have been used by the media to stigmatise these minorities, to turn them into scapegoats - putting all groups in the same bag. The word “cult” (or “sect”) is the expression of that stigmatisation. One of the objectives of the CICNS is to end the ridiculous association between criminality and spiritual minorities. Criminality exists everywhere and it has nothing in particular to do with spiritual minorities. We feel that these minorities deserve to be defended.

Q3.But the danger exists?

There are no more dangerous individuals within spiritual groups than anywhere else. Actually, people who are associated with spiritual groups generally lead lives that are oriented towards friendship, and internal peace. Rare instances of unsavoury behaviour by particular individuals in spiritual minorities should no longer be used to condemn all new age spiritualities, as has been the case to date in France.

Q4. If you are not denying the existence of such behaviour, how do you suggest condemning it?

Criminal acts are committed by unbalanced human beings, independently of their association with a group either political, religious or other. The Judicial system is geared to manage these situations, to deal with criminal acts by all citizens independently of their associations.

Q5. Are you denying that there is a link (cause and effect) between being part of a spiritual minority and a criminal act?

Spiritual minorities do not invite their members to be criminal or to engage in an antisocial behaviour. If such actions occur, the group involved cannot be considered to be a spiritual minority. This is the reason why we are denouncing the association between criminality and spiritual minorities. The myth of a terrorist, antisocial sect is cultivated by the media and some authorities, and hence is well rooted in the mind of the public.

Violent and antisocial behaviour can manifest in any individuals. When a person who belongs to a political party or any other professional or social group commits a crime, no association is made between the crime and the group to which the person belongs. This association between the individual and the group is made only if that person is or has been part of a spiritual minority.

When a fireman lit a fire in a forest a while ago, no one came up with idea that the fire association is a sect. Associating spiritual groups and reprehensible acts is a crime in itself. Today more people are victims of the antisect hunt in France, than are real victims of “sects”.

Q6. Aren’t newspapers talking about sects suicidal tendencies?

The police and educational institutions are those that have the greatest number of suicides. Once again no one dares to even consider that these institutions are legally responsible for that situation. No one concludes that police or educational institutions are sects.

In fact, all human groups exhibit one or more criteria that anti sects activists use to describe a sect. Making such associations is disrespectful to “mainstream” groups. We are asking that the same respect is given to spiritual minorities in France, a country that claims to be a democracy.

It is clear to the CICNS observers that the intention behind this identification is to discrediting spiritual minorities.

Q7. Are you exaggerating? Why would people want to discredit spiritual minorities?

Remember the unforgettable “Essentiel “affair. We think that a true witch hunt is happening in France, and the purpose behind it is to revive old passions and prejudices to take people’s attention away from the real problems in our society.

Q8. What is your comment on the collective suicides that have made the headlines?

Go to the page of our website that discusses this topic. You will certainly be surprised by its content, if you are aware of one side of the story.

Q9. Aren’t there actual cases of abuse in our region?

At the CICNS we are open to discussing such abuse. However we are continually shocked when we observe questions and allegations raised by the media in a superficial flimsy premises and when we see biased official declarations made by the government. Abuses do exist and are present at all level of our society; they are not necessarily handled fairly by the Justice system.

The word “cult” or “sect” that the media and the public use when addressing the subject of spiritual minorities, is a striking example of a successful collective manipulation to associate one thing with another. The result of this conditioning is that people start to believe anything that is said about spiritual minorities.

Honestly ask yourself the question: what do you actually know? Consult our archives and participate in a more open reflection on this phenomenon. Although most of us are aware that the media rarely gives accurate information, we have a tendency to accept everything that they promulgate as the truth. This paradox leads to a false view of the reality, and particularly on spiritual minorities.

Q10. But what about the weird gurus surrounded by many wives, hanging on to power and whose pockets are full of money?

Bravo, you have verbalised one of the archetypal caricature that has been built in the public mind over the past twenty years. Look at this description. The exaggerated human weaknesses are projected onto a scapegoat, to create a hostile narrow-minded reaction; then recognise oneself being on the good side, that is to say the side of the “normal people”.

It is a gross, false and intentionally destructive caricature of the values essential promoted and lived by spiritual minorities. Nevertheless, to be a weirdo, rich and even surrounded by women is not an offence in a democracy; it does not justify the stigmatisation of spiritual minorities. The fact remains that most spiritual minorities are much more discreet.

Q11. Let’s take away the word “caricature”; isn’t spirituality often a label used to mask shameful intentions?

Many things can be twisted towards shameful intentions. Secularity can be used as a mask to antireligious behaviour, politic to mask an immoderate taste for power, and freedom and democracy are often used to justify banning spiritual minorities in France! Adult French citizens have to use their own judgement right throughout their life; it is not up to the government to do it for them. Each one has the right to take a path that may seem unusual to others, and each one has even the right to make a mistake. All the swindles that sects are accused of, not those created by the anti-sect activists, are derisory when compared to the legal swindles unfolding across our consumer driven society.

If you sincerely wish to denounce swindles in our society, know to recognise them everywhere and do not stigmatise a minority group. It is a fundamental democratic principle. The opposite attitude is endangering individual freedoms, including the freedoms of those who are not associated with spiritual minorities.

Q12. What is your viewpoint on brain washing?

Brain washing is a vague and demagogic concept that is used by the anti-sect movement in order to condemn spiritual minorities rather than thorughfully going into the questions about them. If brain washing exists, spiritual minorities are not the only ones concerned by this phenomenon. Advertisement campaigns use very powerful and efficient tools of persuasion; our daily relationships have at times features that resemble brain washing. Most of the programs seeking discredit sects on TV use processes that are similar to brain washing. One way or the other, the human tendencies in abusing small or great powers should not be associated to spiritual minorities. Such minorities are one of the rare places where great human questions are treated with attention and sincerity. Humanism has been absent of the official structure for a long time; that is why the CICNS has decided to help spiritual minorities be heard and get the value of their journey known.

Q13. What are your objectives?

The CICNS suggests a new point of view on spiritual minorities, away from common place comments, away from the most revolting generalisations that have affected the life of thousands of people in France over the past twenty years; this has been caused by the anti-sect campaign.

We are working towards providing the public with factual information that has been occulted so far from the debates on the spiritual minorities phenomenon.

We are waiting for the minorities themselves to come out of a yoke of fear caused by the anti-sects campaign; that minorities stop believing that the “sect is the other group, not them” and that they creatively participate to the CICNS action, by demonstrating that they are not the scourge of our society - instead they are an opportunity for our society, and they let the public know of their spontaneous and deep respect of the fundamental principles that make the foundation of our great constitution.

We are waiting for the authorities to create a more genuine awareness of spiritual minorities, that would include academics and spiritual leaders who have been voluntarily kept away from the debates.

Q14. Who is hiding behind the CICNS?

No one is hiding. The co-founders of the CICNS have either diverse personal orientations or none. We are not linked to any specific groups that have made the headlines or to the groups denounced on the parliamentarian sect lists. Some of the co-founders are not on a spiritual journey as such; they are simply anxious to defend the fundamental right of a human being in a democracy. It seems that these rights cannot be taken for granted, and we have to work at it daily, so the instincts of despotism and ostracism do not return and settle again in our country.

Q15. You are quite virulent towards the anti-sects movements; isn’t their aspiration the same as yours?

The words and action of the ADFI a nd of the CCMM have shown what motivates them; they are not motivated by the values of democracy, and their members are not inspired by tolerance and freedom of conscience. Their obvious determination in refusing dialogue, the systematic demonization without exception, of all spiritual trends, their encouragement to hate which are clearly expressed in public communication shows that they are incapable of observing spiritual phenomena in France with a sociologist or human perspective. This make them primitive and anti- religious activists, although they are subsided by the government, who do not deserve to be listened to the way they are today in the debates.

The credibility given by the government leads to seriously questioning the willingness of the authorities to responsibly avoid inciting passions of vilification and hatred.

Q16. You do not seem to be defending secularity?

The secularity that is backed today in our country is a secularity that excludes; even if everyone denies it publicly.

Spiritual minoritiesdo not have the intention, or the mean to destabilise the secular Republic.

Whatever a wise experiment secularity was at the time of its formation, today it is unfortunately used by rationalists and anti-religious extremists in order to impose a particular point of view on the world. Such secularity is not democratic; it abuses it the fundamental principles of democracy.

The religious and spiritual minorities’ point of view on the world has a legitimate place in our society and should be respected.

Q17. What kind of actions are you undertaking?

The CICNS offers little and often disturbing information about the characteristics and experiences of new spiritualities. Our volunteer team is in daily contact with the media, the authorities and spiritual minorities in order to balance the shorthand debate on “sect”. We are also gathering testimonies of discriminations as well as the fabricated stories about excess, perversion and repression that feed the fires of a delirious witch hunt. We are regularly organising tours in France. You can find more information on this question at the CICNS Charter page, and on the page that introduce our association.

Q18. A spiritual minority point of view: don’t you think that it is better avoiding committing to an action like yours, which is playing the game of polemic and values which is not ‘spiritual’? And that would attract problems rather than avoiding them?

The CICNS view points is that the problems are already there. They can’t be avoided. It is therefore more efficient not to wait for a more direct attack before raising awareness of the progressive slide of our democratic society towards a form of totalitarism that will not allow religious diversity. A spiritual process can also include a look at society, defending its values and not being compromised in a war. The CICNS is determined not to enter into militant combat. We will preserve and observe the peaceful values that we are defending, but we do not resile from necessary debates and actions that are required to match our commitment. If spiritual minorities had more a sens of solidarity in the defence of their rights, they would be heard.

In France, the percentage of the population that is oriented towards new spiritualities and choosing a less classical life style is significant- so we could straight away get ourselves known beyond differences, as a living force, respectable and pacifist, that is part of our society.

Building a new relationship between society and minorities is the way to avoid the possibility of minority group’s corruption. Isolating a group, whatever the group, leads to unproductive confrontation.

Q19. It is damaging that you avoid talking about the drifts of the minorities in your presentation. This does affect the relevance of the other aspects that you are developing.

Doing lists of minorities that have drifted (moving away from human practices and values) is not the action of our association. The anti-sects activists are already taking care of that and the media are greatly amplifying their viewpoints. Also, we maintain that the groups which drift do not constitute spiritual minorities. The drift of the “human race” do not justify the stigmatisation of spiritual minorities as a whole. According to research in our project “Commission d’Enqu ê te Citoyenne” “Citizens Investigation Committee” the phenomenon of these minorities drifting is in fact very rare.

Why should we give up under the pressure of a pervading psychosis; it gets many citizens to have a superficial approach to the questions that are raised and to react to unfounded sensationalist rumours?

Consider wether your assessment of the situation may be the consequence of the twenty five year campaign that has marked people’s minds (a true brain washing if the latter exists at all) and – in spite of the detailed content of our website- obscured your capacity to objectively assess the excess of the situation; May be, in subtle ways, you have been taken in by the anti-sect argument.

It is saddening to realise that those who are in a position to better understand the importance of what we are communicating, (e.g, those who are very talkative about the subject) still quickly adopt the viewpoint that “sects exist anyway”!. Society suffers much more from multiple prejudicial associations than from actual harm caused by spiritual minorities.

To read a study of preconceived ideas about sects.

To Win a Case, the Magic Word: Cult

By Jean-Pierre Joseph, lawyer at the Grenoble bar

Today, before any court whatever, the word cult is the magic word that makes everyone bend. A contested child custody? It is enough simply to say that my spouse belongs to a cult, and the magic word is launched. It is even pointless for the accused to justify himself, either by saying that it is false, or that the group he belongs to is nothing like a cult. Everything happens as though he had already been struck dead.

A mother finds that her child cannot tolerate antibiotics. On the advice of her homeopathic doctor, she gives her child homeopathy. It would occur to nobody to say anything at all. Except if the mother is a member of a cult. The change of treatment becomes deprivation of care and the public prosecutor brings proceedings.

In every area of the Law, the mere fact of pronouncing the word cult has the effect of a conjuring trick, tipping the jurist into a kind of trance/fright, making him assert with hysteria facts he has not seen (except on television), and making him in any case refuse to verify.

And it is thus that numerous judgments have been handed down, in all matters (criminal, family law, etc.) referring either to rigged television reports, or to the parliamentary report, whereas the Ministry of the Interior was recently obliged to declare that this report had no legal effect.

Everywhere, one constant: no judge has ever gone to see for himself whether these clichés were true, as though the magistrates were unconsciously afraid of finding that they had been deceived.

“Cultophobia” affects almost the whole of the legal profession, even lawyers, traditionally the defenders of individual liberties, who, the moment the word cult is pronounced, begin to recite by heart, as though they were chanting a hymn, the same formulas: mental manipulation, misappropriation of funds, etc.

Today, it is entirely normal to pay a subscription to a football club, but it is suspect to pay one to a yoga club, even if it is half the price. Today, a person who is vegetarian, or who merely does not watch much television, has become suspect. But the person who regularly has 2 g of alcohol in his blood, who does his shopping at the supermarket, who takes antibiotics and who is vaccinated, that one is normal! His later cancer will therefore be reassuring… Was that not the main objective explaining all the anomalies of this psychosis?

See also our video dossier: The spectre of the cult in divorce judgments

Read also Here lies the presumption of innocence

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.

Techniques of Manipulation on Television

A Textbook Case: Jean-Luc Delarue’s Programme “Ça se discute”

New cults, new gurus: can we all be manipulated?

19 September 2007 on France 2.

By Éric Bouzou.

See also our review of this programme

Jean-Luc Delarue, another “textbook case” in September 2010?

The term “manipulation” is not innocuous; it permeated the whole of Jean-Luc Delarue’s (JLD’s) programme, presenting the common run of mortals as a vegetative vegetable, incapable of understanding its own acts and manipulable at will provided it has been “indoctrinated” into a cult or has fallen into the hands of a guru.

The theme of manipulation is extremely delicate, and the frontier between psychological coercion and a conscious choice ought to be a subject treated with the most extreme prudence. The psychology of apostates (people who were members of a spiritual group and who turn against it), studied for example by the sociologist Brian Wilson, shows that they can very easily transform a reasoned choice followed by a disappointment (joining the group, for example) into an external manipulation, thereby allowing them no longer to feel responsible for that decision and for the disappointment that followed. JLD abundantly accredited the manipulation of the witnesses present on his set without any further form of investigation. It is by now a classic of the anti-cult discourse: the followers are all manipulated and unconscious of this manipulation; those who claim to be happy with their choice being the most severely affected.

It is astonishing, moreover, that JLD does not ask himself the question of manipulation where his own programme is concerned, since he uses its crudest tricks. In the case of a television programme, most spectators who do not wish to cross-check the information they receive often act out of laziness, or because they prefer to feed their own fears. That does not prevent one from denouncing the attempts at manipulation, and above all the attempts to drag the spectator downwards, which have every chance of succeeding. The public television service ought, for that matter, to question itself seriously about its mission when it encourages this type of programme.

1st manipulation: making people believe that social issues are being addressed.

Television has not given up treating social issues. Some are digestible, others are not, because the spectacle produced becomes more important than the subject treated. Form wins out over substance, and the choice of presenters is in keeping. Many of today’s commentators are “public amusers”, without putting into that term a necessarily pejorative connotation, rather in the sense of the English word “entertainer”. But they are there to amuse the gallery and to make the good people believe that someone is thinking along with them. They are an integral part of the show. Christophe Dechavannes in his day made a sorry attempt at the subject of cults, and JLD has already had several goes at this theme.

JLD’s facial expressions would on their own deserve a detailed analysis, so thoroughly are they the guiding thread of the atmosphere sought in the programme. It is therefore not the panellists’ reflection that carries the programme, but the producer’s script.

2nd manipulation: making people believe in a balanced programme

It is fashionable today to claim to organise so-called “balanced” debates: what it really amounts to is bringing together antagonistic forces which, with a little “luck”, will clash severely. What is more, a good social issue today has one or more victims within camera range.

The whole art of JLD consists in giving an impression of balance where a bias is evident in the treatment of the programme. That bias is the bias of the emotional, and upstream of that bias there are the ratings. JLD doubtless has his own opinions on the subject of cults, but he also has one principal objective, as indeed do most television producers: the programme must deliver the numbers. One can hardly reproach him for it, except when the promised balance is broken and tips a programme into an emotional outpouring, in which any attempt to step back is treated as an outrage against the status of the victims.

In this instance, the frenetic zapping during the programme between a sociologist’s contribution, then a victim’s feelings, then a close-up on the presenter, then a filmed report, then a psychiatrist (the inevitable duty psychiatrist) and so on… makes the debate oscillate between different incompatible levels which render the programme sterile. But this sterility is intended: nothing apart from pathos must come out of it. And everyone finds themselves dragged, willingly or by force, into that pathos.

Anne Morelli tried several times to bring the reflection back to the theme “there are double standards here”, to allow the debate to gain a little height. Those attempts were drowned in the emotional broth. Let us not even speak of the psychotherapist Baudoin Labrique, who was unable to express himself and preferred to leave the programme.

Another ingredient of the simulacrum of balance consists in setting a generality against a particular case. The “cults” (that indistinct ensemble in which all the alternative spiritual movements find themselves lumped) were presented as dens of dangerousness; the particular case would be a movement, listed until then as a “dangerous cult”, which would now enjoy the favour of the MIVILUDES. What of the hundreds of other groups, accused without proof, with which the anti-cult psychosis continues to be fed? If Madame Katz, secretary of the MIVILUDES, by this announcement is also announcing a change of mentality in that body, that is good news. While awaiting confirmation of that evolution, we refer readers to the comments we made on the latest MIVILUDES report.

3rd manipulation: taking the place of the courts

The programme was studded with filmed reports. Their objective was clearly to generate fear and to accredit the words of the witnesses (apostates or alleged victims of therapists). Most of the edited segments were garnished with superadded images of the kind seen in horror films (jerky shots, disquieting colours, disturbing background sound).

It is not a matter of casting doubt on the sufferings expressed by the people present on the set. But the suffering expressed by a person does not necessarily imply the guilt of the parties opposite. Who are, moreover, systematically absent from the programme, which rapidly turns into a popular tribunal. This way of presenting an event has a name: media lynching.

Nor is it a matter of denying that certain offences may have been committed. That point, however, is not to be dealt with on “Ça se discute”, even implicitly, but in a court of justice if necessary and, if time-barred, somewhere other than in a television show in any case.

JLD’s programme holds together only through the testimony of the victims. This status of victim is today untouchable. If JLD genuinely begins to question his “guests” and to weigh their version of the facts, he can shut up shop. No other victim will ever again take the risk of coming onto his set. That weighing is in any case not his to perform, since it ought to be done by people of pluralist expertise in a protected setting. The only way out, in an attempt to obtain a quality programme, would then be to separate completely the testimony part from the analysis and commentary part. However, the objective is not to be intelligent, but to please.

The witness

Yves Boisset was the programme’s witness; his role being to synthesise what had been heard. He has made, among other things, an intelligent documentary on the tragedy of the OTS. Nevertheless his concluding remarks are rather disconcerting. He takes up a discourse heard more and more today, which consists in saying that the application of the law is not sufficient. “Things go on” that the courts do not know how to take into account and that must be controlled. That assertion is a door thrown wide open to every abuse. A discourse which proclaims, in the name of freedom of conscience, that certain practices should not be permitted, even in full compliance with the law, is not long in violating that same freedom of conscience.

One may nevertheless grant the public authorities the right to observe this field of freedom of conscience. But they would still have to adopt a genuine approach of knowledge, an open one, in order to study the phenomenon of spiritual emergence as a whole. Now, that is not the case today, the policy of fighting cults is absurd in its present form, and it is regrettable that Mr Boisset does not perceive the inanity of the debate as it is conducted and of the programme presented by JLD. To conclude, as he did, on the dangers of manipulation without seeing that this programme was its archetype, is dispiriting.

The CICNS regularly contacts the media that take up the theme of cults to recall them to the requirements of journalistic ethics. Most have lost the taste for investigation, because business is more important than information. And that business prefers the spectacular. JLD, following a contribution from Anne Morelli pointing out that many people felt happy in their spiritual community and were never heard, replied to her that a person who was “having a blast in their cult” would surely pull in a big audience. That says it all, it is no longer enough to live normally and peacefully, one must either be miserable or be having a blast. It is time the media returned to more decency.

Jean-Luc Delarue in police custody for possession of cocaine (September 2010)

Jean-Luc Delarue has just been suspended from the airwaves by the president of France Télévisions, René Pfimlin, on account of his problems of drug addiction. For René Pfimlin: “One cannot have addictive and criminal practices and be on the air every day, sharing emotions, giving people lessons” (Paris Match)

This presenter mounted several “programmes on the theme of cults”, notably in his series “Ça se discute”, all of which were a parody of debate and an insult to intelligence.

Voyeurism and Manichaeism are good assets for the ratings, perfectly mastered by Jean-Luc Delarue and applauded by the successive presidents of France Télévisions, so long as the presenter’s criminal activities (violence and insults on an aeroplane, dubious jokes live on air (for example about Yamina Benguigui’s chest), breaches of the Labour Code (paying his employees salaries that were too low) and finally police custody with suspicion of drug trafficking) were not known or had not filtered into the mass-circulation press.

This state of affairs invites us to wonder about these new popular judges, star presenters and others, surfing on the compassionate and the emotional of which our victim-centred society is so fond (see

Le temps des victimes

by Caroline Eliacheff and Daniel Soulez Larivière). Might these judges, and those who support them, be hiding their own turpitudes by fabricating imaginary tormentors delivered up to popular vindictiveness? There is already talk of offering Jean-Luc Delarue a second chance, once he has mended his ways, but would he and his future backers then know how to offer, to those, for example, who propose an alternative reflection on the question of the new spiritualities, a second chance (or rather a first one) to demonstrate the absurdity of the French-style anti-cult fight? We are under no illusion on that point.

Eric Bouzou was born in 1958. He is an engineer. His technical career has been punctuated by encounters with people who bring alive the spiritual dimension of man. His interest in the defence of spiritual freedom led him to commit himself actively to the work of the CICNS.

Selected Extracts from Our Interviews

with jurists, sociologists, historians and other witnesses of our society…

The spoken language has been retained.

See the videos

A book gathering the entirety of our interviews will shortly appear under the title “La France et ses minorités spirituelles, une liberté en danger”

Anne Morelli (historian):

(…) When one says cult, it frightens. When one speaks of a religious minority, it rather gives an impression of sympathy, or of empathy towards a group that does not have the same weight as others, and so it is very important to weigh, to weigh up, these terms. We have here, at the university of Brussels, a reflection precisely on the passage from one status to the other: when is one called a religion? when is one called a cult? when is one a heresy? And the conclusion of this reflection, conducted in the course of a colloquium held at the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Religions and Secularism, is that the power decides the label. One has an official title, if you like, of religion, or else one is considered a cult, a heresy… It is the power that gives this label, that decides who will have the label or not. The relationship to power is therefore essential, and this since before the birth of Christianity, since the Roman era, when religions were inserted into the Roman empire through a process that moved them from a marginal religion to an official religion. And still today, that is the case. That is to say that, broadly speaking, we consider religions those that have this label, and that those that do not have this label are called cults, or new religions. It is extremely important to agree first on the weight of words.

(…) If one says “cult”, it means one considers that there are good religions, the big ones, those that will be the object not only of recognition but also of financial support, in one form or another - even in secular France, of course, church repairs are paid for, chaplains are paid, in Alsace-Lorraine even the salaries of priests and pastors are paid - so these good big religions are entitled to every consideration, they are consulted on ethical questions, they are given places on television, on the radio, in the media, etc. Whereas the religions that are not labelled, those are the object of the power’s distrust, and the power organises against them, more or less, I would say, a witch-hunt, a persecution, in one form or another, by highlighting the difficult or delicate moments that can occur in any human group whatsoever, and by presenting these moments as the norm of all the marginal religious groups. Nobody thinks that all priests are paedophiles, but the rumour is spread that those who belong to so-called “cults” are perverts of every species, and commissions are organised to keep watch on them, to pursue them, to evaluate their presence in groups, to evaluate their lobbying, etc. So there is an extremely differentiated treatment of two phenomena which, from a sociological point of view, are entirely alike. What is the difference, from a sociological point of view, between the Jehovah’s Witnesses and other, better-established religious groups? It is extremely difficult to measure.

(…) The media very often centre their vision on the tale of the penitents, what I call the penitents, that is to say people who were in a group and who left it. And obviously they are not happy, because they spent time, money, devotion, on a cause which, after the fact, does not appear to them a good one. And that is true in religion, it is true in politics too (…) It has a juicy side, since there you have a terrible critique of the structures of the church or the party one has left, and one never listens to the people who continue to be Adventists, or Scientologists, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and who are happy, who receive something which, from the outside, does not appear obvious to me, but they are content in their movement (…) One does not take the trouble to give an objective vision of the phenomenon and one fixates on the malcontents. And so one has an extremely biased view of reality.”

(…) Me, I assert that I have been a victim of mental manipulation, because it is forty-five years since I last went to catechism and I can still recite to you the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the ten commandments, the credo, etc. (…) So must catechism be banned? Well yes, if one is logical and wants to ban all mental manipulation, that is where it begins, obviously (…) Or else one says: well, one cannot say that it endangers democracy. I was mentally manipulated but I got out of it, all things considered, I abandoned my catechism. Mental manipulations are everywhere, there are some all the time, there are some in the political parties, on television, in the big religions, in the small ones.

(…) The anti-cult associations, which I have called “the cult of the adversaries of cults”, worry me a great deal, whether in Belgium or in France. These are people who are fixated on one problem and try to unearth their enemies everywhere. So I think it is quite worrying that they are subsidised to hunt the cults (…) And these groups, as they are paid to discover scandals, well, I would say they are somewhat driven to create the scandals and to play them up.

Maurice Duval (ethnologist):

(…) The media are the sinew of war, they make the rain and the fine weather, they can launch rumours, true or false. That is the real power of our society. If the media have an interest - because it brings ratings, because it works, etc. - in manufacturing fear with the groups called cults as its object, well, they will do it, and it will work. People will go along. I could develop heaps of examples that demonstrate it. From the moment the media say it, people think it is true, even if in the abstract they know they are being deceived by these media. Concretely, when they watch and listen, they acquiesce, they say yes. And that is the problem.

(…) The cult hunt is fairly typically French, it is different in other countries and does not exist in a certain number of others. One may therefore ask: “why?”. I looked for the causes, I had trouble finding them. But, in the end, one can say that in France it is our “axis of evil”. In the United States, they do not need the movements called cults, people are free to believe what they want. They do not need that, since they have another axis of evil, which is terrorism with everything Bush developed. We do not have that axis of evil, and our French-style axis of evil is the cults. And if you speak of cults in the street, people will tell you: “yes, yes, that is evil!”.

(…) Why is it in the interest of the men and women politicians of this country to continue the fight against what they call “the cults”? Since one sees that there is no object, since the offences are insignificant in number and in kind? It is because the fight against the cults manufactures collective fear (…) The manufacture of collective fear is a political ingredient of the first order insofar as, when there is a collective fear, one can manipulate the masses in a way without equal. Look at what was done in the United States with terrorism, putting everyone in the same sack, moreover. It was no longer a fight against terrorism that was at issue but a fight to make a political point of view prevail which justified all-out repression. Well, in France it is the same thing. And this fear means that people agree to accept retreats of democracy, in their own interest, they believe, since it “will make it possible to protect them”. Collective fear makes it possible to roll back democracy with a magic trick, obtaining the assent of a majority of our fellow citizens. And that is the great victory of the anti-democrats: to manage to have the endorsement of the majority of our country’s population for rolling back democracy in order better to fight the cults. Without anyone asking the question: “But what is a cult? What are these people?” There are only ever partisan debates in the media, which do not open the mind but close it.

(…) I am not at all optimistic about what the State is putting in place - none of these bodies seems to me worthy of trust - and I think the only optimism one can have is the awakening of people’s consciences, saying: “No, stop!” If people say nothing, the State will continue as it has been doing for a good while, becoming more and more repressive. It is something that worries me a great deal and on which one must be vigilant. What is happening is extremely serious, for from the moment that system serves political interests, there is no reason for it to stop. I believe in the ant’s work that consists in awakening consciences, in saying: “careful, we are on a path that is taking us into a domain where we will be more and more deprived of democracy”. There are pockets of totalitarianism in our society, and if we do not watch out, if we do not awaken consciences, it will go ever further. It is the duty of every citizen who has become conscious of it to share that consciousness around him. It is a duty. I think one cannot look at oneself in a mirror if, from the moment one has become conscious of the danger, one does not do what one can to move things forward in this domain.

Jean-Claude Guyard (kinesiologist):

(…) Any number of newspaper articles, but also television programmes, end with a call for denunciation. They are looking for victims of Kinesiology or of something else. How many millions of people have seen these programmes, read these articles, always very convincing? It always ends with “if you are a victim, contact…”. For them to be looking for victims to that extent, they must be short of them! They are defending their stock-in-trade, their subsidies, and also perhaps a certain vainglory. In the old days, the ladies of the 16th or the 7th arrondissement had their poor; now they look for victims of the cults, and as these are phantom cults that do not exist, they pass themselves off cheaply as heroines, they play Zorro, they take themselves for saviours of a humanity victimised by the cults. Only there it is, I have the impression they have great trouble finding victims. These poor ladies are short of poor people and short of victims.

Jean Baubérot (historian and sociologist):

(…) I think one may ask the question of psychological subjection, of mental manipulation. But on condition of asking it at the level of the whole of society, that is to say on condition of also asking it at the level of advertising messages, of political parties and the means they dispose of, etc. And then, of trying to see whether one can have a rigorous definition of psychological subjection, of mental manipulation. I am not against asking all the questions one wants, but I am against asking them about certain groups, certain categories of individuals, certain persons, and refusing to ask them about others.

(…) Have we seen a multiplication of affairs in which there was ill-treatment of children, in which there were deaths? No, not at all. The country has been extremely calm (…) And suddenly there is this hardening of the MIVILUDES, which is due to no affair. The MILS at least could pride itself on the affair of the Order of the Solar Temple or things like that. So one wonders whether it is not solely factors of politicking, of pressure groups, of the people I spoke of earlier: the fierce anticlericals and the pre-Vatican II Catholics, who applied pressure and obtained a certain change which, I hope, is not definitive, but which is indeed worrying.

(…) The law of 1905 (…) asks people to respect tolerance, to respect civil peace, to respect the fact that people do not necessarily think as they do. It establishes the same penalties whether one violates the freedom to believe or the freedom not to believe. There is a very strong reciprocity in the law, so it offers everyone rights. But it is social forces, political forces, that apply pressure and make things go more or less well, more or less calmly, more or less aggressively. One must distinguish the two clearly, otherwise one will not understand that the law gives guarantees and that the real problem is the doing of the pressure groups, which somewhat divert the normal application of the law.

Raphaël Liogier (sociologist):

(…) How does one manage to be classified as “normal”? (For that) there is no other possibility than to try to be close to the official federations, no other possibility than to try to have the “official aesthetic”, to correspond to the dominant culture, to the dominant taste, to eliminate every educational project, every project of transmitting values. You do that, and possibly, if there are not too many letters of denunciation, you climb gradually from the bad religion to the “unrecognised” religion, the one that is left alone, and possibly, why not, to the recognised religion. The good religion is the case of Buddhism. It is the good religion par excellence, which bothers nobody, which is in an intimist world, which gives the feeling of difference, of otherness, but in reality (its members) are only bourgeois Westerners of the city centres, who want to change nothing in the system, who have habits of life identical to the others’. So it looks completely different, but it is completely the same thing.

(…) In France, the anti-cult policy is a policy found essentially at the Ministry of the Interior. That is to say, it is a police policy. If it depends on the Ministry of the Interior, it is because it is considered a police problem, a problem of public order, of security. Whereas in most European countries, the policy relating to religious movements is a policy that depends most of the time on the Ministry of Justice. When it depends on the Ministry of Justice, one has not yet “judged”. Whereas police means one has already judged that it is dangerous a priori, a priori it is a risk, a priori it falls under security. That says a great deal about the spirit in which this policy towards the religious is conducted in France.

Gilles Farcet (writer):

(…) I believe it is very important for spiritual groupings not to consider themselves holders of a truth they would have to impose, or which would place them apart, above the others, and really to consider themselves citizens, to develop the citizen dimension, which can sometimes risk being a little absent or dormant. And, as citizens, indeed, from there, to be vigilant and not to tolerate that their rights as citizens and as persons be threatened, not to tolerate calumny, or at any rate to correct it as far as possible, not to tolerate other forms of manipulation or pointless destabilisation. But I believe that the only way - for those who are engaged in a path not always understood or perceived by everyone - to answer is by being themselves convincing witnesses and by demonstrating, by their way of positioning themselves, that it is indeed not a matter of an abuse or a manipulation in the sense usually understood. I believe that we all, who are engaged in these paths, have a responsibility, not of perfection, because perfection is not of this world, but of impeccability. We must not position ourselves as victims, and not position ourselves as persecuted, but position ourselves as citizens who can be vigilant with regard to the defence and respect of their rights.

Maître Bernard Biro (lawyer):

(…) The French policy of fighting the cults is Tartarin’s great hunt. The lion was hunted. The toll is disastrous. We equipped ourselves with an enormous arsenal to run, like Tartarin de Tarascon, after the wild beast haunting the public forest. Hardly any dangerous animals were found, and disastrous effects were produced in the population, notably that collective phobia which has taken hold of the country; and behind that collective phobia, a plethora of lawsuits which had no connection, such as divorces in which some accused others of being in cults. There is the toll, a totally disastrous toll.

Bernard Renaud (publisher):

(…) Certain people threw themselves headlong into this battle because they had a son who had been in a movement, who had died, and certain politicians latched onto that, telling themselves it was a hobbyhorse like any other. What real stake? I have trouble seeing anything coherent behind all that. I think it is rather an action where people want political correctness, so no head must stick out, and these movements disturb, there it is, because they lead people to think differently.

(…) I think that all these movements which have emerged since, I would say, the fifties, to take it broadly, have contributed greatly to making our society evolve, a society that might have remained frozen without them. Because I think those movements brought a certain number of things, good and sometimes bad, made us react well or badly, but they made society move. And I believe one cannot erase all those contributions with a stroke of the pencil by saying “it is bad”. I think these movements have a reason for being, that they have taken part in the evolution of our society, and that in ten years, in twenty years, other movements will spring up which will also correspond, at a given moment, to something, because emergences are like an island appearing in the ocean.

Sylvie Simon (writer):

(…) We are in a politics where only the economy matters. We manufactured avian flu by martyrising animals and vaccinating them to excess, and now nothing else is talked about and this sort of collective psychosis has been created. When we hear talk of a pandemic, it is in fact a pandemic of hysteria that has been spread over the earth, and so long as people are hysterical like that, it is obvious that they can be handled, mastered easily and made to go where one wants them to go, that is all (…) So individuals must take themselves in hand and say: “Let us stop the nonsense, stop the skull-stuffing, let us try to think for ourselves”. I always say to those who listen to me: “Eradicate fear; the only things to eradicate on earth are fear and imbecility”.

Eugénie Francoeur (Quebec journalist):

(…) Spirituality just means learning to know oneself, spending time with oneself, doing a little introspection and sharing the treasures one finds. It is really just relearning to think, eliminating what is negative. Nobody taught me at school how to reflect, how to think, whereas spirituality gives me that space. How many thoughts assail us each day that are absolutely useless, wasted, negative, and drain our energy? Every human being has his spirituality and one need only leave him the space to develop it. It happens in different ways, perhaps through prayer, meditation, the martial arts… Each person chooses what suits them (…) I would like to understand how people who try to do good on the planet, people who try to give, to share, people who are not looking for money, who want nothing from you, can be put in a category of potentially dangerous people? It is a great question mark. (…) I wonder how one can speak of spirituality in a superficial way without having experienced it oneself? It is a little paradoxical that journalists who have no spiritual experience can be specialists in spirituality. In the same way, would one send a novice to cover a great political congress? No. Well, in spirituality, that is what is done. People who have no spiritual approach, no spiritual knowledge, are asked to be judges of a spiritual life. I could not go and cover the congress of your president or your prime minister tomorrow morning, I do not have that knowledge. I could learn it, I could be given ten days and told: right, prepare! And I read everything, we do a “crash course” and one ends up learning. In spirituality, the “crash courses” happen inside. And generally, ten days is not much…

Christiane Singer (writer):

(…) There is a ferocity in a certain part of the population which refuses to tolerate that there could be another form of existence. Fundamentalism is as much in the anti-religious as in the religious. There is in the reigning ideology a sort of ferocity about not having one’s nose rubbed in it, like a puppy, if one tells them: “But life can be otherwise too!”. That, they do not want, because it can put their whole system in danger. But there always comes a moment in existence, at the turn of a death, of an illness, when life takes it upon itself to crack the most concreted-over ideologies.

(…) I find the work you do (at the CICNS) tremendous. It is so important not to act as if one did not see that there is a witch-hunt of laughable clumsiness. I find it so derisory, and I tell myself it is not possible that everyone does not burst out laughing when these commandos of gendarmes arrive in places where people are questioning themselves about life and permitting themselves to ask questions in depth. It is so burlesque. There are certainly stories that belong to the criminal order, but those are the business of the courts, and that represents 1% (of these movements). And for 99%, you have people who assemble to touch that depth together. It is so important.

(…) It is monstrous to fire shells at sparrows that were pecking away joyfully. I think it is a sort of flare of fever. But I do not see it in the rest of Europe. Perhaps I am mistaken. I live in Austria, I do many courses and lectures in Germany, I have never heard similar stories told. The French have made themselves the cantors of rationalism, etc. Perhaps it has gone to their heads in a morbid way. Or else a way of diverting attention from the real problems… It is a phenomenon that is known and practised very often. I can only say thank you that there are people who commit themselves to this vigilance and support the people who are suddenly pursued for nothing. May those keep deep within themselves the conviction that they are carried by all the others, that they are not alone. That is capital. So I salute this activity greatly and I hope with all my heart that this flare of morbid fever will come back down.

(…) I was recently rereading the Decameron of Boccaccio and that of Marguerite de Navarre: characters leave Florence, invaded by the plague, and withdraw to shelter to tell each other bawdy stories for days and days, because that is difficult to do in the middle of a society still under surveillance. In our day, what are called small spirituality groups do somewhat the same thing. They leave the city, not to go and tell each other bawdy stories, because that is authorised in the city, but to speak of God. It is such a funny reversal! I would almost like to write a Decameron of today, of a group of beings who leave the police surveillance of the city to go somewhere in the countryside, in a well-secluded place, to speak to each other of their experiences, of their touchings of being in depth. That would be beautiful. You are giving me the idea for an extraordinary book! The only thing one can say is: “Wake up from this hypnosis!”

Maître Jean-Marc Florand (lawyer):

(…) The European Court of Human Rights will end up finding for the complainants and recognising that the ADFIs and the UNADFI are not of very great utility, cost the taxpayers very dearly since they live exclusively on State subsidies and, in any event, in a certain number of affairs, went off the rails and went well beyond the mission that is theirs as associations, indeed against the mission that is theirs, and went onto terrains where they should never have been found, notably by supplying inaccurate information to the police services or the justice services.

(…) The offences of “mental manipulation”: all the specialists in these questions, be they historians, sociologists, jurists, know very well that it is an offence extremely difficult, indeed impossible, to put into practice in a case file, unless one sees mental manipulation everywhere, and in that case we leave the democratic state: the political parties practise mental manipulation, the credit companies practise mental manipulation, the salesman who calls you at eight in the evening, four times in a row, to offer you a fitted kitchen with many advantages practises mental manipulation, the door-to-door canvassers who visit elderly people to install alarms practise mental manipulation. The monasteries, when they recruit, practise mental manipulation, the churches practise mental manipulation, everyone at that point practises mental manipulation. So I do not see how one could specifically allege - apart from textbook cases, for one will certainly always find a case - an offence of mental manipulation in a cult movement. It seems to me a not very democratic offence, which we know was much in use in countries that formerly did not shine for their democratic qualities.

Michel Maffesoli (sociologist):

(…) There is a distrust of those who attempt to experiment with other ways of living, thinking, praying or the like. What I can say from a sociological or a thinker’s point of view is that it is not good to stigmatise.

(…) There are rearguard battles; the various State bodies that continue to fight the cults are expressions of them, for example (…) The State crispations are real, they exist, but they do not go in the direction of history.

(…) The State needs committees, contraptions, things, sub-groups of this and that. The body you refer to (the Miviludes) is one of them.

(…) Nor must you enter into a scapegoat attitude. You must not interiorise the criticism made of you. Very often, when one “interiorises” what one is designated by, one ends up being what they want you to be. The formula is a little complicated but it says well what it means. If the new spiritualities interest you, it is by living them that they will radiate of themselves (…) The scapegoat technique is habitual. Onto an animal predestined for it are thrown the sins, the defects that are within the social body, and it is driven out, loaded with the sins of society. That is the origin of the scapegoat. It is evident that all the forms of non-rationality are working the social body. The development of clairvoyance, of astrology, of syncretistic forms of philosophy, Buddhism, Zen - like it or not, it is there, it exists. A certain intelligentsia - politicians, journalists, academics - are afraid of it, so they tend to load the animal with all these sins of the collective body in order to drive it out. It is a habitual process. One must not panic, and above all not enter into the game. (…) The important thing is first to make sure of the truth of what one has to say, of its depth, which is not easy work, and if one makes that effort, which truly demands asceticism, then there is a process of diffusion (…) That there can be blockages, rearguard battles, barriers and everything to match, that is how it is, it is the human tragedy, in a certain way. It is the property of institutions to block what is new, or renewal. But, I say it at my age, with, I was going to say, a certain wisdom, at any rate a serenity: it seems to me that if what one has to say is founded, in the true sense of the term, something that refers back to the original, to its roots, well, those roots will be dynamic - it is what I call dynamic rootedness.

Pastor Kounkou (Theologian):

(…) I knew a pastor of great worth and great abnegation who created a church in Mulhouse, Pastor Samuel Peterschmitt, who became a friend: what has he not endured! They even created an association against his church: “The association for the defence of the Victims of la Porte Ouverte Chrétienne”! And I saw reports that went out at prime time on the televisions: they come and film him, he is at the window, he asks simply to be able to give a right of reply. No, he is not given the possibility of replying. But they nevertheless permit themselves to say: “There is the great cult!”. I said no, no, there is a problem.

(…) When one writes a book that touches on the religious question, the media do not welcome it as easily as a book where every page speaks of sex. There, your success is guaranteed (…) One has the impression of a society that wants to manage idiocy to the extreme, you see, that is to say that everything that can help awaken consciousness must above all be pushed aside. It is a real difficulty and I say it firmly so that the media too wake up. Because the media are not made for one given current, a Republic is not made only for one given current. Religion is part of French reality.

(…) The movements themselves - I would say the Christians - must refuse that, must refuse to be labelled in this way, must stand up, as I do today, must tell the truth about the situations. I am sure that if one says of a public man, a politician: “He did such-and-such a thing”, he will say: “First I resign from my post, from my functions, but I want the courts to establish the truth”. And why is it done for those people and not for millions of others…? In France, I believe that if truly serious statistics were made, more than half the population believes (…) The people who have chosen the religion of atheism are a minority, except that they have been put in posts, and instead of doing the real work - giving us happiness, for that is after all the meaning of politics, since the Greeks: to create the happiness of society, the happiness of individuals - instead of that, they are there to create our anxieties.

(…) So I would say rather: one must - and I believe it is the duty of every citizen - refuse to be a slave of suspicions. At a given moment one says: “Ok!” and that too is a cowardice. You are made a slave and you remain a slave. One must say: “No, we are not slaves; no, I did not rape anyone in my ministry; no, I did not do such-and-such a thing; no, my church does not practise that; no, my religious conviction does not lead me to that kind of thing”. And what is not shown is what the movements create, the added values: those added values ought to be valorised. I see social works, I see people being helped out of illiteracy, people being helped out of drugs, people being brought out of psychiatry too, and it is true that these are often great battles.

Régis Dericquebourg (social psychology):

(…) I refuse the idea according to which at the head of these movements (for example at the head of Jehovism) there would be a dozen people who do not believe at all in what they teach and who manipulate six million people, any more than I believe that the Pope does not believe in what he says and manipulates hundreds of millions of Catholics.

(…) I had a tax audit after a journalist from L’Événement du Jeudi said on Antenne 2 that I was a notorious Scientologist. It has happened that at the moment of taking decisions in a university commission concerning me, someone said: “Yes, but he’s a Scientologist!” It is generally the Scientology accusation that comes up most and it is the most stigmatising. I obviously have an absolutely calamitous file at the Renseignements Généraux, and I will give you an example: one day a friend who is part of what is called the new age meets a member of the Renseignements Généraux charged with advising local journalists on the problem of the cults. That person told him that I was a notorious Scientologist, so he should beware of me because he had understood we saw each other, that I had paid for my house with Scientology money, and that I was a shareholder in an esoteric bookshop in Lille (which moreover has no shareholders and which refused to sell my book “Croire et Guérir”). Later his wife came to see me to tell me (his wife is an informer) that this friend was a swindler and that the hospital he was founding in Tibet was a pure swindle. That gives you an idea of the kind of procedures.

(…) These two decades are for me two sad, dark decades, in which a socialist regime tried to hide all its failures, all its corruption, by taking a scapegoat: the cults, of which it made the vehicle of every ill, with arguments as old as the anti-cult fight, such as: the cults are the Trojan horse of the United States… Already under Nazi Germany, it was said of the American sects that they were there to destroy the German people! There are people who amused themselves greatly with that, who vented their aggressiveness copiously. On one side, they were asked not to be racist, and on the other a whole population was allowed to let off steam, with practically an obligation to practise discrimination, ostracism, and I would even say racism (…) Ways of doing things that existed before were taken up again, the old myths employed against the witches were brought out again, but also against groups - read in Jean-François Mayer’s book on the Mormons what was said about them long ago. We have seen journalists, who ought to try to establish the truth, go and copy the pages of the anti-cult groups or the files the Renseignements Généraux gave them, and who sell the calendars of Journalists Without Borders saying: “See, there are journalists who die because they seek the truth!”, and these same journalists are not capable of seeking it about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, about the Evangelicals, about Scientology in France… I find that really very sad.

Maître Canonici (lawyer):

(…) Our society talks a great deal about tolerance. I believe it should talk about it a little less and tolerate a little more. It is very French: we get on our high horse, we give lessons in tolerance to the whole world, but I believe that what the public authorities are doing with regard to the minorities who think differently or live a spirituality different from the “official” or “State” spirituality - even though the latter supposedly left the State’s bosom in 1905 - must lead us, at one moment or another, to consider at last, as adults, the question of the new spiritualities. We are not a reforming country, that would be known, and we are not as tolerant a country as people like to say, and very often these affirmations about tolerance are in the end only a very convenient screen behind which to shelter nicely in comfort and common mediocrity, to avoid speaking of the new problems that arise.

(…) What is worrying in this case is that we continue today to function with a law that invites the condemnation of persons, of movements - criminal condemnation, that is -, even though the notions that would found the charges are not defined by the law. That, I believe, is the most dangerous thing there can be for a state governed by law, and I see in it for my part - I believe one must say things as they are - a pocket of totalitarianism. Certain authors speak of it; I believe that is exactly it.

(…) Does a proven situation of discrimination exist in France with regard to certain spiritual minorities? In the light of what we have just said, the answer is “yes”. There is manifestly a discriminatory situation which is - and this is where things are perhaps gravest - established, instituted, by legislation. We are dealing with very vague notions, so vague that a risk is made to weigh, in my view, on all the people who would not have a classical or academic way of thinking. That seems to me quite dangerous. One ought to think, at some point, that one can perhaps trust the citizen and truly leave him the choice of the conditions of spirituality he wants to live daily.

(…) France will have to explain itself seriously about its way of proceeding, and be held to account for leaving to a commission the task of publishing a report (editor’s note: the 1996 parliamentary report on the cults) of an unbelievable intellectual indigence, and of pointing at groups or “cult movements” without that research having been adversarial.

Christian Tal Schaller (writer, lecturer):

(…) We had the great surprise, after barely a year of operation, of having, in October 1997, the visit of a multitude of gendarmes armed to the teeth. They had two warrants for search and custody. One was in connection with the story of the Solar Temple. That is to say, we were presented on that warrant as associated with the Solar Temple, as if we were an extremely dangerous cult. The gendarmes were persuaded they were coming to save the trainees from a collective suicide that could not fail to happen. And after two days of search and custody, that part collapsed totally, since we had absolutely nothing of a cult or an extremist movement about us.

On the other hand, there was another part: infractions of the hotel-trade laws. We were not yet in order with the commercial register, our premises were not yet entirely up to standard for receiving groups, and we had trainees helping us renovate the premises, which, for the judges, was illegal labour. It was for that part that we went before the court of Valence, the following year. And to our great surprise, because these are truly benign infractions, we received not only an extremely high fine but also a strange penalty, which consisted in forbidding us for 5 years to organise courses and lectures. It was a very discriminatory measure which had, in the end, no relation to the infractions found. And it was then that we understood that, in a way, we were being pursued in court for infractions that had been found, but with the idea all the same of making us pass for a cult, even though everything had shown we were not one.

(…) I believe the real problem is that when people are afraid, it is because they are ignorant. Ignorance is the cause of intolerance. It rhymes: ignorance and intolerance. When people take the trouble to inform themselves, they discover that what frightens them is not as dangerous as they believed, in a way. I believe it very important today that everything new should be able to emerge, and that the people who are searching for new solutions, in the domain of health, of spirituality or of housing, of ecology, should have the space of creativity they need. Trying to normalise all individuals and bring them back to a conformism in which everyone is holed up in fear and afraid of rumours and afraid of their neighbour is not a solution. And I also believe that this demonisation of people who go towards new experiences makes no sense. Because one cannot oppose something that is a little like when day breaks. The day that is breaking is individuals who want to take themselves in hand and stop obeying structures that oppress them, and who want to manage their lives. It is a true rebirth.

Maître Pérollier (lawyer):

(…) What is at issue is not that one should ask questions about the notion of the cult, or about the problems it can pose. Me, that does not bother me at all, I think it is part of free research, of free expression. The problem resides in the drawing up of lists. The central problem is there. The nominal accusation of groups publicly accused of resorting to practices, to methods that are reprehensible - to use a very vague word, but one that falls under criminal offences or at least civil fault - that seems to me very grave, and this way of proceeding under cover of parliamentary immunity is scandalous and ends by depriving such an approach of all legitimacy.

(…) A question that seems to me essential is that of the judicial decisions that may have intervened since 1996. It will soon be 10 years: if these 172 groups were truly all very dangerous, as the report said, they would certainly have been the object of multiple convictions since that time. But one thing seems certain to me: if the 172 groups had been massively the object of convictions, civil or criminal, I am certain that would have been one of the first arguments, if not the first argument, advanced by all the anti-cult associations and all the people who fight the cults as they understand them. That has never been the case. One can therefore deduce, and for me there is no doubt about it, that the immense majority of these 172 groups have never been convicted, either civilly or criminally.

(…) If one had to reflect on the real victims of these anti-cult campaigns, I would say that all told, from the 1996 report onwards, there are 172 listed groups = there are 172 victims. And when one says 172 victims, it is 172 multiplied by the number of people concerned, which makes a very large quantity.

(…) Even if certain groups did indeed engage in certain reprehensible behaviour, that does not justify, even against them, this list procedure. Even those are victims of an unacceptable procedure, a procedure of media lynching, of proscription lists strongly resembling what happened under Vichy. One must be clear and plain. And that allows me to put the accent on the role of the police, and of a very particular police which took an enormous part in all this: the Renseignements Généraux, a police service created under Vichy (…) There are people who are afraid now, afraid quite simply of stating their ideas, their convictions; there are people who hide and who are afraid, who no longer dare to broach a certain number of questions in their family, with their work colleagues; it is something that truly exists, and that alone creates victims, creates an unease.

(…) The current situation is very worrying, and the absolutely scandalous collusions between China and France on this problem are particularly worrying. Once again, that can change, but it is unheard of that France, almost officially, through official bodies, should have collaborated on this plane with the Beijing regime, which uses torture, assassinations and systematic repression against a group qualified as a cult in China (…) When the problem of the Falun Gong group was raised, I remember hearing with stupefaction the presenter of the 8 o’clock television news, on a great national channel, use without any difficulty the term cult because the Chinese authorities had called it a cult.

Maître Joseph (lawyer):

(…) Around 15 December 1995, a television crew from a public channel makes a report on an agrarian community, a report which, according to them, will be sympathetic: “Don’t worry, we will simply talk about your experience of organic agriculture, there will be no problem”. What the group does not know is that this report will be entirely doctored, that the answers will be mixed up, that sentences will be cut, in such a way that when it is broadcast at a prime-time hour, the people will appear completely daft. A week later, on 22 December 1995, following the ratification by the National Assembly of the first anti-cult report, the list of the 172 movements is published in the Official Journal. One may say: “It’s a coincidence.” A national channel prepares a report, not yet broadcast. A week later, publication of the anti-cult report… But it does not stop there. It should be specified that this anti-cult report was ratified by the National Assembly by the unanimity of the 7 deputies present! It is not I who say it, it is the newspaper L’Humanité, which is not a particularly sectarian newspaper, it seems (article published in L’Humanité of 11 January 1996). 172 movements were examined in 50 minutes. That too is a particularity, which makes 20 seconds per file if one calculates properly. On 23 December 1995, the day after the publication of this report in the Official Journal, sixteen charred corpses are discovered in the Vercors and we are told: “It’s a collective suicide!” Who is on the scene before everyone else? Who will give 54 interviews in 48 hours? Who will announce to the whole of France: “I, national specialist, great competent man, affirm to you that it is a collective suicide. I am going to orient the investigation”? Answer: with hyphens: mister-national-anti-cult-psychiatrist-on-government-assignment. What the hell was he doing there on the scene before everyone else? Nobody knows, nobody asked him, no matter. On 23 December 1995, the day after - as if by chance - the publication of the anti-cult report in the Official Journal! About twelve days later, on 4 January 1996, broadcast on a great national channel at 8.30 pm of a programme that will panic a great many people, treating two subjects: the first group I told you about earlier, an entirely doctored report, and that so-called true-false collective suicide, on which mister-national-anti-cult-psychiatrist will speak and will of course forget to say - because normally he does not know it - that these sixteen collective suicides all have several bullets in their bodies and that they were roasted with a flamethrower, which the case file would teach us five years later. So this true-false collective suicide totally panics France, which believes people kill themselves in the cults and does not know these details at all, does not know either that the two pistols found on the scene which served for this collective suicide came from lots of the Ministry of the Interior. People do not know that. So everyone is terrorised on 4 January 1996 at 8.30 pm. On 5 January 1996, at 6 in the morning, that is to say less than 12 hours after the broadcast of the report, police and gendarmerie interventions in many minority groups in France classified as cults, on judicial warrant (commission rogatoire). Now, the jurists understood at once, but non-jurists do not understand the significance of this information. We are barely 12 hours after that report which terrorised the whole of France. A commission rogatoire is a delegation a investigating judge gives to the police or the gendarmerie to accomplish acts he cannot do himself. A commission rogatoire when there is no complaint - there was none - requires that the prosecution service have asked an investigating judge to open an enquiry into a determinate fact, an offence. When there is no complaint, and if the prosecution service asks for that, it means it has received instructions from the Ministry of Justice. That is entirely normal functioning. This whole process, between the circular from the Ministry of Justice, which goes down to various prosecution offices of France, which goes to various investigating judges, takes at minimum three weeks. At minimum three weeks. We are just after the Christmas holidays. Which means, and this is unavoidable, unfortunately, that the instructions from the Ministry of Justice took place before the collective suicide. As if by chance! What a coincidence, is it not.

Bernard Montaud (lecturer, writer):

“We are witnessing a faith in full mutation, where today there is a deep desire among beings of faith to have a more personal dialogue with God than in that sort of rigid monotheism which means we all address the same God. This mutation is not yet very well understood by modern society, that is sure; this mutation, above all in France - I who speak a little everywhere in Europe and a great deal in the United States - arouses an incredible intolerance.”

“I think we should get out of an affective level of reflection, we should, as I believe your movement does, bring into play sociologists, historians, competent people to observe this phenomenon. The principal obstacle is ignorance, that is to say the people who combat spirituality are most of the time people affected through relatives who suffered accidents, or so-called accidents, in spiritual movements. I mean that those who judge are already wounded, so already the problem is false. Moreover they judge only for the prosecution, they register absolutely nothing positive, they register only the negative, so the debate is completely distorted from the start, in its emotional intention and in the very intention of the research. So, I would say, the problem is so deep that it seems to me to be a problem of the maturity of the human species with respect to a mutation of faith.”

“We have no reason to be ashamed of our faith, we have done no harm for thirty years, we are liable for no legal offence; there is no reason for us to position ourselves as guilty.”

“As for the so-called domain of psychic manipulation, I would say that we are far weaker than French television and the football World Cup, and that everyone would be liable to prosecution.”

The Witch-Hunt Is Open

(le Québécois libre, no. 57, http://www.quebecoislibre.org)

Olivier Golinvaux

article reproduced with the author’s permission

The theme of the cults sells well in France, that is the least one can say. One need only observe the politico-media agitation it arouses very regularly, and has for some years. And one understands why: if Alain Gest (1) is to be believed: “beyond the danger the cults represent for individuals and their families, they represent one more and more for the whole community”. For Mr Gest, indeed: “the cults gravely imperil the social and economic equilibrium of the nation”, nothing less! Good grief, but what is to be done, then, against this scourge? Answer: assert that the cults are henceforth an affair of State. Which explains the above-mentioned agitation.

What is really the case? Is civilisation really threatened by the “cults”? And by the way, what is a cult? Might there not be, behind all this circus, a new witch-hunt, very convenient for regilding the escutcheon of the State-man as protector-knight without fear and without reproach - well, above all without fear? Is the State’s “anti-cult” fight not, at bottom, a manifestation of the very intolerance it claims to combat?

Sect, sectarian, to follow and to cut

The word sect derives from the Latin sequi, to follow: those who are part of a sect are those who follow a person, a religious doctrine. So it was with the first Mormons who followed Brigham Young in his march towards the American West. For the German Protestant sociologists like Max Weber or Ernst Troeltsch, the sect appears as a contractual grouping of volunteers inclined to a very radical religious approach, in opposition to the conservatism of the Churches. Mgr Vernette (2) notes that these two tendencies are present from the beginnings of Christianity, for example. The Pauline tradition (Saint Paul) would fall within the perspective of a centralised, universal institution - a Stoic influence, no doubt. On the contrary, the Johannine tradition (Saint John) would be sought in small communities practising a radical mysticism, awaiting the return of Jesus and the thousand years of happiness that would go with it - the millennium - while leading an ascetic and devout life in the interval.

Today, Émile Poulat has rightly been able to say that “sect is a trap word, a socially booby-trapped word”. It indeed conveys a negative, devaluing image. Difficult, in this context, to use this word in the manner of wertfrei sociology - without value judgement. That is why the authors who treat the subject often prefer to use the expression “religious non-conformisms”. Whose fault is it? In fact, for a long time, the dominant Churches have tended to present the schisms carried out by “heretical” groups as sects, those who cut themselves off - from the Latin secare, to cut - from the “official” religion to form a minority religious group. This theological use of the word sect, conveying an (unfavourable) value judgement, explains in part why this word keeps company with the pejorative qualifier sectarian in popular culture. As Jean Séguy wrote:

The term Church is, in current usage, always valorising, and every sect (in the sociological sense) wants to be a Church (in the theological sense), taxing as sects (in the vulgar sense) the Churches that do not answer to its ideal.

This tendency is not about to reverse itself, as we shall see. Indeed, the use of the word “secte” in an exclusively pejorative sense has passed a new milestone since our dear politicians and their media valets made it their duty to work on the file with the zeal and finesse we know them for. Not without skill, it must be admitted, they have managed little by little to take the word secte out of its religious context, to secularise its pejorative connotation, so to speak. To do so, they had to evacuate almost completely the question of the followers’ religious motivations - at the heart of the sociological distinction of Troeltsch and Weber - and to approach the cults through a new prism, that of “dangerousness”.

Between religious association and criminal conspiracy

Since the question has become, it seems, an affair of State - which is the case as soon as an affair interests the men of the State - our text factories have produced the inevitable, obligatory reports. The last two are particularly interesting. One dates from 1995 and is remarkable for its grotesque attempt to define the concept of the cult on the basis of the criterion of dangerousness. A cult would thus not be a dissident religious association: it would be above all a dangerous association, an intermediate category between the criminal conspiracy and the honest association. Ah! Progress! Into conceptual treacle, certainly, but progress… By the way, how to spot the religious-dangerous associations, i.e. the cults? It is here that the genius of the parliamentarians bursts forth: they have concocted for us a battery of ten alternative criteria - fulfilling a single one suffices to receive the loathed qualification - to find our way in the jungle of religious associations. What is amusing, in passing, is that the State, analysed from a libertarian perspective, qualifies on all of them…

• Mental destabilisation; Exorbitant character of financial demands; Induced rupture with the environment of origin; Attacks on physical integrity; Indoctrination of children; More or less antisocial discourse; Disturbances of public order; Scale of judicial entanglements; Possible diversions of traditional economic circuits; Attempts to infiltrate the public authorities.

The Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne (3) has noted the incongruity of these criteria. Thus, he saw clearly the dead ends of the holism implicit in the criterion of “attacks on physical integrity”:

If a pastor of a Protestant community is guilty of rape, does his whole denomination become a “cult”, or does that label concern only his parish or local community? Exactly how many pastors must be accused for their Church to become a “cult”?

What to say, in the same vein, of the criterion of the “exorbitant character of financial demands”, except that this is a new avatar of the centuries-old economic error of the objective “just price”, a thing which obviously exists only in the heads of those who claim to be able to judge in our place the appropriateness of our choices? Now, from the moment a transaction is voluntary - without physical violence or the threat of its use - the price is “just”; no matter that an outside observer subjectively considers - as I do, for that matter - that it is a high price to pay for mystical wind that will do more harm than good to the one who fills his head with it. Moreover, one could apply the same reasoning to the people who spend their money buying Le Devoir, Libération or Marianne - a weekly of the French leftist crackpot J.-F. Kahn.

The funniest thing about this approach based on “dangerousness” as the criterion of the cult is that the 1995 parliamentary report recognises that certain movements commonly called sects - like the Mormons, the Baptists - are not dangerous! All this fuss, to end up self-torpedoing the very criterion on which the whole edifice rests… Now that is work worthy of a legislative draughtsman, I must say!

The 1995 parliamentary report nevertheless ends by listing about 200 “dangerous” cults. Four years later, they lay the table again! And this time, they cast the net wider. I quote:

The criterion of dangerousness retained in 1995 remains independent of economic and financial weight (…) On the other hand, organisations not noted in the previous report, but which on the one hand fulfil certain of the criteria retained in the 1995 report, and on the other have acquired a certain economic and financial weight, were signalled to the commission which, in view of the elements of information gathered, wished to include them in the field of its investigations. An eleventh criterion to add to the other ten, making it possible to extend still further the possibilities of pronouncing the magic word cult, in an accusatory tone?

Mental manipulations: a manipulative concept

Of all these criteria, the one that has made the most ink flow so far is that of “mental destabilisation”, the modern terminological costume for the old “brainwashing”, brought back into fashion in a high-tech version - the washing would now be possible without physical constraint, solely thanks to a psychological constraint. Alain Gest does not hesitate to say of a Scientologist who spoke during a televised debate that he was “remote-controlled by the cult”! Without being a specialist in psychology, I think it possible to note a certain number of elements that allow one to suspect a great intellectual swindle; if only the scale of the defection rate of these “remote-controlled” people - generally between 50% and 100% a year according to D. Bromley.

Fundamentally, these theses indulge in hard determinism and quite simply deny the free will of the human being, which should put us on our guard from the outset. In fact, I think there is a rather close kinship here with the fashionable nonsense about advertising - advertising which supposedly “makes us act in spite of ourselves”, against our will. The sociologist James T. Richardson sums up the problem very well: the theoreticians of mental manipulation carefully ignore the aspects of will in adhesion to the new religions, as well as the character traits - the acquired behavioural habits - predisposing to such adhesion. Whether we like it or not, people knowingly seek out such intense mystical experiences.

J.-F. Mayer, in his work Sectes nouvelles (4), cites the words of an American ex-Moonist: When the outside observer notes that the aims and orientation of the Moonists’ behaviour have changed so much, he calls it brainwashing - I was simply strongly influenced and manipulated by my own will to become acceptable and to belong to the group. Essential. If we forget it, we would then have to qualify as a mental manipulator the woman who threatens to break with her partner if he does not adopt such-and-such behaviour, the partner in question preferring to comply rather than lose his companion. In fact, we would have to accuse of mental manipulation every person, every organisation of persons maintaining with others an exclusive relationship implying the following of a code of rules on pain of rupture. For “emotional blackmail” is in no way specific to the cults, or even to religious milieux in general. It is even, in a certain way, at the base of the cohesion of every human association: family, club, company, etc.

At bottom, what seems to worry the report’s authors per se is that a minority of individuals should be able to cooperate in a process of collective differentiation. The individual on one side, the democratic nation-State “representing society” on the other, and nothing in the middle that could trouble this sacred union: there is the citadel they apply themselves to defending. On this subject, one should know that one of the principal reproaches addressed in France to the Jehovah’s Witnesses turns on the fact that their doctrine based on non-violence invites them to refuse military service - a big reproach made to the Witnesses by the Conseil d’État (the supreme administrative jurisdiction in France). The C.É. considers that the Witnesses are not a worship association within the meaning of the 1905 law - a much lightened tax bludgeoning at stake - because, by inciting their followers not to pay that tax of lost time which is military service, they “do not respect public order”.

Towards a new moral and spiritual administration

Reading the parliamentary reports, one quickly realises that beyond the maniacal and bloodthirsty gurus - who ought in fact to be treated like the “laymen” who commit the same criminal acts -, it is the free market in religious beliefs that disturbs. Take for example the typology of the cults established by the 1995 commission of enquiry and taken up by last year’s. One finds there, for example, the following categories, explicated thus:

The alternatives: advocate an organisation radically different from society and from human relations. [Broad, is it not? It is clear that, as libertarians, we may feel targeted. What is simply hi-la-rious is that the rapporteur of the 1999 commission is… a communist! By the way, do you hear the voice of the State muezzin? “The political status quo thou shalt not contest.”]

The pseudo-Catholics: refer to the Catholic tradition, which they mean to maintain against the reforms imposed by Rome. [And the muezzin continues: “The directives of the central authority thou shalt not discuss.”]

The syncretists: are characterised by a mixture of different worship traditions, according to the guru’s recipes… [ “Thou shalt not innovate overmuch.”]

The neo-pagans: want to re-establish the cults of before Christianity. [“Of antiquity, only the passion for the City shalt thou retain.”]

What, then, is to be done to save the nation from the peril that threatens it? The communist J.-P. Brard was the most radical on this terrain, demanding nothing less than anti-cult legislation and the establishment of a High State moral authority - of the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel type - to decide which religious associations are “cults” and which are not, a Stalinist solution that has the merit of clarity.

Mr Brard was not followed. His colleagues have for the moment a softer imagination, like the gentle tyranny they are accustomed to distil. Nevertheless, the proposals are indeed there and they are not cheering. In the name of the anti-cult fight, certain sectors of activity favoured by these religious movements may be put through the State mincer. Thus, the paramedical professions, professional training and the associative world as a whole risk becoming a manoeuvring ground where the administration will deploy a new regulatory arsenal, with great blows of approval procedures. Let us also note that the report recommends creating posts of magistrates specialised in the matter - there already exists a “cults correspondent” at each prosecutor’s office. Good! The anti-cult judge will be able to shake hands with his colleague, the anti-doping judge (see THE ANTI-DOPING CRUSADE, QL, no. 53)… Finally, the cherry on the cake, the report invites the launching of a project for a European anti-cult convention, at once under the aegis of the European Union and under that of the Council of Europe.

Consulting Alain Gest’s book, I also found this, in bulk: extend the procedure of administrative dissolution of associations through a broader interpretation of the notion of “disturbances of public order”, organise closer control of school curricula by the administration, revise the law of defamation the better to hinder the diffusion of the cults’ written publications, etc. By the way, what were we talking about earlier? The totalitarian drift of the dangerous cults, if I am not mistaken…

Liberty and responsibility

The risk of a fascising drift linked to the cults is quite real. However, it is not located on the side of what is per se only a world market in religious beliefs. It is located, on the contrary, in this very worrying attempt by the State to seize control of that market. The fact that certain cults merge with genuine criminal conspiracies - I do not doubt it for an instant - must not serve as a pretext (5) for letting the most powerful criminal conspiracy run riot all the more.

I will conclude my remarks with this citation drawn from J.-F. Mayer’s work: The society that values its liberties must accept that it cannot always protect those of its members who voluntarily renounce their independence, devote their goods to vain causes or engage in practices harmful to them. Where questions of faith and association are at stake, the individual who is truly free is not only free to enjoy his choices, but also to suffer from them. (Daniel G. Hill)

On the pretext of sparing us useless sufferings, the men of the State want nothing less than to choose in our place. To yield to their de-responsibilising “benevolence” is to take here, as elsewhere, a great step down the road to serfdom.

Olivier GOLINVAUX was a (DEA) student at the Law Faculty of Aix-en-Provence. He is a contributor to Québécois Libre.

1. Alain Gest, Les sectes, une affaire d’État, L’Archer, Paris, 1999. Mr Gest chaired the parliamentary commission whose enquiry led to the much-mediatised 1995 report.

2. J. Vernette, Les sectes, collection Que sais-je?, no. 2519, P.U.F., Paris, 1990. 3. M. Introvigne, “Sectes et droit de persécution” in Pour en finir avec les sectes: le débat sur le rapport de la commission parlementaire, Dervy, Paris, 1996.

3. J.-F. Mayer, Sectes nouvelles, Éditions du Cerf, Paris, 1985.

4. “If it is judged in conformity with the public good to put an end to the malfeasance of the cults, let that malfeasance be ended, even if the principle of liberty has to be jostled for it.” Roger Ikor, Je porte plainte, Albin Michel, Paris 1981. Mr Ikor was addressing the President of the Republic, who “embodies our country and our civilisation”.

Commentary on the “Raffarin” Circular on the Fight against Dérives Sectaires

By Emile Dalbret of CICNS

The circular of 27 May 2005 on the fight against dérives sectaires issued by Jean-Pierre Raffarin was perceived by some in spiritual circles as a source of hope, a sign of the government’s goodwill towards restoring a certain equity in the treatment of new spiritualities.

Reading this circular, the full text of which you will find below, we wonder however how its announcement could have carried any enthusiasm.

This document is enough to convince one that the “policy of fighting against dérives sectaires” is being called into question only on a minor point of form, but in no way in its perspectives, its intentions and its intensity.

Comments in bold italics within the text

Official Journal no. 126 of 1 June 2005, page 9751

text no. 8

Decrees, orders, circulars

General texts

Prime Minister

Circular of 27 May 2005 on the fight against dérives sectaires

NOR: PRMX0508471C

Paris, 27 May 2005.

The Prime Minister to the Ministers and Secretaries of State, to the Prefects,

In creating, by the decree of 28 November 2002, the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combat against Dérives Sectaires (MIVILUDES), the Government intended to reorganise the preventive and repressive action of the services of the State against these doings. After thirty months of operation of the MIVILUDES, and following the second annual report submitted to me by its president, I judge it useful to draw the lessons and to set out the orientations that follow.

I. - The principles of the action carried out by the Government

The action carried out by the Government is dictated by the concern to reconcile the fight against the doings of certain groups, which exploit the subjection, physical or psychological, in which their members find themselves placed, with respect for public liberties and for the principle of laïcité.

Expressed there is the whole paradox of a state which, while claiming to act for the safeguard of its citizens, finds itself regularly confronted with the limits imposed by the fundamental texts of its own constitution.

Experience has shown that an approach consisting, for the public authorities, in describing this or that group as a “cult” and in founding their action on that description alone would not make it possible to ensure this reconciliation effectively and to give the initiatives taken a solid basis in law. It has therefore been decided, rather than blacklisting certain groups, to exercise particular vigilance over any organisation which appears to exert a hold dangerous to the individual liberty of its members, so as to be ready to identify and to repress any doing liable to receive a criminal characterisation or, more generally, seeming contrary to the laws and regulations. This concern for legal certainty, far from weakening the action carried out, only better guarantees its effectiveness.

This is, we believe, an unprecedented admission that the French government engaged, within the framework of its policy of fighting against dérives sectaires, in an “experiment” of “blacklisting” by founding its action on the mere description as a cult. This admission, which seems to us extremely grave, is in no way accompanied by the fundamental reconsideration we could legitimately expect. We can read in this paragraph not only the determination to persevere in this policy, but also the intention of letting a vagueness reign in this action, maintained by terms we have highlighted and which leave the door open to every interpretation and every abuse. The reconsideration of form developed further on is moreover, it seems, motivated only by a “concern for legal certainty”.

It is clear, however, that such an approach can be fully effective only if civil servants and public agents carry out, with discernment, genuine action on the ground:

• they must strive to seek out and to identify, within their sphere of responsibilities, any activity, whatever its form, liable to take on a “cult-like” character, because it places the persons taking part in it in a situation of subjection or of hold and takes advantage of that dependence;

Thus, the groups will no longer be cults, but activities of a cult-like character. The definition given here could once again be attributed to every type of human activity. A supporters’ association, a political party, like a football club or a company, places its members or its employees in a situation of dependence from which they profit. Since indeed, as in spiritual circles, people often gather there through communion of interest, of conviction or of faith in order to make these grow.

• this activity must then be followed with extreme vigilance so as to prevent any reprehensible doing and, should it occur, to engage repressive action without delay. This vigilance must be exercised taking account of the evolution of the cult phenomenon, which makes the list of movements annexed to the 1995 parliamentary report less and less pertinent. One observes in fact the formation of small structures, diffuse, shifting and less easily identifiable, which take advantage in particular of the possibilities of dissemination offered by the Internet.

The State is therefore now attacking the “small ones” more particularly. It is true that certain large groups have turned out to have cumbersome supporters, notably at UNESCO, at the UN, or in certain great States.

This vigilance is particularly crucial with regard to certain groups founded on a totalitarian conception and practising an occult mode of operation, whose doings can have irreparable consequences.

This sentence is typical of an attitude aimed at maintaining the fear of an undefined and anonymous enemy, the sinew of a war which always finds new combatants.

II. - The modalities of the action

The action engaged must be pursued thanks to the apparatus, without equal in Europe, put in place at both national and local level.

1. The existence of an interministerial mission attached to the Prime Minister allows the coherence of the action of the State by coordinating the activity of the services.

The executive operational steering committee, which brings together the representatives of the central administrations most concerned, meets every two months.

I ask that this rhythm be maintained and that the representation of the services be ensured regularly and at the best level of responsibility.

The confident and fruitful dialogue which has been established under the responsibility of the president of the MIVILUDES between this committee and the orientation council, which brings together qualified figures, must be deepened.

The orientation council brings together, among others but in the majority, representatives or associates of UNADFI and of the CCMM, associations which display an “anti-cult” bias, deputies who regularly and publicly reiterate bellicose wishes against spiritual minorities and thus a consensus which does not seem to leave room for any questioning of the belief in a pernicious and grave danger in the new expressions of spirituality.

2. The same coherence has been sought at local level with the institution, by a circular of the Minister of the Interior, of “departmental vigilance cells” placed under the authority of the prefects.

The missions of these cells will be transferred by decree in the Conseil d’Etat, within the framework of the simplification of devolved commissions, to a new council with competence in the prevention of delinquency, the fight against drugs, against dérives sectaires and aid to victims.

The prefects will put in place within each council a working group charged with specifically following questions relating to the fight against dérives sectaires.

3. Certain ministries have designated specialised correspondents or project officers. I wish each minister to equip himself with such an official, at an adequate level (cabinet, directorate of legal affairs or strategic directorate) with recognised capacities for coordination and animation.

4. The regional correspondents of the MIVILUDES designated by the regional prefects have received a general mission of training and information. This mission must be consolidated and enlarged. I wish in particular that a synthesis document be drawn up at regional level making it possible to follow developments, and that an interservice training programme on dérives sectaires be organised, with the help notably of the “Guide for the public agent”.

5. The competent police and gendarmerie services, as well as the judicial authority, will build up collections of updated data, bearing notably on the number and nature of reports, complaints, investigations or convictions in connection with dérives sectaires.

6. Each ministerial department will draw up an annual review of its actions which may figure, in whole or in part, in the report of the president of the MIVILUDES. This review must bear on the activities pursued, the training actions undertaken and the results obtained at local as at national level. The case of children and adolescents must be the object of particular attention so as to ensure the protection due to them.

Decidedly, the matter is serious: it mobilises prefects, ministries and civil servants in a fight which is indeed unique in Europe and which leaves dumbfounded many European governments who see in the emergence of the new spiritual movements no cause whatever for concern or particular vigilance.

7. The answers to the written questions of parliamentarians bearing on the problems linked to the cult phenomenon - several dozen a year - must be the object of your full attention. Given the sensitivity of the subject, I ask you to seek the opinion of the MIVILUDES systematically before any answer.

Our observation of the written and oral questions of the National Assembly reveals that half of the interventions in question have as their author deputies who are members of the orientation council of the MIVILUDES, and that not one of them calls the government’s policy into question. Here again, then, it is a matter of support expressed for a more extremist policy.

8. Finally, a certain number of ministerial instructions given by your predecessors must be updated in line with the orientations defined by the present circular. I ask you to proceed with this examination in liaison with the MIVILUDES. In any event, the references to bodies such as the Observatory of Cults or the Interministerial Mission for the Fight against Cults (MILS) must be replaced by references to the decree instituting the MIVILUDES, and recourse to lists of groups will be avoided in favour of the use of bundles of criteria. I ask you to proceed with this updating by 31 December 2005 at the latest.

Jean-Pierre Raffarin

This last point, which seems to have aroused some hopes of openness, is, in the light of what precedes it, only a “marketing” clarification of an enterprise whose nature and substance remain unchanged.

It is more topical than ever to gather together to support the action of CICNS, and notably its project of the first serious survey on spiritual liberty in France, a survey which the government decidedly does not seem ready to contemplate.

Letters to the Government on the Reappearance of Deprogramming in France

Letters addressed to the Minister of Health and the Minister of the Interior (with copy to the MIVILUDES) following the announcement made by Maître Picotin, lawyer, of the creation of an exit counseling cell in Aquitaine. Exit counseling is presented as an improved form of a method for extracting members of a spiritual minority by force, banned in the United States in the 1980s, called “Deprogramming”. The controversy around these methods is not extinguished, for the names and forms of this method for compelling individuals to renounce their beliefs keep changing in the wake of abuses. The attempted “exfiltration” in England, a private initiative of Maître Picotin and his team, of the “recluses of Monflanquin”, well illustrates this will to “get the member out of his group” against his will, and before even having spoken with him. Exit counseling, in our view, represents only an extreme form of the intolerance and blind repression manifested by the primary anti-cultism of our era. These letters have remained unanswered to this day (April 2011).

For the attention of the Ministers of the Interior and of Health

Montpezat de Quercy, 1 December 2009

Subject: Concerns about the methods known as: Exit Counseling, Thought Reform Consulting and Deprogramming in France Ref: cicns/EC/no.1 Monsieur le Ministre, The affair known as that of the “recluses of Monflanquin” has agitated the media world for several weeks. Our association (Centre d’Information et de Conseil des Nouvelles Spiritualités), which has worked to balance the debate on the fight against dérives sectaires for nearly 6 years, has noted the usual exaggerations and defamations on the part of the media. But we are contacting you more particularly about a piece of information which slipped in amid the avalanche of dispatches and interviews and which arouses our keen concern. Maître Picotin, lawyer for the civil parties in this affair, revealed in the course of his excursion to England that he had created in Aquitaine a “team of exit counselors” to help members leave a group judged to be a cult (even if these persons have asked for nothing). You are perhaps aware of the stormy past of deprogramming practices in the United States and in France, which have taken in turn the names of “exit counseling” and then, more recently, “thougt reform consultation”. We invite you to read our dossier on the subject (Document A: Deprogramming) as well as our recent communiqué (Document B: Communiqué) . These practices, little regulated but often tolerated because they seem to suit distraught family members, are in total contradiction with the current directives concerning the regulation of psychotherapies in France, which require that all psychotherapists be qualified. Indeed, if in the past (the 1970s-1980s) deprogramming was the work of veritable gangsters (kidnappings, violence, harassment), some of whom served prison sentences, the methods of exit counseling, presented thereafter as an improvement, are, by the very admission of their promoters, often practised by persons without any training other than their personal and often passionate involvement in the anti-cult fight (which is the case of Maître Picotin, to our knowledge). We had occasion, in another affair, to bring to light the case of parents who confined their daughter and administered medication to her by force to make her renounce her beliefs. Their testimony was presented in 2007 on a television programme (Document C: Télévision) . We ask that light be shed on the exit counseling body founded in Aquitaine by Maître Picotin (and his associates, whose names were curiously kept secret during their attempted “exfiltration of the members of this group at Oxford) as well as on any other body with the same objectives. We therefore thank you to let us know the information at your disposal on this subject, and the existing legal framework for these practices which are developing in the shadows. The French spiritual minorities have the right to know whether the government supports these methods, whether they are therefore official or represent a marginal and unrecognised activity. Awaiting your reply, we beg you to accept, Monsieur le Ministre, the expression of our very high consideration.

The CICNS’s Letters to the Media Following the 2008 MIVILUDES Report

The 2008 report of the MIVILUDES, which we have commented on, is a regrettable example of a political drift. But the account of it given by the media is another cause of indignation for anyone who cares about individual liberties and about the power of information. We wrote to a certain number of them to express our feeling to them. Do not hesitate to do the same, the road to a healthier state of affairs is still long and needs all our efforts combined.

La Croix - 18 May 2009 - “When charlatans pass themselves off as therapists”

http://www.la-croix.com/article/index.jsp?docId=2374018&rubId=788

Email from the CICNS for the attention of Marianne GOMEZ - 20 May 2009:

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 18 May 2009, you wrote an article entitled “When charlatans pass themselves off as therapists”

This article takes up the assertions of the MIVILUDES without nuance and makes itself the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic, educational or other choices.

While it is natural for you to express your point of view, you are bound to provide balanced information presenting an overall view of the opinions on the subject. That is a condition for respecting your readers’ free will. It is also a minimum condition of respect for those women and men whom you point the finger at without precautions and without apparently concerning yourself with the impact of your words.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, each part being viewable independently of the other two.

Part 3 is more specifically devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

The page The fight against the cults on your newspaper’s site would, in our view, deserve to be revised, and it might be useful to you to draw inspiration from Part 1 of our documentary.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

Libération - 18 May 2009 - “The report that takes the cult machine apart”

http://www.liberation.fr/societe/0101567845-le-rapport-qui-demonte-la-secte-machine

Email from the CICNS for the attention of the editors-in-chief on 20 May 2009:

Hello,

Please find below the message we sent today to Guillaume Dasquié.

Cordially,

The CICNS team

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 18 May 2009, you wrote an article entitled “The report that takes the cult machine apart”

You write in your introduction:

“The brawl is growing fiercer between the cults and their principal detractor in France, the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combat against Cultic Deviances.”

Even if your article has the merit of pointing out that not everyone agrees with the government’s policy in this matter, it conveys an extremely reductive vision and, in essence, makes itself the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic, educational or other choices.

While it is natural for you to express your point of view, you are bound to provide balanced information presenting an overall view of the opinions on the subject. That is a condition for respecting your readers’ free will. It is also a minimum condition of respect for those women and men whom you point the finger at without precautions and without apparently concerning yourself with the impact of your words.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, each part being viewable independently of the other two.

Part 1 is more specifically devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

Finally, you will find a presentation of the CICNS as well as our Charter.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

20 Minutes - Series of articles accompanying the release of the MIVILUDES report

http://www.20minutes.fr/article/327221/France-La-Miviludes-veut-referencer-les-sectes.php

Email from the CICNS for the attention of the editors-in-chief, 20 May 2009:

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

In recent days you have published several articles on the subject of “dérives sectaires”,

-“Professional training, the cults’ new market”,

-“The shadow of the cults hangs over mental health”,

-“Psychotherapists once again singled out by the Miviludes”,

-“The Miviludes wants to ‘index’ the cults”,

-“Satanism in the Miviludes’ line of sight”,

(a non-exhaustive list). The last article is the exception among these publications, since it is the only one to question the assertions of the MIVILUDES and to open itself to an alternative opinion, namely that of Olivier Bobineau, an academic specialising in the study of Satanism.

The other articles cited make themselves, without precaution, the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic or educational choices.

The exception we highlight ought, in our view, to be a rule: while it is natural for you to express your point of view, you are bound to provide balanced information presenting an overall view of the opinions on the subject. That is a condition for respecting your readers’ free will. It is also a minimum condition of respect for those women and men whom you point the finger at without precautions and without apparently concerning yourself with the impact of your writings.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, and on the abuses of the “fight against dérives sectaires”, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3: each part can be viewed independently of the other two.

The third part is more particularly devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

Cordially,

The CICNS Team

http://www.cicns.net

Midi Libre - 20 May 2009 - Editorial: “Charlatans”

http://www.midilibre.com/articles/2009/05/20/20090520-EDITO-Charlatans.php5

Email from the CICNS for the attention of François Martin (editor-in-chief) on 29 May 2009:

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

In recent days you have published several articles on the subject of dérives sectaires, including an editorial entitled “Charlatans” which bears your signature.

These publications make themselves, without precaution, the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic or educational choices.

While it is natural for you to express your point of view, you are bound to provide balanced information presenting an overall view of the opinions on the subject. That is a condition for respecting your readers’ free will. It is also a minimum condition of respect for those women and men whom you point the finger at without precautions and without apparently concerning yourself with the impact of your writings.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3: each part can be viewed independently of the other two.

The third part is more particularly devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

Cordially,

The CICNS Team

http://www.cicns.net

Europe 1 - 19 May 2009 - “A third of psychotherapists come from cultic milieux”

http://www.europe1.fr/Info/Actualite-France/Societe/Un-tiers-des-psychotherapeutes-viennent-des-milieux-sectaires/(gid)/223854

Email from the CICNS for the attention of Marc-Olivier FOGIEL on 25 May 2009:

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 19 May 2009, you received Georges Fenech on your programme.

While we cannot judge the value of the practices and persons called into question in the course of the programme, or their possible abuses, we were able to observe that you took, and repeated, at face value the assertions of the 2008 MIVILUDES report and of its president, which are in reality supported by no serious study or significant proof of the danger they describe.

You thus make yourself the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic, educational or other choices.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, each part being viewable independently of the other two.

Part 3 is more specifically devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

France 2 - The 1 pm news - 19 May 2009

Email from the CICNS for the attention of the information mediator of France 2:

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

The France 2 news bulletin of 19 May 2009 at midday was devoted in part to the release of the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

While we cannot judge the value of the practices and persons called into question in the course of that edition, or their possible abuses, we were able to observe that the news desk took, and repeated, at face value the assertions of the 2008 MIVILUDES report and of its members, which are in reality supported by no study or significant proof of the dangers they describe, and which present an extremely distorted version of certain facts.

France 2 thus makes itself the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent persons or groups on account of their spiritual, therapeutic, educational or other choices.

We ask for a right of reply, in the name of freedom of conscience and of the charter of professional duties of French journalists, which stipulates that “a journalist worthy of the name” holds calumny, accusations without proof, the alteration of documents, the distortion of facts and lying to be the gravest professional faults.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, each part being viewable independently of the other two.

Part 3 is more specifically devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

France 3 - 19 May 2009 - “Ce soir ou jamais” - “After Soir 3: The Cults”

http://ce-soir-ou-jamais.france3.fr/index-fr.php?page=emission&id_rubrique=686

Email from the CICNS for the attention of Frédéric Taddei on 26 May 2009:

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

We wish to salute the programme that will have left the most room for opposing views in the very consensual media concert accompanying the release of the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

The debate was nevertheless far from balanced, and started from an assumption that is almost inescapable in France today and that has dramatic consequences for many citizens: the soundness of the “anti-cult fight”.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, and the abuses of the so-called “fight against dérives sectaires”.

These interviews and testimonies are available on our site: http://www.cicns.net/Video.htm.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3: each part can be viewed independently of the other two.

You will find at http://www.cicns.net/CICNS.htm a presentation of the CICNS as well as our charter.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report: /library/cicns/miviludes8/

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

LCPAN - 19 May 2009 - “Ça vous regarde” - “The cults: have they disappeared?”

http://www.lcpan.fr/emission/74816

Email from the CICNS for the attention of Arnaud Ardoin, 26 May 2009:

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

We watched your programme “Ça vous regarde” of 19 May 2009 entitled “The cults: have they disappeared?”.

While we cannot judge the value of the practices and persons called into question in the course of that programme, or their possible abuses, we were able to observe that the debate, like a panel lacking balance, was dominated by an assumption that is almost inescapable in France today: the soundness of the “policy of fighting dérives sectaires”.

That action is in reality supported by no study or significant proof of the dangers it describes, and presents an extremely distorted version of certain facts.

Your programme was thus the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent persons or groups on account of their spiritual, therapeutic or educational choices.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, each part being viewable independently of the other two.

Part 3 is more specifically devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

France 5 - “C dans l’air” - “Cults: the gurus are lying in wait for us”

http://www.france5.fr/c-dans-l-air/index-fr.php?page=resume&id_rubrique=1160

Email from the CICNS for the attention of Yves Calvi on 27 May 2009:

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

We observe the media landscape attentively and have made a thorough analysis of the treatment of the subject of the “cults” on the major television channels.

The “C dans l’air” programme of 6 January 2004, “The cults strike back!”, was the subject of an article available on our site (/library/cicns/television/) and of an analysis in the third part of our documentary “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”.

Viewing the programme of Tuesday 19 May 2009, we appreciated seeing you more sceptical and less docile towards the anti-cult theses than in 2004, and seeing Nathalie Luca receive more respect when she expressed opinions alternative to the anti-cult discourse than Maurice Duval had been able to obtain five years ago. The debate was nevertheless far from balanced and started from an assumption that is almost inescapable in France today, symbolised by the programme’s caricatural title, and that has dramatic consequences for many citizens: the soundness of the “anti-cult fight”.

We therefore encourage you to persevere in the direction of an openness to alternative views on the question, and notably to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, and the abuses of the so-called “fight against dérives sectaires”.

These interviews and testimonies are available on our site: http://www.cicns.net/Video.htm

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3: each part can be viewed independently of the other two.

You will find at http://www.cicns.net/CICNS.htm a presentation of the CICNS as well as our charter.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report: http://www.cicns.net/Miviludes8.htm

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

France Inter - 22 May 2009 - “L’éco autrement” - “Cults: companies are not immune”

http://sites.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/chro/lecoautrement/index.php?id=79845

Email from the CICNS for the attention of Alexandra Bensaid, 26 May 2009:

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

We listened to your programme “L’éco autrement” of 22 May 2009 entitled “Cults: companies are not immune”.

You say in your introduction: “It is no fantasy to say it: certain cults seek to infiltrate companies, or even government departments”.

The fact is, and you are doubtless not conscious of it, that your programme conveyed far more fantasy than truth.

The assertions of the MIVILUDES are in reality supported by no study or significant proof of the dangers they describe, and present an extremely distorted version of certain facts.

You have been the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent persons or groups on account of their spiritual, therapeutic or educational choices.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

These interviews and testimonies are available on our site: http://www.cicns.net/Video.htm.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links:

Part 1: http://www.dailymotion.com/popular/user/cicns9/video/x3ka7r_partie-1-120-minutes-pour-la-libert_politics

Part 2: http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/120+minutes+sectes/video/x3ks3v_partie-2-120-minutes-pour-la-libert_politics

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMcnowsfUW8

each part being viewable independently of the other two.

The third part is more particularly devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

You will find at http://www.cicns.net/CICNS.htm a presentation of the CICNS as well as our Charter.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report: http://www.cicns.net/Miviludes8.htm

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

La Provence, 19 May 2009, Audrey Savournin

The new strategies of the cult movements

http://www.laprovence.com/articles/2009/05/19/820185-Region-On-est-confronte-a-un-eclatement-des-mouvements-sectaires.php

Cicns to: Audrey Savourin

Tuesday 2 June 2009 19:12

Subject: “The new strategies of the cult movements”

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 19 May 2009, La Provence published your interview with Jacqueline Burguière, president of the ADFI Provence.

This publication in reality makes itself, without precaution, the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic or educational choices.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, each part being viewable independently of the other two.

Part 3 is more specifically devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

President of the CICNS

06 34 11 49 58

www.cicns.net

Sud-Ouest, 21 May 2009, Christophe Galichon

REPORT ON DÉRIVES SECTAIRES.

“Reiki soit qui mal y pense”

http://www.sudouest.com/charente-maritime/actualite/article/596584/p/1/mil/4555137.html

cicns to: Christophe Galichon

Friday 29 May 2009 17:19

Subject: “Reiki soit qui mal y pense”

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 21 May, Sud Ouest published an article entitled “REPORT ON DÉRIVES SECTAIRES. In Charente-Maritime, reiki practitioners strongly deny any abuses whatsoever - Reiki soit qui mal y pense”

The CICNS has no particular link with reiki practitioners. Nevertheless, we wish to salute this genuine piece of investigation and this voice given to the defence, in a media concert that has servilely backed the accusations of the MIVILUDES against a great number of honest and sincere women and men, on account of their spiritual, therapeutic or educational choices.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

La Dépêche, 20 May 2009, Philippe Rioux: “Four times more cults in 15 years”

http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2009/05/20/609516-Trois-fois-plus-de-sectes-en-15-ans.html

cicns to Philippe Rioux

Friday 29 May 2009 17:09

Subject: “Four times more cults in 15 years”

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 20 May 2009, La Dépêche published an article entitled “Four times more cults in 15 years” which bears your signature.

Your article in reality makes itself, without precaution, the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic or educational choices.

While it is natural for you to express your point of view, you are bound to provide balanced information presenting an overall view of the opinions on the subject. That is a condition for respecting your readers’ free will. It is also a minimum condition of respect for those women and men whom you point the finger at without precautions and without apparently concerning yourself with the impact of your writings.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

lepetitjournal.com, 19-05-2009, Damien Bouhours

CULTS - The Miviludes sets off on crusade again

http://www.lepetitjournal.com/content/view/41296/204/

cicns to Damien Bouhours and Betty Ruby.

Thursday 28 May 2009 18:43

Subject: “CULTS - The Miviludes sets off on crusade again”

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 20 May 2009, you published an article by Damien Bouhours entitled “CULTS - The Miviludes sets off on crusade again”.

The title of this article contains, unintentionally it would seem, more truth than the text that follows it.

To speak of a crusade is in reality apt, if one remembers that the crusades were political tools with dramatic collateral damage, which stigmatised an entire (Saracen) population in a criminal amalgam.

“Scientology, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Raël and a plethora of other cult movements are extending their influence almost everywhere in the world. If in France the cults are subverting therapeutic practices and professional training, they are today infiltrating international organisations such as the UN. The French mission for the fight against the cults (Miviludes) sees to it that these cult movements remain under control”

The article’s introductory paragraph faithfully (complaisantly) reproduces the narrowed vision of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic or educational choices.

While it is natural for you to express your point of view, you are bound to provide balanced information presenting an overall view of the opinions on the subject. That is a condition for respecting your readers’ free will. It is also a minimum condition of respect for those women and men whom you point the finger at without precautions and without apparently concerning yourself with the impact of your writings.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

Agence France Presse | 19/05/09

By Chantal VALLETTE

The cults profit from the personal-development market

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5icWzG4WC6Nv35yb4PmpnxYuEwUkA

cicns to Chantal Vallette

Thursday 28 May 2009 18:34

Subject: “The cults profit from the personal-development market”

Hello,

During a telephone exchange in 2007, you confided to us that you regularly read our press releases.

We are surprised today to see circulating a dispatch entitled “The cults profit from the personal-development market”, signed with your name, which is truly an anti-cult parti pris.

While it is natural to express the MIVILUDES’s point of view, given your position of influence, and knowing you to be informed of the existence of alternative opinions on the subject, we hoped for more balanced information from you.

The use of a few precautions, conditionals and quotation marks (for example: “The ‘cults’, according to the MIVILUDES, are said to be profiting from the personal-development market”), would be a minimum condition for respecting your readers’ free will. It would also be a mark of respect addressed to those women and men pointed at without precautions by such a dispatch.

You could also mention the criticisms addressed to the MIVILUDES, by our association, but also,

by the Ministry of the Interior and by many academics and jurists

We would be keenly interested to know what stands in the way, in your profession, of the publication of genuinely plural information on the subject of the said cults.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report

We will be happy to pursue this contact with you.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

Le Parisien, 25 May 2009

Soon an anti-cult unit within the judicial police

http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/bientot-une-cellule-antisectes-au-sein-de-la-police-judiciaire-25-05-2009-524550.php

cicns to avouslaparole@leparisien.fr

Wednesday 27 May 2009 19:37

Subject:

“Policy of fighting dérives sectaires”

For the attention of “A.-C.J.”

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

We observe the media landscape attentively, and Le Parisien is, to our knowledge, the only major general-interest medium at present to highlight the disagreement between the Ministry of the Interior and the MIVILUDES, and the intervention of American elected officials with the French embassy to denounce the French policy of fighting dérives sectaires.

We encourage you to persevere in the direction of an openness to alternative views on the question, and notably to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

SUD OUEST, 20 May 2009, Hélène Rouquette-Valeins

“DÉRIVES SECTAIRES. The report of the Vigilance Mission (Miviludes) points at wildcat psychotherapies”

http://www.sudouest.com/accueil/actualite/france/article/595114/mil/4553435.html

cicns to Hélène Rouquette-Valeins

Wednesday 27 May 2009 19:37

Subject: DÉRIVES SECTAIRES. The report of the Vigilance Mission (Miviludes) points at wildcat psychotherapies

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 20 May 2009, Sud-Ouest published an article entitled “DÉRIVES SECTAIRES. The report of the Vigilance Mission (Miviludes) points at wildcat psychotherapies - Halt to the charlatans” which bears your signature.

Your article in reality makes itself, without precaution, the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic or educational choices.

While it is natural for you to express your point of view, you are bound to provide balanced information presenting an overall view of the opinions on the subject. That is a condition for respecting your readers’ free will. It is also a minimum condition of respect for those women and men whom you point the finger at without precautions and without apparently concerning yourself with the impact of your writings.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

France 24, Tuesday 19 May 2009

The dérives sectaires of well-being and health

http://www.france24.com/fr/20090519-focus-medecine-france-derives-sectaires-bien-etre-sante

cicns for the attention of: Willy BRACCIANO

Monday 25 May 2009 12:40

Subject: “The dérives sectaires of well-being and health”

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 19 May 2009, France 24 broadcast a programme entitled “The dérives sectaires of well-being and health” on which you collaborated.

While we cannot judge the value of the practices designated, or their possible abuses, we can observe that the report produces no proof of any harm suffered or any malicious act, but echoes a partisan and dramatic approach resting essentially on the arguments and assertions of the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

You thus make yourself the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic, educational or other choices.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

You may also consult our reading report on the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

BLOOB, 19 May 2009

Satanism and pseudo-therapies: the cults target teenagers

http://www.bloob.fr/la-presse-en-parle/satanisme-et-pseudo-therapies-les-sectes-ciblent-les-ados-5828.html

cicns to info@bloob.fr

Thursday 21 May 2009 14:49

Subject: “Satanism and pseudo-therapies: the cults target teenagers”

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 19 May 2009, you published an article entitled “Satanism and pseudo-therapies: the cults target teenagers”

This article, in essence, makes itself the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent persons or groups on account of their spiritual, therapeutic, educational or other choices.

While it is natural for you to express your point of view, you are bound to provide balanced information presenting an overall view of the opinions on the subject. That is a condition for respecting the free will of your young readers. It is also a minimum condition of respect for those women and men whom you point the finger at without precautions and without apparently concerning yourself with the impact of your writings.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

The editors of Le Post

19/05/2009

More and more cults in France: why?

http://www.lepost.fr:80/article/2009/05/19/1542413_de-plus-en-plus-de-sectes-en-france-pourquoi.html

cicns for the attention of The editors of Le Post

to coach@lepost.fr

Thursday 21 May 2009 14:47

Subject: “More and more cults in France: why?

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 19 May 2009, you published a post entitled “More and more cults in France: why?”

Your selection of links and information, like the choice of the post’s title, leaves no room for any opinion alternative to the anti-cult theses.

This post conveys an extremely reductive vision and, in essence, makes itself the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent persons or groups on account of their spiritual, therapeutic, educational or other choices.

While it is natural for you to express your point of view, you are bound to provide balanced information presenting an overall view of the opinions on the subject. That is a condition for respecting your readers’ free will. It is also a minimum condition of respect for those women and men whom you point the finger at without precautions and without apparently concerning yourself with the impact of your words.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

La Nouvelle République, 20 May 2009

“People are free”

http://www.lanouvellerepublique.fr/dossiers/journal/index.php?dep=IG&num=1238502

cicns to nr.redactionenchef@nrco.fr

Thursday 21 May 2009 11:34

Subject: Interview with Marie-Françoise Bardet

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

You have published an interview with Marie-Françoise Bardet, president of the ADFI - Touraine.

You thus make yourselves the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic, educational or other choices.

While it is natural for you to express your point of view, you are bound to provide balanced information presenting an overall view of the opinions on the subject. That is a condition for respecting your readers’ free will. It is also a minimum condition of respect for those women and men whom you point the finger at without precautions and without apparently concerning yourself with the impact of your publications.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, each part being viewable independently of the other two.

Part 3 is more specifically devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

E24, Wednesday 20 May 2009

The coaching offer is exploding

http://www.e24.fr/economie/france/article91500.ece/L-offre-de-coaching-explose.html

cicns to contact@e24.fr, Thursday 21 May 2009 11:27

Subject: Dérives sectaires

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 19 May 2009, you published an article entitled “The coaching offer is exploding”

This article mentions the MIVILUDES and its 2008 report, which speaks of risks of “dérives sectaires” within companies.

That reference deserves, in our view, a certain circumspection.

The MIVILUDES is in fact the spearhead of the anti-cult movement, which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent persons or groups on account of their spiritual, therapeutic, educational or other choices

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

Finally, you will find below the CICNS press release concerning the 2008 MIVILUDES report.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

Metro, 19-05-2009

The cults are in rude health

The personal-development market is said to be the target of the cult movements

http://www.metrofrance.com/infos/les-sectes-affichent-une-sante-de-fer/pies!OWARBicPi0dHhoe@QpOJqg/

cicns to frederic.vezard@publications-metro.fr, florence.santrot@publications-metro.fr, adrien.cadorel@publications-metro.fr

Thursday 21 May 2009 11:12

Subject: “The cults are in rude health”

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

On 19/05/2009 you published an article entitled “The cults are in rude health”.

This publication stands out from most of those accompanying the release of the MIVILUDES report by your use of the conditional when you take up the MIVILUDES’s assertions. We salute this prudence towards the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic, educational or other choices.

You will find below the CICNS press release concerning this report.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, each part being viewable independently of the other two.

Part 3 is more specifically devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

Cordially,

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

Le Figaro, 18/05/2009, Angélique Négroni

”We need a new list of the cult movements”

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2009/05/19/01016-20090519ARTFIG00072-il-faut-une-nouvelle-liste-des-mouvements-sectaires-.php

cicns to Angélique Négroni

Thursday 21 May 2009 11:01

Subject: MIVILUDES report

Hello,

The CICNS is an independent association whose object is to bring balance to the debate on the question of the new spiritualities.

You recently carried out an interview with Mr Georges Fenech, which gave rise to the article entitled “We need a new list of the cult movements”.

This publication makes itself the complaisant relay of the anti-cult action which, without discernment, files a great number of honest and sincere women and men in the category of delinquent groups or persons on account of their spiritual, therapeutic, educational or other choices.

We invite you to visit our site, which presents a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our French society, interviews with sociologists, lawyers and social actors, as well as testimonies from people who have suffered discrimination.

The CICNS has notably produced a three-part documentary entitled “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, on sale on our site in DVD format.

It is also possible to view the three parts of the documentary at the following links: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, each part being viewable independently of the other two.

Part 3 is more specifically devoted to the media’s treatment of the subject.

Cordially

The CICNS Team

www.cicns.net

Correspondence between CICNS and the MIVILUDES

CICNS attempted to communicate with the MIVILUDES from 2005 to 2007, under the presidencies of M. Langlais and M. Roulet. We have broken off this communication since the arrival of M. Fenech.

CICNS sent the MIVILUDES, on 10 April 2007, a substantial file assembling a part of the discriminations and violence suffered by the spiritual minorities as a consequence of the anti-cult campaign conducted for 25 years in France. The flood of these discriminations has very largely submerged that of the “victims of cults” on which the media and the anti-cult activists feast. M. Jean-Michel Roulet, President of the MIVILUDES, acknowledged receipt of it on 25 April last.

Monsieur Jean-Michel Roulet

President of the MIVILUDES

66 rue de Bellechasse

75007 - Paris

Montpezat de Quercy, 10 April 2007 Subject: The CICNS “discriminations” file Reference: CICNS/miv/no.10 Monsieur le Président, At our meeting of 24 October 2006, we raised with you the question of the discriminations and other excesses suffered by persons who have made an alternative spiritual choice. You had mentioned being interested in this question. We therefore attach to this letter a file which will give you an overview of these discriminations; this file is regularly updated as affairs are brought to our knowledge. In case you have not had occasion to read our latest electronic letters, we take the liberty of giving you the Internet link of the interview with the community of La Balme: Balme_1.htm, which perfectly illustrates the violence that persons choosing an alternative way of life can suffer. We are moreover recording more and more cases of children traumatised by gendarmerie assaults like this one. Such a situation ought to alert you in the context of an inquiry into the cults and childhood conducted by a recent parliamentary commission. We thank you for the attention you will have been good enough to give this letter and beg you to accept, Monsieur le Président, our distinguished salutations. For CICNS, the President, Eric Bouzou

Letter addressed to Jean-Michel Roulet following the publication of the MIVILUDES 2006 report, in which CICNS is mentioned in a context unrelated to its action: lobbying against copyright! Monsieur Jean-Michel Roulet

President of the MIVILUDES

66 rue de Bellechasse

75007 - Paris Montpezat de Quercy, 26 January 2007 Subject: The mention of CICNS in the MIVILUDES 2006 report Reference: CICNS/miv/no.9

Monsieur le Président, We have just taken cognisance of the MIVILUDES 2006 report, on which we shall publish a general commentary on our site. The object of this letter is to raise a particular point of this report, p. 78, where you assert: “CICNS has been campaigning for some months for the liberalisation of intellectual property law” and “CICNS’s principal target is copyright”. These assertions are false and grotesque and demonstrate once more, if it were needed, how elements of information are “used” and “manipulated” to give body to the theses the mission supports. The quotation from our site reproduced in your report is moreover not a CICNS text but an article by an American author which seemed to us interesting for challenging readers on the usefulness of “fairly” shared information (fair use). This page is the only one on this subject among the 750 our site comprises. Which shows how modest our “militancy” is concerning copyright. We have no doubt that any Internet user wishing to inform himself and “of good faith”, which is evidently not the case of your drafter, will know how to find in reading our site an essential analysis of the question of the place of the spiritual minorities in France, with no link whatever to the theme of intellectual property. Nevertheless, because your mission has a natural media audience, the false information you produce in your report is taken up and diffused by the media and conveys a biased appreciation of our association, which is certainly the intention. You cannot be unaware of the effects of rumour and disinformation, since the anti-cult discourse, extreme as it exists in France, is founded on the systematic application of rumour to the new spiritualities. The amalgams you make about us moreover assimilate us to a cult activity, since every analysis contrary to yours is automatically accused of sectarianism: that is a curious conception of democratic debate. We are attentively studying the means at our disposal to answer this disinformation. We beg you to accept, Monsieur le Président, our distinguished salutations. Eric Bouzou, President of CICNS

Account of the meeting between the President of the MIVILUDES and the President and Spokeswoman of CICNS Paris, 24 October 2006 These exchanges led to a meeting with Monsieur Jean-Michel Roulet, who agreed to receive us at his office on 24 October 2006. We met a courteous and attentive person. There are however deep divergences on the questions of substance (the MIVILUDES’s certainty that there exist victims of movements of a cult character and CICNS’s certainty that there exist above all victims of the anti-cult campaign do not meet. One might believe, listening to the president of the MIVILUDES, that he judges collateral damage inevitable in a just war against the so-called cult movements). We indicated that, in our view, the thesis of the social scourge constituted by dérives sectaires was founded neither sociologically nor legally. Monsieur Roulet thinks the contrary. There was also a first, somewhat epidermic interpretation of our statements, judged “discourteous” by Monsieur Roulet, when a dispassionate reading could reveal our intention of balancing a hitherto partial debate, and that our firmness is the measure of the difficulty of making oneself heard. M. Roulet attempted to demonstrate to us that very few spiritual minorities were concerned by the hunt for dérives sectaires and told us he was unaware that certain inoffensive groups were victims of this campaign. The numerous examples of defamations, amalgams and even traumas of children subjected to gendarmerie assaults, for example (while a commission of inquiry on “cults and childhood” is under way), do not seem to have dented our interlocutor’s conviction. But he nevertheless manifested the desire that his action be just and agreed to be kept informed of such situations. We therefore wait to see the evidence of it in his next interventions. CICNS presented itself as an interlocutor on this subject of society, for which the sources are too unilateral in a democratic country. We received no promise in this direction, but the MIVILUDES can no longer ignore the information we shall send it regularly. The annual reports of the MIVILUDES, containing certain statements we judge unacceptable in our country, will find a true balance with the point of view of our association. To be continued…

Answer of M. Jean-Michel Roulet, president of the Miviludes No. 620 Paris, 30 August 2006 Madame, I have the honour of acknowledging receipt of your letter of 22 August 2006 requesting an appointment. I note that less than a year ago you had already expressed the wish to meet me and that I had accepted the principle once I had had time to settle in at the MIVILUDES. Shortly afterwards, your organisation sent me a most discourteous letter informing me that, following the first measures I had been led to adopt, any request for an appointment seemed useless to it. That said, the MIVILUDES never renounces dialogue and I shall therefore meet you either on Tuesday 24 October at 4 pm, or on Wednesday 8 November at 3 pm. I thank you to inform my secretariat which of these dates suits you. I beg you to accept, Madame, the homage of my distinguished consideration. Jean-Michel ROULET

Prefect

Monsieur Jean-Michel Roulet

President of the MIVILUDES

66 rue de Bellechasse

75007 - Paris

Montpezat de Quercy, 22 August 2006 Subject: Request for a meeting Reference: CICNS/miv/no.8 Monsieur le Président, As your secretariat confirmed to us in our telephone exchange, our association is known to your services. You will however find all useful information about us on our website at www.cicns.net. Our association was born of the observation that spiritual orientations and practices have, in France and for several years, been mistreated by the tendentious amalgams of a discriminatory crusade against the new expressions of spiritual search. This observation has not changed recently, and we learn, almost daily, of the effects of a repression without much discernment against inoffensive and often highly valuable persons and movements. We think our action must be founded on dialogue. That is why we would like to obtain an appointment with you in order to present to you our entirely rational approach to the situation. It seems to us today that our association is in fact the best ally of the MIVILUDES, in the sense that it applies itself to providing reliable, dispassionate, direct and therefore honest information on the spiritual minorities. Awaiting the chance to share with you another gaze on the spiritual minorities in France, we beg you to accept, Monsieur le Président, the expression of our respectful salutations. Marie-Christine Koenig, Spokeswoman of CICNS

contact@cicns.net

www.cicns.net

Copy of the letter addressed to M. Jacques Chirac, President of the Republic, drawing a parallel between the Clearstream affair and the rumours propagated by the public authorities about the spiritual minorities. Sent to M. Jean-Michel Roulet.

For the attention of Monsieur Jacques Chirac, President of the French Republic

Palais de l’Elysée, 55 rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, 75008 - PARIS Montpezat de Quercy, 13 May 2006 Subject: The use of rumour in France Ref: cicns/PR/no.2 Copies: Dominique de Villepin, Prime Minister; Jean-Michel Roulet, President of the MIVILUDES Monsieur le Président, CICNS is an independent association whose object is to balance the debate on the question of the new spiritualities in France. We had the honour, in a previous letter, of presenting our action to you. Our site will give you fuller information: www.cicns.net. A few recent events call for a fundamental reflection on the harm done by rumours and the dangers they make the whole of society run. - The Outreau affair led to a commission of inquiry, one of whose objectives is to understand and take the adequate measures to, if not suppress, at least limit as much as possible the devastating effects of unfounded allegations, of rumours against citizens subject to the law. While this affair ought to have led to a national awakening and an evolution of behaviour, one notices that nothing of the kind has happened. Two examples will suffice to illustrate it. - The MIVILUDES 2005 Report, in the lineage of the previous reports, maintains a psychosis against the new spiritualities. The dangerousness of the new spiritual and health approaches, asserted without proof, and the danger they would make the Republic run, are rumours dating from the 1980s. No serious large-scale sociological study, and no statistical and legal analysis, makes it possible today to say that the “dérives sectaires” observed are a menace for French society, which would be one of the only European nations to be their target. - The recent Clearstream affair shows how rumour can destabilise a great part of the executive and of political leaders. What differentiates these three affairs is the treatment they receive. The Outreau affair finally initiated a fundamental reflection (will it remain one?) on the workings of justice; the Clearstream affair generates a great media and legal activity to put an end to the rumours and clarify the situation. The spiritual minorities, for their part, continue to be discriminated against amid general indifference and, what is more, under the pretext of the defence of the rights of man and of the child (we attach a CICNS press communiqué which gives three examples among a multitude of others). The consensus of the political chessboard on this question ought to challenge, rather than delight, the principal protagonists. When there is unanimous agreement to cast out of society an important part of the population, how can one hope for social cohesion? “It is not by entering the logic of scapegoats that we shall make our democracy grow. (…) It never serves any purpose to howl with the wolves!” How just and good these words of M. de Villepin, the Prime Minister on whom the MIVILUDES depends, would be if they applied not only to the affair which concerns him but to all those of the spiritual minorities of our country. It is important that our elected representatives set the example. Beyond personal responsibility in “the affairs”, of which we shall not make ourselves the judges, none of them should, during his mandate, permit himself behaviour that does not promote respect for the other and a tolerant and altruistic vision of our fellow citizens. Without that, it is not surprising that power loses its credit. We thank you for the attention you will have been good enough to give this letter and beg you to believe, Monsieur le Président, in the assurance of our high consideration. Eric Bouzou, President of CICNS

Letter to M. Jean-Michel Roulet on the subject of the MIVILUDES 2005 Report Montpezat de Quercy, 28 April 2006 Subject: CICNS commentaries on the 2005 Miviludes report Ref: CICNS/miv/no.7 Copy to Monsieur Dominique de Villepin, Prime Minister Monsieur le Président, Please find attached the commentaries which the reading of the Miviludes 2005 report inspired in us. Hoping this document will hold your attention, Please accept, Monsieur le Président, the expression of our distinguished salutations. Eric BOUZOU, President of CICNS. See the CICNS commentary on the MIVILUDES 2005 Report

Letter addressed to Jean-Michel Roulet, president of the Miviludes, to withdraw our request for an interview, following the departure of Nathalie Luca, that departure having as its motive the hardening of the policy of repression against “dérives sectaires”.

Monsieur Jean-Michel Roulet

President of the Miviludes

66 rue de Bellechasse

75007 - Paris Montpezat de Quercy, 20 December 2005 Subject: The departure of Nathalie Luca from the Orientation Council of the MIVILUDES Ref: cicns/miv/no.6 Copies: Monsieur Jacques Chirac, President of the Republic

Monsieur Dominique de Villepin, Prime Minister

Monsieur Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister of the Interior Monsieur le Président, We recently approached you for an interview, in order to discuss the treatment of the new spiritualities, or new religious movements as the sociologists prefer to call them. As we have already presented it to you, our action aims to balance information and debate on this question, and we are attentive to every sign of progress in this domain. Now, we have just learned (Le Monde 19/12/05) that Nathalie Luca, research fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), has just left the Mission’s orientation council because she refuses to be linked “to a foreseeable hardening of the position of the MIVILUDES”. The cooperation agreement between the MIVILUDES and the EHESS has been suspended. This information is very worrying insofar as, in our view, the academics are the only counterweight within the mission in the evaluation of the phenomenon. The other voice being that of the anti-cult associations, which obstinately refuse dialogue and forbid themselves to understand the place of spirituality in society. This announcement leads us to think the way is now free for increased discrimination. Your statements on the subject seem moreover unequivocal. Must it be recalled again that there exists no verifiable proof of the reality of the social scourge which serves as the basis of the policy of fighting dérives sectaires in France? Parting with the academics is a sure means of preventing objective research on the subject. We regret that the public authorities do not have, beyond the façade discourses, a more responsible attitude on this question. This observation has led us to initiate a citizens’ commission of inquiry into spiritual liberty in France. It goes without saying that the proposal for a parliamentary inquiry from the deputies who are members of the study group on the cults at the assembly is for us the assurance of a biased debate, given the partial and discriminatory statements of the principal parties concerned. In these times of commemoration of the centenary of the 1905 law, of laïcité as guarantee of spiritual liberty, we perceive, contradictorily, a radicalisation of the discourse against spiritual liberty. Blacklisting citizens without proof of their guilt has never favoured rapprochement and social cohesion. The only exception to this sad picture is the creation of the commission of legal reflection on the relations of religions with the public authorities. These opposite directions are however not of a nature to make the government’s policy on the subject legible. In these conditions, and short of a clear sign that openness and dialogue will be the tools chosen by the MIVILUDES, we withdraw our request for an interview. Please accept, Monsieur le Président, the expression of our respectful salutations. Eric Bouzou, President of CICNS

Answer of CICNS to Monsieur Jean Michel Roulet, President of the Miviludes

Montpezat de Quercy, 9 December 2005 Subject: Request for an appointment - answer to your letter of 30 November 2005 (495) Ref: cicns/miv/no.5 Monsieur le Président, We thank you for having taken the time to answer our letter and we wish, by the present, to answer your request for clarification with a view to an appointment. We beg you to believe there is in our letter no “charge” brought against the government’s policy in the matter of prevention against dérives sectaires. Our tone is resolutely that of dialogue and conciliation, but we make the choice of speaking without detour of the questions that occupy us. The long list of worrying points mentioned in our previous letter doubtless gives you the impression of a register of grievances a little too laden, and in which is found no recognition of the State’s efforts to protect its fellow citizens. From our point of view, two perceptions oppose each other on the question of dérives sectaires. That of the public authorities and that of the persons who consider that the corresponding policy ends by infringing the right to individual liberties: among these persons are counted many academics and jurists. The first vision is widely mediatised, the second is passed over in silence or ignored. And it is there that democratic debate does not seem to us respected. It does not seem to us balanced to speak of dérives sectaires without mentioning the excesses of the corresponding policy, since they exist (cf. our interviews). To ignore the amalgam made, voluntarily or not, between the new spiritualities and criminality is not legitimate. That would be to feign ignorance of the force of rumour and defamation. Recent events demonstrate the devastating effects unfounded accusations can have. To be accused of being a “cult” or of “dérive sectaire” today has the same consequences for a significant number of French citizens. Our action places itself resolutely within the framework of the law, but of a law applied without discrimination. One can say there exist two debates today. The first is a debate of conviction, where each party presents its perception, based on the information at its disposal. It is necessary to support these convictions not on fear but on precise and verifiable facts. We observe that psychosis, rather than the understanding of the phenomenon of the new spiritualities, is an ingredient too often used by certain public authorities, seconded in this by a great number of media. The second debate, the only one able to decide between the two camps that have formed on the subject, is that of proof. The actions of the Miviludes, and particularly those of the anti-cult organisations supported by the State, do not seem to us to go in the direction of an objective and dispassionate study of the reality of the “cults” in France. That is why we have had to initiate a Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry into spiritual liberty in France. That is not our role, for Parliament ought to have been the initiator of such an inquiry. But the last parliamentary report on the question demonstrated the superficial approach of the parliamentarians to this subject. The information we provide on our site and the interviews we have made of sociologists and jurists express a voice that cannot be ignored in this debate. We invite you to consult them in order to understand our approach. We hope these few clarifications will have convinced you of our constructive action and our will to dialogue objectively and rationally, even if that may pass through an uncompromising critique of what appears to us an infringement of the individual liberties a democracy must defend at all costs. It is laudable that the State seeks to protect its fellow citizens. But the precautionary principle should not end in an infringement of liberties. Please believe, Monsieur le Président, in the assurance of our high consideration, Eric Bouzou, President of CICNS

Letter addressed to M. Jean-Louis Langlais, president of the MIVILUDES, with copy to M. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, prime minister. Below it, the answer of M. Gilles Bottine, secretary of the MIVILUDES. Monsieur, We have the great regret of finding in your latest report of 2004, at page 54, the mention of our association among the groups to be watched, in a paragraph introduced by the formula “new forms of sectarianism”. This direct attack on our association, in the form of an amalgam, in a report which nevertheless avoids drawing up blacklists, confirms that the intention of the Miviludes and the government is indeed to eradicate all the expressions that do not echo the pensée unique on the “cults”. This ignoble procedure, which allows you to discredit all efforts towards a balanced debate, will not pass unnoticed. This implicit condemnation of our civic action, without having taken the trouble to meet us, and this despite our proposal to take part in the debates, remains in the continuity of the French-style anti-cult campaign which History will remember as one of those blindnesses mankind undergoes cyclically since the world has existed. The members of CICNS are sorry to note that it is impossible today to take part in a democratic dialogue on the subject of the “cults” and the essential questions the spiritual minorities pose to our society. Cordially, The President. Answer of Gilles Bottine, secretary of the MIVILUDES: Monsieur le Président, I answer the letter you addressed on 3 April 2005 to the President of the interministerial Mission concerning your mention on page 54 of our 2004 activity report. The paragraph you refer to merely reports a few observations presented by the Centre de documentation, d’éducation et d’action contre les manipulations mentales, in the framework of its contribution to our report. I invite you to approach that association. I beg you to accept, Monsieur le Président, the expression of my distinguished sentiments. Gilles BOTTINE

Letter to Monsieur Jean Michel Roulet, new president of the Miviludes, to congratulate him on taking up his functions and request an appointment, followed by M. Roulet’s answer

Montpezat de Quercy, 26 November 2005 Ref: cicns/miv/no.4 Monsieur le Président, CICNS is an independent association which brings a new gaze to spirituality. We address to you our congratulations, as new president of the Miviludes, and we wish to share with you our questions about the true intentions of the public authorities concerning the spiritual minorities. We speak of spiritual minorities where you speak of “cults”. This latter term today conveys an amalgam between spirituality and criminality. It condemns de facto all the movements arbitrarily grouped under this term. A circular of M. Raffarin of May 2005 seemed to put an end to the lists of movements labelled “dangerous”. You yourself say (AFP 29 Sept 2005) that the list is “completely obsolete” but “made it possible to grasp the phenomenon even if in a manner sometimes erroneous and partially incomplete.” Our analysis is rather that the list is without validity insofar as there was no adversarial analysis, and that the way of “grasping the phenomenon” took little account of the impact produced by this “error” on the persons who suffered this discrimination. Moreover, several deputies who are members of the group on the cults at the National Assembly (MM Vuilque, Brard, Fenech) published a press communiqué in which they specify: “the circular absolutely does not advocate finishing with the parliamentary list… Better still, by this ruling, the Conseil d’État confirms the ‘informative’ interest of the parliamentary list, which thus remains a reference for the work of prevention and of fighting dérives sectaires.” The French anti-cult arsenal rests on the hypothesis of the social scourge the cults would constitute, that is to say all the alternative spiritual approaches: the parliamentary lists are in effect augmented by unofficial lists produced by associations like the ADFI, which speaks of 600 to 800 cult movements. Yet the MIVILUDES has, to this day, provided no quantitative proof, no credible and verifiable statistic on the extent of this alleged scourge. The discourse rests on a psychosis maintained on the basis of the testimony of apostates and without any precaution about the use of these testimonies. At the same time, the discriminations suffered by the spiritual minorities are passed over in silence. Why such an imbalance of information, widely amplified by the media? Your statement to AFP of 20 Sept 2005 also challenges us. It seems you wish “to advance by at least five judgments” during your presidency. Would this be a repetition of what happened in 1998, when culprits had to be found to justify the anti-cult policy? The testimony we gathered (cf. our videos below) on the affair of l’Essentiel, in the Aveyron, dates from that period: a community of peaceful people underwent an assault reserved for the worst terrorists to justify the installation of a scapegoat. Who spoke of it? Who knows of this violence? The map of the cults in Paris is for us another example of the baseless psychosis raging in our country. And it is in this climate that certain elected officials of the Paris City Hall are asking for a public debate on the subject: how can one believe it could be balanced in these conditions? We do not deny the existence of offences in the spiritual minorities as in every human group, but we denounce the amalgam made between spirituality and criminality and the absence of proof on which the “fight against dérives sectaires” in France rests. The Netherlands also made a study on the cults. They concluded that these groups were not criminogenic and that there was no need to pay particular attention to them. What particularity could make these groups criminogenic in France? We deplore the little account taken of the work of numerous sociologists and jurists on the subject. The MIVILUDES organised promising colloquia: “Sectes et laïcité”, “L’avocat face aux dérives sectaires”. When we read the conclusions of these colloquia, it seems the only advantage drawn from these contributions was to the detriment of the subject treated. This assessment led us to initiate a Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry into spiritual liberty in France: CEC.htm. We propose a visit to our site www.cicns.net and in particular the page FAQ.htm. We also invite you to consult our videos of sociologists, lawyers, writers and discriminated persons: http://www.cicns.net/Video.htm. We would like to meet you to dialogue on all these points as well as on the mention of our association in the MIVILUDES 2004 report among a list of associations to be watched. We have had several exchanges with Monsieur Bottine on this subject. We had made him a proposal for a meeting and he had answered us (GB/DG no.266) to reiterate our request after your appointment to the presidency of the MIVILUDES. Awaiting your answer, we thank you for your attention. Cordially, Eric Bouzou for CICNS. Answer of M. Jean-Michel Roulet, President of the MIVILUDES: Paris, 30 November 2005. Monsieur, I have taken cognisance of your letter of 26 November 2005, for which I thank you. You express the wish to meet me to discuss aloud various subjects broached in your letter. I do not hide from you the astonishment aroused in me by the charge brought in this letter against the government’s policy in the matter of prevention against dérives sectaires. A clarification of the facts motivating such an analysis on your part seems to me indispensable before any meeting. I beg you to accept, Monsieur le Président, the expression of my distinguished consideration. Jean-Michel ROULET, Prefect

To M. Jean-Louis Langlais, President; M. Gilles Bottine, Secretary General, Miviludes, 66 rue de Bellechasse, 75007 - Paris 1 June 2005

Monsieur le Président, Monsieur le Secrétaire Général, On 22 April 2005 we addressed to you a letter following your answer on the subject of our citation in your 2004 report in terms that appear to us suspicious. To all appearances, this suspicion is based solely on your appreciation - which one may qualify as summary given the few exchanges having taken place between us beforehand - of our gaze on spirituality in France. We think that the plurality of opinions makes the wealth of a democracy, and that any hasty suspicion of the opinion of persons of a different view is a way of denying this legitimate right to debate. Being nevertheless convinced that you are, like us, attached to an adversarial and open exchange on the treatment of the spiritual minorities in France, we propose to come and meet you to present our action and our objectives. Awaiting a specification of the place and date of an appointment at your convenience, we beg you, Messieurs, to accept our sincere salutations. For CICNS, The President. PS: we copy in our latest letter. To read also, on the CICNS site, our commentary on the Miviludes 2004 report: http://www.cicns.net/Miviludes3.htm

22 April 2005 Monsieur le Président, Monsieur le Secrétaire Général,

Your answer to our remarks is disappointing on several counts. First because it attempts to render anodyne a mention which forms part of a report issuing from a governmental body, which necessarily has an impact on public opinion. Without comparing our case with that of the numerous spiritual minorities victims of discrimination, the procedure used is roughly equivalent to that which consists in publishing a non-adversarial list of 172 movements while qualifying them as dangerous cults, distributing this report in all the ministries and local administrations, and then specifying by a note of the Ministry of the Interior that this list has no normative value, while feigning ignorance of the impact of rumour on public opinion. In the second place, it is curious that you displace the responsibility for these statements onto the provider of the information. You publish an official report; the least one can expect is that you feel responsible for its content and bring a minimum of interest to the quality of the information it contains. We still question the unilateral action of the MIVILUDES, which seems to see dérives sectaires (are they such?) only on one side. We have made contact with the HALDE, which today constitutes the best proposal of the public authorities for beginning an open and serene dialogue on the question of the spiritual minorities. We remain however ready for a dialogue with you on the same subject. We beg you to believe, Monsieur le Président, Monsieur le Secrétaire Général, in the expression of our best sentiments. For the CICNS Team, The President. PS1: We copy the HALDE into all the correspondence we have with you. PS2: We take the liberty (since we have an existing correspondence) of sending you our fortnightly information letter at your mail address: miviludes@miviludes.pm.gouv.fr. It is possible to unsubscribe from this letter in each issue, but we are confident its content will interest you.

Such Things Do Not Exist, Come Now!

QED, or the “State Spanking”

by Claude-Gérard Sarrazin, writer, trainer and lecturer

In our society “freed from superstition”, “emerged from archaic thought”, the “belief in supraphysical universes and in the paranormal facts deriving from them is on the way to disappearing”. Such at least is the assertion often read or heard. The success of books and films dealing with the supernatural and the paranormal tends to demonstrate the contrary.

The popular press, the “serious” media, the specialised press, and the School on the quiet - everything leagues together to achieve the eviction of whatever touches the “paranormal”, the spiritual, the religious. The adjective “sectarian” stigmatises “the enemy of the people” (in whose name one speaks, of course; he is regularly consulted by telepathy, without any doubt).

I use quotation marks because these expressions are consecrated by usage and cover nothing I can take seriously.

I am going to attempt to lift a corner of the veil and show the underside of the cards, at least what I can know of it. It will be discovered that the argument from authority does not hesitate to twist logic and impose itself by abrupt assertion. This will be a mini-lesson in epistemology, such as I used to offer my senior pupils a very long time ago, such as all holders of the baccalaureate ought to have as habit and automatic practice. I ask the indulgence of professional philosophers accustomed to this kind of exercise.

In what way do these philosophical quibbles concern the good citizen?

One begins by creating a consensus: atheism is the State religion, the philosophy of modern man, freed from his old demons. Then one defends “the good citizen” against the perverts who, in the name of freedom of thought, threaten public order by swelling the army of the retrograde cults. Once the approach manoeuvres are well oiled, one will perhaps prohibit, as in the USSR of old, every form of religiosity, every form of spirituality, every “retrograde” publication; in passing, one will prohibit the alternative medicines and “organic” agriculture, which seem to disturb well-established industries and privileges.

The origin of these targeted and progressive attacks is, for the moment, vague and multiform. Even a minister cannot show himself in a church or on a pilgrimage without suffering the furious attacks of the “defenders of liberty”. An elected official must represent “the people” (which elected him, or the category of elite citizens which…).

If we do not watch out, the French motto Liberty-Equality-Fraternity will soon be part of mythology, on the same footing as the chansons de geste of the Middle Ages.

Let us see, then, the procedure used at the start, that of institutional demonstration.

Epistemology

The positivists, the materialists (in the philosophical sense of the term), the “serious minds”, the rationalists, the reductionists generally express themselves thus: “Reality is the physical world, the material universe. The true is what my senses perceive.”

In the name of this assertion that brooks no reply, a whole part of so-called civilised (conditioned?) humanity condemns supraphysical realities (the bases of religious beliefs, religious rites, so-called cultic groupings, etc.).

Nevertheless, all educated minds know that matter dissolves into an infinity of ever more tenuous particles, so that the term “matter” now covers only a vague but convenient concept. The material universe is…? And yet the senses of the normal man perceive matter as a monolith without flaws.

The senses (everyone’s, scientists included) perceive a Sun turning around the Earth, and the capricious planets running through the sky like anarchists (from the Greek planêtês, wandering star), while the stars are perceived as diamonds stuck on a dark vault that lights up by day.

Man’s senses perceive colours as real entities and not as particular frequencies. Sounds, noises, timbres are perceived as real entities and not as simple or combined frequencies. Smells are not perceived as an arrangement of a small number of basic molecules.

So the trained mind reconstructs the “reality perceived by the senses” and systematically contradicts all the “evident” perceptions. Why then should the reality reconstructed by the reductionist mind be more authentic than the reality perceived and defined by the spiritualists and other expanding minds? The “reality” constructed by the mind is not perceived but necessarily invented and modified as discoveries proceed.

One therefore cannot assert, without covering oneself in ridicule: “Reality is the physical world, the material universe. The true is what my senses perceive.” Reality is what my mind invents.

To this kind of (oh how disturbing) demonstration, the riposte has been:

“Esotericism and the religions are based on acts of faith; science is an act of knowledge and experience. Nobody can verify the sayings of the occultists, magi and theurgists without becoming a so-called occultist; whereas everyone can verify the sayings of the scientists.”

Let us begin by remarking that very few people could verify the slightest theory used in nuclear physics, in cutting-edge biochemistry, in theoretical astronomy, in virology, in teratology, etc.

In fact, each of us is forced to perform act of faith upon act of faith.

Permit me to take up an example of elementary epistemology that I taught thirty years ago. The example has perhaps aged; so much the better, it will inconvenience nobody.

It is accepted (and rare are those who could doubt it) that man has trodden the lunar soil.

Let us set “proofs” against objections:

1. The astronauts planted a flag on the Moon.

Did you accompany them to verify that this is a material fact and not a photo or a film?

2. They were seen leaving in their rocket.

Were you present at the moment they climbed aboard? Are you certain they really left in that rocket without disembarking on the other side?

3. They were recovered in the ocean on their return.

Are you certain it was a round trip to the Moon and not an orbit around the earth? Or a simple parachute drop from a thoroughly terrestrial aeroplane? Were you present at the recovery, to affirm they were there?

4. Television retransmitted their movements from the Moon.

Are you certain it was not a science-fiction film? Were you at their side?

5. Lunar rocks were brought back and laboratories analysed them.

Were you present at the gathering? Did you visit those laboratories? Are you certain these are not simple, thoroughly terrestrial pebbles?

6. Photos were published.

Have you never seen doctored photos? (Today one would speak of photo-retouching software.)

7. One does have to trust someone.

The great word is out: one must trust - we are back to the act of faith.

Why then can one decently believe that men have trodden the lunar soil?

Thanks to a converging bundle of proofs. The more numerous the proofs, the shorter the leap, the smaller the act of faith.

Each of us must therefore accept the converging bundle of proofs, for he cannot redo, on his own, all the steps that led to this or that accepted law or theory. To “demonstrate” that supraphysical (therefore immaterial) data are inadmissible, that bundle of proofs is rejected, on principle, by invoking the argument from authority. We shall see it further on.

One must therefore conclude that so-called scientific knowledge differs in nothing from so-called occult or paranormal or spiritual knowledge:

1- the “specialists” reconstruct a world totally different from the one our senses perceive; a logical but theoretical universe;

2- a set of proofs is assembled and one finishes with an act of faith.

Nothing can be proven directly, even in the most trivial world. Unless one redoes all the experiments oneself; and knowing that the mind will be forced to reconstruct everything (matter is not a dense block but an immaterial cloud, for example), one cannot accept any law, any fact whatsoever, as proven. That is how it is.

BUT the atheist fundamentalists will continue to deny. “Reality” is delimited by a series of gratuitous postulates, and everything that exceeds it is inadmissible, “scientifically impossible”. That is proven, since I say so, is it not? So-and-so, Nobel laureate in this or that, said it ex cathedra, therefore… But So-and-so, also a Nobel laureate, had said… Oh, he was a naive man, who let himself be taken in. The two scientists reconstructed the world differently; one is accepted, supported by the media (and “the silent majority” accepts), the other is muzzled, erased or attacked.

Let us see another channel of the negation.

The measuring instruments

Use a precision thermometer to evaluate the sound level of a loudspeaker? Use a Geiger counter to measure the speed of the wind? Who would dare to proceed thus? Everyone knows one must use the appropriate apparatus, in direct relation to what is to be evaluated.

When it is a matter of so-called supranormal realities (for the moment, so long as the materialist postulate remains in force), there is never any hesitation. Instruments totally inadequate by construction are used. Measuring instruments designed to measure material energies cannot measure anything else.

Let us take, to make ourselves understood, a few harmless examples.

Perceptions

A colour-blind person does not perceive colours in the same way as an individual with normal vision. Even more evidently, a myope does not perceive the landscape like an emmetrope, and a hypermetrope cannot read small typographic characters like the emmetrope or the myope. Spectacles correct these defects of accommodation. The blind perceive none of this.

The atheist fundamentalists do not perceive (and do not want to perceive) so-called paranormal data. The difference between these limited perceivers and the colour-blind or the blind lies in awareness. The former are convinced they are right and will deploy everything to prove it; the latter know that a piece of reality escapes them. See the aura - well, really! See the energy of a charged crystal - well, really! Kirlian photos and other electrophotographs? Fakery, of course.

Acute perceptions

A wine taster does not read the labels on the bottles before dipping his lips in the tasting cup: he is capable of giving an opinion from what he perceives. There are no corrective spectacles for those who cannot accomplish such a feat.

Another example concerns absolute pitch; this is a measurable particularity, perfectly “evaluable”, though still denied by a few stragglers, egalitarians or people lost in their theories.

May the use of the first person singular be forgiven: I am certain of what I advance; rather than compile statistics or reflections, I have preferred to draw on my continuous experience in the matter.

Absolute pitch.

When I began studying the piano (I was a child), a cousin of my father’s, a former musician of the opera orchestra, amused himself by making me guess the names of the notes he pressed. I was at the other end of the room. He would press with one finger (he was not a pianist), after counting from middle C, the key which I named immediately (octave and name). He found this extraordinary and I found it so childish that I wondered how he did not lose patience.

At the Conservatoire, the musical dictations seemed to me child’s play, amusing riddles, while my neighbours erased ceaselessly and sweated abundantly.

I only discovered the expression “absolute pitch” at the age of twenty-three, in a work lent by a friend. Since that distant period, I have met a few musicians endowed with absolute pitch and have been able to learn that all had it immediately, and not through training.

Deaf theoreticians thought they had found a brilliant “proof”: musical notes are only arbitrary frequencies that nothing distinguishes from one another, therefore the theory of tonalities and specific notes is absurd. These deaf men are comparable only to blind men who would permit themselves to write (in braille, no doubt) that colours are all alike because they are only arbitrary frequencies… The wavelengths of colours do not proceed by leaps but are progressive. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish a yellow-green from a green-yellow but, apart from the colour-blind, every normal individual, and above all any painter - is that not what counts? - can distinguish a green from a yellow, and even a bluish green from a frank green or a yellowish green.

It is exactly the same in music: notes are wavelengths, quite simply, just like colours. However, it is strange that the majority of musicians cannot, like painters, put a name to these wavelengths.

A first conclusion must already be drawn: even if a majority vote tipped the balance to the side of the upholders of the uniformity of musical frequencies (notes do not exist), reality would remain unchanged: the tones exist in the absolute. A piece of reality that the senses of the majority do not perceive and that, in certain cases, these majoritarians noisily deny.

There are no corrective spectacles for those who cannot accomplish such a feat.

There exist, then, phenomena (the names of the notes) that the majority does not perceive, which does not invalidate their existence. So, the supraphysical energies?

Such things do not exist, come now, since I, noble consecrated scholar, do not perceive them… Heard that somewhere before? See the aura? Well, really! Perceive an energy in or around the body? Well, really! You would do things that I, at the summit of evolution, could not manage? Well, really! All humans are equal and alike - really! But I, who am after all superior…

Energy

For millennia, acupuncturists discovered the acupuncture points and the path of the ch’i WITHOUT the slightest electronic apparatus. The West, rationalist out of respect for the State religion installed at School, scoffed: ridiculous superstitions. The meridians followed no anatomically recognised path. Came the day when technology (a purely electronic detector, very material, easy to find in a specialised shop) made it possible to locate the points and measure the ch’i. No Mr Know-it-all has yet come to present his apologies.

One can feel, one can see this energy.

The Tradition has taught it for millennia. But it is good form to raise the placard: scientifically inadmissible. It is admitted (with a sigh) that machines measure, detect, inject, BUT not that humans do the same DIRECTLY.

In the same way, the upholders of the “organic” in agriculture and food are deviants. They doubtless disturb the people… Their claims are explained, like miracles, by the placebo effect.

Placebo

The word “placebo” (from the Latin: I shall please) has become synonymous with the rational explanation for everything concerning the therapeutic effects of a non-aligned medicine (energetic, homeopathic, miraculous or empirical healing, etc.). Lourdes is “explained” by the placebo.

The upholders of “it is only…” refute the “stories”: the sick man imagined his illness, and his “cure” is only a just return to reality; in the other cases, it is only the placebo effect. Autosuggestion thus operates in every case.

One may wonder, in the first place, why these right-thinking people do not systematically use this non-destructive placebo effect, instead of imposing difficult and costly treatments (the Social Security deficit?), or condemning the patient to infirmity.

In the second place, one will wonder how a wounded individual (a grave haemorrhage, for example) or an accident victim (a joint almost completely destroyed, for example) could “imagine” his disorder and rise completely cured after a healer has laid on hands for a few brief instants.

The upholders of “it is only…” line up the lists of frauds and take good care not to report the authentic facts.

It is hardly possible, within the framework of an article, to report precise facts. The author of these lines has not witnessed miracles at Lourdes (he does not live there), but he has been witness to, or has been able to verify the authenticity of, several “miracles”; these were not “psychosomatic illnesses” or imaginary illnesses, hysteria or “compensations”. It is easier to “explain” by the placebo than to go and verify on the spot. The argument from authority makes law.

A celebrated author went to verify on the spot. He is now considered a hallucinator. The book? Le voyage de Lourdes. The work was published posthumously, found among its author’s papers. The author is known by the name of Alexis Carrel (his real name Marie Joseph Auguste Carrel-Billiard; French surgeon, biologist and neurophysiologist born at Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon on 28 June 1873 and died in Paris on 5 November 1944. Nobel Prize in physiology-medicine 1912, “for his work on vascular suture and the transplantation of blood vessels and organs”.) As a young atheist doctor (doctorate in 1900), he accompanied (in 1903) a journey of condemned patients. He witnessed the miracle, before his eyes. He converted. He had the audacity to recount the details in his book. He puts himself on stage under the name of Dr Louis Lerrac (his name backwards). This scientist “let himself be taken in”.

Let us return to the placebo.

Thus, when one says “placebo effect”, one implies “illusion”, whereas the results are perfectly measurable.

The placebo in itself

All medical research nowadays uses the double-blind protocol; the results obtained with a so-called active substance and an inactive substance (the placebo) are compared. In theory, lactose is used orally; in injectable form, distilled water or physiological serum; the whole is presented in the form of capsules, tablets, powder, ampoules or drops; everything nicely coloured, nicely packaged, like real medicines.

The layman is left dumbfounded on reading the results well known to all those who take part in or organise research, or simply read the reports regularly:

“The placebo effect acts, of course, on the signs experienced, but it is also possible to measure it on objective parameters, such as gastric acidity, pupil diameter, the level of lipoproteins, of white blood cells (eosinophils, lymphocytes), of electrolytes, of corticoids, of glucose, of cholesterol in the blood, or again blood pressure.”

(Lemoine, Dr P., Le mystère du placebo, Odile Jacob, 1996, p. 25).

As can be seen, it is not a question of a subjective impression vaguely expressed by a patient, but indeed of objective measurements. This is a psychosomatic action of the first order, whose reality is measurable by all the specialists.

“Placebos […] have physiological effects. They can provoke immediate reactions, nausea, skin eruptions, diarrhoea, fainting, pain and drowsiness. But it has also been demonstrated that placebos could accelerate the healing of wounds and recovery after a surgical operation, suppress pain and reduce fever. […] The placebo has no direct physiological impact on the nerves acting on the blood vessels, but its curative effects are no less real, and those that do not take place in the test tube (in vitro) can assuredly occur in vivo - within that complex system that is the human body.”

(Friedman, Dr H., Les secrets de l’autoguérison, Rocher, 1994, p. 156).

The author (doctor and psychiatrist) already cited above sums up the effects of the placebo:

“Overall, the product would be effective in about 30% of cases. […]

“Like any effective product, Placebo can induce a certain number of undesirable effects: asthenia, headaches, nausea, dizziness, insomnia, diarrhoea, constipation, anxiety are the signs most frequently found (about 20 to 30% of cases).”

(Lemoine, Dr P., Le mystère du placebo, pp. 222-223).

Thus the nocebo effect (the contrary of placebo) exists as well.

Dr Howard S. Friedman, professor of psychology and social medicine, even specifies:

“It is noted with interest that the condition of the people treated with the placebo practically always improves (compared with the control group, which receives no treatment). It happens that the improvements due to the placebo are greater than those due to the medicine. But this effect is often neglected; it is considered a random variation or a systematic error, not a phenomenon in itself.”

(Friedman, Dr H., Les secrets de l’autoguérison, p. 155).

And yet…

“The results are sometimes curious: placebos prove in certain cases more active than the real drugs. Amphetamines, stimulants of the central nervous system, increase physical endurance by 88%, while placebos increase it by 132%. That gives an idea of the role suggestion plays in sporting performances.”

(Godefroy, C., La dynamique mentale, Jour, 1990, p. 120).

One may moreover ask THE question: in what percentage does a so-called active substance draw its effectiveness from the placebo effect? Which would modify the picture still further. Instead of 30% of cases, should one not read 50% or even more?

Indeed, one generally forgets to insist on a constant fact: the active substance, in these comparative experiments, acts, it is said, in 50 to 65% of cases, which means in plain terms that it does not act in 35 to 50% of cases. It is therefore not necessarily specific, and perhaps it is only one more placebo.

Let us retain the essential: the introduction of an inactive substance (placebo) into an organism produces measurable effects. The psychosomatic effect is therefore proven. In lay terms, the action of the “mind” on matter is quite real.

Why is the effect not verified every time? A blockage can occur on any plane, and the body may not be capable of responding (too worn out, too intoxicated, for example).

The discovery of the placebo effect thus adds itself to the classical knowledge concerning autosuggestion. The atheists have not failed to seize on these key concepts to explain miraculous cures. For these reductionists, the cure is easily explained: autosuggestion or placebo, therefore an intense mental and affective coagulation, hence a psychosomatic action. Let us suppose the cure is ONLY that; SO WHAT? Why have these masters of “it is only…” not succeeded in curing or relieving a patient condemned to infirmity or death by implanting such a coagulation? Why, in case these holy places were only suggestion factories, destroy that “naive” faith which permits the implantation of a saving coagulation? To offer what in exchange?

Why not a secular basilica of Lourdes, where all the principles of suggestion would be applied? Where all the treatments would be reimbursed by the Social Security? Where the doctors would all be convinced reductionists, pure and hard? One would thus prove, definitively, that the “miracles” are only placebo.

That way, one could not hide behind the habitual screen: the first diagnosis was wrong. Why must the doctors who made the first diagnosis always be incompetents, capable of confusing hysteria with an incurable disorder, of mixing up files, while the atheists who make the post-miracle diagnosis are infallible?

BUT there remains the key point, never addressed: if the mind is only a secretion of the brain or the electrical functioning of the neurons, what is the mechanism of the placebo? Since the physical substance is inactive, WHO or WHAT acts on the body? The doctor’s magnetism? But magnetism does not exist, since it is only placebo. QED.

The spiritualist explanation is evacuated by drowning everything under the placebo umbrella, but one takes good care not to explain the process itself.

Fakirism

We could not write such an article without recalling the well-known experiment in group hypnosis; Rémy Chauvin reports it in a very interesting work (La fonction psy, Laffont, pp. 252-253): a fakir plays the flute before a coil of ropes; the end of the rope rises and dances like a snake, defying all the laws of gravity. It is filmed… and it is discovered that the ropes stayed quite quietly on the ground. The sneerers exult: it was only an illusion. Serious people understand: a fakir was capable of hypnotising a group of onlookers, without any particular staging, instantaneously. This form of hypnosis is unknown in the West and, if it is practised, it is not avowed.

By a brilliant sleight of hand, the phenomenon (what is visible) is evacuated and the fact is omitted: the success upon the crowd of witnesses.

Who, among the most learned upholders of “it is only…”, can hypnotise a crowd (or even a group) without speaking, without technical means, or even while speaking in abundance? Who can provoke a collective hallucination? Bad faith is a pledge of authority when it comes to defending materialist thought.

Let us take another example.

Evolution

(I do not call into doubt the theory of the evolution of species; I do not have the competence to discuss its tangible proofs; I confine myself to the philosophy, to the explanation, to the noumenon as opposed to the phenomenon. The materialist explanation is impossible. I recall in passing that theory means working hypothesis and not theological certainty.)

The key phrase, for materialism, is: “little by little”. Everything evolves “little by little”. One must sometimes count in millions of years.

Thus, “the function creates the organ”.

For a good million years, man has dreamed of having wings; he has had to content himself with taming the horse and then horsepower. The need is nevertheless there.

“Man has toes because he no longer needs foot-fingers.” The remains of the man of a million years ago show toes and not foot-fingers. Evolution therefore stopped at… the first steps. Let us forget this useless detail.

Let us imagine a science-fiction scene in conformity with the theory (pardon, the dogma).

Hitler, duly advised by scientists eager to please him, has discovered a means of verifying the theory of evolution. With his approval, they build a tower a hundred metres high. A lift saves time. Night and day, at the rate of five persons a minute, inmates of the death camps are sent up. One after the other, helped by conscientious guards, they jump into the void. A well-designed mechanism receives them below to clear the ground. One waits for wings to grow on them and allow them not to fall according to the laws of gravity.

The upholders of the evolutionary theory will protest: this experiment would not have lasted long enough. Only 7,200 people would have been seen to plunge each day, therefore barely 2,629,800 in the average year. Two million samples is insufficient. And two or three years…

Let us leave man and his dreams.

Terrestrial life was born of the ocean. So be it. Fish therefore “decide” to leave the aquatic milieu to stroll on the sand and rocks. Even if “courageous” fish sacrifice themselves for a million years, no fish will have the time to see lungs grow, just as the man jumping from his tower will not have the time to feel his wings grow. The lungs must grow BEFORE leaving the water.

WHO or WHAT makes these lungs grow, perfectly useless under water? The millions of years will do nothing about it. Chance?

The birth of the eye and of the “vision” function…

It is demonstrated that the eye formed itself “little by little” and that… Why do certain beings, very numerous ones at that, still not have eyes, which would simplify their lives? WHO or WHAT generated eyes? The elementary animal doubtless “imagined” that the surrounding landscape was worth the effort of manufacturing a rudimentary eye? That animal does not think, so it cannot imagine… And thought is only the secretion of the brain…

A cosmic catastrophe? An unexpected radiation? In the right direction, obviously, and on certain species only, well targeted… (by WHOM?)

In this manner, one can imagine the process at work in the evolution of species, so dear to the materialists.

1. The atoms vote and unite into molecules; then the molecules unite into cells, which unite into multicellular organisms, which share out the functions to become organs.

2. Much later, the marine animals gather and vote that some of them will grow lungs to colonise terrestrial space.

3. Further on still, the monkeys vote to designate certain of their number who will become men.

4. And men vote to elect chiefs, kings, priests…

Men repeat the original (principial) gesture: the cells share themselves out into organs so that a complex organism may live.

A marvellous logical process, where everything starts from the base…

Who would dare believe in such a circus? How could the cells have shared out the functions of an organism? How could marine animals have “decided” to grow lungs?

“Over the millennia, or rather the millions of years,” repeat the materialists, convinced in their voluntary blindness.

In what way can millions of years modify an already established order? In what way can the “decision” of an assembly of monkeys transform a portion of the primates into men? But the genetic code… Who dictates the transformation to it?

Any logical “mind” admits that these transformations must be dictated by a higher Power, by a higher Order, by a Logos, represented at the level in question by an active, internal principle. Certainly, certainly, spontaneous mutations… across millions of individuals, obviously. Such is the spiritualist explanation conveyed for millennia.

A tree begins with its roots… That is the visible phenomenon (a necessary pleonasm). But it began with a buried germ, and the force contained in that germ DICTATED the form of the tree. The Order starts from the invisible. One can always imagine growing a tree by planting roots.

Evolution is a fact almost impossible to deny; the evolutionary process cannot be a simple material movement, even one of the atomic order: something must dictate, something conscious.

“Scientific” demonstrations

A psi subject gives a filmed demonstration. Beforehand, he has been searched, studied, checked, tested to verify that he carries no concealed apparatus, no means of trickery. The premises have been gone over with a fine-tooth comb, the cameras as well as the seats and supports. The slightest blink, the slightest movement of arm or leg is watched. If they dared, they would force the experimental subject to remain totally naked. He is expected to bend a metal bar, twist a spoon, make a compass deviate, move an ashtray, make a cup fly.

He succeeds. Conjurors hasten to demonstrate that it is an elementary trick and reproduce the same phenomena. Power over matter does not exist.

QED, or almost.

“The silent majority” is thus protected from charlatanism and the exploiters of credulity. Amen.

An extraterrestrial acquainted with our intellectual habits would demand a scientific experiment, as one would do to test a new medicine: parallel groups, in the same conditions, according to the same protocol. Which, in this instance, would mean that the conjurors would be searched, stripped, in an equally bare laboratory. Would they succeed in the slightest “trick”? Certainly not, since they demonstrate that everything is faked. And the psi subject, then?

“Such things do not exist, come now!” Let us protect the good people (they are still in their infancy, are they not?) from the charlatans and the exploiters of credulity.

Let us demonstrate to them that God is only a chimera, the expression of a fundamental neurosis, and the loop will be closed.

God does not exist, it is obvious

The basic argument, the “unavoidable” postulate of the atheists: where does this God, origin of all things, come from?

Let us quickly turn the argument around and not let ourselves be taken in by the habitual closed set of chained arguments. The materialists create sets (in the mathematical sense of the term) and triumph: whatever does not enter the defined set is inadmissible.

The material universe comes from an original coagulation according to the accepted theories; the modalities of the expansion do not command unanimity (and that is secondary in our reflection).

Let us ask THE question that people take good care not to ask: WHERE does this original matter come from? What was there before? The physicists refuse to answer: inadmissible…

It is no more logical to accept the (observed) existence of a universe born of nothing than the (undemonstrable) existence of an eternal god.

The word “God” is difficult to accept: it has been so debased, so often associated with the old bearded man on his cloud… No matter: “something” exists; it is impossible to “prove” that God exists or that he does not exist. The converging bundle of proofs is lacking.

Who or what could awaken that silent majority which people are so keen to protect?

The School

The School has the mission… does it still have a mission? Let us start again. The School ought to have the mission of forming individuals capable of analysing, of understanding, of manipulating concepts, and above all of knowing how to construct a reasoning (and reciprocally, of perceiving the flaws of a pseudo-demonstration).

Created in 1808 by Napoleon I, the baccalaureate ought to crown twelve years of study and demonstrate the aptitude for reflection. In 1900, 1% of pupils finished with the bac; in 1970 it was still 20%; we are now, while awaiting better, at 63%.

Since almost everyone obtains the bac, almost everyone should be able to cry halt to false demonstrations. But if Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to form “the elite of the nation”, that elite is perhaps anaesthetised, or abandoned without the slightest inner formation.

Unless our society is voluntarily living the prelude to the decadence that destroyed Roman civilisation. Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis), Latin satirical poet (≈50-≈130), wrote already, nearly two thousand years ago:

”… [populus Romanus] qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, PANEM ET CIRCENSES.”

”… [the Roman people] which once bestowed full powers, fasces, legions, everything, now holds itself back and anxiously wishes for only two things: BREAD AND CIRCUSES.”

(Satires, 10, 78-81)

It is for each of us to gauge the timeliness of citing Juvenal.

Provisional conclusion

We have no gulags in France; we are in a democracy. Nevertheless, a strange force, supragovernmental perhaps, seems to organise events so that “the good people” is conditioned, as in the re-education camps.

Democracy cannot and must not be synonymous with anarchy; the term must express a state of law and of rights; each person must be free, so long as he knows that his liberty stops where that of others begins.

The upholders of materialism and atheism must share the order with the upholders of spiritualism and of faith in other intimate truths. Wars rage in far too many countries for fundamentalists to attempt to give birth to one among us.

Irrelevant and Arbitrary Criteria for Denouncing Dérives Sectaires

by CICNS

The “criteria of dérives sectaires” allow the MIVILUDES to transform into a “cult”, in the pejorative sense of the term, any group whose reputation it wishes to tarnish. The abusive and arbitrary use of these criteria deserves reflection. On 11 December 2008, Georges Fenech visited a community in the Jura named “Amour et Miséricorde”, following a citizen’s request for judicial appeal, dissatisfied with the dismissal pronounced after an investigation into this community. The president of the MIVILUDES concluded that there exists in this group “a process of hold over its members, of rupture with the family and social environment and of financial pressures” (AFP, 17 December 2008). The members of the group denied these accusations (Bien Public) but decided, following the media uproar accompanied by the MIVILUDES (G. Fenech, for example, mentioned his visit and his conclusions on the France 2 programme “les Infiltrés”), to dissolve their community before the end of the judicial action (Plein Air). This affair shows once again that the mediatised use of these contested criteria tramples on the presumption of innocence and hinders the serene application of justice, the only institution empowered to sanction disturbances of public order.

Thirty years of anti-cult struggle in France have transformed the members of spiritual minorities into characters more fictitious than imaginary ones. Nothing is known of these citizens, who are nevertheless heavily mediatised, but always for the prosecution and at a “distance”; in a climate of maintained psychosis, they can easily be transformed into scarecrows, so much easier is it to imagine the worst about men and women who so rarely have the floor. The MIVILUDES, helped in this by the media, maintains this ostracisation, first by deliberately keeping away from any approach of getting to know the spiritual minorities (they are thus rendered invisible as human groups pursuing legitimate life objectives around a belief or a practice) and by manufacturing the concept of dérives sectaires.

On 8 June 2008, France 24 broadcast a long report from a Buddhist monastery in Auvergne, whose members were just emerging from a retreat of three years, three months and three days: ”(…) a moving return to the world (…) a unique experience of voluntary confinement in the greatest austerity with 12 hours of daily meditation”, comments the presenter introducing the item. The journalist on the spot continues: ”(…) Heads shaved and smiles on their lips, these men are emerging from a long retreat of more than a thousand days; most are French, but there are also Germans, Belgians and Swiss; the retreatants are reunited with their loved ones; this moment is intimate, our presence is barely tolerated; during their stay, the retreatants were followed by lamas, spiritual guides like Lama Landrup; Lama Landrup was the only link they had with the outside; inside, no radio or television; the news of the world, like the route of the Olympic flame, must not come to distract them”. At the moment of their emergence, auspicious signs are traced on the ground. A flashback shows us the novices before their entry into retreat. Some express their apprehension. The journalist reports the reaction of parents who struggle to accept the retreat choice of their two sons: “[they] had great difficulty accepting their choices; for the family, being in retreat can lead nowhere professionally, and monk is not a career”. A monk comments on the reactions of his circle: “people who don’t know, they are in their fears, so we are there to reassure them, to make them see that we are really happy doing this, that it really comes from us”. Other parents testify positively to this experience, which is also theirs. Throughout the report, the journalist shows respect and interest for all these people who have chosen an unusual path: “I had no preconceptions; they struck me as people who really had their feet on the ground, their head in the stars, perhaps a little more than others because they were drawn by all this Eastern philosophy and by Buddhism, but a very good impression”.

Let us now imagine an analogous item on a spiritual minority classified as a “cult”; would the journalist have shown the same curiosity and the same openness of mind? Assuredly not. Several criteria of dérives sectaires would be applicable to this Buddhist congregation, but it enjoys religious status and attracts an a priori benevolence, one reason for which is, for example, the well-known and emblematic figure of the Dalai Lama. Their members are considered persons endowed with free will even when they decide to isolate themselves from the world for several years. The members of spiritual minorities, for their part, are considered a priori as manipulators or manipulated, and nobody has the chance to see them testify in the media, which unanimously choose to give the floor only to apostates.

In our democratic and secular society, the best means of treating the question of excesses from now on consists in establishing a respectful and permanent dialogue between the parties concerned, within the framework of the law. Going out to meet people makes it possible to understand them while accepting differences. There exists no valid reason, on the part of the public authorities and the media, to refuse this treatment to the spiritual minorities.

State Cynicism or Political Pragmatism

Facing the Spiritual Minorities

An analysis of the statements of Nathalie Luca, anthropologist, researcher at the Centre for interdisciplinary studies of religious facts (CEIFR) and member of the Orientation Council of the MIVILUDES, at the colloquium “The lawyer facing dérives sectaires”, in her paper entitled: “The ‘cults’: an obstacle to citizenship? European and United States policies”

by Émile D’Albret of CICNS

Beyond the intention of justifying the French policy of fighting against dérives sectaires, one finds in this intervention, crudely exposed, and far indeed from the humanist pretensions of the usual discourses, the part that can be played by the hegemonic will to control citizens on the part of the French State.

She poses as the definition of a cult: “a religious group socially non-assimilated and perceived as menacing for the stability of a given society”, and takes the angle of a study whose subject is finally the state more than the cult, considering that “the capacity of a society to integrate this or that type of group varies according to its points of vulnerability”.

France is classed, according to her, in the category of states which “refuse (…) communitarian particularisms within the public sphere” according to a “republican logic”.

The few lines that follow explain her theory:

”(…) thus the strongly politicised religious groups, which reject the idea of a confinement of the religious to the private sphere alone, are targeted by the fight against the cults in this country ( editor’s note: France): they call its foundations into question by annihilating the individual-citizen in favour of the community-citizen. This individual-citizen is equally denied by groups which, conversely, refuse any investment in social life, the refusal to vote or to enrol children in state schools being salient aspects of it. The adherent then lives in and for the community, beside the Republic whose primacy he renounces. He is no longer a citizen of it”

One may conclude that what is reproached to the groups catalogued by the MIVILUDES is inventing a new citizenship, without its being established that this lies outside the framework of the laws. It is simply opposed to a political will to format society.

A second sub-category of the analysis groups the States which “refuse (…) communitarian particularisms within the public sphere” in a “cultural logic”, of which Germany would be an example.

These states would refuse the new groups in order to preserve their religious or cultural traditions. She gives the example of Greece and recalls its repeated condemnation by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Nathalie Luca denounces a “mote” in the Greek eye which does not seem to us absent from the French gaze on the new spiritualities, while omitting moreover to mention the “beam” constituted by France’s numerous condemnations linked to its policy of fighting the cults by that same ECHR.

We read, through her statements, that the French State acts not according to its Constitution and the principles laid down by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but for a republican ideal which in fact opposes them, in the definition she gives of it.

How, indeed, to reconcile article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guaranteeing “freedom of thought, conscience and religion”, including “freedom to manifest one’s religion or conviction individually or collectively, in public or in private, through worship, teaching, practices and the performance of rites”, with a “refusal of communitarian particularisms within the public sphere”? Or again, how to perpetuate the French constitutional right guaranteeing the freedom to choose one’s children’s education, when the refusal to send one’s children to state school can be considered a “denial of the republic” or “a negation of citizenship”, and entails being “targeted by the policy of fighting against the cults”? (Note: a lawyer confirmed to us that certain groups had been qualified as a “cult” for the sole fact of having removed children from school, without for all that having neglected to give them a solid and valid instruction, in accordance with French law.)

At the opposite pole from France, Nathalie Luca presents States which accept communitarian particularisms, according to a logic she calls “multi-culturalist”, on the example of England, where “one can, in theory, be a citizen while publicly claiming the specificities due to one’s communitarian belonging”, supposed to serve “the general interest and the good functioning of society as a whole”, and where “religious movements, however controversial they may be, have little difficulty integrating into the social fabric”.

This observation of a successful integration of certain movements, which demonstrates, quite evidently, their absence of intrinsic dangerousness, does not seem, in her eyes, to call into question the legitimacy of the French policy which has nevertheless been fighting for years against these same groups in the name of the significant danger they would present for human rights and fundamental liberties.

Further on, the evocation of the tragedy of the Peoples Temple (the Guyana massacre of 1978) to justify the action of the French government is dismaying in its approximation and simplism. Let us quote this sentence as an example: “an altercation with members of an association fighting them led to a shooting. There were ten wounded and five dead. The followers then found themselves at an impasse, and took their own lives, by poisoning.” (We recall that this concerns the death of 923 people!). In 1997, the FBI’s 39,000-page report on the subject fell into the public domain and revealed the ineptitude of the suicide thesis and the reality of the CIA’s responsibility. To ignore this in the context of this colloquium is a breach of academic ethics and the demonstration of a flagrant partiality.

The analysis continues beyond our borders, answering directly the reproach often made to the MIVILUDES of isolating France by its policy. Curiously, the argument tends not to demonstrate the legitimacy of the French approach, but to denounce another form of state cynicism.

Mme Luca expounds this while evoking certain groups and supposed criminal behaviours and malevolent intentions, totally forgetting that most of the time these are only allegations…. For example, the Unification Church of the reverend Moon disturbs the States, according to her: “because it represents a flight of capital”. Then, because it claims to recast the “social bond” proper to each “community of citizens” into a “social bond” shared by a “planetary community”. It is therefore “undesirable wherever its values dissociate themselves ostensibly from those which found the national sentiment”.

Having recognised the true reasons for the hostility of certain States towards this movement, the least one could do would be to cast doubt on the pretexts commonly put forward to justify the persecutions that flow from it. Yet it is without precaution that her statements evoke supposed links with “fascist” and “Nazi-type” groups.

Her next analysis is interesting, and we invite the reader to compare with his own aspirations the image of France given here by a representative of the government:

She opposes France and the United States on their “type of national regulatory instances”. For the latter, “it is the courts of justice which fill the role of ‘normative institution’”, a system in which she recognises “the suppleness of Regulation” since the cases are necessarily judged one by one, in a pragmatic fashion, which allows each time the possible revisiting of previous decisions, in order to adapt them better to societal demands”. Which forbids any “rigid regulation by an established principle of regulation”.

(…) “This pragmatic, supple and dynamic mode of regulation is opposed to the French system, very centralised and orchestrated by the legislator. In this case, the political is supposed to precede the legal, elaborating new laws or transforming them, according to the evolution of needs. The action of the deputies is centred on prevention: preventing the abuses observed or the affairs that have occurred from being able to recur; protecting the citizens. This protective mission that the citizens give to the French State makes it possible to understand why the latter was the first, in Western Europe, to pass from the generally shared observation of the necessity of watching the cults, to an effective policy of fighting against dérives sectaires”.

(…) “The reports on the cults, national and European, published from the 1980s, show in effect that despite a common will to warn against certain groups, the political handling, of a necessarily preventive nature, of the question of the cults has remained delicate. It poses the problem of the frontier between freedom of beliefs and the necessity of preventing offences associated with certain beliefs.

France nevertheless launched itself into the elaboration of a preventive campaign by publishing, in 1996, the Gest and Guyard parliamentary report on the cults, where the mission of protecting the citizen is reaffirmed and serves to legitimise the warning against 173 groups, listed in alphabetical order and by number of adherents”.

This last point is surprising to say the least on the part of a representative of a State body, for it amounts to saying that a tool, the parliamentary inquiry report, was deliberately used and diverted for the ends of a political will and not of an objective study of a problem.

The parliamentary inquiry report is originally a tool of reflection intended for the debates of the National Assembly, and in no case a means of diffusing a nominative and totally subjective accusation, which is what it has nevertheless become here.

If you give “parliamentary inquiry report” to an Internet search engine, you will at once see the word “cults” appear on your screens. When one knows that the twelfth legislature has already seen more than 200 similar reports appear, one can only note the exceptional use made of this one.

Her commentary on the About-Picard law joins the same pragmatism: “Finally a law of general application is voted, but politically conceived and practically constructed to reinforce the effectiveness of legal repression against the cults”. And further on: “The mission of prevention and protection of the French political leader and legislator can sometimes collide with the power of the legal, which possibly operates as a counter-power”.

Power and counter-power… The foundations of the Republic and its ideal of respect for persons and their liberties as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights seem totally absent from this portrait of France.

As for the conclusion of the paper, concerning Franco-American relations: “one may note that with the replacement of the MILS by the MIVILUDES, whose title is more in accord with the European positions, the European and United States tensions have very visibly calmed”, it resembles more the self-congratulation of the marketing department of a company that has suffered a bad press than the positive assessment of a responsible state body, faced with what is in fact a challenge from the whole international community on the grave subject of its non-respect of fundamental liberties.

Cult and Democracy

Interview with Françoise Champion published in the magazine “Les trois mondes” no. 14

Sociology takes a close interest in the existence of the spiritual movements. Pushed aside from the debate by the public authorities, sociologists have nevertheless conducted and published various studies which show clearly the necessity of clarifying things.

Françoise Champion directed, with Martine Cohen, the publication of a work entitled “Sectes et démocratie”, which is a standard reference.

Q: Is there not a blindness on the part of the political parties?

A: I think that is quite true, and that is where the debate is difficult. If one argues “closely” both with the politicians and with the leaders of the anti-cult associations, as I do, and one tells them that the “cultic” phenomenon is extremely marginal, they acknowledge it. And they even say: “It is not because one believes in chakras, in healing by the hands, etc., that one is in a cult.” A cult is quite precise, it is this and that… and freedom of belief ought to be respected, including the most far-fetched beliefs. They say “we know it”, and then it is as if they forgot. Which is to say there is a perpetual contradiction. When one argues precisely, they know it is a very limited phenomenon and that one must not conflate. It is true that public opinion is in fact anxious and demands spectacular actions against the “cults”.

Q: Why such mediocrity in this debate?

A: The media and the general public no longer have any religious culture and no longer know what religion is. It is as if the journalists had forgotten what the religious is. Religion is the supernatural, it runs on charisma. And the very fact that religious groups run on charisma, on prophecy, means by nature that they cannot be democratic. That kind of religious, the “classical” religious that proselytises, that evangelises, has a right to religious freedom until further notice, in our democratic societies founded on the respect of public liberties, including religious freedom.

Q: In your view, how can the debate be depassioned and made really to exist?

A: To depassion it, one would have to examine the groups, the cults, case by case, that is to say get out of the logic of the amalgam; there are groups where things happen that are not at all condemnable. Here this happens, in such-and-such a group that happens, elsewhere something else happens. One should stick to facts, facts as fully established as possible, cross-check the information from the various sources and not rely solely on that supplied by the anti-cult associations, the Renseignements Généraux or the former followers - who have a right to speak and who say important things, but which must be confronted with other sources. It is not a matter, as some of our sociologist colleagues have done, of disqualifying everything that might come from the anti-cult associations or from the followers. There are things to take into account, but one must not content oneself with a single side of the story. In France, given this climate of the anti-cult fight, everyone wants to set themselves apart for fear of being classified as a cult. Thus at Lille last March, at the Assises of interreligious dialogue, I led a workshop on the subject of the cults with my colleague Jean-Paul Willaime. The final declaration of the Assises, prepared in advance by the organisers, concerning our debate went in the direction contrary to the spirit that had reigned there. We protested to the organisers, but in vain!

Interview conducted by Michel Rousseau

Read extracts from the work “Sectes et démocratie”

A Certain Feeling of Desolation

Interview with Daniel Fradette of the CINR of Montreal by the review “les 3 mondes” (The CINR later became the CSRM: http://www.interspirituel.org or http://www.nouveau.qc.ca/profil/5/104705.htm)

To take the measure of the French exception in matters of religious intolerance in the homeland of human rights, we asked Daniel Fradette, president of the CINR in Montreal, to give us his point of view.

In Europe, which country holds your attention in matters of harm to religious freedom?

The French situation is the one that holds our attention most. It is first of all the best known, and we have many contacts over there. We have the clear impression of facing a witch-hunt against everything that is alternative spirituality. This impression is based on the written press and the published works. Our body subscribes to a very large number of publications. Correspondents on the spot relay this information. Another source is made up of people who travel in Europe and who, on their return, testify to the situation.

How do you judge this situation in Europe?

I have a certain feeling of desolation before what I would call a retreat of the critical spirit, in the sense that this witch-hunt is conducted in the name of a rationality. At the same time, one notices that the rationality is an instrument in the service of an ideology; it is therefore remote-controlled from the start. Moreover, I think the fundamental question is that of the imperilling of religious freedom. On one side, it is affirmed that each person has the right to their religious convictions, to freedom of association, but, on the other side, as soon as it exceeds a certain norm - a fundamentalist norm rather than a real one - then the old demons resurface and everything is deployed to restrict that freedom under other pretexts.

How do you explain the difference between this European world and the approach in Quebec or the United States?

The difference would come down to two elements. The first rests, in France, on the famous religion/State or spirituality/laïcité dispute. It has existed for centuries and, since it is not settled but repressed, it re-emerges with even more force.

Whereas in Quebec society, this separation is recent, barely fifty years old. The presence of the religions is still very strong and one does not feel the threat as one might feel it in Europe. Moreover, Europe has for centuries been the front where a particular relationship between Christendom and Islam is lived out. In Canada and America, a de facto plurality has existed for quite a long time, which makes it possible to approach this question of the new spiritual currents with more detachment.

Could this French intolerance be exported and graft itself onto the Quebec population?

There is a crisis situation in Europe that favours the search for a scapegoat. In America and Canada, if the social situation deteriorated, it is not excluded that the cults, as they are called, would be targeted. I believe nothing is ever secured, backward steps are always possible. For the moment, the chances are rather slim. The media here also maintain an anti-sectes or anti-cult tendency. But on the radio side it is the reverse, a real openness exists, which is rather paradoxical. There is still a critical spirit here, even at the level of public bodies like the Direction de la protection de la jeunesse or the police intervention league, a spirit capable of keeping its distance from the anti-cult current.

Do you know the anti-cult literature in France?

Yes, it is the very type of literature which, from the outset, evacuates the religious and spiritual dimension of the human being. It suggests that the fact of believing is an illness, a grave psychological deviance. It has favoured a reduction of the spiritual phenomenon and has led psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and psychologists to close the doors from the start on certain dimensions of their clients’ lives, in order to approach the questions from a psychological angle which is only one of the dimensions of existence.

How can the situation be made to evolve in Europe in general and in France in particular?

I would say that the neuralgic point remains the relationship with the media, which daily shape public opinion in this domain. There would be room to improve the way of dealing with this problem, and for that to think, to work against the current, in a broad network of bodies that have the respect of religious freedom at heart, and this in a critical way - bodies that campaign for the rights of the person -, to establish a “networking” and to work together. Then to work at identifying the journalists, the media who are ready to work with us, and to try to invest at that level. One must knock on every door, it is important to make the different points of view known even if they are rejected at first. There are risks to run, even if it sometimes hurts a little.

Would you agree to sponsor European mediation initiatives?

Naturally, our experience in the domain of mediation, as we have developed it in Quebec, leads us to encourage and therefore to help the development of this type of initiative in France, and this for several reasons: on the one hand for the development of the network and, on the other, because the cause itself is of importance. The value of the mediation process is undeniable and the results in divorce cases are exemplary.

Interview conducted by Jean-Denis Maisse

On the Refusal of Difference

Nostalgia for the Inquisition and the Vichy Government?

by Claude-Gérard Sarrazin, writer, trainer and lecturer

http://www.editions-theia.com

Our civilised century declares itself “freed from superstitions and archaic thought”; it is not agnostic; it displays itself as atheist. It wages a discreet or muscular fight against the “laggards”.

It therefore seems difficult, if not dangerous, today, in our country, at the beginning of this millennium, to think of joining ideological groupings not linked to accepted traditions; it seems even more difficult to affirm a thought not conforming to the socially correct model, that is to say materialist, atheist. The tolerated anticonformists must conform strictly to the model of a slapdash counter-culture, negator of hierarchy, enemy of aesthetics… and harmless.

It is even difficult to publish reflections casting doubt on atheist thought, unless one keeps to purely theological works, provisionally tolerated by a society more and more weary of making the effort of self-mastery or self-forgetting.

Everything happens as if a tentacular authority had fixed the social norms, as in a tribe managed by the elders, enemies of all change. Our “elders”, our listened-to sages, appeared well after the Second World War, perhaps even a little later. In a few decades, they crystallised what had been in preparation for a century or two: the eviction of religious or spiritual thought, indeed of thought simply open to realities other than material ones.

Let a group, however small, claim to cast doubt on the holy laws, and there is talk of a cult, of dérive sectaire, of manipulation, of danger to society. It is understood that adults (from the Latin: having finished growing) do not let themselves be manipulated; they are therefore atheists and conforming (the possible indoctrination that made them what they are is not considered manipulation); adolescents (from the Latin: in the process of growing), whatever their physical age, “are prey for the manipulators”. The press, and more spectacular media, seize the windfall and make of it a subject of revelation: a new cult in formation, a cult at last discovered, a cult dismantled…

One might have believed that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was taken seriously. It must now be understood thus: man is free to do what is permitted to him; what is permitted is fixed by a consensus obtained by… By whom?

Respect for difference is a rare value, taught everywhere, strictly reserved for those who are forced to bend. Those who are above that weakness are not bound to practise that theoretical virtue.

One may then wonder whether our society, which reads the newspapers and watches television, is not preparing a return to tyranny, to the Inquisition, to the Vichy regime.

Our society is perhaps still at cujus regio, ejus religio (as the religion of the prince, so that of the kingdom).

One must face the evidence: inertia is a social fact; every deviance threatens the beatitude of that inertia. The status quo is wished for, imposed if need be.

So: is the refusal of difference natural, or is it conditioned?

We shall doubtless not answer this fundamental question directly. Each person will draw the conclusions that seem logical to them.

I will therefore treat the respect of difference in two parts: the first will be personal, necessarily limited; the second will be historical (from generally accepted data), necessarily vaster. We will then be able to understand better the current situation aiming at the control (muscular if need be) of deviances through the witch-hunt.

I will treat neither racism nor antisemitism: others than I apply themselves to that; the racists and antisemites will continue to think they are right and must act accordingly, but they can no longer (at last!) hope for the support of the official bodies or the forces of order. The partisans of a different thought are not in the same situation (for the moment at least).

Let us begin with my personal experiences (facts of which I can be certain), the first part of the attempted philosophical demonstration. My experience is not universal, but it can help understanding.

I settled in Canada in 1962 (in Montreal for a few years, then in the Laurentians). I returned to France in 1995.

The old hegemony (by consensus)

I had been living in Montreal for a few years; I lived near the Université de Montréal. I had become friends with the manager (a Belgian emigrant) of a large bookshop located almost at the foot of the University. He told me one day what had happened to him: he had placed signs to mark the sections, to make the customer’s choice easier. The great classification systems were not yet much spoken of. He had written on one label: “religions”. The superior of the community (in Quebec, nothing could then exist without the approval of a community or of a secular priest) called the manager to point out a spelling mistake that had to be corrected so as not to let people think the bookshop was ignorant of grammar. The manager looked in vain at his labels. The superior finally showed him the offending one: “You have put an s on religion”.

The cults were not yet spoken of, above all in the Quebec of the early 60s. But difference was already denied. There was only one religion, the Catholic religion. The rest was only deviance or folklore. Cujus regio…

The School transmitted, explicitly and above all implicitly, the Christian values. Atheists and agnostics kept a low profile. It was only much later that I understood that the School bore a share of responsibility for the refusal of difference: it is the School that transmits values, it is the School that can change the mentality of a people.

Before the First World War, the School taught little French children hatred of the Germans; after their defeat, the Germans taught hatred of the French to little Germans.

I had just discovered, without drawing conclusions, the refusal of difference, at one remove. I was going to discover it directly for myself.

First deviants

It was 1966. I believed I could discover a new group, in which an elite would be prepared in the service of humanity’s progress; society, grateful in return, supporting the pioneers’ efforts… I thought that man had come out of the caves thanks to courageous visionaries.

So I underwent the required tests with a psychologist of the Université de Montréal and was able to take part in my first meeting within the Mensa society on 8 November 1966.

At that period it was the North American Mensa: Canada did not yet have an autonomous section. We managed to create an autonomous Canadian section. Nobody prevented us: it was a structure, a mere structure.

A year later, a project was born: to create a school for mentally gifted children and adolescents. I was elected head of the project.

So I drafted memoranda, theses, requests, reports, chaired all the meetings of the little committee, knocked on doors. Two years later, I handed in my apron: society did not want gifted pupils; it agreed to help the handicapped (no possible rivals) but not the gifted, whose potential it envied and whose intelligence it feared. No non-manipulable deviants without visible coercion.

With a psychologist friend and a colleague who taught mathematics, we tried again in 1972, to arrive at the same result. The project had been studied in high places. I had once again presented a file (at that period personal computers did not exist; everything had to be typed, with the obligation of starting everything again for a new presentation). The academic authorities of the region answered me: all my demonstrations were accepted, but “this project does not correspond to our policies”.

The Mensa adventure ended for me: I left the group on tiptoe and was forgotten. I had learned a great deal and I regret nothing. Society refuses difference, whatever it may be.

Yet it was not a matter of creating a religious or “demonic” or anarchising sect; it was only a matter of creating a place propitious to the flourishing of gifted children and adolescents. To accept that project would have been to recognise a fundamental difference. Only the bed of Procrustes was known (and I fear is still known).

If it is unthinkable (and decades later, that school is still in gestation) to live education and schooling differently, how is one to live one’s spirituality differently, if society imposes atheism and philosophical materialism?

A utopian grouping

In 1970, I was approached by the president of the Cosmos Foundation (Jonquière, a few hundred kilometres north of Montreal) to collaborate on the review and on future projects. The project filled me with enthusiasm. It was a matter of putting into practice the highest spiritual data and of giving birth to a village in the manner of Auroville (in India). The cults were not yet spoken of; brows were merely furrowed; sufficiently for the president, finally, five years later, to find himself alone and have to dissolve the body before having been able to see the birth of the city of the future, Cosmopolis, which remained a beautiful dream.

A small sample will suffice: everything is well tied up, at a certain level.

The president published several issues of a fine review and three works. The distributor (a big name) distributed. My book pleased. Television granted me several programmes, including one of a whole hour, alone with the presenter. But the distributor refused to pay. Lawsuit. After three years, the president won his case. Too late: he had filed for bankruptcy. My book died out; those of the others as well.

At the same time as my work was appearing at Jonquière, a big Montreal publisher was publishing my first treatise on morphopsychology, which aroused no opposition. QED, I believe.

Psi faculties at the University

I was asked to be part of the board of directors of an institute in gestation, the Institut Canadien de Recherches en Parapsychologie (Canadian Institute of Psychic and Parapsychology Research, a non-profit body). The board meetings began. The Université du Québec supplied us with premises. It must be said that we had elected as president the dean of the psychology faculty of a celebrated university. Throughout the summer, the founder organised weekly lectures (a full auditorium). He asked me to introduce all the lecturers and to give three lectures myself. It was fascinating, heroic, enriching. It was the period of the discovery of the Filipino healers. I had to arbitrate a debate between a journalist, a patient of Agpaoa and a representative of the Order of Physicians; all had been to the Philippines. Our project touched forbidden spheres.

The great evening arrived: it was 24 August 1973, after a fine summer in public. It was the general meeting of all the members and sympathisers. All the prospective committees were there, except the president, detained in Quebec City. I had to chair in his place and present the Institute’s organisation chart, a chart that a friend (a member of the Mensa society, as it happens) and I had developed over very many hours.

A delegate of the Ministry of Education was present, uninvited but inevitable. He obstructed so much, delayed the proceedings so much, criticised so many points, that the tension rose in the room (still at the Université du Québec). The audience clenched its teeth. The representative let doubts hover over the qualifications of certain members of the selection committee (three doctors), then he attacked me personally and demolished all my work. My replies only deepened the ditch.

Exasperated, I rose and announced my resignation, offering my place to the government delegate. I gave my notes and documents to the founder and went to sit in the room. After a moment of heavy silence, a colleague rose and, in his stentorian voice (he was, incidentally, an opera baritone in his free time), trumpeted:

• Sir, you are ignorant of all good manners. You bring only discord. Your turn now to tell us how we should organise ourselves, since you have taken us for children.

The delegate took the blow, but he knew how to swim; he replied:

• From discussion springs light! I wanted above all to make the best ideas spring forth!

A hubbub covered his voice and the assembly broke up into small groups. All the members of the Institute were academics and many were doctors in some discipline.

I reached the president by telephone; he approved me and added his resignation to mine. The adventure stopped there. One had to understand: our project was inadmissible, however serious it might be.

The detractors did not hesitate, in the past, to attack the eminent: how many “scientific” scribblers have not deplored the fact that the great Pascal was so drawn to religion and mysticism? How many have never forgiven Alexis Carrel for having written Le voyage à Lourdes? One feigns modesty by insisting on the scientific merits of the geniuses in question (Pascal, Carrel and the others) and one speaks of their extreme naivety, indeed of their terminal madness.

The Order of the Temple was indeed brought down…

So attacking simple citizens…

The disturbing teacher

I taught for many years in Quebec. Until 1998, the public School was confessional. A Catholic, I had to teach in a Catholic school. I had forgotten to remain discreet about my intimate convictions, I had not yet understood the rules of the game. I had the gospels read in class… and the pupils discovered important differences between what they learned there and what was habitually conveyed. I disturbed the habits. Halloween (the festival of witch and wizard costumes) was celebrated, for example, in the Catholic school; I recalled that witches had once been burned. Chocolate rabbits and eggs were passed around for Easter; I asked what the connection was between the Passion of Jesus and these traditions issuing from the fertility festivals of the pagans, who had been eliminated in a manner not always Christian.

I added to my misdeeds the leading of a charismatic group.

The charismatics

From 1971 to 1974, I led a group of young charismatics. No pope had yet pronounced on the question (one had to wait until 1975).

My group worked in small teams to establish a biography of a saint according to a grid I had supplied. I obviously gave a large place to mystical experiences.

I was seated in the middle of a team of four working on Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. The group had reached the moment when the saint is about to die.

“What sorrow we shall have after your death!

”- Oh! no, she replied joyfully: you will see, it will be like a shower of roses.

“It is the promise of that shower of roses, a promise fulfilled, that made Thérèse’s renown in the world.”

(Laudet, F., Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux, Mame, Tours, 1949, p. 82)

A scent of roses made itself felt, at first discreet, then more and more distinct. The smell went beyond the small group to spread through the whole room, with such intensity that two girls opened a window to breathe. As a precaution, I asked whether someone had spilled a bottle of perfume, and I went round all the teams, all well-behaved and talking in low voices until my verifying intervention. In an impressive silence, they watched me visit each team. The scent was perceived for five whole minutes.

The event became known throughout the region and was much mocked. Two months later, in the same group, I recalled the event… which reproduced itself with the same intensity and for even longer.

With the group of charismatic boys, we went to visit a neighbouring abbey. The Trappists received us very amicably. The prior guided my group in the visit of the monastery. I told him the story of the roses of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. While the defenders of the holy faith spoke of diabolical manifestation and sorcery, the prior said to me, in a fraternal tone:

• I shall speak of it this evening at chapter. It is beautiful to know that children receive such graces so close to us.

The account of these manifestations (there were not only the roses) had gone round the village and then the region. At the end of 1972, I was summoned by everything the region counted in the way of priests, parish priests and chaplains, in an annexe of the central church: was I a sorcerer? I managed to prove my good faith, but my reputation as a magician-sorcerer endured, and the troubles were reborn each year, thanks to the defenders of the true faith.

We disturbed, we were deviants.

They attacked otherwise; an attempt was made to build against me a file of corruption of minors and paedophilia (the classic accusations). They did not manage to find the slightest witness (even the pupils I had had to punish in class refused the idea of my hypothetical perversions) and certain parents assured me of their support.

A fundamentalist teacher fed the local press, which published two articles ridiculing my lessons and my person. The school management refused to get involved; the union (more atheist than agnostic, anticlerical) begged me “not to make unnecessary waves”. A colleague (a Parisian emigrant) advised me to call on a lawyer and sue for defamation. I was wrong not to follow that advice.

In 1978, I was summoned by the academic authorities; and the president gave way to a representative of the bishopric, who led the combat. That literature was brought out again, and taken seriously. The union took my defence: if they managed to bring me down (motive: bad Catholic), almost the whole teaching body was in danger (the expression “religious lukewarmness” is a euphemism).

They were quite willing for me to speak of religion, since the School was confessional, but according to the norms; a very secular religion, made of rites, obligations and prohibitions (spiritual experience being reserved for recognised saints, dead if possible).

I had just said that my pupils had reached the philosophical age; I therefore owed it to them to teach them to reflect for themselves. The reply of Mgr*** stupefied my assistants:

• You do not have to teach them HOW to think, but WHAT to think.

One Monday morning, I found in my mail pigeonhole an immediate summons with a prohibition on entering my classroom. The personnel director received me. It had been “discovered that I was directing a cult” into which I was bringing minors. The surprise past, I asked where my cult was located, where my limousine was parked, where such information came from. The union again took my defence. I remained banned from teaching for a month. They agreed, however, to pay me a salary. The teachers’ union demanded written and precise accusations; if the answer did not come, measures would be taken. The authorities backed down: they sensed the scandal of a legal action brought to the knowledge of the general public. Everything was erased and I resumed my lessons, applauded on my return by my colleagues (we were a hundred and fifty teachers; the fundamentalists did not show themselves that day).

The administrative harassments were multiplied until I left teaching.

In France, the School is secular, is it not? I would not have been troubled. For that.

I had understood certain laws of the exclusion of politically incorrect deviances.

Rods for one’s own back

While being a teacher, I held other functions. Vice-president of the Order of Naturotherapists of Quebec from 1973 to 1977, vice-president of the international congress of alternative medicines in Montreal in 1976, Director of Studies and co-founder of the National Academy of Hygiene and Natural Medicine (alternative medicines) of Quebec, I was part in 1976 of the delegation (of five leaders) received by a parliamentary commission with a view to having the alternative medicines recognised. Our programme (which I had developed in consultation with the other therapists) was accepted. A single condition was required: that all the Schools and Institutes of alternative medicines unite around us to form a single federation with a common core. The Order of physicians (called the College of physicians in Canada) did not even have to intervene: each wanted to remain sole master in his own house, and the federation died before being born. I resigned in 1978 and withdrew from all public activity for several years.

Minority groups often refuse to unite (union makes strength) and remain without weight against well-organised and well-united adversaries. Unfortunately, many persecuted groups, or groups thinking themselves persecuted, are intimately convinced of possessing the truth - pardon, THE Truth, with a capital T; to associate with other groups would mean relativising that unique truth. Others, more naive, think they live in countries that have signed their adhesion to the Charter of the Rights of Man.

Let us pass now to the second part of the study and ask ourselves whether certain officials might not have a nostalgia for the Inquisition and the Vichy government.

Let us start from far back in time.

The Inquisition

The Inquisition was created by Pope Innocent III in order to fight the Cathars; the decision was approved by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215; 1,200 members). Besides the heretics (judged as such), many people were burned alive for magic, sorcery, “diabolical” illness, without forgetting the “apostate Jews” (converted Jews who returned to Judaism).

The “good Christian” did not read the Scriptures (he reads them no more today); the new Inquisition - secular, atheist - can act in broad daylight to “drive out the enemy”… of whom?

The “good Christian” might have asked himself why the religious authorities did not respect the fundamental principles willed by the Founder of Christianity:

“You have heard that it was said to the ancients: You shall not commit murder; whoever commits murder shall answer for it before the tribunal.

“And I say to you: whoever is angry with his brother shall answer for it before the tribunal; whoever says to his brother: Imbecile shall be answerable to the Sanhedrin; whoever says: Fool shall be liable to the gehenna of fire.” (Mt V, 21-22).

“Stop judging by appearances, but judge according to what is just!” (Jn VII, 24).

“for it is by the way you judge that you will be judged, and it is the measure you use that will serve as measure for you.” (Mt VII, 2).

People were of course made to swear “on the holy gospels”, princes as much as peasants, religious as much as laymen, despite the formal prohibition, still ignored in our day for that matter (in the United States, a country nevertheless “faithful to the Scriptures”, the oath on the Bible is statutory); which suggests that accommodations are always possible, since “the good people” never reads the legislative texts, religious or profane:

“You have also heard that it was said to the ancients: You shall not perjure yourself, but you shall discharge your oaths to the Lord.

“And I say to you not to swear at all: neither by heaven, for it is the throne of God,

“nor by the earth, for it is the footstool of his feet, nor by Jerusalem, for it is the City of the great King.

“When you speak, say yes or no: all the rest comes from the Evil One.” (Mt V, 33-37).

Why did the clergy not drive out the demons that had taken hold of the suspects, instead of burning them? Had they forgotten (or were they far from the spiritual realisation required to officiate):

“And these are the signs that will accompany those who have believed: in my name they will drive out demons…” (Mk XVI, 17).

Times have changed, the Middle Ages are forgotten. Today that attitude is unthinkable. Which does not prevent the fundamentalisms of every side, the active and murderous fanaticisms, today and sometimes among us. If everyone agreed to read the Scriptures with which they are conditioned…

The anticlericals ceaselessly remind the Church of its past errors and pass over in silence the changes that have appeared over the centuries; they forget the contemporary fundamentalisms, not necessarily religious ones.

The secular Inquisition

The refusal of difference and the witch-hunt are part of thoroughly human traditions. Our era has invented nothing, it merely uses the recipes that have demonstrated their effectiveness.

Revolutionaries free the people from royal tyranny. “In the name of the people”, they install liberty.

On 26 August 1789, the representatives of the French people, constituted as a National Assembly, sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: “the National Assembly recognises and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights of man and of the citizen.”

This Declaration is so fundamental that it was taken up in the 20th century under the name of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted by the general assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948 in Paris). We shall return to it.

Let us stay with the great liberation of 1789.

On 10 March 1793, less than four years after the solemn Declaration, the Convention created the revolutionary tribunal intended to judge “crimes committed against the Republic”. After the promulgation of the law on suspects (of 17 September 1793), everything accelerated. “Let us place Terror on the order of the day,” proposed Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac (responsible for the death sentence of Louis XVI) in the name of the Committee of Public Safety. Blood was needed to consolidate the Revolution. In that year 1793, Paris saw the guillotining of Marie-Antoinette, the Girondins, Bailly, Barnave, Philippe Égalité (on 6 April 1793), etc. Sent pell-mell to the scaffold were quantities of people foreign to politics, like the sixteen Carmelites of Compiègne (17 July 1794), Madame Élisabeth, the Comtesse du Barry, etc. About 17,000 death sentences according to the official documents; in fact nearly 40,000 victims, if one counts the people assassinated without judgment. Because he was a noble, Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier, founder of modern chemistry and a farmer-general, was guillotined in Paris on the Place de la Concorde on 8 May 1794. He was told that “The Republic has no need of scientists”.

Certain historians draw up a heavier toll: 40,000 people guillotined; 200,000 people killed; 500,000 imprisoned. In the name of the sovereign people (not consulted).

Religion had nothing to do with the installation of the Terror.

Nevertheless, it had to suffer from it.

Talleyrand (Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, 1754-1838), bishop of Autun in 1788, elected for the clergy to the Estates-General of 1789, appointed a member of the Constitution committee, proposes, on 4 November 1789, to place the clergy’s goods at the disposal of the nation to improve the state of the finances.

From 12 July 1790, all the ecclesiastics of France had to swear an oath of fidelity to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. In 1792, the refractory priests are all banished from France. Those caught on national territory would be punished with death on simple verification of their identity.

Atheist fundamentalism insists on the religious Inquisition but never speaks of the Terror.

Let us skip a few centuries. Let us find the good tradition again.

Vichy

No use returning to the statute of the Jews; everything has been said, everything specified, and it would be indecent to add to it. Let us see another aspect of the refusal of “social deviation”.

The law of 13 August 1940, decreed by Marshal Pétain, prohibited “secret associations”. The masonic obediences were dissolved, while their dignitaries were subjected to the statute of the Jews. (On 15 December 1943, an ordinance of the French Committee of National Liberation, signed at Algiers by General de Gaulle, annulled the law of 13 August 1940.)

The law of 11 August 1941 prohibited Freemasons from exercising public functions, functions enumerated in article 2 of the statute of the Jews of 2 June 1941.

Freemasonry was not the only target. All the employers’ pressure groups, for example, were in mind.

On 30 August 1942, at Gergovie, Pétain expresses himself clearly (and his words could be current today): “A sect, flouting the noblest feelings, pursues, under cover of patriotism, its work of treason and revolt.”

In those times of war, the prohibitions were not merely formal; the deportation of the Jews was not a simple working hypothesis.

Hitler

Hitler closed all the masonic obediences in 1935. Persecutions and the concentration camps were the lot of the Freemasons. Göring said that “the fight against the Jews, the freemasons and other ideological powers opposed to Germany is an ever urgent task of the party and the army.”

No use, here again, insisting on the fate of the Jews. Everything has been said, and well said.

As for Christianity, official contempt. Let us retain only one celebrated example. Rajmund Kolbe, in religion Maximilian Maria Kolbe, died in the concentration camp of Auschwitz on 14 August 1941.

And the Jews?

Everyone thinks immediately of the wearing of the yellow star. It is difficult to imagine that this is only a reminiscence. The origin of the discriminatory practice goes back to 1259, and it was the “good king Saint Louis” (Louis IX) who took the decision: every Jew would have to wear, sewn on his garment, a circular piece of yellow cloth (the rouelle). In France, on 3 October 1940, most professions are forbidden to Jews. All Jews over six would have to wear the yellow star from 7 June 1942.

And Russia?

The revolutionaries had freed the people from “the odious tyranny of the tsars” and the people was sovereign. The refusal of difference (of thought) was carried to its height.

• 1922-1953: continuous deportation of hundreds of thousands of real or supposed opponents, arbitrary imprisonments, prohibition of any contestation of the person of Stalin.

• 1930-1932: deportation of two million kulaks (well-off peasants) to the gulags.

• 1932-1933: Stalin deliberately drives the Ukrainians to famine: between 4 and 7 million dead.

• 1937-1938: the Great Purge eliminates 690,000 people.

• spring 1940: the Katyn massacre (elimination of nearly 22,000 Polish prisoners of war).

Let us add the number of detainees (according to QUID):

1930: one and a half million.

1941: thirteen and a half million.

Religion is totally banned.

Hitler thus had a twin, whom certain French intellectuals venerated because he was a communist model, friend of the people.

The dissidents who attempted, in Germany, in Russia or elsewhere, to awaken “the good people” were not heard. “They” were dealt with.

The formula has proved itself: a “liberator” breaks the yoke of a “heavy and tyrannical hierarchy”. The good people applauds, takes part in the lynching, and everything returns to order. The new “representatives”, in the name of the sovereign people (never consulted), install a new dictatorship.

Let us leave those troubled times and come to the great world peace (officially, we are not at war).

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

“Article 19.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, which implies the right not to be troubled for one’s opinions and the right to seek, receive and impart, without consideration of frontiers, information and ideas through any means of expression whatsoever.

“Article 20.

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.”

Need the situation be analysed? Others than I have done it. Their studies and conclusions can be found on the CICNS site. Without forgetting all the reviews and all the sites that devote themselves to these updates.

Let us content ourselves with a few landmarks.

When a group of people threatens the hegemony of an industry (agri-food, pharmaceuticals, oil, official medicine, etc.) by its attempts or its achievements (alternative medicines, renewable energies, “organic” farming, etc.), “they” at once wave the guaranteed scarecrow: a new cult, or the resurgence of an old conspiracy (an ancient chivalric or magical Order, for example); “they” will shrink from no sacrifice to blacken, to poison life, to multiply the administrative problems and legal requirements, in order to bring the group down. If it is an isolated individual, a link with a cult will be sought; failing that, his private life will be attacked and “embellished”. The media, always avid for scoops, will seize on the thing, and the trick will be done. Deviants are accepted only if they feed the mechanisms ensuring a certain supranational or local cohesion.

Why do the publications, though numerous and documented, awaken no echo?

First, because they are not relayed by the popular press and the mass media in general. Everyone prefers to close their eyes and ears so as not to worry. It is human, it is normal. The popular press speaks rather of sporting encounters, of stars and idols, of the speeches of public men; it leaves in the shadows the harassments of the “cults” unless there is a catastrophe or a juicy scandal. We have the press we deserve and demand.

And each person shelters under his little umbrella of anonymity: it only happens to others; I risk nothing, since I am part of the silent majority. That silent majority risked nothing, indeed, at the beginning of the French Revolution, at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, at the beginning of the Chinese Revolution. The good citizen trusts the elected. Then the wind turns, the first elected change or are replaced. The anarchists build nothing: they oppose.

And the School?

It ought precisely to prepare the citizen to reflect, since he has the right to vote, that is to say to choose those who will govern.

It is found normal that an average baccalaureate holder has never received any steeping in Western civilisation. He has received thousands of hours of lessons on subjects he will forget as soon as he enters his professional life, but he is incapable of appreciating (still less distinguishing) Raphael, Rembrandt and Renoir; any more than he listens to (still less distinguishes and appreciates) Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; he has vaguely heard of the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, never of the Baroque churches; he is ignorant of Greek sculpture and that of the Renaissance; the great classics of the cinema are unknown to him. Of religion he knows only the official anticlericalism, or the little his family has transmitted to him; no reflection in depth. A pure savage, he is delivered without landmarks to the ambient vulgarity. The School has no time…

It is found normal that the School draws the attention of the child, then of the adolescent, to the infinitely great and the infinitely small, to the politicians of the past and the present, to the wars and the empires, but never, ever, teaches him to know HIMSELF, to reflect on himself, to discover his strengths and his weaknesses, his capacities and his limits. How could he then pass judgements (he does not, moreover, know how to distinguish a value judgement from a judgement of reality) on a cultural or worship difference, a philosophical difference (who would have taught him philosophical discussion?) or a religious one?

A very small example of unreflectiveness? Why should an unvaccinated child be refused at school or another public place? Suppose he is the victim of a grave illness against which the others have been vaccinated: in what way does his presence endanger the health of his peers?

• If the vaccinated are immunised by virtue of their preventive vaccination, the presence of a disease-carrying child cannot touch them, since they are protected.

• If the presence of a sick child contaminates the other children, vaccinated and immunised according to the law in force, then immunisation is only a decoy. Why, then, vaccinate?

Vaccination seems a State religion. Cujus regio… What does non-aligned Science think?

The situation expresses the expectations of the majority. We are in a democracy. If we do not want to relive the Inquisitions and the dictatorships, no use weeping and cursing. One must act for oneself, not by taking up arms or burning buildings or officials, but by making conscious, considered gestures.

If nothing moves, atheist fundamentalism will nibble away, little by little, at all the liberties linked to spiritual thought and life; not only the small communities of thought but also the great religions will one day be prohibited (as in Russia under Stalin).

I am neither bitter nor disappointed. I have not always known how to play chess, and I will not change humanity all by myself. Despite my errors, I have done my small part.

It is not because fundamentalist and backward priests annoyed me that I reject Christianity, which built Europe (the cathedrals still answer one another from one end of the continent to the other, and Europe already existed in the Middle Ages), whatever certain current fundamentalists, much listened to it must be acknowledged, may say.

Everything is possible. It is for each of us to will it. There is still time.

Eckankar and the St Paul Affair…

Interview with Jean Maunick, head of the Eckankar movement in Mauritius, on the subject of the tragedy of St Paul…

By Nad Sivaramen and Elwyn Chutel

Registered in Mauritius since 1997, it is only today that the religious movement Eckankar is making itself talked about. Its founder in Mauritius, Jean Maunick, insists that Eckankar’s teachings condemn suicide without reserve, and lifts the veil on his organisation…

Do you know the victims of the St-Paul tragedy?

Of the ten dead, I knew only Rajesh Dhayam. He was a member of Eckankar from 1990 to 1996. He distanced himself from the movement for personal reasons. I saw him again when he came to attend a seminar of our movement in 1999, held at the Max Boullé gallery. We barely greeted each other, as I was very busy that day. We never saw him again at our functions. I have said it over and over: I know nobody else. What happened at St-Paul has nothing to do with Eckankar.

How do you explain that two of the victims were wearing Eckankar medallions?

Perhaps Dhayam had his own medallion and had a copy made for his companion. Anyone can go to a jeweller and have one made. In Eckankar, wearing the medallion is not obligatory. Anyone can wear one without being a member. It proves nothing, absolutely nothing.

Could there be a movement parallel to yours?

We officially represent the only branch of Eckankar in Mauritius. There is no affiliation or anything whatsoever with any other group. Eckankar is the unique religion of the light and sound of God…

When and how did you launch Eckankar in Mauritius?

It was in 1986, on my return from Australia (where I had emigrated in 1968), that I launched the Eckankar movement. This ancient science of “Soul Travel”, which counts thousands of followers throughout the world, I discovered by chance in my reading in Sydney. Interested by this philosophy, I joined a movement of this religious obedience, whose teachings changed my life. On my return to my native country, I told myself I had to share this immeasurable experience.

How many followers did you have at the start?

I began with two members. They were people who had read articles on Eckankar that I had had published. And they wanted to join the movement. Little by little, by word of mouth, the number of followers increased appreciably. Today, we are about fifty.

Only about fifty?

It is not the number that counts. Eckankar does not advocate proselytism. Anyone can come and attend our talks without having to change religion. And then, we are not a profit-making organisation, so it is not our objective to draw crowds and amass money.

At what rhythm are your meetings held?

Normally it is once a week, on Sundays. There are about twenty who come regularly. We have only just opened our centre, thanks to the support of our members. It is modest, with a few chairs and a few books. That is all we possess.

How do these weekly sessions unfold?

Our sessions begin with a short reading drawn from an Eckankar work or from our bible, The Shariyat-Ki-Sugmad. Then we do the collective HU, which is a love song to God. Lasting twenty minutes, it is in fact a silent contemplation, which opens consciousness. And we finish with a free discussion on a subject of a spiritual order: the love of life, the journey of the soul. The objective is to master the changes in our life, to learn to love, to serve one’s neighbour, to listen in order to learn to survive spiritually in the present time. Make no mistake: we have no rituals out of the ordinary. We have chairs, and we sit to pray. There is no guru, no spectacular ceremonies, no worship of any kind…

You are not the guru - what then is your rank?

I did the studies and I am what is called the high initiate. In reality, I am only a servant to help the faithful better receive the sound and light of God. We all have a single spiritual leader, whom we call the Mahanta. That is Sri Harold Klemp, who made Eckankar an international religion, today in full expansion in a hundred countries and legally recognised as a non-profit organisation in forty countries.

Do Eckankar’s teachings approve of suicide?

No, no and no. It is the very opposite of our philosophy. We consider that life is a gift, better, a present from God. And consequently suicide goes against the spiritual law. Each person is a soul, a divine particle, sent to earth to acquire the maturity of consciousness. Those who give themselves over to suicide have understood nothing. Life is in fact a school where we learn to face ourselves. Every problem has a spiritual solution, which is certainly not suicide.

You who launched Eckankar in Mauritius, how did you react on learning that the movement was probably linked to the mystery of the ten corpses?

It was like a sledgehammer blow. Believe me, it hurts, when people who do not know Eckankar’s teachings at all begin to say anything whatsoever, to make the most far-fetched allegations. Never could I have thought that men, women and children could die in that way. What happened is very unfortunate. I can tell you that this whole tragedy has nothing to do with Eckankar, for as I told you before, life is a divine spark, and we respect it more than anything. Eckankar teaches us to control the negative and destructive passions such as lust, gluttony, attachment to material things and vanity. We advocate virtues such as forgiveness, tolerance, detachment and humility. I can assure you that I have nothing to hide, hence this interview…

But Eckankar is classified a “dangerous cult” in France…

Since certain religious organisations experienced problems in France, the media have led a virulent campaign against several of them, with a tendency to generalise. The enquiry conducted by the French authorities is today contested by several European countries… It is a breach of religious freedom, at least as far as Eckankar is concerned.

Does the appellation cult seem inappropriate to you?

We are not a cult, for we do not live in community, we have no guru, we have no financial interests. And then, Eckankar imposes nothing. On the contrary, we recognise the importance of the spiritual role of the other religions and of their spiritual leaders, such as Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad. Members are required to respect the religious beliefs of other people. Consequently, we do not gather the basic characteristics of a cult. We do not indoctrinate.

Since when have you been registered in Mauritius?

Since 25 June 1997. To register the Mauritius Eckankar Satsang Society, we fulfilled all the conditions. The Prime Minister’s Office took a year to study our file and gave us its approval. We are registered at the Registrar. Our documents can be consulted there. We have nothing to hide…

Read also the development of the enquiry in our “News” section, and the evident media manipulation leading to the condemnation of a cult from the very first hours of the affair…

Editorials

All the editorials since the CICNS’s first newsletter

January 2008

The mere mention of a questioning of our “French-style laïcité” sufficed to rekindle a conflict more than two hundred years old, which the law of 1905 did not manage to extinguish.

Yesterday a good part of the left took offence at the audacity of a head of State daring to defy the immutable principles of our secular Republic: “Atheist friends, return to your depression, you no longer belong to the human race…”, dramatises Caroline Fourest. Today, the Grand Orient waxes indignant at “the cults’ offensive on Europe” and calls for a mobilisation “at a time when some - and the cults in the front rank - mean to reform the French law of 1905”.

According to Raphaël Liogier, sociologist of religions: “The French exception is an exception characterised by the obsession with the religious”. Is it then permitted to consider that, despite a few “historical shortcuts that are cavalier to say the least” (A. Duhamel, Libération, 23/01/08), Nicolas Sarkozy’s remarks echo the deep aspiration of a part of the French to live their faith openly, whatever it may be?

Mr Liogier continues by describing how, from the historical point of view, France has come to be “one of the countries that intervenes the most in the religious domain in Europe, by giving religious definitions, by making religious classifications.” A study that would surprise many partisans of laïcité if they took the trouble to read this university research, which we need so badly to bring a little good sense back into these parochial quarrels.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Barack Obama, candidate for the presidential election, is also breaking the old taboos: “In nine short days, nearly half the country will have the occasion to join us in saying that we have had enough of the old habits of Washington, that we are hungry for change and that we are ready to believe again,” declares the senator from Illinois.

If the world is moving, why should France not move with it?

January 2008

Nicolas Sarkozy, during his visit to the Vatican, reaffirmed his conviction that the French are waiting for spirituality, values and hope. It is indeed the reality of a large part of the population, which is turning to the spiritual search in the hope of finding a deeper meaning to existence. The number of books testifying to spiritual experiences, the growing attendance at courses offering spaces of replenishment and meditation, the multiplication of groups of people gathered around common spiritual values, translate this strong need for values and meaning that the President perceives in his compatriots.

Paradoxically, the fight against the spiritual movements stigmatised under the term cults is intensifying, and the MIVILUDES has just brought out a new guide, intended for all the actors of economic life, to sensitise managers and employees to cultic risks. In this work one can read a list of suspect words the reader is invited to associate with the idea of dérive sectaire. To cite only a few: self-accomplishment - well-being - quest for meaning - interpersonal skills - trust - sense of sharing… These expressions, which are precisely the reflection of the quest for meaning of a multitude of French people, are thus pointed at in order to instil ever more distrust and fear towards every spiritual path.

The anti-cult crusade of these last twenty-five years will nevertheless not have succeeded in extinguishing faith and hope in the hearts of the French. The growing malaise of materialist society cannot be only the seedbed of hatred, fear and violence; it also carries within it the germ of a more just and fraternal society, turned towards humanist and spiritual values.

At the dawn of this year 2008, the CICNS invites all the people concerned by spirituality not to yield to fear, but to claim their fundamental right to live, without hiding, the spirituality of their choice.

Our team will continue its information work with the general public and the authorities to attempt to establish a constructive dialogue on the place of spirituality in society. We will be very attentive to the way our President of the Republic reconciles his conviction of the French people’s need for spirituality with the policy conducted by his government to condemn and fight every new expression of the spiritual quest.

December 2007

We know that the anti-cult discourse resembles an attempt at “skull-stuffing” more than a pedagogical will to alert the population to a real menace. The incantatory repetition of a danger whose proofs are non-existent (despite three parliamentary commissions!), the simplistic statements that betray the desire to frighten more than to educate, the opportunism of certain politicians’ interventions (in election periods, for example), the amalgams and the crudeness of the caricatures presented to the general public are the demonstration of a totalitarian intention which obviously cannot display itself in broad daylight. Somewhere, someone thought a great cleaning-out was needed. The suggestion seduced a few lobbies and the machine set itself in motion. Complaints, reminders of essential notions like those of human rights or individual liberties, will do nothing, for it is not (for most of the anti-cult actors) a matter of a misunderstanding or a lack of education, but of a campaign determined to rid the landscape of the spiritual minorities. No negotiations possible, or “one does not discuss with the cults”, according to the general watchword. That is why our action cannot be limited to the mere “information” of the public authorities, but must also widen to that of the spiritual minorities themselves, and of the general public, which has heard only one insistent side of the story ring out for more than 25 years, to the point of still being deafened by it. We count on your help to relay the information we have gathered and thus allow the year 2008 to see a little wisdom, discernment or good sense reborn in the midst of this morass.

December 2007

Madame Picard spoke at Brest on the subject of the cult movements: “They practise manipulation, seduce, multiply enticing propositions in the domains of care, health, food, children’s education, cultural, scientific and environmental activities. The cult movements are invading every domain of life.”

In the issue of Libération of 30 November 2007, Olivier Bomsel, economist, member of the mission on downloading, gives his opinion on the body “UFC Que choisir”: “The UFC is a cult of charlatans. A cult because it represents only itself and instrumentalises the consumer in public debate (…) Far from the consumer, the cult now defends only its own errors”. There is a link between these two statements, even if it does not appear at first sight. The anti-cult rhetoric of exclusion of the spiritual minorities has built itself a vocabulary, a posture in debate, which is winning imitators just about everywhere; why go without, the effect is guaranteed.

Madame Picard, along with a certain number of people waging the same combat as she, have become masters in the art of installing a climate of fear around an imaginary enemy. This technique of manipulation insinuates itself into every sector of society: rather than engaging in a serene dialogue, despite differences of point of view, one begins by verbally discrediting one’s contradictor, the important thing being not to be constructive but to lay low. All this in the name of Truth, of Democracy, of Consumer Freedom, etc.

In a certain way, the spiritual minorities are no longer alone in carrying the burden of the cult label. Should one rejoice? No, for the generalisation of a new rhetoric of discrimination is a regression. Yet this situation can make it possible to return to more intelligence in the debate, by observing that the reproaches addressed to the spiritual minorities, once relieved of their charge of ostracism, are not particular to these groups. From there, an overall, comparative reflection can be engaged to understand better the springs of human groups. And it is only at the end of that reflection that public action can take over, if need be.

Our Observatory project is an illustration of this approach.

November 2007

An AFP dispatch published in Le Monde.fr of 12 November 2007 mentions that the Council of Europe rapporteur, Dick Marty, “attacks, in his latest report, another aspect of the antiterrorist fight: the blacklists of presumed terrorists”. Here are a few extracts:

“The Swiss senator denounces the absence of ‘rights of the defence’ for the people listed”; “The consequences can be dramatic for personal and professional life”; “One country proposes to include a person on the list without supplying detailed reasons (…) The other gives its agreement without hearing, or even informing, the person concerned”. “He (Dick Marty) also proposes a ‘de-listing’ procedure. “Now, and this is frankly the last straw, no such procedure exists”.

As regards the lists (but also on account of the police violence of certain assaults), senator Dick Marty would assuredly arrive at the conclusion that the spiritual minorities in France are treated like terrorists (an ethnologist like Maurice Duval presents the theme of the cults, moreover, as the French-style “axis of evil”). The same “non-law” weighs on the people who have been listed.

To get out of this rut, the CICNS proposes the creation of an independent observatory of the spiritual minorities. The success of its creation, beyond the financial and technical aspects, rests on a new paradigm: the spiritual emergence of recent years could be the renewed expression of an essential human dimension which ought not to be pushed aside, still less stigmatised, as it unfortunately has been for thirty years.

November 2007

The Île-de-France region grants a subsidy of €17,000 per year over three years to the ADFI to “catalogue the groups active on the themes of health and personal development” so as to track “unscrupulous gurus, disguised as therapists, Yoga teachers or clairvoyants, (who) prey on fragile people and on professionals” (Source).

This is, then, in plain terms, a new list of persons or groups judged dangerous. The State, scrupulous about offering a more presentable image, subcontracts the dirty work of producing a list to its fetish association.

Following the last parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults, it clearly appeared that the ADFIs and the UNADFI also serve as relays to supply the MIVILUDES with the results of their assessments of beliefs: an approach the public authorities can hardly avow openly if they want to respect, at least in appearance, the secular pact.

There is no need to return to the incompetence of the UNADFI and the ADFIs in treating these questions. But the irresponsibility of these practices is truly worrying, as is the absence of any supervisory organ capable of sounding the alarm within the public authorities (the Observatory of laïcité seeming to be only another ceremonial “contraption”, to use a well-known expression). The finding therefore remains negative on this front after three years of our association’s action. We count on your support and your testimonies to give the necessary weight to what we denounce.

October 2007

At a recent conference within the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe) in Warsaw, from 24 September to 5 October 2007, and in the more precise framework of the ODIHR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights), the French government, through the voice of its ambassador, permanent representative of France to the OSCE, supported the position of the MIVILUDES and of FECRIS, notably by denouncing “those who reverse the roles when they position themselves as victims of religious discrimination”: http://www.miviludes.gouv.fr/spip.php?article244&iddiv=2.

We will not comment on the regrettable quasi-obligation of the French government to support a mission it created, the MIVILUDES, and a federation it finances, FECRIS, whatever the statements made by these bodies. It is interesting to note, moreover, that FECRIS stands for European Federation of Centres of Research and Information on Sectarianism. We would like to know what is to be understood by “Centre of Research”, an expression suggesting a set of university or equivalent authorities recognised in the matter; which are they? We suspect that where France is concerned, the authority is the UNADFI. Let us be clear: the ADFIs have no authority, credibility or competence in terms of scientific research on religious movements or on what is called sectarianism. The only competence of these associations is self-proclaimed and unfortunately validated by the public-utility status granted by the State.

Let us come back to the argument: the spiritual minorities, alleged to be responsible for numerous “victims of sectarianism”, are said to pass themselves off “dishonestly” as “victims of anti-sectarianism”.

The French debate on the cults has reached the point of confusion where proofs are inaudible. There are two currents of thought that rub shoulders, avoid each other with rare exceptions, and when an exchange takes place, it tips into the mode of confrontation and is therefore inoperative; the research results in sociology of religions and legal sociology become beside the point; the only arguments that “get through” are at the emotional level, often a generator of aggressiveness, and they resemble, on both sides, an appropriation of the “true” defence of human rights.

Outside all factual data, the citizen might then tell himself that all this is six of one and half a dozen of the other. Yet, while waiting for the space to be created where the proofs will at last be audible, it is worth insisting on the enormous difference there is, in the reference to fundamental values, between the discourse of the MIVILUDES/FECRIS type and the discourse of the CICNS, for example.

In the first case, this reference is affirmed, while refusing an open dialogue with those principally concerned - the new spiritualities - and departing as far as possible from an approach of knowledge. For illustration, let us recall the remarks of Mr Roulet (President of the MIVILUDES) on the subject of the annual meeting of CESNUR in Bordeaux: a way “for a few academics to spend their time citing one another” (source: Sud-Ouest, 2 June 2007, article by Hélène Rouquette-Valeins). Respect for the person is granted only when it goes in the direction of a policy of selective victimisation, and the principle of the presumption of guilt is systematically applied against the spiritual minorities.

On the contrary, the CICNS affirms the necessity of respecting spiritual freedom and the spirit of the 1905 law, by re-establishing a permanent dialogue with the members of the spiritual minorities (tens of thousands of people) and by using the analytical work of the sociologists, the jurists and all the people for whom the presumption of innocence is the basic principle of the relationship to the other. This overall work would be the mission of an independent observatory of the new spiritualities, whose creation is one of the CICNS’s objectives.

The difference evoked above thus distinguishes a society that contents itself with appearing democratic from a really democratic society. Some, evidently, content themselves with the appearance.

September 2007

Why is it important to relaunch a real debate on the question of the said cults?

Because there is no human question that is not resolved through dialogue and mutual respect. Yet the current treatment of this subject has made it taboo, making suspect in the eyes of opinion those who dare to confront the received ideas. This intellectual laziness is sly: it transforms intolerant behaviour and counter-truths into “self-evident facts”.

Because one cannot pass over the dark parts of a democracy while exalting its virtues. Above all if that exaltation is the alibi for justifying anti-democratic behaviour. Justifying the fight against the cults as practised in France in the name of laïcité and the defence of human rights is one of those impostures.

Because believing oneself safe today, when one is oneself directly concerned by the accusation of being a “cult”, is an illusion. The anti-cult discourse in our country is based on rumour, which takes little account of a discreet and law-abiding attitude. Rumour sweeps away in a day what then requires years of reconstruction, if that is even possible.

Because defending freedom of conscience, spiritual freedom, freedom of therapeutic choice, is not a restrictive attitude intended to guarantee the exercise of one’s own belief or path. It is necessarily a global attitude, within the respect of the laws, which it is necessary to adopt when the constitutional and legislative texts, though eloquent and protective as regards these freedoms, are no longer respected in their spirit.

We hope that many of you will understand the necessity of mobilising this Sunday 30 September 2007 in order to help regenerate this debate.

September 2007

The UNADFI, through the voice of Jean-Pierre Jougla, addressed the Council of Europe on 28 June 2007. We take an extract (Source, translated from the English by the CICNS):

The followers of the cults are chronic victims who undergo a prolonged and repeated victimisation over an indefinite lapse of time and with multiple traumas. They are always (whatever the cult) victims of an excessive influence and their state of weakness is abused. Unlike the ordinary victims of tangible, visible or sudden aggressions caused by a third party, the followers of cults are not conscious of their state as victims nor of the mental influence of which they are the object. One can therefore affirm that they are deprived of the lucidity necessary for their free consent…

The tens of thousands of people targeted by these words, because they are accused of being in cults, and who have made a conscious life choice, will feel justly indignant at this total absence of respect for freedom of conscience, disguised as protection of human rights and of victims “in spite of themselves”. The forced victimisation of persons, doubled with an affirmation of their unconsciousness, is the fashionable rhetorical tool for attempting to discredit the new spiritualities.

These words would matter little if they did not come precisely from an association declared of public utility in France, with the financial and moral support of the State. It is urgent to restore a balance both with our government (which does not do itself credit by very often associating itself with such statements) and with the European bodies. Our forthcoming colloquium will contribute to this indispensable awakening.

-------------- the text in English

cult followers are chronic victims who undergo prolonged and repeated victimisation in an undefined lapse of time with multiple traumatisms. They are always (whatever the cult) victims of undue influence and whose state of weakness has been abused. Contrarily to current victims of tangible aggressions, visible or sudden, caused by a third person, the cult followers are unaware of their state of victim and are not conscious of the mental influence of which they are the object. One can thus affirm that they are deprived of the lucidity which should accompany the freedom of assent

September 2007

At this stage of our action, we wish to alert all the people engaged in spiritual paths or alternative ways of life respectful of the human being to the growing urgency of joining the CICNS’s action and making their voice heard by the authorities (by writing to the MIVILUDES and the Prime Minister to testify to the benefits of their spiritual paths or to denounce the discriminations and police abuses suffered, by signing our petition, by organising screenings of our film, by taking part in our colloquium). Not a week now goes by without our learning of the closure of a venue hosting courses (one in Paris and one near Nice recently), or of police harassment of others. Our warning is apparently not carrying far enough or loudly enough, and the dissolution of the French spiritual landscape is under way, in silence, fear or general indifference. The new president of the National Assembly is even said to have taken a position by offering his protection to a person accused of defamation by a spiritual minority in a lawsuit. The media continue to use their power of influence to soil reputations, to substitute themselves for Justice and to promote the most aggressive activists of crude French anti-cultism. The misdeeds of a democracy adrift are multiplying, and if the spiritual minorities are the first to feel the effects, they will certainly not be the last. It is perhaps not too late for the people concerned to wake from the collective hypnosis and torpor, to come out of withdrawal and resignation, and to manifest their impulse of solidarity within this morass.

Do not hesitate to contact us to allow us to relay your testimonies, or to ask to take part in our action. Do not let this campaign of denigration smother your deepest aspirations.

August 2007

According to an AFP dispatch of 31 July 2007, the Minister of the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie, is contemplating an adaptation of the status of the faiths without however calling into question the 1905 law on laïcité. It will be a matter of “permitting the establishment of a financial flow between the worship associations governed by the 1905 law and the associations falling under the regime of the 1901 law”.

Anne Demetz criticises this approach on Betapolitique. We will not comment on the soundness or otherwise of the measure contemplated by the Minister, but on one of the shock arguments given to criticise it: the current law is said to be “one of the best guarantees against fundamentalist and cultish practices”, an argument illustrated again in the rest of the article.

The cultic fear is decidedly the all-purpose argument that allows any contradictor to win over the doubtful to his cause. If the factual arguments do not suffice, then the fantasy of the cultic danger should do.

What are “the cults” (that great indistinct ensemble of so-called dangerous movements) doing in a debate on the financial flows of a 1905 association towards a 1901 association? The worship legal status has long been refused to movements alleged to be cultish, with a few exceptions, like the Antoinists or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is true that the precautionary principle currently in place commands the suspicion of everyone except the great religions, and that the list of the cults varies according to the interlocutor. Let us note in passing that the current tax dispute between the State and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, if it ended in the State’s favour, would herald a complete calling into question of the financing of all the worship associations; but it is true that this is a “cult”, so some will then know how to justify, in this case, the modification of the spirit of the 1905 law.

Not only do the spiritual minorities designated as cults have no access to worship status, but the character of a faith is refused them because of that label. Which then allows certain magistrates to invalidate complaints of religious discrimination when the group to which the complainant belongs is considered a cult (see our interview with Raphaël Liogier). In this case again, few are moved by the disregard of the 1905 law.

Let us recall, finally, that these “cults” acquired this defamatory label, or will acquire it, following parliamentary reports and MIVILUDES reports without legal value, and under cover of article 1 of the About-Picard law, of which one still wonders who has the competence and the means to apply it.

July 2007

In an article in Le Monde, the CEO of Peugeot-Citroën denounces the amalgam between suicide and working conditions: “The media and many contributors solicited by the press, such as the unions, the doctors, the psychologists, wanted to establish a close link between work and suicide, notes Mr Streiff. (…) I protest against the amalgam that is made to say that ‘work kills’; I think it makes no sense. It is a lack of humility before a fact that nobody understands.”

These words seem sensible to us. They do not, of course, exonerate the CEOs of industry from questioning themselves very seriously about “dehumanising” working conditions, where productivity and objectives of excellence serve as dogma, where money makes law. Let us add the 3 suicides at Renault, and imagine for a moment these dramatic events within spiritual minorities. The kill would have been sounded. The anti-cult campaigners of every stripe would have bayed for blood, denouncing mental manipulation, the suicidal cults. Files would have been hastily reassembled in all the weeklies, evoking Waco and the OTS, to show the enemy. By comparison, Mr Streiff in fact benefits from a certain media “restraint”, not to mention that he can express himself, which spiritual groups condemned in advance could not have done.

Let us pursue the comparisons. In a recent affair at Lisieux, the About-Picard law is going to be invoked. Since everyone is equal before the law, could one not invoke abuse of weakness at Renault and Peugeot? Which would unfailingly have been the case if these suicides had taken place within spiritual groups. It is not a matter for us of encouraging the use of this bad law (see news 1 and news 2), whose promoters are feverishly trying to obtain its inclusion in our case law - on the contrary. But it is useful to bring out the discrimination suffered by all those arbitrarily classed in the cult category.

These media gesticulations are the norm today; the victim-centred treatment of social problems allows us to doze off between two puffs of indignation and to evade substantive reflection (see our book digest).

June 2007

It is when one suffers rumour oneself that one fully measures its effect, both personally and in the consequences it can have on those around one.

A freemason testifies to his stupor on learning that the MIVILUDES wishes to check whether there might not be dérives sectaires within the masonic obediences: Link

That stupor, thousands of people within the spiritual minorities have lived it and live it every day. It is astonishing that the first reaction of this freemason citizen is: “As if there were not enough cults to deal with” - and not to realise the indifference, indeed the approval, aroused by the discredit cast on others, of whom one generally knows nothing, and before any enquiry.

If we are not careful, the whole of civil society will soon have been put through the sieve of cultic prevention. So long as rumour is not denounced for others - even, and perhaps above all, when it crushes us - there will be a soil that keeps it alive. What, then, was the use of the Outreau tragedy?

We do not endorse the extension of the MIVILUDES’s anti-cult fight, for the blindness that accompanies this body’s action leaves one perplexed. The damage caused by a policy that pushes a precautionary principle to the extreme, violating freedom of conscience, is far greater than the number of so-called victims it claims to protect. This damage is unfortunately considered “collateral” and ignored by the greatest number.

June 2007

Certain small political parties presenting candidates in the legislative elections were qualified as “wacky”, in an implicit amalgam with the cults, on the public channel (France 2, Wednesday 6 June 2007, 8 pm news). Every week now brings its share of anti-cultish accusations. And everyone will appreciate the democratic character of this attitude directed against the alternative movements, a few days before the elections.

One must, once again and without great hope, castigate the absence of professional ethics of the principal media on the theme of the cults, and deplore its gravity.

Certainly, “images of people jumping on carpets” are surprising in a presidential election, but in the end no more so than the rather vulgar pile-up of eleven footballers just after a goal: sport being very well regarded among our politicians (the author of these lines rather likes football).

The most formidable adversary of tolerance is not the group of frenzied anti-cult figures who haunt the public domain, and some of whose representatives quickly seized on the France 2 report to drive in the anti-cultish thorn. Certainly, that group holds the megaphone today, but it represents few people. The most formidable adversary of tolerance is the anti-cult campaigner lurking in each of us, who, after making us say that the cult hunt is an absurdity, leads us to designate one peremptorily.

May 2007

The word “secte” has become an insult thrown in the face to discredit one’s opponent. Its use for nearly thirty years concerning the spiritual minorities has produced imitators who have well perceived its power of discredit.

Thus Claude Allègre (among others), in his latest work “Ma vérité sur la planète”, speaks of the green cult to designate the ecologists who disturb industrial interests. In an article in Libération, there is talk of the blue cult to designate the French national team. The political parties LCR and FO have also enjoyed the favours of this appellation (the red cult?).

The word ends up designating evil generically, a little as one spoke of the demon not so long ago. With the same supernatural and indisputable character that allows one to dispense with explanations or proofs. The concept has merely been secularised.

When personalities with a large media audience use so charged a word to advance their arguments, their first reflex ought to be to question the prior intentions that drive them to denigrate the other a priori with so wounding a term. But very few have that honesty.

May 2007

The UNADFI is taking an interest in the “doctrinal content of the cults” (see “news”). This point had been mentioned by Mme Picard, President of the UNADFI, during her hearing before the third parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults (see our comments on the hearings). Mme Picard specified that her association owed it to itself to study doctrines when they harm public order. Nobody within the commission found anything to say…

That an association should decide to evaluate beliefs in a country of free expression is its most legitimate right. That an association declared of public utility should do so, when it is the principal supplier of information on the subject to the public authorities, raises the question of its competence to give such opinions. When one knows that the sociologists of religions are pushed aside from the debate by these same public authorities, no legitimacy remains to this organisation.

We may seriously question the assertion of the executive and legislative authorities that they do not concern themselves with beliefs, so true is it that our “laïcité” has variable geometry. The Republic does not judge them, but apparently “delegates” this mission to associations declared of public utility. A good subject for the new Observatory of laïcité.

May 2007

The good and bad use of victim status are very well illustrated in an article in Le Monde by Alain Salles of 21 April 2007. Alain Salles explains: “Who can be against the victims? The political parties are at their bedside. Jean-Pierre Raffarin gave them an ephemeral secretary of State: Nicole Guedj. Nicolas Sarkozy wants to create judges dedicated to them. Ségolène Royal proposes to ‘place a lawyer at the disposal of the victims of grave violence within the hour following the filing of the complaint’.”

Further on, he gives the floor to Daniel Soulez Larivière and Caroline Eliacheff: “The ever more massive arrival of victims on the criminal judicial scene is a retreat of symbolisation in justice; and under fallacious pretexts of care lavished on the victims, it is an occasion of social and individual regression.” And he concludes: “The victim comes to court to obtain vengeance. Now, the judicial system is built to oppose vengeance and lynching.”

Alain Salles also cites Robert Badinter: “There has been a drift and a recuperation of this just cause. We have passed from the legitimate preoccupation with the condition of the victims to a political activism. Aid associations have transformed themselves into associations for the defence of this or that party, given a role equivalent to that of the civil parties or the public prosecutor in the judicial process, in a selective compassion.” “Justice cannot become a psychological assistance service, a ‘justice of mourning’.” These words could not better translate the instrumentalisation of the victims of alleged “cults”.

April 2007

Much has been said about the candidates, too much no doubt. A word about the militants. The enthusiasm they demonstrate for their champion at rallies deserves a pause. In many regards, their impulsive ovations at the slightest emphatic proposal from the speaker are similar to the hurrahs of sports supporters. These noisy manifestations, like so many goals scored against the adversaries, add no credit to political action, which ought to leave the competitive mode in which it has got stuck, and we regret that a large part of the electoral effort consists in discrediting one’s adversary or showing that he is not up to the job.

Most of the media also seem more interested in the tactics of the game, the dribble or the winning tackle, than in the deep meaning of the match. They are at the surface, and question the accuracy of the analyses and forecasts, a futile activity if ever there was one.

Everyone will swear that the future of France is at stake, but how much does that element really weigh against the pleasure of suspense in the electoral joust?

The circus games will stop when we have had enough. In the meantime our team has chosen the “fighter” who seems to us the most willing to defend the value of the spiritual dimension and a more fraternal “living together”.

April 2007

Words return ceaselessly in the candidates’ speeches: poverty, precariousness, unemployment… and their remedies: growth, competitiveness, solidarity in effort, restarting the economic machine. One constant emerges: the primordial value granted to work. To the point of associating human dignity with it; not to have work is to feel unworthy (Nicolas Sarkozy), humiliated (Ségolène Royal).

Should a mother at home feel unworthy? Everyone will answer no, of course, but it is a worrying trait of our consumer society to have reduced human dignity to the sole fact of having work socially recognised as such. Adolescents express their worry about unemployment very early because they are hammered with this fear of joblessness, and their life prospects are reduced to this value of work, pillar of our consumer society.

For many, and notably the people who bring alive a spiritual dimension, the value of life is within oneself, and dignity rests on values different from that of work as the pillar of existence. These testimonies are a richness for society, to help it out of its consumerist madness and its dread of economic degrowth.

But space would still have to be left for that inspiration; we noted this sentence from Nicolas Sarkozy (Villebon speech): “I claim the right to say that capitalism cannot survive without an ethics, without the respect of a certain number of spiritual values, without humanism”, and we find refreshing the “Long live life” at the end of François Bayrou’s speech (Zénith)… so much more so than the Marseillaise and the violence of its verses.

France is world champion in “laïcité”. And it wishes to beat its own record. It has therefore just created an Observatory of laïcité. We will wait to see what this organ’s action will be, but one may already worry about it. The spirit of laïcité is not respected in France. The spiritual minorities are well placed to know it, since the denomination of “cults” takes them de facto out of the framework of that laïcité. If this observatory has the function of re-establishing that initial spirit of tolerance and protection of faiths and beliefs, in the respect of public order and without debasing the notion of public order, then this observatory will have a point. If this body is to support the fight against the cults and observe the mothers wearing religious signs while accompanying their children on school outings, we may wager that our public authorities will discredit themselves further at their fellow citizens’ expense.

March 2007

On 27 February 2007, the Official Journal published a question from Mr Fenech (deputy and recently president of the commission of enquiry on the theme of the cults and minors) to the Minister of Justice, on the motives that had led the Chancellery to call into question the training of magistrates in the fight against dérives sectaires (in the framework of the National School of the Magistracy: ENM).

Mr Fenech speaks coyly of the cultic phenomenon as a “developing social phenomenon whose victims belong to fragilised publics, in the front rank of which are minors”, thereby justifying an ad hoc training within the ENM.

The government departments heard by the third parliamentary commission of enquiry (of which Justice was one) all supplied figures showing, on the contrary, that the cultic phenomenon is insignificant. Let us recall Occam’s principle, a scientific principle that has proved itself: faced with a question, it is desirable to reduce the number of hypotheses, and the simplest is generally the right one. If the figures indicate that the number of cases of dérives sectaires is insignificant, the simplest hypothesis is to say that there is no developing social phenomenon (above all if several departments simultaneously arrive at the same result), and not that the departments did their work badly, as the commission of enquiry concluded. The Chancellery seems to have understood this.

It is not surprising that Mr Fenech perseveres on the path traced by the commission he chaired, but he is defending preventive measures that correspond to no reality, are sources of discrimination and cost the taxpayer money.

February 2007

There comes a day, in our societies, when one realises that to remain whole, faithful to one’s faith or one’s life choices, one must confront the oppression of the powerful and the ignorant. That day, one feels there are still two possible choices: to keep quiet and remain undisturbed in the shadow of liberticidal laws, or to speak and risk being jostled by exposing one’s disagreement. But the more the laws become effectively liberticidal, the less real the choice is.

Indeed, the abuses mean that it is no longer merely a matter of being discreet and conforming, but of quite simply abandoning what one feels to be just and precious.

There is then no alternative left, short of disowning oneself: we must live our life in accord with what is just and precious, because one simply cannot sacrifice it. What life would remain behind such a sacrifice? So there is no longer any question, even if sadness and powerlessness are sometimes present.

That day has come. The harassments are more and more frequent (see our press release in “new on the site”), and the sword of Damocles of the powerful hangs over the heads of all those who asked only to live this existence as they see fit. The pressure of the powerful can only awaken the disagreement of the minorities. And the world has evolved more than once in this way in the past. Let us make our disagreement known, peacefully but with courage.

February 2007

According to an article in Le Monde of 6 February 2007: “The French would take religious irreverence badly.” “51% of them find it unacceptable that a religion should be pointed at for its influence on society. Criticism of the way religions function, or of their teaching, is also considered unwelcome” (see also the ongoing trial of Charlie Hebdo over the caricatures of Muhammad. The caricatures of the “cults” that the magazine had made had not made so many waves).

What must the thousands of people who belong to spiritual minorities think of these figures, when they are dragged through the mud (the police and gendarmerie assaults have multiplied in recent weeks) through endless parliamentary enquiries and MIVILUDES reports? It appears, once again, that the fact of being cited as “cults” takes the incriminated groups out of the framework of laïcité, and therefore out of the statistics.

Irreverence then becomes commonplace. We believe that a public informed in a balanced way would have a consideration for the new forms of spiritual expression similar to the one it has for the religions. The current French situation is the result of a deliberate political action; it will be righted by a political will. But that will knows only the law of the ballot box. It is therefore important to show that the people who make a particular life choice and want to give a deep meaning to their existence are an electoral force that counts.

That is the meaning of our presidential test-bench and of the declaration of commitment sent to the various candidates.

February 2007

In an article in Le Monde of 20 January 2007, Jean-Michel Dumay testifies to the phenomenon of “school phobia” experienced by a growing number of pupils.

It is not surprising that, some time after the release of the parliamentary report “cults and minors”, one of the real questions should resurface, since the anti-cult psychosis is the inverted pointer of the principal problems society does not manage to treat.

So “school phobia” has been replaced by “cult phobia”, and legislative amendments have been tabled against the alternatives to the Republic’s schooling, the latter guaranteeing the flourishing of our children (?).

Let us propose a test. Take the children who live this “school phobia” and launch a parliamentary commission of enquiry on the subject using the methods of the “cults and minors” commission, that is to say taking into account only the testimony of these pupils… National Education would unfailingly be declared a “dangerous cult” and closed. Is that an acceptable approach, even if in this case a fundamental reform is needed in that institution? The answer is no, of course.

There are the real problems, like that of education, and then those that are invented. The MIVILUDES has just invented (incidentally at the CICNS’s expense) a cultic activity of “lobbying in the domain of intellectual property”. Nobody had heard of it, but no matter: true or false problem, the alleged cults will have to shoulder the responsibility for it.

January 2007

Good feelings give us a good conscience.

In the name of the protection of childhood, of the development of the critical spirit, of contact with hard human reality, a parliamentary commission of enquiry is attempting to reduce to nothing the attempts, perhaps sometimes clumsy but sincere, of certain people to teach children new values. Yet one need only watch the television news and the end-of-year programmes to observe the stupefaction of which we should on no account deprive our youth.

Just as, at a certain period, the nobility hid its lack of hygiene by perfuming itself, a certain right-thinking class sprays itself and us with good feelings to preserve a system of values that no longer corresponds to the aspiration of many people, or serves only as a foil.

The start of the year is symbolically a moment for good resolutions. The coming election period is propitious for making heard the voice of a change that few candidates take into account: giving the spiritual dimension the place it deserves in society.

December 2006

A year after the anniversary of the 1905 law, France demonstrates its difficulty (its incapacity?) in being truly secular. The insistence of a good number of political officials on wearing laïcité like an apparatchik’s decoration is certainly the mark of a badly lived inner tearing. The press conference of the parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults reproduced all the known artifices for demonstrating that it is not healthy to make an alternative spiritual choice outside the religions recognised or labelled by the State. The expression “little recognition” contains all the hypocrisy of the system.

The latest battering-ram blow, after the failure of all the other measures to eradicate spiritual diversity, was to use the theme of childhood. Of course, the deputies affirm, condescendingly, that adults may do as they wish (understand: delude themselves about the meaning they give their existence), but children will have to bend to the republican requirements (that is to say, those decided by a few deputies), and if the parents do not agree… they know what remains for them to do.

We have expressed several times the inanity of this indiscriminate fight: it will not turn away from their choice the hundreds of thousands of people who mean to live differently. This rearguard combat makes life needlessly difficult; it is a waste of time for the community.

December 2006

In an article in La Croix of 28 November 2006, the journalist Marie Boëton cites the deputies of the parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults (MM Fenech, Gest, Vuilque, Brard). Following a three-hour visit to the community of Tabitha’s Place, these deputies granted themselves a competence in child psychology and behavioural analysis which they share with the media planet, which takes at face value, and without much discernment, this hammering of unfounded alarmist statements (the deputies say they are “in shock”, “it is urgent to fight the psychological and social isolation of these children”).

Behind the grand feelings and, let us concede it, perhaps a desire to do well in some, minors are today a political showpiece. Fifteen deputies were present to vote on the delinquency law. As if, once the games were played, the subject lost its interest. There is no doubt that the broad lines of the proposals of the parliamentary report on the cults were already written in June 2006, at the launch of the commission of enquiry. They will be announced come what may, at holiday time, even if reality must be bent and good sense replaced by an avalanche of liberticidal amendments.

Apart from the inconsequence and lack of humility of our deputies who proclaim themselves psychologists (an attitude they would readily qualify as a “dérive sectaire” in others), one may fear the impact of these media sallies on the people in the field - National Education inspectors, social workers, etc. - who do not confuse the evaluation of a child’s education with a quiz show and who, through listening and dialogue, have a fruitful cooperation with the people offering an alternative to the Republic’s schooling. That is the true meaning of freedom of education.

To reduce education to knowledge and to a potpourri of culture (Mozart, Zidane, the Beatles - without any value judgement or judgement of taste on our part about these figures) is certainly the greatest misapprehension of our educational system; it is not surprising, therefore, that many within the spiritual minorities put forward other values.

December 2006

In Kazakhstan, a governmental commission must rule on the question of a spiritual minority: the Society for Krishna Consciousness. Before the publication of the report, the authorities undertook an operation to demolish the dwellings of certain members of this minority.

In France, a parliamentary commission of enquiry running out of breath, on the theme “cults and minors”, launches a mediatised raid on a community with the objective of proposing laws making school attendance compulsory and protecting minors from “cultic” influence. Let us recall that in France school attendance is not compulsory, only instruction is, according to the fundamental principle of freedom of education recognised by the laws of the Republic and confirmed by the decision of the Constitutional Council of 23 November 1977, and that the school results of home-educated children are equal to and sometimes higher than those of national education.

If there is a difference of form in the treatment (and this point would deserve deeper study - read again our article on the assaults), is there a real difference of objective between these two events? Although we hear more often here about the values of our Republic, the framework of our law, the bedrock of our laïcité, the difference is minimal in the facts, for if in that other Republic the diggers expelled the undesirables without scruple, in ours, short of a genuine citizens’ awakening, the laws and directives will end up smothering every expression of difference, even if that difference expresses itself within the framework of the laws and the respect of the Constitution.

November 2006

The CICNS has carried out an analysis of the hearings of the parliamentary commission of enquiry on the theme “cults and minors”. Our finding is severe.

Many see society as sick. It is probable that one of the causes of the sickness is the resistance to accepting the forces of change within society. The spiritual minorities, despite possible clumsiness, bring a dynamic of change.

Most of the members of the commission think, on the contrary, that they are the sickness. Rather than looking at what causes it and attacking those causes, they seek to generalise a name for this sickness, as if that could help cure it. The names of the sickness are “secte”, “dérive sectaire”. And they try “feverishly” to stick the label on everything that disturbs by its difference.

These expressions, in the French context, are inextricably associated with an approach of amalgams that rejects wholesale everything outside the norm. Instead of studying case by case the situations that raise questions, the commission maintains a system of all-out stigmatisation. Amalgams have one sad advantage: one guilty, all guilty. Yet everything shows that the problem, as it is apprehended, does not exist.

Can they hear that it is better to accompany this change than to confront it?

November 2006

The intervention of Didier Leschi during his hearing before the third parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults is significant. It shows that a certain number of people in government have understood the difficulty of the questions posed and, before that difficulty, refuse to practise the amalgam. They are, we are persuaded, more numerous than those who practise systematic stigmatisation, but curiously the latter hold the megaphone.

The supposed disturbance of public order, ceaselessly evoked in this commission, leads in principle, sooner or later, to a court action or an opinion of the Conseil d’État. It therefore appears natural, in a state governed by law, to refer in fine to the decisions of these bodies to evaluate the disturbance of public order.

Apparently the deputies of the commission do not see it that way, and explain that a level of disturbance exists which is not taken into account by case law but is nevertheless significant, and documented in the various international conventions for the defence of children’s rights.

The commission invokes “victims’ testimonies” to support its theses of the dangerousness of the spiritual minorities. Even if these testimonies must be heard, they can in no way constitute a sufficient element for asserting a dangerousness globally: in these situations, what share belongs to human behaviour that could be found in any organisation whatsoever, and what share of that behaviour can be attributed to the group’s doctrine? Let us acknowledge, moreover, that if any organisation were evaluated on the basis of the people who leave it and turn against it, none would survive. But evidently, in this case, that is the aim sought.

The deputies of the commission consider, without proof therefore, that a menace not delimited by the courts must be taken into account. Let us grant it. But then, the members of this commission have not assembled the expertise required to evaluate this new “disturbance of public order”. The question having been subtly displaced from the sphere of law towards a sphere of psychological, sociological, ethnological evaluation, are we meant to believe that the few people heard (in the great majority, moreover, spokespeople of the anti-cult discourse) will allow the deputies to assess justly all the minorities they are targeting? That is not serious.

The only way out of the impasse is to create in France a genuine observatory of spirituality, as the CICNS proposes. This observatory, independent, will allow the various assembled expertises to adopt at last an approach of knowledge and to turn their backs on a path of stigmatisation followed for too many years. It will also spare some of our deputies from improvising dramatically on sensitive subjects.

October 2006

The debates of the presidential campaign have begun. There is talk of “consuming better”, of “living better”, the second proposition often being dependent on the first.

Yet, for many people engaged in a spiritual path, life is defined at a deeper level. This domain was long a private matter in France, but the negative exposure of the spiritual minorities over many years has reversed that tendency. Today they are “undergoing” a third parliamentary enquiry which designates them as the enemy to be brought down.

Why can the French-style fight against the cults have no successful outcome? Because the great majority of the people who have chosen an alternative spiritual path are sincere and have made a conscious choice that gives meaning to their existence. They will therefore pursue their path in one way or another. Stigmatising them serves only to envenom relations that could be tolerant, if not harmonious.

It is time our political leaders realised this simple reality, either with their good sense or, in time, no doubt, through the peaceful electoral force represented by the hundreds of thousands of spiritually committed people who contemplate a society based first on human, and not mercantile, relations.

Let us salute in this regard the remarks of Didier Leschi, Director of the bureau of worship, addressed to the presidents of the parliamentary commission of enquiry and of the Miviludes. The fact that he notes indisputable “approximations” in the treatment of the question of the so-called “cults” by these two bodies is a sign of an indispensable rebalancing on this social question.

October 2006

The CICNS was present at the new Science and Conscience encounters 2006, whose theme was: “Freedom - what have we done with it?”. 1,200 people attended, over two days, the forty lectures on offer. The site itself (Le Hohwald) is not unrelated to the convivial atmosphere of these encounters, where everyone could exchange peacefully on a subject that is nevertheless delicate: freedom. The majority of the talks (Pierre Rabhi, Jean-Marie Pelt and others…) invited us to a different “living together” that does not seem out of reach at these encounters.

We presented our action at a lecture that was the occasion for screening our film on the new spiritualities in France. The authorisation to show this film during the lecture was withdrawn from us at the last moment by the colloquium’s organising committee: it did not find the film positive enough! (the film was nevertheless authorised for showing at our stand). This little incident is interesting in several respects. First because it shows that the film shakes up received ideas: it is therefore playing its role. Then because this “disturbance” shows how difficult the debate is on a subject where some have the impression they are taking risks if it is tackled head-on - perhaps rightly. But one cannot eternally content oneself with soothing words; there were, moreover, no soothing words from the speakers at the colloquium, which shows that the fear attached to this particular theme is artificial. In any event, we warmly thank Nicole Bertaud (organiser of the colloquium), who supported with dynamism the presentation of our action.

The people present at the lecture made possible a fruitful exchange that contrasts vividly with the pre-formatted and one-sided statements regularly heard in the media. One can only salute this gathering of ideas allowing openness and dialogue, and regret the impoverishment of reflection maintained by the press and the public authorities.

Many people came to our stand to speak of the difficulty of living peacefully the spirituality or convictions of their choice. It is a reality that often expresses itself discreetly: some do not want to awaken difficult memories, or even tell themselves they are not safe from further trouble. But each in their own way, by their determination to remain in accord with their life choices, made it possible to evoke the necessary solidarity that must be created between all the people attached to the right to spiritual freedom.

September 2006

In our last newsletter, we recalled the physical violence of the assaults that a certain number of spiritual minorities have suffered.

There is another violence, a verbal one, which has become banal over the last decade. To say of a group that it is a cult implies grave offences: manipulation and exploitation of persons, violence against children, paedophilia, rape, mafia-style fraud… It is therefore a statement that cannot be used lightly in a state governed by law.

Yet it is a common expression, and almost nobody worries about it today. Certain parliamentarians use the term abundantly to designate those they consider the enemies of human rights. The great majority of the media, because they confuse the sensational and the ratings with information, no longer have any interest in asking themselves the question (since only “the profit and loss account” matters, as Patrick Le Lay asserted in reply to François Bayrou after his intervention on the role of the media).

For that matter, our case law does not consider the term defamatory. For it to be so, one must for example say “dangerous cult”, which is a redundant expression. Let us note, then, that a spiritual minority must be designated as dangerous at least twice in the same sentence before the possibility of defamation begins to be considered.

This “banalised” verbal violence is doubtless the most insidious, and very certainly leads one day or another to the physical excesses observed during the assaults.

September 2006

Two dangers deserve our attention, in particular as to the real impact they have on French society: the cultic danger, and the danger of the psychosis maintained around the cultic problem.

The cult question has been analysed for twenty years by the public authorities. What proofs, research work or in-depth enquiries, university references, convincing statistics - verifiable by independent observers - do we have to speak of a social scourge and justify the arsenal of struggle put in place? Many sociologists and jurists answer that the social scourge does not exist; which does not mean there are no problems worthy of being looked at both sociologically and legally, but nothing resembles, from near or far, the peril evoked, and nothing justifies the absence of open debate on these questions.

The second problem is the feeding of a psychosis about the supposed cultic danger: parliamentary reports not respecting the adversarial principle and establishing blacklists, specific legislation against the spiritual minorities suggesting the idea that their dangerousness requires specific action outside the common law, a partial and biased media coverage of the phenomenon (let us cite, as the latest example to date, the France Inter programme of 5 September 2006, “Le téléphone sonne”, on the theme “Where does the cults’ money come from?”). This programme, distressing in its bias, without the slightest ambition of critical spirit, gives an idea of what the French media have become. The impact of this psychosis is patent: discriminations passed over in silence, and a banishment from society for all the people concerned.

Is the real disturbance of public order - so often invoked against the spiritual minorities, to get round the spirit of the 1905 law, foundation of our laïcité - not in the maintenance of this national, unjustified fear, which insidiously turns French society against a part of itself?

September 2006

The question of the cults has known no summer truce. The polemic around the gathering of the Jehovah’s Witnesses at Lens sums up on its own the ambiguities and, one might say, the meanders of French laïcité, as well as the difficulty of the spiritual minorities in finding a place in French society.

The State recognises no faith. That is the 1905 law. It is therefore not the State that decides who is or is not a faith. When 20,000 people decide to gather around their more than century-old faith, one can hardly deny the worship character of their movement and the right to meet within the framework of their associations. But the confusion comes from the “worship association status” granted or not by the State on criteria rarely free, moreover, of value judgements, and therefore of assessment of the content of the faith. This granting is therefore in principle not a “recognition” of the faith that unites these people (since the State is supposed to be incompetent on this question), but makes it possible to specify a legal status and to grant tax advantages.

Some (including Mr Nicolas Sarkozy) justified the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ right of assembly by reason of the worship status granted to the association, while others (including Me Pesenti on RFI: http://www.cicns.net/RFI.htm) refuse that right because the Jehovah’s Witnesses are supposedly not recognised as a worship association within the meaning of the aforesaid status. Let us note that worship status is not even sufficient for being treated with dignity, since the Antoinists, who obtained it, were placed on the 1996 list of cults in an arbitrary manner, like 171 other minority spiritual movements.

Jean-Pierre Elkabbach on Europe 1 (18 July 2006) finally summed up the heart of the problem by asking Nicolas Sarkozy, caricaturally: “Is it a cult or not?”, speaking of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

This question, which one could replace with “are all these people criminals or not”, is a blank cheque for stepping with impunity outside the democratic framework and outside laïcité, and for authorising, for example, Mr Jean-Pierre Brard on TF1 (20 July 2006) to call the Jehovah’s Witnesses “perfect delinquents”. It then becomes admissible to discriminate against groups considered a priori guilty.

The third parliamentary enquiry, which is to rule in December 2006 on the impact of the “cults” (understand: the spiritual minorities) on minors, starts from the same presumption of guilt that authorises, in the name of the great principles, this “exit” from the framework of our laïcité, and more simply from that of respect and tolerance.

Things can change if many of us testify together to another view of what are called the “cults”.

July 2006

The Caesars of Rome organised circus games to please and subdue the people. Today they are organised by the market economy, like the football World Cup. It is not a matter of sulking at the beauty of the game when it is there, but of recognising the illusion at work. A short while ago, grievances and disagreements were piling up; our qualification for the final brings the French together. Really?

At the moment when France shines in sport and believes it is finding its unity again through sport, a much duller reality is coming to light. The parliamentary commission of enquiry that is to rule on “the influence of movements of a cultic character and the consequences of their practices on the physical and mental health of minors” has been launched. It must deliver its report in December 2006. The parliamentarians of our secular Republic have therefore chosen to continue the discrimination of certain of their fellow citizens on the question of spiritual freedom. To be convinced of it, a few citations from some of them (source AFP): “The indoctrination of children is a major stake for the cultic groups: it is indeed when individuals are most malleable that the hold can be complete”, “abuses and ill-treatment that can lead to death are established”, “the number of children present in the cults is estimated at nearly 20,000”. On the subject of the Raffarin circular of June 2005, which seemed to put an end to the method of blacklists: “In reality, the question posed by the Prime Minister (editor’s note: Mr Raffarin) was that of the ageing of the information collected in 1995 and 1999”.

These few extracts indicate that the results of this enquiry - is the word enquiry not being debased? - will certainly be of the same tenor as the two previous ones (1995, 1999), with effects of an equally great brutality. Numerous support for our project of a Citizens’ Commission of Enquiry on spiritual freedom would constitute a strong signal of the affirmation of our rights addressed to our elected representatives.

We wish you a good holiday.

June 2006

On 30 May 2006, the Official Journal published a question from Mr Éric Raoult to the Minister of Justice: “Mr Éric Raoult draws the attention of the Minister of Justice to the development of the cults in our country. Indeed, according to various pieces of information appearing both in the press and in certain reports, notably parliamentary ones, these cults have been developing for several years in the suburbs, in the overseas departments, through the intermediary of professional-training organisations directed at youth. This information is worrying in the current context of tension. He therefore asks him to specify the action he intends to conduct in this domain.”

A draft parliamentary commission of enquiry entitled Influence of movements of a cultic character and consequences of their practices on the physical and moral health of minors was on the agenda on Wednesday 21 June 2006 in the law commission.

Recently Raphaël Liogier, university professor at the IEP of Aix-en-Provence, told us that the studies, the proofs, on the question of the spiritual minorities seemed to be of no use, in the sense that the anti-cult fight continues while resting on no evidence. The two announcements above are two examples among others.

One explanation for this is certainly that two discourses, carried on at different levels, do not manage to meet. The anti-cult discourse is emotional, defensive and founded on fear. It cannot accommodate a step back and factual evidence. To realise this, one need only stroll through the anti-cult forums, where every attempt at reasoned speech immediately meets an aggressive, indeed insulting, response.

One can however have no indulgence for our elected representatives, who dispose of sufficient elements to engage another type of reflection, which would moreover be their role. Even granting that some of them find themselves helpless before the cultic fear, it is flagrant that this subject serves to divert attention. Who can seriously think that the so-called cultic phenomenon has any influence whatsoever on the “current context of tension”? It is a fraud! The danger the spiritual minorities represent in our country is sociologically insignificant. The danger represented by a political use of the cultic fear deserves all our attention (see our interview with Maurice Duval).

So should we continue to bring sensible and balanced information? Yes, for it keeps us alert. One can however compare the cultic fear to a little Berlin wall artificially separating people whom everything permits to live together. A little wall of shame. What made the Berlin wall fall without a blow struck? One can reasonably say that it was because a great number of people willed it at the same time. For the wall of cultic fear to fall, we must will it. That is the meaning of the impulse of solidarity the CICNS wishes to initiate.

June 2006

In Le Monde of 7 June 2006, an article draws a worrying picture of delinquency, more particularly on the subject of weapons in schools; recommendation of the DCRG: “filtering of access, development of video surveillance around and even in the corridors, installation of alarms and motion-triggered lighting, police presence in the public spaces around the establishments. The RG suggest raising the anti-intrusion railings and multiplying the number of supervisors.”

Ségolène Royal, saying out loud what some had doubtless not dared to say, spoke of military supervision for delinquents.

Some time ago, we mentioned a colloquium of the parliamentary study group on the cults wishing to alert opinion to the indoctrination of children in the cults - without proof, of course. What irony!

Our society no longer dares look itself in the face. Not in the sense that the problems are not mentioned - on the contrary, we are stupefied with bad news. But in a certain way responsibility is evaded: nowhere, or onto a scapegoat. Very often, the only riposte of our elected representatives is then rot or repression; our values of competition and generalised mercantilism are never called into question.

A single example, even if it does not cover the whole question: many studies have shown that the violence of the young has a relationship with the force-feeding they undergo (the word is almost a euphemism) of video games and TV series in which this violence is banalised. One statistic has estimated that an American child of 12 has already ingested 130,000 aggressions of every kind and 9,500 murders and assassinations. Have we heard proposals for concrete measures to stop this drift of the free market? No, people prefer to contemplate installing video surveillance, a police presence, military supervision - in fact, ultimately, recreating the atmosphere of those video games in reality, since they are the reflection of the way we preserve our values; and, when the occasion arises, as often as possible, pinning the blame for a dangerous education on the alleged cults.

May 2006

The approach of the presidential and legislative elections has restarted the electoral machine.

We are thus witnessing the beginning of that long series of media contortions which often hide merciless combats and where there is nevertheless talk of peace, security, social integration and progress. Spot the error.

A recent poll showed that a large majority of the French no longer trust the political world. It is not certain, for that matter, that we are not ambivalent - simultaneously depressed by the political spectacle and captivated by these confrontations, so much does our weariness vie with our thirst for spectacle.

Nevertheless, if it is difficult to believe the electoral promises of our candidates - who are, it must be acknowledged, assailed by conflicting demands - it is essential to continue to believe in ourselves. The interest of the coming electoral campaigns lies not first in the expectation that what we ask will be realised, but in the solidarity that unites us in expressing it. It is an unavoidable beginning if one wants things to change. The politicians will follow, since they can in any case no longer do otherwise today.

We have initiated a test-bench on our site which will progressively compare the visions of the various candidates on the question of the new spiritualities. We are asking them concrete questions whose answers will assuredly be instructive. Who knows, perhaps we will have a good surprise among all these candidates. It will then be for each person, in their soul and conscience, to match their choices to their aspirations.

May 2006

It is interesting to set side by side two recent events: the publication of the 2005 MIVILUDES report and the Clearstream affair. In both cases, accusations are proffered in the form of rumours, of partial and biased information, of disinformation. Against alternative spiritual and health paths in the first case, against the political class in the second.

In the Clearstream affair, the many political personalities implicated at once took public offence at these unjust attacks. A great media and judicial effervescence took place to shed light on these rumours and find the “crow” responsible for this shambles. We may wager that even if some do not have a clear conscience, they will slip through the net.

What means are given to the spiritual minorities to silence the unfounded rumours that have designated them a menace to the Republic for more than twenty years?

Where is the true menace? In the sometimes clumsy attempts of some to recover, alone or in a group, a harmony through a spiritual path? Or in that dismaying display of political low blows, conflicts of interest and power struggles, so recurrent that one ends up getting used to it, once the first dismay has passed?

May 2006

The fight against the cults in France is an example of a derisory combat that justifies itself by inventing new angles of attack against a non-existent enemy.

First there was talk of cults, well structured; then, faced with the impossibility of demonstrating any social scourge whatsoever, it is explained that the phenomenon is evolving, that it is no longer solely a matter of large groups but of small groups that hide, that mutate in their forms and their doings. What could be more practical than an invisible and mutant enemy to justify any repressive measure, however inconsequential?

First studied and discredited in the United States (http://www.cesnur.org/testi/melton.htm), the notion of brainwashing was imported into France under the slightly more watered-down term of mental manipulation, which transformed itself in the About-Picard law into abuse of weakness, a term more in conformity with our law. The words are chosen to become acceptable and to fit the democratic framework; the acts, for their part, can remain anti-democratic.

There was talk of cult offences; we passed to dérives sectaires, then to actions of a cultic character. A gradation into vagueness whose only aim is to leave no doubt about the cultic risks.

The accent was placed on the alleged tormentors, but that did not bear enough fruit, so the spotlight is placed on the supposedly numerous victims, a discourse more apt to touch the emotional fibre and a defensive attitude: a university diploma in victimology linked to cultic harm has just been created.

One could give many examples of this self-adaptation of the anti-cult discourse in France. What a waste of time, carefully avoiding understanding an unavoidable social phenomenon from which society has everything to gain.

April 2006

Extract from the UN report on freedom of religion and conviction in France (18-29 September 2005), paragraph 108: “However, she [the Special Rapporteur] is of the opinion that the policy followed and the measures adopted by the French authorities have provoked situations where the right to freedom of religion or conviction of members of these groups has been unduly restricted. Furthermore, the public condemnation of certain of these groups, as well as the stigmatisation of their members, has resulted in certain forms of discrimination, notably with regard to their children…”

Remarks made at a colloquium of the Study Group on the cults of the National Assembly at Saint-Priest (Rhône), 30 March 2006 (source AFP): “Several thousand children and adolescents are today in cults. They represent a profitable investment: they secure the next generation”… “50,000 children are victims of cultic hold out of 700,000 followers.”

The contrast between these two visions is striking. Beyond any argument for one camp or the other, when national elected representatives mandated by the French Parliament in the framework of a study on the cults have an assessment so radically opposed to that of foreign observers mandated by the reference body on human rights, it is time to open an independent public debate on the subject.

If the public authorities cannot have the distance necessary to apprehend the question of the new spiritualities, it is for citizens and experts of every horizon to take the floor and bring back good sense.

April 2006

In an article in Le Monde of 18 March 2006, one can read:

Almost all the media derailments in criminal news stories occur in the first 48 hours. Before rushing at a sensitive story, “we will look twice, even at the cost of losing a little ground to our colleagues,” promises Mr Grenu, of France 3 Nord - Pas-de-Calais. “One often speaks of the solitude of the investigating judge; there is also the solitude of the journalist,” underlines Jean-Luc Evin, editor-in-chief at Ouest-France. “We encourage colleagues to share their doubts, even at the cost of delaying a story by a day.”

The whole limit of the efforts conceded is contained in that concession: “even at the cost of losing a little ground”. What will that “little” weigh against the sacrosanct ratings? Is there really an acceptable degree of haste when there is a risk of defaming, and therefore of soiling, people presumed innocent for long years? As for the solitude of the journalist, one wonders what it consists of, if it is a matter of relating the facts as accurately as possible - when they are known, that is, and when there is something to say - unless that solitude is linked to the fragility of renown and the difficulty of obtaining a “scoop”.

The journalists’ charter contains all the rights and duties permitting a respectful and effective journalism. Following the Outreau affair, one is astonished that the great media have not already taken public measures to recover the sense of that charter. But let us keep hope…

The image of the spiritual minorities would be quite different today if those journalistic values had been respected these last twenty years.

March 2006

If you happen to stop at motorway service areas, you will surely have noticed those little kiosks presenting guides on very diverse subjects: history, politics, science, etc. They are in general quite well made. One concerns civic education “…based on respect for the other within the framework of life in society…”.

In the middle of this booklet, there is a paragraph on non-discrimination: the 1958 constitution ensures “the equality before the law of all citizens, without distinction of origin, race or religion”. It is also mentioned that a whole legal arsenal has been put in place “in order to fight sexual, racial, name-based and physical-appearance discrimination”. Let us note that this arsenal for preserving the values of our constitution omits to mention the term “religion”. It is not surprising that difficulties appear if essential words are deleted.

Just after this paragraph, a yellow inset evokes the resurgence of the cults and the efforts deployed to determine properly the frontier between cult and religion. There follows a definition of the cult, which we will spare you. Let us note the feat of arriving at a definition where the contemporary sociologists who have studied the question seriously have given up.

It is important to keep the traveller, even on the road to his holidays, alert to the dramatic and worrying social scourge that the cults constitute…

February 2006

What does the affair of the Muhammad caricatures teach us? Did the caricaturists have the right to make those drawings? Must freedom of the press be respected at all costs? Must religions be protected from blasphemy?

Right (even divine right) is invoked to the rescue of each position. Some will say it is a matter of liberty, but that liberty is generally expressed within the framework of the law. Another way of approaching the question might be to ask: what is the intention of each protagonist? What was the intention of the caricaturists? What really motivates those who want to protect the right of the press, or the image of their religion? What was the intention of those who envenomed things? Is it an intention of openness towards the other, a tolerant one, or the contrary? This simple honest assessment, which does not hide behind the invocation of the law, would be of a nature to appease the divergences, and would doubtless allow the observation that the caricatures are only pretexts. A few drawings suffice to inflame a whole region of the world and leave another at a loss.

February 2006

On the subject of the Outreau affair, the Minister of Justice speaks: “Everyone is deeply moved. It is a good first step and we must not stop there; the second step is that we will have to recover our composure and legislate with a little distance.”

That distance does indeed seem often absent. Certain “methods” similar to those one wants to denounce seem to be used in the search for a culprit… for another scapegoat, as if to counterbalance the horrors the first victims suffered.

Is this wisdom of “distance”, of “stepping back”, not the foundation of justice in a state governed by law? The Outreau commission will have served no purpose if it does not result in promoting that taking of distance on every subject. One test will be to observe the behaviour of the judicial apparatus and, more generally, of the public authorities and the media towards the new spiritualities.

January 2006

The parliamentary commission of enquiry into the Outreau affair brings its share of revelations and emotion every day.

A threshold of tolerance was crossed in this affair which obliges a reconsideration of the whole judicial system.

And the new spiritualities in all this? At the risk of repetition, let us recall the way they were stigmatised in an arbitrary parliamentary report, and how the resulting discriminations are passed over in silence in the media. That is a threshold of tolerance one may call high, but apparently insufficient to arouse questioning at the level of the public authorities.

At the CICNS, we have been able to observe that the psychological shock of Outreau has not yet had any effect on the treatment of the new spiritualities. The same rumours and amalgams are used, including in the course of certain trials. These rumours shift things, crudely or subtly depending on the case, from the presumption of innocence - which is the foundation of our law - to the presumption of guilt.

What is needed to return to the presumption of innocence?

It is desirable that the adjustments that will be made to the judicial system play their role as safeguards. But those safeguards will certainly not be able to put an end to an attitude of distrust towards difference without the rebirth of certain human values. How can a society based on competition and gain hope to develop fraternity?

Yet this new fraternity exists, in multiple forms, and in particular within the new spiritualities. It is doubtless enough to affirm it with patience, in a great impulse of solidarity.

January 2006

An article in Le Monde of 7 January 2006, lost in the mass of news items, informs us that, according to certain researchers, and in large part because of human actions, a massive extinction of species could occur in the 21st century.

It is remarkable to observe how “globalisation”, which could be a showcasing of diversity, leads unfailingly to uniformisation, indeed destruction.

The rejection of spirituality in its diversity in France falls within that great crusher which is single-track thinking, at the origin of our criminal behaviour towards nature and towards men.

Many voices are rising in the ambient hubbub to propose a new vision of the world. It is up to us to make 2006 a “megaphone” year for the right to spiritual freedom.

December 2005

The UNADFI has won at first instance a lawsuit against a collective of lawyers and complainants accusing it of being a thought police.

The judgment considered that their honour and reputation had been harmed. In a press release, the UNADFI asserts that the claimants in reality aimed only to “instrumentalise justice…”.

Let us ask what is done about the honour and reputation of the thousands of people who have been soiled over the last twenty years by defamations, rumours and (instrumentalised?) trials by reason of their spiritual affiliation, and who prefer to keep quiet about it. Indignation at the ravages of unfounded accusations has not yet reached the spiritual sphere. We will continue to work to restore a necessary balance.

December 2005

The events in the suburbs of the great cities show that the only response of our democracy to difficult questions is to build a rampart of violence (physical, political, media-based or legal).

That rampart is closer to or further from our space of liberty depending on the subject. Concerning the new spiritualities, the policy of fighting dérives sectaires very quickly restricted the citizens’ space of expression.

Violence belongs to man. The spiritual impulse is not at fault, even if, on occasion, that impulse can be perverted by violence. What the new spiritualities, and the religions in a general way, bring in their initial message is the idea of a possible fraternity between men.

We have ended up accepting that individual liberties be flouted for various reasons, invoked whenever convenient: reason of State, public order, social scourge, etc. And the idea of fraternity very quickly gives way to the certainty that man is a wolf to man and that only a restriction of liberties, and violence, will restore order.

The 1905 law, by separating the spiritual sphere and the sphere of the State, finally allowed the people who wish to bring alive their spiritual dimension to revivify in their own way that idea of fraternity which the State has trouble keeping alive.

The separation can remain as it is, but the State could advantageously take up for itself this idea of a new fraternity, which is for that matter part of our republican motto: “Liberty, equality, fraternity”. What indeed is that fraternity, if not the idea that men can live something other than competition and distrust policed by social rules?

November 2005

For four days, the CICNS took part in the Éveil et Action encounter in Paris. We met many people very concerned by our action, many of whom told us their painful story, often with very hard words against the ADFI, and calling a cult “this fascist country in which one is forced to think ill of every alternative path”.

At the same time, few of them really know the situation. Those who believe they know it best declare that the situation in France is improving and that the public authorities are more tolerant, and it would indeed seem that certain large spiritual movements are being left more in peace. On the other hand, individuals testify to a worsening of the harm to their freedom of thought.

The some 600 people who took part in this encounter had in common a desire to share values other than those advocated by our declining materialist society, and carried a message of peace, sharing and fraternity. They testified to a dynamism and a great creativity through concrete and solid projects capable of bringing immediate solutions to the problems of health, energy, education and social and family relations, as well as in the political and economic domains. They also testified to the difficulty of finding, in France, a space in which to express oneself freely, above all as soon as one speaks of spirituality or of a holistic vision of life.

We carried out a few interviews which this newsletter will echo, and doors opened towards spiritual movements with which we had very positive contacts, promising common actions.

In a general way, the CICNS’s message was very well received and strongly encouraged, and many came to bring their support to our project of a Citizens’ Commission of Enquiry, not hesitating to show their joy at seeing such an initiative take shape.

Thanks to all those who were there and welcomed us, as to all those who read us and join us in this great, peaceful movement of solidarity that is changing the world.

November 2005

27 June 2005: Press release of the deputies Philippe Vuilque, Georges Fenech, Jean-Pierre Brard, members of the study group on the cults at the National Assembly:

“With the RAFFARIN circular of 27 May 2005, some would like to see a turning point in the French policy of fighting the cults, and more particularly a calling into question of the list of cults established by the 1995 parliamentary report and updated in 1999… the circular in no way recommends putting an end to the parliamentary list… Better still, by this ruling, the Conseil d’État confirms the ‘informative’ interest of the parliamentary list, which therefore remains a reference for the work of prevention and of the fight against dérives sectaires.”

Which unfortunately puts an end to the hopes of those who saw in the Raffarin circular a positive inflection of the blind fight against dérives sectaires.

AFP, 29 September 2005: in an interview, Jean-Michel Roulet, new president of the MIVILUDES, declares:

“We are not very good at receiving the victims of mental rapes; there is training to be done among the police, the magistrates, so that these victims can testify.” Mr Jean-Michel Roulet would like “to advance by even five judgments” during his presidency.

Is it a matter, as already happened in 1998, of manufacturing culprits to justify the arsenal of the anti-cult policy?

Saturday 8 October 2005: Anne Hidalgo, deputy to the Mayor of Paris, in an interview with La Vie no. 3136: “The nebula of the cult movements, which practise mental manipulation and want to take possession of the individual’s liberty… A great public debate should take place on this question.”

Many in France have now discovered that they are part of this nebula, of which a map will be kept up to date in Paris by the City Hall. The enemy is designated; it is nebulous, therefore difficult to define, which makes it all the more dangerous, and at the same stroke justifies every excess.

It is in this climate of maintained psychosis that Mme Hidalgo wishes for a public debate and that MM Philippe Vuilque, Georges Fenech and Jean-Pierre Brard call for the creation of a parliamentary commission of enquiry. Can one believe that the public authorities wish to balance the debate on the spiritual minorities?

If, after 20 years of surveillance, no statistics are available on the importance of the phenomenon of dérives sectaires, the question is perhaps moot. It is not a matter of denying the existence of offences, which the courts can treat without creating specific legislation, but of firmly calling into question the policy of amalgam and discrimination followed until now.

That is what we propose to study in the framework of the Citizens’ Commission of Enquiry on spiritual freedom in France. This enquiry is an opportunity we are giving ourselves to get out of the disinformation. Will this opportunity find an echo among the more than 500,000 people who are in this so-called nebula, unjustly pointed at, and who ask only to live openly and, for the great majority of them, within the framework of the law? We know that a certain inertia still weighs on the victims of the campaign against the spiritual minorities, but we hope for an imminent awakening.

October 2005

The debate on spiritual freedom frightens. But it also frightens those who, in a certain way, promote the new spiritualities.

As announced in the previous newsletter, we were to take part in a programme on Radio Ici et Maintenant on Thursday 15 September, as well as in the “Restez Zen” fair in Paris from 16 to 19 September. In both cases, the organisers finally did not accept our participation. We apologise to those who would have liked to listen to us or meet us at these events. Listening to their fears and their arguments, the negative answer of these organisations to our proposal to prompt reflection on spiritual freedom brings out two things:

• A French context which has long installed the dread of simply mentioning the subject of the spiritual minorities, and which has generated a self-censorship.

• The germ of discrimination which is in each of us. Because the choice of avoiding a debate on spiritual freedom potentially hides certain settled ideas about who is dangerous and who is not. And we may then ask ourselves the question: on what is this fear founded, is my information reliable, complete, have I taken the trouble to listen to other sides of the story? Am I not myself suspect in the eyes of some? And even if my assessment is founded, does that prevent me from speaking of it without passion?

This questioning leads to the acceptance of the other in his difference, with discernment but without judgement (that is the role of Justice). The impulse of solidarity we wish to create through the petition for the Citizens’ Commission of Enquiry on spiritual freedom in France is an affirmation of this attitude of openness, to look things in the face within the framework of the law.

September 2005

For several years now we have been challenging the public authorities and the media on the policy of discrimination that targets the spiritual minorities.

Abundant information has been and continues to be brought by the CICNS and by people recognised for their competence (sociologists, jurists, philosophers), or by people testifying directly to the discrimination they have suffered, to prompt a balanced debate on the subject.

Despite this, the public authorities have made no concrete and credible proposal for truly understanding and taking stock of the emergence of the new spiritualities. The only analysis offered is truncated and places excessive attention on the problem, alleged to be of great scale, of dérives sectaires. This last expression perpetuates the amalgam between spirituality and criminality, and thus banishes from society all the people who simply wish to live the spiritual dimension that animates them.

It is time to launch a project for a Citizens’ Commission of Enquiry on spiritual freedom in France. The term “citizens’” implies that citizens take the initiative of the enquiry. It is therefore important that this action be supported by the greatest number of people, by signing the support petition, to constitute a representative voice.

Responsibility for the enquiry will be given to a Steering Committee made up of academics (sociologists, ethnologists, specialists in law) and jurists (lawyers). The members of this Committee will have to have a recognised competence and neutrality on the subject.

The first contacts we have made for the constitution of the Committee have received a positive echo for this initiative. We are confident of being able to bring together, with your support, the people who will bring credibility to the results of this enquiry, while being conscious that this commitment demands accepting the criticisms and pressures inevitable on a subject difficult to depassion in France. But is this difficulty of our democracy with self-analysis not one more reason to act?

This impulse of solidarity will gather the people attached to spiritual freedom, beyond beliefs and fears and in the respect of the law. It will be the testimony of the acceptance of the other in his difference and the recognition that diversity is a chance and a richness. That is already inscribed in our French, European and universal Constitutions; let us know how to recover in our behaviour the inspiration of those founding texts.

August 2005

The new religious movements? “Soon it won’t interest anyone any more. Everything is done so that it interests nobody.”

Such were the words recently offered us by Bernard Renaud, a publisher in the domain of esotericism, spirituality and natural health.

We do indeed observe the advance of repression in its legal contours, the vexations inflicted on the spiritual movements by way of the town halls, the banks and certain administrations, but also in the consecration that the “anti-cult fight” receives from certain media, writers, politicians or film-makers, who take up without distinction or precaution received statements and ideas, and thus banalise the banishment from society of a part of its citizens.

If we share the observation, we do not associate ourselves with this pessimistic prophecy. The CICNS, over this summer, has been enriched by new contacts, has met people who, like Bernard Renaud, are ready to denounce the smothering of spirituality in what is most alive in it.

The CICNS has also been enriched by new members, and by the now discreet spectacle of the inexorable and silent renewal of the spiritual impulse within the very heart of a society whose face is made up with materialism and cynicism.

The CICNS’s return from the summer break will come with the announcement of new projects and a vitality equal to the demands of the news.

July 2005

A new anti-terrorist bill will be presented at the end of August in France. If it is accepted, a camera should be installed in every bus in Paris (4,000 in all): “In the name of the fight against terrorism, the government will therefore propose to Parliament, which will discuss it in the autumn, to multiply the surveillance devices in public places (metro, buses, shops) and to oblige the operators to keep the record of telephone calls (excluding the content of conversations) and of emails” (Le Monde of 27/07/05).

The answer to the great social problems is always the same: an increase in surveillance and in the repression of individual liberties… in the name of their defence. Who can believe that these cameras will be used only in the event of terrorist threats, and that conversations will not be listened to for any other reason? The new technologies are now in the service of the control of populations.

The difficulty of the spiritual minorities in living their faith falls within a general movement of suspicion towards everything that can imperil the consumer society. It is not a matter here of defending terrorism, which is a true calamity, but of seeing how our societies, based on competition and on the a priori that difference is a danger, are led to create enemies. What would remain of our values if there were no more enemies? So when one disappears, another must quickly be created.

The spiritual minorities, sources of new ideas, bring another perception of life in an ailing society. Is that the reason they are hunted like terrorists? Another vision nevertheless seems unavoidable if we want to get out of an increasingly vicious circle. Our individual choice is at the heart of the answer to the problems, and of what will or will not come to pass.

June 2005

The HALDE (High Authority for the Fight against Discrimination and for Equality) is, on paper, the most promising apparatus proposed today by the public authorities for fighting all discriminations. The speech of the President of the Republic at the installation of the HALDE nevertheless clearly defined the principal orientation of this body: equality of opportunity in the world of work. That objective is laudable. Nevertheless, if one sets this strong inaugural message beside the many press comments that pointed out the HALDE’s lack of resources for treating all the files and complaints that will come up, it appears that discriminations against the spiritual minorities will assuredly come at the tail end of this institution’s preoccupations.

The France 2 8 o’clock news of 20 June 2005 generated a certain emotion among people sensitive to spiritual freedom. A report in the bulletin mentions the intention of the public authorities to put an end to the use of the 1995 parliamentary report. One does not quite know what the expression “put an end” covers, insofar as, theoretically, that report has long had no legal or normative value. Should one see in it an admission by the State of the absence of legal and normative value of the Ministry of the Interior’s notes?

Be that as it may, another very plausible way of understanding the intentions of the public authorities in this announcement is that, far from limiting itself to the 172 movements of the first report, the fight is going to extend to all the movements (between 600 and 800) catalogued by the ADFI as “cultic” groups. Where is the change? The list will be extended, but it will not be official.

Looking more closely, this report is a model of the genre in its way of launching different contradictory messages. One may perhaps be astonished that a public television channel does not seek to clarify them. But can one really still be astonished?

These two events, placed end to end, point always in the same direction. Short of a rather unexpected reversal on the part of the public authorities and the media, the spiritual minorities are destined for condemnation.

It would suffice, however, for all the spiritual seekers, representing more than one per cent of the population, to affirm in solidarity their right to a spiritual life, for there to rise up in France a force of peaceful resistance that would touch consciences and make heard a voice other than that of intolerance and oppression.

June 2005

This newsletter no. 18 reaches you earlier than planned because we judge that the revelation of Mme Hidalgo’s project in Paris demands our attention as a matter of urgency.

The list of the 1995 parliamentary report on the cults has no normative or legal value. It seems vain to recall it, since it continues to be a reference for putting a part of the population on the index: the map of the cults in Paris is the illustration. The public authorities know perfectly well the destructive power of rumour. They are at the origin of this rumour and maintain it while protecting themselves legally: the report cannot be challenged, and the Ministry of the Interior is itself the origin of the note legally disqualifying the report. It is an implacable mechanism. But who is fooled?

Thank you for reading our article and circulating it widely. You are also invited to write to the mayor of Paris or the arrondissement mayors, as well as to the political officials of your choice. A model letter is available on this page, but you are encouraged to write it even more spontaneously, making your voice heard before this totalitarian turn our society is taking.

May 2005

The Teva channel, the Nouvel Observateur, soon France 2, speak of the alleged cults. The discourse is without surprises. We present a testimony from Doctor Tal Schaller. Between these two visions of one and the same reality, does a bridge exist? We think so. First factually: it seems possible to us to assemble the evidence showing that the rejection by the former rests on no reality permitting them to denounce the abuses of the spiritual minorities as a significant phenomenon. Beyond this factual evidence, there is a share of the irrational in the attitude of rejecting the other who is different and who disturbs because he calls for change. It is probable that even in the face of the evidence, some will continue to react against what frightens them or what they do not agree with. One might almost say that these are the foundations of that bridge we are trying to build together. To manage to accept the other even if one does not agree with him, because it is in that diversity that life expresses itself. This part of the bridge must be built from both sides, but we will go as far as possible towards the other bank to hold out our hand.

May 2005

The results of the CICNS’s tour in March 2005 continue to take concrete form with the release (on your computer screens) of the interview films made during that journey. You now have the testimony of Maurice Duval at your disposal; others are in preparation. These new perspectives make even more alive the message of openness to the diversity of spiritual paths that we wish to share. The path is barely cleared, but there is no lack of good will, or of citizens full of ardour to bring their experience, their knowledge or quite simply their good faith to the illumination of a domain of human existence that must be able to be lived in broad daylight. It is enough to gather one’s energies in one form or another to create a movement of solidarity, a first movement of butterfly wings that will become a salutary breath, that one. Spring is a bearer of new ideas. We will not fail to present them to you as soon as they have hatched.

April 2005

The CICNS’s perspective is awakening a renewed interest, if the visitor statistics of our site are to be believed (about 500 visitors a day). Beyond the figures, the positive echoes following our presentation tour this spring encourage us on the path traced. Each person can transmit this message of openness for a freer spirituality. It is addressed first to oneself, for accepting difference, accepting the other, is not always simple, and can then be addressed to others. This period, against the background of the referendum, is favourable to great confusion, so fogged do the debates seem by reactions and fears. Some do not hesitate to speak of a choice of civilisation in the times to come. The MIVILUDES, through its president, prides itself on the scale of the administrative and legal apparatus put in place to fight the significant phenomenon of dérives sectaires. It specifies however that one of the objectives of the coming year will be to define this notion, and that there are no figures for measuring its importance, the figures not being reliable. We have thus been witnessing, for many years, the installation of a phenomenal apparatus without knowing precisely what it is for, either in quality or in quantity: there is indeed something to be proud of. It seems that the people attached to spiritual freedom and freedom of conscience are being pushed to demonstrate their innocence. May this conjuncture bring us closer to one another and encourage us to unite, to speak with that same determined and serene voice the world so greatly needs today.

March 2005

From Tours to Marseille, the CICNS’s journey was a fascinating adventure. Two weeks of nomadism under the sign of spiritual freedom, two weeks punctuated by very diverse sharings, all equally rich, of experiences, ideas, advice.

On the menu, first of all, five lectures, which gathered some sixty people. If the number is still small, the encounters, on the other hand, are of great quality. We were able to exchange with the members of several spiritual minorities, who told us very simply of both their difficulties and their fears, but above all of their aspiration to true solidarity, the kind that, beyond differences, allows the voice of spirituality, alive, to be raised against the lie.

We had, moreover, the opportunity to carry out some ten filmed interviews, for the 52-minute documentary whose project you know. Authenticity and depth guaranteed. We now have “in the can” a multiple and documented material that answers many questions on the legal, sociological and spiritual planes. Clear, “bracing” testimonies that lift the veil and dismantle the mechanisms of the anti-cult fight.

Three stages remain for us to complete this tour, and we hope, of course, for the presence of many people from Montpellier and Toulouse at the coming encounters. But already we can testify to a new and essential stage in our work: that of taking root, the one where the work of the last two years begins to bear concrete fruit, through tangible options, effective support. We feel clearly that we have left the domain of mere hopes to enter that of realisation. More than ever today we must remain vigilant, but the light is on the march, and we owe it to our unity. Thank you.

January 2005

Did you say “cults”? We say: “New Spiritualities”.

The CICNS (Centre d’Information et de Conseil des Nouvelles Spiritualités) is an association born from the observation that spiritual orientations and practices have, in France, for several years, been battered by the tendentious amalgams of a discriminatory crusade against the new expressions of the spiritual search. Not a day passes in France without a lecture venue, a spiritual group, a therapist or a private individual having to endure the intimidation attempts of the activists of the fight against the spiritual minorities.

The media speak of gurus, of mental manipulation and of collective suicides. We, for our part, meet people who have simply gathered in communal or associative form to follow their deep aspiration to rediscover life.

Most of these “spiritual minorities” are above all hearths of mutual aid and reflection, where certain values, lost in the strayings of our societies of profit and falsehood, are beginning to be reborn.

Criminality and suicide within these groups are practically non-existent, very much less frequent than in the rest of society.

The spiritual leaders of these groups, contrary to received ideas, most of the time show an integrity and a disinterestedness from which many company directors or party leaders could draw inspiration.

All suffer this rejection by society, and some, who are no different from the others, are openly discriminated against, calumniated, sometimes lose custody of their children, when they do not undergo “raids” by armed men, as if they were terrorists.

Where does this gulf of incomprehension come from, this rejection, when it is not hatred?

The State Is a Cult

Why fight the cults?

by Hervé Duray on La Page Libérale

The criteria for recognising a cult applied to the state: a demonstration that has proved itself…

Note: The CICNS is not in agreement with all the statements made in this text, but our team decided to publish it because it describes a point of view that seems to us to deserve to be taken into account

In France there has been no state religion for more than a century. Yet the State regularly concerns itself with religious questions: for example when young Muslim girls go to their secular lycée veiled according to the writings of the Koran, or again through the debates in civic and citizenship education classes.

The cults provide the State with a new pretext for intervening in the private, and even spiritual, life of the French. Now beware if your beliefs are stamped “CULT”.

The French Senate adopted the bill on the cults last Thursday. It must be said that the debate has been running in France for some years, after the multiple tragedies of the Solar Temple (twenty dead at the very least), and the recurring polemics over the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The latest episode to date: a 14-year-old child who refuses a blood transfusion, although suffering from leukaemia. His gesture certainly cost him his life, but his will was respected. And one no longer counts the affairs of every kind concerning rapes, extortions of funds, or the illegal practice of medicine. The most prominent “cults”? The Jehovah’s Witnesses and of course the Church of Scientology. The activities of the Jehovah’s Witnesses have never been illegal, except the refusal of military service, but who could reproach them for that?

But there are many others… down to Catholic groups respectful of the purest tradition, like those of the Church of Saint Nicolas in Paris, itself dependent on the Catholic Church!

To convince us thoroughly of the immense gravity of the problem of the “cults”, the Parliament’s commission of enquiry put forward the figure of 160,000 followers in France, and 100,000 sympathisers. A virtual army!

In short, one sees through this little overview that the cults include both groups that are large but marginal in their ways of life and worship, and dangerous, quasi-mystical groups where a guru leads to murder, suicide, etc. The definition of the cults cannot be made by the crimes they cause their followers or their leaders to commit, since one sees clearly that the whole range of the penal code already exists, but by their religious nature. At the same time, since crimes and offences are already covered by the law, why not apply the law? And now, how will one differentiate what is a “cult” from what is not?

For that, happily, the Parliament has provided an answer. Movements will be qualified as cults if they present a cluster of indicators comprising:

• mental destabilisation;

• the exorbitant character of financial demands;

• the indoctrination of children;

• a more or less antisocial discourse;

• disturbances of public order;

• the importance of judicial entanglements;

• the possible diversion of traditional economic circuits;

Apart from the fact that the indicators are difficult to define, to say the least, and are for that reason subject to all sorts of interpretations, I amused myself by applying them to the State:

Mental destabilisation: by the spreading of false news, warming of the planet, fear of mad cow disease, of foot-and-mouth, of AIDS, of unemployment, in short of everything and nothing, it seems to me that the State practises mental destabilisation on a very large scale, helped in this by the media it controls (public television channels and radios, subsidies to the press).

Exorbitant character of financial charges: at more than 55% of public spending in the French GDP, it seems to me that the exorbitant character of the charges demanded of the French needs no proof. The lifestyle of the principal gurus of the state cult reflects, for that matter, the weight of this charge: sumptuous palaces, journeys to all the most prized destinations, innumerable benefits in kind, and of course exceptional incomes often untaxed, skilfully sheltered from taxation.

The National Education system takes charge, for its part, of the indoctrination of children. This tentacular structure is perfect in this role. 99% of teachers are won over body and soul to the most leftward left there is, and they are perfectly conscious of their strategic place. They therefore take the greatest care to spread historical versions that are reworked, expurgated, kneaded, so that the truth current within the State is well diffused into the following generations. If that truth were to change, the conditioning received forbids any critical reading of the press, and the information received is automatically assimilated in place of the old truth.

The more or less anti-social discourse: what to say of a State that permanently stigmatises certain categories, like the “employers” or the “rich”, it practises, without any doubt, a violently anti-social discourse. Its goal? To destroy society as it would be if the State did not intervene in it: the rich are therefore reviled, like families, the basic element of every society (apart from a few tribal societies). Authorising the abortion of girls under 16 (!) without referring to the parents, for example, goes in this direction.

Disturbances of public order: what a contradiction for the State, which should be the guarantor of order, to find itself precisely a fomenter of disturbances. The State’s nuclear policy thus caused numerous demonstrations in the 1970s. But that is nothing. Think rather of the reckless policy of building HLM housing estates everywhere in France and of frenzied immigration: the result? Delinquency, violence!

The State also participates in disturbances of public order by bringing its support to the groups that hamper life in society: strikers of the SNCF, of the RATP, of the National Education system. In short, the State is a permanent fomenter of disturbance for the French.

The judicial entanglements of the State are beyond counting. The politicians all have innumerable skeletons in the cupboard, including our President Mr Chirac. Some make more noise, because they are carried by men said to be “of the right”, but on the left they exist too. One need only remember the golden period of the 1980s with the URBA/GRACO affairs: everyone was implicated, and at that time the General Secretary of the Socialist Party was none other than Lionel Jospin, current Prime Minister and perhaps future President!

As for the State as a legal person, lawsuits against the State are also legion. The failings of the State that is supposed to protect us have led numerous people to turn against it. From contaminated blood to mad cow disease, the State drags its own skeletons along!

Diversion of traditional economic circuits: ah… there is a theme I appreciate. What does the State do by its permanent interventions: laws, decrees, regulations, expropriations! All that has only one goal: to divert money from the pockets of the citizens (subjects) towards their elected representatives (masters). The State grabs large shares of the citizens’ resources, often leaving them in a misery which necessarily makes of them a ready-made clientele.

For the State to be declared a cult, a few additional indicators would be needed: that the State physically harm its subjects. If the State does not harm its subjects, it is perhaps because the system of pressure is already well enough adjusted: no need to send the police to extort a man’s salary. The threat is sufficient, when the propaganda has not worked. The State would also have to attempt to infiltrate the public authorities, but there one could rather turn the indicator around by declaring that the State attempts to infiltrate civil society. And that is already done: subsidised associations, a press gagged by subsidies, an economy gangrened by public enterprises and public procurement.

I therefore believe I can denounce the French State as being a cult. So why attack the other cults? Quite simply because the State is founded on monopoly, on undivided power: the cults are competitors… to be eliminated!

And if you naively believed that freedom of worship was guaranteed by the Constitution or the like, think again: “all beliefs are respectable, on condition that they are exercised in the respect of the laws of the Republic” (source: official text). That says it all.

So since the cults must be got rid of, legal means must be found. And as the victims are consenting, otherwise they would file complaints, they would find help, or the existing articles of law would make it possible to act, new laws must be invented.

The previous law said in substance that “the fraudulent abuse of the state of ignorance or of the situation of weakness either of a minor, or of a person whose particular vulnerability, due to age, to illness, to infirmity, to a physical or psychic deficiency or to a state of pregnancy, is apparent or known to the perpetrator, in order to oblige this minor or this person to an act or an abstention gravely prejudicial to them, is punished by three years’ imprisonment and a fine of 2,500,000 francs”. Problem! It must be added to this article of law that the criteria of vulnerability be extended to… everyone, in fact: the cults recruit just as well in milieux where people are “well-off”, cultivated, structured, etc. The Solar Temple is the cruel demonstration of it: all managers, company directors, etc. Notables!

In fact, the extension of this article would make it possible to dispense with the consent of the “victims” in order to attack a group by declaring it a cult. That is therefore the path chosen by Nicolas About, rapporteur of the text: henceforth it is a matter of abusing “a person in a state of psychological or physical subjection resulting from the exercise of grave or repeated pressures or of techniques apt to alter their judgement”. And there, the trick is done.

On other planes, there also exist numerous services of the State capable of “tracking the cult”: “the police and gendarmerie services, the regional directorates of labour and employment, the departmental directorates of judicial protection of youth, the education-authority inspectors of national education and of youth and sports…”. An example? In France some 6,000 children followed schooling outside the system, at home. Now forbidden. The fact of not enrolling the child in an educational establishment is a criminal offence. If the child is enrolled in a school “hors contrat”, that is, outside administrative authority, the establishment will have to undergo unannounced inspections and the children periodic examinations. The cults will not be able to keep the children at home… but free education is dead.

Despite a few timid reactions, smothered in the general clamour of relief of a people threatened by the cults, the law has therefore passed.

Freedom of thought has retreated once again in France.

Hervé Duray was born on 14 July 1976. He holds a degree in economics followed by training at the business school of Grenoble. In 1995 he created La Page Libérale to flush out media propaganda and oppose to it a liberal vision. In 2001 he reactivated La Page Libérale after years of abandonment. At present he writes for Québec Libre and continues to keep La Page Libérale alive. “The cults provide the State with a new pretext for intervening in the private, and even spiritual, life of the French. Now beware if your beliefs are stamped ‘CULT’.”

Sociological Study of a Pentecostal Assembly Labelled a “Cult”

CICNS reading report on Etude sociologique d’une assemblée pentecôtiste mulhousienne « Mission du Plein Évangile. La Porte Ouverte Chrétienne », October 2004, by Jean-Paul Willaime and Laurent Amiotte-Suchet.

In this sociological study, Jean-Paul Willaime and Laurent Amiotte-Suchet present the history and the theological heritage of the Mission du Plein Evangile (MPE-POC), a movement founded by Jean Peterschmitt. They also describe the worship and cultural activities of the mission, as well as the polemic, against a background of the anti-cult fight, that developed around the movement. If the sociologists’ work is instructive on every plane, it is this last aspect that we summarise.

The dispute that developed around the MPE-POC is a typical example of the negative impact of the French anti-cult climate on French society’s relationship with its spiritual minorities, and we recommend reading this study.

The two researchers do not present the MPE-POC as a victim group. The movement, according to the sociologists, clearly asserted its desire for growth and gave itself the means of that growth through an effective and conquering proselytism which ended up vexing the Catholic Church (from which a great number of the MPE-POC’s faithful come). Quarrels of a theological order developed; people disappointed with the MPE-POC expressed their discontent. The affair could have stopped there, despite the MPE-POC’s ill will about engaging in dialogue with mediation structures. But the France of the 1990s was resolutely anti-cult, and the first accusations of “secte” began to appear (the first seems to come from the Catholic Church, according to the researchers). From there, the anti-cult machine set itself in motion; the CCMM seized the file, and the “disappointed of the MPE-POC” transformed themselves into “victims of mental manipulation”. A husband refusing his wife’s membership of the movement, a conflict leading to their divorce, drew close to the CCMM, then founded his own victims’ association, the AVIPOC. His posture as victim and the joint action of the CCMM seduced the media, which backed the movement’s supposed cultic thesis: the MPE-POC had become a dangerous cult. The first anti-cult files on the movement appeared after the first commission of enquiry on the cults (1995), which, according to the sociologists, allowed the MPE-POC to avoid being listed in the parliamentary report of 1996. But the sustained action of the anti-cult associations, against the background of the vote of the About-Picard law in the 2000s, allowed them to put an accusatory national media spotlight on this movement. The AVIPOC and MPE-POC filed complaints against each other. These complaints were dismissed without further action or their authors were unsuccessful (one of the MPE-POC’s lawyers was Maître Biro).

A few extracts from the study on the anti-cult context:

”(…) Until the end of the sixties, the term ‘secte’ is used to designate Christian religious groups cut off from the great Churches and seeking a spiritual purity in an ascetic practice. The 1967 Robert dictionary cites as an example, for that matter, ‘la secte des luthériens’. The term ‘secte’ at that point still has only a slightly pejorative connotation. It is principally with the development of an increasingly diversified religious market that this term will pursue its semantic career, progressively coming to designate organisations (religious or not) which, to increase their demographic and financial power, will use destabilising psychophysiological methods in order to draw numerous new followers in their wake and obtain from them obedience and devotion body and soul to the movement’s cause. The increasingly deep conviction that numerous movements are flourishing everywhere in France whose discourse is only a façade for an enterprise of alienation of the followers then becomes dominant. Scientists and media of every kind relay this preoccupation with its paranoid dimension and participate in the elaboration of a ‘new’ vocabulary: sectes, followers, guru, mental manipulation, psychic rape, freely consented submission, etc.”

“To consider that a religious ideology can be the target of complaints from a follower for its deceitful and alienating character is not self-evident. The passage from malcontent to complainant therefore represents not the becoming-conscious of a reality, but the modification of the interpretation of a situation. 1993 is, let us recall, the year of the first great collective suicide of the members of the Davidian movement. The structuring of a way of thinking about cultic movements therefore resurfaces that year with more impact. The elaboration of a psycho-scientific discourse on the cult phenomenon invests the media universe in a growing manner. In the image of the historical emergence of a new category of illnesses, it is one of the new ills of our society that then comes into being: les sectes. As with other ‘curses’ (AIDS, mad cow disease, etc.), the phenomenon will be the object of repeated report-programmes carrying out the meticulous autopsy of this ‘virus’ henceforth ‘discovered’. The ill then has a name, and therefore a face. Everyone can rapidly acquire the recognition tools necessary to protect themselves from it. Everyone can realise that these angelic façades have everything of the colourful carnivorous plants that excel in matters of predation techniques. A globalising discourse on ‘les sectes’, which pushes into the background the heterogeneity of the groups so designated, then contributes to constructing scientifically the concept of ‘mental manipulation’ aiming to dissociate edifying beliefs from imprisoning ones. The enterprise of defining the cult phenomenon, largely driven by associations gathering former members of groups (or relatives of members), thus makes it possible to put in place fixed categories on the surface of a fluid and intermingled reality. The ‘secte’ is not an intrinsic reality but a socio-historically constituted reality. Our purpose therefore does not aim to contest the reality of the doings of certain controversial groups, but to take note of the fact that, on the one hand, such doings have become unacceptable through the action of a new semantic context and, on the other hand, that even in the absence of condemnable doings, the rate of suspicion that weighs on minority and heterodox religious groups now puts them in a situation where the slightest lapse of conduct can be fatal by triggering the process of stigmatisation.”

“If the first steps towards complaints against the MPE-POC take place from 1993, that can be explained, in our view, by the rise to power of a mediatised discourse on the cult phenomenon offering the malcontents of a religious group new tools (concepts) for re-thinking their experience. ‘The national debate on the “sectes”, by the climate of suspicion it has generated, obviously has repercussions at the local level’ (Willaime, 2001a, p. 356). The relations of indifference or even of trust that certain groups had with the local authorities could brusquely be called into question by the national hypermediatisation of the cult question. The argument in terms of religious fraud by mental manipulation offers a de-culpabilising semantic solution for giving meaning to a necessarily polysemous experience. The discontent can then mutate towards a victimisation of the vexing experience, legitimising the filing of a complaint by the former member as ‘abuse of trust or of weakness’ and that of the relative of a ‘follower’ as ‘assistance to a person in danger’. Without dwelling longer on the evolution of semantic tools, we do wish to recall here that words construct us just as much as we construct them. In this sense, mental illnesses like the old melancholia or the recent obsessional neurosis, for example, are sometimes less intrinsic pathologies than the products of historical constructions linked to a specifically Western interiorisation of the ill (guilt).”

”(…) The C.C.M.M., for its part, is one of the most active anti-cult associations in France. Its objective is not only to listen to and advise suffering people. The construction of a file on a movement suspected of cultism aims to have it recognised as a dangerous cult by the parliamentary commission of enquiry. (…) The objective of the C.C.M.M. is therefore situated in a repressive approach aiming, through the application of existing legislation, to combat effectively the movements recognised as cultic.”

”(…) It is only at the end of 1996 that the C.C.M.M. publishes a first working document on the MPE-POC. The latter describes in eighteen pages the activities of the assembly, its organisation chart, its history, and analyses the practices of the Church by the yardstick of the eleven criteria retained as indicators of dangerousness by the C.C.M.M. This document being confidential and its content rather ‘classic’ for anyone who knows the works published by the anti-cult associations, we will not return here to the argument developed. The facts cited in it, in the light of our enquiry, appear to be the object of a scarcely pertinent amalgam, with gratuitous accusatory formulas added here and there (linked to the sole intuition of the writer). The document ends with a few ‘well chosen’ extracts from the book of Jean PETERSCHMITT and with a dubious rapprochement between the MPE-POC and the Église Evangélique de Pentecôte of Besançon, recognised as cultic by the Gest-Guyard parliamentary report.”

Concluding remarks

This study brings to light the importance of adopting an approach of knowledge towards the spiritual minorities. Such an approach makes it possible to put possible disputes within minority groups into perspective inside the French anti-cult context that the authors qualify as “paranoid”. This rebalancing of reflection, if it were systematised within an independent observatory of the spiritual minorities, would make it possible to clean up the French climate. But the current action of the MIVILUDES is the opposite of this approach and the result is predictable; in their conclusion the researchers specify:

”(…) The logic of radicalisation developed by the assembly since at least 1984 constitutes the first act of this play. But this element is only a spark without a future if it does not meet a fuel. The latter seems to us to appear during the 80s with the progressive irruption of a whole grammar on the cult phenomenon largely developed by the media. The Catholic parishes of Mulhouse are the first to feed the fire by exploiting this inflammable vocabulary. But at that moment, the relations that the MPE-POC maintains with established Protestantism and most of the local evangelical Churches are too slight for the fire doors of the great Protestant family to be able to close. The E.R.N.R. [CICNS editor’s note: a mediation structure initiated by the Catholic Church] will only manage for a while to limit the intensity of the flames by keeping them at a distance from one another. The concentration operated by the C.C.M.M., then by the A.V.I.P.O.C., will contribute to making the situation explode by setting the whole Mulhouse sector ablaze. The few buckets of water that the MPE-POC will belatedly go to fetch from the A.E.F. [CICNS editor’s note: Alliance Evangélique Française] and the F.P.F. [CICNS editor’s note: Fédération Protestante de France] will then prove quite derisory in the face of so many years of slow combustion. If the ‘rain of the Spirit’ did not make it possible to avoid this incendiary process, the faithful at least credit it with having truly fireproofed the assembly by allowing it to pursue its growth without any truly vexing consequence being able to make it regret today not having concerned itself earlier with the smells of smoke that were amplifying around it day after day.”

“An article by François KOCH, with a strong critical dimension, which appeared in June 2002 in L’Express (no. 2659), proves that the social disqualification of the MPE-POC is still very much alive and that any obscure affair concerning one of its members always risks turning against it. To get out of this vicious circle and engage a minimum of constructive dialogue, perhaps it would be fitting for everyone to manage to distinguish better the possible condemnable facts (already provided with a legal arsenal) from the effects of strangeness provoked by the discourses and practices of a movement issued from a ‘religious culture’ simply out of step with the ambient liberal theologies.”

The Interior Ministry’s “Conflict with the Cults” Advice Sheet

This “Advice sheet” is found on the site of the Ministry of the Interior under the heading “Your security” and the sub-heading “Your family”. It is not a hoax.

Read the sheet on the site of the Ministry of the Interior

Conflicts with the cults

You have a problem with a cult which is causing you prejudice or harming one of those close to you.

Not all cults are dangerous.

Some however can harm the moral, financial and family equilibrium of their members. But there exists no specific regulation concerning them.

These organisations have rights.

Most often, they are associations governed by the law of 1901.

They therefore benefit from freedom of association and religious freedom.

But they also have duties.

They must notably respect the law: tax law, accounting law, labour law, social security law, criminal law, the protection of minors. The legal actions you can bring against the cults will most often be for the following offences: failure to assist a person in danger, illegal practice of medicine, breach of the legislation on narcotics, financial offences, offences against morals, breach of labour legislation, breach of social security or pension law.

If you have knowledge of these doings, notify the police or the gendarmerie. The laws protecting minors are the most effective for fighting against the doings of the cults. But they protect only minors: abduction of a minor, educational assistance measures, respect for compulsory schooling, etc.

If no direct action against the cult is possible, or if you do not wish to use it.

Try to dialogue with the person who belongs to it and who is close to you.

If this person cannot be reasoned with, and if she makes a significant financial contribution to the cult, you can have her placed under guardianship, curatorship or judicial protection.

If these measures are not applicable, you can have recourse to the protection of the adult of sound mind provided for by article 488 paragraph 3 of the civil code.

For more information, apply:

to the Association de Défense des Familles et Individus (ADFI), 130 rue Clignancourt 75018 PARIS Tel: 01 44 92 30 14.

Centre de Documentation, d’Education et d’action contre les Manipulations Mentales (CCMM), 19 rue Turgot 75009 PARIS Tel: 01 42 82 04 93.

See also

Site of the Interministerial Mission for Vigilance and Combat against Dérives Sectaires

Commentary:

If you are truly conscious of what the word “cults” means today, the explanations below are not addressed to you; you will simply have taken note, as we have, of a new advance in the effrontery of a policy of persecution which dishonours France.

If the self-evidence of this assertion is not apparent to you, we would like to make you take the measure of the human prejudice this sheet constitutes and of the insult it makes to all the texts guaranteeing respect for human rights ratified by France.

Everything hangs on the meaning of the word “cult”. To remove any ambiguity, links figure at the bottom of the sheet and refer to the sites of UNADFI and of the CCMM. The word “cult” acquired its letters - not of nobility but of villainy - under the impulse of anti-cult activists for whom the new spiritualities, that is to say all the spiritual movements which for some forty years have been renewing the Western landscape of the religious in the broad sense, are social scourges, homes of delinquency and perdition whose members are either sordid profiteers (gurus) or mental defectives in a state of blind submission (followers).

This term is resolutely pejorative. The proof is that nobody claims it for themselves any more today. It is therefore a sheet which could be entitled, once the mask of respectability is removed, “Conflict with the dangerous new spiritualities”.

In the same way that “witch”, in bygone times, meant “the demon”, and its use led to the stake for women guilty only of marginality, gifts of healing, knowledge of plants or other behaviours that disturbed public morality or the established powers, the word “cult” is today synonymous with perversity and criminality and condemns innocents to public opprobrium and to persecution by the State.

A few lines under the title, we can read “Not all cults are dangerous”. This, in 2006, on the site of a ministry, is as cynical as the warning “Careful, there are good witches…” would have been in the mouth of an inquisitor.

The chapter “The cults also have duties” is in reality a legal instruction manual whose objective title would be “How to harm a natural or legal person who disturbs you by using the levers of the law”.

As for what follows this paragraph…:

“If no direct action against the cult is possible, or if you do not wish to use it. Try to dialogue with the person…”

we are not far from “With the cults, shoot first, parley afterwards”.

And to finish:

“If this person cannot be reasoned with, and if she makes a significant financial contribution to the cult, you can have her placed under guardianship, curatorship or judicial protection. If these measures are not applicable, you can have recourse to the protection of the adult of sound mind provided for by article 488 paragraph 3 of the civil code.”

In other words: “if the judges do not find in your favour, you can have your relative passed off as mad. And if the doctors do not follow you in your approach, we remind you of the existence of the paragraphs of article 488 of the civil code”, voted in 1968 (!), intended among other things to protect adults against their “idleness”, their “intemperance” or their “prodigality” (2), terms whose subjectivity leaves one wondering.

In conclusion, this text is the admission that in the eyes of the State there exist in France sub-citizens designated by the word “cult”. It is a clear message to the “good citizens” saying that if they are disturbed by the existence of a community or an association with a new or minority spiritual connotation (whose exact list they will be able to find by following the links at the bottom of the page (1)), they can count on the support of the State to assert the precedence of right-thinking citizens or good believers.

It goes without saying that CICNS does not place these new spiritualities above the law or above other citizens; they have indeed the same duties as they. They could in that case claim the same privileges for others, and one would then see on the site of the Ministry of the Interior an advice sheet, for example, “Conflict with the philatelists”, “Conflict with the firefighters”, “Conflict with the doctors”*… and why not, “Conflict with the anti-cult associations”?

*These social groups are given as examples of respectable human groups generally well regarded by their fellow citizens.

(1) The UNADFI say they have a list of 800 “cults” and, like the CCMM, denounce pell-mell gentle medicines, Buddhist groups, spiritual movements of Eastern inspiration, but also Catholic and Protestant churches and, more generally, everything that departs from “commonly accepted” practices and theories.

(2) Article 488 of the civil code.

(Law no. 68-5 of 3 January 1968 art. 1, Official Journal of 4 January 1968, in force on 1 November 1968)

(Law no. 74-631 of 5 July 1974 art. 1, Official Journal of 7 July 1974)

Majority is fixed at eighteen years accomplished; at that age, one is capable of all the acts of civil life.

Nevertheless protected by the law, either on the occasion of a particular act or in a continuous manner, is the adult whom an alteration of his personal faculties puts in the impossibility of providing for his interests alone.

May likewise be protected the adult who, by his prodigality, his intemperance or his idleness, exposes himself to falling into need or compromises the execution of his family obligations.

Source: http://www.vie-publique.fr/documents-vp/Cciv_art_488.shtml

Freemasonry

All Cults Are Equal, but Some Are More Equal than Others…

By Valérie Dole, member of the CICNS

Introduction The masonic orders in France What difference, in the texts, between a masonic lodge and a “cult”? Behind the scenes of a women’s lodge The Freemasons and the police in France

An initiatory order, with rites, rituals and symbols, in which the follower travels a path of evolution through the High Grades and the Orders of wisdom to reach the status of Grand Master… after having gone through a period of initiation and sometimes waited up to two years before being accepted, where men and women are clearly separated, where proselytism is practised in order to become known and, of course, to recruit new followers… what does that make you think of?

Reading the texts that follow concerning Freemasonry, one catches oneself dreaming:

When will there be “airtime” for everyone?

A press favourable to each, or at the very least equitable and open to every form of spirituality in France?

When will there be a “book fair” open to all, including the new spiritualities?

The right for everyone to follow openly and without fear the “method of spiritual awakening” of their choice?

The right “to flourish and develop one’s consciousness” along the paths that suit one?

To realise an “ideal of universality”?

The freedom for everyone “to choose the Light that can best illuminate their Being”?

To “gather freely” for “profound spiritual reflections” without becoming the opprobrium of the local community?

Might Freemasonry be entitled to preferential treatment?

If what Alain Pozarnik, Grand Master of the Grande Loge de France, says is true: in what way does Freemasonry distinguish itself from the other French spiritual movements which for the most part have no other intention than to apply the wise counsel of the wise: “Know thyself”?

We will doubtless be met with the reply that a number of “cults” are dangerous, according to ten criteria of dangerousness established principally to serve the aims assigned to the Renseignements Généraux. But it is an open secret: a single one of these criteria erected into a bogeyman applies at most to one group in 1,000. Must all the others suffer for it? Or can we envisage that the preferential treatment granted to Freemasonry be extended to all?

If that is not possible, it will one day be necessary to say why… unless Freemasonry is something other than what its followers say it is.

And let there be no mistake: we are not asking for a modification of the treatment granted to Freemasonry, and whether the rights conferred on it are deserved or not is not our purpose. We do wish, on the other hand, that they be accessible to all, so that “human rights” become something other than mere privileges of freemasons.

The Freemasons in France: Grand Orient de France

(GODF, founded in 1773): the leading French masonic obedience.

1,030 lodges, 42,000 members (35,000 masters, 10,000 high initiates, average age 56, annual budget 5 million euros). Abandonment of the Great Architect of the Universe (God) in the statutes of the Grand Orient de France in 1877.

Grande Loge nationale française (GLNF, founded in 1913): 1,400 lodges, 30,000 members.

Grande Loge de France (GLF, founded in 1738): 700 lodges, 26,000 members.

Fédération française du Droit humain (DH): 500 lodges, 14,000 members.

Grande Loge féminine de France (GLFF): 340 lodges, 11,000 members.

Grande Loge traditionnelle et symbolique Opéra (GLTSO): 170 lodges, 3,600 members.

Grande Loge mixte de France (GLMF): 80 lodges, 1,800 members.

Grande Loge mixte universelle (GLMU): 50 lodges, 800 members.

Grande Loge féminine de Memphis-Misraïm (GLFMM): 35 lodges, 850 members.

Loge nationale française (LNF): 25 lodges, 250 members.

That is about 150,000 members in all.

The French Socialist Party has since 1981 been the instrument of the Grand Orient de France: “One could not say today with precision which, of the Socialist Party or the Grand Orient de France, has taken over the other” (Le Monde of 13 August 1981).

In June 2001, nine French obediences decided to constitute among themselves a common space of dialogue, work and expression named “La Maçonnerie Française” (or the masonic institute of France). It was in this capacity that, a few months later, its nine grand masters and grand mistresses were received together by the President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac. This initiative evidently marks a new stage in French masonic relations and makes it possible to establish a “harmonious organisation of freemasonry in France”.

The principles evoked below resemble, to a fault, those of numerous spiritual minorities… One struggles to see the difference that would make the lodges spaces more secure than those of the said “cults”.

Is masonic teaching more oral than written?

“The teaching permitting the evolution, the perfecting and the completion of man must be adapted to each of the seekers so that he acquires the total freedom proper to an accomplished Man. This path, which is travelled in the secrecy of hearts and of the spirit, has never been appreciated by the political or religious authorities, which has led these transmissions to be oral.”

“Freemasonry is the last bastion of the values that our society seeks so ardently.”

Can a freemason publish articles and books? Does he not risk unveiling the famous masonic secret?

The freemason is a free man of good morals. In freemasonry there is no secret since it is solely a matter of a method of personal awakening. Everything can be said. The difficulty is to live it. The great error often consists in dressing a possible discovery in one’s old ideas and one’s fears. Instead of setting off on a journey, one imagines the journey. The true masonic secret is the path we take to go from the man we are to the Man we could become. It is therefore a personal, intimate, deep and unsayable secret.

“The Freemasons, in the common pursuit of one and the same ideal, recognise one another by words, signs and touches which they communicate to each other traditionally in Lodge during the initiatory ceremonies. These words, signs and touches, like the rites and the symbols, are the object of an inviolable secret and cannot be communicated to anyone who is not qualified to know them.”

The true masonic work is not occultist but spiritualist, and serious masonic books participate in the flourishing and the development of consciousness. They form part of the riches of humanity in evolution.

With airtime, if you please… “The Grande Loge de France speaks to you”

On the third Sunday of each month, at 9.40 a.m. on France Culture, members of the Grande Loge de France express themselves, in their own name, on points of their respective masonic journeys, giving the general public the opportunity to familiarise themselves with what constitutes both the unity and the diversity of viewpoints of the members of the Grande Loge de France. http://www.gldf.org/content/view/46/105/lang,fr/

Read on: http://www.lexpress.mu/display_article.php?news_id=30289

Women freemasons lift the veil

They have always acted in discretion, indeed in secrecy. But from time to time, they reveal themselves. To make the movement known but also, without however ever admitting it explicitly, to gain new followers. It was thus that the world president of the Grande Loge féminine de France (GLFF), Marie-Françoise Blanchet, and a few Mauritian women freemasons faced the press yesterday. A presentation of this lodge and of the two Mauritian branches, that of the Rose de l’Aurore and of the Flamboyant.

These lodges are 100% female. They are neither a religion nor a cult, Marie-Françoise Blanchet specifies. (there we are, it was enough to specify it…) With 10,000 members in France and 1,500 in some thirty countries, of whom 35 in Mauritius, the women freemasons of this obedience have as their objective to build a better world in liberty, fraternity and equality.

“At 35, I was a happy and fulfilled woman. But I felt that a little something was missing, and it was at that moment that a friend suggested freemasonry to me”, declares Marie-Françoise Blanchet who, since then, has found “that little spark” and has given her life “an additional dimension” through the rites, “spiritual reflection without religion and deep reflections” on a wide range of subjects with her sisters of the lodge.

The freemasons have penetrated the police more than any other professional body: 1 superintendent in 4 is said to be a brother. Almost as many among the officers. But fewer at the base.

by Laurent Chabrun, François Koch, Jean-Marie Pontaut, Romain Rosso (extracts)

(…) It is a troubling liaison. Police officers are attracted to the temples like moths to the light. “Because they see in freemasonry a great republican institution, and even, consciously or not, a great corps of the State”, explains Roger Dachez, president of the Institut maçonnique de France. “Because they feel unloved and misunderstood, they give their vote to discreet structures where they can meet to talk”, adds the former masonic counsel of a police union. Confronted with a gloomy and violent daily life, police officers, more than any other profession, would need to air their minds.

(..) A police officer from the north of France, a worshipful master at the GO, asserts that his obedience numbers precisely 460 police superintendents, serving or retired. “If one extrapolates to the two other great obediences, the Grande Loge nationale française (GLNF) and the Grande Loge de France (GLF), one could count up to 1 superintendent in 4”, this senior officer ventures.

For Eric Vanlerberghe, president of the Mutuelle of the Ministry of the Interior and himself initiated at the GO, this rate is about 20% of the 14,939 officers, that is to say nearly 3,000 lieutenants, captains and police commanders, mostly at the GO. Which is colossal in view of the total number of masons within the French population: 135,000.

The police services are not equal before masonry. Public security, the Renseignements Généraux (RG) and the CRS are said to be more masonic than the judicial police (PJ).

But the masons remain in key posts. Currently, for example, one of the deputy directors of the RG is said to wear the apron. Likewise, most of the most influential trade unionists of the “big house” are masons. The brothers are also very present in the associations internal to the police, like the mutualist orphanage or the Association nationale d’action sociale de la police nationale (Anas). Moreover, their power, real or exaggerated, still causes fear. To a young superintendent, assigned to the RG, an “old” director gave this advice: “Never turn the freemasons against you: they can break your career.”

(…) Pierre Joxe, himself an initiate, had stuffed his cabinet with brothers. Likewise, some civil servants of the Paris police prefecture must have thought that it would perhaps be good for their careers to be co-opted into the GLF, where Philippe Massoni occupies the highest functions.

(…) Certain masonic police officers have also been, in the past, mixed up in genuine affairs of State. “Freemasonry is a replica of French society”, pleads Vanlerberghe: “there are as many deviances as elsewhere.”

Valérie Dole is a member of the CICNS. An independent journalist, she has been studying the New Spiritualities since 1977. Head of News at the CICNS. Presse@cicns.net

Intervention of M. Gilles Bottine, Secretary General of the MIVILUDES, in 2005

Read also the CICNS commentary on the 2005 Miviludes report and The impossible tolerance? In the course of his functions at the Miviludes, M. Bottine seems to have measured the excesses of the anti-cult fight. We believe that anyone who invests himself seriously in the study of the spiritual minorities in France can only “water his wine” on discovering to what point this partisan fight resembles a medieval witch-hunt and is not a democratic combat as some would like to have it believed. We hope to see the new president and the new secretary of the MIVILUDES evolve towards the same wisdom. Intervention of the secretary general of the Miviludes, Monsieur Gilles Bottine 14 October 2005 Intervention at the ENM from 10 to 14 October 2005

Theme “The cults” When Monsieur Roulet, the new President of the MIVILUDES, asked me to intervene in his name, I accepted with great pleasure. I myself followed this training three years ago, a few weeks before being seconded to the interministerial Mission to exercise there the functions of secretary general. This training brought out well the complexity of the phenomenon and I have been able to measure, since then, the diversity and the very passionate character of the possible approaches. I am also pleased to be with you today, because you are, as magistrates, police commissioners or gendarmerie officers, the guarantors of the implementation, by the public authorities, of individual liberties, and because you see to it, in your daily practice, that the situation of the victims of dérives sectaires is taken into account without ever compromising on respect for the law and constitutional liberties. Since its creation in November 2002, the MIVILUDES has been concerned, equally, to reconcile these two objectives and to hold itself on a sort of ridge line at equal distance from those who show themselves resolutely allergic to everything in social behaviour that takes paths other than those of pure reason, but also from those who claim that a State is never legitimate in setting limits to the expression of convictions or of religious practices in particular. I shall not speak to you of the cult phenomenon as is often done by listing some of the best-known movements. I believe it more useful to specify which doings fall within the competence of the interministerial Mission and of the administrations. I shall do so in the light of the Prime Minister’s circular of 27 May 2005 on the fight against dérives sectaires. I shall do so using by preference the concepts of movement of a cult character (MACS), of at-risk social group or of at-risk social practices, rather than using the term “cult”. The word “cult”, except among the sociologists of religion, is generally used in France to stigmatise very diverse groups which symbolise what society does not want to be or should not be. Very negatively charged, it is indisputably discriminating with regard to certain movements which we know are perceived very differently according to the country. I am thinking of a movement like that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Certainly, certain small groups can be very dangerous. We all remember the criminal doings of the Japanese movement AUM, the collective suicides of the followers of the Peoples Temple, of the Davidians of Waco, of the followers of Heaven’s Gate and, closer to us, the massacres within the Order of the Solar Temple. In other movements, it is less the physical integrity of the followers than their psychological equilibrium and their capacity for autonomy that may be threatened. But most of the movements said to be of a cult character do not expose people to this kind of risk, and the way they are perceived, like the political reactions they arouse, sometimes depends more on their capacity or their difficulty in integrating into a cultural and political environment than on a clearly demonstrated dangerousness. However, the manner in which we perceive the cult phenomenon is still today very largely influenced by these collective tragedies, which touched France less gravely than other countries such as the United States or Switzerland, which, more severely affected, reacted in a different manner. The term “cult” is, equally, ill-suited to apprehending in its entirety a phenomenon which is not reduced to a few clearly identified movements. We have been witnessing for a few decades the development and propagation of a spirit of calling into question the most commonly accepted principles and norms. Moreover, France has opened itself to different cultures, to new religiosities and to non-conventional social or care practices. Confronted with such a diversification of our religious and philosophical landscape, it is essential not to confuse non-conformism and dangerousness, and to distinguish original social practices from authentically at-risk practices where, after being invited to leave all critical spirit in the cloakroom, you find yourself caught in a totalising system of total control. With the creation of the MIVILUDES, the angle of approach was modified. The Government drew the lessons of past experiences, which showed that an approach consisting, for the public authorities, in qualifying this or that grouping as a “cult” and founding their action on that qualification alone did not make it possible to give the initiatives taken a solid foundation in law, nor to ensure effectively the reconciliation between two requirements: - The fight against the doings of certain groups which exploit the physical or psychological subjection of their members, on the one hand, - Respect for public liberties and for the principle of laïcité, on the other. It is no longer a matter of blacklisting groupings but of identifying, preventing and repressing doings contrary to the laws and regulations. This approach, which is none other than that specified by the Prime Minister in his circular of 27 May 2005, is not new: Since 1789, the Republic has respected all opinions, even religious ones, provided their manifestations do not disturb the public order established by law. Since 1905, if the Republic recognises no religion, it guarantees their free exercise under the sole restrictions enacted in the interest of public order. One always finds this requirement of a balance between respect for liberties and the necessities of public order. The MIVILUDES, a body attached to the Prime Minister, comprises three structures: -A permanent structure composed of project officers or advisers seconded by their ministry of origin. -Two other structures which the President convenes regularly: An Executive Committee composed of some twenty representatives of the administrations concerned. An Orientation Council composed of thirty figures, parliamentarians, academics, representatives of the senior administration and of civil society. This council contributes notably to the reflection of the public authorities on dérives sectaires and to drawing out orientations. The MIVILUDES contributes to the information of the public and to the training of public agents. It is charged with reinforcing the coordination of the prevention and repression actions of the public authorities in this domain. It must also facilitate the implementation of actions in favour of victims. It is charged with analysing, observing and fighting against movements of a cult character whose doings infringe fundamental liberties, are contrary to the laws and regulations, or constitute a menace to public order. It is these doings that are designated generically under the concept of dérives sectaires when they are induced by the ideology or doctrine of such movements or by their mode of functioning. In any event, membership of a minority of conviction could not be regarded, from a legal point of view, as a dérive sectaire. That deserves to be recalled. We are, indeed, often questioned about situations presented to us as situations of cult infiltration or entryism in administrations, social services or companies, and which are, in reality, only situations of membership of a minority of conviction or belief on the part of persons whose professional practice turns out to conform to what it ought to be. But the administrative apparatus is not limited to this interministerial level. It extends to the central administrations, justice, national education, employment and training, youth and sport, which have put in place specialised units. This apparatus is replicated at the regional and above all departmental levels. The prefects regularly convene the vigilance cells which reproduce at departmental level the partnership structure that is the interministerial Mission’s Executive Committee. The apparatus put in place by the French public authorities is not only administrative. It is also legal. It rests on all the legislation in force, and not only that of a repressive character. Likewise, in a domain as particular as that of convictions and beliefs, the principle of laïcité and its legislative, regulatory and jurisprudential translations constitute an effective rampart against any intrusion of communitarian practices or demands, which have no place in a public space it is fitting to preserve. That is true of public education. It is true equally of the public hospital service. Finally, it is fitting to evoke the notion of public order which guides the public authorities in their relations with the religions, the minorities of conviction or the at-risk social groups. Thus, in a ruling of 29 April 2004 concerning the Vajra Triumphant, the Conseil d’Etat found that there existed, between three worship associations devoted inseparably to the same religion and possessing common leaders, a “community of interests”. It relied on the existence of this community of interests to refuse one of these associations the tax advantages it claimed, holding against it public-order problems noted in the doings of the other two. But conversely, it is by relying on the absence of any disturbance of public order that the Prefects, under the control of the administrative courts, granted the worship associations of the Jehovah’s Witnesses a certain number of tax advantages, and that the ministers of the Jehovist religion were authorised to affiliate to the old-age and sickness insurance fund for ministers of religion (CAVIMAC). In summary, you have at your disposal the necessary means to answer the legitimate expectations of our fellow citizens. To be effective, the fight against dérives sectaires passes through respect for the law, the refusal of amalgams and of discriminations. These few developments on a French apparatus which is without equivalent in Europe lead me to broach the question of national practices. The only countries to have drawn inspiration from it are Belgium and Austria. Belgium, by a law of 2 June 1998 voted following a recommendation of a parliamentary commission of inquiry, created a Centre of Information and Advice on Harmful Sectarian Organisations (CIAOSN). This centre, which is essentially an observation and analysis structure of great quality, was recognised by the law as having an advisory competence which confers on it a status of expert that the MIVILUDES does not possess. Another point in common with France: Belgium wants to complete its legal arsenal by sanctioning manoeuvres of psychological constraint and by creating an offence of abuse of weakness. As early as 1998 the Austrian government put in place an interministerial working group composed of the representatives of some ten ministries and created a Federal Bureau for sectarian questions, the B.F.S. The role of this independent public-law institute is to gather documentation and information on the dangers that may come from movements or activities of a cult character, provided there is a sufficiently substantiated suspicion and these dangers concern goods or interests worthy of being protected. The fundamental requirement is the obligation of pertinence, objectivity and authentic information. The BFS is supervised by the federal minister of the environment, youth and the family. The Jehovah’s Witnesses benefit, in Austria, from the status of confessional community. This status allows a confessional minority, at the end of a period of ten years, to be recognised as a religion. In 2002, the Swiss put in place an intercantonal Centre of information on beliefs and on the activities of groups of a religious, spiritual or esoteric character, the CIC. This Centre offers information of quality, adversarial and of great neutrality, on this type of movement. Great Britain, for its part, has long favoured the emergence of a structure of the same nature called INFORM (Information Network Focus on Religious Movements). INFORM is an independent non-profit structure. It was founded in 1988 with the support of the British Home Office and of the major Churches to gather and diffuse objective and updated information on the new religious movements and the “cults”. INFORM is directed by Mrs Eileen BARKER, honorary Director of the sociology department of the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. INFORM, which has information on nearly 3,000 structures, is the sole source of information of the British public authorities in this domain. The situation of Germany must be broached taking account of its own organisation and of a particular conception of the separation of Churches and State. Movements of a cult character are not the object of any particular surveillance, with the exception of the Church of Scientology which, since 1998, has been observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution both at federal level and in the Länder. Four Länder have put an end to this surveillance for want of concrete elements gathered over seven or eight years. Since the putting in place of this surveillance, Scientology has not been the object of judicial proceedings. Recently, in March of this year, the administrative Court of Appeal of Berlin recognised the community of Jehovah’s Witnesses as having the status of a corporation of public law. To obtain this status, a community must prove the loyalty indispensable to stable cooperation with a democratic State. This status confers on it numerous advantages, notably tax reductions, freedom of religious teaching, the right to collect the religion tax. In Spain, neither opinion nor the political class is really sensitised to the problem of dérives sectaires. The Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Moon movement are considered authentic religious movements. In Italy, where opinion is equally little sensitised, the Council of State, which judges only doings, considered that the community of Jehovah’s Witnesses posed no problems with regard to the Italian legal order. Since 2002, Italy has been asking itself about the opportuneness of repressing situations of damaging subjection in movements of a cult character. It seems that the Italian national representation is not yet ready to join France in this domain. In summary, in Europe, most countries do not treat the so-called cult phenomenon or at-risk social practices as a specific phenomenon. They have put in place observation structures and settle problems case by case, relying on existing legislation. In so doing, they are only drawing inspiration from recommendation 1412-99 of the Council of Europe, which advocated, in 1999, the necessity of objective information on the new religious or esoteric movements within the framework of respect for freedom of conscience and religion. The Council of Europe equally invited the States to create centres corresponding to this recommendation. Source: www.mivilude.gouv.fr

Interview with Janine Tavernier (1)

by Joseph Veillard The media-prominent president of UNADFI (Union Nationale des Associations de Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu, which helps the victims of cults) receives us in her house in the western suburbs of Paris. She has just resigned from her post as president and seems relieved to pass the baton in a fight into which she threw herself twenty years ago, after her husband joined the eco-fundamentalist cult Ecoovie. Irony of fate: the former first cult-hunter of France finds herself in the dock, since her daughter works as a specialised educator in an establishment inspired by the pedagogy of Rudolph Steiner, classified as a cult. Shocked by the blacklisting of which her grandchildren’s schools have been victims, mocked by certain cult-hunters who reproach her for her indulgence towards a cult movement, she worries about an atmosphere of witch-hunting which can lead to a general confusion, indeed to certain blunders. Janine Tavernier, why are you leaving the presidency of UNADFI? After twenty years in this association, and ten years of presidency of UNADFI, I consider it is time to hand over. Moreover, there are people arriving in our associations with new ideas and who want to change the course of things a little. Meaning? There is a whole team of people who want to interest themselves in doctrines and philosophies. I do not care for that. I joined the association precisely because we did not concern ourselves with doctrines or beliefs. We concerned ourselves only with the victims of totalitarian groups. The cult phenomenon is changing completely in France. I think the general public knows what a cult is whereas, in 1974, the date of the creation of ADFI, everything had to be discovered. Today there is a renewal in this milieu and I want to step back to reflect. Could there have been amalgams in the anti-cult campaign? More and more, people see cults everywhere. If you do yoga, if you treat yourself with homeopathy or acupuncture, you belong to a cult. I find that extremely grave, because one must have a great openness and accept parallel medicines without judging or cataloguing. What is more, the cult phenomenon is used to denounce and to create rumours. Broadly, if you have it in for your neighbour, you accuse him of belonging to a cult. People dear to you, involved in the Steiner schools, have thus been directly accused… We interest ourselves only in victims, and we have never received any from the Steiner schools. I find it abnormal that they are catalogued as cults and that I am reproached for supporting them because my grandchildren are educated there. I ask myself questions. I would like to fight against that, notably when I see that shops like Nature et Découvertes are presented as belonging to Scientology. All these rumours are inadmissible and I will not play that game. Me, I feel entirely free, I have no belief, no philosophy. One must draw the difference between the new religious movements and the cults. The former are entirely respectable, while the latter are harmful. Your departure from UNADFI leaves the field free for other, more dogmatic people. Is that not a bad sign? I hope not. It is important to change, to take stock of everything anew, to allow a better study of the phenomenon. Me, I have done my time, it was a formidable period, not always easy, during which I acquired much maturity and humility. Faced with the cult phenomenon, one must question oneself all the time. There is no instruction manual for helping someone leave a cult, for helping the families. Today there is less need to make the cult phenomenon known, for the world is more or less aware of it. What is needed is to work with finesse and to see to it that people no longer get taken in. (Interview published in Technikart Number 57 of November 2001. This issue is missing from the archives of the magazine Technikart ) Read another interview with Janine Tavernier

“They Did Not Save My Life”, a Scandalous Anti-Cult Docu-Fiction

A reading report on the book by Antoine Guélaud, deputy director of the TF1 newsroom: “Ils ne m’ont pas sauvé la vie” - Toucan/TF1 Entreprises, 2009

An extract from the chapter in which the author describes what drove him to write this book (he is speaking of Evelyne Marsaleix, who died of cancer): “our first and last meeting overwhelmed me, haunted me, leaving me a strange sensation, never felt before.” and “your freckles, your feline gaze at once so determined and gentle. Everything about you troubles me and makes me sway. Instantly, listening to you, I identify with you, I want to carry your combat and pursue it post-scriptum and post mortem. I feel the irrepressible need to substitute myself for you.”.

The book’s summary on the back cover: “My name is Evelyne M. Fate placed on my path doctors who were followers of a healing cult. I never recovered from it: a breast cancer carried me off in a few months”. The broad lines are laid down: it is not Evelyne who writes but Antoine Guélaud, even if the narration might suggest the contrary. From there, every amalgam is permitted.

The doctors in question are named in the book: they are Doctors Guéniot and Saint-Omer, the latter being Evelyne’s treating physician, but it is the former, supposed to have manipulated the latter, who is one of the work’s principal targets. The novel’s scenario takes shape page by page: a group of people, at the centre of which Gérard Guéniot is said to stand, is supposed to have knowingly led Evelyne to her death, in the name of a spiritual belief (reincarnation).

We took the trouble to read the 80 pages of the record of the appeal trial of what the press wrongly presented as “the Guéniot affair”. A trial which concluded with the acquittal of Doctor Guéniot and the rejection of the claims of the UNADFI (the leading anti-cult association and the true pillar of the complaint brought before the courts) and of Evelyne’s family, who asked that a “cultic” context be taken into account, in the name of which they sought the conviction of the two doctors for involuntary homicide. It is therefore flagrant that the author of this denunciatory book disregards this decision of the courts and, without underlining it clearly enough, develops a personal thesis against the current.

Evelyne speaks to the reader directly, “from up above” where “she sees everything”. Antoine Guélaud writes in the first person in the name of Evelyne, now deceased. This artificial position of the pen is an undeniable advantage for the author. The author, the first witness of the events, speaks to you from the beyond. Guélaud takes the opportunity in passing to throw a few flowers at himself, and at his profession, by having Evelyne speak of a journalist from the “renowned magazine, Le Droit de savoir” who, with his report, is said to have “suddenly woken (…) the police, the Justice system, the council of the order of physicians (…) At last! The fourth estate doubtless deserves its name. It is sometimes even the first.”

And yet one must understand that Evelyne wrote nothing, nor even dictated anything herself. The intimate diary which appears episodically in the work is another invention of the journalist’s. Finally, Evelyne comments with authority on events subsequent to her death.

The findings of the Douai court teach us that the real Evelyne “would express herself in writing or orally in a manner that would evolve according to the chronology of the investigation, in parallel with that of her cancer, and according to the period and the interlocutor, especially as regards the role she would attribute to Gérard Guéniot”. One can also read there that it is “particularly apparent that, before the phase of a posteriori reconstruction (…) Évelyne Marsaleix, while giving, from the first phase, a detailed account of the events of which she was the first and only permanent witness, mentions at first (…) only Michel Saint-Omer, to the exclusion of Gérard Guéniot”. It is likewise reported (p. 63 of the hearing record) that during an interrogation by Doctor Abgrall (an expert appointed by the Court and a notorious “anti-cult” figure), a few days before her death, Evelyne had to correct propositions of the (prosecution-minded) expert which attributed to Doctor Guéniot “words, acts or writings” of Doctor Saint-Omer.

None of this, of course, appears in Antoine Guélaud’s tale, which relies essentially on Evelyne’s statements and supposed statements to express his clearly anti-cult thinking: “I want to understand how you could fall under the spell of these zealous cult followers, bearers of an extravagant mystical and irrational certainty that is an insult to Descartes”. He also has Evelyne launch this vibrant warning to the reader: “Do not cross the yellow line of the irrational, you would lose yourself there”.

It is just as shocking to see how Antoine Guélaud sweeps aside the findings of the trial and its conclusions: there again by usurping an identity, that of Justice herself. He begins that chapter thus: “I am justice, the one everyone knows, not her blindfolded face”, and ends with: “In the balance there is on one side a purely legal assessment and on the other a human situation”.

Antoine Guélaud asks many good questions in this book, but he does so without really answering them, even when they concern him first and foremost (the procedure known in rhetoric as prolepsis 1). As if the fact of having asked them, anticipating the objections that might be made to his work, released him from all introspection and responsibility.

We shall, on his behalf, answer the one that is perhaps the most essential, p. 22: “Journalism and injustice, the eternal theme forever unfinished. How far can one go in identifying with the subject of one’s report?

Answer: up to the point where it causes harm to others. If Antoine Guélaud is conscious of having identified with one party to a conflict, he knows he has lost his objectivity. The best course is then not to express oneself before having taken the necessary distance, or to express oneself in one’s own name, but without passing off one’s partisan opinions as objective testimony under cover of a humanist mission and in the name of a “right to know”. Moreover, such a tale ought to be published as a “simple citizen” engaged in a personal fight, and not as a professional French journalist who is a signatory of a charter in which one can read:

-holds calumny, accusations without proof, the alteration of documents, the distortion of facts and lying to be the gravest professional faults;

-holds scruple and the concern for justice to be primary rules;

-does not confuse his role with that of the policeman.

-does not use the freedom of the press with a self-interested intention;

And, on the subject of the hidden camera which Antoine Guélaud abused:

-forbids himself to invoke an imaginary title or capacity, to use disloyal means to obtain information or to catch anyone’s good faith by surprise; (source)

The CICNS wishes to underline the indecency of this publication, which produces nothing positive, resting as it does on an extremely subjective and partial vision of the facts (the quasi-sentimental tonality of Mr Guélaud’s words makes his testimony particularly biased in a supposed search for truth), it works the vilest springs of instrumentalised emotion, disregarding a “ruling” of Justice which the author could profitably have taken at its word, to reflect for a moment on the motivations and consequences of his writings, or more radically to cease, after a “ruling of Justice”, to keep up the vain cycle of unsupported accusations and personal vengeances. But it is frequently observed that all these elements weigh little in the balance when the occasion presents itself to publish a book on a potentially saleable subject.

To note: By a judgment dated 21 October 2009, the Paris tribunal de grande instance convicted the publication director of the magazine Marianne for having published an article entitled “the trial of a guru” containing defamatory statements against Gérard Guéniot, who had been definitively acquitted by the Douai court of appeal in February 2009.

See our video report on the Guéniot affair (November 2009) > ADSL 56k

Read Jean-Luc Martin-Lagardette’s point of view on this book “A brilliant but fallacious charge against the cults”

Read our article on the Guéniot affair

1:

Considered an argumentative figure, it consists in going ahead of the interlocutor’s objections by first stating the thesis he might maintain, the better to eliminate or refute it before the adversary even speaks of it. Source

Presentation and Critique of the Book

“Le phénomène des sectes” published by Info-Secte

by the CICNS team

The complete book can be downloaded at http://www.math.mcgill.ca/triples/infocult/phenomene/bookorder.html

For some twenty years in France, the organisations or individuals who have taken an interest in the phenomenon of the spiritual minorities — in the sense of a warning against them, indeed of an active fight against them — have been characterised by a vindictive and often crude militant attitude, showing, in the best cases, a limited discernment as to the motivation of the spiritual quest.

The judgements passed are then founded on nothing more than a rational psychological analysis, when it is not quite simply a personal anger that has found in the matter a convenient outlet.

There exists however in Quebec a centre called “Info-Secte” whose discourse, without showing a very deep understanding of spiritual reality, brings a more balanced tonality and from which the activists of the anti-cult fight in France could have drawn inspiration had they been sincere in their approach.

Info-Secte has published a work entitled “Le phénomène des sectes”, from which we publish below a few extracts giving the measure of a less emotional and therefore, overall, more open approach.

We have found nothing better in the French language today, and this example is still far, on reading the appendices of the book in particular, from providing the balanced information necessary in these troubled times. It will be easy, for the informed reader, to identify in this book the persistence of cult-phobia and of its characteristic blindness, as in the mistrust it cultivates towards spiritual aspiration, to the point of giving a list of standard questions to ask before any contact with a spiritual movement.

But this work is principally a study of the functioning of groups. It sheds accurate light on certain deviances that have remained in memory in the recent history of Quebec, without making of them a generality concerning all groups with a spiritual vocation.

The participants of Info-Secte show a will to objectivity in their approach which the book does not permit one to doubt, despite the inevitable automatisms of this kind of approach in the current context.

Le phénomène des sectes

By Mike Kropveld, Marie-Andrée Pelland

Info-secte / Info-Cult

(…) The human being has always shown the desire to associate himself with an individual bearing a divine message. He also feels the need to associate with others in order to share beliefs, practices… As these needs have been present since the beginning of time, the presence of groups named “new religious movements”, “spiritual groups” or “cults” is not a recent phenomenon.

In the contemporary era, since the 1960s, these groups have provoked a reaction on the part of the media, the population, academics and several governments. Thus, for some, these groups are innovative organisations trying to answer the needs of a category of people. Consequently, they must not be the object of surveillance or of particular attention. For others, these groups must be studied, indeed attentively observed, in order better to understand the lived experience of the members and to intervene with those who are victims.

Fear of these groups is periodically revived by certain tragedies. Let us think for example of that of the Peoples Temple, where 913 members of Jim Jones’s group died in Guyana (1978); of the violent death of members of the Branch Davidians at Waco (1993); of the murders, arsons and ordered suicides committed within the Order of the Solar Temple (1994, 1995, 1997); of the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo metro by the members of the Aum Shinrikyo group (1995); and of the collective suicide of the members of the Heaven’s Gate group in California (1997). These dramatic events have contributed to reinforcing the idea that the “cults” are problematic, indeed dangerous, groups.

Although such manifestations (neglect, coercion, aggression or suicide) are extremely rare occurrences, these outcomes exist and reflect the existence of a problematic that it is useful to address, if only better to understand these groups.

The phenomenon of the “cults” is first of all a group phenomenon. To understand the functioning of groups, the interactions between the members and the laws surrounding interpersonal exchanges is also to know the whole set of organisations recognised as “cults” or “new religious movements”.

Starting from the objective of informing the population about the groups and their internal and external functioning, Info-Secte decided to publish a text dealing with these different questions.

Here are some of the objectives pursued:

• To inform the reader about the place of groups in a democratic society;

• To understand the internal and external functioning of groups as well as certain problematic aspects of them;

• To provoke discussions and debates on the phenomenon;

• To permit the development of a critical thinking about the groups that surround us.

The phenomenon of the “cults” is a vast subject that can be treated from different angles. This text does not claim to cover the whole set of questions that can be asked in order to understand the subject, but the objective of the creation of such a tool is to present a different vision “of the cult phenomenon”.

In the middle of the 1990s, the staff of Info-Secte questioned themselves about the use of the concept of “cultic thinking” (pensée sectaire). Research and discussions were undertaken to learn the meaning and the usefulness of such a concept in order to distinguish the groups that can potentially be damaging for some of their members from the groups that are not.

The organisation defines cultic thinking as:

A manner of conceptualising reality and society by dividing them into two monolithic blocks (good / evil, saved / damned, white / black). The groups that present a cultic thinking include no place for grey areas. The individual and the movement possessing this form of thought quite naturally class themselves in the camp of the good and the saved. This separation of the world leads the groups and the members to seek scapegoats in order to explain the problems experienced by them or by society. This group of cultic thinking can lead towards intolerance and fundamentalism.

Info-Secte and the choice of vocabulary

The choice of the vocabulary used to designate the phenomenon of the “cultic” groups constitutes in itself an obstacle to research and to the understanding of the phenomenon. Historically, the term “secte” was used to describe groups that had broken away from a religious group.

Today, the term takes on quite another meaning in people’s minds. The term “secte” now has in general a pejorative signification.

Some suggest eliminating the use of the term “secte” by reason of its pejorative connotation (1). The use of the word “secte” can erroneously lead to considering “dangerous” groups that would not be so. If it is preferable not to employ this term, it is probably impossible to eliminate the use of the word “secte” because it is integrated into popular language.

According to Info-Secte, groups should be distinguished according to their internal and external functioning, by their vision of the world and their behaviours and not only by a summary evaluation

Info-Secte recognises that it is not the whole set of groups identified as “cults” that represent a risk for their members. Nevertheless, it is important to recognise that certain groups can harm the rights of their members;

Info-Secte recognises that participation in the life of a group certainly constitutes an opportunity for social participation, for socialisation and for comfort, but also underlines that certain groups can become places of psychological and/or physical exclusion

Info-Secte considers that the existing laws answer the multiple problems associated with the cults and the cultic groups.

Like a human being, Info-Secte has developed over these 23 years of existence. Like the groups it observes, frequents and studies, Info-Secte has developed and modified its perception as well as its understanding of the cult phenomenon. Moreover, the links with the scientific and international community as well as with different spiritual and esoteric groups allow the organisation to improve the understanding it has of the groups and of their functioning.

Over more than twenty years of existence, Info-Secte has amassed a diversity of information on the cult phenomenon. This makes Info-Secte the largest centre of its kind in North America. With the arrival of the 21st century, Info-Secte pursues its reflection and its search for information on the phenomenon and continues to offer a service of help and referral.

The Quebec Charter of rights and freedoms ensures, for example, the protection of freedom of religion; it does not however define what it means by the term “religion”.

To understand the meaning of this word and of this right, one must refer to the case law. The decisions rendered by the different Quebec courts give no precise definition of it. Certain judgments have nevertheless made it possible to trace the limits of religious freedoms (2):

• The right to believe what one wishes in religious matters;

• The right to manifest one’s beliefs by worship and practice;

• The right to propagate one’s beliefs.

According to the judgment in the case R.C. Big M Drug Mart, freedom of religion has two dimensions:

• A positive dimension: the individual is free to believe what he wishes and to profess his beliefs;

• A negative dimension: No one can be forced to embrace a religious conception or to act in opposition to what he believes (3)

In daily life, groups can be places of social participation, of comfort, of exchange, but also places of exclusion and of psychological brutality.

The reasons for becoming a member of a group

The human being seeks to understand the experiences he lives (4). In this search for meaning, the beliefs taught or the vision of the world shared by the group can bring a person the answers she is seeking or give a new meaning to her daily life (5).

In a situation of crisis, becoming a member of a group allows the person to diminish the tension or the stress she feels. People who are confronted with disturbing events such as the death of a close relative or the break-up of a love affair often feel tension. The fact of joining a group, however, can make it possible better to understand these events and to diminish the tension and the sadness felt. Becoming a member of a spiritual group that believes in the existence of a life after death can be a solution for the person who suffers (6).

The group gives a frame of reference to the person, which allows her to interpret differently the problems she encounters. Following the integration into her life of the doctrine or the philosophy of a group, the ordeals may no longer be perceived as insurmountable; they have a new meaning.

In a situation of crisis, a person can, in certain cases, manage more easily the emotions she feels because the group offers her plausible explanations for her problems and her sufferings. Thus, the group answers the person’s needs and in exchange the person pursues with the other members the objectives of the group (7).

Even if a person cannot, for example, bring her deceased child back to life, the beliefs transmitted by the group allow her to interpret that event differently. In this situation, the death perceived as unjust takes on a different signification. The unacceptable death is now a fact a little less painful and in certain cases tolerable (8).

Belonging to a group allows certain people to adapt in a more harmonious way to the problems of everyday life. The loss of a job, for example, is no longer perceived as a catastrophe but as an ordeal that allows the person to acquire new skills.

Integrating into the life of a group allows certain people better to adapt, for example, to ageing, to death, to stress, to physical and psychological effort (9). Commitment in a group can also allow certain people to stop consuming drugs or alcohol (10).

The leader-follower relationship

The relationship with a good guru (11)

It is difficult to qualify the leader of a group as good or bad. Every guru or leader can, in his interactions with the members of a group, have harmonious or problematic relations with certain members.

Nevertheless, certain characteristics can be observed to qualify a leader as “good” (12):

• The leader demonstrates a good knowledge of the group’s scriptures;

• The leader has been the disciple of several masters; he asks himself many questions about his own path;

• The leader lives in conformity with his teaching.

The infantilising guru

This type of leader has a paternalistic attitude with his members; he is overprotective and tries to keep the leader-follower relationship secret. Although the leader has the intention of protecting and reassuring the members, he demands in exchange a sometimes extreme submission from his members. In this type of relationship, spiritual or personal growth is effected through the teachings and the relationship to the leader. The objective of the group is to favour the spiritual growth of the leader, so that the participants may accede to his knowledge.

The spiritual abuser

The spiritual abuser can be described as a leader who uses spiritual, biblical or other writings to make the members feel guilty. Thus, he treats social, psychological or health problems by means of divine words or prayers.

The swindler guru

Swindler gurus can be described as leaders who constantly ask their followers for money. These leaders have a luxurious lifestyle while their disciples live an ascetic lifestyle, indeed a life below the poverty line. This type of guru often does not accept questions from the members; they have only to listen to his word and to give money to maintain the leader’s lifestyle.

Footnotes:

1 Bergeron, R. (1997). Vivre au risque des nouvelles religions. Montréal, Médiaspaul.

Campiche, R. (1995). Quand les sectes s’affolent. Ordre du temple Solaire, Média et fin de millénaire. Entretien avec Cyril Depras, Genève-Lausanne : Laboret Fides-Institut d’éthique Sociale.

2 R.C. Big M Drug Mart (1985) 1 R.C.S. 295, 336-337, as cited in the Mémoire à la commission de l’éducation de l’Assemblée nationale sur la place de la religion à l’école. (1995) Commission des droits de la personne (1984) La définition de la religion dans l’article 10 de la Charte des droits et libertés de la personne du Québec, working document. P.36

3 Bosset. P. (1999). Mémoire à la commission de l’éducation de l’Assemblée nationale sur la place de la religion à l’école. Commission des droits de la personne et de la jeunesse du Québec. http://www.cdpdj.qc.ca/fr/publications/liste.asp?Sujet=51&noeud1=1&noeud2=6&cle=0

4 Duhaime, J. (1998). L’adhésion à la conscience de Krishna de 1965 à 1977 aux Etats-Unis : Un point de vue des sciences sociales, dans Croyances et sociétés. Montréal : Fides (Collection Héritage projet), p.247-263.

5 Glock, C. Y. (1963). Origine et Évolution des groupes religieux, Archives de sociologie des religions, vol. 8, p. 29-38.

6 Pargament, K. (1997). The Psychology of Religion and Coping : Theory, Research, Practice. New York : Guilford Press, 548p.

7 Duhaime (1998). op. cit.

8 Pelland, M-A. (2000). Récits de vie de membres actifs et d’anciens membres de groupes sectaires, Mémoire présenté à la Faculté des Études supérieures. Université de Montréal, p.156

9 Pargament, K. (1997). Ibid.

10 Richarson, J. (1984). Psychological and Psychiatric Studies of New Religions. dans L.B. Brown, Advances in the Psychology of Religion, New York : Pergamon.

Richardson, J. (1986). Religiosity as Deviance. The Negative Religious Bias in the Use and Misuse of the DSM III”, Deviant Behavior, vol. 14, no 21, p. 34-65.

Richardson, J.T. (1993). A Sociological Critique of Brainwashing Claims about Recruitment to New Religions, dans J. Hadden et D. Bromley (1993), The Handbook of Cult and Sect in America, Greewich CT JAI Press inc, p.243-271.

11 The term guru is used in this section as a synonym for leader. Pelletier (2000) uses this term to describe spiritual leaders.

12 Pelletier, P. (2000). Les gourous et les Maîtres. Montréal. Édition

Forced Psychiatric Commitments

By Valérie Dole, member of CICNS

The spiritual minorities are often perceived as the refuges of cranks and of the “mentally ill”, of so-called “fragile” persons in general whose capacity to make healthy choices is supposedly diminished.

This perception, made popular by the media and a few political figures, prompted CICNS to make an inquiry into forced psychiatric commitments in France.

CICNS denounces in passing the convenient amalgam which leads to anyone taking an interest in the excesses of psychiatry in France being associated with Scientology.

See on this subject the letter of Philippe Bernardet, research fellow at the CNRS:

“For some ten years, in effect, no criticism of psychiatric practice can be formulated in France without one being immediately branded a Scientologist. (…) Why, moreover, should it be forbidden to talk with Scientologists denouncing certain practices in psychiatry? Besides the mad to be excluded and the delinquents to be locked up, are there new pariahs never to be frequented, on pain of risking the stake oneself? Is this how one envisages fighting the cults and the churches, to leave standing only the republicans of the Jacobin club?” (1)

Facts not without echoes of the famous Paris “map of the cults”

“In a recent report, the Court of Accounts was alarmed at the explosion of the number of forced psychiatric hospitalisations (in 2000, the Court recorded 52,000 forced hospitalisations, an increase of 45% over 1988). Because in France the administration decides commitments, one can, on the occasion of a quarrel between neighbours, a divorce or a difficult inheritance, a work dispute, or for political reasons, find oneself locked up in a psychiatric hospital, ‘treated’ against one’s will, indeed ill-treated… France is the only European country to practise administrative confinement, that implacable machinery made possible by the administration’s manipulation of psychiatry, but also their connivance. Veritable zones of lawlessness exist, like the psychiatric Infirmary of the Paris Prefecture of police (I3P).” (Enfermez-les tous!, by Philippe Bernardet and Catherine Derivery, Robert Laffont).

“France, in the matter of psychiatric commitment, remains one of the last countries in Europe to involve the police. In Paris, the latter has every power: from that of judging that someone is ‘insane’ to that of having him locked up, the compulsory placement being signed by… the Prefect of police himself. But if a policeman’s training includes learning the use of force, it has never provided - and so much the better - for transforming constables into psychiatrists. Yet here they are apprehending, confining, filling in certificates, indeed injecting drugs, at a frightful rhythm: 3,000 people on average each year for Paris and its suburbs! As a result, the abuses are innumerable.”

Concerning compulsory hospitalisations (HO): “The signature of the prefect of police, who is moreover responsible for the management and direction of the psychiatric infirmary of the Paris prefecture of police, will validate this decision impossible to contest, and which forbids the person struck by it to oppose his ‘treatment’. Without the assessment of a judge, and on the sole faith of the medical certificate delivered by the doctor carrying out the ‘hearing’, the police can deprive someone of his liberty without further form of trial, and force him to accept a treatment whose first objective is to break all his resistance.” (Les Asiles de la Honte, Pascal Colombani, éd. Carnot)

“The motives of daily life which allow someone to instrumentalise psychiatry and to use commitment as a weapon to settle a conflict opposing him to a third party are: divorce, inheritance, neighbourhood conflict, school conflict, professional conflict… But beyond the circumstantial and conjunctural elements (malevolence of some, imbalance of others, complaisance, indeed medical complicity), there exist structural causes (legislation, the current exercise of psychiatry, judicial and police practices…) which make such medical imprisonments possible. Among others, a particularly important space of incarceration is the psychiatric infirmary of the Paris prefecture of police (I3P). This singular structure goes back to 1845, the date of the creation of a medical post at the prefecture of police. It has functioned since then in complete illegality!!! Not only because it has no legal existence, but because the rules governing it are derogatory and contravene numerous legislative and regulatory provisions: absence of control, diversion of public and individual guarantees, publicity of passage through this infirmary in violation of medical secrecy… Yet it is nearly 3,000 people who each year are brought to spend from several hours to several days behind these bars.” (1)

“In 2002, the Society of psychiatrists of the sector hospitals of Paris (Somepsy) revealed that in Paris, ‘between 1989 and 2000, the rate of compulsory hospitalisations (HO) went from 10 to 20% of hospitalised patients, which is an absolutely enormous figure compared with the other French departments (of the order of 1 to 3%)’.”(2)

“In the current movement of continuous increase of incarcerations of every order (delinquency, trade-union activities, the residence of foreigners…), psychiatric commitment constitutes an additional worry when one knows the manner in which despotic regimes, notably the so-called popular democracies, were able to use it to organise the repression of their opponents. It is indeed another face of the carceral reality of our society that these practices unveil, aiming to conceal, behind the medical domain, a police activity. Certain slips of the tongue do not deceive: one has thus come to speak of ‘psychiatric police custody’. The risk, already realised in certain circumstances, of generalising situations where the doctor intervenes as an agent of police is real. And yet it seems to preoccupy general opinion only feebly, including within the medical profession!”

“While waiting for an end to be put to commitments, the framing of these practices urgently requires the reinforcement of the rights and legal guarantees of the committed, notably by the limitation of the powers of the police in favour of those of the judicial authorities, perhaps a little less inclined (let us hope) to free themselves from public and individual rights and liberties. French medicine has in effect this particularity of being the most condemned by the European Court of Human Rights for disputes relating to psychiatry (33 condemnations in the second half of 2000, for example).(1)

Everywhere in France, the inconvenient are locked up

“Nearly 2,800 Lyonnais were forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital in 2003, against 1,600 in 1993, that is, an increase of more than 70% in ten years, and ten points more than the French average. An impressive figure which represents 18% of the 15,000 psychiatric hospitalisations in Lyon for 2003, against 13% at the national level.

“Hospitalisation under constraint at the request of a third party (HDT) represented 80% of commitments under constraint in Lyon last year. A letter from a relative and two medical certificates suffice to obtain the commitment of a patient.

At the origin of this phenomenon: social misery, unemployment, drugs, alcohol… And above all solitude.” (…)

“According to Georges Hron, regional delegate of the Groupe Information Asiles, ‘15 to 20% of hospitalisations under constraint are abusive.’ (GIA is an association of former patients who consider they were committed abusively.)

“It is very rare for the judge to consider that the patient’s state does not justify a measure of constraint and to demand the lifting of the measure: on average barely one case a year. ‘The judges take no risk. And if you have already been hospitalised, you are presumed ill,’ asserts Georges Hron.” (Lyon Mag, 1 December 2004) (1)

What does the law say?

“150 years after the law of 1838, the law of 27 June 1990, motivated by the search for a better guarantee of patients’ rights, begins by dispensing with their consent. It permits the imposition of two types of hospitalisation under constraint.

“Thus, a person suffering from mental disorders can be hospitalised at the request of a third party (HDT), if his disorders ‘make his consent impossible’ and if ‘his state requires immediate care accompanied by constant surveillance in a hospital milieu’. It is carried out on the basis of a request for admission presented by a person capable of acting in the interest of the patient (family or other) and of two medical certificates.

“Exceptionally, and in case of ‘imminent peril’ for the patient’s health, admission may be pronounced on the basis of a single medical certificate and the request for admission (this procedure was used in 23% of cases in 1995).

“Compulsory hospitalisations (HO) are for their part pronounced by order, in Paris, of the Prefect of police, and in the departments, of the Prefects, on the basis of a medical certificate, for ‘persons whose mental disorders compromise public order or the safety of persons’. This certificate may not emanate from a psychiatrist having a legal link with the receiving establishment; on the other hand it may be drafted and signed by a private doctor, by a doctor of another establishment or by a non-psychiatrist doctor of that establishment.

The doctor gives an opinion following what he has observed or heard concerning the ill person, when he has not been able to examine him.

“In case of imminent danger for the safety of persons, attested by a medical opinion or, failing that, by public notoriety, the Mayor and, in Paris, the police commissioners, order with regard to persons whose behaviour reveals manifest mental disorders all the necessary provisional measures, on condition of referring the matter within 24 hours to the Prefect, who rules without delay and issues, if there is cause, an order of compulsory hospitalisation.”

“The imprecision of the law brings out a risk of amalgam between mental disorder and irresponsibility. It exposes the persons to whom it applies to the arbitrary. In the two measures of hospitalisation under constraint, nothing in effect makes it possible to discriminate what arises from pathology from what arises from a conscious and responsible act.” (3)

“‘To commit someone without serious reason requires the complicity of a general practitioner and then of a psychiatrist, which is impossible,’ rules a psychiatrist of the Vinatier… According to Dr Ph. de Labriolle, hospital psychiatrist, Lyon: ‘This objection was, at least partially, receivable before 1990. It no longer is, for two principal reasons: the psychiatrist drafting the second admission certificate and the psychiatrist drafting the 24-hour certificate are work colleagues; there is no need for complicity, that is to say shared malevolent intention; it suffices to let the need for security generated by the interdependence between colleagues do its work, indeed simple passivity.’” (1)

“The law of 1990, whose concern was to improve the protection of persons receiving care and to limit recourse to commitment, remains a law of exception. The evaluation made of it today tends to demonstrate that it has not reached these objectives.

“Hospitalisations under constraint increased considerably between 1980 and 1995 (+94% for hospitalisations at the request of a third party and +48% for compulsory hospitalisations from 1980 to 1988, the date from which they diminished, only to increase again from 1992. They reach, in 1995, the figure of 1988). For the sociologist P. Bernardet, research fellow at the CNRS, the law of 1990 is more a ‘law of police of the insane’ than a law permitting access to care. The examination of the motives of the compulsory hospitalisations which he gives us makes one fear ‘a medicalisation of delinquency’, even more than the law of 30 June 1838.

“In the same sense, the tidying-up of article 64, replaced by 122-1 in the new penal Code, maintains the mentally ill person in the straitjacket of irresponsibility, which the notion of non-punishability would have avoided.

“One sees today that the mentally ill person remains an individual whom the legislator removes from ordinary law. For his own good or for the protection of others, the administrative and medical power continues to deny him certain fundamental rights. The increased sensitivity with regard to the status of hospitalised patients, the will to respect individual liberties, collide in practice with the institutional organisation. The principles of free choice of practitioner, of free movement, of the possibility of refusing a treatment, of communicating (…) do not apply to this population. These restrictions, justified by the search for the ‘good of the patient’, do not rest on clearly stated criteria, which still leaves a large place for the arbitrary and the subjective.

“The 20th century will not bury with it society’s ambivalence towards the mentally ill, which psychiatric praxis only reveals: it remains torn between indignation at confinement and the fear that madness inspires in it.” (3)

Proposed resolution No. 1459 registered at the Presidency of the National Assembly on 25 February 2004, tending to the creation of a commission of inquiry into the growth of the number of psychiatric commitments in France, presented by M. Georges HAGE, Deputy.

”(…) The study of the reports drawn up by the departmental Commissions on psychiatric hospitalisations (CDHP), created by the law of 27 June 1990, reveals numerous irregularities in the matter of commitment and constraint in psychiatry. Certain problems appear notably recurrent and pose serious questions with regard to the necessary respect for individual liberty. In certain departments, it is thus noted that there is ‘an increase in the number of hospitalisations at the request of a third party (HDT) as an emergency, when this measure ought to remain exceptional. For the CDHPs, this is an abusive banalisation.’ This recourse to the emergency procedure makes it possible in effect to dispense with gathering the opinion of a doctor from outside the hospital, a fundamental guarantee which the old law of 30 June 1838 had posed to avoid all abuse and arbitrariness in this domain. In some thirty departments, emergency admissions have thus become the majority of all admissions at the request of a third party, whereas they remained marginal before 1990 and the law of 1990 stipulates that they must be exceptional.

”(…) a last example, probably the most worrying for the future of the Nation: the CDHPs note that ‘behavioural and social difficulties of minors are too often transformed into hospitalisation under constraint when other solutions ought to exist’.

”(…) In recent years, the Courts of appeal of Paris and Douai have been led to order the State to pay indemnities of more than 45,000 to 190,000 euros to the victims of abusive commitments of some ten days to several months. By a Resolution DH (97) 394 of 17 September 1997, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe found a violation of the European Convention for the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the case of an arbitrary commitment of one year, and ordered the French Government to pay 230,000 F to the victim.

”(…) The General Directorate of Health is for its part still not in a position to provide the detailed statistical figures for the year 2000, having until now been able to process only those of 1999. The delay in processing the information thus now reaches 4 years, when the safeguarding of individual liberty is at stake. It seems there is a will to conceal a very worrying aspect of current psychiatry.” (2)

Mme Maryvonne BRIOT, deputy, reports the following answer of the National Assembly (circular No. 1598 registered at the Presidency of the National Assembly on 12 May 2004):

“One will however regret that the author of the proposed resolution retained the terms ‘hospitalisations under constraint’, and still more those of ‘psychiatric commitments’, which seem to hark back to darker times when psychiatry was powerless in the face of cases of deep psychosis and when the care of these persons was limited to an approach of assistance and security. Far from being a measure of confinement and sanction, hospitalisation without consent constitutes in reality a measure of restraint justified by the specificities of certain mental illnesses, namely denial of the illness and refusal of care, which justify that restrictions may be brought to the exercise of their individual liberties. Thus, as the report of the national group evaluating the law of 27 June 1990 rightly underlined, ‘hospitalisation without consent is totally different from commitment and placement. It is always first of all a health measure, ordered by a doctor’.

”(…) By a letter dated 7 May 2004, M. Dominique Perben, Keeper of the Seals, Minister of Justice, informed the President of the National Assembly that ‘judicial proceedings are regularly instituted following psychiatric commitments denounced as arbitrary’ (4)

On 14 July 2004, Philippe BERNARDET, Research Fellow at the C.N.R.S., answers Mme Briot:

“It is with consternation that I took cognisance of your report on the proposed resolution of M. Georges HAGE tending to the creation of a commission of inquiry into the growth of the number of psychiatric commitments in France, but also of the record of the debates which took place within the Commission for Cultural, Family and Social Affairs following your presentation. Such an absence of critical sense on the part of the Nation’s elected representatives on so delicate a subject frightens me, when what is at stake is the keystone of every democracy (individual liberty) and probably humanity’s most precious good (mental health).”

“It is nevertheless impossible, in 2004, to accept that the national representation should continue to ignore in this way the innumerable protests and cries of distress of the victims of abuse and of the arbitrary - in great part state-driven - including those suffered by persons afflicted with mental disorders who manage to access care only in a relation of violence and of negation of their rights, their dignity and respect for their person. The Groupe Information Asiles and the national Federation of associations of psychiatric patients (FNAPPsy) possess, in their archives, thousands of alarming letters and testimonies on the way their authors were treated. The courts now condemn, each year, several persons responsible for abusive psychiatric hospitalisations, where, before the 1980s, there was less than one condemnation every ten or twenty years.” (1)

According to the testimony of Ph. de Labriolle, psychiatrist of the Lyon hospitals:

“I come to the statement of my essential worry, shared by many:

The structural modifications of the public psychiatric hospital milieu tend towards the disappearance of medical ethics within it. The independence of the doctor is affirmed and concretely discouraged. Without the independence of the doctor from his employer, the supervisory authorities, and ‘collegial’ normativity, the user’s confidence is subject to the vagaries of the conscience of his interlocutor of the moment. Now, we have seen that everything leads the doctor to conformity with the expectations of those more powerful than he. The consented abandonment of ethics in favour of the concrete exercise of this conformity collides with the vigilance of no precise body. If this exercise is damaging, it can only be to the detriment of the user, who, in the matter, proves to be the weak link: applying to the courts has remained, for a century and a half, a marginal act.

”(…) Faced with a useless, illegal or arbitrary commitment, a hospital psychiatrist takes risks in refusing it. His interests of serenity, stability and career are at stake as soon as he ceases to be a cog or a clone, by challenging the authorities so that the law is applied. In doubt, keeping the patient is always more secure for oneself than giving him back his liberty and thwarting those who wanted the commitment. In its present state, the public psychiatric hospital illustrates André Gide’s aphorism in ‘Return from the USSR’ (1936): ‘To be happy, be conforming.’

”(…) It is essential to make users aware of their right of access to their hospital medical file, reaffirmed by the law of 4 March 2002, even for a hospitalisation without consent. A systematic claiming of files is a procedure which would contribute to having the law applied and the formal rights of patients respected.” (1)

“Following the double murder of Pau, in the night of 17 to 18 December 2004, when two women’s bodies were discovered terribly mutilated, Philippe Douste-Blazy, then Minister of Health, presented a ‘mental health plan for 2005 to 2008’, promising more than a billion euros in investment and operations to be devoted to this plan, a considerable effort by the community at the height of the stakes of mental health. ‘You see, both by the method, by the means released and by its objectives, it is not a simple plan I wish to build but a genuine policy of mental health.’” (5)

“A year on, public psychiatry is still waiting for the effects of the mental health plan.” (6)

“For years, the psychiatrists have been announcing that they are ‘on the edge of a great discovery’ in their understanding of the mental; or they announce the latest ‘miracle drug’ which will bring happiness to all. And each year, on the basis of these promises, billions come to be added to the billions already spent on research - to send new rats into mazes and test more chemical pills on new guinea pigs and new monkeys. For what result? The statistics of ‘mental health’ continue to worsen - according to the psychiatrists themselves.” (7)

But in what way do current psychiatric practices concern the spiritual minorities?

The Ministry of the Interior gives this advice, in case of conflict with a cult:

“If no direct action against the cult is possible, or if you do not wish to use it: try to dialogue with the person who belongs to it and who is close to you. If this person cannot be reasoned with, and if she makes a significant financial contribution to the cult, you can have her placed under guardianship, curatorship or judicial protection. (8) Judicial protection is a measure of provisional incapacity, of a duration not exceeding 3 to 6 months. It can be requested by a member of the family or a neighbour and be put in place very quickly (24 hours). The patient loses no legal capacity (apart from that of being designated a juror at a trial), nor any liberty: nobody can impose on him or forbid him anything whatever. This placing under judicial protection constitutes a sort of ‘framework of prudence’ while waiting for things to settle. At the patrimonial level, it presents the advantage of facilitating the annulment of an act which the dependent adult may have signed some time before, even though he was no longer perfectly master of his decision.” (9)

“If these measures are not applicable, you can have recourse to the protection of the adult of sound mind provided for by article 488 paragraph 3 of the civil code.” (8)

In a circular of the Keeper of the Seals of 29 February 1996 on the fight against attacks on persons and property committed within the framework of movements of a cult character:

Distribution to the prosecutors general, and, through the latter, to the public prosecutors

“The vigilant exercise of the civil attributions of the public prosecution service, outside the cases provided for in articles 375 and following of the civil code, should make it possible to ensure as well as possible the protection of persons, adult or minor, subjected to the hold of cult movements, as well as of their circle. In this regard, the procedures of placement under judicial protection, guardianship or curatorship can be an adequate response for adults. (10)

In a circular of 1 December 1998, the Minister of Justice addressed several recommendations to the prosecutors general, in order to reinforce the effectiveness of the fight against the cults:

”(…) The circular insists, like that of 29 February 1996, on the necessity of institutionalising, at the level of the prosecutors’ offices, coordination meetings involving all the services of the State confronted with dérives sectaires, in particular the police and gendarmerie services, the regional directorates of labour and employment, the departmental directorates of judicial protection of youth, the academy inspectors of national education and of youth and sports… (11)

The General Directorate of Social Action (DGAS)

Five sub-directorates compose the General Directorate; three of them carry the public policies of fighting exclusions, of responding to dependence and of aid to autonomy.

The sub-directorate of insertion policies and the fight against exclusions coordinates the interministerial policies of prevention of the risks of exclusion, of insertion and access, and of the fight against ill-treatment of vulnerable adults, the follow-up of the apparatus of legal protection of adults in relation with the Ministry of Justice, the management of the credits of State guardianship and curatorship as well as the follow-up of the policy of fighting against dérives sectaires. (12)

CICNS wishes to bring to the attention of the public and the authorities the current excess concerning psychiatric commitments. Must the designated enemies of the republic, often scapegoats or mirages generated by the ambient psychosis, undergo the waywardness of a democracy in search of stability?

Are we going to return to the dark ages of the inquisition, the concentration camps, the gulags, in order to control the populations who express the necessity of reforming our institutions? It is a serious question which deserves better than the pathetic reports of a few soulless officials.

Read also “the spiritual minorities are a delicate pathology according to secretary of state Nicole Guedj”

Sources:

(1) http://www.groupeinfoasiles.org/

(2) http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/12/propositions/pion1459.asp

(3) http://www.serpsy.org/piste_recherche/violence(s)/nelly4.html

(4) http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/12/rapports/r1598.asp

(5) http://www.premier-ministre.gouv.fr/information

(6) http://psychiatriinfirmiere.free.fr/infirmiere/infirmier/presse/monde/sante-mentale.htm

(7) http://www.elysees-monceau.com/Therapie/PolitiqueSante/internements_abusifs.htm

(8) http://www.interieur.gouv.fr/rubriques/b/b2_vos_demarches/b21_fiches/Conflits_avec_les_sectes

(9) http://www.seniorplanet.fr/sp.fr.php?id=2286&action=article&id_cat=342&page=1

(10) http://www.justice.gouv.fr/actua/circulaire%20du%20011298.htm

(11) http://www.senat.fr/rap/l99-131/l99-1312.html

(12) http://www.travail.gouv.fr/ministere

See also http://www.breggin.com on the effects of neuroleptics and other medicines used in psychiatry (site in English)

Hatred

… and the Scapegoats

by the CICNS

Footnote on the subject of Punishment Park

Alain Bouchard (2001) has shown how the model of the cult that emerges from newspaper articles seems to belong to the “urban legend”, those fictional stories which become socially plausible and which express in an unconscious way the preoccupations of the individuals who create and propagate them. These rumours are cathartic narratives which furnish the social group with an acceptable scenario for substituting an order for the dissonance generated by the evolution and the destruction of the traditional forms of socialisation.

One then takes up the typical scenario of the “stranger” and the “abduction”. The ogre of the fables resurfaces under the mask of the cults. As in urban legends, the media narratives about the new religions point to the preoccupations of an era and identify a scapegoat revealing of the anxieties of a society. The cult threatens the future of the group (the young) by tipping them into the irrational, which is the inversion of the modern founding myth: rationality, science. The cult is more than the other. It is finally the inversion of us.

Fanaticism and hatred feed on ignorance, on fear, on disinformation and on half-truths.

On the Internet, numerous hate sites practise the hunt for the scapegoat. They attribute to certain targeted groups (the “cults”, for example) the responsibility for all sorts of political and social problems. Their assertions rely on the ignorance of the public and on “proofs” created out of whole cloth (see, for the phenomenon of the spiritual minorities, Jonestown, Waco and the recurring defamations of the anti-cult activists).

These hateful assertions come to stimulate prejudices, often unconscious, which influence our perceptions and our actions. These instincts are, in our era, presented in a socially admissible light (it is a sophisticated form of barbarism, as we shall see).

When pressure groups come to give hatred a quasi-legal character, a feeling of immunity awakens along with the primary instincts of discrimination and ostracism, so convenient in a period of “crisis”.

The reality of this phenomenon can escape us when we are personally confronted with it, when we have “our nose in it”. But our so-called “civilised” society must very urgently look into this infernal mechanism.

That is why I present below a few examples, beyond our borders, which allow a more neutral look to be taken at it, before quickly observing to what extent the situation is identical everywhere and in every generation.

In 1830, with the adoption of the Indian Removal Act, the government of the United States of the time launched a campaign against the American Indians in order to drive them from their lands. During the displacement of the Indian populations, who sometimes had to walk for hundreds of kilometres, thousands of Indians perished, in addition to those who had been killed previously. Yet the artists of the time represented the Indians as aggressors, rather than as the victims of an unjust government expulsion order. The image of the “demonic” Indian or of the “ignoble savage” became deeply anchored in the country up to the first westerns of the cinema, which still represented them in this manner (remember, it was yesterday). Very few people at the time were capable of calling into question this incredible reversal of the situation, in which the oppressor presents himself as an oppressed with the assent of the majority of the witnesses of a whole generation.

The image of “Daniel Boone fighting an Indian” is a sculpture that still forms part of a stone bas-relief on a rotunda of the Capitol in Washington DC. The Indian there is imposing, his features are demonic, he appears violent. He is presented in a manner designed to frighten. It is a veritable manipulation.

Later, McCarthyism managed to feed a blind and repressive hatred of the communists in the space of a few years (there exists a terrifying film from 1971 of a murderous “manhunt” in the desert, with minorities as prey, partially banned in the United States on its release: see note). This phobia, this madness! towards a “target” group already recalled, for some, “the witch hunts” of the past.

Another example that has been practised by graphic artists: the image of Father Christmas — nothing frightening, it can even evoke pleasant childhood memories. But it is enough to change the red hat for a turban for our perception to change totally and for other emotions to appear (Father Christmas becomes a Muslim fundamentalist).

Where does this perception come from and to what emotions is it attached? It is interesting to observe for oneself the mechanisms that are at the origin of our judgements and emotions. Do these judgements and emotions really belong to us? Can we speak of liberty when we come to feel hatred or attraction by simple conditioning? And if the turban is replaced by another ritual headdress of a religion? If it recalls a report on the “cults” in which the spiritual minorities are always presented in a “folkloric” manner? What happens?

The habit no longer makes the monk, but has it managed to make “the cult” or “the danger”?

Since 11 September 2001, the perception of Muslims, and by extension of “Arabs” or of “foreigners”, has changed and fear has been amplified.

The turban has the power to transform Father Christmas into a threat.

It is in any case this perception that is inculcated in the populations (this situation is to be set beside the adoption, in France, of the laws against the “Islamic veil”).

Today, in France, the stigmatisation of the spiritual minorities rests on the same schemas of hatred, of the designation of scapegoats and of repression of ways of life or currents of thought which present, no doubt, a danger for the system in force or for large-scale projects of which the population is ignorant. But if the population — you and I — are ignorant of what is being plotted behind the repression, we are nonetheless the playthings of these collective manipulations, while often believing we “think for ourselves”. There is nothing exaggerated in all this. One need only see how we react blindly on the basis of information we have digested without calling it into question. We become the instruments of a hatred that does not belong to us.

If reflection has a virtue — when it does not remain on the surface of automatisms and conditionings — it must be exercised now, in our country, by each one of us, on this question which deserves a genuine and sustained attention.

Hatred has the power one gives it. It currently has full power and numerous groups and numerous people are its victims.

I wish, once again, that history should not repeat itself indefinitely, and that thanks to the necessary becoming-conscious of that scourge which is the hatred of difference. Hatred is one and the same despite the renewal of the scapegoats and the fallacious arguments, primary and repetitive, which succeed in making us accept them.

Sources of the documents:

http://www.tolerance.org

http://www.media-awareness.ca

http://www.bugbrother.com

See the terrible “Punishment Park” by Peter Watkins (1971):

In the middle of the Californian desert, a handful of young men and women, accused of having undermined the security of the American state, appear before a special tribunal which justifies its existence by the aggravation of the North Vietnamese conflict. President Nixon, relying on the McCarran Act of 1950, which allows him to decree a state of emergency without the approval of Congress, has all the elements hostile to his policy inside the country imprisoned… Special tribunals are rapidly instituted. In the dock are found all the “protesting” minorities: Blacks, extremists, pacifists, humanists, communist militants…

They are condemned to heavy prison sentences which they can escape on condition of spending three days in “Punishment Park”.

All of them, without knowing what it involves, choose this alternative. The ordeal consists in covering 80 kilometres on foot in the desert, under a leaden sun, without water and without food, while “special forces” armed with rifles and pistols and using cars, jeeps and helicopters set off in pursuit of the fugitives, after having let them take a two-hour lead.

To those who might reach the American flag planted at the limits of the park safe and sound, a pardon is promised. But none reaches the end of the ordeal and a great part are pitilessly gunned down before the television cameras invited for the occasion…

This fiction is filmed in so realistic a manner that the viewer is profoundly shaken. It does not seem to him that all this is so far from reality. On its release, there was even talk of bans in certain cinemas… (The history of the film)

This report was broadcast on Arte in February 2002.

On the same subject of hatred, read also:

P. Barrucand, Haines d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, campagnes anti-juifs, anti-franc-maçons, anti-sectes.

Laïcité, Cults - Is There an Alternative to the Current Foot-in-the-Dish Politics?

by Éric Bouzou of CICNS

A certain time having passed since Nicolas Sarkozy’s speeches at Saint-Jean de Latran and Riyadh and those of Emmanuelle Mignon and Michèle Alliot-Marie on the cults, it is not useless to return coolly to these episodes which set a good number of commentators boiling. The two subjects are linked, since the question of the cults belongs to the controversial framework of laïcité as an outlet for repressed passions.

The least one can say is that Nicolas Sarkozy’s statements raised a chorus of mostly critical reactions.

A few examples in the media. “Sarkozy the American introduces into France the tradition of ‘God bless America’” (France 24 quoting Le Monde). Le Monde goes further: “Nobody contests that France has Christian roots. But the Republic of which M. Sarkozy is President remains, in the terms of article one of the Constitution of 1958, ‘indivisible, secular, democratic and social’. It also has roots forged by the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789.” For Jean-Yves Camus (Rue89): “Nicolas Sarkozy persists and signs: for him, the two great scourges of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, were born not ‘of an excess of God, but of his formidable absence’ (…) We have escaped (for the moment) the calling into question of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, but narrowly”. Sylvain Lapoix (Marianne) questions the application of the 1905 law: ”(…) Certainly, the text instituting the separation of Church and State does not guarantee an ideal functioning of the religions. But is that not because it is badly applied rather than because it was badly written? There is a question one hardly has time to ask oneself when one wants to mark history with the seal of one’s politics of civilisation”. Grégory Blachier in the JDD wonders: “Does Nicolas Sarkozy want to patch things up between Church and State?”

The sociologists and philosophers are not to be outdone. Jean Baubérot, who devoted a book of answers to the President’s speech, specifies in Le Monde: “Nicolas Sarkozy’s speech infringes laïcité insofar as it is not philosophically neutral, but privileges religious convictions to the detriment of other convictions, instead of respecting all beliefs, all convictions, as is said in the preamble of the French Constitution”. Henri Pena-Ruiz makes a similar observation: Nicolas Sarkozy “feeds a constant confusion between spirituality and religion. Spirituality is the life of the spirit, the life of human consciousness freeing itself from the immediate. It is irreducible to religion. Religion is a perfectly respectable form of spirituality, but there are others” (L’Humanité). Régis Debray in Le Monde of 24 January 2008 comments thus on the President’s assertion that — “In the transmission of values and in the learning of the difference between good and evil, the schoolteacher will never be able to replace the priest or the pastor (…)” —: “After happy insights into the considerable contribution of Christianity, the Latran speech drifted towards a falsification of our civil status (…) There is a long way from the secular teaching of the religious fact, which I had recommended, which the National Assembly approved, to this devout diversion of the secular fact. Our purpose was not to humiliate the schoolteacher to vaunt the imam or the pastor. But to extend the Enlightenment to the ‘dark continent’ of the religions, not to lower it. Still less to extinguish it.” As a counterpoint, Emile Poulat thinks that “Nicolas Sarkozy’s message to the religious forces is situated explicitly within the framework of the existing secular regime and the established equilibria. He is only saying out loud, for the first time, what has been done without words for a century, including under the Popular Front. It is not a gift: it is a call. It delights the churches: will they know how to answer it more and better than they do today? The answer is not obvious (…) The President did not resist the pleasure of irritating the ‘secularists’. He could have avoided it.” (Le Figaro).

The politicians did not miss the occasion either. Following the Latran speech, François Bayrou exclaimed: “This is nothing other than the opium of the people that Marx denounced” (Le JDD). Laurent Fabius judged it “very important that the President keep to the traditional version of laïcité. We must not mix the religions, which I respect, and the public domain in which they have no business interfering.” (Le JDD). Jean-Luc Mélanchon, relying on his very personal vision of laïcité, explains: “From laïcité as the State’s indifference towards the religions, he passes to laïcité as ‘neutrality’. Then neutrality is described as the equal treatment of the religions, which is already quite another thing than indifference. Then, from this equal treatment one slides to the idea of an equal valorisation of the religions as indispensable to the good functioning of society and the flourishing of persons. Of course this no longer has anything to do with the laïcité of the 1905 law” (Voltairenet). Michèle Alliot-Marie recognises, in answer to a question from Jean Glavany (PS), a divergence on the very meaning of laïcité: “We wish to recognise the role of spirituality” against “negative laïcité, a sectarian attitude” (La Croix).

The speeches of the President of the Republic triggered an outcry from the secular associations: “Among the first to judge ‘unacceptable the calling into question of this principle indispensable to civil peace’ figure the teaching unions, the FSU, the Sgen-CFDT, Unsa éducation, the trade-union confederations CGT, CFDT, but also the Grand Orient de France, the Libre Pensée, the League of Human Rights…” (Libération, 26 February 2008, by Marion Mourgue). A petition in defence of laïcité has moreover already gathered more than 150,000 signatures (Appel laïque). Nicole Delattre (Union rationnaliste) asks: ”(…) one may also pose the following question: by going to play exactly the same score as the most fundamentalist of the Muslim fundamentalists on ‘the sacred land of Islam’, does President Sarkozy think he is protecting France against Islamist terrorism? (…) what Sarkozy is doing in France, indeed proposing for Europe when ‘his’ France takes the presidency of the Council of Europe in July: before all things, not to shock the conscience of believers; as for the atheists, the agnostics and the indifferent, although they have in France the right to express their absence of belief, having no conscience, they could not legitimately be shocked.” For the Grand Orient de France, “the anti-Enlightenment forces are taking their revenge” (La Croix).

The Christian currents rather welcomed Nicolas Sarkozy’s statements. The President of the Protestant Federation of France, Claude Baty, concedes: “I am not disappointed that the religions are recognised as having a right to speech and to public expression. That representatives of the religions should, for example, be invited to take part in the Economic and Social Council seems to me a matter of good sense. We are social actors! No better than the others, but no worse either! (…)” On the subject of adjustments to the 1905 law, he specifies: “Much as I am ready to step back from the current polemic, which seems to me largely a false debate, it is out of the question that the media noise should divert us from our objectives. Because we are laity, we shall not content ourselves with glosses on the holy law!” (Fédération Protestante de France). It is not useless to recall that the Protestant current is the one that most applies the 1905 law, with the greatest number of worship associations. Jean-Marie Guénois in La Croix considers that “on the Catholic side, and beyond the diverse political options of these milieux, the Latran speech was rather well appreciated. ‘Positive laïcité’, understood as a new culture, relaxed and constructive, between State and Church, is an ardent wish for a majority of Catholics after a century of bitter combats whose gravity the centenary of the 1905 law recalled. A law, in passing, whose balance the Church appreciates and which it does not want to see revised.” Some, however, hear in the Latran speech nothing Catholic at all: “The former Grand Master Alain Bauer, quoted by Martin Peltier, joins him perfectly in decrypting Sarkozyan thought: ‘Sarkozy’s speech is paradoxically not a Catholic speech. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, none of them can recognise themselves in the absence of a doctrinal backbone in this speech’ (…) In other words, Sarkozy’s openness is that of Masonic humanism, not atheist but agnostic, culturally open to the religious fact in a relativist conception” (Chretienté info).

As for Emmanuelle Mignon, her flash of brilliance was short-lived. After asserting in VSD that the cults in France were “a non-problem”, that the MIVILUDES should be “transformed” “into something more effective, and an end put to the blah-blah” (Nouvel Obs), she did as all politicians do who realise the embarrassing import of their statements: deny their authenticity and muddy the waters. In the same way, Michèle Alliot-Marie, who seemed to take the measure of the excesses of the anti-cult fight in France, quickly returned to an “orthodox” discourse with the support of François Fillon on the question (AFP). Raphaël Liogier well described the difference of culture that exists between the Ministry of the Interior and the Prime Minister on the question of the cults. A difference criticised by Alain Gest when Michèle Alliot-Marie launched her trial balloon: “This evolution is the fruit of a manipulation orchestrated by senior officials of the Ministry of the Interior favourable to the cult movements, who place the debate on freedom of conscience and religion, when the dangerous movements today no longer have religious references” (Le Monde). As for Jean-Pierre Brard, he exclaimed: “Let us refuse the Kärcher clean-up of the 1905 law as of the Miviludes” (PARIS, 6 Feb 2008 AFP). Nevertheless this difference of culture, bearing optimism for a more balanced treatment of the question of the cults, apparently did not survive the fall in the President’s popularity. One can deal with the cults more intelligently, certainly, but perhaps not at the price of popularity. The latest MIVILUDES report brought, in this respect, no good surprise.

To say that the cults are a non-problem is a quick way of stating a real fact: the sociological problem of dérives sectaires is minor. It can of course be treated, but no longer within the current framework of the French anti-cult fight. The true large-scale problem is the use of the fear manufactured around the cults by a part of the public authorities.

The words of the members of the executive up to the highest level are not script errors, possibly marks of ignorance for certain statements. It is a matter of sounding out opinion on difficult subjects, indeed of imposing a personal vision on the President’s part. Some might call this the “politics of the foot in the dish”, with the consequence of sowing confusion and discord.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to ask why it is chronically impossible in France to broach calmly, and with the necessary openness of mind, the subject of laïcité and that of the cults (except in an academic context), it being understood that one can no longer call “debate” the epidermic contributions, gesticulations and other courtroom flourishes encouraged by the media. One remembers in particular the law on laïcité (alias the veil law) and the About-Picard law, promulgated in the name of a laïcité that many want petrified and sanctified.

One then finds oneself dreaming of a salutary recovery by the public authorities which, following the example of Quebec with the Bouchard-Taylor commission, would launch a great project of reflection to define “the practices of accommodation related to cultural differences” (see our page on the subject). That is something other than the French parliamentary commissions of inquiry on the cults, or even than the Machelon commission convened on the quiet in the suspicious French climate. Jean Baubérot, who knows the subject, believes he sees in the Quebec approach an opportunity, since he intends to entitle his next book: “Liberté, laïcité, diversité. Le Québec une chance pour la France” (Blog Jean Baubérot).

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.

See our comments on other television programmes Page 1 Page 2

La peur des sectes

by Duhaime (Jean), Saint-Arnaud (Guy-Robert)

Montréal, Fides, 2001.

The work directed by Jean Duhaime and Guy-Robert Saint-Arnaud publishes the proceedings of a colloquium held at the ACFAS in 2000. The title, La peur des sectes [The fear of the cults], situates from the outset the argument of the work and the axis in which it is carried out. It is resolutely a matter of leaving the beaten track by proposing a crossed view between the scientific perspective and the social perspective. It is therefore not a simple formulation of what the cults are and of what they do in a scientific perspective, but rather a going back and forth between scientific object and question of public policy. It is not the only quality of this work to have risked that audacious wager.

The debate around the “cults” constitutes the first part of the work. Jean-François Mayer — a specialist on the question — retraces the stakes of studies on the cults, halfway between public security and scientific study. The reflection on the place of the scientific researcher in relation to the political or judicial use of his works and of his expertise on the cults contributes to a much broader reflection on the place of the scientist in society. And that is the second tour de force of this work: to succeed, starting from a very targeted subject, in undertaking a more global reflection on the place of science in society.

This introductory article gives way to one of the major stakes of the cults: that of their place in the media. This second part, composed of three texts, approaches the question in various ways. Benjamin-Hugo Leblanc’s contribution resituates the question through the French media. He attempts to show that the French media focus on the dangerous aspects of the cults. The argument sins, however, through its lack of positioning between the theoretical dimension — where the author seeks to tell us how the French media ought to treat the cults — and a more empirical approach which would carry out a solid content analysis, the only basis of scientificity in our view. “Curiously”, Alain Bouchard’s article seems to answer these questions by offering a content analysis of the media on the subject of the Raëlian Movement. He shows how the discourse on the Raëlians is constructed by the media and how the latter metaphorise the movement. The final reflection on the nature of the cult — bearer of counter-societal values because they are not valued in society — offers stimulating avenues of reflection. Christian Saint-Germain’s text proposes, to close this part, a philosophical reflection on the relations woven between the cults and the media. “Allergy to the cults and the ethics of the minority situation” puts back into perspective the question: are the cults a danger? By seeking to invert the argument. According to the author, the existence of the cults testifies to the democratic vitality of a society. The critique of the media becomes from then on quite sharp, insofar as they stigmatise the cults as the incarnation of evil. And the author concludes on the prudence necessary in the matter.

Minority religions and risks for persons forms the second part of the work. The approach of this part is rather psychological. The different contributions seek to evaluate the danger of the cults for the human personality. The psychoanalyst Pierre Pelletier proposes a reflection on gurus and masters. He distinguishes the “good” gurus from the “dangerous” ones. Faced with this diversity and the complexity of the cult phenomenon, the author encourages the carrying out of a prudent scientific analysis. Dianne Casoni shows for her part that the “dérives sectaires” all rest on a similar mechanism, constituting in a way an ideal type of the cult, not on a sociological plane but in the order of the psychological. These reading keys make it possible to approach the chapter on “L’aliénation ou l’atypie du groupe sectaire” with greater serenity. The reflection on the mechanisms of alienation proposed by Céline Castillo shows that everything is defined from the nodal point of the subject’s liberty. This theme is, in a certain manner, taken up again in Guy-Robert Saint-Arnaud’s contribution, but the insistence here is placed on the relative incapacity of psychoanalysis to bring cultic pathologies to birth.

The cults and the risks for institutions forms the third part of the work and returns to more sociological dimensions. Martin Geoffroy and Jean-Guy Vaillancourt propose a study on extremist Catholic groups. It is therefore a whole reflection on the sectarian dimension within the Church that is proposed, which joins one of the classic — but still topical — debates of the sociology of religion. Through the observation of Quebec Catholic groups, the authors show clearly the limits of the routinisation that the Catholic Church can undertake in order to “normalise” them. But they also prove that these “sectarian” Catholic groups are so also by their contestation of the values of modernity. Jean Duhaime’s study is, for its part, among the most original by its object. “Diversité religieuse et risque sectaire dans les forces armées canadiennes” shows that a diversification of religious options is under way in the army and that it is not excluded that the minority religions and the cultic groups will be more represented there in the coming decades. However, the cultic risks are low, notably by reason of the way in which the army marks out all the forms of expression of religious convictions. Alexandru Gurau’s article bears on the political situation of the cults in Romania. Under the communist regime the cults were fought virulently. The strategies developed by the communist State consisted in marginalising them by qualifying them as obscurantist and retrograde and by insisting on the social pathology they represent. The author concludes however on the current rapid changes in Romania and on the necessity of pursuing these studies on the “cults”, because they can serve as a “revealer” of societal changes. A legal overview could only close this part. Elisabeth Campos looks into French criminal law in the matter. The author shows that French law is more nuanced in the matter than it appears a priori. The judicial acts and the decisions rendered take account of the delictual situations of certain cults, which it is fitting to condemn. But the principal contribution of this text, in our view, is to encourage prudence. French law judges the “cults” case by case, taking good care not to implement a generalising public policy. This makes it possible to conclude that this way of proceeding does justice to the non-dangerous “cults” by ensuring them a fundamental legal liberty.

The work ends by giving the floor back to Jean-François Mayer. On the future of research on the “cults” he advocates developing interdisciplinarity which, as we have shown in this review, is very fruitful in the analysis of the phenomenon. All in all, this book has the merit of opening numerous avenues of reflection by decompartmentalising the disciplines and by shaking up established norms. That is not the least merit of a scientific work whose reading can be recommended to anyone concerned with knowledge and enamoured of varied intellectual contributions.

KRISTOFF TALIN, Research Fellow, CNRS, Visiting Professor, UQAM

http://www.ccja-acjp.ca/fr/rccr/rccr37.html REVUE CANADIENNE DE CRIMINOLOGIE ET DE JUSTICE PÉNALE

Individus et pouvoirs face aux sectes, by Nathalie Luca

Nathalie Luca is an anthropologist, a researcher at the Centre d’Etudes interdisciplinaires des Faits Religieux (CNRS/EHESS), and teaches at the EHESS. She was a member of the steering council of the interministerial mission for the fight against the cults (MILS), then of the mission of vigilance and of the fight against dérives sectaires (MIVILUDES), from which she finally resigned at the end of 2005.

In her book “Individus et pouvoirs face aux sectes”, éditions Armand Colin, Nathalie Luca proposes a new understanding of the fear that the “cults” inspire in our societies: ”(…) If one must not deny the dangerousness of certain groups, still less can one keep silent about a striking and somewhat disturbing observation: on one and the same synchronic scale, the movements that worry the public authorities change from one country to another”. ”(…) I came to wonder whether these forms of religious expression considered unacceptable, which are nicknamed “cults”, did not have as their principal defect that of jostling a little too ostensibly certain national symbolic frontiers (…) Might the State react in part because it fears that these organisations, by thus overflowing the space left to the religions, may develop in rupture with the citizens’ pact that it has a duty to defend? (…) The cults question the State’s capacity to bear that adherence to a religious community, whatever it may be, can mortgage belonging to the citizens’ community, lead the convert to deny the need he has of it, to consider it optional, or to call into question its usefulness and its protective role”. Nathalie Luca pursues her demonstration by defining “ideal-typical” models of citizens’ communities and by characterising the different reactions of the corresponding States in the face of movements regarded as “cults”. Her reflections are illustrated by concrete examples: France, Great Britain, Germany, the countries of the East, Russia, the United States, Japan, Korea, China, Brazil, Africa. The sociologist also applies herself to describing the conditions that allow a religious group to become transnational.

This necessary work on the so-called cult phenomenon makes it possible better to understand the French situation, by putting it into perspective in a globalised context. We warmly recommend reading it to anyone who wishes to get out of the knee-jerk clichés that generally accompany the evocation of the theme of the cults in France.

It is useful to recall that Nathalie Luca forms part of the too restricted number of French sociologists who “dare” to approach the theme of the cults frontally and assiduously. Most of them have moreover been interviewed by the CICNS. The difficulties encountered by French academics in studying this subject of society are a good indicator of the climate that reigns in our country. Nathalie Luca herself specifies in the work referred to: ”(…) it must be recognised that to suspect a sociologist of religions of being Catholic, Jewish, Protestant or Muslim may possibly harm the appreciation of his scientific work but is not insulting. To suspect him of being a member of a cult, on the other hand, is particularly uncomfortable. Politicians and associative militants have understood this well: as soon as a researcher in the social sciences pokes his nose into these affairs, he is told that he is one of them! From then on, what credibility remains to him?”

We propose below other extracts from Nathalie Luca’s book, followed by a certain number of commentaries that the reading of her book inspired in us (these commentaries do not necessarily concern reflections specifically addressed by Nathalie Luca; they will be limited to the case of France, which we know).

Extracts from “Individus et pouvoirs face aux sectes”, éditions Armand Colin, Nathalie Luca

”(…) To study the evolution of the relations between the State and the cults is thus to stage a whole combination of tensions declined between the citizen, free to answer the new religious offers; the transnational religious movement, more or less inclined to negotiation with the national bodies; civil society or the family; and finally the State, anxious to preserve a certain grip on culture, including religious culture, as well as a minimum of control over the citizen, globalisation making this double task more and more delicate.”

”(…) When the State comes to treat a group as a cult, it is because the latter has entered into conflict with the values of the citizens’ community of which it is the guarantor.”

”(…) Certain European countries have nevertheless ended up absorbing these movements, or at the very least have managed them peacefully enough to take them out of the category ‘cult’. Others, on the contrary, of which France is the emblem, have felt literally assailed by them, to the point of declaring war on them.”

”(…) The retotalising and desecularising dimension of these movements gives rise to the fear that their adherents may no longer be able to benefit from the liberty that the differentiation of the institutions precisely authorised.”

”(…) the list of the Gest and Guyard report, although without legal value, becomes, for the decision-makers obliged to decide, an unavoidable working instrument, liable to lead to discriminatory decisions (…) The list of 173 ‘potentially dangerous’ groups established by the parliamentary report of 1996 can also be read as answering the French State’s duty to protect ‘freedom of thought’ against everything that seems harmful to the good development of reason and of the critical spirit.”

”(…) The European Parliament thus underlines the ‘contradiction between the protection of the perfectly legitimate right to believe, and the equally legitimate right to harbour concerns as to the consequences of beliefs’*.”

”(…) The report of the commission of enquiry of the Federal Parliament (…) opposes the publication of a list of the groups active in the Federal Republic of Germany, ‘because such a list carries the considerable risk that the groups mentioned be stigmatised’**. The analysis tends finally to show that it ‘is not reasonable to describe a given group as globally radical or dangerous’. No more than one can consider the followers as simple ‘passive victims’.”

”(…) Great Britain does not seek to fight against the religious movements that are in conflict with society. It does, on the other hand, require them to conduct their contestatory activities within the legal framework (…) The implementation of such a treatment of the problems linked to the new religious movements owes much to the rigour of an association that has fought in favour of a detached treatment of the questions linked to the cults: INFORM: Information Network Focus on Religious Movements.”

”(…) Great Britain refuses both the elaboration of a negatively discriminating list, in the image of that of the [French] parliamentary report of 1996, and the systematic examination of religious communities (…) Great Britain does not neglect the questions relating to dérives sectaires or to religious practices it deems unacceptable. It concerns itself with them case by case.”

”(…) a group of a religious nature well integrated here can be stigmatised elsewhere, each country, each culture, each people not feeling equally threatened. The groups do not necessarily change from one country to another, but the threat they represent differs. It varies according to the points of vulnerability of the society.”

”(…) rights and duties vary according to the modalities of construction of the symbolic frontiers of the citizens’ community. Three ideal-typical positions make it possible to frame the possible variations: the republican position, the multicultural position and the cultural position.”

”(…) In order to develop, the religious movements play on the porosity, the credibility, the solidity or again the flexibility of these frontiers. They do not all have the vocation to spread beyond the national territory. Many, however, aspire to internationalise themselves.”

”(…) The new religious movements are not powerful enough to travel alone. So they borrow transnational currents in order to spread. In exchange, they form part of the networks of transmission of the values conveyed there.”

”(…) The degree of alert of a State faced with the cults makes it possible to decode the level of vulnerability of a nation with regard to certain forms of religious expression. In their face-to-face with societies, the spotlight has been, most of the time, trained on the said cults to the point of making one forget the actor who considered them as such. This forgetting is most often politically intended: it makes it possible to make people believe that the cults exist in the absolute. The Gest and Guyard parliamentary report of 1996, the paroxysmal moment of France’s going on alert, is a salient example of it. It had thought it opportune to posit ten criteria making it possible to interrogate the dangerousness of a cultic movement in its absoluteness. Without wishing to deny the pertinence of criteria that could apply to many other types of associations than those called into question by the parliamentarians, and without denying the existence of drifts or the despair of the victims, the case studies treated in this essay nevertheless demonstrate that the political feeling of the dangerousness of certain forms of expression — which go well beyond the sole framework of the cults or of the new religious movements — also varies according to the logics of construction of the symbolic frontiers and of the stability of the society.”

”(…) Voluntarily or not, E. Mignon [CICNS: the former head of cabinet to Nicolas Sarkozy who said “In France, the cults are a non-problem”] in any case managed to shift the lines: suddenly the media became conscious that in this debate, it was difficult for them to sidestep the definitions: what is to be understood by cult? What is to be understood by religion? The interest of the French demonstrated, if there were still need of it, that adherence to the nation also rests on the choice of spiritual conducts that integrate a certain number of implicitly shared values, and that in the end, what is reproached to the cults is that they introduce disorder and confusion into all that — all things moreover not condemnable by the law and entering into contradiction with the principle of neutrality inscribed at the heart of laïcité.”

“The words of the head of cabinet were so anxiety-inducing for French society that they had the contrary effect to the one that Western Europe could expect of them. In April 2008, the Accoyer bill aiming to give the witnesses of parliamentary commissions of enquiry the same protection as that enjoyed by persons called to testify before the courts was voted through (…) Certainly the witnesses were regularly prosecuted for defamation by the said cults. The claimants nevertheless lost their cases as soon as the witness brought proof of his good faith. He was therefore only troubled when the complainant could demonstrate that it was a matter of a highly defamatory false testimony. One may wonder about the concrete consequences of such a law, explicitly voted so that the ‘victims’ called to testify against the cults they have left should not have to answer for their words before justice. In parliamentary commissions, there is neither defence counsel, nor judge, nor jurors, nor accused. No contradictory debate is ensured. Conceived today to fight the cults, against whom will such a law be able to serve tomorrow? The state of alert has perhaps never reached such a level. Might it be because the President of the Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy, has proposed a more open laïcité, thus opening Pandora’s box?”

* Sitting document of the European Parliament: 1-47/84, 2 April 1984

** German report 1998

CICNS commentary – March 2009

The dangerousness of the “cults”

One of the merits of Nathalie Luca’s book is to propose a notion of dangerousness based not on the evocation of real or supposed offences that would be committed within the “cults”, but rather relying on a conflict of symbolic values with a nation State.

This analysis appears to us entirely pertinent. It nonetheless remains that the evocation of offences committed within the cults is always topical and feeds the rumour machine. These rumours express themselves in terms of fiscal or economic offences, of paedophilia, of ill-treatment of children and sexual abuse, of abuse of trust and of weakness, etc. It will indeed one day be necessary to treat “officially” the question of delinquency within the spiritual minorities by comparing it with that of society in general and to rule, in the light of the law, whether or not these groups are particular hotbeds of criminally sanctioned drifts. We think not, and we even believe that these groups are for the most part places where delinquency diminishes; the visible legal data and our own enquiries go in this direction (read our position on the victims of abuse within the spiritual minorities).

The deliberate absence of an answer to this question, when the cult problematic has occupied the front of the stage for three decades, allows the public authorities to perpetrate acts of discrimination without having to confront their statements with reality. Georges Fenech, the current president of the MIVILUDES, regularly and without apparent deontological problems gives media coverage to grotesque figures that have no foundation other than that of causing fear (here and there).

It is probable that certain political leaders are more or less conscious that the question is not on the point of delinquency but rather where Nathalie Luca points her finger.

The About-Picard law appears to us moreover as a regrettable will to translate this conflict of “values” into criminal law. The offence of mental manipulation at the origin of this law thus makes it possible to reject wholesale those who promote practices considered disturbing, since they become de facto “manipulators”. Nathalie Luca specifies: ”(…) It matters little what discrepancy the sociologist or the anthropologist denounces between the concrete and daily mode of functioning of society and the perception it has of itself, or again between the ethnographic description of the denounced group and the fantasy image given of it. It is in part in the register of representation that the combat is played out. In this extreme situation, the combatants deny the free and enlightened judgement of the adherent or the convert. He is assimilated to a prisoner whom it is urgent to deliver. Entry into the “cult” is interpreted as an authoritarian mode of subjection of the individual to values and rules of life that lead him to transgress those to which he is subjected by his birth.”

The parliamentarians therefore agreed to vote through a discriminatory law, permitting the dissolution of the associations of the targeted groups, without concerning themselves with the absence of scientific foundation of the concept of mental manipulation, skilfully rebaptised “psychological subjection” in the law so as not to innovate too much in the Penal Code and thus to avoid embarrassing controversies. Thanks to this law, the public authorities can once again pose the question of the cults in terms of offences (the MIVILUDES is feverishly seeking to create a case law with the About-Picard law) while remaining hypocritically in conformity with the rules of a state governed by law. The reader may refer to Patrice Rolland’s article (CNRS-EPHE) for an analysis of the genesis of the law and to Maître Pérollier’s article for an analysis of the text of the law.

The republican values of France

Nathalie Luca analyses the “republican” model type, to which France corresponds, and observes that the new religious movements “call its foundations into question by annihilating the individual-citizen to the profit of the community of adherence”.

It is entirely natural that a society should question itself about the currents that can modify, indeed endanger, its foundations. But two points are to be analysed closely: the way in which the questions are posed and the methods employed to answer them. Where the new religious movements are concerned, the good question would have been: what can or must their place be in France? And not the question of dérives sectaires, which is reductive and deliberately negative. France is doubtless the democratic country where the anti-cult terminology is the most pejorative. We have illustrated elsewhere how this devaluing language extends to every sector of society. It is hardly conceivable to construct a healthy public debate about groups and people designated by terms that are henceforth insulting.

Then the answer brought by France to this badly posed question, in the form of the fight against dérives sectaires, tramples underfoot a good number of the values that are supposed to be defended. Do amalgams, rumours, media lynchings and lists of proscriptions form part of the methods one wishes to institutionalise? There is such a contradiction between the stated intentions (respect for laïcité, freedom of conscience, etc.) and the anti-cult policy chosen by the public authorities that one can only wonder about the legitimacy of their action. Nathalie Luca illustrates well the disapproval of the countries of Western Europe and of the United States with regard to the French approach and, on the contrary, the cooperation that has taken place between France and the countries of the East (notably Russia) and China, that is to say countries that regularly infringe human rights (France, moreover, is not well placed in matters of respect for human rights on the European scale).

The sociologist writes: “The list of 173 ‘potentially dangerous’ groups established by the parliamentary report of 1996 can also be read as answering the French State’s duty to protect ‘freedom of thought’ against everything that seems harmful to the good development of reason and of the critical spirit”. It is possible, certainly, with a considerable effort of imagination, to envisage that this initial objective played a role among the parliamentarians who worked in the parliamentary commission (we can at least suppose that some were sincere in their intentions). But the result is there: the work of these parliamentarians was conducted in conditions unworthy of a democratic country, normally respectful of the adversarial principle, and freedom of thought has been seriously dented by the diffusion of such a report.

In the same order of ideas, the increasingly frequent interventions of the ADFI and of the CCMM in schools to sensitise pupils and to “develop” their critical spirit on the question of the cults are worrying. If a more balanced information is not offered to the young, freedom of thought has a dark future before it.

Must the level of alert then be high, as Nathalie Luca mentions? “The state of alert has perhaps never reached such a level”. Yet only an unreasoning fear seems to serve as the ferment of a hardening of the anti-cult fight.

The members of the spiritual minorities are citizens

Nathalie Luca speaks of a declaration of war by France on the new religious movements; the term seems to us exact and deserves reflection. Usually one does not declare war on one’s own citizens, unless one does not consider them as citizens. Does this attitude make sense, and does it not have the effect of turning French society against a part of itself?

We place ourselves here outside the domain of possible offences, a subject we addressed above. Certain groups do indeed make life choices “out of step” with the rest of the population, but this gap rarely covers the whole citizen spectrum and does not prevent an integration into the social fabric. Two examples among the groups given media coverage: the Jehovah’s Witnesses do not vote, but they respect the republican School; the members of Tabitha’s Place live in autarky but nevertheless participate in economic life in the markets by selling their products. Georges Fenech, let us credit him on one figure, speaks of 500,000 people involved in “cults”. Even removing the Jehovah’s Witnesses (the most numerous group among those qualified as cults) and the few groups regularly cited in the media, there remain several hundred thousand people, rendered invisible in the media but nevertheless put into the great bag of cultic movements. There is however no reason to think that these people are not also citizens despite their alternative life choices. They are perhaps not completely invested in republican citizenship (while respecting the law), but who really is? Media figures claim, for example, not to vote and are nevertheless received and respected on television sets.

When Nathalie Luca mentions the interest of the French in questions relating to religions and to cults, following Emmanuelle Mignon’s remarks, and their attachment to implicitly shared values on spiritual conducts, it is useful to look at who produces the “symbolic images”. Michel Maffesoli in his latest book “La République des bons sentiments”, éditions du Rocher, shows how a right-thinking elite (political, media, intellectual) maintains and diffuses its own vision of the world, which probably ends up becoming, on the question of the cults, “the implicitly shared values” of the French. We have illustrated in a recent article how a Buddhist community that decides to cut itself off from the world for three years gathers benevolence and interest where any group qualified a priori as a cult and promoting similar practices would unfailingly be castigated. The difference lies in the will really to “meet” people in the first case but not in the second. The French would perhaps accept more easily to shift “symbolic frontiers” alleged to be rigid, if the information offered on the new religious movements were honest and respectful.

To see the new religious movements as enemies is an impoverishment. Many bring a new breath to the idea of a more fraternal living together which it would be a great pity to neglect in a world losing its bearings.

Mandarom

Condensed reading of: Un ethnologue au Mandarom, Presses universitaires de France

Enquiry Inside a “Cult”: Maurice Duval

Maurice Duval’s book presents two points of interest. The first is to bring to light the difficulty of speaking about or studying serenely in France everything that touches on what is called, in a tendentious and stigmatising way, a “cult”. The second point of interest concerns the ethnological study of the Mandarom proper.

Given the purpose of the CICNS’s site, the extracts that follow attach themselves more particularly to giving an overview of the pressures and difficulties that Maurice Duval encountered during his study. The reader is nevertheless encouraged to read the book for both aspects that make its interest.

The hyperlinks in the condensation are added by the CICNS.

See our interview with Maurice Duval (video clip)

Story of a piece of research

(…) This book gives an account of a singular ethnological piece of research, …inside the cult of the Mandarom, situated at about 1,200 m of altitude in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence… The director of the laboratory to which I was then attached suggested undertaking the study of this group… Frightened at the idea of studying a cult, I answered at first in the negative… On learning that a Catholic nun was a specialist on the “cults” in Montpellier, I made an appointment with her. The nun …explained to me that she went into these groups with the aim of “bringing their members back onto the right path”, that is to say onto hers… The fact that she could go there without consequence for herself led me to suppose that I too ought to be able to go.

(…) On 21 October 1996, I addressed a letter to the head of the Mandarom, Mr Gilbert Bourdin, whom his disciples (editor’s note: the “aumists”) call “His Holiness the Lord Hamsah Manarah” (editor’s note: SHM), indicating to him my intellectual curiosity about his group and requesting authorisation to study it. I specified in this letter: “I am a stranger to your system of beliefs and to your practices, of which I know nothing, and I shall have to remain external to them.” This precaution answered the recurrent reaction of a good number of friends and colleagues who feared that I “would not remain an unbeliever for long”… The negotiations with the Mandarom were long, the agreements never seemed definitively acquired, I was asked for patience… But it was an unconditional requirement: either the Mandarom accepted the ethnological enquiry, its method and its duration, or the enquiry would not take place… On 1 October 1997, I spent my first day on the spot… The favourable answer received from the CNRS on 1 December 1997 announced to me that my project on the Mandarom had been ranked second (equal) at national level.

(…) A monk had stopped following me after a few weeks of work on the spot… One of the obstacles I encountered was obviously linked to the media campaign that had taken the Mandarom as its target… It still sometimes happened that I was suspected of being an agent of the Renseignements Généraux, but that was becoming rarer and rarer… Another obstacle, a more objective one this time, came from the initiatory character of the group, because secrets are inherent to every initiation… Access to information was a combat from the beginning to the end of this work.

(…) The ethnological method consists in living as much as possible with the people one wishes to know… When the ethnologist puts on work overalls, as I really did here, he has nothing of an academic, and one will easily imagine that people spoke to me differently because I was perceived differently…

(…) Numerous texts are written on the “cults”, but many of them have the unfortunate tendency to repeat one another, apart from the articles and books that emanate from sociologists of religions. It appeared to me that a deep knowledge of these movements remained to be produced, because in the end, very few journalists have spent more than a few hours in the “cults” they speak of. The debate is so impassioned that one can write a book and publish it, because it sells well, without ever having set foot in the group about which one claims to have knowledge. Scientifically that is obviously unacceptable, and it seemed to me that this work had to fill a gap… I therefore began this study as an ingenuous person, that is to say by disregarding what the media or the “authors” for the general public say, whose purpose can sometimes be suspected of stating what makes a scandal rather than the truth… But to disregard common sense, that is to say everything one thinks one knows, is not easy when it is a matter of a subject so present in the news. My friends and certain colleagues offered their commentaries, advising my wife to keep an eye on me, testing me permanently to see whether I was keeping well away from belief, asking me whether I was not a witness at the Mandarom to rapes, drugs, embezzlement of money, watching to see whether I was becoming an ascetic, etc. As soon as I began this research, I was permanently on the defensive, ostensibly showing the medicines I used to demonstrate that I treated myself with allopathic remedies, not missing an opportunity to exhibit my unbelieving character, etc.

(…) One may be surprised at the lack of intellectual enthusiasm for these groups which nevertheless seem to disturb society… I regret being currently the only ethnologist in France to make a study of what is called a “cult” using the method of that discipline, that is to say immersion in the group studied… What we think we know about the “cults”, in any case about the Mandarom, rests on discourses that emanate from former followers who have broken with the group, sometimes strongly stimulated by associations that have an interest in it. All that rests on debates too impassioned for one to be able to credit them. Even if the words of former followers are very interesting and must be received, it is also fitting to analyse them and not to take them as absolute and systematic truths as soon as they are uttered.

(…) Given the number of cults and the intensity of the debate on this question, it is really very surprising that the State — which nevertheless says it is preoccupied by the question with ostentation and recurrence — suggests no research on these groups… I was sometimes asked whether the Mandarom really deserved a study to be made of it, adding: “The guru is a nutcase and so are the followers.” … But once “They are all mad!” has been asserted, has one advanced? What is more interesting is to know why the followers of the Mandarom are qualified as “mad”… To advance the idea of madness before any minute examination of the question is to evacuate in advance any possibility of reflection.

(…) Working on an object as sensitive as this one, the question of how to name is of the first importance… Words are often polysemous, and where one thinks one is expressing one meaning, the reader may hear another. So it is with the words “cult” and “guru”… The great difficulty in naming concerns above all the group as a whole: is it a cult, and what does that word signify exactly?… to say of a group today that it is a cult is to stigmatise it, indeed to criminalise it… Objectively, the group of the Mandarom has put in place a clergy, rites, a corpus of beliefs, a dogma; it has a relation to the divine — so many elements that make it necessary to speak of a religious group, and more precisely of a marginal religious group.

The formation of a totalitarian pocket

(…) The story of this research could not pass over in silence the pressures I underwent throughout this work (see also on this subject the interview with Régis Dericquebourg)

(…) In 1998, I received a letter from the president of section 38 (CNRS), which deals with ethnology. It said among other things: “Your projects appeared insufficiently (…) detached; hence the fear… that your deliberately relativist approach may be used for the banalisation of movements of the type of the one you are studying.”… It (editor’s note: the commission) condemned before knowing, which, for a commission of researchers, is worrying to say the least… This story brings into relief a serious phenomenon: there exist taboo objects for the majority of the ethnologists who sat at that time on the CNRS commission.

(…) The president of the University of Provence refused to let me organise a colloquium on the theme of the “cults” at that university, although he had accepted at first, while specifying that we would be closely watched. I had proposed to my laboratory to set up a Centre for research and documentation on the New religious movements. My laboratory, favourable at first, then changed its mind. Yet the public authorities say they are interested in the observation of the cults, so how is one to understand these contradictory practices, if not by a deliberate will not to know?

(…) The paroxysm of suspicion towards me was reached when the management of the Mandarom had the unfortunate idea of sending 13,953 letters (!) to defend itself. Believing that researchers and teacher-researchers would understand better than others… I could no longer spend an evening in the company of friends or colleagues without being flooded with questions, not about what the aumists are, but about the crimes attributed to them… Troubled by what I observed, I wrote to the president of the Ligue des droits de l’homme, explaining to him what I knew of the Mandarom and the contradictions I had been able to note on certain aspects with what was said of it in the media… I never received a reply… The position of the Ligue des droits de l’homme on this question is to oppose an extension of the penal provisions while affirming that the doings of the cults must be fought (LDH info, no. 90, June 2000, p11). Obviously, the Mandarom is included in the catch-all “cults”.

(…) I wrote three articles intended for specialised journals. The first was sent to one of the great ethnology journals… He (editor’s note: the editor-in-chief) telephoned me and informed me that the journal’s reading committee had great reservations about my text. Here are some of the corrections that were asked of me:

• not to say that the rumour about the Mandarom is unfounded; (Read also on the theme of rumour: http://www.cicns.net/Rumeurs_3.htm, /library/cicns/rumeurs2/, /library/cicns/rumeurs/)

• to say that my study risks serving the group studied;

• to analyse the group’s finances (it is in all likelihood the first time in the history of the discipline that an ethnologist has been asked to transform himself into a tax agent), etc.

I nevertheless agreed to revise the article within certain limits and returned it corrected. I received a letter from the journal’s director: (…) “We have however collectively considered that an approach by participant observation was certainly useful and even necessary, but that it was frankly insufficient and that one could not approach such a subject without diversifying the approaches… it is preferable that you now take back your freedom for this text and I am asking the editorial office to return it to you.” I wondered, reading this letter, whether it was the first time that an ethnology journal had exercised a censorship in order to conform to common sense… That is a paradox, and not the least of them, since the aim of research work is above all to deconstruct common sense, to go against opinion…

A few months later, the University of Aix-en-Provence published a collective work on prayer… I proposed to the person in charge of the work a text on prayer at the Mandarom… The University’s editorial council opposed the publication of my article. I received a letter from the director of publications who wrote this: “I have never called your scientific rigour into question…”. It is quite evident that since it is not “scientific rigour” that is at issue, the reasons are indeed ideological ones, inherent to a secular fundamentalism just as dangerous and antidemocratic as the religious fundamentalisms.

(…) There seems to be no taboo about an ethnologist going to study a prophet and his movement in Africa, contrary to what happens with the Mandarom… The Other enters one of two classes, valued or devaluing, according to his spatial proximity.

(…) The aumists decided to submit a dossier to the President of the Republic… They were asking (therefore) for equality of treatment… The delegation comprised the president of the Association du Vajra triomphant, four bishops, all in sacerdotal dress, a woman lawyer and follower in civilian dress, and a bailiff who did not belong to the movement… Police officers asked the delegation not to pursue its course of action… The president asked: “What offence have we committed?” They (editor’s note: the police officers) retorted that the aumists had made no declaration of a demonstration to the police prefecture… She (editor’s note: the president) declared that she in no way wished to be in breach of the law and headed at once for the prefecture… The president proposed (then) to reduce the delegation to three people. “That would still be a demonstration”, she was told. She suggested that only two people go there. “That would still be a demonstration”, insisted the Secretary (editor’s note: of the deputy director for Public Order)… the aumists decided to renounce their course of action and entrusted their dossier to the bailiff… The Élysée refused to take it.

Democratic inquisition

(…) The accusations that have been formulated against the Mandarom are: rape of followers by the guru, embezzlement of money, money laundering (see on this subject), construction of statues that disfigure the landscape, use of drugs, mental manipulations, confinement of children, confinement of the followers, madness of the guru, madness of the followers, etc. Where the aumists are concerned, the habitual presumption of innocence has been replaced by the presumption of guilt… It must be specified that the Mandarom has never been convicted to this day (except for the statue, which was destroyed by the public authorities in 2001), nor its guru on the question of rape notably, and this despite the intense work of the justice system.

(…) Contrary to widespread opinion, the Tribunal de grande instance of Nanterre ordered the authors of a work accusing the guru of rape — written by a former follower designating herself as the victim and above all by her friend, a TF1 journalist — to pay 10,000 F in damages to SHM for non-respect of the presumption of innocence.

(…) On the question of the children imprisoned at the Mandarom, as I said above, I never saw a single child shut up in that place during the years my research lasted. Now, opinion is convinced of the contrary, which shows clearly that there is a powerful ideological factor at work.

(…) As for the question of drugs, it would make anyone laugh who honestly knows the aumists, because they manifestly have no need of that to “travel” in the cosmos!… (One may ask oneself whether or not this way of life should be forbidden, that is to say the monastic way of life, but then one must ask the question for all monasteries… in order to respect equality of rights.)

(…) “Mental manipulation”, also called “brainwashing”, was long ago refuted by researchers… Need it be recalled that until the 1970s, the Cistercian monks had no private cell to sleep in, that they had to sleep fully dressed in order to be in a state of permanent wakefulness, and that even today these monks renounce their family, a career, a social life, etc.

(…) The same belief at the Mandarom and in the Hindu religion does not have the same status and does not provoke the same reactions. Our society seeks to elaborate a single norm, a norm that aims to codify our behaviours and our thoughts to the extreme and in which there is no longer any place for the margins, even peaceful ones. Everyone must fall into line, despite a discourse on liberty that would give the illusion of the contrary.

(…) The rumour concerning it (editor’s note: the Mandarom) expresses itself in diverse and multiple manners. Thus a television programme expresses itself with images of the OTS (Order of the Solar Temple), a “cult” whose members apparently committed suicide, associated with photographs of the Mandarom, when there is no link at all between these two groups… On the same page of a magazine for young people, devoted to children in the cults, one sees the photograph of a little girl who is supposed to live with the Devotees of Krishna (that is in any case what the magazine suggests). Beside her figures the photograph of Gilbert Bourdin — yet there is no question at all of the Mandarom in the article.

(…) The formation of opinions in our society is principally the doing of the media. Indeed, anthropology posits that what women and men think does not necessarily result from their own will, but that a part of these thoughts is forged by the society that secretes and diffuses them. But of course, alas, these ideas can be more or less close to the truth. Journalists are subject to professional constraints capable of preventing them from taking time to elaborate their dossiers. That sometimes entails errors liable to have heavy consequences, even for those who do their work with the greatest seriousness and with a certain ethics.

(…) In this instance, the media have, as their principal source of information, the associations for the fight against the “cults”. These are the ADFI (Association for the defence of the individual and the family)… and the Centre Roger-Ikor (CCMM)… They (editor’s note: the associations) are surrounded by a few authors who find here the material for their writings… I undertook to telephone the president of a section of the ADFI in Paris… he begged me to accept being followed by the good offices of his association “to protect you”, he told me… In vain did I tell him my age, my professional experience, my absolutely unbelieving character; nothing worked… Deafness is a necessity in order to condemn a priori.

(…) One of the spearheads of the combat against the Mandarom and against these groups, A. Vivien, says clearly that one must not understand, because knowledge would prevent one from fighting! ”(…) by dint of understanding one ends up justifying (…) The sanctimonious sociologists, at the CNRS and elsewhere (…) meekly fall into line with the discourses of the cults which must be understood and thus authorise themselves not to fight their excesses”. This virulent anti-intellectualism leads Mr Vivien to draw his revolver on hearing intellectual knowledge spoken of… yet, in elementary logic, to know makes it possible either to observe that one was mistaken and that there is nothing to fight because nothing is delictual or, on the contrary, to use the knowledge acquired better to counter what must be countered. There certainly exist “cults” that represent a danger, even if, in the words of a sociologist of religions, “these groupings are not necessarily dangerous and I would add that they very rarely become so” (R. J. Campiche, Quand les sectes affolent, Labor & Fides, 1995, p.103).

(…) The politicians, of all tendencies combined, say the same thing about the Mandarom:

• With the cults, you are in danger, a danger sometimes invisible and all the more pernicious. That is what the Interministerial Observatory on the cults says very explicitly in its annual report of 1997. It condemns the cults while saying that it does not know what they are.

• (…) We are well informed… and we are doing what is necessary to protect you.

• (…) So trust us… we are protecting you from Evil.

The political benefit of the anti-cult campaign is enormous, because it institutes a consensus in French society. Indeed, who does not adhere to this opinion according to which the cults represent a danger?… Currently, along with terrorism, there is no better instrument on the political plane for making a diversion from the essential social problems than that of the cults.

Daily life

(…) The Mandarom is initially a monastery sheltering monks and nuns. Those who wish to consecrate a part of their life to spirituality within this framework take vows of chastity and poverty, but do not pronounce perpetual vows — “that is no longer adapted to modern society”, SHM said.

(…) Aumist vegetarianism is explained by the concern to take the minimum from Nature, because every levy disturbs a process of reincarnation… The higher the being consumed is in the hierarchical scale of the vegetable or animal kingdom, that is to say the closer it is to humanity, the more one must pray.

(…) One has the impression that, for the aumists, nothing any longer belongs to the profane. Cooking, eating, washing up, etc., profane activities if ever there were, for most people, become here acts associated with spirituality.

(…) Renunciation comprises (therefore) two categories: exterior renunciation, which has as its object concrete things (silence, the pleasures of the table, comfort, the pleasures of sexuality, those of the affects, etc.) and interior renunciation, the most difficult, that is to say the one that takes the ego as its object… The knights, that is to say the faithful who live in civil life, cannot be renunciants in the same way as the monks and nuns, since renunciation does not accommodate itself to social life.

(…) Sexual liberation is condemned, and the guru calls for a resacralisation of sexual relations… Contraception is accepted because it is preferable that the child be wanted… If abortion is tolerated, everything must nevertheless be done to avoid it…

(…) Violence is condemned, whether physical or verbal, and non-violence is a virtue…

Portraits

(…) The aumists think that Gilbert Bourdin is a reincarnation of God on earth, but that it is always the same God who has manifested himself since the dawn of time; the idea of excluding one is therefore unthinkable, since it is the same one. Moreover, the social context and the ideology of the time were opposed to the exclusion of the different. There resulted from this a syncretism that seeks to associate all the religions of the world, monotheistic and polytheistic, which the guru has synthesised.

(…) finding the former followers is difficult when it is a matter of those who have turned against their former movement… Curiously, it is those who had no contact with the ADFI… whom I was able to meet. Should one establish a relation of cause and effect here?

Who are they?

(…) Aumism is (therefore) a minority religion which is inscribed both in the rupture with the Christian Churches and in continuity with them, since it can be compatible with them.

The beliefs

(…) Aumist time is a cyclical time composed of four cycles: the Age of Silver, the Age of Copper, the Age of Iron and the Age of Gold. To these four times is added another, outside of time, the Age of Diamond… The “Lord” Hamsah Manarah is (therefore) for the aumists the Cosmo-planetary Messiah. He has returned to earth with the aim of helping humanity to accede to the Age of Gold, because now the “Christ on the cross is finished”, he is a God of the Age of Iron, and he has returned as “glorious Christ” with the sword and the shield… Gods (also) declared war on him with the design of hindering his project, and he had to clean the earth by annihilating numerous demons… Between 1983 and 1988, a war could have broken out, but the “Lord” intervened and prevented it. Certain gods also tried to attack SHM, following which tens of millions of gods were obliged to take refuge on other planets.

(…) One addresses oneself directly to God — even if that is not always systematically the case — but here, as in Hinduism, God is present in each person. Indeed, “a divine particle is in each one”; it is the “supreme self” that it is fitting to develop through spiritual work.

(…) In the final analysis, one may say that the gods of aumism are like the Greek gods: they are not infinitely good and can even be perverse… These multiple gods are mortal… Above the religions and the gods, the God of Unity is immortal. He returns regularly to earth as to all the planets. The “Lord” Hamsah Manarah was an incarnation, but in that he is like every living being, since each holds a divine particle within himself that allows access to deity, as in Buddhism and Hinduism.

Not to conclude

(…) One could not conclude the series of grave questions that have been addressed here. The questions are posed, and that is already a great deal. Their aim is to question further, indeed to disturb, by showing how opinion can construct a rumour, with foundations as fragile as they are dangerous, but nevertheless largely consensual. Now, it falls to the researcher to deconstruct these opinions and to replace them with a view as objective as possible, and to substitute, in this debate, reason for passion.

(…) One is mistaken when one thinks of eradicating a system of beliefs by violence, as our society is doing at the moment, because in this domain, only the apprenticeship of the critique of judgement and of critical judgement can serve… One thing is certain: the truth of these movements must be discovered, and for that research in the social sciences must be encouraged… To ensure that religious groups, marginal as well as traditional, conform to the law and to the broad lines of collective morality, and to leave them the possibility of living their beliefs, is the rule to be adopted, even if a critical debate is then engaged with regard to them.

A senior lecturer in the ethnology department of the University Paul-Valéry in Montpellier, director of the CERCE (Centre d’études et de recherches comparatives en ethnologie), Maurice Duval is notably the author of Ni morts, ni vivants : marins, Pour une ethnologie du huis-clos, “Ethnologies-Controverses”, PUF, 1998

Not to be missed: Our interview with Maurice Duval

Read also The calumny on the subject of rapes at the Mandarom

and sociologues-nouvelles-spiritualites-23.htm

Cults, Media and Single-Track Thinking

By Éric Bouzou (enquiry, December 2008 to February 2009)

A certain number of intellectuals have made a critical analysis of the mass media. Their work and their perspectives allow us to understand better how the public debates organised on these media function. After citing some of these authors, we offer several comments and criticisms of the programme Les infiltrés dealing with the theme of the cults, broadcast on France 2 on 17 December 2008.

Single-track thinking in the media

The programme Les infiltrés (France 2 - 17 December 2008) - The CICNS’s invitation

The programme Les infiltrés (France 2 - 17 December 2008) - Commentary

The programme Les infiltrés (France 2 - 17 December 2008) - Follow-up

Various comments on hidden-camera investigation methods

Single-track thinking in the media

Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent, Vintage, CICNS translation)

“The mass media are used as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general population. Their function is to amuse, to entertain and to inform, and to inculcate in individuals the values, beliefs and codes of conduct that will allow them to integrate into the institutional structures of society. In a world where wealth is concentrated and is the site of major conflicts between interest groups, fulfilling this role demands the use of systematic propaganda”.

Peter Watkins

”(…) The Monoform has become the only language used for editing and structuring cinema films, television programmes, television news, serials, soap operas, comedies, reality shows… - as well as most documentaries, practically all subject to the rigid codes and standards that come directly from Hollywood cinema. The result is a form of language characterised by: fragmented space, repetitive rhythms, a perpetually moving camera, rapid and jerky editing, a bombardment of dense and aggressive sounds, and a lack of silence or of spaces for reflection.

(…) This silence is also reinforced by the reluctance (to put it mildly…) of the contemporary educational system to discuss the nature of the AVMM (Audio-Visual Mass Media) in critical terms, and more particularly to analyse the impact the Monoform can have. It would even seem that most of today’s teachers are barely conscious of, or even concerned by, this impact”.

Pierre Bourdieu

“There is an implicit philosophy in the heads of television people, which makes it impossible for a figure like Bourdieu (but there are masses of others) to be listened to for more than thirty seconds by an ordinary citizen, and yet it is false”.

“Every channel equips itself with a little pseudo-critical programme that brings in a bit of audience, but on condition, obviously, of touching nothing (…) Nine times out of ten, professional ethics is hot air; it is what journalists tell themselves to give themselves a good conscience”.

The programme Les infiltrés (France 2 - 17 December 2008) - The CICNS’s invitation

The CICNS is regularly contacted to take part in “debates” on the question of dérives sectaires (see our review of the programme “Ça se discute”). Recently, France 2 contacted our association to take part in the debate in the framework of the programme “Les infiltrés”, presented by David Pujadas and scheduled for 17 December 2008. Let us recall that the principle of this programme is to use a hidden camera to detect reprehensible conduct or, at any rate, to give the impression that it is. We declined this offer because the programme is not live and the panel presented at the time of contact did not guarantee respect for the adversarial principle, two conditions that seem to us indispensable for allowing a quality exchange on this sensitive subject. The France 2 contact nevertheless stated that she had made contact with academics to provide the counter-argument. When we suggested to her that she also bring in people happy to belong to spiritual minorities, her embarrassed answer was: “No, that’s not easy to find”. The CICNS, which meets these minorities in the course of its work, can testify that it is easy to find such people.

The programme’s announcement on the France 2 site specified: “David Pujadas welcomes onto his set victims, former followers, but also a representative of the authorities in charge of the fight against the cults”. The presence of contrary opinions was not mentioned, and the journalist in charge of this announcement seemed moreover to be unaware that in France there is, in theory, no “representative of the authorities in charge of fighting the cults” but rather of fighting “dérives sectaires”. Was this blunder of ill omen, at first sight, in reality the mark of a salutary lucidity about the hypocrisy of the public authorities, who try to legitimise their “fight against the cults” by renaming it the “fight against dérives sectaires”? Let us wager rather that it was indeed journalistic ignorance, a confusion, it is true, systematically maintained by the executive power (the deputies in charge of the cult question being on this point less hypocritical, but is that a quality when it comes to stigmatising?). The MIVILUDES declares that it is interested only in dérives sectaires, believing perhaps that it can erase (but does it really wish to?) 25 years of rumours about the dangerousness of many spiritual minorities called “cults”. Its concrete action and the recent statements of its president demonstrate that most of the time this is nothing but a smokescreen.

In a programme on the cults, one counts on average three promoters of the anti-cult discourse for one contributor proposing an alternative reflection. This edition of “Les infiltrés” respected that ratio, since the guests were, on the anti-cult side: Georges Fenech, president of the MIVILUDES, Catherine Picard, president of the UNADFI, Jean-Pierre Jougla, a lawyer close to the UNADFI, Claudine Delpech, president of the AFSI (Alert to Induced False Memories), Nicolas Jaquette, a former Jehovah’s Witness, and Alain Stoffen, a former Scientologist. On the alternative-reflection side: Nathalie Luca and Raphaël Liogier. These two sociologists intervened only in the second part of the debate, for an undetermined reason, that is, ten minutes out of an hour of exchanges.

The discussion that followed the hidden-camera report illustrates the difficulty of expressing oneself in a context of single-track thinking. This type of situation has been very well described by Noam Chomsky in his study of the media (see in particular Pierre Carles’s documentary “Enfin pris”, in which Pierre Bourdieu offers an analysis of the media; an extract from the documentary illustrates the argument of Noam Chomsky who, though he does not take up the question of the cults, describes a generic principle).

In a context of single-track thinking, it is very simple to reach the audience with short sentences or insinuations that fall within that single-track thinking, for example: “The cults are a social scourge” (or, more hypocritically, “Dérives sectaires are a social scourge”). In France, the acceptance of such a statement, acquired by dint of repetition, in no way implies that it is a “truth”. In this instance, sociologically and legally, the assertion “The cults are a social scourge” is false (the fear manufactured around the cults, on the other hand, seems to be becoming a social scourge). Furthermore, the terms “cults” and “social scourge” are extremely vague and open to comment but, curiously, once put together and after incessant hammering, they end up taking on meaning and speaking directly to our unconscious.

Conversely, if a protagonist declares: “The cults are a non-problem” (as did Emmanuelle Mignon, Nicolas Sarkozy’s former chief of staff), he collides with what has been artificially constructed as common sense. He is liable to trigger visceral reactions and will from then on be summoned to explain himself, which is not in itself a problem. However, explaining a position that departs from the single-track thinking demands development, and the media generally do not give the time for it. Any exposition of thought that exceeds one minute (an optimistic figure) is interrupted to give the floor to another protagonist or to zap to another idea (the forthcoming third part of our documentary “120 minutes for spiritual freedom” will take up the role of the media extensively).

A work of rebalancing is to be done by the media, whose growing power today demands an acute consciousness of their responsibility. But they would first have to not themselves adhere exclusively to the single-track thinking on the question of the cults. The information presented by our association can help them broaden their point of view. There is no doubt that if they consult it, they will find a profusion of high-quality and enthusiastic interlocutors ready to take part in constructive debates.

The programme Les infiltrés (France 2 - 17 December 2008) - Commentary

The report in this edition of “Les infiltrés” on the cults showed journalists (with hidden cameras) inside the Raël group, with a member of the Kryeon movement, and with a therapist of whom the extract shown seems to indicate that she induces false memories in her patients (the “induced false memories” thesis).

It should be noted that in the course of two previous programmes in the series (concerning retirement homes and the celebrity press), a representative of the infiltrated organisation had been invited onto the set. During the programme on illegal labour, no business owner using illegal labour was present on the set, for understandable reasons. We may on the other hand wonder about the absence of Raëlian witnesses or Kryeon followers in this programme: did they refuse to take part, or are the cults considered “uninvitable”?

The CICNS has expressed its position on the victims of “dérives sectaires”. It is not a matter for us of ignoring certain troubling facts set out in the report, notably on induced false memories (read our article on this subject), but of underlining that the amalgam consisting in denouncing one abuse in order to condemn all such paths is a way of ostracising the people who “step out of the mould” while claiming to protect victims, who moreover express, as Madame Picard rightly noted, a real demand which must be taken into account. The answers given to these demands (through beliefs or alternative therapies) must fall within the framework of the law and respect a certain number of criteria that ought to be debated democratically; we are far from that. This is what Raphaël Liogier summed up well by saying that the notion of “public order” could easily transform itself into “moral order”. The non-acceptance of ideas considered outlandish was also illustrated when David Pujadas, incredulous, asked the question: “Do the Raëlians, and Raël himself, really believe in extraterrestrials?” Need one recall that the whole of humanity (including many rationalists) associated itself with the costly project of an American probe, Voyager, and that a recording on a golden disc was sent towards hypothetical inhabitants of the universe? Tolerance towards ideas out of the ordinary cannot be an option in a democratic State.

Raphaël Liogier added: “When one generalises and when one operates a little too much on fantasy, forgetting the democratic principle of the adversarial process (…), one can undermine human rights, a certain number of public liberties (…). It is possible to act more effectively by being more targeted and generalising less”. A technique of generalisation that G. Fenech could not restrain himself from using. From the start of the discussion, criticising the procedure of induced false memories, he specified: “according to the National Council of the Order of Physicians, there are about 3,000 titled doctors who are said to engage in this kind of psychotherapy, in this kind of technique”, thereby implicitly blacklisting all these practitioners without their being able to reply.

Nathalie Luca, for her part, proposed that the MIVILUDES use the work of researchers and have the spiritual minorities take part in the discussion, as other European countries do. For Georges Fenech, the researchers’ work as “theoreticians” does not fall within his mission: “I am not as intelligent and brilliant as they are (…) My only work, mine, is not to do university studies, it is to denounce what disturbs public order, what is an infraction of the law, what is a danger to public health (…) and to fight against everything that is contrary to the interests of individuals and of society; let each do his own work”. Which puts an end to any hope (insofar as we had any left) of seeing an approach of knowledge adopted at the MIVILUDES.

All the participants agreed on the fact that dérives sectaires must be fought. Which did not prevent David Pujadas from explicitly asking Raphaël Liogier whether Raël, Scientology, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and induced false memories were real cults. The notion of “cults dangerous to public order” developed by Raphaël Liogier, in the very short time allotted, does not however seem to us constructive in the French context.

Yes, everyone agrees, the CICNS included, that abuses (whatever they may be, and supposing it is possible to define them) should be dealt with within the framework of the law. However, the method used is at issue and ought to be seriously reconsidered by all, for it discriminates against a large part of the population while claiming to protect another.

The programme Les infiltrés (France 2 - 17 December 2008) - Follow-up

The programme “Les infiltrés”, decried within the journalistic profession itself because of its investigation methods (infiltrations and hidden cameras), justified itself in the introduction to its latest edition (28 January 2009) in the form of a “follow-up”.

It congratulated itself notably that since its programme on “the cults” and the report on “induced false memories”, the MIVILUDES had received about a hundred letters written by “families broken” by “these same gurus” and that, “faced with the multitude of testimonies”, it was setting up jointly with the Ministry of Health a “technical support group” comprising doctors, police officers and gendarmes charged with “detecting such abuses”.

It seems too early to judge the relevance and validity of the theory of “induced false memories” that the MIVILUDES uses to justify casting suspicion on many psychotherapeutic practices, when the said theory is barely developing in France and when in the United States, where it was born some fifteen years ago, it still has no recognition either from the medical profession or from the scientific community as a whole.

That it is put forward by the media and the MIVILUDES is a bias we have already underlined.

Nor do we prejudge the authenticity of the testimonies received by the MIVILUDES, but it must be observed that “Les Infiltrés”, for their part, do so with an indecent haste by grouping this hundred or so letters under the label “families broken by gurus”, when it seems, according to Georges Fenech himself, president of the MIVILUDES, that only some of these files will be investigated and that we are still far, of course, from seeing a conviction.

Beyond the evaluation of the various therapeutic methods, it is a matter for the CICNS of bringing to light, from this example, a dubious method characteristic of the anti-cult action. This method consists in “crying wolf”, then waiting for the inevitable echoes of the cry that has just been uttered: more or less opportunistic complaints, hateful expressions of an ancestral phobia, and also, unfailingly, testimonies of the beast’s appearance in the most improbable situations. In the growing fear, it is then easy to justify an all-out hunt.

Let us imagine a hidden-camera report which traps, for example, a salesman in the act of hoodwinking a customer, followed by an announcement of the existence of a State body in charge of helping and supporting the victims of salesmen’s abuses. It is a safe bet that it is well over a hundred letters demanding justice, rightly or wrongly, that the said body would receive in the following days. Would that suffice to justify the existence of the said body, or again the derogations from the journalists’ charter constituted by the use of false identities and hidden cameras to unmask the “dangerous salesmen”?

We regularly receive, in error (so difficult is it for most Internet users to imagine that a site which speaks of “cults” is not anti-cult), letters demanding justice against a “cult”. The following example shows how opportunistic these manifestations can be. (Full transcription, uncorrected):

urgent thank you

Hello

Is a will in favour of a cult valid.?

We have a distant case around us, the non-direct heirs not knowing what to do…”

thank you for your reply and your help

do you have a legal text?

Cordially

The number of cult accusations in divorce proceedings, whose explosion followed the publication of the first parliamentary enquiry report on the cults in 1995, is another example. According to the lawyers who have observed the phenomenon, these accusations are said to have rarely been taken seriously by the courts, but they will undoubtedly have contributed to maintaining the amalgam between spirituality and criminality that the word cult provokes.

A proverb says: When one wants to drown one’s dog, one says it has rabies… But there would still have to be a declared epidemic.

The designation “cult” is a galloping epidemic, and still current. Some thirty years earlier, it concerned only a few spiritual minorities, but it spreads year by year through all the so-called alternative milieux. Its mode of transmission is said to be principally hertzian, but propagation is also said to occur orally, through the press, through administrative channels…

We think that a minimum of ethical precautions in the journalistic profession, together with the public’s application of a certain hygiene of life (a varied and balanced diet of information, daily exercise of the critical spirit…), could mark a halt, if not a regression, of this social psychosis.

In the meantime, we advise everyone, as preventive and curative treatment, to acquaint themselves with the CICNS’s two documentaries.

Various comments on hidden-camera investigation methods

In an article in L’Express, Marion Festraëts evokes “the investigation programmes” in which “television prides itself on filming where it hurts”. Laurent Richard, creator of Les Infiltrés, declares there that the “hidden cam” is a “procedure as old as information itself”. But “The principle is not without danger. Paul Moreira is thus wary of stolen images, restricting their use to the minimum: ‘In France there reigns a culture of secrecy and opacity which sometimes makes recourse to the concealed camera pertinent, the journalist admits. But one can only do investigation by being loyal with people. The enquiry is more important than all the images one might bring back on hidden camera: one must beware of the fascination they exert, of the voyeurism they induce.’ Not counting the risks that weigh on those who consent to speak: ‘For me, it is unacceptable that a person should lose their job or suffer pressure because they were willing to testify, Moreira insists. I have no scruple about cutting such sequences.’ Bernard Nicolas acknowledges it: ‘One poses oneself fewer ethical problems when dealing with bad guys.’”.

Extract from Le Figaro

(…) “Les infiltrés” are indeed making noise even before their intrusion into the schedules. At issue: the very concept of this new magazine, made using hidden cameras and presented by David Pujadas. And above all the way of obtaining them: the falsification of identity.

“The use of the hidden camera is in no way a first, any more than the falsification of identity, argues Guylaine Loquet, deputy director of the newsroom at Capa, which produces the magazine. The images obtained serve to denounce a situation, a system, but absolutely do not have the aim of attacking particular persons or companies”

Seven editions are for the moment scheduled. With the rumour going around that an infiltration attempt is under way in the celebrity magazines, all the interns are now looked upon as possible moles… Quite an atmosphere. The only certainty: the second edition will be devoted to undeclared work. For the rest, there is talk of a plunge inside a cult and another into the heart of the false-papers networks…

Extract from: Le Post

(…) What will they answer me? That these are complicated subjects where only the use of a hidden camera makes it possible to film what malicious actors (cults, false papers, abusers of the elderly…) want to conceal, and that there are no other means of carrying the camera into the wound. Fine, let us grant it.

One will accept this kind of argument when the treatment thus administered is the same for everyone. So let the procedure be generalised to all the actors of public life, let hidden cameras be multiplied and let Pujadas, for example (and at random), be asked to carry one into the wings of the political programmes where he is given the opportunity to question the President of the Republic. I wager the result will be most fascinating.

I can already see the title of that exceptional edition of “Les Infiltrés”: “In the wings of the cult of the Élysée”, or again: “Two hours with the guru of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré”.

Jean-Michel Apathie (RTL blog)

“What are the values journalism conveys? Sincerity, since it falls to it to establish facts. Honesty, since it falls to it to investigate disrespect for social rules and laws. Transparency, since it reveals and brings to light. How can one attain these objectives, sincerity, honesty and transparency, by choosing to exercise one’s profession using lies, dishonesty and concealment?

One will answer, an old, old, old classic, that the end can justify the means. In another register, that is how, since the dawn of time, dictators and profiteers have freed themselves from moral codes. The former say to the people: you do not live free, but you live in security. A negation of the values and philosophy that raise men above their mortal condition. The profiteers, for their part, accommodate themselves to the transgression of laws by pleading the creation of wealth. That is to place materialism and venality above effort and perseverance.

What a strange idea, what a singular project, to want to place journalism in this perspective. Informing would be so important that the means of achieving it would be secondary. That reasoning is deadly for journalism. A journalism without values would quickly become a profession without morality. If the principle of the goal begins to win out over the observance of means, then the breach would be open for all means to become legitimate for attaining the goal.

It is in this sense that the project of ‘Les Infiltrés’ cannot be acceptable to those who have chosen the profession of journalism. If it were to see the light of day and settle durably into the French landscape, it would then be, even if it met with success, an immense defeat for all the journalists of this country”.

Media and Spirituality: The Journalism of Denunciation

An article published in the magazine “Les trois mondes” no. 14

By Jean-Luc Delfin

Insofar as the spiritual minorities express and experiment with the qualitative values denied and ignored by the mercantile society, they represent targets particularly aimed at by those whom Serge Halimi calls “the new watchdogs”.

People who take an interest in the new forms of spirituality are always astounded by the ignorance, the prejudices and the superficiality with which the mass media give an account of them. It must be said that nothing is more opposed to the tempo and tone of the media than a spiritual path. While the time of the media is that of immediate news, paced by the spectacular and the sensational, spirituality awakens in the secrecy of an unsayable experience. While the media aim at consensus, authentic spirituality always supposes a break with the ambient conformisms.

Media and spirituality thus represent two contradictory “points of view”: that of the body in search of “strong sensations” and that of the soul in search of subtle inspiration.

A few specialists have studied the way the media give an account of the spiritual minorities labelled cults. What emerges from these studies is that the very great majority of journalists respect no ethical rule in this field: no field investigation, no cross-checking of information, no verification of sources, most do nothing but copy out the files conceived and drafted by anti-cult back-offices which use, while modernising them, all the techniques of the inquisition: rumour, denunciation, “testimonies” of penitents, amalgam etc. These practices confirm what one professional says (1): “Journalism, in 90% of cases, is copying out.” If many journalists thus resemble parrots, there are a few who behave like scavengers, ready to swoop on easy and fragile prey designated as scapegoats…

These pitbulls of disinformation represent the armed, media wing of a “catho-secular” lobby in which hysterical housewives, psychiatric normalisers, unscrupulous lawyers and more or less villainous politicians come together. Media disinformation is one of the key elements of the modern inquisition: it demonises the spiritual minorities through campaigns that accompany every political, administrative or legal decision concerning them. Any new or alternative path will be judged non-conforming and presented under a folkloric, condescending, ridiculous, delinquent or indeed criminal aspect.

A study of this journalism of denunciation enriches the reflection on the normalisation mechanisms of the modern media. Under the mask of journalism, the procedures of low policing and the crude devices of propaganda are used: editing tricks, fakery, fabrication and false testimony are charged with illustrating a single, accusatory point of view. All the other points of view, that of the leaders and members of the spiritual minorities, like that of informed specialists, are systematically set aside. We could thus cite dozens of cases, across all media, of patent disinformation. In a society where the information market obeys the laws of supply and demand, the point is to give the reader or viewer images and information that comfort him in his prejudices.

There is, quite evidently, beyond the ideological and financial interests, something pathological in the way certain “journalists” confuse their role with that of inquisitor, informer, policeman or prosecutor. Those who, in the persecution of their neighbours, find compensation for their impotence are the same who, during the last war, held forth with antisemitic discourses on the official airwaves, who denounced the bad Americans during McCarthyism, or who combat dissidents, today in China as yesterday in Russia. The spokesmen of the ideologies of intolerance always express the same fear and the same hatred of difference.

Everyone can react to this generalised disinformation and to this intellectual terrorism, whose aim is to frighten people away from all alternative forms of life and thought. By being active within associations that fight for freedom of conscience and constitute poles of vigilance against disinformation. By responding systematically to media caught with their hand in the bag of lies and amalgams. By creating relational networks and media capable of circulating free information on the new forms of spirituality.

While he was fighting against all the political, judicial and media authorities, Zola wrote during the Dreyfus affair: “Truth has within it a power that carries away every obstacle. And when its path is barred, when someone succeeds in shutting it underground for a longer or shorter time, it builds up there, it gathers there such an explosive violence that, the day it bursts out, it blows everything up with it.”

The diehards of disinformation risk being the first struck by the explosive surging-up of a truth they have buried under the weight of lies and prejudices.

Read also The end of the traditional media? and “Do the media lie?” by Le Kiosque

1 Journalistes précaires, éditions Le mascaret (return to text)

The Impossible Mediation

The tendentious psychology of the UNADFI and the ideology underlying it

by André Tarassi

Extracts from the publication of the ADFI no. 80, fourth quarter 2003 - Editorial

”(…) Experience proves that dialogue, consultation with the follower (of a cult) is impossible. Deprived of liberty, the follower will affirm loud and clear that he is entirely free, that he entered the group freely and that he can leave it freely, that it is his family or those close to him who are infringing his freedom to belong to his group. And in the event that the cult were summoned before the courts, he will be ready to come and defend the leader and the members of the cult against all comers.”

The arguments of the anti-cult activists leave one dumbfounded: if someone “affirms loud and clear that he is entirely free” and is ready “to defend the leader and the members of the cult against all comers”, there is, according to them, a problem all the same. It is with this kind of tendentious psychology that the spiritual minorities have been confronted for years. The ADFIs think they hold a truth that could not be undermined by the affirmations of those they would like to save from the clutches of the cults… against their will! Other explanations follow:

”(…) the follower loses his capacities for reflection, for discernment and for decision, his critical spirit and his free will, solely as regards the theories and practices of his cult. For the rest of his life, professional, family, he may be absolutely normal. That is what explains the follower’s behaviour when he is brought before the courts or the psychiatrist, with whom he will give proof of his intellectual and human qualities, etc…”

The follower has therefore undergone a sort of selective brainwashing. A lobe, perhaps, or a few of the follower’s neuronal connections have been dexterously manipulated by “the master of the cult” so that he becomes entirely stupid where the affairs of the cult are concerned while remaining (and this in order to deceive the courts and the psychiatrists) “absolutely normal” in all other domains! The message can be summed up thus: “Do not let yourselves be deceived by the apparent normality of our victims, it is a trap”! After having described to us for years the behaviour of the “abnormal”, we are now advised to be wary of “normal people”. Even accepting this hallucinatory argumentation, one may wonder whether someone “absolutely normal” in “the rest of his life” causes any harm whatever to others and whether he moreover deserves the title of “victim”… seeing that he is not even ready to acknowledge it.

Who has lost part of their brain in this story?

”(…) As for mediation with the cult, it is perfectly impossible. The associations improperly called anti-cult are often reproached with not seeking to establish a dialogue with the groupings they designate under the name of ‘cults’ (…) It is obvious that parents whose child takes drugs will obtain no result by discussing with their dealer. Just as parents whose child is caught in a prostitution network will not arrive at a solution by discussing with the pimps. It is the same for the cults, which are a psychic drug and a psychic rape. No mediation is possible. Only Justice will be able to free the innocent victims and condemn the guilty.”

This condemnation “a priori” of the spiritual minorities is a central aspect of the anti-cult fight. There is in it no intention of understanding the nature of the spiritual quest and its place in society (any more than of understanding the malaises of our society that can lead to the consumption of drugs. Would their ideology advocate a “final solution” for the spiritual minorities?). It is indeed a matter, in any case, of destroying under cover of “protecting”. If the activists of the anti-cult camp had a genuine concern to protect human beings, we would find that again in their approach and their words, as much on the subject of the presumed guilty as of their presumed victims. By brandishing expressions with a strong emotional power such as “children”, “rape” and “drugs”, they deliberately stigmatise a current of “thought” in order to reduce it to nothing. There is a great violence in this attitude, which does not escape them but which may escape those of their readers who are blinded by the intensity of their argumentation. The ADFI is today so deeply mired in this vindictive attitude that it sometimes even attacks certain bodies of the government when the latter shows any inclination to dialogue with the spiritual minorities.

Where does this feeling of impunity, usually found among dictators, come to them from? They must feel well protected to diffuse their doctrine so freely without fear of a backlash.

”(…) It is precisely because they know this impossibility of communication and of mediation with the followers and with the cults that the gurus, in their media campaign of intoxication, propose that the ‘two parties in conflict be brought together to find the solution to their problem together’.”

Always this fallacious argumentation which uses untruths as a smokescreen. Here, the intention of dialogue is said to come from the certainty that there can be no dialogue!

This distressing literature is served to the population as a veritable enterprise of disinformation which will end up making us believe in the reality of “brainwashing”.

And the authors of this text conclude with this quotation which, in their confusion and their lack of culture, seems to them to go in the direction of their sickening diatribe:

”(…) Fifty-five years ago, in 1948, Albert Camus declared:

‘I shall not try to modify anything of what I think or anything of what you think (as far as I can judge) in order to obtain a conciliation that would be agreeable to us all. On the contrary, what I want to tell you today is that the world needs true dialogue, that the contrary of dialogue is falsehood just as much as silence, and that there is therefore no possible dialogue except between people who remain what they are and who speak truly’. (Essais, La Pléiade, 1965, p. 372)”

It is the eternal masquerade of the militiamen of a single-track and brutal thinking who, from China to France, by way of less publicised lands, daily trample the spiritual impulse in the hope of ruling a world that nevertheless gives every sign of decline.

Read also “Séva”

André Tarassi was born in 1961. He is the founder of the CICNS. An independent researcher, he has been studying the New Spiritualities for 25 years. He studied journalism and television in the United States. He has published, under another name, several works on the spiritual approach.

The Impossible Tolerance?

The IEP of Toulouse makes available a thesis by Monsieur Lionel Mariani entitled:

“Political responses to the ‘question of the cults’ - the French example of the impossible tolerance.”

An exemplary piece of work

This thesis is a very complete and balanced description of the modern anti-cult fight in France from its genesis in the 1970s to the present day. One must in particular salute the work of methodological verification employed by the author to free himself as far as possible “from multiple biases [which] risk at any moment making the researcher stumble into an analysis tinged with subjectivity (…) Every researcher in the social sciences must therefore carry out an intellectual surveillance of himself in order to remain conscious of the possible interferences of his background and social habitus on scientific production”. The author mentions in particular his various internships within the Central Bureau of Religious Affairs (at the Ministry of the Interior) and at the MIVILUDES, and the ties of friendship which may have tinged his analyses.

This quality document will interest anyone wishing to understand the French climate relating to the question of the cults and the responses brought by the various political actors. All the parties involved are presented and quoted, this panorama allows the reader to have an overall view and to form his own opinion, an editorial attitude one would like to see in the media on this subject.

The CICNS critique

We shall nevertheless make a set of remarks concerning the description of the action of the MIVILUDES, not to criticise the quality and constant balance of the elements presented, but to comment on what may resemble an unconvincing position-taking (tinged perhaps by the ties of friendship mentioned above) and a difficulty (in this precise case) in calling a spade a spade. We are aware that the author did not wish to analyse the effectiveness of the political responses. His remarks nevertheless give us the occasion to raise this aspect.

Lionel Mariani concludes his thesis with these words: “The frame of reference of the intrinsic dangerousness of the cults remains in effect predominant and legitimises, a fortiori, a public approach in terms of struggle. Any nuanced, indeed sympathetic approach seems difficult: ‘the impossible tolerance’ towards the cults seems to be the only conceivable and legitimate option in France.”

Is “the frame of reference of the intrinsic dangerousness of the cults” legitimate? That is the heart of the problem. This dangerousness can only be qualified scientifically by comparison, as Eileen Barker expressed at the colloquium we organised on the theme: “Cults: social scourge or scapegoat?”. What studies, in any fashionable domain: paedophilia, abuse of weakness, violence, etc., show that the said cults are a home of dangerousness greater than the rest of society? To our knowledge none exists, and for good reason. If these studies were done they would perhaps show that this dangerousness is lesser, and the question would be not that of the cult danger but rather that of the positive contribution of the spiritual minorities. Yet the dangerousness of the cults in general is an a priori, a false self-evidence that one does not even wish to question. Which brings us to the action of the MIVILUDES.

The author of the thesis specifies: “The term ‘hardening’ being too strongly connoted, it does not convey the reality of the current evolution of the interministerial structure charged with conducting the political response to the ‘problem of the cults’. By deepening of the repressive character one must in reality understand the redefinition and implementation of a more offensive policy, compared with the MIVILUDES of Jean-Louis Langlais and Gilles Bottine, with the aim of fighting more effectively upstream and downstream of the dérives sectaires” and further on: “For all that, contrary to what some have said, nothing in the facts can lead one to suppose that the interministerial Mission has transformed itself into an ‘unreasonable’, ‘obscurantist’ or ‘liberticidal’ structure”.

Is it reasonable to claim, without proof and before inquiry, in unison with the deputies of the study group on cults, that 80,000 children are in danger in the cults?

Is it reasonable to claim, after parliamentary inquiry and with proof of the contrary, in unison with the deputies of the commission, that 80,000 children are in danger in the cults?

Is it a proof of respect for fundamental liberties for the president of the MIVILUDES to say (words he pronounced before us): “Were there only one victim, my policy would be justified”, without taking into account the collateral damage of that policy?

Is it a proof of respect for fundamental liberties to endorse in this way police assaults such as certain persons have undergone (people forced to the ground with a pistol at their temple) and the innumerable discriminations undergone by others by reason of their choice of life?

Is it not a proof of obscurantism to refuse the contradictory voice of the majority of researchers in the social sciences on the question of spiritual minorities?

Is it not obscurantism to speak of a social scourge without bringing the slightest proof and without activating the levers that would make it possible to bring such proofs? For a problem the size of a social scourge, a proof would be a consensus of the scientific (human sciences) and legal community on these questions: what actions has the MIVILUDES undertaken in this direction?

One must call a spade a spade. The hardening of the MIVILUDES’s policy is patent, and the term “hardening” is justified because there is no rationality behind this change of policy but rather an opportunistic political response. Lionel Mariani speaks of the competence of the MIVILUDES staff in these terms: “Thus, with their civil servants’ know-how, these individuals are capable of operating ascents into generality or descents into technicality on questions arising from the cult phenomenon”. A genuine will to dialogue and an openness of mind would doubtless have been more useful. The interministerial mission is a bad answer to a false problem or, at best, a badly posed question, and its action as it stands can only generate tension and confusion. The adequate response today in France is the creation of a genuine observatory of the new spiritualities which could apprehend the question of the spiritual emergence of these last years in its entirety, and not only from the angle of dangerousness.

Local Authorities Facing Dérives Sectaires: the New MIVILUDES “Guide”

A commentary by Éric Bouzou

In a now-famous formula, Benjamin Franklin said: ” Those who are ready to give up a fundamental liberty for a little temporary security deserve neither the one nor the other ”.

That is the conclusion we might draw on reading the latest opus of the MIVILUDES: “Local authorities facing dérives sectaires”, so thoroughly does paranoia impregnate the text: ” The cult movement knows how to find the slightest loophole in legislation or regulation to pursue its harmful activities with complete impunity. It also understands very quickly how to disturb the serenity of the debate by invoking arguments of bad faith, by proceeding to simplistic amalgams between freedom of belief and the freedom to carry on activities far removed from any spiritual concern ”.

Of course this guide is written in the name of the defence of the true republican values and of liberty, which the cults flout while daring, moreover, to appeal to them: ” the cult phenomenon, far from fading, has grown and diversified at the same time as the organisations or groups in question were becoming more and more litigious and did not hesitate, often by invoking questionable grounds, to attack head-on the Republic and its structures, presented as a liberticidal and discriminating machine ”

The ” cult movement ” is the enemy. It is everywhere, infiltrates everywhere, with a single objective: to enslave as many followers as possible, take their money, abuse them sexually and use them to destabilise the country. The proofs of the omnipresence of this enemy are not given; it is an established fact, there is no point going back over it. In the same way, the designation “cult movement” seems to belong to those who have arrogated the right to it to themselves: the MIVILUDES and the anti-cult associations declared to be of public utility and financed by the State. That this designation is without legal foundation and does not respect adversarial process makes no difference.

The authors specify that ” the present study does not claim to be an academic legal work: its vocation is to be a practical guide for the use of elected officials and territorial civil servants ”. They could have added that the work is not scientific either, despite the inevitable theory of mental manipulation, which has now become the bedrock of the dérive sectaire. Is not this popularisation of a pseudo-psychological thesis, which is the object of no consensus in the scientific community, an attempt at indoctrination by dint of being hammered ad nauseum into the inattentive reader?

The territorial civil servant is forewarned. He is himself a prize prey for the cults, by his proximity to the administration destined to be infiltrated. Cultural affairs, sport, economic support, education, training, social assistance, religious associations, town planning: he must be at the peak of vigilance against the cult invasion. Let him make no mistake, the rules and laws which protect fundamental liberties (some still exist) and which must be applied are often ” pitfalls ” preventing the villains from being flushed out. He will have to make the best of a bad job and get round as well as he can these laws outrageously invoked by the ” cult movement ”; in certain cases, alas, it will not be possible…

This new MIVILUDES guide forms part of the security excess which characterises French society, as described by Jean-Marc Fédida in his work ” L’horreur sécuritaire - Les trente honteuses ”. The consequences will be disastrous, short of a salutary awakening. Where stepping back and a little common sense would be of a nature to help the action of the public agent, excess and partiality can only disturb that action.

The authors lament: ” How can a well-adjusted and lucid person – “Mr or Mrs Everyman” – come to accept the unacceptable, to believe in the unbelievable, to live the unbearable ?” That is indeed the question we ask ourselves when we deplore the presence of a body like the MIVILUDES in France.

A document to be read, then, sparingly, and with a sense of proportion, which, we are convinced, most mayors who have taken the time to weave ties with their constituents will know how to do.

The Unification Church of Sun Myong Moon

Introduction by the CICNS

The Unification Church has been a privileged target of the anti-cult fight in France. In our country, everyone is free to say what they think of a philosophy, of a religious movement, of its proselytism, of the theology of Reverend Moon in this instance.

The limit one would wish to see respected lies in the manner and means employed to express one’s point of view. When debate (respecting the other’s differences) and the exercise of the law are replaced by a combat driven by fear - the fear that one set of values will be replaced by another -, abuses are inevitable.

Of course, the anti-cult argument consists in saying that the danger is so great that it is a question of the survival of our system of values. Let us note first that this is a way of refusing a priori the forces of change and evolution in a society. But even granting that it becomes legitimate in a given situation to defend “our values”, the supposed danger would still have to be supported by irrefutable proof (disturbance of public order, delinquency of the incriminated groups, apology for criminal actions, etc.) Which, to our knowledge, is not the case for Moon’s Unification Church.

The anti-cult argument systematically evokes the worst in order to override our traditional values: respect for democratic debate, respect for the law, respect for the other, tolerance, freedom of conscience. The other is necessarily manipulated or a manipulator.

The anti-cult fight in France is a fairly precise measure of the state of our system of self-defence. The cursor has moved dangerously from a legitimate position of protection to a position of hysterical crispation.

Laurent Ladouce, in charge of public relations for the Unification Church in France, offers us below his view of thirty years of his movement’s history.

From “la secte Moon” to “l’Empire Moon”

The image of Reverend Moon in France (1975-1987)

The development of the Unification Church (Moon) in France never had the same scale as in Korea, Japan or the United States. The French branch is today slimmer than its counterparts in Great Britain and Germany. But the French media reacted sharply to its breakthrough, giving several incidents that occurred between 1975 and 1987 a worldwide resonance: the spectacular abductions of two followers, Marie-Christine Amadéo (1976) and Claire Chateau (1982), had a planetary echo. Above all, the French press invented two expressions that hit home in worldwide popular imagery: in January 1975, Ouest France was the first press organ in the world to speak of “la secte Moon” (“the Moon cult”). In the 1980s, Jean-François Boyer, a senior reporter at TF1, signed a best-seller translated into multiple languages: “L’Empire Moon” (“The Moon Empire”).

“La secte Moon” and “l’Empire Moon”: two hard-hitting journalistic coinages, imprinting on the zeitgeist two images or two mental galaxies with their subsets: “la secte Moon” evokes images of a Korean messiah, collective weddings, deprivation of sleep and food, zombies, depersonalisation, brainwashing. “L’Empire Moon” is a universe of soldier-monks, of the spider’s strategy, of infiltration, of entryism. These two images applied to the same object are not compatible: the first evokes the subversion of an all-powerful Oriental figure come to “steal our children”, to prevent them from realising the ambitions and hopes their parents placed in them. The easy clichés would come thick and fast: “On one side, powerful organisations, rich, skilled at recruiting. On the other, individuals - often very young - in love with an ideal, who abandon family, studies, career to follow what they believe to be their spiritual path”.[1] The second image supposes that a multitude of Reverend Moons are among us, highly intelligent and motivated, working to subvert our elites. Certainly, these two images follow the objective evolution of the movement itself, which changed in nature and method. But these two images are also “snapshots” of passing time, two photographs of the France of the 70s and 80s. The image of “la secte Moon” is irrational and archaic, belonging to a psychology of crowds as in Fritz Lang’s “M” and “Fury”. The mental image induced by “l’Empire Moon” is more sophisticated. It reflects the Mitterrandian ideology and thus refers back to a modern State’s capacity to create mythology. The myth of “la secte Moon” is typical of the French collective unconscious, that of “l’Empire Moon” of the French State.

“La secte Moon” and “l’Empire Moon” are not words for naming things or phenomena, but verbal arrows secreting primary reflexes in the crowd. Fabricating archetypes is typical of a process of stigmatisation. Stigmatisation (literally branding) consists in strongly amplifying an anomaly. It becomes an idol that fascinates and terrifies. All stigmatisation supposes an interaction between an objective anomaly and a subjective will to stigmatise. If Reverend Moon’s movement is indeed an objective anomaly in French society, its outrageous stigmatisation says more about that society than about the stigmatised object. The manufacture of anti-Moonism borrowed other mental schemes in Germany (where the myth of a new Nazism was favoured) or in Great Britain, where the essential actors were the popular press and the courts.

Why this French fixation on “la secte Moon” and “l’Empire Moon”? Resituating these two terms in their context will enlighten us. Jean Séguy suggests it when he writes: “the recent sects themselves have characteristics that can only be understood through an analysis of the cultural or political - and no longer merely religious - context in which they have spread.” The author would have been better advised to say that it is “the image of the recent sects” whose characteristics need to be understood.

1. “La secte Moon”

“La secte Moon” corresponds to a precise stage in the history of the Unification Church’s development in France. The movement had already existed since 1968. It burst suddenly into the French news at the beginning of 1975 on the occasion of a series of circumstances that we shall set back in the scenery of the France of the 70s. Ten years later, the same movement would have evolved, France too would have changed: “la secte Moon” would become “l’Empire Moon”.

1.1 Individual, family, tribal, social, national, world levels

A first grid of analysis consists in deciphering the symbolic import of the expressions “secte Moon” and “Empire Moon” from Reverend Moon’s own theology. A constant of unificationist rhetoric is the notion of levels or spheres (gwon in Korean) of Providence. In other words, the human being must return to God by gradually widening the spheres of salvation. Starting from the individual level, he attains the family, tribal, social, national, world, then cosmic levels. If a person achieves individual felicity, it remains for him to conquer the sphere of family felicity, then tribal, etc. It is the roadmap of a human salvation that takes place on earth, in this world. Now, the passage from one sphere of liberation to another comes at the price of a sacrifice or an “indemnity” (tamgan in Korean) which can involve the opposition and persecution of the “adverse camp”. The persecution of “la secte Moon” thus corresponds to a moment in its historical ascension, the one where it moves its followers from the individual level to a family and tribal level. It then arouses a lightning adhesion in a certain profile of people who will not be found in the following phase, when its recruitment tends to stagnate. It also arouses a no less lightning rejection among many actors who will not be heard of afterwards. The persecution of “l’Empire Moon” accompanied the phase in which the movement was reaching a national and international audience. It then draws other actors to itself and arouses other rejections.

Reverend Moon’s disciples see themselves as the people of God who must free individuals, families, tribes, society, the nation and the world from evil influences. Each national branch of the movement sets itself the ultimate objective of “restoring the nation”, in other words of making it a country that accepts being guided by Reverend Moon’s ideas. The disciples are “in the Abel position”, in the light, and facing them are people “in the Cain position”, in the darkness, who strive relentlessly to demonise them. Holding firm, loving these enemies without yielding to the influence of their hostility, contributes to saving both Abel and Cain. So much so that phenomena of fraternisation are conceivable between the two camps, or the passage from one “camp” to the other.

One may of course not accept this unificationist theology, but it proves operational for two reasons. First, it illuminates the phenomenon of mimicry proper to phenomena of stigmatisation. Anti-Moonism ends up resembling the image it gives of “Moonism”. The demoniser, fascinated by the idol he execrates, tends to imitate it.

In the phase of “la secte Moon”, the movement is accused of “stealing” children from their parents, of “washing their brains”. Yet Marie-Christine Amadéo, though of age when she joined the Unification Church, would be abducted twice by her relatives. Likewise Claire Chateau would be held captive to be subjected to a “deprogramming” supposed to “free her”. We are thus in the case of two groups of influence fighting each other on equal terrain (that of the individual, the family, the clan), one of which intends to criminalise the other in public opinion. But the one who cries “crime” gets carried away and breaks the laws. The site “Prévensectes” gives an echo of this mimicry in the lucid confession of a repentant ex-Moonist called Roger. After describing to us how Roger was “indoctrinated” by the cult, we are told of his “deliverance”, during a visit he agreed to make to his Breton family: “His family decided that he would not leave again. It confiscates his papers. At the house, it is a procession: friends of the family, priest, pastor, psychologist… The whole entourage attempts a debriefing…”[2]

Moonist theology is also operational for explaining the passage from the fantasy of “la secte Moon” to that of “l’Empire Moon”. When Moon’s disciples make themselves talked about for the first time in France and find themselves called “la secte Moon”, this corresponds to a stage of development where they have just entered the “tribal” sphere, and their adversaries too. During this period, the French State (the national level) remains neutral. It does not arbitrate the struggle between the young “Moonist tribe” and the nascent “anti-Moonist tribe”. At this stage, hostility to the “Moonists” is at once affective and religious, it touches the ties of blood, not the social contract. Eloquently, the “anti-cult” association founded by the Champollions (parents of a Moonist who joined in Rennes in 1974) baptises itself “Association for the Defence of the Family and the Individual”, by a curious phenomenon of theological mimicry with the object of its execration. Questioned on the choice of these terms, Madame Champollion would moreover later express her embarrassment about this terminology.[3]

The Moonists then have against them people close to them: parents, brothers and sisters, extended kin, as well as various mentors and directors of conscience - teachers, spiritual guides, psychologists. They all know one another. The psychodramas are sometimes followed by reunions; people tell one another of the affection they continue to bear one another despite everything. But the stigmatisation would go beyond this relatively intimate framework, as we shall see, ending in a reciprocal demonisation.

Ten years later, the scenery has changed. The young Moonists are married, have founded their families, have often resumed a professional activity; many have by then normalised their ties with their families. The initial communal phase “of rupture with society” has come to an end. Freed from the family and tribal hostility of the preceding decade, the French Moonists will face a situation unique compared with their co-religionists in other industrialised countries. For the French State, which had remained neutral until then, takes the lead, after the election of François Mitterrand, of a curious worldwide crusade against “the cults”. Reverend Moon’s movement would be subjected to several years of fiscal and judicial harassment. In parallel, the movement had ceased to address itself primarily to young individuals in order to convert them, and aimed also to develop a national network of influence among intellectuals, journalists and politicians. The CAUSA Institute then organised high-level seminars throughout France and published a magazine. This whole strategy would culminate in the election of Pierre Ceyrac as deputy for the Nord in the National Assembly. The adversary of the unification movement had then changed in nature: it was the State.

In this French context of State persecution on the one hand and “national conquest” on the other, Jean-François Boyer published “L’Empire Moon”. The back cover presents it as “an explosive work, full of unpublished revelations, which reveals that the Unification Church is less a cult than an empire”.

1.2 The turning point of 1975

We have spoken of the evolution of the image as a function of the space occupied by Moonism. Let us now see the evolution as a function of time.

When “la secte Moon” makes its first entry into the French news in 1975, the movement has already existed for 7 years and has gained all or almost all its historic figures, without attracting attention. But for a year it occupies the front of the stage, with peaks in January-February 1975, June 1975 and January 1976. The persecuting hatred culminates with the abduction of Marie-Christine Amadéo and the bombing of the Moonist centre at the Villa Aublet. These twelve months would see the term “secte Moon” mark French and then world opinion in depth.

Let us resituate the first stigmatisation in its religious, political and cultural context.

For a year, the Élysée has had a new occupant. Breaking with Gaullism, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing speaks of an “advanced liberal society”. He very quickly lowers the age of majority from 21 to 18, right in the period when the recruitment of followers by the Unification Church is in full swing in France; a France where the birth rate is falling, where the middle classes are over-investing in the social advancement of their children. The “Family” of the “True Parents” comes to capture these young people just beginning their university studies. Among them, many are brilliant, come from middle-class or well-off families. Their families even have some standing. A great number of these young people have had a structured spiritual journey, generally in the Catholic Church, whose voice still counts in France. The president of the French branch, Henri Blanchard, is himself a former Picpus monk. Several Moonist cadres have a solid Catholic background. This movement thus attracts beings who are precious on the moral, spiritual and intellectual planes.

Convinced by the study of the “Divine Principle” that they are living “in the last days” and that Reverend Moon is the Messiah, these young people often abandon their studies, even if they resume them later. In the communal centres, the boys wear white shirts and ties, the girls are often in skirts. Curiously, they send back to their parents and to society the image of the traditional, polite and healthy France that is “going to the dogs”. Observers would be struck by the great idealistic freshness of these young people. All live a frugal, disciplined communal life in which sexual relations before marriage are inconceivable. Their life is at once monastic and very public. Many of these young people leave France for the United States. Reverend Moon is leading the Day of Hope campaign there, which culminates with the Madison Square Garden speech in New York on 18 September 1974: a turning point. The American press goes wild and the shock wave reaches France a few months later.

In the last months of 1974, “recruitment” in France accelerates, especially in Rennes, the city Henri Blanchard comes from, as do the first three members of the Association for the Unification of World Christianity (A.U.C.M.). Sometimes several members of the same family, or several friends from the same class, join. The “recruits” are younger and younger. Many attend the best schools of Rennes.

Cry from the heart, tom-tom effect and religious horror

If the family and tribal pain of the ADFI meets a national echo, it is through a chain of events well summed up by Gilbert Lebrun. In a report published for “Le Rennais” in 2004, on the occasion of the ADFI’s thirtieth anniversary and entitled “The fight against the cults began in Rennes”, he specifies:

“Determined to fight, Claire and Guy Champollion file, on 18 December 1974 at the prefecture of Ille-et-Vilaine, the statutes of the ADFI. On 21 January 1975, the journalist Joseph Fontaine publishes in Ouest-France the first article of a series entitled The Moon sickness, or the new messiahs, which would quickly find an echo in the national press. Testimonies flood in. A little more becomes known about Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the new church.”[4]

The phenomenon of resonance between the cry from the heart of the relatives and the tom-tom effect of the local press would be incomplete without the entrance on stage of Father Pierre Le Cabellec [5]. In a Catholic Brittany, the word of a parish priest gives the crusade of the ADFI and Ouest-France the inquisitorial side that was missing to arouse a collective panic. It is here that one sees how aleatory the manufacture of the image is. In the phase known as “la secte Moon”, where the political power remains neutral, the adversary plays the card of religious horror: Moon is then a “guru”, “the Korean messiah” who abuses the credulity of the “followers” and “indoctrinates” them with a “heresy”.

Other “cults” are then making themselves talked about, such as the Children of God, Scientology or the Krishna Consciousness movement, but the trisyllabic term “la secte Moon” feeds the fantasies. This movement then appears as the purest archetype of the “cultic phenomenon”.

Later, the image of “l’Empire Moon” plays rather the card of political horror. The State, fearing to play Nero, seeks to deny the religious side of Moonism and of anti-Moonism. Whereas the established religions, in the days of “la secte Moon”, had shown some spiritual solidarity with the families and advised the ADFI, they will come to suspect the State of encroaching on a domain that does not concern it. The ADFI moreover renounces the confessional veneer of its beginnings, accepting the instrumentalisation of the government, which declares it of public utility and gives it subsidies. In the phase of “la secte Moon”, the ADFI attracted the parents of Moonists. In the phase of “l’Empire Moon”, it drives them away and the ADFI tends to become an empty shell: the parents of Moonists distance themselves from it, preferring to pacify their relations with their children. The State made use of the initial tribal hatred to settle its scores by taking the ADFI under its wing.

It is significant that Boyer dedicated his book to Madame Claire Champollion. After her husband’s death, she would campaign against Moonism only for ideological and political motives; on the individual and family plane, her relations with her son’s family had normalised. She would pursue her crusade against her favourite enemy almost until her death, but for motives less visceral than the defence of the family and the individual.

But let us return to the year 1975: the wave of Rennes Moonism suddenly strikes three reefs: the ADFI, born in Rennes, represents the resentment of the families who say they have been “broken” by the secte Moon. This cry from the heart and the guts, Ouest-France gives it a regional amplification: the daily (conscience of the west and voice of the Breton tribe) denounces the peril and alerts the whole of France. Finally, Father Le Cabellec brandishes the danger of heresy. Through his summary theological explanations, he leads the country to become passionate about christological questions: is Christ God or not? Is there a trinity? Did Jesus come in order to die on the cross? For years, these questions would return incessantly in connection with “la secte Moon”. They would disappear in the era of “l’Empire Moon”. The French phenomenon of the “secte Moon” is thus explained by a regional trio: the tribe of betrayed families unleashes the thunderbolts of the press and the local clergy against young heretics, in a country where the lowering of the age of majority had called into question centuries of relations between parents and children.

This cocktail explodes in January 1975, with a new peak in February. For the first time, indeed, a stunned France discovers on television the “mass weddings” celebrated by Moon and his wife. On 8 February 1975, 1,800 couples receive in Seoul the Blessing of the True Parents; among these new couples, there are six French people. PARIS MATCH publishes a long report on the event and does not hesitate to headline: “Moon, the living god, is taking our children.”[6]

Typical of the image of “la secte Moon”, the headline plays the cards of family horror (“taking” “our” children from “us”) and of the religious horror dear to Father Le Cabellec.

The Paris-Match article also mentions the first public meeting organised in Rennes by the ADFI, with parents of members of the Unification Church, on 16 February 1975. Claire Champollion modestly evokes the “stormy and impassioned” character of the meeting.[7] A sweet euphemism: when a Swiss mother dared to say that her three children were happy with Moon, she attracted not an adversarial debate but a din of indignation.

This meeting illustrates the phenomenon of mimicry depicted above: the blessing of 8 February marked for the French Moonists the passage from the individual-family level to the level of the great international tribe of the “blessed couples”. On 16 February, the ADFI, then only two months old, manages to federate into a European tribe the individuals and families who say they are victims of “la secte Moon”. In the following weeks, the ADFI opens provincial branches in all the French cities where the AUCM has centres. Each side marks the other.

But the French and particularly Breton context of “the Moon affair” does not suffice to explain its resonance. We have already underlined the role of the three principal actors in triggering the fear of 1975: the couple of Rennes notables, the local journalist, the parish priest. But another, international factor would amplify the panic.

Reverend Moon’s writings evoke a “21-year course” between 1960 and 1981 (three times seven years). If the years 1960-1967 correspond, for the Unification Church, to its individual, family and social implantation in Korea and Japan, they are also years when the movement does not yet exist in France. Henri Blanchard only encounters “the family” in March 1968 in Paris. Now in 1968 the Unification Church had begun in Korea its second 7-year course, which ends precisely with the blessing of the 1,800 couples in February 1975. During these seven years, Reverend Moon’s movement had on the one hand reached a national size in Korea, and on the other launched a powerful crusade on American territory. Moon himself arrives in the United States in 1971 and quickly obtains his green card.

At the moment when the ADFI stigmatises the AUCM in France, the public discovers a movement of planetary scale through the media. At once, the latter scent the spectacular and passionate side. For the blessing of the 1,800 couples marks, in the words of Moon himself, the beginning of the third and final 7-year course, in which the movement must reach the world stage. In April 1975, Moon sends Japanese, American and German missionaries to 120 countries. Many would remain 21 years in their mission nation. Now April 1975 is also the month that sees the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh. Vientiane falls in December of the same year. In Africa, several countries fall into the communist purse. Faced with a communist international then in full expansion, the Western world does not react. The trauma of Watergate and the American humiliation in Vietnam leave the field free for Marxist-Leninist triumphalism.

The only international to defy world communism is then world Moonism, well before the moral reawakening of the 80s that would sweep away the red empire. Moon’s real strength is in fact insignificant, in money as in members, but he stakes everything on the great forgotten element of the fight against communism: the ideological offensive. And he launches the decisive slogan: “communism is not only the enemy of men, but the enemy of God”.

Just as the Marxists had first stupefied the world by the word, Moon declares an ideological war where the free world limits itself to scattered protests and to the humanitarian accompaniment of refugees. This verbal force suffices to create a legend attributing quasi-unlimited powers to the “Korean messiah”. It is this that would later fascinate Jean-François Boyer, when he described, dumbfounded, the zeal of the soldier-monks of “l’Empire Moon”.

At the beginning of 1975, Moon has mobilised the “International One World Crusade”, setting out from the United States and arriving in Japan and Korea. It comprises only five hundred young people of various nationalities, but the great rally of 7 June 1975 in Seoul gives them a planetary resonance: that day, a new peak of panic is reached in France, when the media reveal to the general public the Reverend’s power of action. He has gathered 1.2 million people in Seoul in a patriotic rally intended to counter the imminent threat of an invasion. In the crowd, Reverend Moon’s faithful are few in number, but they have managed to mobilise a whole people, and among them one recognises a few young Breton faces who, a few months earlier, were leading an uneventful life in Rennes. In the history of communism, never had such a rally taken place to oppose its expansion, and this rally marks the beginning of the 3rd and final 7-year course.

Abduction, bombing and auto-da-fé

The fight against Moonism in France then commits two derailments with grave consequences for religious freedom: a theoretical derailment, and a derailment of behaviour.

Anti-Moonist behaviour tips into a growing violence, which justifies itself: the authorities let it happen, on the grounds that these are “family matters”. Unpunished violence legitimises itself in the eyes of opinion. Given the passivity of the forces of order, everyone tells themselves that the only solution is probably to resort to force. The feeling of legal impunity would moreover be reinforced by a theoretical violence. We shall return to it. Ransacking of premises, abduction in broad daylight, a bomb placed to kill, the criminal acts are serious. Their impunity would mean that the AUCM, the victim, would definitively pass, in the eyes of public opinion, for the guilty party.

At the beginning of 1976, Reverend Moon sets his faithful an ambitious objective: a great patriotic rally at Yankee Stadium in New York, to celebrate the bicentenary of the American revolution and recall the role of the United States in Providence. The event would be a decisive stage in the strategy of conquering world public opinion. Now in January 1976, the European branch of the “International One World Crusade” arrives in France, and intensifies “recruitment” in the great cities of France.

Suddenly, stupefaction: the world’s televisions replay in a loop the abduction of Marie-Christine Amadéo by her parents. The cameras of the “third channel” filmed it live under the eyes of the gendarmes. Her mouth gagged by a powerful hand, the young Lyonnaise, of full age, struggles as hard as she can. The gendarmes observe the scene, doubtless ready to act if the Moonists tried to oppose force. The name Amadéo then goes around the world. A few months earlier, Paris-Match, sure of itself, had headlined: “Moon, the living God, is taking our children.” The shock of the abduction photos leads the editors to weigh the weight of words more carefully. On 31 January 1976, Marie-Christine is on the front page of Paris Match, smiling and arms crossed, slightly set back behind a fine photo of the Reverend, with this caption: “She is happy with Moon”.[8]

In the inside pages, one also discovers the photos of a young woman who is “less happy”. And for good reason: a few days after the failed abduction of Marie-Christine Amadéo (she would escape the surveillance of her “protectors”), a bombing smashes in the communal centre of the Villa Aublet in Paris. Gravely wounded in the arm, Ann-Britt Komedal, a Norwegian missionary, fights for months to avoid amputation: she would come out of it with a mutilated arm and lifelong after-effects. No investigation would ever elucidate this criminal affair.

In the days that follow, certain walls of Rennes are covered with inscriptions: “Moon assassin”. Ouest-France announces that a demonstration will be held in front of the AUCM’s headquarters, at 9 rue de Bertrand. The centre’s leaders alert the police station. When the day comes, an angry crowd shouts its slogans beneath the Moonists’ windows. The onlookers, the curious, the ADFI militants are marshalled by specialists in agit-prop; the groupuscular leftism of the Rennes campuses shouts the anger of the masses. No uniformed officer is visible, but plain-clothes agents are on the spot. Detailed photos would be taken from a building opposite. They show the leftists throwing photos and books out of the windows. Other shots show them burned on the spot in the street. Inside, the ringleaders who smashed in the centre’s front door have looted, broken, thrown. A young girl who had mingled with them leaves silent and in tears: the spectacle of the “brothers and sisters” praying serenely in one room while the rest of the premises is ransacked has moved her. A journalist from Armor Magazine would likewise be edified, and would write the first different article on Moonism in France.

The anti-AUCM violence profanes its image in public opinion. Wickedness towards the victim makes the victim wicked in the eyes of the city’s chorus: a classic of the procedures of stigmatisation. All the emotional arrows of the expression “la secte Moon” poison minds. A “cursed cult” attracts misfortune, there is the proof by nine. Yet the violence is only the armed wing of a theoretical anathema which must be understood.

This anathema consists in depersonalising the Moonists, to make of them “zombies” with whom all dialogue is vain, impossible. To arrive at this depersonalisation, reification, demonisation, the adversaries bring out a pseudo-science: “brainwashing” quickly becomes the last word of the Moon affair. The theory of brainwashing has little scientific credibility, but it would have an emotive credibility in the days of “la secte Moon”, Boyer would distance himself from it totally in order to defend the thesis of the soldier-monks in “l’Empire Moon”. To understand how so strange an idea could seduce public opinion and certain complaisant media, one must return to the context of the years 1975-76.

The first factor, doubtless decisive, is that quickly the procedure of “mimicry” between “rival tribes” dehumanises itself: once carried onto the public square and judicialised, the passion agitates an anonymous crowd, and no longer two tribes that know each other. Without arbitration between the two clans, a hardening takes place, an escalation.

Certainly, the AUCM would organise several meetings with the members’ parents, at the château de Mauny (up to 700 people in 1978). Bridges would be maintained between the members of the AUCM and those of the ADFI. On both sides, for some time, people try to avoid demonisation, the essential thing being to preserve family ties. While speaking of heresy and false doctrine, Father Le Cabellec was open to dialogue, out of pastoral concern. The Champollion couple themselves and other ADFI cadres knew how to debate; but new actors foreign to the affair would say that debate is vain. Mediatised to excess, internationalised, the affair escapes the parties involved. The escalation to extremes reflects the blockages of French society, the absence of places of mediation, of civil society.

This depersonalisation is theorised in various writings. In Les Nouvelles Sectes, Alain Woodrow, then a journalist at Le Monde, reports the turn taken by the ADFI:

“The ADFI of Rennes made a declaration to the Judicial Delegation of Rennes on 28 May 1975. After declaring that it refused to judge the doctrinal claims or the political aims of the (Moon) sect, the association formulates against it the following accusations:

• Deception as to the nature, aim and functioning of the movement. Brainwashing. Psychic terror. Rupture of family ties.

To which are added, according to the journalist himself, “refinements proper to this sect: frequent relocations, in the country of origin and then abroad, to cut the follower off completely from his milieu; confiscation, inside the communes, of shoes, to make flight materially more difficult; the practice of encouraging followers to hold back from urinating as long as possible - ostensibly to prove their ‘resistance to Satan’ - (in fact, the raising of the urea level in the body diminishes mental and physical resistance)”.[9]

Some, like Maurice Clavel, would denounce so crude a materialism and would recall, moreover, the rigour and asceticism of the evangelical precepts and of every authentically spiritual path. Others would recall the mysterious suddenness, the subjectivity of every conversion, its profoundly irrational aspect.

The second factor explaining the “brainwashing” theory: the Korean origin of this movement. As a young man, Reverend Moon lived through the concentration-camp experience of North Korea, the food deprivations and forced labour of the Heung Nam camp, the tortures to make Christians abjure their faith. His former torturers stuck the image of their crimes onto him. People have, on the other hand, forgotten what the Korean War was, and the genealogy of the idea of brainwashing. Until 1950, “brainwashing” did not exist in Western languages; it came to plaster onto a very brutal notion of de-braining and skull-stuffing the literal transcription of a Chinese ideogram xǐ nǎo (洗脑) which describes the reconstruction of the supposedly feudal or reactionary thoughts of the people; a figurative expression was taken literally by a crude scientism to describe something which, according to most specialists, is a myth.

According to the experts, brainwashing entered the language during the Korean War, in a military context it did not have at the start. In September 1950, the Miami Daily News publishes an article by the journalist Edward Hunter (1902-1978), the first to speak of “brainwashing”, a few months after the start of the Korean War. In 1951 he publishes Brain-Washing in Red China, and in 1956 Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It. Hunter’s theories are terrifying and have hardly been corroborated on the scientific plane. He himself, a CIA agent as much as a journalist, is said to have sought to accredit the idea of an effective brainwashing, the better to demonise a technique that was, all in all, primitive and did not deserve such regard. The “counter-brainwashing” developed by the CIA was a disaster.[10]

During the Korean War, the communists attempted to make Western soldiers docile to their cause. In The Manchurian Candidate [11], an American soldier, son of a family of prominent politicians, is captured by the Soviets on Korean territory and programmed to kill the future president of the United States. The film is so implausible that it empties the idea of brainwashing of meaning. The staging of the mental manipulation is caricatural and treated, moreover, in a comic mode. Yet the “Korean plot” is only the film’s first level. The film’s strength is to suggest the more disturbing, but more plausible, idea of the typical profile of a person who may one day let himself be manipulated; it is this classical psychology that is the most credible thing in the film, rather than the heavy artillery of brainwashing. Of the film’s two heroes supposed to have been brainwashed, only the fragile man will crack. The film’s assassin is at the start a man unbalanced by his mother. The staging shows that it is the mental torture she exercises that leads him to murder, far more than the North Korean plot.

Let us return to “brainwashing” in “la secte Moon”. “Moonist” psychiatric wrecks, there have been, as in every religious movement at its margins. But the clinical accounts evoke subjects who were very fragile at the start, who thought they had found in this movement a respite from their inner demons before sinking again. Objectivity would require that one also study the cases of psychically ill subjects who found in Moonism a relative spiritual and family flourishing that society would not necessarily have offered them. It is in both directions that psychiatry must investigate, as it does in the study of the other religious orders, which can just as easily structure as annihilate fragile subjects. A better knowledge of religious history shows that the great spiritual guides have always attracted a certain share of the sick. What would the Christ of the Gospels be without that cohort of paralytics, the lame, the blind, the possessed, the sick of every kind hoping for deliverance?

As for “brainwashing”, it is better to confine it to the context of the Korean War. It is, moreover, doubtless more a mystification of Hunter’s, amplified by the Manchurian Candidate, than a scientific reality.

Several serious studies by American doctors have shown that the techniques of “brainwashing” (sleep deprivation, harassment) had a superficial impact, aiming more at the stupefaction of the prisoners during their captivity than at their adhesion to a belief. Certain psychiatrists who worked on prisoners of war apparently very affected during their captivity showed that they quickly returned to normal, and evoked a remarkable “homeostasis” of the human mind. But myths die hard, and it is interesting to see how, 25 years after the Korean War, the myth of North Korean brainwashing was projected onto Reverend Moon.

However, the context of the Korean War does not totally explain the genealogy of “brainwashing”. To realise the psychiatric absurdity of this term, one must know Chinese, a language in which “brainwashing” is above all not to be taken at face value. Maoism borrows its “xǐ nǎo” from Taoism and its “xǐ xīn” 洗心 (washing of the heart), an inscription that adorns the entrance of many Chinese temples. The “political and ideological purification” demanded by Chinese communism is thus an allusion to the old tradition of asceticism of the heart widespread in Asia. The Chinese ideologues, to evoke ideological persuasion and re-education, also spoke of “sī xǐang gǎi zào”: reform of thought. We are very far from Hunter’s woolly idea in which brainwashing is a draining of the brain followed by a refilling with another programme. Hunter diverted the Chinese term from its meaning to apply it to his own fantasy of a Pavlovism that would succeed.

If the international scientific community almost unanimously rejects “brainwashing”, does it then retain the notion of “mental manipulation” applied to religious movements? Without rejecting the colleagues who believe in it, most professional psychiatrists ask them to give credible experimental proof of it. There is no point in rejecting a hypothesis a priori, for even badly formulated, it pushes reflection forward. The idea that seems to impose itself on everyone, and which meets simple common sense, is that the temptation of mental manipulation certainly exists in “the cults”, consciously or unconsciously. It is a trait of all cultures, a trait of human nature, and manifests itself in many domains of daily life. To see it only in the cults would be typical of a classic process of stigmatisation.

The third factor behind the brainwashing myth is the deprogramming network. The deprogrammers, often paid very dearly by parents to take their children back from the gurus and hold them captive, strive to bring the follower back to normal by a course symmetrically inverse to his conversion. Always the same mimicry already observed. As Massimo Introvigne and Dick Anthony report:

“The deprogrammers lure the members of religious movements, under various pretexts, then shut them up in isolated houses, bombarding them with information hostile to the group, in order to obtain a ‘deconditioning’ that is supposed to ‘reverse’ the effects of the brainwashing. (…) The 1970s and 1980s are strewn with episodes in which the deprogrammers are the object of grave accusations: use of drugs, physical violence, sexual relations, indeed outright ill-treatment. Almost all the best-known deprogrammers, moreover, ended up in prison.[12]

2. “L’Empire Moon”

How does one pass from one image to another? From “la secte Moon” to “l’Empire Moon”? These two myths are born in France, why? Why their worldwide resonance? How to explain that the cult obsession shakes so strongly the rational bedrock of the country of Descartes? “I detest what you write, but I would give my life so that you could continue to write”. This remark is attributed to Voltaire in a letter he is said to have written to an abbé: yet it is in the gentle Voltairean France that a good parish priest, Father Jacques Trouslard, can declare himself “obsédé sectuel” (“sect-obsessed”) and receive in 2002 the Legion of Honour in homage to his combat against the cults.[13] Blessed are the “obsédés sectuels”, the Legion of Honour is promised to them!

Is it State laïcité that drives the children of Descartes mad? Certainly, a certain French laïcisme, triumphant under Mitterrand after 1981, found in the cults a choice target, particularly Reverend Moon’s movement. In the 25 years that followed, there were 4 parliamentary commissions on the cults, and a list of 172 dangerous cults was even published by Parliament in 1996. In 1997, an “Interministerial Mission for the Fight against the Cults” came into being. These French exceptions have no equivalent in the other democratic States. According to Jean Baubérot, a specialist in laïcité, “This allows one to advance the hypothesis that the different social treatment of the cults in France, compared with the great majority of democratic countries, may be linked to the dominant overall functioning of French-style laïcité.”[14]

But State laïcité does not explain everything. It plays on a permeable French collective unconscious, on an inflammable public opinion with archaic foundations. During the period of “l’Empire Moon”, Jean-François Boyer conjures up a whole imaginary that pleases the French and would also seduce the Russian public, where the book would be a best-seller.

2.1 Fascinated by his subject

The book constitutes a turning point in the literature on Moonism. Massimo Introvigne, known for his concern to present the new religious movements with neutrality, is not tender with Boyer. Speaking of the literature that attacks the Unification Church, Introvigne specifies: “The most typical example of this genre of literature is doubtless L’Empire Moon. The author seems not, or very little, interested in the religious aspect of the phenomenon, about which he says a few enormities. He appears solely concerned by the anticommunist activities of the Unification Church and by the list of people who cooperate, even very distantly, with unificationism.”[15]

Introvigne’s judgement may seem unjust. Boyer conducted an international enquiry, had extensive contacts with the members of the Church, which is exceedingly rare among those who write, and became genuinely passionate about his subject. It was the enquiry of his life, which earned him an international renown. Boyer was not motivated by a brutal hostility. But he was too fascinated by his subject, and his book shows it.

Let us begin by seeing what is credible in Boyer’s thesis. L’Empire Moon appears in 1986, the year Pierre Ceyrac is elected, at the age of 40, deputy in the National Assembly, 20 years after the arrival of Reiner Vincenz, the very first Moonist missionary in France. Ceyrac is often cited in Boyer’s book. The French Moonist movement, despite the intense harassment it has been subjected to since Mitterrand’s arrival in power, sends one of its own to Parliament. He would later be a European deputy, then a departmental councillor of the Nord. In the 1980s, Moon is imprisoned in the United States, but his daily, the Washington Times, wins respect in the media world. Out of prison, Moon is acclaimed by more than 1,800 American pastors, and made doctor honoris causa of Latin American universities. He has a seminar held at the Hotel Intercontinental in Geneva on the end of the Soviet Empire. This is 1985, in the middle of triumphant perestroika, and few Sovietologists envisage the coming end of the “evil empire”. Five years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in April 1990, Moon enters Moscow at the head of a delegation of 1,000 personalities from all over the world; many former heads of State have made the journey. The meeting with Gorbachev would be followed by a series of seminars in which tens of thousands of Russian students would take part. Very few would join the Unification Church. But many would defend the parliament and the young Russian democracy during the putsch of August 1991. The collapse prophesied in 1985 had come to pass. Written in 1986, L’Empire Moon overestimates the real means of Reverend Moon. But it has the very great fault of underestimating the ground swell of which Moon is the most emblematic figure and which would engulf the Soviet empire. Boyer’s whole problem is to exaggerate the features of the prophet while minimising the content of his prophecy. Later, Boyer thought fit to say that with the end of communism, “Moonism” no longer had any reason to exist, precisely because he never took the trouble to study the totality of its teaching.

Be that as it may, L’Empire Moon reads like a documented enquiry into a structured international movement, endowed with a powerful network of influence and substantial means, and which aims at power. This first-level reading does not explain why this book was written in France and exercised such fascination there.

Another reading, at the second level, favours the hypothesis of mimicry. Boyer is carried away by his quasi-obsessional fascination for the object of his study. Never again would his career offer him such a subject, he would be orphaned by it. He seems to have put a great deal of himself into it and projected his personal fantasies.

The book often crosses the ethical limits of investigative journalism and turns detective. Starting from murky and often subversive methods, it is easy for him to project a disquieting aura onto the object of his study. He is to the Empire Moon what the deprogrammers are to “la secte Moon”: always a little police idea in the head, alas. Thus, one of the theses of “l’Empire Moon” is that this empire carries out an occult and sly work of infiltrating society, advancing masked. One may of course adhere to this content. Where prudence is called for is in the methods chosen by the author: to unpack all these revelations about L’Empire Moon, Boyer did not hesitate to infiltrate a spy who feigned conversion and therefore lied about his identity and his true intentions. Boyer also resorts abundantly to telephone taps complaisantly relayed by the police. He acts thus while doing everything to cajole and inspire confidence in the members of the Church, and to give pledges of his sincerity. The constant feeling of a double game is off-putting.

2.2 The Moon Empire and the Mitterrand Empire

Fascinated by the image he forms of the movement, Boyer piles it on and prefers to ignore all sorts of Moonist activities that do not fit his thesis. The fantasy of L’Empire Moon can thus only function in a French society accustomed to opacity, to anonymous denunciations, to the double game, to “film noir”, to a taste for dirty tricks, where the general public accepts a certain skulduggery in power relations. It remains to grasp the function of such a work in the French society of the time. We have seen how the French society of the 70s had been permeable to the fabulous myth of “la secte Moon”. To set the witch-hunt against heresy racing, it had sufficed to bring together the ADFI tribe, the Ouest-France tom-tom and the tribe’s priest.

These actors no longer exist in the 80s. The French Moonists pass from a communal and monastic life to long-term work to accomplish their family ideal. Their preoccupations are to find work, housing, and to raise their children, generally numerous. Henceforth the unificationists would invest themselves greatly in their family success. Sociologically, the movement is no longer the same and tends towards the model that already exists in Korea: a church gathered around its pastors, where the faithful pay a tithe and diffuse an influence in their neighbourhood. Many have been reconciled with their parents, who are no longer “clients” of the ADFI. As for the clergy in general, it recoils from ideas of “mental manipulation”. Abbé Trouslard, the “obsédé sectuel”, is an exception.

But the Moonophobia injected in high doses into French society has left a mental trace there. The country is in withdrawal from that sensationalism which is now part of its psychic landscape. The success of L’Empire Moon can be read as an answer to that lack, on the one hand; on the other, as a mirror of Mitterrandian France. Under Giscardian France, several actors of civil society had driven adhesion to the mythology of “la secte Moon”. Once these actors were forgotten, and with society still in withdrawal, the Mitterrandian State monopolises the cult-hunting drive. The cult obsession of this State intrigues. The 14 years of Mitterrandism are of course a continuation of the political game proper to the French Republic. At the margin, there is also a whole crowd of sorcerer’s apprentices of “changing life” for whom 10 May 1981 is “the frontier that separates night from light”[16]. This is the hour of social experimentation in which the new socialist clergy would lose its soul and lose the faith. The symptoms of this decay would include an art of controlling money, power and persons which is to politics what heresy is to religious orthodoxy. The corruption of power under the mitterrandie refers back almost to the typology of cultic power. The fantasy of the Moon Empire, mirror of the Mitterrand Empire, as well as its ritual scapegoat? Even if Boyer did not write with that intention, his book played that role on the sociological plane.

The 1980s come at a bad time for the social-messianism of the common programme. It is carried to power by Mitterrand, a man often suspected of imposture by his own camp; but this time the imposture worked. From a power at odds with the wind of history would come a dérive sectaire.

The 1980s see the emergence of moral figures standing up against the totalitarianism that still intimidated many democracies. Pope John Paul II, Václav Havel, Lech Wałęsa, and others make oppression retreat in Europe. The faith of the Afghans tames the Soviets. Many resisters of the shadows who knew prison, exclusion, banishment would finally take power. Now Moon is in that camp, as he was formerly in the fight against Japanese fascism; several of his missionaries clandestinely risked their lives in Eastern Europe, one of them perished in the Czechoslovak jails, the unificationist film-maker Lee Shapiro was killed by the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1987. In Tanzania, a Japanese missionary was assassinated by the political police. Boyer could have seen that Reverend Moon’s combat partook of the same fundamentally liberating logic.

In the same 1980s, a president accedes to power in France with a common programme that preaches rupture with capitalism, and undertakes his campaign of nationalisations as soon as he is elected. Many nationalised companies would later be at the heart of financial scandals without precedent under the 5th Republic. For several years, the French government governs with four communist ministers, even as the last Marxist-Leninist regimes to come to power in 1975 distinguished themselves by horrors rarely seen in human history. The great affair of 1984 would be the bitter fight against private schooling, finally lost, which empties the ideology of the common programme of meaning. The previous year, Alain Vivien had published a report on the cults in France, the beginning of a long war of the French State against religious minorities. Yet the 80s signal the powerful return of the religious in the art of steering history: Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Lech Wałęsa.

Curiously, there exists a curious country where the president has himself called “God” or “Tonton”, has himself photographed with his courtiers on the pilgrimage of Solutré every year at Pentecost, and organises around himself a network of swooning Mitterrand-worshippers. France is under influence. The president is re-elected in 1988 with a “Génération Mitterrand” poster in which a baby gives its hand to the old monarch, of whom only a few fingers are visible. An involuntary parody of the creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, an allegory of a power at once senilising and infantilising, the poster reminds us of the real state of France at the time of “l’Empire Moon”: a country adrift, with its Irishmen of Vincennes, its false Turenge spouses sinking the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, its telephone taps to protect the president’s daughter. A scenario unimaginable in any democracy, but which stupefies the country for 14 years. And it is this power that wanted to bring down Moonism in France.

A little-known clue shows the scale of the phenomenon of mimicry. On 8 June 1982, a search takes place at 6 am at the headquarters of the AUCM, 18 rue Friant. Several sympathising university professors also receive early-morning visits. What are the forces of order looking for? Weapons, drugs. Who put them on the trail? Two deprogrammers, one of them a former member of the movement, Martin Faiers. In March 1982, the two acolytes had held Claire Chateau captive in a villa in the Doubs. On the prosecutor’s orders, the police would free the young Moonist. Faiers risks the assizes, but he then confides to the investigating judge that Claire was abducted for her own good and that the police will realise it by searching the cult’s premises. Nothing, of course, would be found. In the months that followed, the AUCM, harassed by a ruinous tax trial, leaves its headquarters at 18 rue Friant.

Now in 1985, a great affair of the first seven-year term holds the press spellbound for weeks: the Carrefour du Développement affair, linked to the ministry of cooperation: Yves Challier, chief of staff of the then minister, would be accused of having embezzled 27 million francs between 1984 and 1986 from the ministry’s coffers, with the help of forgery of public documents and breach of trust. Certainly, the sin of the Carrefour appears venial compared with far heavier financial scandals touching the Mitterrandian power. But he who steals an egg steals an ox, and fraud is one of the most frequent clues of a “dérive sectaire”. Now the sin was committed at a curious address in Paris: 18 rue Friant. The venal development company had set itself up in the very place the police had searched, looking for innocents, in 1982.

The Irishmen of Vincennes, the presidential wiretaps, the State crime against Greenpeace reveal a pronounced taste for parallel power, a drift of the public thing towards an oligarchic, brutal, cynical power, where men of the shadows devote themselves to the prince in order to harm others. The enslavement of souls in base tasks to protect a caste indicates a profound rupture with political orthodoxy and a pronounced taste for imposture.

The monarch’s twilight leads the weakest souls of the regime, the most dependent on the guru, towards death. Mitterrand finally gives the pathetic Bérégovoy the power he burned for, the Prime Minister’s interlude would be a descent into hell concluded by a suicide; the chagrin of no longer being loved by the prince seems to have played a fatal role. Another death bloodies the parallel alleys of “l’Empire Mitterrand”. François de Grossouvre, quintessence of the Mitterrandian courtier chilled by the manipulative indifference of his idol, was found dead in the very Palace of the ageing “God”, his .357 magnum in his hand. Suicide or assassination, no matter, the heart had been spurned, the brain was carried off: a man of the shadows dead of and for “l’Empire Mitterrand”.

That was in 1994. Many of those who then lived for “l’Empire Moon” celebrated that year, with joy and solemnity, the 40th anniversary of a movement ceaselessly persecuted since its foundation in 1954, and many of whose adversaries lapsed into imposture.

[1] Alain Woodrow, “Les Nouvelles Sectes”, éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1977, back cover

[2] “La lutte contre les sectes a démarré à Rennes”, http://prevensectes.com/moon32.htm

[3] In “Bulles” of the first quarter of 1992, to the question “why this name ADFI?” she replies: “The one that was chosen did not please us all that much: the family was rather ‘retro’ at the time. But it was true that each departure to the AUCM had been a family drama, and that the individuals in question passed under the hold of a force that deprived them of all personal liberty, of all critical spirit, at least with regard to that decision. So, ADFI it was.”

[4] On the origins of the ADFI, one may read the detailed testimony of Madame Claire Champollion at http://prevensectes.com/moon17.htm

[5] Moon ou Jésus, 1977, Le Dossier Moon, 1983

[6] No. 1344 of 1 March 1975

[7] http://prevensectes.com/moon17.htm

[8] Paris-Match 1392, 31 January 1976

[9] Alain Woodrow, op. cit. p. 108

[10] Project MK-ULTRA was the name of this project

[11] Film by John Frankenheimer, 1962, with Frank Sinatra, Janet Leigh, Laurence Harvey

[12] Massimo Introvigne, Dick Anthony, Le lavage de cerveau, mythe ou réalité ?

[13] Pourfendeur de sectes, Grégoire Amir-Tahmasseb - L’Union, Sunday 30 March 2003

[14] Jean Baubérot, during a lecture at the MIVILUDES, early 2004

[15] Moon et l’Église de l’Unification, CESNUR, 1996, pp. 19-20

[16] Jack Lang, National Assembly, 17 November 1985

The Media Treatment of the “Cults”

The recent example of a France 2 programme

“Ça se discute”, 19 September 2007

by Anne Morelli, deputy director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Religions and Secularism at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (CIERL-ULB)

It is more than ten years since Serge Halimi 1, and before him Pierre Bourdieu 2, warned us: French television is a counter-model of free and balanced information. It presents only conventional points of view, in harmony with the positions of the powers that be, and grants no space to dissidents, whom it refuses to invite or whom it censors on the set.

But you know Alphonse Daudet’s tale “Monsieur Seguin’s goat”. The little goat knows very well that all those who went up the mountain before her got devoured by the wolf, but she means to face him all the same. She trusts in her sharp little horns…

Like Monsieur Seguin’s goat, I thought myself sufficiently hardened to the media not to be trapped by an invitation from France 2. I am an old regular of the debates on RTL and of programmes on Belgian television (RTBF and VRT). I am invited there either as an “expert” (in historical or religious matters) or as a representative of secularism. I am always treated there with respect: the debate can be lively, as is sometimes the case with religious representatives, but “Controverse”, for example, is recorded at RTL in real time, most often live, and no cuts are made to it.

My only French experience (the much-missed programme “Arrêt sur images”) had seemed to me proper, and so I lent an attentive ear to the invitation made to me by France 2. A charming assistant asked me to take part in a programme of which I knew nothing and which she presented to me as an adversarial debate on the new religious movements. It was Jean-Luc Delarue’s “Ça se discute”.

The young assistant asked to receive and read my books on the subject and gave me a fair summary of them, which was, she said, to serve as a basis for the construction of the programme. She promised me they would be presented in the course of the programme.

A little worried by what I was told about Delarue, I asked to receive assurances about the serious character of the contribution I would make to the programme and about the genuinely adversarial character of the debate. I was answered firmly that victims of the “cult hunt” were invited to come and speak as much as victims of “cults”. Reassured, I agree to take part in the programme, whose date is set for 5 September.

Two days before that date, the assistant calls me back: the programme’s title has changed and incorporates the pejorative word “guru”, and moreover it will not take place live. The programme’s content must be supervised by the channel’s authorities, it will be pre-recorded and edited. Furthermore, I am informed of a very strange instruction: to avoid any publicity (sic) for one or another “cult”, I am requested not to pronounce the name of any of them!

I had thought of drawing a parallel between the equally absurd or reasonable character of Raëlian and Christian beliefs, but I am flabbergasted at having to transform “Raël” into “Tralalala”. To my question whether I could nevertheless cite the Carthusians, the assistant, not scenting my trap, answers innocently that “for them, obviously, there is no problem”!

The recording being earlier in the day than the live broadcast initially planned, and thesis defences not allowing me to leave Brussels earlier, France 2 does not hesitate to send a motorcyclist to the Gare du Nord to take me quickly to its studios. There I discover an unbelievable circus: the “spectators” are in fact docile extras who are warmed up, and among whom the programme’s managers - though it is theoretically open to the public! - are quick to spot people who took at face value the officially free access to the programme but who are unwanted there. One lady, in no way violent, nor dirty, nor aggressive, is thus marked for expulsion. First they try firmly to persuade her to leave the stands. As she cannot bring herself to do so, two heavies lift her up, lay her flat and carry her off, one holding her by the feet, the other by the shoulders! The scene will of course not appear on screen!

Moreover, the Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Combat against the Cults, the MIVILUDES, intervened at the last minute so that the victims of the cult hunt, though duly invited (train ticket and hotel already paid) and present, would not be admitted to testify.

The programme is called “Ça se discute” (“It’s up for discussion”) but in reality no discussion is possible: the “victims of the cults” alone have the floor. They are invited, one by one, to come and testify at very great length to tragic and moving stories that happened to them sometimes more than twenty-five years ago.

A psychotherapist, from the University of Brussels like me, was invited to speak about his practice. Jean-Luc Delarue treats him with aggressive irony and, as soon as he begins his explanations, the presenter interrupts him (twice) to say: “We are not going to stay here all night listening to you”. At the second interruption, this gentleman rises with dignity and leaves the set.

For the representative of the MIVILUDES, by contrast, time is in no way counted, and she alone may intervene throughout the programme and on every subject.

As for me, after a two-hour wait on the periphery of the set (the only basket of dried fruit there bears an insolent label “reserved”, and is reserved for Mr Delarue alone!), I am finally brought on at the end of the programme. Before sitting down on the seat the psychotherapist has just left, I ask Delarue whether he will treat me more politely than his previous guest, but that will barely be the case. Time presses, and when I begin a parallel with “harmful” practices of the great religions, Delarue interrupts me to say: “It seems to me you have quite a problem with the Catholic religion”. His mockeries are automatically relayed by the laughter (recorded or spontaneous?) of the audience.

At the moment when one of the witnesses utters an enormity, I decide to intervene, but… my microphone is switched off. It is totally impossible to discuss on “Ça se discute”. Of my books, of course, there was no question.

I understand why no religious grouping accused of being a “cult” should agree to take part in such parodies of debate. This programme has, alas, obtained in 2000 and 2003 the prize for “best society magazine”.

I myself repent of having innocently fallen into this trap, which revives the anti-cult hysteria and offers no space for discussion.

On the pavement outside the studios, officials of the MIVILUDES congratulate themselves on the excellent result obtained. They have revived the anti-cult anguish and phobia which, in France, secure their strange employment, unknown in most other countries.

People duly invited but prevented from speaking fume about the time they have been made to waste.

The assistant calls back the extras who, yawning, rejoin the recording of the next show.

Crestfallen, I set off to look for a restaurant in Paris that can offer me for 15 euros (that is the maximum I was allotted!) an evening meal with a drink (McDonald’s perhaps?). It will remain for me to get reimbursed, via complicated formalities, the money I advanced for the train and that lavish meal, and above all to meditate on the risks of always wanting to verify everything for oneself, according to the principle of free enquiry that underpins the teaching of my University…

(1) Les nouveaux chiens de garde (1997)

(2) Sur la télévision (1996)

Return to the text

See the video interview with Anne Morelli by the CICNS

See the CICNS clip analysing this programme

Anne Morelli

extracts from the book: “Lettre ouverte à la secte des adversaires des sectes” [Open letter to the cult of the adversaries of cults]

published by éditions Labor, collection Quartier Libre

Anne Morelli took part as an expert in the parliamentary Commission of enquiry on the cults. She is professor of the History of contemporary Christian Churches and of Contemporary Christian Texts at the Institute of the history of religions of the Université libre de Bruxelles.

Throughout this book she establishes a parallel between the “small religious groups” commonly called cults and the great religions. In her childhood she knew numerous religious communities. Three of her mother’s cousins entered different communities (the monastery of the Visitation, the little sisters of the poor and the little sisters of the Assumption).

See the video interview with Anne Morelli by the CICNS

The parallels:

· Words:

“Every word we employ is generally charged with a negative or positive emotion… It is the same with the words ‘religion’ and ‘cult’. The first sounds really serious. Religions are respectable and it is shocking, indeed vulgar, to attack their practices.

By contrast, the word ‘cult’ arouses anguish and disquiet. One forgets that until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Church (with a capital letter, the Catholic Church of course) designated as ‘sect’ everything that was not itself.”

There follows a whole series of words that vary according to whom one is speaking of:

· Work:

“The Guyard report on the cults in France accuses them of ‘diverting the economic circuits’ by recourse to clandestine work… The bill instituting in Belgium a parliamentary commission of enquiry charged with elaborating a policy with a view to fighting the cults (March 1996) considers that the cults recruit people who work like slaves without any protection. … But when one has faith (and I think I have it in the domain of the struggle for equal rights, for example) one does not have the impression of working or of devoting oneself. One does not earn money by one’s action, but one gains something else that is not measurable and yet real… The cults have taken up the traditions in force in the religions, according to which total commitment passes through total devotion. Monastic life is obviously built on this basis.”

· Money:

“One can also bring this base-hierarchy dualism of convents and of ‘cults’ closer to what happens in the Church in general. The priests of the base today often live in scarcely brilliant material conditions in view of those reserved for the prelates… The common rule is rather that religions draw profit from the goods, gifts and work of their members and that the spiritual domain does not long remain sheltered from the commercial domain.”

· Private life, sexuality:

“But I see no fundamental difference between Mme Gabrielle, high priestess of the Ananda group, who imposes the condom, the pill or the coil on her faithful, and Mr Wojtyla, ‘sovereign pontiff’, who forbids them to them. Both, for reasons that seem excellent to them, intervene in the most intimate part of lives, come and rummage in bedside tables and take it upon themselves to choose in the individuals’ place.”

· Brainwashing, indoctrination:

“Can one distinguish ‘true’ conversions from ‘false’ ones, and if so, by what objective elements? One must remember that the apostles were recruited on a simple ‘Come and follow me’. That Saint Paul converted in an instant on the road to Damascus… I believe — personally — that they did not lie in describing themselves as struck by the sudden grace of conversion… The millennial permanence of the religions is due only to this untimely invasion of childish consciousnesses, this permanent violation of their liberty by a forced information, which is proper to all conditioning, but doubtless also to all education.”

· Losing one’s personality:

“The cult, like the charismatic community, the convent, the prison, the hospital, the barracks, the boarding school (and perhaps also certain parties or companies when it is a matter of Disney or McDonald’s!) is one of those total institutions which take, mark, change the name of or number, print into a mould and disguise in order to give the impression of uniformity of bodies and minds. It removes by essence the individual’s personality, who has interest and dignity only as a member of the group. Its rules explain everything and one cannot get out of them. To call them into doubt is already to exclude oneself from them.”

· Having dealings with the courts:

“The parallel with the way the judicial entanglements of the cults are treated is telling. For the cults, an accusation is worth proof and is highly highlighted by the media. If it is a matter of a minister of a recognised religion, the greatest discretion, for the longest possible time, is always in order.”

· “Healthy” life and “unhealthy” life:

“If one is to believe the image maintained in public, another distinctive trait of the ‘cults’ in relation to the religions would be that the former lead to living an ‘unhealthy’ life, contrary to the latter. By ‘unhealthy’, one may in turn and according to the case understand a sexual life too much or not enough regulated, an ‘abnormal’ dietary regime, strange clothing, incomprehensible rites and decorum… a very rigorous discipline that weakens the individual and reduces his critical spirit…

· Intervening in politics:

“As vice-president of the MRAX (Movement against racism, antisemitism and xenophobia), when I think that a forthcoming political decision is going to influence the causes I defend… I write to the political representatives setting out our movement’s point of view; I ask them for a meeting in order to defend this point of view in person; I point out to them the consequences that their vote or their decision may have on the lived experience of those I consider myself to be defending. This set of steps in politics is called by a barbarous term: lobbying… Now this right to influence political decisions is recognised for all… except for the minority religions…”

· Wacky beliefs and serious beliefs:

“All beliefs are by essence of the domain of the irrational, but we consider those we have known for ever serious and ‘normal’ and those we discover today wacky and ‘abnormal’. It is certainly not on the terrain of beliefs that we can objectively establish the frontier one would like to erect between cults and religions.”

· “Harmful” cults and “beneficial” religions:

“The difficulty of defining and of distinguishing the cults is evident. Their practices are similar and their beliefs impossible to classify in terms of rationality.”

so, other criteria: antiquity, number of faithful, “above a certain floor, the cult would accede to the status of religion… If harmfulness is calculated in number of deaths, the Order of the Solar Temple must be considered a poor amateur in relation to the human damage caused simultaneously by the great religions… I think that the cults are still, in matters of ‘harmfulness’, only pale amateurs beside the great multinationals of the religions, whose dead are to be counted in millions. As for knowing which among today’s cults will be dangerous tomorrow, I refuse this type of forecasting, because the evolution of human groups is impossible to predict… Who could have imagined in the first centuries of our era that those persecuted Christians, so likeable in the firmness of their convictions before their torturers, would become, a few centuries later, the driving force of the Inquisition…”

· Should the obligation to persecute the “gullible” be instituted?

“Under the pretext that the naive are abused by scarcely democratic religious leaders whom they obey, to whom they devote themselves, to whom they consecrate their money, their health and sometimes their life, all in the name of ideas that seem absurd to us, must one add to their various alienations an official persecution that would make martyrs of them? … The public authorities thus arrogate to themselves the right, in religious matters, to ‘separate the wheat from the chaff’. To the first would go the subsidies, to the second the legal proceedings…”

· A very powerful lobby: the anti-cult lobby:

“Their methods are everywhere similar: to cast discredit on all religious groups outside the great classic religions and to sow disinformation on the subject. The cult of the adversaries of cults grips the media and the political world quite particularly, but does not neglect the approach to the world of university research either… Another practice of disinformation conducted by the cult of the adversaries of cults is to inflate the figures of the adherents of these minority religions… The anti-cult lobbies also insist on an aspect of the ‘capture of our fine youth’, which scarcely corresponds to the reality we have been able to verify during our field enquiries.”

· The legislative initiatives of the great multinationals of religion against the religious SMEs:

“The religious monopolies, losing ground if not in peril in our regions, have imagined legislative strategies to slow their erosion and prevent the development of their young competitors. The offensive is conducted on the European as much as on the national plane… Unanimously decried by university circles, the report of the French parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults has been the object of a systematic refutation both in its hazardous working methods and in its conclusions.”

· Conclusion:

“Not having found in the course of my research a single objective criterion permitting the cults to be distinguished from the religions, I obviously refuse to take part in this sorting… I plead for openness to the ideas of tomorrow and for tolerance. Tolerance is an inconvenient virtue…”

Information about Anne Morelli at http://www.ulb.ac.be/rech/inventaire/chercheurs/0/CH1160.html

MIVILUDES Descent on the “Moulin des Vallées”

See our video interview with the residents: broadband or low bandwidth (16 minutes)

Read the complaint filed in 2010

The Moulin des Vallées was founded in 1999 in the department of Ille-et-Vilaine in France. It presents itself as an ecumenical monastery, inspired by André Chouraqui, who contributed greatly to building up this place, where one can “find a little silence, a respite, for reflection”. It gathers about 70 qualified health practitioners around the teaching of the philosopher Brother Abel.

“Descent of the MIVILUDES”

On Tuesday 13 October 2009, the residents of the monastery received an unexpected visit, in any case an unsolicited one, which forms part of the French anti-cult policy, that is to say, in the classic manner, beyond the law, the rules of propriety, indeed of journalistic ethics. The letter sent by some of the residents to the Prefect of their department sums up their situation (reproduced with their permission):

The residents’ point of view

Monsieur le Préfet,

We were present at the Ecumenical and Secular Monastery of the Moulin des Vallées on Tuesday 13 October, during the visit of the MIVILUDES, which we experienced as extremely violent, a veritable “descent” as the journalist of “Aujourd’hui en France”, Madame Anne-Cécile Juillet, defined it in her article of Friday 16 October.

Looking back, a feeling of having been taken by the throat, of having been abused, remains. We witnessed, stunned and powerless, this astounding intrusion:

We feel such a procedure as a violation, so brutal was this descent of the MIVILUDES. We were dumbfounded that such procedures should be the rule in the name of the interministerial commission for the fight against dérives sectaires.

We endured an uninterrupted fire of questions, which we made every effort to answer, on the standing alleged by Monsieur Fenech, and we were particularly shocked by the cult-related insinuations he uttered, cutting us off at every moment.

Our answers received not the slightest credit: we were judged and condemned in advance.

Indeed, by a succession of assimilations, insinuations and inaccuracies, our choice of life was denigrated and compared to movements whose principles are in complete opposition to our values.

Why was Monsieur Fenech, who was acting in the capacity of a ministerial officer, accompanied by journalists to conduct an official inquiry?

We thought we had before us genuine investigators, wishing to look more deeply into what is lived in our Monastery, and from this lightning visit we keep the feeling of having been duped, cheated in our good faith.

Here is a succession of facts which seem to fit together marvellously well:

• Tuesday 13 October 09: “Descent” of Monsieur Fenech and his team on the Ecumenical and Secular Monastery of the Moulin des Vallées, following a failed attempt at intrusion into another supposedly cult-related place.
• Thursday 15 October 09: Debate on the infiltration of cults into medicine, at the National Assembly, presented by Madame Picard who, following the surprise law permitting the non-conviction of Scientology, visibly had nothing left “to get her teeth into”.
• Thursday 15 October 09: Visit of a photographer engaged by “Aujourd’hui en France” to take photographs of the place.
• Thursday 15 October 09: Fax sent to the director of the newspaper “Aujourd’hui en France” asking him to submit the article to us before publication; which was refused us.
• Friday 16 October 09: Publication of the article in “Aujourd’hui en France” which assimilates the residents of the Moulin des Vallées to the members of a cult, drawing an insulting parallel with the worrying excesses of Scientology. In this article, the arrangement of the photographs leads to a suggestive negative image: “Brocéliande” - “flying saucer” - “Bearded man” - “caption relating the suicide of a person and implying that it was his supposed membership of our Monastery that was the origin of it”. Which the police investigation refuted. Likewise, the arrangement of the other articles on this double page induces an assimilation of our Monastery to cult movements.

6. Tuesday 17 November 09: Planned television broadcast “Prise Directe”, programmed under the title “Worrying Disappearances”, in which the report filmed during this descent was to be included! It was by calling France 2 that the journalist Céline CRESPY (present with her cameraman at the Monastery on 13 October 2009) informed us of this. We opposed this broadcast by registered letters of 2 November 2009 1.

7. And what next?

Monsieur le Préfet, we ask for your help in understanding how Monsieur Fenech can legally enter a monastery, under cover of a ministerial inquiry, in reality to help journalists make an unauthorised report?

Please accept, Monsieur le Préfet, our respectful salutations.

1 Further information from the Moulin des Vallées: Dispatch of the registered letters to the director general of France 2 between 3 and 5 November. Call from the France 2 journalist on 10 November who, furious, declared at first that “it is a pity you are refusing this airtime because it could have allowed you to defend yourselves” and finally specified to us that “it was pointless to send the registered letters since you were off topic”. Yet, according to the content of the programme which we obtained from France 2, a slot was indeed planned, at the end of the programme, devoted to drawing an amalgam between discussion groups or spiritual communities, so-called cults, and the unexplained disappearance of children.

The New Age as Seen by the French-Language Written Press in Quebec

An essay by Eric FORGUES

Reading digest by the CICNS

“In this book, the author wanted to please the young adult he was at the time when he was living through experiences of spiritual awakening in a world that had not mastered their alphabet. (…) If the press echoed what was then called the new age, it remained an external judge of this movement, which it did not manage to understand and from which it wanted to keep a certain distance (…) The author wrote this work so that the memory of the press’s treatment of the new age phenomenon might be preserved.”

Page 13

“This work has its roots in a feeling I had in the 1980s and 1990s that the press was marked by a bias in its coverage of the new age phenomenon… I wondered how one could thus sweep aside with the back of the hand a phenomenon that touched significant sections of the population. Was it the popular aspect of this phenomenon that so irritated the so-called intellectual point of view?”

Page 20

“Something irritated me in the media’s reaction of resistance to the new age phenomenon. The new age movement called into question a world the media defended. As if a whole world were threatened by what was conveyed in the experiences of personal awakening and spiritual exploration that an ever larger part of the population was living through… I referred to the alienation of a humanity that has built a world outside the link with the divine source in order to account for this closure. The new age announced a world that could compromise the foundations and the materialist values of the present world. At bottom, the media were only expressing this closure of humanity with regard to the divine, and expressing our situation of alienation.”

Page 27

“I place the New Age or new age phenomenon within what I call the renewal of the relationship to the transcendent. (Forgues 2006). The new age phenomenon designates a popular social phenomenon characterised by the renewal of spiritual and health-and-wellbeing practices and beliefs. As several observers have noted, this phenomenon testifies to an individual freedom and expresses itself through syncretisms that can take many forms. In other words, the individuals who give form to this phenomenon borrow elements from various spiritual traditions to compose them into a whole that makes sense for them, at their individual scale… It is composed of individuals who sometimes gather in groups which form and dissolve according to the various spiritual and ideological orientations to which they adhere.”

Page 45

“It seems that Quebec was a propitious land of welcome for the new age. The phenomenon is said to have taken on a greater scale here than elsewhere. This can be explained by the void left by the abandonment of religion in Quebec.”

Page 85

“As in music, new age literature will be presented as a catch-all category.”

Page 86

“The ‘catch-all’ label in fact translates a certain incomprehension, an ignorance, indeed a complete lack of interest on the part of journalists towards this literature.”

Page 99

“Despite this enthusiasm for new age literature, it should be noted that this literature receives little coverage in the press… This testifies to a closure of the press and the intellectual elite towards this literary phenomenon.”

Page 112

“Thus new ideas are a crime against reason. The rise of the new age marks the return to obscurantism and threatens the education system against critical reason. The new age is suspected of infiltrating even the schools, with the tacit consent of the authorities.”

Page 113

“So long as the new age presented itself as a somewhat eccentric spiritual movement, it could arouse certain questions, but when it influences even the education of children, it then constitutes a more serious threat. The tone changes suddenly and this event becomes the pretext for alerting public opinion and proposing active measures of awareness-raising against the new age. Five years later, there are even calls for awareness campaigns against the new religious movements.”

Page 117

“It is curious that a movement whose first aim is personal growth should be asked to defend democratic values. Shortcuts are quickly taken to pass the new age off as antidemocratic, tyrannical, authoritarian and reactionary. Indeed, several observers speak rather of an individualist movement founded on individual freedom in spiritual matters. Certainly, as we shall see further on, some observers will not miss the occasion to link the new age to certain dérives sectaires. Might the new age constitute, in a way, the return of the repressed of modernity and even of the religious tradition? Might it be linked in part to the shadow of a civilisation, a shadow it refuses to see, which it stifles and which returns to haunt it, announcing to it a possibility it does not dare to be? The shadow can also be ‘stifled light. The shadow is not only what a being does not want to be. It is also what it does not dare to be’ (Bauer, 2000: 148).”

Page 148

“Thus one returns to the old landmarks of Judeo-Christian culture, which appears more human compared with the new age. Faced with a freedom in spiritual matters, an institution is valorised which permits hardly any salvation outside the paths it prescribes. In a tone that brooks no appeal, the individualism running through the new age is called into question, with the assertion that the return to oneself characterising the new age is opposed to the concern for the other promoted by the Catholic Church, and that by definition any ideology marking a return towards the self is by definition egocentric. But one may wonder how one can love the other and be in solidarity with him if we are not authorised to love ourselves. How to make a ‘gift of oneself’ if that self carries the wound of not having been loved? If one truly loves the other, why make that love cease as soon as it is a question of oneself? What is this difference in nature between self and other?”

Page 164

“Not only does the definition of cults risk amalgamating groups that are in no way dangerous with dangerous groups, but proceeding to such a definition for the purposes of legal intervention raises questions on the plane of law. Whereas certain elements of the criminal law could have been specified/modified while remaining outside any spiritual consideration, in order to frame interventions in groups, spiritual or otherwise, that give rise to offences, an approach is favoured which harbours a potential for abuse on the plane of law. By entering the domain of beliefs to circumscribe spiritual groups held to be suspect, even before examining the practices of these groups, one risks infringing the right to freedom of belief.”

Page 187

“In fact, as regards the alternative modalities of healing, supposedly the work of charlatans, the official sciences strive less to evaluate their potential scientifically than to condemn them without further examination… This observer thus reminds us that it is first of all the researchers and the research institutions in place that have the material means, and the duty, to verify the validity of health treatments. Before concluding that they are ineffective, their ineffectiveness must first be demonstrated.”

Page 194

“The new age will thus little by little be limited to spiritual beliefs and ideologies. The good elements of the new age withdraw, and the new age comes to designate only the most superficial practices, the most tinged with trickery. The new age then presents itself as a shrinking skin that contracts more and more in one’s hands as the criticisms grow severe.”

Page 201

“If the new age worries the defenders of reason, of science and of the professions that claim them, it also worries the defenders of the faith, notably the representatives of institutions that claim a certain monopoly of truth in this domain… To put it simply, the claim of new age sympathisers to accede directly to the divine, to have personal experience of it and to formulate a knowledge from that experience, calls into question the position the Catholic Church occupies between the faithful and the divine, presenting itself as the obligatory passage for acceding to it.”

Page 227

“It is curious to see that these new spiritual currents are asked to answer political requirements, when their first aim is to answer the requirement of creating meaning and helping people to live their interiority. It seems that different interests are being mixed up, the one proper to life in society and the other proper to individuation. There is a refusal to see that the new age is indeed the product of modernity. It is reduced to practices of manipulation that charlatans are said to exercise on victims on a spiritual quest, whereas what motivates the sympathisers of the new age is the capacity to define their beliefs from their freely lived experience. The new age expresses itself through this quest and this demand for freedom in matters of spirituality. The sympathisers reject every form of authoritarianism in spiritual matters. Which does not mean that it is safe from certain abuses of which the newspapers have made a feast.”

Page 245

“As we have observed, a theme that returns often with the new age is the idea that this movement infiltrates several sectors of society, making the phenomenon still more suspect, indeed threatening.”

Page 246

“The tone is that of a fight waged by the partisans of reason and of established practices in matters of health and spirituality against the new age. The press becomes an instrument of that fight. Thus the new age, this ‘particularly virulent plague in Quebec’ or this ‘wind of foolishness and irrationality’, must be dammed up, all the more so as it is said to be infiltrating the highest circles of politics. As if Quebec society were being pulled at every level by a struggle between the partisans and the adversaries of the new age. The journalist underlines that the new age is spreading in ‘deep Quebec’, thus expressing an elite’s need to supervise the popular masses, who are on the way to sinking into foolishness and irrationality. The change of political party gives rise to a repositioning of the Quebec government with regard to practices of new age inspiration.”

Page 273

“Practices of personal awakening are suspect, while humanitarian practices are in favour. This allows us to take the measure of what separates the journalists of the written press from the readership. If the journalists are in phase with a certain readership, their point of view expresses a real gap with a whole section of the readership. We may ask ourselves to what extent the written press has alienated that readership by offering a single point of view on the new age and neglecting to express also the point of view of its readership sympathetic to the new age.”

Page 275

“The written press’s coverage of the new age phenomenon manifests an evident resistance to understanding this phenomenon from the inside and to accepting its existence. The journalists and observers remain outside this phenomenon, resisting it and retaining only its most negative or caricatural traits. We come out of this press review with a rather worrying idea of the new age.”

Page 278

“The fact remains that it is difficult to assert that the new age benefited in Quebec from a written press favourable to it. Quite the contrary, the written press’s coverage of this phenomenon demonstrates well the gap that exists between a significant section of the population, which is renewing the relationship to the transcendent in several ways, and the press, which defends the values of modernity (and of reason) and of tradition (religious tradition in particular). In short, the new age is thus opposed as much to what represents modernity as to tradition. The media make themselves the spokesmen of three quarters of society (the traditionals and the moderns) and forget a quarter of the population, who are in fact the cultural creatives and who are said to be the bearers of a new culture.”

A researcher at the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities, Eric Forgues obtained his doctorate in sociology at the Université de Montréal. His thesis dealt with the role of the State in the economic development of francophones in Quebec.

Since 1998 he has conducted research at the Université de Moncton on community development, health and well-being, and regional and sustainable development. He has taught sociology and environmental studies at the Université de Moncton. He has also been an innovation officer at the Université de Moncton’s Innovation Support Office. http://www.umoncton.ca/icrml/chercheurs_reguliers.html

Compulsory Schooling

Chronology of the assassination of the right to freedom of instruction

by Valérie Dole, member of CICNS

The purpose of this article is to inform about the methodical putting in place of a system of children’s education which imposes on every French person a single manner of dispensing instruction to them. The alternatives enjoyed by our contemporaries in Europe, America and a great part of Asia are today in France more and more difficult of access, by reason of constraining administrative procedures established to discourage any holistic and spiritual vision of the world, reflection of the diversity of human experience.

In December 1998, the National Assembly met in session to debate a bill of M. Jean-Pierre Brard, adopted unanimously by the Senate, tending to reinforce the control of compulsory schooling. The motive invoked at the outset was to “protect children against dogmatic manipulations” by reducing the liberty of the members of a spiritual movement to educate their children according to their convictions. We see in what follows that the implementation goes far beyond the displayed intention, as this extract from the Official Bulletin of National Education of 20 May 1999 shows: “Instruction in the family, which is subject to a declaratory regime, must be of an exceptional character, answering in particular to the cases of sick or disabled children or to certain particular situations.” … Or “how to pass unnoticed from the scapegoat to the whole flock”.

You will find the complete text of this session at:

http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/cri/leg11/html/19990115.asp

We reproduce here only the most illuminating passages.

The law no. 98-1165 of 18 December 1998 tending to reinforce the control of compulsory schooling was adopted unanimously by the National Assembly.

National Assembly OFFICIAL ANALYTIC RECORD

Ordinary session of 1998-1999 - 45th day of sitting, 115th sitting

1st SITTING OF THURSDAY 10 DECEMBER 1998

M. Patrick Leroy

At least 6,000 children from six to sixteen years old are said today to be removed from the school of the Republic and subjected to the hold of cults. Besides the menaces weighing on their physical and mental health, these children are victims of cult propaganda and subjected to a dogmatic manipulation under cover of original educational programmes. They risk being marginalised and regimented, for they do not yet possess the critical spirit that would allow them to preserve their freedom of conscience.

(…) This text concerns solely the grave problem of children educated by the cults. It is in effect impossible to target the cult organisations explicitly, for they have no precise legal definition. Nor is it a matter of opening a more general debate on compulsory schooling.

The Senate’s text provides that the control of compulsory schooling will first of all be reinforced by making stricter the modalities of the declaration that parents who choose to instruct their child in the family must make. This declaration must henceforth be made each year, at each change of domicile and also when a child is withdrawn from an educational establishment during the year.

Children instructed in the family will also be subjected, from the first year and at least once a year, to a control by the academic authority to verify that their right to instruction is respected. Moreover, the mayors will conduct every two years a social inquiry into the conditions of the instruction dispensed in the family. In case of negative conclusions and at the end of an adversarial procedure, the parents will be put on notice to enrol their child in the educational establishment of their choice.

(…) It would not do, however, for the deadlines fixed to be too long, so as not to delay the triggering of judicial action when it is necessary.

Finally, the text adopted by the Senate provides for hardening the criminal sanctions (…) Also provided is the possibility of engaging the criminal liability of legal persons, that is to say of the cult organisations supporting such teaching.

This text will mark an important stage in the fight against the cults. (…) But we must move fast, for the future of thousands of children is at stake. That is why the commission asks you to adopt this text without modification.

The school of the Republic must be privileged to promote the autonomy of the child, the flourishing of his personality and his opening onto the outside world. It alone makes it possible to transmit the spirit of the Enlightenment in the face of the obscurantism of the cults.

Mme Ségolène Royal, minister delegate in charge of school education -

(…) the debate which is opening goes beyond partisan divides; it concerns, in effect, the protection of all our children against cult regimentation. And, an exceptional fact, if the Assembly adopts this bill in terms identical to those of the Senate, the text will be immediately applicable.

(…) Each year, several thousand children are deprived of the elementary right to instruction by the failure of the control mechanisms.

Very often (…) in the name of instruction in the family, children are maintained in a state of ignorance and lack of culture, or worse still, regimented, alienated, ill-treated. Gurus assert the necessity of awakening the child to pleasures the better to abuse him; some deprive them of their autonomy the better to enslave them, and others, finally, do not hesitate to sacrifice their lives. In fundamentalist or obscurantist milieux, the schooling of girls is also opposed.

It is necessary to ensure instruction as a priority within educational establishments. In effect, the school is the crucible of citizenship.

The schooling of children within institutions teaching them that citizens recognise the authority of the laws of the Republic, and not the absolute power of an individual, a group or a caste, and teaching them respect for differences and the sense of equality, is a fundamental right of the human person.

(…) As soon as a child reaches the age of 6, the family must enrol him in an educational establishment or explain to the mayor and the academy inspector why he is not.

(…) The academy inspector, who will have the mayor’s report, must once a year, within three months of the start of the school year, verify that the teaching provided does conform to the child’s right to instruction, defined in article one.

The control may be carried out, notably but not exclusively, at the domicile of the child’s parents. That will make it possible to summon the minor to a place other than his domicile, where he will be much freer to express himself.

In the absence of sufficient measures, the academy inspector may refer the matter to the public prosecutor on the basis of the offence of endangering minors, exposing the persons responsible for the child who have refused to enrol him in an educational establishment to a penalty of six months’ imprisonment and a 50,000-franc fine.

(…) The national representation, if it adopts this bill, can count on me to take very rapidly the necessary implementing texts, notably to give the academy inspectors the means to enforce these fundamental rights

M. Jean-Pierre Brard

(…) Things have certainly changed in the matter of cults. I no longer see, in one of the most prestigious galleries of our assembly where she had managed to gain entry, Mme Gounord, the “she-guru” of Scientology.

It took the death of a 29-month-old baby in a “community” of the Hautes-Pyrénées, following malnutrition and lack of care, to pose again the problem of the situation of children living within the cults.

Experience proves that the school can contribute to protecting children against the cults. But there is in France only an obligation of instruction and not an obligation of school attendance.

Children can therefore be instructed in a family belonging to a cult.

Moreover, the cult organisations rely on the facilities offered by our legislation to open non-contracted schools, which favours the establishment on our soil of all sorts of cult communities.

Children born in a cult, or brought there by their parents, are completely cut off from the outside world and first of all from the school system.

On 29 June last at the Senate, the rapporteur, Jean-Claude Carle, spoke of 1,000 children instructed in families belonging to cults and 3,600 instructed in private establishments said to maintain links with cults, that is, 4,600 children in all.

Evidently, many children escape these statistics for want of having been declared at the town hall by their parents.

Moreover, hundreds of children are enrolled at the national centre for distance learning for reasons said to be religious, but which in fact sometimes arise from cult behaviour.

Finally, at least 30,000 to 40,000 children of families that are members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, schooled in establishments of National Education, receive a double schooling in the all too famous “Kingdom Halls”.

The child ought to be able to benefit from an education allowing him to become a full member of society. The Jehovah’s Witnesses practise on the contrary a confinement which translates into numerous prohibitions, such as taking part in any association whatever, being a class delegate or taking part in a vote, or again celebrating birthdays and holidays.

That harms the flourishing of the children, which implies openness to the world.

Long is the list of the cults whose children are the first victims.

The children subjected to these groups in rupture with the social and school environment are regimented and placed under the control not of their natural parents, but of a guru. Thus, Mme Narootai Salve, alias Sri Mataji, the “she-guru” of the Sahaja Yoga cult, says to mothers: “You must not attach yourselves to your child: that is my work. These children are mine, not yours. Too much attachment to children is a sign of degradation”.

The pseudo-reverend Moon says as much: “Every mother should consider her child as her enemy”.

Moreover, many testimonies report insufficient medical follow-up, sleep deprivation, irregular meals, and attacks on physical integrity.

At the cult of the Citadelle, the children are subjected to very frugal food, with repetitive fasts.

Among the devotees of Krishna, under the pretext of a vegetarian diet, the children are victims of a deficient diet.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, despite the genial air of their preachers, have a criminal attitude when they refuse blood transfusion, even if the life of their children is in danger.

Children are beaten in the cult “Tabitha’s Place”; in that of the “Citadelle” they are struck with a belt to drive out demons, or again among the “Children of God”.

Rapes have been perpetrated on minors in the Mandarom cult and among the Raelians. Children were subjected to the practice of prostitution in the cult of the Children of God. Finally, the crime of incest has been observed among Jehovah’s Witnesses. Three of its members, accused of non-denunciation of this crime, benefited from favourable treatment by the courts, since they were sentenced to only three months’ suspended prison.

It was therefore becoming urgent to equip ourselves with more effective tools to improve the protection of minors.

The reinforcement of the control of the obligation of instruction in conformity with the values of the Republic constitutes a first concrete step in this fight against the liberticidal hold of the cults (Applause on all benches).

M. Bourg-Broc - This bill, presented in the Senate by the opposition, was adopted there unanimously, and it is placed on our agenda by the communist group: it is the symbol of an intelligent consensus of the national representation to fight against the cult phenomenon and, more precisely, against the regimentation of the youngest, who have no means of resisting or escaping.

The provisions planned will allow the public authorities to grasp better the number of children concerned and will give them good tools. Even beyond the problem of the cults, they will make it possible to control better the level of home education for the disabled, itinerants and the other children raised by their families. This aspect is important at a time when the development of the new technologies will doubtless multiply the number of pupils studying at home.

If this text on the whole answers the expectation of the RPR group, I nevertheless wonder how, practically, the mayors and the academy inspectors are going to apply it. The law already obliges families who want to instruct their child themselves to declare it at the town hall when the child reaches the age of 6, and the mayor is supposed to order an inquiry at 8, 10 and 12 years. Every mayor here knows that nothing of the kind happens. At Châlons-en-Champagne, the town of which I am mayor, we have recorded only two declarations in ten years and we have not ordered the slightest inquiry.

There is no real means of verifying that all parents make the declaration imposed by law. The obligation of control extending to collège age, would it not have been more judicious to entrust it to the prefect?

The academy inspectors must control both the acquisition of knowledge and the development of the personality of children raised in families and in non-contracted establishments. How are they going to carry out these annual controls? By what norms is the development of the personality to be verified?

One must see clearly that this is no longer an obligation of means, but an obligation of result: now, as concerns the basic skills - reading, writing, counting -, public and private teaching do not guarantee that result: the number of pupils entering 6th grade without mastering these skills is estimated at 20%. What will be the consequences of article 1A on these children?

If one considers that there is an obligation of means for public and contracted private teaching and an obligation of result for non-contracted private or family teaching, that is a treatment inequitable to say the least. I would like, Madame the minister, your answer on this point.

(…)

Mme Catherine Picard - It is urgent to protect the thousands of children who, under cover of education in the family, are in fact schooled in cult schools. Jean-Pierre Brard has just described the exactions committed there.

Following the work done by our Senate colleagues, and by the parliamentary study group on the cults, we are going to be able to develop the fight against the abuses of those who, under cover of educational practices, harm the instruction and flourishing of children.

(…) We cannot content ourselves with school requirements dating from the 19th century: knowing how to read, write and count. That does not make it possible to remove several thousand children from fundamentalisms, from violence, from voluntary stupefaction and from regimentation.

(…) this text reaffirms that educational establishments provide compulsory instruction as a priority.

Nor is it a matter of sanctioning the few hundred parents who make the choice of educating their children themselves, provided they do so in the real interest of the latter: the public authorities have the duty to make sure of it.

(…) in certain cases, recourse to correspondence teaching serves to remove children from compulsory schooling. It would be particularly useful to fix the criteria justifying recourse to distance teaching and to control, for example, the invocation of “school phobia” on a simple medical certificate. We shall have to be vigilant, for the cults are very prompt to use every gap in the control.

(…) By involving the municipal authorities for the general follow-up of the family and the inspection corps of National Education for the pedagogical control, we are going to build an effective system. By requiring that the parents’ declaration and the controls be renewed each year, we shall prevent many children from being left in a state of educational abandonment, and by extending the controls to non-contracted establishments - which represent no more than 5% of private establishments -, we shall limit the “swindles” of which too-credulous parents are victims, all the more so as the sanctions provided are dissuasive.

Our combat against the cults is founded on the idea that the State, without substituting itself for the individual in his choices of life, must guarantee to the child that he will be able to make them freely. It is therefore in strict respect of laïcité that our work as legislators is placed.

M. Christian Kert

(…) The school is the place where the child discovers the world and learns citizenship; instruction in the family, whether cult-related or not, must remain an exception. In this regard, certain clarifications will have to be brought.

It was not possible to keep to more flexible arrangements which, for the most part, we have tried without success. It appears in particular that the fact of suspending the payment of family allowances not only is not effective, but gives families the feeling of being freed from any constraint towards society.

(…) It remains to give proper responsibility to the various actors of the planned apparatus. I do not doubt the capacity of the ministry to give the academy inspectors the means to fulfil their role. On the other hand, I worry about the possibilities the mayors will have of playing theirs, for they already have a multiplicity of missions. Perhaps it would be good, Madame the minister, for you to make contact with the great associations of the mayors of France to sensitise them to this problem.

M. Gilbert Gantier

(…) If the cult phenomenon must be fought because it infringes the dignity of the person and public order, and if children must be preserved from the excesses of adults, nevertheless the controls must not be carried out in contempt of the constitutional requirements of freedom of teaching and freedom of conscience.

Freedom of teaching is a fundamental principle recognised by the laws of the Republic, according to the decision of the Constitutional Council of 23 November 1977. It includes notably respect for the proper character of private establishments. Freedom of conscience, itself also a fundamental principle recognised by the laws of the Republic, extends to religious freedom and to the freedom of philosophical opinions. It is therefore only in case of infringement of public order that sanctions ranging from the closure of classes to six months’ imprisonment and a 50,000-franc fine may be taken.

The fight against phenomena dangerous for the dignity of the person could not endanger the liberties which make the greatness of our Republic. It is only under these reservations that the Démocratie Libérale group will vote for this bill

M. Jean Le Garrec, president of the commission for cultural, family and social affairs

I congratulate myself that this text was adopted unanimously by our commission, its conforming vote making possible its immediate application. I think, Madame the minister, since decrees are doubtless not necessary, that you will very rapidly give instructions to your administration by way of circular.

(…) This work is indispensable, by reason of a risk of contagion it would be wrong to underestimate.

Mme the Minister delegate

I rejoice at the unanimity which has just manifested itself in favour of this bill adopted by the Senate: due to the initiative of a UDF parliamentarian, it was taken up here by the communist group (…) and its discussion was brought to a successful conclusion thanks to the work done by M. Brard and by Mme Picard. Everything therefore leads one to think it will be adopted in conformity, thus becoming immediately applicable - which is exceptional for a text of parliamentary origin.

During the preparatory work and the debate at the Senate, I myself wondered about the role to give the mayors. The possibility had been envisaged of entrusting to the prefects alone the power to trigger an inquiry, after a report by the CCAS, by the DDASS, by a doctor or by a neighbour. We preferred to leave this power to the mayors, insofar as it is at the town hall that enrolments in primary school are made. Moreover, the social services of the municipalities are in a position to hold useful information.

That said, I reassure you: the mayors will not be bound by an obligation of result. They will simply have the possibility of contributing to the lifting of the law of silence. In case of difficulties, the prefect may substitute himself for them, requiring the assistance of the police or the gendarmerie, as has already been done in the Drôme, for example.

(…) The whole of the bill, put to the vote, is adopted unanimously.

Emile d’Albret, member of CICNS, commented thus on this “Apparatus for the fight against the cults put in place within national education”:

“The population of a country, like a child, reacts to supposed danger by a demand for the reinforcement of authority. An old mechanism, or atavistic reflex of “power” to increase its power, a tendency embodied strongly and sometimes obsessively by certain leaders to reinforce the control of individuals, systematically profits from these “states of emergency”.

For example, the reinforcement of controls on non-contracted teaching was done under the pretext of urgency in the face of cult problems. However, one cannot ignore that it answers the much older desire of some, and a hegemonic policy of republican National Education.

The “cult phenomenon” could be used as an ideal tool for passing from liberties to restrictions. It is totally subjective and can be applied to any domain of society. The opening of an important breach in the liberties of associations, by instituting the possibility of dissolving a legal person for the doings of one of the individuals composing it (the About-Picard law), could be an example of this.

These mechanisms are not unknown, of course, to those who, in the governing bodies of the State and the world, pursue objectives more personal than humanist.”

This law was followed by a decree no. 99-224 of 23 March 1999, which defines the content of the knowledge required of children instructed in the family or in non-contracted private educational establishments.

Most of the provisions of the laws of 28 March 1882 and 18 December 1998 are now codified in the Education Code (legislative part).

The code can be consulted at http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/.

The provisions concerning instruction in the family are codified in articles L. 131-1 to L. 131-12, which also refer to the following article L. 122-1:

“The child’s right to instruction has as its object to guarantee him, on the one hand, the acquisition of the fundamental instruments of knowledge, basic knowledge, the elements of general culture and, according to choices made, professional and technical training and, on the other hand, the education allowing him to develop his personality, to raise his level of initial and continuing training, to insert himself into social and professional life and to exercise his citizenship. This compulsory instruction is provided as a priority in educational establishments.”

These new directives were the subject of a special issue number 3 of the Official Bulletin of National Education, dated 20 May 1999 and entitled: Reinforcement of the control of compulsory schooling, which was addressed to the rectors of academies; to the department prefects; to the academy inspectors, directors of the departmental services of national education; to the members of the inspection corps; to heads of establishments; to school directors.

See the complete text at http://www.education.gouv.fr/bo/1999/hs3/som.htm

To consult also:

http://ecolesdifferentes.free.fr/APPELCOOP.html

A page of a website which sets out the remedies against National Education: “If you receive a formal notice to school your child in a public or private establishment, there exist against this injunction three types of legal remedy which must be exercised within a period of two months.”

http://cise.asso.free.fr/pages/page%20question%20recours.htm

“National Education, crucible of the pensée unique”

pensee-unique.htm

“…all the services of the State have been informed that educational alternatives - and in particular instruction in the family - form part of the ‘indicators of cult behaviour’. From then on, families who want to avail themselves of the freedom of instruction - though guaranteed by more than ten international texts ratified by France - must accept undergoing a thorough social inquiry, ordered by the Mayor at their domicile and renewed every two years. An official directive even specifies that schooling in the family ‘must be of an exceptional character’, which empties of its meaning the very existence of a liberty.”

Read also the article by the president of “créer son école”

Valérie Dole is a member of CICNS. An independent journalist, she has studied the New Spiritualities since 1977. Press contact at CICNS. Cicns9@aol.com

Parenthood, Convictions and Children’s Rights in the MIVILUDES 2009 Report

By CICNS

In this section of its report, the MIVILUDES proposes to study the case law relating to parenthood when disputes arise between parents holding convictions: “It is when a conflict arises between them, either precisely on the question of the transmission of convictions and notably on religious practice, or in the more general framework of a conflict linked to separation, that the judge is called upon to set new bounds to the right of the parents, and that he is then led to examine, at the request of one or both parents, this particular right linked to the exercise of parental authority”.

Taking into consideration the context of the anti-cult fight is indispensable for appreciating this case law, particularly in France.

The first aspect of this context concerns the climate of suspicion generated around the spiritual minorities (or, more generally, the groups qualified as “cults”). Unless one believes that magistrates are impervious to social pressure, it is obvious that the recurrent psychosis fed around the “cults” influences the statements of magistrates and the decisions of judges. If it is granted that many of them will know how to extract themselves from this political and media pressure, the fact remains that many others will be won over by the dominant thinking on the subject. It is particularly significant that, in almost all the extracts from judicial reasoning offered by the MIVILUDES, the groups concerned are designated as “cults”. Yet the magistrates cannot be unaware that this term has no legal meaning, that its sociological definition (in the sense of Max Weber notably) is obsolete, but that this term has nevertheless acquired an extremely pejorative connotation, since it is synonymous with criminal group in the public mind, thanks notably to the persevering action of the MILS and then the MIVILUDES to discredit the spiritual minorities. Which is to say that the magistrates, unbeknownst to themselves (thus potentially unconscious of the effects of a dominant thinking) or willingly, use a designation which de facto and a priori discredits the groups targeted. One must be naive to imagine that this power of discredit would have no influence on judicial decisions. And if one must grant the rapporteurs that they have reproduced examples of case law where a spouse’s membership of a spiritual group is not considered an aggravating circumstance in a dispute, it would nevertheless be very useful to evaluate the weight of the “MIVILUDES-style” anti-cult fight on judicial decisions. All the more so as Georges Fenech spares no effort to diffuse his ideological convictions on the anti-cult fight at every level of the magistracy.

The second aspect is a consequence of the first. The rapporteurs’ study makes a complete impasse on the psychology of spouses engaging in separation proceedings, on the violence this separation can entail and, in consequence, on the disrespectful arguments that can be used to recover custody of the children at any cost. Our inquiries have demonstrated that the anti-cult fight was welcomed by certain parents as a windfall for winning their case by accusing their spouse of belonging to a “cult”. The French context lent itself very well to this, at one period (see our interview with Maître Biro), and if the judicial apparatus has managed to right the ship somewhat in this domain, this accusation still has an immediate effect casting suspicion on the person targeted. See our report on three women, among dozens of cases, testifying to their experience of divorce in an anti-cult context.

The third aspect concerns the role played by the anti-cult associations, privileged partners of the MIVILUDES. Christian Paturel (formerly a lawyer) was able to observe that these associations frequently envenomed the dispute between two spouses to justify their anti-cult crusade.

It is not surprising that the MIVILUDES passed over this deleterious climate in silence, for it is responsible for it. It is its stock in trade, and when the rapporteurs mention, for one particular precedent, “that the judge refers explicitly to the public echo unfavourable to the practices of this movement and to its judicial setbacks, as well as to the rupture of relations between the mother and the child, to characterise the fault”, one would have to be naive to believe that the MIVILUDES is unaware of being the artisan of this famous “unfavourable public echo”.

This hypocrisy is the trademark of the French anti-cult policy. It reaches its peak when the rapporteurs, commenting on a case which mentions the 1996 parliamentary report on the cults, specify: “As a preliminary, one must cite here, the better to set it aside from the outset, the bad use sometimes made by the judge of the notion of a ‘dangerous cult movement’. (…) But above all, it is regrettable that judges have ventured onto this terrain, at once slippery and sterile, for on the one hand, what is the legitimacy of the judge for awarding a certificate of harmlessness or endorsing the dangerousness of a movement, relying moreover on a parliamentary report without normative force, and on the other hand this single element without explanations could not justify the interference the judge might consider he must make with the rights of the parents in case of ‘danger’”. In a communiqué of 27 June 2005, Georges Fenech, backed by Philippe Vuilque and Jean-Pierre Brard, opposing Jean-Pierre Raffarin’s circular of 27 May 2005, considered the parliamentary list of cults as “a reference for the work of prevention and of fighting against dérives sectaires”. The same people who encouraged the indiscriminate use of this list, once the rumour was well established and almost indelible, suddenly adopt a posture respectful of democratic rules. If Georges Fenech is so convinced of the obsolescence of this list, he who moreover communicates insistently to the Mayors so that they rally to his anti-cult doxa, why did he not telephone the Mayor of Boulogne-sur-mer, who has just banned a meeting on the basis of the parliamentary report (see our communiqué on this subject)?

On page 195, the rapporteurs encourage magistrates to make better use of the provisions of the CRC (International Convention on the Rights of the Child), ratified by France in 1990, evoking in particular the development and education of the child. It is not insignificant that at the moment the rapporteurs’ recommendations come out, the bankruptcy of our educational system is so flagrant that it has led to an Estates General on school security held on 7 and 8 April at the Sorbonne (Le Monde). Yet the action of the MIVILUDES, by discrediting all the alternative educational experiences of the “cults”, is a stakeholder in the bankruptcy of this educational system which cruelly lacks new ideas (see in particular our article on the regulation of violence).

On page 215, the rapporteurs evoke the office of the administrative judge by describing a case of accreditation refused to a nursery assistant because she belonged to the Aumist religion. The rapporteurs comment: ”(…) it is the responsibility of the State to guarantee that the placement of the child will entail no unjustified encroachment on the liberties of which he is, even as a minor, the holder”. The question that comes to mind is the following: in our secular country, would the consideration of religious membership intervene in the same conditions in the case of a person belonging to the Catholic Church (and an assiduous practitioner), a Church of which one cannot say that it is not making headlines today? In the same way, the rapporteurs evoke a child adoption refused because the parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses. The same question can be posed.

Two other points deserve to be mentioned on this study of case law.

The first is methodological. The politics of suspicion conducted by the MIVILUDES cannot burden itself with comparative studies. The study of the cases presented omits any comparative, quantitative and qualitative approach with regard to disputes over parenthood outside a context where convictions intervene. This study therefore brings no proof of the social-scourge thesis defended by the MIVILUDES.

Which brings us to the second point. What has become of the repetitive assertions of Georges Fenech and others, proclaiming that 80,000 children are in danger in the cults in France? No doubt a thorough study of the case law must have made it possible to appreciate the irresponsibility of such statements for those who may for a time have given them credit. These figures, hammered without respite through the intermediary of the media (without any critical spirit on their part, need one recall?), are absent from the present report. This proven tactic is the same as the one used for the 1996 parliamentary report. First, distil the rumour, our era of “buzz” lends itself to it, and once it is part of the pensée unique, return to a “posture” more respectful of the rules of law and democracy. Fooled is he who wishes to be. This hypocritical attitude is notably useful for keeping up appearances towards the international bodies little seduced by the French anti-cult excesses.

In the conclusion of this section, the MIVILUDES evokes its “ambition of contributing to improving the quality of decisions relating to the exercise of the prerogatives of parental authority, notably by the recall of the great principles”. The position of the MIVILUDES is too partial to permit any progress, including at the judicial level, in the direction of a better understanding and accompaniment of the emergence of the new forms of spirituality. The legal expertise present in this study (at last a real expertise in a MIVILUDES report! one is tempted to say) is subordinated to a political approach of exclusion and contempt which ends, as we have noted on several occasions, in turning French society against a part of itself.

If the magistrates want to understand the cult problematic, rather than following the “training courses” of the MIVILUDES, we invite them to consult our site.

Read our general commentary on the 2009 report

“Plus belle la vie”?

“Plus belle la vie”, a popular fiction watched daily by millions of French people, presented from 8 October to 15 December 2008 (episodes 1063 to 1111) the storyline of a young woman (Mélanie) who progressively becomes the “victim of a cult” before finally being “freed” from it.

We have extracted and gathered a few short sequences illustrating the points of this article into a “clip”, the link to which you will find at the bottom of the page.

Course of the plot:

A young woman (Mélanie), left fragile by a romantic break-up, is offered help by an osteopath (Elisabeth). The latter offers her massages, then to wear a necklace whose stone is said to have soothing virtues. Elisabeth little by little becomes her “spiritual godmother”, guiding her towards a community living in a hotel she manages, called: “The paths of self-knowledge”. Their practice consists in applying the teaching of “Professor Müller” and his founding book, through talking groups, relaxation, seminars, etc.

Mélanie’s involvement in and enthusiasm for this “cult” worry those around her. Mélanie’s vocabulary and her life choices are more and more influenced by new ways of thinking, believing and acting. For example, she files her relationships under two categories: “toxic or non-toxic”.

Elisabeth turns out to be a manipulator and a swindler, who profits from Mélanie’s credulity.

Her relatives alert the courts. It turns out that the group in question is already under police surveillance and that a judge is trying to build a file so that the association may be “officially classified as a cult”.

Everyone tries to pull Mélanie out of this influence, which is making her lose her discernment, while she must pay ever larger sums to take part in the association’s activities (accommodation, seminars, etc.). She finds herself obliged to take a second job, and despite that runs up debts, stops paying her rent, etc.

The judge will come personally to the victim’s rescue. In the script, it is he who is the moral and pedagogical guarantor of what the notion of “cult” is. He explains how “it” acts in order to manipulate, and how the victim must be protected.

Finally, Mélanie realises that she is being “manipulated” and decides to leave her group.

Elisabeth prevents her from leaving by threatening to reveal to the police confidences she had asked her to write down in the framework of a seminar.

Finally, someone close to Mélanie traps Elisabeth in her turn, and she finds herself forced to let Mélanie go and to reimburse her for all the sums spent in the framework of the association’s activities.

As for Elisabeth, she will leave town precipitately.

The victim recovers her “freedom” and declares herself ready to testify to help the courts.

Comments and Analysis:

This plot, supposedly realistic, imposes on viewers the amalgams conveyed by the anti-cult campaigners, with abundant detail. It is a consensual bias which unfortunately has a redundant effect with the “cult hunt”. It is the bias of caricature, on the theme of the “cult”: breach of trust, fraud, against a backdrop of mental manipulation by a pseudo spiritual guide.

The threat of the cult is illustrated here by the osteopath offering charlatan’s treatments, who turns out to be the spiritual leader of a community of followers who are manipulated and stripped of their possessions.

The clichés dear to the “anti-cult” campaigners have become, in this fiction, “realistic” concepts…

It is legitimate for a scriptwriter to draw the viewer into an imaginary world, but this procedure becomes open to criticism when it passes the exception off as the general rule and thereby stigmatises a whole set of respectable practices and life choices.

The evocation of “The cult” suffices to rally the good against the wicked.

In the film, many totally unrealistic details are presented as plausible. For example, and contrary to what is described in the script, a judge cannot open a file of victims’ testimony with the aim of having an association recognised as a “cult”. Because the word “cult” has no legal definition, and the courts are supposed to use no “list of cults”.

The script reproduces the anti-cult archetypes to the point that one might believe in a form of propaganda that does not speak its name, in which culture ends up making itself the spokesman of the dominant ideology.

It is not rare to see at the beginning or end of certain films a preventive note: “Any resemblance to existing situations, or situations that have existed, can only be fortuitous.”

When we see with what preconceptions the scriptwriters of “Plus Belle La Vie” approach techniques of “personal development” or “self-knowledge”, we think that the least honesty would be to make that reminder at every episode.

Links to the clip: view adsl view 56k

The Current Policy of the MIVILUDES Is Condemned to Fail

CICNS article - May 2009

At the moment of the release of the MIVILUDES 2008 report, followed by an impressive media coverage, it is not useless to evaluate the action of this Mission.

In no. 18 of the magazine Culture-Droit of November 2008, Jean-Michel Roulet, former president of the MIVILUDES, drew up an assessment of his work: “A relationship of confidence with Parliament and the victim-defence associations (…), a better cooperation between the police and justice services (…)”. Thirty years of fighting against one of the principal “scourges of our society”, according to part of the public authorities and the majority of the media, end in this meagre balance sheet. A neutral observer would probably conclude that the MIVILUDES is not effective, or that the problem of the cults as it is posed does not exist, or indeed both.

And as if these statements were not sufficient to demonstrate that something is not working in the public action applied to the cult question, Jean-Michel Roulet specifies, when asked how he envisages the future of the interministerial mission: “One must remain vigilant. Towards dérives sectaires but also towards ourselves. We must not transform ourselves into a cult by setting ourselves up as directors of conscience” (ibid). This warning is not anodyne. It is addressed, then, to Georges Fenech, the new president of the MIVILUDES, who is apparently not sensitive to the argument.

We have already had occasion to comment on the parliamentary commission of inquiry which Georges Fenech chaired, and his report to the Prime Minister “La justice face aux dérives sectaires”. In his radio and television interventions to present the 2008 report, he methodically repeated that he himself and the mission as a whole respected freedom of belief and the personal choices of citizens. We have nevertheless, on several occasions, commented on unfounded statements and verbal slips which leave a serious doubt hanging over his recent declarations. Can he really respect citizens representing 1% of the population, when he asserts that he has them in his “crosshairs” and wishes to have the necessary means to put them under surveillance?

The impulse he gives to the action of the Mission by hardening it further can, in our view, only lead to a failure, even if a few mediatised events here and there will probably be presented as victories of Good over Evil.

We shall retain three principal themes of analysis among others.

A failure on the two principal objectives of the MIVILUDES

One of the principal objectives of the MIVILUDES is to defend the victims (real, potential) of cult movements.

There exists in fact a second objective, passed over in silence (or rather disguised as incantatory affirmations about respect for fundamental liberties). The passage from the MILS to the MIVILUDES (i.e. from the fight against cults to the fight against dérives sectaires) was supposed to put an end to indiscriminate discrimination by concentrating on the evasive notion of “dérives sectaires” while avoiding unfounded and globalising accusations against groups and persons. The second, implicit objective of the MIVILUDES, at its creation, was therefore to ensure that an end was put to the discriminations.

To defend the victims of the cults, an adapted methodology should have been followed: cataloguing these victims, to evaluate their number and verify the pertinence of a large-scale public action on the subject; categorising these victims into “real victims” or “non-credible victims”; qualifying, for the real victims, the offences suffered; evaluating the offences caused by individuals or those that could be attributed to a movement’s doctrine; establishing quantified comparisons between the delinquency observed within the spiritual minorities and within society in general, to verify whether these minorities could be a particular home of delinquency (we think not, following our own inquiries). This groundwork would have required the cooperation of recognised and independent experts in several disciplines (sociology, theology, psychiatry, psychology, law, etc.), publishing referenced and cross-evaluated results.

To ensure that an end was put to the discriminations against the spiritual minorities, an assessment should have been made of the damage caused by the policy of fighting the cults (parliamentary reports of 1996, 1999, 2006, MILS), analysing it qualitatively and quantitatively; verifying, within the groups arbitrarily qualified as dangerous cults, that people no longer suffer for their spiritual choices in their professional, associative or private life. A preventive action oriented on the “case by case”, without amalgam, without the use of rumour as a weapon of discrimination, would have been of a nature to clean up the debate on this question of society.

One is forced to observe that the results obtained by the MIVILUDES on the first objective are non-existent. The attentive reader will be hard put to find, in the mission’s successive reports, credible inquiries into the victims of cults. The only available data are those of the administrations, which totally invalidate the conclusions of the MIVILUDES, whose own figures are at best far-fetched, at worst irresponsible, and used as publicity effects to feed the anti-cult psychosis. This disinformation allows the Mission to consolidate at little cost (or at great cost to the taxpayer…) the false idea of a social scourge (on the basis of information mainly issuing from the anti-cult associations), but finally prevents it from properly attending to the true victims (those who can exist in any human group) by asserting that everyone is a victim.

As for the second objective, putting an end to the discriminations, it is not excessive to say that they are on the contrary institutionalised, through a devaluing official rhetoric (the anti-cult terminology) and a specific legislation (the About-Picard law, the law protecting witnesses at parliamentary commissions). Our association has produced enough information to illustrate it.

Faced with such a failure, responsible public authorities (or ones on the way to becoming responsible on this subject) should conclude that the MIVILUDES is inadequate for treating a badly posed question of society, and decide on the creation of an independent Observatory of the spiritual minorities.

The non-respect of the secular pact

Evoking the legal means of fighting against cult movements, the MIVILUDES 2007 report specifies: “It is absolutely essential to refer to the movement’s doctrine and to integrate it into the investigation, for it contains in a quasi-systematic manner the ideology which advocates or leads to the violation of the law”.

Within the framework of the 1905 law, the State and its services recognise no religion and therefore have no business evaluating beliefs. The evaluation of a movement’s doctrine can therefore only be envisaged if it is entrusted to independent and competent persons, in this case and for example to sociologists of religion. Yet the MIVILUDES has freed itself from any approach of knowledge by ousting the academics, thus preventing the constitution of a balanced information base on the spiritual minorities. In so doing, it therefore encourages the services of the State to give lapidary and undocumented opinions on beliefs, and this in contradiction with the secular pact.

It is moreover not excluded that the MIVILUDES itself draws on associations like the ADFI for this type of analysis, since the rapprochement between the two types of structure is considered by Jean-Michel Roulet as a positive element of his balance sheet. Madame Picard, president of UNADFI, clearly indicated at her hearing in the framework of the parliamentary commission of inquiry “L’enfance volée” that her association carried out such analyses (see her answer to deputy Christian Vanneste). The probable contribution to a work of evaluating beliefs on the part of an association declared to be of public utility, without recognised competence on the subject, in a privileged relationship with the MIVILUDES (Mme Picard is a member of the mission’s Orientation Council), not to say instrumentalising the mission, poses real questions.

In his book “Une laïcité légitime - la France et ses religions d’Etat”, Editions Entrelacs, the sociologist Raphaël Liogier describes French laïcité as a system of self-justified and extensive intervention in the religious domain. The MIVILUDES merely implements this strategy of intervention within the spiritual minorities. It is legitimate to hope, despite the difficulty of broaching this subject in France, that this perversion of the secular spirit, exacerbated in the framework of the anti-cult fight, will end up being “seen” and prompt various social actors to demand a complete re-evaluation of the treatment of the cult question.

The incomprehension of a groundswell of society

At the colloquium organised by CICNS on the theme “Cults, social scourge or scapegoat”, Raphaël Liogier specifies: “I cannot stop myself, even if we are told we have no right to do so, from studying these new religious movements, because that gives us a vision of what the evolution of values and beliefs is becoming”. This groundswell of society is inescapable, and it is probably vain to oppose it; it should rather be accompanied. The MIVILUDES chooses on the contrary a brutal confrontation. In his latest book “La République des bons sentiments”, Editions du Rocher, Michel Maffesoli writes: ”(…) what the defenders of piety and the bigots of yesteryear sensed, what their worthy scientistic, republicanist and other dogmatic rationalist successors sense well, is that they are overtaken by the mutation of societal values, and therefore by the mutation of minds that it induces”.

The people who make an alternative spiritual choice today, even in the context of the so-called “spiritual supermarket”, are answering a deep personal need. They will not put an end to their spiritual search and their deliberate life choices, even if an unsuitable policy throws them to public opinion as fodder on the pretext of saving its “victims”.

Understanding this movement of society requires going out to meet these people, “exposing” them to the public but in the sense of an open and respectful dialogue, within the framework of the law, the same for all. The persistence of the MIVILUDES and of a certain number of parliamentarians in ignoring the fact that a dialogue respectful of the adversarial principle is the only means of answering questions of society in general, and this one in particular, leaves doubts as to their competence or their sincere desire to favour social cohesion. No doubt their obstinacy will be swept away by this groundswell of society.

The Political and Social Treatment of the Question of the Spiritual Minorities in France

The “Question of the Cults”: Institutional Deregulation or French Singularity?

Archives de science sociale des religions 2002, No. 118, April-June, 29-44

Based on the book by Danièle HERVIEU-LÉGER: “La Religion en miettes ou la question des sectes”, Calman-Lévy

By Jean BAUBÉROT and Micheline MILOT

(…) The political and social treatment of (the question of the cults) in France is doubly dangerous: dangerous by the ignorance and/or contempt of any scientific discourse on social reality (…), dangerous by its consequences for freedom of religion and conviction.

(…) The social problem of the cults must be placed back within the specific aspects of the crisis of the institutions with symbolic capacity, of their respective roles and of their specific interrelations in the history of French modernity.

(…) The “cult fact” is perceived in a dominant way in France “as a sort of disease liable to undermine, starting from the contaminated individuals, the whole social body” (p. 56). The fight against the cults then becomes a “campaign of public hygiene”, a therapeutic fight against an “epidemic menace” (p. 57), inscribed in medical science’s secular combat against ‘obscurantism’ and ‘superstition’, indirectly relegitimising the latter. The circle is thus closed.

(…) Certainly it seems clear to me that deregulation poses new problems and that they must be faced in a new way. But why regulate the religious specifically, when the work itself shows that analogous problems, paradoxes and contradictions run through the religious and the non-religious? Because the religious has a relation to the absolute (p. 71) and thus always risks inducing fanaticism, “sect-ness”? Would it not rather be the whole of the symbolic, of the ideological, and notably of the multiple forms of associative engagement sacralising a cause (ecology, hunting, the right to housing, anti-globalisation, etc.) or a corporation, that can have a relation to the absolute?

The extensive pluralism of modern societies overflows the religious. It multiplies ambivalences. Social perception can valorise it or find it menacing. But it is not always lucid and, when it denounces dangers, it often takes the effect for the cause. All the more so as it does not master the cause.

Perhaps one of the causes of the current risks – and what society would live without risk? – is to be found in a profound mutation of the articulations between socialisation, subjectivation and identity.

(…) communities or groupings around religious references constitute one of the places of construction of meaning and of moral normativity which often arise in reaction and in resistance to the dominant tendencies of society. From then on, that conflicts of norms arise with the surrounding society becomes inevitable. But these conflicts take place in a social dramaturgy that differs greatly according to the normative framework prevailing in the various societies.

Danièle Hervieu-Léger gives us access, in the mode of a rigorous and uncomplacent analysis, to the French scene where a veritable collective anxiety manifests itself concerning the question of the cults. The author places the cult phenomenon back within the more general religious landscape of modernity, putting into perspective the new economy of believing. Her incisive sociological analysis makes it possible at once to grasp all the ambivalence French society maintains with the religious fact and to delineate the crystallisation of collective fears expressed by this political anxiety over the cult question, an anxiety largely constructed and strongly maintained by the media. But what is thus put on trial is the capacity of the republican tradition to come to terms with the diversification of conceptions of meaning which abound in France as elsewhere in the West. The author therefore calls, in conclusion, for a reasoned public debate that would make possible the construction of a “new approach to religious pluralism within laïcité itself”.

(…) Yet there is no direct correspondence between the facts and French society’s anxiety on this subject. So, is this much ado about nothing, Shakespeare would ask? Or is France showing itself avant-garde in hunting down the “cult disease” lurking in every democracy?

After demonstrating the imprecision and historical reversibility of the criteria retained for drawing up the list of cults, D. Hervieu-Léger underlines well that “the publication of the list and the effort undertaken by the parliamentarians to fix the spiritual cartography of the ‘potentially dangerous groups’ […] reveal above all a dead-end effort to dam up the disorder induced by the deregulated pluralisation of a religious scene which is no longer organised exclusively from the ‘great religions’ instituted and long known on the national soil” (p. 48). By bringing to light the incoherences, the gropings and the preoccupations of French policy concerning the cult question, the author draws out two problematics which are superimposed in this impassioned debate.

If such a mobilisation of the public authorities appears “normal” in France, D. Hervieu-Léger points out first of all that it rests on an anxiety-inducing “doublet”: the fear of the cult risk and the allergy to pluralism, which translate into a will to regulate the religious in a normalising mode, modelled on a Christian confessional pluralism. Very well described, this Christian typification of normalisation surprises, at first sight, in a country where laïcité was constructed precisely to contain the Catholic Church within certain limits. Thus, even if the French State claims neutrality, in the sense that it forbids itself to judge the content of this or that belief, there is there, it seems to me, a first narrowing of the very meaning of neutrality, since an implicit definition of the “normal” religion serves as markers for the public power to approve or stigmatise this or that association of persons gathered around certain beliefs.

The second problematic delineated by D. Hervieu-Léger is that of the opposition, whose lineaments go back to the Enlightenment, between the democratic will to guarantee freedom of belief and the will, less explicit, “to tear consciences from the influence of representations judged radically contradictory to reason and autonomy” (p. 22). This highly ambivalent relation between laïcité and religion has been translated, in the works of Jean Baubérot to which the author refers, by the argument of freedom of thought against that of religious freedom. This ambivalence maintains, at least outside France, the perception that laïcité, at bottom, is less the accommodation of religious pluralism than its ousting. In Quebec notably, a former French colony, despite notable structural advances of laïcité, the use of the term itself has always carried a major difficulty, and the neologism “non-confessionality” is preferred to it, to get round its anti-religious tenor!

D. Hervieu-Léger demonstrates to what point French society’s relation to the cult question is translated by a whole semantic arsenal of the pathological and prophylactic type. Whence the importance taken, in political and media discourse, by the couple “regulation-protection”. From a North American legal point of view, this manner of presuming such a “malaise in civilisation” would doubtless be perceived as a tactic for surreptitiously getting round the fundamental question of freedom of conscience. There is a sort of paradox of consequences in the French political tradition facing the religious fact: the indifference and neutrality the State wishes to display transform themselves into anxiety in the face of any group not situated within the spectrum of the implicit definition the political power gives itself of the religious; this implies that the protection one wants at all costs to ensure for freedom of thought against beliefs considered absolute carries all the ingredients of a possible repression of freedom of religion.

The question which poses itself, beyond the French case, is to know what type of regulation a democratic State can claim, and to what end? How far can the secular State go in its interventions to facilitate or brake the expression of the identity particularities of groups which reject, to different degrees, the normative ideal of societies of law? Must the State be tolerant towards the intolerant – to take up here a question of Locke’s? On the contrary, should one expect the deep convictions of individuals and the behaviours flowing from them to conform, if not at once, at least gradually, to the democratic principles which rule social life, even if the groups to which the individuals belong must, to achieve this, reinterpret their doctrines and values?

(…) For John Rawls, for example, it is clear that “imposing” the liberal conception of man or imposing a sect doctrine is one and the same. That is moreover the argument sustained, before the American courts, by several fundamentalist religious groups which oppose the secular orientation of the public school, for, in their eyes, “secular humanism” is not a neutral doctrine. Rawls nevertheless agrees that, given his political conception of the person, he cannot admit that a group, whether majority or minority, should restrict the right of its members to re-evaluate their conception of the good life and of ultimate ends. On the other hand, one must indeed recognise that certain individuals believe sincerely and firmly that their own conception of the good cannot be revised. The fundamental stake, in the end, then consists in knowing how to resolve this tension between freedom of thought and freedom of conscience.

(…) can the State legitimately intervene to bring the individual back to “the right path” of political citizenship, which presupposes that he adheres to certain democratic virtues of which freedom of thought is one of the most essential to political deliberation?

(…) What surprises, from a North American point of view in any case, is that membership of a cult appears in France, de facto, suspect, insofar as the doctrines or practices of the group in question suppose the submission of the members to a religious authority.

In Canada and Quebec, the publication of a list identifying certain groups as potentially dangerous in the chapter of freedom of thought and religion would without any doubt be judged contrary to the Constitution. The State would be blamed for abandoning its position of neutrality if it thus decreed what is religiously correct or in conformity with the more commonly shared values. In Canada, the cults do not constitute in themselves, in social or political perception, a menace for society or for their members (even if certain individuals or ex-members may think so personally). The excesses of believing are, in Canadian society, neither more nor less grave or numerous than in France. Reprehensible acts, accomplished within a religious group or in the name of a belief, fall quite simply within the domain of criminal, civil or administrative law.

If, for example, the safety of children is threatened, whether in a religious group (as has happened) or in an ordinary family, they will be placed under the protection of the State and the responsible adults will be accused of harming physical integrity and of ill-treatment, if such is the case; the cult logic then has little to do with the judgment rendered and the social perception. As for adults who voluntarily place themselves in a situation of submission and abandonment to some guru (or spouse…), it appears rather difficult to define the dividing line between the right of an individual to renounce his freedom of thought, or his freedom full stop, and the duty of the State to make effective the exercise of the fundamental rights of the person, including freedom of thought, by intervening actively to do so.

Compared with the French tradition and with the very position advocated by D. Hervieu-Léger, who valorises a clearer political regulation, Canadian legal regulation is perceived by the population as more apt to ensure a treatment of equal justice and a true protection of the freedoms of thought and conscience. It is not for all that a political liberalism which lets the courts settle “case by case” the deviances liable to criminal prosecution while the State washes its hands of them. It is on the contrary a matter, in the judges’ eyes, of protecting individuals, particularly those who endorse non-conforming values, against the pressure to social conformity or against the State itself. One does not for all that tip over into a Republic of judges.

(…) it must also be said that the type of laïcité put in place in North America was, at its base, a framework making possible the cohabitation of differences, whereas French laïcité seems to have difficulty freeing itself from the normative ideal which first defined it in its conquest of legitimacy in opposition to the hegemony of Catholicism.

It is obvious that the perception of the constraint a minority group imposes on its members is generally conditioned by the dominant social representation, rarely by the group’s real practices. However that may be, the recognition of diversity and of social non-conformism can oblige the State to review a certain number of its own political presuppositions. Such an adaptation of the political to pluralism concerns in the first place the capacity for cultural interiorisation of pluralism in society itself. But equally, recourse to law to rethink the forms of laïcité appears as necessary as it is inevitable, given the internationalisation of human rights and the conventions flowing from it.

(…) The proposal to create in France a “High Council of Laïcité”, which the author advances in conclusion, could doubtless make it possible to rethink the “regulation-protection” dilemma. But being positioned with the President of the Republic, does this council not risk making itself the relay of demands for social conformism in the examination and follow-up of the “problems” that would be catalogued? For who says problems says an implicit definition of what is normal. Moreover, could the groups or individuals targeted have recourse to law to defend themselves against a regulation they judge contrary to freedom of conscience?

(…) In every society, the tyranny of public opinion and the pressure to social conformity tend to impose, implicitly, what is considered “religiously correct”. But the State has the duty to protect non-conforming convictions, those of each individual as those of minority groups, and to avoid serving as a relay for this social conformism, while allowing the legal power to exercise its function.

Jean BAUBÉROT

Groupe de Sociologie des Religions et de la Laïcité – EPHE-CNRS

Micheline MILOT

Université du Québec à Montréal

Elections 2007

The CICNS Test Bench

CICNS proposes a dialogue to all the candidates for the presidency of the Republic, for the ballot of April and May 2007, in order to learn their own relationship to spirituality and to question them on their intentions regarding the spiritual minorities in France (several hundred thousand voters are concerned by an alternative spiritual or therapeutic approach).

A questionnaire was sent to them at the end of January 2007 to solicit from them a declaration of commitment towards the spiritual minorities in France. Their answers (and their possible evasions) will be published progressively on this page. Good points and bad points are awarded, and an assessment presented on our mailing list during the last three months before the election.

Read our letter to the first-round candidates

Read the archives presenting all the first-round candidates

The Second-Round Candidates

Nicolas Sarkozy (UMP)

born in 1955

Good point: Good point: Read extracts from Nicolas Sarkozy’s book

Good point: M. Sarkozy urges other politicians not to content themselves with speaking “of the economy, of the social, of the environment, of security. We must also broach spiritual questions”. For Nicolas Sarkozy, “the moral dimension is more solid, more rooted, when it proceeds from a spiritual, religious approach, rather than when it seeks its source in political debate or in the republican model”. It remains to be determined whether this spirituality is akin, in his mind, to that of George Bush or of Mahatma Gandhi?

Good point: “To be president of the Republic is an asceticism, it is the forgetting of self, and doubtless the putting in parentheses of one’s personal happiness, of one’s feelings, of one’s interests, so as to have in mind nothing but the happiness of the French (…) “I will not lie to you, I will not betray you, I will not shirk. I ask for your confidence so that together everything becomes possible” (This quotation may certainly be received dubiously, but we note that the fact of expressing it, without prejudging his capacity to act in this direction or not, is an indication of M. Sarkozy’s spirit. That is obviously judged positive by our association).

Bad point: His muscular formulas, probably aimed at gathering the greatest support of the population, have lost all the subtlety present in the statements of the preceding “good point”. The events of the banlieues, category 1 dogs, the judge of the Outreau affair or juvenile delinquency: everything seems to be an occasion for resorting to the most demagogic promises. Yesterday, the young people of the banlieues lacked spiritual inspiration, today they lack police repression. On one side, a “liberal” policy which opens the door to freedom of conscience, and on the other an all-out repressive programme which sows confusion. Where is the real Nicolas Sarkozy?

Facts: In October 2002, M. Sarkozy, Minister of the Interior, comments on the waywardness of the MILS and advocates an evolution while yielding to the formulas of the pensée unique in his introduction: “We shall have no weakness towards the dérives sectaires, which are all the more condemnable in that they touch people in situations of weakness (…) But we run up against a difficulty: we must respect another great principle which comes to us from the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen and from the law of 1905, the respect of all religions and beliefs. If the mission’s balance sheet is excellent from every point of view, it has happened that the behaviour of its leader (Alain Vivien, editor’s note) provoked polemics which turned out to be counter-productive.”

Extract from a speech of 11 February 2007:

“I am proud to be the child of a country where conscience is free (…) If I am elected, I shall not be there for myself (…), I want to be the president who reconciles the religions and laïcité, and the believers with the secular (…). I want to go and see those one never goes to see (…), to meet those one never meets. (…) I want to go and speak to those who say they are victims of discrimination. (…) I want to meet those who do not agree with me, I want to listen to their point of view (…) because they too (…) have something to teach me, they too are France. (…) It is a great wrong for our country to have lost the value of respect: respecting others. (…) Those who are rigid are weak people (…) The presidential function demands that one open one’s mind, (…) it demands a form of asceticism. (…) this pensée unique that I fight… (…) I want an irreproachable democracy (…) where individual liberties are respected… (…) It is not the institutions that weaken democracy but the lack of political will, the lack of intellectual honesty, the lack of clear-sightedness (…) I want to speak of liberty (…). Man has been deprived of choosing his own rhythm of work, there is the error of the 35 hours. (…) Families have been forbidden to choose their children’s school. (…) Prudence is to be in truth. (…) I feel I have the spirit of a challenger (…) Everything can become possible if I manage to bring the French together.

M. Sarkozy did not answer our letter

Ségolène Royal (PS)

born in 1953

Bad point: for Ségolène Royal, who does not publish the questions CICNS posed on her site

Bad point: Ségolène Royal has taken Arnaud Montebourg, former lawyer for the ADFI (in particular in the Paturel affair), as spokesman.

Bad point: The party most hostile to the spiritual minorities?

Bad point: Ségolène Royal is at the origin of a “plan against the cults” presented in 1999 to the education-authority inspectors. Her presentation takes up the usual anti-cult clichés: “The cult movements use front establishments to inculcate their doctrines.” or again “Examples are not lacking, alas, of depersonalisation techniques used by the cults” and “the public prosecutor may, if he judges it opportune, prosecute parents who refuse the child the right to instruction (…) I add that the education-authority inspectors may call on the public forces in case of refusal of inspection by the families and schools inspected”.

According to a research institute, the success rate on standardised tests was 65 to 80% for children schooled at home against 50% for children in state schools.

Bad point: A “participative debate” on the subject of “children’s rights” and their protection against the “cults” was organised by the Socialist Party on 30 January 2007, at the call of Serge Blisko, deputy of the 10th constituency of Paris and mayor of the 13th arrondissement. The presence of the “great witness” Catherine Picard augurs well for the “great neutrality” of the debates. “The tenor of these debates will be transmitted to Ségolène Royal’s team to nourish the project of our candidate, the only one capable of bringing together and making the left win,” declared Serge Blisko.

Facts: Read the religion of socialism on Psinfo: ”(…) Jaurès thinks that every man is naturally inhabited by a religious aspiration, an aspiration to the infinite. Etymologically, religion is the bond. How to ensure a bond between men? That is the major political question. Jaurès considers that Christianity, which he inherited from his mother, betrayed the essence of the religious, that is to say the possibility of living in community and of flourishing as a man, and that only socialism will make it possible to realise this essence of the religious, because it will give every man the faculty of realising himself and of going towards justice. Socialism is therefore not one religion among others, it is the very essence of the religious. a religion which rests on liberty and justice.” What does the candidate think of this rapprochement between socialism and religion?

Extract from a speech of 11 February 2007:

(…) I want to make France the country of environmental excellence (moratorium on GMOs, reduce nuclear power to 50% of energy production) (…) the protection of the environment is incompatible with liberalism (…) I need you to build a France which resembles itself and which gathers itself together. (…) With me, never again will politics be made without you (…) The school is the crucible where the future citizens are formed. It is going through a deep crisis. Will it keep its promise of equality of chances tomorrow? Teachers, you will be supported by the Republic, without your having to fear inspections that are a little too rigid. Compulsory schooling fixed at 3 years. I shall re-establish the Handiscol plan I created when I was Minister of Education. All disabled children will be able to enrol at school from nursery school, and it will fall to the school and no longer to the parents to justify a refusal (…) A landscape we love, a great history with sublime moments (…) and in the background the great light, never extinguished, of the French Revolution. (…) France must show itself intractable for the respect of the values linked to its tradition of humanism and light.

Mme Royal did not answer our letter

Les radis de la colère

Extract from the work of Jean-Pierre Joseph

Louise Courteau Editrice, ISDN 2-89239-208-X - Chapter II, pages 71 to 95

The true objective of the hunt for “cults”

(…) One may be tempted to say that everything that has been evoked concerning pollution, food and health is a debate that has nothing to do with the problem of the cults, and that there are therefore two parallel debates, totally different from one another. Now, as we shall see, it is indeed the same debate.

I - The justification of horror

“A society that draws a quarter of its economic revenues from illness will pursue, defame and, finally, render harmless anyone who wanted to teach his fellow citizens to live in good health.” Gunther Schwab

For years, I heard it said: “The Jehovah’s Witnesses are strange people. They are against transfusions. They prefer to see their child die rather than authorise a transfusion.” At no moment did I ask myself: for what medical reasons are they against transfusions? And with good reason: those who evoked this problem added that, in the conception of “those people”, the Bible had forbidden transfusions. I therefore asked myself no questions and I confess that these people frightened me, without my really knowing why. A psychosis is exactly that. Nobody ever evokes the real problem, namely whether there exist solutions other than blood transfusions. For as soon as this question is evoked, the debate closes immediately with the sentence: “Only the Jehovah’s Witnesses contest it, for ‘solely’ religious reasons.” So the thing appears clear: no scientist has ever asked himself the question. And if one day a scientist does ask it, he too can only be a member of that movement.

Let us now examine two quotations which, apparently, have nothing to do with the matter, whereas in fact they are at the heart of our problem:

“We already knew that drug money represents more than a third of the flow of currencies and of world stock exchanges and that, without it, the international banking system would collapse. Clearly, drug trafficking is indispensable to world economic equilibrium. If one adds the price of the substances harmful to our health and the wastage of arms spending, also justified by the balance of terror, one may consider that the dominant so-called ‘liberal’ economy is an enterprise of destruction.” Philippe Desbrosses, doctor in environment, consultant expert to the EEC and the European Parliament

“Let us imagine a medical paradise on earth, a society where there would no longer be heart attacks, where cancers would be unknown. Let us imagine a world where all the ills that strike our modern society had practically been eliminated. This paradise exists at the present time. It is the country of the Hunzas, it is the valley of the centenarians in Ecuador, it is the Mormons in Salt Lake City. These populations live essentially on natural products and eat moderately. They do not know illness.” Dr J.P. Willem, former assistant to Dr Schweitzer, Le secret des peuples sans cancer

Have you read these two quotations carefully? Are you beginning to perceive something? Let us now examine the three following quotations:

“The true doctor is the interior doctor. Most doctors are unaware of this science which, however, works so well.” Dr Albert SCHWEITZER

“The world will be saved, if it can be, only by the insubordinate.” André GIDE

“The survival of the planet and the well-being of those who people it, men and beasts, depend on courageous actions that will not come from above, as is generally believed.” Philippe DESBROSSES

Of course, the reader has understood that in order to escape these horrors, it is useless to wait for solutions from above.

1 - A plot, why?

In the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, there were built around the factories of the workers’ estates shops and function halls managed by the boss. Later, cinemas and even stadiums belonging to the boss appeared. Thus, the worker received a wage that he spent in the boss’s businesses, which, in this way, recovered with one hand what it had given with the other.

One was a boss by “divine right”. In fact, the function was even hereditary. But, with the development of the means of communication, the appearance of the motor car and the paid holidays of 1936, the boss lost his “divine” character when he left the limits of his town.

At home, he was “great among the small”, but when he travelled, notably when he went to the capitals, he became more and more “small among the great”.

The workers travelling too, the absolute power of the last century faded more and more. Some of them, from the beginning of the century, perceived this evolution and reflected on the means of recreating the workers’ estates of the nineteenth century on a national, indeed a world, scale. This process would make it possible not only to earn ever more staggering sums, but also to be ever more powerful, as owner of the means of production.

The simple calculation that follows makes it possible to understand. Let us imagine, at the beginning of the century, a small town of 8,000 inhabitants in which a single factory, surrounded by an immense workers’ estate, enables 2,000 employees to house themselves, they and their families, of an average of two children. The town has been swollen by 800 job-seekers. Let us imagine now a sort of local unemployment fund that compensates them by having the boss deduct an amount from the wage of each worker. The unemployed, housed near the workers’ estate, will get into the habit of doing their shopping in the boss’s shops. The latter will collect several hundred francs a month, multiplied by the 800 unemployed. The boss can thus indirectly collect, each month, 80,000 F if each unemployed person spends 100 F, and up to 800,000 F if each unemployed person spends 1,000 F. He will therefore not hesitate to see to it that sums are deducted from wages for the unemployment fund. However, the town having no frontiers, he will not be able to prevent the unemployed from going elsewhere to do their shopping.

Let us now transpose this example to the national scale: the small local boss disappears, in favour of a national, indeed international, employer class, for which the profit of ever more gigantic companies falls into ever fewer pockets. If one admits, as a certain number of newspapers specialising in economics have taught us, that France belongs to 300 families, in the sense that a part of the profits of companies falls into their pockets, one can transpose the calculation we have just made to an entirely different dimension. These 300 families will never criticise the sums paid out for unemployment compensation, since the unemployed will pay to house and feed themselves. And the more the economy is centralised, the more parcels of all the sums paid out will fall into those 300 pockets. If each unemployed person has indirectly given 100 F a month to mass distribution, that is 3 million × 100, therefore 300 million F, that is one million francs a month for each of the 300 families. Tomorrow, when the whole Western economy belongs to the 300 families, each of them will indirectly receive the product of the consumption of 20 million, indeed 50 million, unemployed…

What power will each family have when it receives each month a minimum of 5 billion francs (coming solely from unemployment)?

When revenues are of this order, one understands that the true power is not in the official buildings, ministries, prefectures, etc., but rather in discreet offices. Unfortunately for those who collect, numerous people can still escape, at least partially, from this process.

A - The independent: a nuisance

Any person whose product of sale or of service does not fall directly into the pockets of this centralised economy is a nuisance who must be eliminated sooner or later.

a) The craftsman and the small trader

The craftsman and the trader who provide quality products and services are direct competitors of mass distribution. The product of their sales escapes the monopolists. Consequence: the independents undergo the worst reprisals: compulsory and exorbitant social contributions, business taxes, various taxes and duties… In short, the independent works on average at 70% of charges, that is to say he pays back 7/10ths of his income to the community. That amounts to saying that he works two days for himself and all the other days of the week for the community. As if by chance, the number of liquidations is impressive and whole districts see bars, hairdressing salons, haberdasheries, hardware shops, grocers and bakeries disappear. The decision comes from above and is not negotiable: consumers will go to the superstores…

b) The farmer

The farmer has always been a super-nuisance, insofar as he is theoretically capable of living without buying anything, that is to say of feeding himself from his production. As if by chance, farmers are fewer and fewer.

B - The ecological agrarian community: “dangerous cult”

The agrarian community, by its functioning, can represent a model of economy totally different from the classic models, capitalist or communist. If 50 people are capable of feeding themselves while asking nothing more of anyone, if they are capable of remaining in good health and, consequently, no longer need to frequent either the superstores or the pharmacies, if they no longer buy chemical fertilisers — in short, if they are self-sufficient — there is an example that risks spreading like an oil stain. Tomorrow, all those who are on the pavements, notably the unemployed, could very well say: “Give us or rent us a piece of land, some tools, and we will do the same. We will certainly be better off than on our square metre of tarmac.”

Only here it is: the public must not know that this solution is possible. Otherwise, tomorrow morning, thousands of people will settle in the countryside, produce their food, learn to live in good health, refuse vaccinations and desert the doctors’ surgeries, the hospital centres and the pharmacies. In short, thousands of people will cease to be assisted and, above all… to pay. No government wishes it.

2 - A plot, how?

The slow process of the globalisation of the economy did not happen by itself. It had to pass through several stages, some of which moreover are far from complete. Those who possessed the means of production first had to appropriate food and water. It is by these two elements that peoples will be brought to their knees. And if one adds dependence through health, one understands that whoever possesses chemistry, food and water is the master of the world.

Until 1945, the majority of the French were farmers who, for centuries, had fed themselves from their production. Today, few are those who are self-sufficient. It is difficult to see in this only the perverse but involuntary effects of capitalism, so much does what is happening appear to be the result of a concerted and very well orchestrated action. Here is its programme.

A - Weaken agriculture

It is remarkable to observe that the worst-paid work is the one that provides us with the product we most need after water: food, in particular fruit and vegetables, which the human being can hardly do without, whereas he can without danger never eat meat. Thus, those who feed us are the worst paid, while those who rob us harvest the fruits of their efforts. This paradox is certainly not an accident. Progressively, farmers have lost the possibility of living from the land. There remains to them only to survive, dependent on the distribution circuits. Land taxes, taxes on buildings, the EDF monopoly — in short, numerous and heavy charges, accompanied by the fact that the farmer is paid very little for his fruit and vegetables — mean that the peasant can no longer live without laying out money that he must find somewhere.

In order to have the right to cultivate his own land, in order to feed himself and his family, without asking anything of anyone, the farmer must pay! He therefore extends his holding and tries to sell his products. But profitability is almost nil, because of the very low price of agricultural products, which means that he is obliged to increase the yield per hectare by using chemical fertilisers. He therefore produces fruit and vegetables less nutritious than those of former times, saturated with chemical products, but in greater quantity. The consumer must therefore consume more of them. As his products have the same quality as those found in the superstores, it is more and more difficult for him to sell his production directly to the consumer. He therefore sells more and more to the distribution centres.

As if by chance, the producer who continues to sell untreated products meets more and more difficulties. Thus, the “European standards” mean that a superstore can put the label “extra fresh” on eggs 15 days old, whereas the grower whose hens laid that very morning and who sets out his eggs on a stall covered with straw, writing that they are “extra fresh”, commits a double infraction: he does not have the regulation label, and the straw on which eggs have been sold for millennia is no longer “hygienic” today…

Recently, a local man (having all the same passed forty), living in a village on which a ski resort of the Belledonne chain depends, and running in summer an activity for children in the resort, explained to me that the local farmers had not been authorised to sell their products directly in the resort, frequented in summer by numerous hiking tourists, because the manager of the mini-market, dependent on a national chain of shops, had fiercely opposed it before the Municipal Council which has, let us say it, a very curious way of defending the inhabitants of its commune.

But after all, money has no need of fertiliser…

The result is that the civilised countries are those whose farmers disappear. More and more there will remain large operators who will supply mass distribution with products more and more poisoned by chemical products, which will taste of plaster or papier-mâché, perfectly conforming to EEC standards and entirely in the image of the bread one finds today in most bakeries, which tastes of blotting paper 12 hours after coming out of the oven. Certainly this bread has no microbes!

B - Weaken the independents

In a general way, the independent — trader, craftsman, doctor, lawyer, etc. — is in the long term a nuisance, because he still retains the practical possibility of not thinking like everyone else. As it is not yet possible to abolish the independents, the first action consists in isolating all the independents who do not think like everyone else. Nothing is easier. It is enough to impose on each profession draconian standards of practice, a demanding code of ethics and charges such that only those who work like mad manage to get by, but no longer even have the mental availability to reflect on changing their condition.

C - Hunt the minorities

The objective of the hunt for minorities is to prevent any research or approach different from the one considered official from succeeding. The citizen’s greater well-being has no bearing on this kind of debate: only power and money count.

I should like here to use an example drawn from a domain very different from those we have spoken of until now: sport. The example of karate in France speaks for itself. I permit myself here to quote a passage from my book Améliorer notre santé par une méthode qui ne coûte rien:

“From the 1950s, the French decided to class the martial arts among sports. Hence the perplexity of the promoters of Tai Chi Chuan, Yoga or Chi Quong who, if they followed this logic, would come under the same rules as those applicable to football or pétanque. It is true that the majority of French practitioners of the time had no intention whatever of seeking the ki (trans.: concentrated energy), their teachers themselves often being unaware of its existence, and running into pedagogical difficulties arising from the fact that these disciplines, taught in Japan most often at university, arrived here with a university teaching system ill adapted to the French adepts of the time. In parallel, although there exist hundreds of styles or schools of martial arts, each discipline was to be represented before the French government by only one federation, a Law of 1975 having limited the approval of the Ministry of Sport to a single federation per discipline. […] This explains why in numerous federations, one style very quickly became preponderant, sometimes to the detriment of the others. Thus, in karate, the absolute monopoly of Shotokan was to disconcert many adepts of other styles, nevertheless just as deserving.

Practitioners of karate, who know that there existed several dozen styles very different from one another, know how this legislation imposed a sort of single and uniform karate. Those who wished to continue their original practice were obliged to give a different name to their discipline. This fact is all the more regrettable in that certain schools taught at the same time respiratory techniques of health, and that some of them, although functioning exactly in the same manner as all the others (federations, regional leagues, clubs), were qualified as ‘cults’. What is more, within the sole federation approved by the Ministry of Sport, all instructors were taught a discipline called ‘Kuatsu’. It was taught in judo, in karate, in Aikido, etc. This discipline is a sort of Asian first aid. Its techniques are remarkably effective. In judo, I saw someone intervene effectively in a case of cardiac arrest. In karate, in cases of nasal haemorrhage or other violent traumas, I saw these techniques act successfully. Kuatsu is entirely complementary to our European first aid, the two sciences being able to be applied at the same time on the same subject. In the 1990s, the teaching of Kuatsu was removed from the programme of the training school of the French Karate Federation. No explanation was given, either to practitioners or to teachers.

By this levelling, a very complete discipline was completely transformed into a banal sport. It is by constraints of this nature that one destabilises minorities and marginalises them. The practitioner then has the choice, either of keeping his identity by marginalising himself, or of obeying ‘like everyone else’.”

D - Qualify whoever resists as a crank, a charlatan or… a member of a cult!

Now that one knows that this kind of qualifier instantly makes any citizen lose all credibility, even if he is a Nobel prizewinner, it becomes easy to launch these appellations, which stick to the skin more than a formal investigation or even a conviction. The person under investigation may be the object of a dismissal or an acquittal. The convicted person may be rehabilitated. But the so-called follower of a cult will be suspect as long as anyone remembers that “somebody said that it appears such and such a person was part of a cult”.

That is why homeopaths, thanks to whom one could be treated by paying 10 times less, have all officially become followers or sympathisers of “cults”. A large regional daily devoted almost an entire page to explaining that it had taken a team of researchers 10 years of study to prove the scientific mechanism of homeopathy. The team was in a position to assert that this science was a reality and that it gave results. So the National Council of the Ordre des médecins sent instructions to its members, explaining to them that the cults are everywhere, that they “recruit” among doctors and that almost all homeopaths either form part of them or are sympathisers who have lost their credibility, because manipulated cosmo-magically by a guru.

The homeopath must therefore mobilise all his energy to demonstrate either that the association to which he belongs is not a cult, or even that he belongs to no association. Even if he has succeeded in demonstrating that, which is almost impossible (how does one bring proof of a negative?), he has not got very far, since he then becomes quite simply… a crank.

This process results in the fact that, in every layer of society, one does not listen to the member of a cult, nor even to the sympathiser, any more than to the one who is suspected (even if he denies it) of being a follower, and not even to the one who is simply suspected of being merely a sympathiser. Even that one is “manipulated”. This marvellous mechanism means that it is enough to qualify any researcher who finds something as a crank, any group of researchers as a cult. In this way, whoever they may be — doctors, researchers, professors — whatever they may have found — a water-powered engine, applications in the matter of solar energy, therapeutics in every field — all their reports will be systematically ignored. What is more, even if they expressly announce that their research has succeeded, that the applications are not merely projects but have been realised, and that they ask the scientific community simply to come and verify, not only will nobody come, but in addition, with contemptuous airs, those who have been approached will assert hysterically that “in any case, they do not believe in it”. They will then pronounce the magic formula: “It’s a cult!”, implying “I am not going to make a fool of myself by verifying what members of a cult tell me”.

The objective of the process is then attained: all the research, and above all the results of the research liable to call the established order into question, are then neutralised. The “idiots-who-don’t-believe-in-it” will be able to go on sniggering for a long time yet. They have moreover never stopped. At the beginning of the century, they claimed that the human being could not withstand a speed of more than 100 km per hour and that aeroplanes could never really fly. They therefore held back, by blocking funding, all research in this domain. Subsequently, they blocked acupuncture for nearly 50 years. By the same sniggering, they limited the funds allocated to research on solar energy, thus favouring the construction of buildings of the plutonium breeder-reactor kind, castigating moreover, at the time, the “cranks” who opposed them. And if tomorrow a researcher announces that he has found a product that could have spectacular effects on improving the state of health of AIDS patients, the idiots will snigger, especially if this product is a plant extract and costs almost nothing. On the other hand, and as if by chance, they will applaud the “discovery” of the substance (horribly expensive, but what would one not do to stay in good health?) that will procure a slight improvement. This example is not theoretical, since it has already occurred, notably with the Beljanski case.

The true acupuncturists, those who intervene daily in the hospitals of Shanghai, Canton or Peking, use needles in only one case out of three, whereas in the two other cases they use… their hands, and practise a sort of technique of the laying on of hands. These techniques, moreover, were still practised recently by most Asian experts of judo, karate, aikido, jiu jitsu, shintaido, chi quong, etc. The Asians, who have very well perceived the Western spirit, have unveiled to the general public only the least interesting but most conspicuous part of the technique… So when I hear today the same idiots crying scandal, “It appears that N… treats by the laying on of hands”, I can only be dismayed, knowing that millions of people are treated every day in this manner. If it were really ineffective, a whole continent would not have maintained this therapeutics for several millennia. Do they know, moreover, when they snigger about homeopathy, indicating that it is only autosuggestion, that numerous farmers use it today successfully on their animals… One can then hypocritically announce, with great sad but “hopeful” airs, that “we are doing what we can” in the matter of cancer research, but “we lack the means” (of course), that the pollution of petrol engines has been reduced, that a “vaccine” against AIDS is being sought, that we are on the eve of finding the miracle formula for reducing unemployment…

II - The intelligent mechanism of the installation of psychosis

The reader has now understood that if a group of people, not content with holding such information, decides to develop another way of life, thus escaping consumer society and “consumer health”, it becomes a model, unlike those who content themselves with demonstrating and taking to the streets without having anything to propose. This group therefore becomes dangerous.

When one knows moreover that it is particularly unthinkable that any person studying spirituality for several years should commit suicide, one may ask oneself many questions about the “collective suicide” that took place at Christmas 1995, in the Vercors, and one may wonder whether we are not being taken for fools.

The plot is not decided by fools, and the manner in which it is put in place proceeds from a scenario that cannot be the fruit of chance.

1 - The phases of the triggering of the psychosis

A - 1st phase: putting in place an “anti-cult” associative movement and allocating large subsidies

Very discreetly, for several years, there have been constituted, in every region, associations which subsequently grouped together and which today form the very famous ADFI (Association for the defence of the family and the individual). This movement receives very large subsidies from various ministries and local authorities. Through it, it is possible for any person claiming to be the victim of a cult to receive a payment enabling them to reintegrate into society. It is therefore quite possible that the individuals who come to complain on television sets about the “manipulations” they claim to have undergone are those who have just received subsidies. If such is indeed the case, we find ourselves in the unique and exceptional hypothesis of the witness who has “been to the cash desk” before testifying… The ADFI is a reassuring body: a grouping of local associations, it puts forward its voluntary administrators, of a certain age, most often of an advanced age, who, although fighting all sectarianism, warmly encourage “reintegration” through prayer within the Church (Catholic, of course)… These calm and reassuring people use, without one realising it, the methods they denounce: canvassing, telephone harassment, both of the “victims” and of the “followers”, encouragement to informing, lectures and propaganda speeches, etc. A lawyer of the Paris bar was recently astonished at the presence on the national board of administration, to which she had been invited, of a former colonel of the French army’s secret services. For the rank-and-file militant of the ADFI, the subsidies received must be justified by identifying a maximum of cults. For the one who subsidises, it seems that the aim is more subtle. Progressively, in the collective unconscious, there makes its way the idea according to which if there exists an association (of a “non-profit” character) that hunts down the “cults”, it is because cults exist and because that represents a real danger. The citizen therefore does not at all have the impression of being manipulated, since the rank-and-file militant does not himself have that impression. What is more, the rank-and-file militant believes he is doing humanitarian work and is not at all conscious of the enormous financial stakes that have led the government to promote his association. The ADFI intervenes in an unusual manner with the public services (National Education, most often) to report that such and such a person forms part of a “cult”. It intervenes with the justice system by addressing letters to magistrates, in the name of the defence of individuals. It even suggests, in the name of the defence of the family, having the children living with their parents in a “cult” placed directly in the care of the DASS… Thus, for several years, it has fulfilled its role: public opinion now thinks that there exist numerous cults in France, and above all that these cults are dangerous.

B - 2nd phase: mediatise fear in a subtle manner

1 - How to manipulate sincere journalists

To succeed in this tour de force that consists in manipulating journalists, the best means is to use a small minority of them who do not necessarily have the same professional conscience as most, and who, because they will have been the first to express themselves on a new subject, will not see their word doubted by their colleagues.

It is then almost certain, for the sincere journalist who arrives in a “cult”, that when one of his colleagues has already done a report dealing with horrors, ill-treated children, mystical fasts, rituals, sleep deprivation, etc., even if this journalist sees none of that, he is nevertheless convinced that it exists and that it is being hidden from him (since one of his colleagues said so before him). All his attention will then be mobilised in trying to discover these elements that he does not see (and with good reason). The research of scientists who are members of the “cult” will therefore not interest him. But, as he is going to come back “empty-handed”, that is to say having been unable to observe anything alarming, he will then announce that they “managed” to show nothing…

One must therefore find at the outset, for each group, journalists still little known, hungry for celebrity, to whom an editorial office promises to buy a report, on condition that something sensational figures in it — and never mind the truthfulness of what will be written. Subsequently, it will be easy to send the other journalists who, convinced of the truthfulness of the “horrors” described by the previous one, will try, by reflex, and even out of professional conscience, to support that, keeping in the editing of the film the gesture which, in their view, is of a nature to demonstrate the “horrors”.

2 - How to manipulate opinion: a few techniques of television faking

a) One films children playing in an immense meadow. As everywhere in the countryside, the parcels of land are often marked out by barbed-wire fences. At one moment of the game, the cameraman asks the children to approach a fence. Care is taken to film that moment so as to keep in the editing only the five seconds during which a child is seen behind barbed wire. The viewer cannot then know that, behind the cameraman, there stretched 100 metres of land giving directly onto the road, without a fence, for that matter.

b) One films a father who has been asked to perform, for the camera, a few minutes of work typical of a farm. He then proposes to saw wood. The journalist suggests at that moment that this take place in the presence of the children, specifying to him that it will be “warmer”, that it will show that they “are not dangerous people”. During the filming, one of the children, proud to be in front of the camera, asks to try sawing wood. For a few seconds, the child is then filmed sawing all alone. The film crew even applauds, without saying that subsequently only the child sawing wood all alone will be kept in the editing. Five seconds of this image will be sufficient to give the viewer the impression of a real work session imposed on a child…

c) The person qualified as a guru is submitted to an interview. The interview is warm. There is laughter, there are jokes. In the middle of the laughter and the quips, the “guru” then says: “When I think that those who bear me ill will say, mocking me, that I am the reincarnation of a pharaoh.” By good luck, for the journalist, the person interviewed paused between “that” and “I am”. In the editing, only the last part of the sentence will be kept. The viewer will see the “guru” for only three seconds and will hear him say only: “I am the reincarnation of a pharaoh”.

d) The members of the community have agreed that the journalist may visit the buildings. Finally, he pokes about everywhere and then finds, in an attic, an old souvenir brought back from a journey, namely an Egyptian statuette, covered moreover with dust. He cleans it, goes down to the living room, where several people are seated at table, puts it on the table and asks to question the people about the circumstances surrounding the purchase of this object (which journey, in what year, etc.). In the editing, the dialogue between the members of the community will be removed. There will remain only background music (by J. Michel Jarre, for example) and a commentary that will say simply: “These followers whom we see at the moment in conversation around an Egyptian statue.”

Let us stop the examples there, and let us now try to imagine what a viewer who has seen these four consecutive sequences can think. He has indeed seen: children behind barbed wire; a young child sawing wood all alone; a person of whom it is asserted that he is a “guru” and who says: “I am the reincarnation of a pharaoh”; the “followers” seated around a statuette.

What can the magistrates of the courts or the gendarmes think who have seen such reports without knowing that they have been made fools of? How then can one be astonished at the judicial dramatisation of every event that may occur in a “cult”, since, in good faith, the gendarme and, subsequently, the magistrate are absolutely convinced that they are in the presence of dangerous people? None of them can imagine that the impression they have in mind has been manufactured out of whole cloth for precise reasons. That is what manipulation is!

3 - The sensitive chord of opinion: children

At this stage of the manipulation, the coup de grâce is going to be given by playing on the sensitive chord of the situation of children. They will be systematically put forward. Editing and faking will be used in order to arouse fear as to the safety of children.

A few examples will suffice to show the way it is done:

a) It is announced to public opinion: “The child of cult X nearly died, because he was not vaccinated.” Care is taken not to say that there was perhaps another cause of the child’s illness. Care is also taken not to indicate that the effectiveness of vaccines is currently much contested and that the parents maintained that this child was indeed vaccinated.

b) It is announced: “The children are totally cut off from the world in cult Y.” The viewer has no means of knowing that, for example, the house these children live in is in the middle of a village, that they therefore necessarily have friends who come to the house (and vice versa), that the children regularly watch television and that they go on holiday camping or even to summer camps. This manner of announcing things is called disinformation.

c) A great publicity fuss is made by announcing that the gendarmerie came one fine morning to fetch all the children of cult S., because malnutrition, sleep deprivation, violence and morals offences are suspected. The viewer is left with this idea, because nobody, among all the media that proclaimed this information loud and clear, will publish the slightest paragraph to explain that the children all came back two hours later, because all the checks were negative…

That too is called disinformation. One could thus multiply the examples. Every time the viewer hears the word “cult”, he also hears “child” and “danger”. This is very subtle, because numerous democrats suggest, concerning “cults”, that after all, people live as they wish and that nobody can reproach them for it. It is at that moment that moralisers arrive to say: “And the children — do they have the right to force the children into all that?” By dint of hearing this hammering associating the same notions, cults = children = danger, everybody ends up believing it, including the magistrates. The latter have neither the will nor the time to go there in person. They are from the outset persuaded that these notions necessarily exist and that if the procedure does not make it possible to establish them, it is because they are in the presence of intelligent people who have managed to conceal the facts from them.

The proceedings will therefore follow one another, the educational assistance measures will rain down, the normal outcome of the process being the placement of all the children in the care of the DASS. Those who take these measures are moreover persuaded that they are saving children in danger and do not at all suspect that they have reacted in conformity with this gigantic plan, of a nature to destabilise and neutralise all the groups one absolutely wants to silence.

C - 3rd phase: reassure the democrats by creating a parliamentary commission of enquiry

A parody of enquiry: 172 files in 50 minutes!

In an imaginary country, a military dictatorship wants to reassure public opinion. It therefore charges a commission of enquiry with establishing a list of suspects, letting it be known unofficially that it must content itself with copying out the confidential list that the generals are going to send it. After receiving the list, this commission meets for a few minutes, for form’s sake, and announces the conclusion of its “work”. In the country of human rights, it happened in the same way. When one knows the colossal financial stakes in the background, one cannot worry about the situation of Mr Alain Gest, RPR deputy, president of the commission — a real one this time — whose “work” proved to be of the most fictitious. Despite the fact that in the spring of 1997 this “democrat” was not re-elected, he is certainly sheltered from need…

Indeed, so many anomalies taint the “work” of this commission of enquiry that one is entitled to ask oneself serious questions:

1 - The list is appreciably the same as the one that had been established much earlier by the Renseignements Généraux, as if one had contented oneself with copying it out.

2 - The work was placed under the regime of secrecy, an exceptional thing in this matter. In a press release of 30 October 1996, Philippe Séguin, president of the National Assembly, moreover saw fit to recall it: “The political enquiry we are mandated to conduct […] can only be carried out in broad daylight.”

3 - The establishment of the list was not adversarial. Without the members or the representatives of the movements having been heard, the list was established in a totally arbitrary manner. The so-called visits to the sites were mere formalities. Mr Gest simply came to announce to the groups that they were part of the list, without even listening to their arguments. Only 20 hearings were held.

4 - The commission of enquiry met only twice, that is 50 minutes in total, and, in that space of time, “checked” the application of the 10 criteria to 172 movements or associations. From one day to the next, these groups were all qualified as “cults”. That represents less than 20 seconds per file! A record.

5 - The commission’s report was ratified by the National Assembly ”[…] unanimously, on 20 December 1995, by the 7 deputies present”. (L’Humanité, 11 January 1996)

6 - As if by chance, certain movements that do not contest being dangerous were “forgotten” from the list: satanic movements and violent extremist movements laying claim to certain religions. As if by chance, these call into question neither the globalisation of the economy, nor the agri-food industry, nor health policy, nor vaccinations…

This number of anomalies is so caricatural that at this level, any commentary would be superfluous.

2 - The objectives of the psychosis: future control of associations and neutralisation of all the groups, above all those who “know too much”

A - Future control of associations

Every democracy functions thanks to the enormous associative fabric. If tomorrow associations could be controlled by power, it would be the end of democracy. Of the Republic there would remain only the name. Now, at a time when the unemployment rate is becoming gigantic, when agriculture is in total collapse, very paradoxically, all the measures taken by governments have made things worse for 10 years. As long as one thinks they did not do it on purpose, nobody says anything. One votes right, then left, and then one will vote right again. But more and more associations are trying to put in place parallel economic circuits and are thus recreating an economic life. Now, the minorities that possess the means of production in the world in reality live off poverty and unemployment. They enrich themselves on the back of our misery. They do not at all wish unemployment to diminish and agriculture to become flourishing again. They take a very dim view of these revivals of a parallel economy. The poorer we are, the richer they are. All this associative milieu must therefore be silenced. But how does one control associations without triggering a revolution? Quite simply by making people believe that certain associations are dangerous and by manoeuvring skilfully enough for public opinion itself to demand a law controlling associations. That nearly worked when, from the beginning of the anti-cult campaign, in 1996, the parliamentarians questioned declared that it was not possible to tell the difference between a cult and an association.

Fortunately, some of them reacted, indicating that our legislative arsenal was sufficient. The psychosis had, moreover, not yet raged enough. For, if the manoeuvre had succeeded, from 1996 public opinion would have demanded a bill controlling associations. Under the screen of the defence of the “poor indoctrinated children”, this bill would have been widely voted through, to the applause of the trade unions. The latter would have understood, but too late, that this law applied first of all to them…

B - Neutralisation of the groups “who know too much”

Today, it is clear that if one wants to counter the arguments of any person or any group having anything disturbing to propose, it is enough to claim that they form part of a cult for the debate to stop.

Homeopaths are currently accused by the Council of the Ordre des médecins of being members of cults or, at the minimum, sympathisers. As a result, all the doctors who were interested in homeopathy drop out, often through fear. Homeopaths will therefore in future have to prove that they do not form part of a cult, that their association of homeopaths or of people reflecting on another way of approaching health is not linked to a cult either. In short, homeopathy is no longer spoken of. Everything is mobilised on the debate: cult or not.

That is exactly what was foreseen at the outset. As soon as there exists somewhere in France a research group on another economy, another diet, another conception of health, sooner or later this group is qualified as a cult. It is no longer listened to and nobody is interested in its work. Thus, among the journalists from all the radio and television channels and the written press who came to La Coucourde, none asked himself: “And what if it were true that their science produces more abundant fruit and vegetables per hectare, succulent, energetically rich?” So convinced were they of being in the presence of a cult that they walked between the citrus fruits, the giant carrots and the 2 kg aubergines without seeing them. None of them, either, noticed that the strawberries grew in open ground until December, almost under the snow.

That is exactly what was expected of them…

C - Objective: single-track thinking; neither smell nor frontier for the billions

Thus, progressively, all the spoilsports, all those who try to make it known that there exist solutions other than pillaging and destroying the planet while increasing the colossal profits of a small minority, will be put on the index. Every isolated researcher who, one day, no longer thinks “like everyone else” immediately becomes a “crank”. So he is no longer listened to.

In the 1960s, when a famous writer, or a professor, or even a renowned churchman, expressed an unusual opinion, everyone questioned the substance of what he had said. He could not, from one day to the next, have sunk into madness. So one verified.

Today, as soon as a public figure, whoever they may be, even covered with diplomas and experience, expresses a disturbing opinion, we have all acquired the reflex of not questioning the substance of what they say, but only the fact of knowing whether or not this person has lost their reason.

In great numbers, we protested for years about the fate reserved for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, without knowing that we would do the same thing to some of our fellow citizens because they handled taboo subjects. We all have certainties about facts we have not verified. In theory, our democracy allows everyone to express themselves, but here it is: the researcher who disturbs loses his place; the academic who does not think like everyone else loses his post; the writer who expresses an unusual opinion is censored; the sports director who wants his pupils to be comfortable in their skin and all happy to practise, to the detriment of medals, is replaced. In sum, everything that disturbs the “single-track thinking”, destined to globalise the economy, that is to say to concentrate profits in a few hands, is swept away. That is why: the house of the inventor of the compressed-air engine burned down (in the 1950s). The insurance companies paid very quickly and without discussion. In 1973 (the first oil shock), it was “suggested” to those who had developed the water-powered engine that they make all the plans disappear. They obeyed. In 1985, Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior was sunk. It was “forgotten” to publish what Haroun Tazief said about nuclear power stations in France. The Chernobyl cloud did not pass over France. The cults are dangerous: they must therefore be destroyed…

Atheist Fundamentalism and Single-Track Thinking

Two Forms of Intelligence

by Claude-Gérard Sarrazin, writer, trainer and lecturer.

There are human beings open to spirituality and to mystical experience, and human beings centred on reflection, on rational logic, on “sensible experience”. The first often judge the second impenetrable and narrow-minded; the second often judge the first dreamers and utopians; simplifying labels are frequently thrown at one another: archaising thought or reductionist thought, infantile nostalgia for impossible dreams or the stubbornness of the blind man making of his blindness a superior virtue; projection of the desire to survive oneself or masochistic mentality.

Simplifying to the extreme, confining ourselves to the domain of thought (neglecting the other levels of the self), we could divide human beings into two great categories: the reductionists and the enlargers (the author has retained this particular acceptation in his writings since 1977); the other nuances (abstract or concrete intelligence, sensory or rational, generalising or particularising, analytic or synthetic, etc.) do not concern our subject.

The materialists (in the philosophical sense of the term and not in the common acceptation) reduce reality in its entirety to matter alone and explain all vital, mental and conscious phenomena by tenuous modifications of matter and molecular or atomic arrangements. Atheists and rationalists are found in this category of beings. By contrast, the spiritualists admit the reality of one or several non-physical universes. They form part of the second category, called enlargers for want of a more general term. The enlargers tend to consider the reductionists as handicapped in consciousness (a whole side of reality is said to escape them, just as the world of visual realities escapes the blind), and the reductionists (generally materialists, in the philosophical sense of the term) tend to consider the enlargers as handicapped in reason (potential schizophrenics).

The enlargers most often consider the reductionists as blind men waving their white sticks before their uncertain steps in order to decode a reality they imagine without seeing it; the second see the first as waking dreamers who superimpose their fantasies on realistic perceptions which they distort or interpret as they please. One cannot even speak of a “dialogue of the deaf” but rather of “different frequencies” that one and the same receiver cannot pick up at the same time.

For the empiricists, the rationalists and the reductionists in general, the universe, man included, was born by chance, evolves by chance and dies by chance; it is not a microbe like man who can claim to modify anything whatever in the laws of Nature. For these consciousnesses limited to the physical plane, man dies because he wears out like any machine, after having aged; such is the law; the mystics are from then on only dreamers, and those who listen to them dreaming aloud are only stragglers of evolution, prisoners of their archaic thought.

For an enlarging mentality, Manifestation (which is too often called Creation) is not limited to the physical world alone, even extended to all the galaxies; other planes exist, and man’s consciousness can have access to them and draw from them data and energies capable of modifying his destiny and his limited nature.

One can nevertheless discuss and exchange points of view between reductionists and enlargers, but, with rare exceptions, one does not convince, one does not “reverse the steam”. The two worlds seem separated by a sort of ontological frontier. Let us return to everyday reality.

Disquiet

Single-track thinking generally leads to dictatorship. Whether it be the Inquisition, Nazism, Bolshevism, Fascism and other tyrannies, all the fundamentalisms, the “saviours of the people” always begin by “defending the rights of the people”, overthrow the opponents of this “liberation” and install a flawless dictatorship. It is to be noted that “the good people” go blithely “along with the scheme” and realise their alienation only belatedly; the resistants, conscious from the outset, are denounced, muzzled or eliminated.

Now, the question must indeed be posed: why, at the beginning of the 21st century, must the enlargers (in the particular acceptation retained in the present chapter) defend themselves against ever more numerous attacks on the part of the reductionists? The reductionists began by demanding the right to difference by advocating freedom of conscience; that was progress; religious hegemony was finally to share the monopoly of “the Truth”. Science was able to flourish.

It seems, however, that a certain overflow is in gestation: in order not to cut himself off from the “serious world”, a researcher cannot publish his work and his reflections in recognised journals unless he keeps to absolute materialism. Theological publications and religious reflections are accepted (condescension), but any attempt at demonstration concerning other realities, subtle universes and spiritual experiences is refused.

How is one to go deeply into the religious fact or the use of “powers” while keeping to the phenomenological or anthropological approach?

Everything had nevertheless begun well: the Encyclopédistes, in the “century of the enlightenment”, fought for freedom of conscience and respect for difference.

Laws were voted and the secular school, for example, was born. Would these pioneers recognise their successors?

The holders of free thought won their battle because they insisted on the fact that single-track thinking was retrograde; certainly the vocabulary was different, but the idea was the same. Faced with the imperialism of the religions in place, scientific thought first and then atheism demanded their right to dissidence. They were right. Single-track thinking, let us insist, generally leads to the Inquisition, to absolute dictatorship (“liberation of Russia from the tsars” in order to replace imperial power with a dictatorship far more coercive, which cost the country decades), to fascism, to Nazism, to fundamentalism. “I alone possess THE Truth and the opponents are traitors to the cause”; one never calls oneself into doubt and “the cause” is never clearly defined; it is always beribboned.

The “free-thinkers” were therefore right.

BUT it seems that an underground movement recalls that a pendulum rarely stops at the vertical; it continues its movement…

Rationalists, materialists and atheists have multiplied crusades against the religions, particularly Catholicism, which seemed to them the best structured. “Names” serve the just cause of atheism and daub the enlargers with their “definitive demonstrations”.

The religions have not known how to modify their language and still teach the same catechism for children, without transmitting the sacred heritage of the great mystics and the great thinkers. The rationalists have no difficulty in dismantling theological arguments, in ridiculing the Scriptures, which they obviously read at the first level… The religions in place still and always publish their Scriptures in translations at the first level of reading, giving to understand that it is these banalities that the Founders were determined to spread.

The “free-thinkers” have therefore felt stronger.

Science (or rather, a brotherhood of reductionist scientists) has followed suit and refuses any datum that could lead to the intrusion of a dimension other than the material space-time continuum.

Might the heirs of the “century of the enlightenment” today be taking over from the fundamentalists of old?

Those religious fundamentalists, in former times and here, burned, destroyed, muzzled, delayed; today and elsewhere, they kill, destroy, muzzle. The fundamentalist rationalists are attempting, here, today, to take up the torch by forbidding the enlargers to express their point of view and, one day that they hope is not too far off, quite simply forbidding them to live according to their conscience.

Freedom of conscience and the right to difference are preparing to be flouted.

Not long ago, one could still remind a reductionist that an enlarger could be as intelligent as he. I have several times crossed swords in public or in private with obstinate people and I spoke to them of Mensa and of its numerous members interested in these taboo subjects, vehemently condemned by materialist Science. The fundamentalist rationalists have finally found a riposte: intelligence tests, they assert, do not express the whole personality (which is perfectly exact) and, moreover, they measure nothing at all (which is perfectly ridiculous). Thus, one can “scientifically” practise ostracism and curtail the right to freedom of conscience and to difference. Difference is accepted if it concerns ethnic groups come from elsewhere, but not that of the recalcitrant, who cling to their “archaic” and “irrational” thought.

A scarcely honourable inheritance

Would one imagine monks ransacking the chapel of their monastery or that of the neighbouring monastery? Would one imagine a knight of old fleeing before the enemy? A Christian of the first times denying his faith to escape torture? Would one imagine a schoolteacher of the beginnings of the secular school encouraging in his class the signs of religious affiliation and the battles between children of different confession? A Resistance fighter delivering to the enemy the secrets of the network in order to escape torture?

What is the common denominator? The system of values.

One lives by or for values. What values does our society transmit?

The religions, with exceptions, withdraw into themselves and, if they meddle with the social, keep to the analyses of past centuries without taking account of progressive transformations. The School contents itself with teaching (when it manages it) intellectual data and does not often concern itself with transmitting collective or individual values.

Implicit transmission is generally more effective and deeper than explicit transmission… A materialist society (in every sense of the term), perfectly egocentric, cynical, and what else?

One of the fundamental causes is of a metaphysical order. We are paying for a century of materialist indoctrination: scientific reason, the refusal of any “irrational sentimentality”, in a word, “self-evident” or aggressive atheism. The certainty of final failure (one must die totally), the certainty of the non-existence of immanent justice: everything is transmitted implicitly to the young generations, who grow up and transmit implicitly at first, then more and more aggressively and explicitly.

The School

At its beginnings, the secular School perfectly fulfilled its mission: to unite the different confessions in a common ideal.

The ideal of the founders of the secular School has been extinguished. Formerly, respect for difference was lived elsewhere than in class and all went well: common values.

The School will be able to weld “the communities” together again by returning to the principle: to transcend differences by proposing a superior goal. But if the teaching body is contaminated by the reductionist mentality, it is hopeless. Nothing “logical” can bar the way to racism and violence. Materialist theories (the social contract) are fine for educated adults, for conscious thinkers, but without attraction for young minds.

What is to be done?

Those nostalgic for the old order wish to return to the good old days, “a return to the sources”… They forget, in their data, that the old sources produced today’s fruits. Error is generally a truth of the past that refuses to evolve. Let us insist, let us repeat: Evolution does not go backwards. Time is not reversible. A new society must be built.

Certainly, it is easier to paint a very dark picture than to propose solutions; it is likewise easier to suggest solutions than to put them into practice. Still, attention had to be drawn.

Man must be given back his spiritual dimension; a century of materialism has amputated an essential part of his being. If the religions in place opened their teachings to the new data, if they united with the initiatory Orders and the Schools of Mysteries… As Alain Pozarnik very rightly says (on the subject of Freemasonry, but we can generalise for all the Orders),

“man must first be transformed, because an ordinary man will be able to create only ordinary and disappointing things in a society that is itself disappointing.”

(Article-interview, Sud-Ouest, 15 February 2000)

It is these goodwills that will serve as catalyst and, perhaps, reverse the process of destruction. Everything is still possible. One can be an atheist and conscious of one’s acts; one can be a rationalist and not live solely for profit. The reductionists could, justly, reproach me with not having insisted at length in my writings on the excesses and the slippages of the religions of old (without forgetting the lamentable religious wars of today) and of today’s self-initiates, slippages that would seem to condemn enlarging thought. If tons of books have been published by the rationalists on these excesses, almost nothing has yet been published to shake the materialist fortress; and neither the guilty religions nor the self-initiates (often founders of cults) are inspired by enlarging thought: they are, in their way, reductionists. The religions are “recyclable”; they can go back to the true sources, change their discourse, read and have their Scriptures read at a higher level, apply the teachings of their respective Founders. Only the fundamentalists ought to be stigmatised and isolated.

Does one ask a surgeon to build a bridge, or an engineer to operate on an open heart? Does one ask an astronomer to study the mutations of bacteria, or a biologist to study black holes?

These self-evidences are so only in science, in the marked-out domains. As soon as it is a matter of subtle universes, of immaterial realities, of faith or of mystical experience, competence is self-proclaimed. This or that physicist (competent in physics) condemns, better than the Inquisition whose misdeeds he recalls in “self-evident” texts, underlines all the frauds of the charlatans and takes good care not to note the patent, disturbing facts. For these “authorities”, for certain fanatical (fundamentalist) reductionists, the believer is a backward creature. And if…

“In September 1971, Wernher von Braun […] declared in an interview on American television: ‘For myself, I do not have to “prove” God to myself, I can say that I see him, that I in some way experience his presence, for the sole reason that it seems to me inconceivable to think that one could make calculations and scientific predictions as precise and as complex as those we have had to make, if this cosmic universe were not subject to precise and constant laws which alone can permit them. There has never, as far as I know, been any law without a legislator… God is for me that supreme legislator whom the worlds obey.’ […]

‘I manage to understand that it may be possible to look at the earth and be an atheist; but I do not understand how one can raise one’s eyes to the sky at night and say that there is no God’, said Abraham Lincoln.”

(Théo, Nouvelle encyclopédie catholique, Droguet-Arant/Fayard, 1989).

Hide That Religion I Do Not Wish to See

by Alain BOUCHARD

Professor at the Collège de Sainte-Foy and lecturer at Université Laval in Quebec City.

The media hold an important place in the daily life of our contemporaries. Watching television to inform oneself is now an activity shared by all social classes, and probably the only contact people have with events. That is why there is more and more talk, particularly since the Gulf War, of the dangers of manipulation by the media. More and more information circulates live thanks to the developments of technology, leaving less and less room for reflection and analysis. This tendency has modified the relationship people have with the news. One can speak today of a consumerist relationship that has taken hold with regard to information. The media treatment of the news has imprinted a form, thus attesting, as McLuhan said, that the medium is the message.

One day, while I was waiting for a researcher for a television interview, my eye was drawn to a laminated sheet bearing the logo of a large Quebec news network. On this sheet one could read the criteria sought for a good report on the news bulletin. The “standards” were presented in the following order:

1. Impact: significant and striking images.

2. Atmosphere: ambient sound to live the emotion.

3. Involvement: reporter in action in the field.

4. Story: the text sticks to the images.

5. Clarity: simple language, short sentences.

Form thus becomes more important than content. What is sought is the effect more than the facts. This more playful approach to the news, however, creates an effect of selection of information according to the needs of the medium. The same goes for the media coverage of the religious.

The religiously correct

In a world where the news becomes spectacle, room is left for emotion more than for analysis. When one seeks emotion, one targets the viewers’ sensitive chords. This play of supply and demand in matters of journalism has put in place a religious correctness on the screens and in the public space. The events of April 2002, concerning the wearing of the kirpan by a young Sikh of Montreal, constitute a good example of what is acceptable today, for public opinion, in matters of religion.

The principal argument used by the opponents of the wearing of this religious symbol is that, nowadays, religion must be practised in private and not in the public square. A veil at home, yes; but at school, no! Any explicit religious representation in the public space becomes ostentatious, it shocks, and people declare themselves outraged. The religious must therefore be discreet and measured to be accepted today. No exuberance, no emotionality when celebrating in matters of religion, there is an implicit norm in circulation of how to practise one’s religion.

If emotion must be excluded, the irrational is too. A religion must be rational and logical to be acceptable, it is forbidden to speak of miracles or of phenomena that defy the laws of nature. A correct religion cannot claim social relevance. It is unthinkable to want to base an argument or a choice on religious foundations. Stephen Carter gave this situation a name: The Culture of Disbelief. In addition, a religion must prove that it does not manipulate and that it leaves all its members totally free, outside the Church is salvation. In sum, the model religion for today is a personal religious practice, leaving room for the individual’s free choice. This practice must take place at home and serve only the person’s flourishing. Religious institutions fit poorly into this portrait, and it is within this relationship to religion that the distinction between the church and the cult is inscribed.

The church

When it is a matter of saving a heritage church, the media mobilise to publicise the situation and defend the interests of Catholicism. But when the bishops take a position on a current issue, the tone changes. Some speak of a chill with the Church resulting in a poor and unjust treatment of that institution. Quebec Catholicism is thus judged by the yardstick of religious correctness. The Church becomes an acceptable institution when its private character is valorised. In the reports devoted to the religious phenomenon over the Easter weekend of 2002, a presentation of the life of the monks of a monastery made the front page of a Quebec City newspaper. It was clear that these religious threatened no one’s religious correctness from the depths of their abbey, but if one of them had decided to organise a public rally to deliver the same message, the media coverage would not have been the same. That is what happened in 1988.

On Sunday 13 March 1988, 25,000 people travelled to see and hear the preacher Pierre Lacroix at the Montreal Forum. At the end of the gathering, a hundred or so miracles took place, to the delight of the crowd and the stupefaction of the media. For The Gazette, this rally was a banal event and the journalist devoted only a few lines to it. The Journal de Québec headlined, on the front page: “Miracle!”, Le Soleil of Quebec City, in its first section, proclaimed: “Miraculous healings at the marathon of love”, La Presse of Montreal trumpeted: “Miracles by the dozen at the Forum!”, while Le Devoir of Montreal spoke on its front page of bewitchment and sorcery to describe the event. By putting the accent on the few spectacular manifestations, not necessarily representative of the evening as a whole, the media created a less than credible image of this gathering.

The mediatised Church is thus a place of service for the consumer of the religiously correct. Its heritage character makes it acceptable. The cult is the reverse. In the media hubbub that followed the Forum event, the question was raised whether the preacher did not embody a form of cult. It is not surprising that a few years later, in the framework of the television series Miséricorde, old clichés about religious life were dredged up, going so far as to compare it to brainwashing, as in a cult.

The cult

The cult, then, is the embodiment of the inverted image of the religiously correct. The cult refuses the private and wants to invade the public. There is talk of the proliferation of the cults, of the invasion and the cultic menace. The cults embody the irrational in our society, which is why it is fashionable in the media to ridicule their beliefs. The loser in this vision of the world is always the follower. He is presented to us as a weak being without resources, as a sick person or as a chronic dependent whom the manipulative cults exploit. The cult is the inversion of autonomy and free choice.

Here is an example that constitutes a good synthesis of the characteristic elements of a cult according to several media: “[L]ike viruses that use the organism itself to reproduce, the gurus are found in the school itself. They infest the centres of power, governments, State corporations, schools, churches, trade unions, media. […] [I]f [you] want[ed] to screw people over and get rich quickly […] You have only to say that the end of the world is approaching, and your followers blow their own brains out while you count your cash. Above all, do not go believing that my sulphurous remarks are aimed at the Church of Scientology, the Raëlians, the Krishnas or the Doughnut-Hole Liberation Front. First, because they really are the friends of God, and because they really did eat Italian poutine with Buddha in the back seat of a UFO.”

This media treatment reveals to us a society afraid of emotional overflows, even minimal ones. In wanting to control the cults, is one not seeking a form of social Ritalin for a problem which is perhaps only a media distortion of a phenomenon that is, all in all, quite banal? But above all, these stories reveal to us the ambiguous relationship Quebec maintains, through the pens of its journalists, with Catholicism. Behind the religiously correct, a whole discourse on Quebec identity is speaking itself, and the fact that it emerges around a Sikh religious symbol is symptomatic. The media thus become a mirror before which the Quebec citizen wants to see only what he wants, and as in the fairy tale, the mirror tells him what he wants to hear.

Alain BOUCHARD is Professor at the Collège de Sainte-Foy and lecturer at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Sciences of Université Laval in Quebec City. President of the Council of the Société Québécoise pour l’étude des religions (SQER)

Anti-Cult Law: The Poisoned Remedy for an Imaginary Ill

by Raphaël Verrier on the site Les mots sont importants (lmsi)

The hyperlinks were added by the webmaster

In the space of a decade or so, the cults have become a political problem, and their repression is today the object of a broad consensus. At the moment when a new bill has been tabled before the Senate, it is necessary to recall how the notion of the cult was manufactured, the better to understand how the anti-cult fight menaces both the associative world and public liberties.

A cheap tolerance

A few months ago, an advertising spot selling “thermal comfort” staged a Krishna devotee going door to door in the middle of winter. He was then warmly welcomed by a middle-aged couple, in a spacious and well-heated house. That is why the latter claimed to need no comfort, even a “spiritual” one, while our proselyte, subjugated by so much innovation, was at once converted to the joys of modern life.

Like so many others, this advertisement valorises differences so as to exclude no consumer: “whoever you are, you too will want to buy an efficient heater”. But this commercial version of freedom of conscience produces, moreover, dubious stereotypes. Thus, while priests and other monks are transformed into refined pleasure-seekers, the Krishna devotee is on the way to being incorporated into advertising iconography as the prototype of the crank cut off from modern comfort. In this advertisement, he thus represents the out-of-date and uninformed customer, always quick to marvel at the technological novelties offered him. He therefore embodies the imbecile our advertisers dissuade us from being (a naif outside the world of commercial consumption) at the same time as the one they urge us to become (a blissful consumer). Just as monastic life is not criticised for its enclosure, but because it authorises only a limited consumption, it is not the Krishna devotee’s credulity that serves as a foil, but his impossibility of following the general movement of consumption owing to his rupture with the world of commodities.

The fact is that our Krishna devotee follows the teachings of masters other than those dispensed by our advertisers and their employers, which leads him to cut himself off from the common values. Following and cutting are found in the two possible etymologies of the term sect: sequi and secare. One is forced to note that the advertisement clearly distinguishes these two aspects, since it valorises one, the following, and ridicules the other, the rupture. What it denounces, then, is the fact of not following its own teachings, which are mass teachings, in order to adopt minority practices and modes of thought. If it were established that the advertisement achieves its ends (modifying the public’s perception to induce a buying reflex), one could then legitimately worry about the lessons of tolerance it dispenses across the media and their effects on the population.

Metamorphosis of a private commitment into a political problem

The adoption, by the unanimous senators, of a bill aiming to create an offence of mental manipulation gives the measure of this formidable influence. It is in effect very rare, in a democratic country, for no elected representative to manifest opposition. A fortiori when public liberties are touched so closely. Is this to say that the cults are stigmatised to such a point that nobody dared any longer, on that 16 December 1999, to defend the most elementary republican principles?

To understand the emergence of this new intolerance, one must retrace the manner in which the notion of the cult took on meaning and the consensus [1] around its denunciation was manufactured. The recent affairs (collective suicides of the members of the OTS, disappearances of files during the fraud trial of the Church of Scientology…) are not the only causes of this renewed interest. Indeed, many others have already taken place, like the collective suicide of the followers of pastor Jim Jones in 1979, without ever leading to a political taking-in-hand of the cult question. For such a placing on the political agenda to be possible, the notion of the cult first had to be constructed in such a way that a private commitment should appear as a problem capable of being treated by the public authorities.

Three types of actor intervened in this elaboration: associations, to pose the problem, notably the Union Nationale des Associations pour les Défenses des Familles et des Individus (UNADFI) and the Centre de documentation, d’éducation et d’action Contre les Manipulations Mentales (CCMM); the police services, principally the Renseignements Généraux, to construct it; political leaders at the intersection of the political and the legislative, like M. Vivien, former minister and deputy, to submit it to public debate. The latter is the author of the first parliamentary report on the cult phenomenon, dating from 1985. The precocity of his commitment on this question earns him today the presidency of an Interministerial Mission for the Fight against the Cults (MILS) which is directly attached to the Prime Minister. Which shows the importance accorded today to this question at the highest level of the State.

Inflating the menace

Yet the attention paid to the so-called cult groups is not particularly motivated by their expansion. If this was indeed significant in the period 1960-70, the cult nebula has remained numerically stable for some fifteen years. Certain groups have even almost disappeared from the French landscape, like the Association for the Unification of World Christianity (Moon) or the International Association for Krishna Consciousness. One may thus remark that it is neither the appearance nor the multiplication of the cults that provokes the strongest reactions, but the halt of their growth accompanied by their durable installation on the market of ideological supply. Nevertheless, all the actors have an interest in inflating the phenomenon: the groups themselves, but also the family associations to justify their combat, the media [2] to make ratings, and the politicians to give themselves the fine role in the face of this “new” social scourge [3]. It must however be recalled that of the 175 “cult movements” catalogued in the Guyard report [4], only about ten present a dangerous character according to the MILS. In fact, these movements are essentially small associations: 57 have fewer than 50 followers, 80 have between 50 and 500 followers, only 24 have between 500 and 2,000 followers, and 13 have between 2,000 and 10,000 followers. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, with their 130,000 faithful, are the only group exceeding the threshold of 10,000 people. They alone represent two thirds of the disciples of all the “cults” catalogued in France.

All in the same bag. Well, almost?

With the Guyard report, a limit was crossed, since the parliamentary Commission of inquiry made public a nominative list of the associations it considers cult-like. One finds there pell-mell murderous groups, like the Order of the Solar Temple; associations convicted of fraud, like the Church of Scientology; totally inoffensive occultist and New Age groups; evangelical communities traditional in the United States; and even the association l’Arbre au milieu, which it was noticed, but too late, had been mentioned on the sole basis of calumnious denunciations.

Above all, one finds there no trace of Opus Dei. Yet this organisation, 80,000 members strong in the world and with 1,500 followers in France [5], would have deserved greater attention from our parliamentarians. Indeed, demanding unconditional obedience to its directors of conscience, the Work is said to be “psychologically dangerous for its own members” according to M. John Roche, former leader of the movement in Great Britain. Moreover, recruiting principally among the social elites, the Opus seems to implement a veritable strategy of infiltration of the international organisations (UN, UNESCO, OECD, European Commission), as well as of the public authorities of many countries. Its practice of clandestinity makes the evaluation of this influence difficult. Indeed, until their revelation in 1982, the organisation’s secret statutes stipulated “that the numerary and supernumerary members should know well that they must keep a prudent silence as to the names of the other associates, and that they must never reveal to anyone that they belong to Opus Dei”. It is however known that the first Juppé government included at least two persons close to the Opus, Hervé Gaymard and his wife Clara Gaymard-Lejeune. Moreover, the sympathies of M. Barre, former Prime Minister and current mayor of Lyon, have been no secret since he attested to the “signs of sainthood” of the founder of Opus Dei at the latter’s beatification trial.

But it is above all in Spain, and in Latin America, that the political weight of this organisation is most perceptible. Thus, the ninth Franco government counted twelve members of the Opus among nineteen ministers. Still today, eminent cadres of the PPE, like Ignacio Salfaranca, Juan Trillo, Loyola de Palacio or Isabel Tocino, are Opusians. Likewise, the high command of the Spanish army counts several adherents of the Work. One will thus not be surprised to learn that Juan Antonio Samaranch-Torello, former Francoist minister and current president of the International Olympic Committee, belongs to this organisation.

To assimilate Opus Dei to a cult would thus have angered a good number of our politicians and our European partners. But it is above all the Vatican as a whole that would then have been targeted. Indeed, John Paul II made this organisation, to which he owes his election, his personal prelature. Since then one counts numerous Opusians among the Pope’s close collaborators, like the chaplains Joachim Pacheco, Klaus Becker, Fernando Ocariz and Felipe Rodrigez, the Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, Cardinal Martinez Somalo, the (ex-DC) deputy Alberto Michelini or the financial adviser Gianmario Rovero. A close presence which leads people to say that Opus Dei, a veritable “Church within the Church” according to John Roche, is henceforth all-powerful at the Vatican.

The constant practice of secrecy, justified by imperatives of Christian humility and apostolic effectiveness, above all allows Opus Dei to obtain public subsidies (like those granted by the European Commission to its newspaper Europe Today), to control a maze of limited companies (Saidec, Socofina, Acut, Sofico, Trifep…), of publishing houses (like the éditions du Laurier), of universities and professional schools (like the Institut Robert-Schuman, intended to supply “reliable Catholic journalists” to Eastern Europe and the Third World).

Thus, the fortune of Opus Dei is said to be considerable, even if it remains impossible to evaluate with precision. One can nevertheless form an idea of it by remembering that the Work’s bankers refloated, to the tune of 260 million dollars, the Institute for the Works of Religion - responsible for the scandalous bankruptcy of the Banco Ambrosiano in 1982 and directed at the time by the Pope’s bodyguard, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. The financing of the Opus is itself also tainted by a few scandals, like the Matesa affair, in 1969, implicating Prince Jean de Broglie, an Opusian and treasurer of the very Giscardian Républicains Indépendants, since assassinated in circumstances never elucidated; or again the affair of José Maria Ruiz Mateos, head of the multinational consortium Rumasa, who confessed to having paid 300 million pesetas to Opus Dei and who was indicted, in 1982, for tax fraud and breach of exchange-control legislation. It seems that, in a general way, the Opus can count on the support of business circles, with which the organisation shares, among other things, very spiritual ideas about pensions. Thus, according to Le Monde Diplomatique [6], Claude Bébéar (AXA), Michel Albert (AGF), Didier Pineault-Valenciennnes (Schneider) and Louis Schweitzer (Renault) are said to have given lectures for the Opus at the Centre Garnelles in Paris.

This rapid overview shows that Opus Dei gathers almost the totality of the ten criteria retained by the parliamentary Commission for recognising the cult character of an association, criteria we shall examine in detail below. Yet one finds no mention of the Work among the organisations pinned in the Guyard report. The importance of the support the Opus enjoys is certainly not unconnected to such an omission. One may thus wager that if the Work had officially been put in the same bag as the Church of Scientology and the Sokka Gakkaï, the parliamentary unanimity around the anti-cult fight would have been more difficult to obtain. The question nevertheless arises of the real usefulness of this crusade, when those who conduct it consider it no grave matter to renounce combating the most influential of them.

When the opinion of the Renseignements Généraux substitutes itself for public opinion

That this blacklist proceeds by amalgams and arbitrary distinctions can only be understood on condition of grasping how the notion of the cult was constructed. The fact is that it is not easy to define it, to the point that many sociologists prefer to speak of “new religious movements”. But it is not this scientifically delimited object that the parliamentarians studied, since their list includes movements that are no longer so new, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Antoinist Cult, and even groups with no religious vocation like the International Federation for the Development of Instinctive Eating. The Commission of inquiry does not moreover evade the problem. According to it, “the difficulty of defining the notion of the cult, which will nevertheless be used in the remainder of the report, led the Commission to retain a bundle of indicators, each of which could lend itself to long discussions. It therefore preferred, at the risk of ruffling many sensibilities or of proceeding to a partial analysis of reality, to retain the common meaning that public opinion attributes to the notion”.

One can only admire the methodological rigour of our investigators. Thus, the Commission teaches us that the notion of the cult is not definable, but that it is nevertheless useless to equip oneself with a more appropriate concept. It would suffice, in effect, to trust the representation “public opinion” forms of it, without asking whether that representation actually corresponds to a reality. One would at least expect this public opinion to be formed by scientists or by associations fighting the cults. But the Commission mentions them only to dismiss them at once as too partial or too detached. Very prudently, it admits, for want of an incontestable definition, to having only a bundle of indicators for recognising cult associations. But it is to teach us a few lines further on that these indicators were elaborated by the Renseignements Généraux. Would these services be the depositaries of the “common meaning that public opinion attributes to the notion”?

The public opinion to which the parliamentarians very democratically refer turns out to be, in the Guyard report, only the common sense of the police services. In other words, the term cult is not universally definable for the simple reason that it is only the product of a system of representation proper to the Renseignements Généraux. The notion of the cult reveals itself here as the criminal denomination of freedom of conscience and worship. It is therefore nothing other than a police category intended to repress what the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, placed in the preamble of our constitution, formally guarantees.

To convince oneself of the arbitrarily repressive character of the notion of the cult, it suffices to examine the criteria suggested to the Commission by the Renseignements Généraux. They are ten in number, but nowhere is it specified how many must be gathered to be considered a cult movement. Moreover, as the Commission recognises, “each could lend itself to long discussions”. But it does not suffice to admit that the procedures by which opprobrium is cast on nearly 160,000 citizens are debatable; one must still know why. In the absence of an explanation from the Commission, we must examine for ourselves each of its famous indicators whose convergence is supposed to allow us to recognise the cult character of an association.

First indicator: “mental destabilisation”

Insofar as this notion has a meaning, it would require knowing whether the followers were “mentally stable” before entering the cult. Now, the Commission recognises elsewhere that the cults “offer answers to important needs”: the crisis of the development model of Western societies, the deregulation of the market in “spiritual goods”, the economic crisis, the upheaval of family structures, the need to improve individual performance and the shattering of social cohesion are said to contribute to arousing a desire to “transform oneself in order to transform the world”. But if one accepts that these factors explain the success of the “cults”, one is obliged to admit that they disturbed the psychic formation of individuals prior to their initiation. Mental destabilisation is thus logically anterior to entry into the “cult”, even if the latter can transform into illness what was still only a malaise.

One would still have to specify to what point the “cult” is to be incriminated in this process, since the desire to “transform oneself” is also necessarily a demand for “destabilisation” which is never without risk. Should one accuse a licensed psychotherapist of “mental destabilisation” if the troubles of a few of his patients worsened in the course of the cure? How to evaluate the improved well-being brought by a “cult” if not by the successes it meets as much as by its failures?

One therefore sees poorly how, in the absence of psychiatric assessments conducted on a large scale, the Commission was able to determine the mentally destabilising groups. This nevertheless did not prevent Senator About, and Deputy Picard, from drawing inspiration from this criterion to propose the creation of an offence of “mental manipulation” to their respective assemblies. The Ministry of the Interior had nevertheless manifested its opposition to this bill, qualifying it as “dangerous for public liberties” and as “legislation of exception”. The Place Beauvau considered notably that the imprecision of the meaning and scope of this notion opened the door to every excess, which history confirms. It is indeed with the help of a similar law that Mussolini liquidated the Italian Communist Party.

Moreover, this bill also menaced the “great religions”, which were not slow to express their worry. Thus, Mgr Jean Vernette, the episcopate’s delegate for the cults, asked [7]: “what will make the difference between spiritual direction and mental manipulation?”. While the president of the Protestant Federation asked just as lucidly: “where is the limit between convinced discourse, ardent oath and mental manipulation?”. All recalled moreover, with rabbi Haïm Korsia, that the first parliamentary Commission of inquiry had considered, in 1994, that the existing legal arsenal was sufficient for fighting the cults.

Faced with these oppositions, and with the sharp criticisms of the national consultative Commission on human rights as well as of the League of Human Rights, a new text was presented on 25 January 2001 to the Senate, where the terms “mental manipulation” disappeared. They were replaced by the notion of abuse of a “state of subjection”, which will amount to broadening article 313-4 of the penal code repressing “the fraudulent abuse of the state of ignorance or the situation of weakness”. But if the appellations change, the content remains the same. While the first draft defined mental manipulation as “the fact, within a cult grouping, of exerting on a person grave and reiterated pressures in order to create or exploit a state of dependence and to lead the person, against his will or not, to an act or an abstention gravely prejudicial to him”, the latest version makes the state of subjection result from “the exercise of grave and reiterated pressures or of techniques apt to alter judgement”.

But how then are these delinquent techniques going to be determined? The only ones recognised as incontestably effective arise from “brainwashing”. They consist in erasing the individual’s memories in order to re-form his personality. However, such practices require holding the victim physically prisoner, as certain American soldiers were in Korea. Now, nobody contests the fact that the cults rely on seduction, rather than on constraint, to recruit and form their followers. In other words, the “techniques” they employ, in a fashion more empirical than scientific, draw their effectiveness only from the consent of their “victim”. Consequently, the only way of detecting the use of manipulatory techniques is to note their effects, that is to say the alteration of judgement. The latter is recognised when a person is “led to an act or an abstention gravely prejudicial to him”. One would nevertheless have to add, and the parliamentarians strangely forgot to do so, acts or abstentions gravely prejudicial to others. However that may be, it will be when the act or abstention profits the “manipulator” while harming the “victim” (or perhaps also others) that mental manipulation, renamed abuse of a state of subjection, will be observable by the judge.

In other words, the legislator is going to prevent harming oneself for the profit of a third party, the latter then being deemed to have altered the judgement of the former with the help of “techniques” nobody is capable of designating a priori. One could long ponder the state of a society preparing to prohibit the sacrifice of oneself or one’s own interests. One is forced to note that such behaviour has become so foreign to our parliamentarians that they can no longer see in it anything but an alteration of judgement produced by mysterious techniques. The moral effects of such blindness are unfortunately foreseeable: the new law orders, in fact, every citizen to conduct himself as a perfect homo economicus on pain of being regarded as a victim. The fact that self-transcendence now inspires nothing but compassion could nevertheless have unexpected consequences. Should one not consider the resistance fighters as victims, not of Nazism, but of De Gaulle or Stalin?

But it will never come to that. Just as it will never come to condemning the beneficiaries of the techniques of psychological manipulation used both in human resources and in sales and communication [8]. These methods, the object of costly research, nevertheless have no other aim than to alter judgement for the profit of companies, the army, the State.

There is however no risk that these organisations will one day be considered “groups having as their aim or effect to create or exploit the psychological or physical dependence of the persons taking part in their activities”. For, though corresponding to this definition of the cult which the various legislative labours ended by producing, these organisations were not included in the blacklist of the Guyard report. Now, the About-Picard bill has the restrictive objective of “reinforcing prevention and repression against groups of a cult character” [9]. In judicial practice, the modified article 313-4 will therefore apply exclusively to the associations catalogued in the Guyard report [10], a report in which they were already accused of “mental destabilisation” when this notion had not yet acquired any determinate meaning. That is what is called closing the loop.

Second indicator: “the exorbitant character of the financial demands”

This indicator is supposed to reveal the venal character of certain associations presenting themselves as spiritual. Here, the fact that spirituality must appear disinterested is considered self-evident. Yet it occurred to no parliamentary investigator that the originality of certain religious movements could also reside in calling into question our traditional (and entirely ideal) separation of religion and money. Is it not inevitable that, where one finds what they themselves call “spiritual goods”, one also finds veritable worship enterprises to produce and commercialise them? The lessons in liberalism of our politicians are decidedly very selective. However, the parliamentarians’ problem seems not to be the existence of a market in “spiritual goods”, but the exorbitant price they can reach. But how to measure this exorbitant character, if not by relating it to the prices of equivalent goods and services on the market? Now such a comparison is impossible, since each “cult” offers a range of unique “products”: can the cost of becoming an “operating thetan” again among the Scientologists (about 500,000 francs) be compared with that needed by the Raelians to build an embassy intended to welcome the extraterrestrials (7% of net income)? It seems these prices appear exorbitant above all to those who do not share the same hopes.

Should one, in that case, include psychoanalysis in the list of the cults on the pretext that, by demanding a minimum of 200 francs per session, at the rate of two sessions a week payable even in case of absence, it often extracts far more than 7% of its patients’ net income for a result nobody can guarantee?

Third indicator: “The induced rupture with the environment of origin”

One must understand here the rupture of children with their parents, following their entry into an association. It is surprising that the milieu “of origin” has more value here than the environment created: no mention is made of induced ruptures with one’s own children, one’s spouse or one’s friends. However that may be, this criterion recognises as normal that children, even adult ones, belong to their family before belonging to themselves. It thus legitimises the parents’ associations fighting the “cults”, notably UNADFI, which was recognised as an association of public utility one year after the release of the Guyard report.

It is not useless to recall that at its creation, in 1974, it was called the Association for the Defence of Family Values and the Individual. Judged too “reactionary”, the appellation was quickly modified to Association for the Defences of Families and Individuals. However that may be, this new denomination leaves one pensive. What liberty remains to individuals if they do not have the choice of deciding their own influences, even at the cost of rejecting those of their “environment of origin”? Are such practices of rupture not moreover characteristic of certain monastic orders, without family associations or parliamentarians seeming moved by it? If certain groups do indeed “induce” such separations, is the responsible party not the one who finally made that choice, namely the adult child himself?

Finally, the parliamentarians do not take seriously the expression “environment of origin”, whose use dissimulates their agreement with the biblical commandment enjoining respect for one’s parents. For rigour would require including in the environment of origin the social and geographical milieu. Now the parliamentarians do not seem ready to consider as cult-like the practices of profitable companies which offer their employees the free choice between unemployment and work on a site far from their region, or country, “of origin”. In a general way, the valorisation of the environment of origin refers us to political practices far removed from democracy.

Finally, by speaking of “induced” ruptures, the parliamentarians open the door to the greatest arbitrariness. Indeed, the concept of induction is so indeterminate that it makes it possible to incriminate anything and everything by extending the chain of responsibilities indefinitely. Thus, what should we think of the practices of the French State, and of numerous national companies, when they “induce” entire populations to migrate by reducing them to misery? Would it not be legitimate to suppose that our deputies are inclined to point the finger at the effects “induced” by cult practices to make people momentarily forget the social ruptures “induced” by their own doings?

Fourth indicator: “Attacks on physical integrity”

Here again, the parliamentarians give no precision. Is it a matter of consented or imposed attacks? In the first case, they are assimilable to tattooing, piercing, scarifications and sado-masochistic practices between consenting adults, which do not as such interest the public authorities. If it is a matter of imposed attacks, are they mutilating or not? If an imposed but non-mutilating attack on physical integrity shocks the parliamentarians, why did they exclude Judaism from the cult movements when the circumcision of newborns is practised there? Finally, the parliamentarians do not distinguish, among attacks on physical integrity, those that are voluntary from those that are accidental, nor those that are systematic from those that are merely repeated. Such distinctions would nevertheless have their importance, without which one would have to consider as cult-like the companies where involuntary and repeated attacks on the physical integrity of employees are legion, as is the case in the construction sector.

If only groups voluntarily and systematically imposing mutilations on their members are to be considered cult-like, where does one find such associations in the list established by the Commission of inquiry? There is none, apart from the OTS. But in this last case, to speak of an attack on physical integrity, when it is death that is at issue, manifests a dubious sense of euphemism.

It emerges that the Guyard report attempts to discredit certain associations by claiming that they endanger the physical integrity of their members. But, on the other hand, it does not mention the groups that practise the traditional excision of young girls. The parliamentarians here give the unfortunate impression of having established the list of the cults in France before even having elaborated the criteria for recognising them.

Fifth indicator: “The regimentation of children”

It seems that in the eyes of the parliamentarians, regimentation consists in placing the child in a univocal educational structure, limiting as much as possible the penetration of outside elements (family, media, school knowledge…), so as to prevent the appearance of any critical distance from the dogmas and practices of the cult. One must however recognise that every education implies the necessarily selective imposition of values, practices, knowledge and social relations, since it aims at the insertion of the child into a society, which presupposes submission to the authority of adults. So that every education carries a part of regimentation, if one keeps to the definition the Petit Larousse gives of it: “to bring someone, by constraint or persuasion, into an association, a party, any group whatever”.

In fact, most children are led to join a social group identical to that of their parents, or close to it. Reproduction (of values, behaviours, inequalities…) is the rule and rupture the exception. If that were not the case, one could then reproach national education with “inducing ruptures with the environment of origin”, which one would find very hard to do. One sees here how the third indicator contradicts the fifth, since whoever does not induce a rupture of the child with his environment of origin falls automatically under the accusation of regimentation. It becomes very difficult not to be cult-like.

Above all, before speaking of regimenting behaviours, one would first have to compare the rate of former pupils of national education who have broken with their environment of origin (by joining a cult, for example) with the rate of children raised in a cult who have subsequently made the reverse journey. Given the relative stability of the cult phenomenon for some fifteen years, one may suppose the existence of a significant leakage rate (not counting those who, while remaining in the cult sphere, change affiliation): regimentation is thus perhaps not most effective where it is usually believed to be.

Moreover, it must be recalled that the law is supposed to prevent the total removal of the child from outside influences. France has notably ratified a series of international conventions on the rights of the child, bearing notably on the right to a normal education and the right to the family (which implies the possibility of seeing one’s grandparents, or one of the parents in case of divorce). Consequently, if the law were applied, and it is for the parliamentarians to give the executive the means to do so, there should no longer be, on the national territory, any regimentation of children in the sense understood by the Commission.

Finally, that a multinational like Vivendi finds itself at the head of one of the largest networks of private schools in France [11] obviously does not alert the parliamentarians, since a company so respectable and generous cannot engage in the “regimentation” of youth. For those who consider such a menace exaggerated, we can only recall the reaction of the firm Nike to the adhesion to the Workers’ Rights Consortium [12] of three American universities it subsidised. As for the stranglehold on the means of mass persuasion by a few Bouygues or other Lagardères, it presents, of course, no risk of indoctrination for children.

Sixth indicator: “The more or less antisocial discourse”

The “more or less” says much about the amplitude of the statements involved in this category. But what does the term “anti-social” mean when it applies to groups whose strong cohesion the Commission puts forward? It would be a matter of statements denouncing the dangerous or perverted character of society, and intended to accentuate the followers’ rupture with it. We might remind our parliamentarians that the French revolution, to which they owe their seats, would never have taken place had nobody been found to denounce the harmful and perverse character of monarchical society.

But above all, the 26 associations denounced by the Renseignements Généraux are far from being the only ones to maintain a besieged mentality. Thus, the apocalyptic discourses of many politicians on the subject of the banlieues (lawless zones where one should no longer have a right to tolerance), or of the young people of immigrant origin (unintegrable savages), have the direct effect of reinforcing the apartheid with these populations or neighbourhoods [13]. Anti-cult propaganda is also part of these demonising rhetorics, among which one finds again the denunciation of the Islamist peril (which yesterday was still red, and the day before yellow).

Is working to make minorities disquieting less antisocial than the paranoid fear maintained by a few often very small groups? It is all the less sure in that all these frights, distilled at will into opinion, have in common that they bear on the foreign (migratory, financial, cultural and worship flows), and consequently tend to make the rest of the planet be perceived as intrusive.

One may thus suppose that the foreign origin of most of the catalogued “cults”, notably among the largest, is not unconnected to the denunciation of which they are the object. That is the case for the New Age movements coming from the United States, like the evangelical churches and, of course, the Jehovah’s Witnesses as well as the Scientologists. It is also true of groups coming from South America (like the Association Nouvelle Acropole France or Tradition Family Property) or from Asia (notably the Association for the Unification of World Christianity, the French Federation for Krishna Consciousness and Sokka Gakkaï International France).

Seventh indicator: “Disturbances of public order”

This catch-all notion consists in respect, “in the broad sense, for public tranquillity, security, salubrity and morality”. This definition is so vague that it makes it possible to incriminate anyone according to the good pleasure of the authorities. It is thus that the Conseil d’Etat refused to recognise the status of worship association for the Christian Association of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, in an assembly ruling of 1 February 1985, on the ground that it did not have an activity in conformity with public order and the national interest [14]. It must be recognised that the Jehovah’s Witnesses openly profess pacifism and antimilitarism, which constituted, in the eyes of that jurisdiction, a grave disturbance of public order. A contrario, wars, and the armies that wage them, would never have provoked the slightest disturbance of public tranquillity, security, salubrity and morality.

With the same rigour, the Conseil d’Etat considered that the refusal of blood transfusion by the Jehovah’s Witnesses also constituted a disturbance of public order. It should nevertheless be recalled that nobody is obliged to seek treatment, and that the legal problem in fact arises only for minors. Now the question is not new, and the law already authorises doctors to relieve parents provisionally of their authority with a view to carrying out indispensable care, like transfusions for example [15]. Thus, in the facts, the doctrine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the matter [16] disturbs public order less than the papal refusal of the use of the condom. Indeed, many children, born and dead with AIDS, are the direct consequence of that pontifical decision. Yet, of the 500 congregations legally recognised by the republic, almost all belong to the Catholic religion. And rare are the Catholic groups refused the advantageous status of worship association.

That the notion of public order was elaborated to give full latitude to administrative action is revealed also by the use that is not made of it. Thus, the DPS, the Front National’s security service, has never been sanctioned despite the menaces its armament and training pose to public security. Likewise, the Front National, instead of being sanctioned for non-respect of public morality (unless one considers racism in conformity with good morals), continues to receive State subsidies. Finally, while the hostels for immigrant workers are rarely in conformity with the legal provisions on hygiene and security, the associations in charge of their management have only very rarely been sanctioned for failure to respect public salubrity.

If considerations of expediency prevail over respect for the law, it is thus fitting to ask what reasons motivate the administration to discriminate against certain associations, in particular the 26 organisations denounced by the Renseignements Généraux as disturbing public order. Besides the very dangerous Jehovah’s Witnesses and the terrifying members of the French Federation for Krishna Consciousness, one finds the Nouvelle Acropole, of which the report says that it is “a cult with political aims, of a far-right and neo-fascist type (…) They are moreover declared enemies of democracy (…) For them, the end justifies the means”. The nullity of so noxious an association has nevertheless never been requested by the administration since then.

Eighth indicator: “The importance of judicial entanglements”

Here again, the parliamentarians handle vagueness and amalgam, for they draw no distinction between the legal actions brought at the initiative of the cult organisations and the trials brought against them. Thus, if the Scientologists are habitués of the courtrooms, it is because they are most often at the origin of the procedure. Yet their strategy, which consists in transforming into legal proceedings the slightest criticism addressed to them, in order to dissuade their adversaries, is used by many others: starting with the Front National, which the Guyard report does not mention on its blacklist.

Moreover, companies and political parties have far more legal disputes, and often for far graver motives. Above all, “the importance of judicial entanglements” is a criterion all the less pertinent in that it concerns only the associations with the least hold over their members. Indeed, to open a procedure one must first file a complaint, which supposes a critical distance incompatible with the regimentation and mental manipulation of which the cults are accused. One ought thus rather to consider the absence of judicial entanglements, notably with one’s own adherents, as a worrying sign.

Ninth indicator: “The possible diversion of traditional economic circuits”

The formulation of this indicator is revealing of the inquisitorial method of the Commission of inquiry. In the absence of established facts, one contents oneself with suspicions. It suffices, in effect, that the diversion of economic circuits be possible for the parliamentarians to consider they are dealing with a cult. Despite this procedure, the Guyard report considers that only 51 catalogued associations are liable to engage in these delinquent practices (recourse to clandestine labour, tax fraud, swindling…), which places the 134 others above all suspicion. Would the cults be abnormally honest? Indeed, how many companies, how many political parties or how many secret services have never engaged in “possible diversions of traditional economic circuits”? Our parliamentary investigators are particularly well placed to know that there are very few, indeed none - unless one considers the diversion of legal economic circuits traditional.

Tenth indicator: “Attempts to infiltrate the public authorities”

The Commission worries about the attribution of subsidies, and of certain public contracts, to bodies affiliated with “cults”. In theory, calls for tender are regulated in order to select the best service. To be alarmed that public contracts are attributed to “cults” means either that, despite their performance, one would wish to eliminate them from the competition (that is to say, discriminate against them relative to other companies), or that one considers that their penetration of the State apparatus would favour them unduly.

The menace is perhaps real, though it seems artificially inflated for the needs of our parliamentarians as much as of our police services. One may nevertheless wonder at the fact that the parliamentarians reduce it to a list of 175 associations, qualified as cults for the occasion, most of which do not exceed two thousand adherents. The causes of corruption of the administration are evidently far more numerous, and often much more powerful than these “cults”. The close links with certain large companies, and the connivances, informal or formalised by common affiliations (grandes écoles, political parties, Freemasonry and other clubs…), influence public decision-making far more strongly than all the cult movements put together.

Numerous companies, and not the least, have thus specialised in obtaining public subsidies in exchange for jobs that never saw the light of day. By way of illustration, La vie du rail [17], relying on declarations of SNCF managers, reports that the 12-billion cost of the new TGV-Nord line includes 750 million of undue expenses generated by the illicit agreements between the big construction companies. When these facts were discussed at the “transport and infrastructures” Commission of the Regional Council of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, on 31 March 2000, M. Percheron, vice-president (PS), is said to have defended these agreements which, according to him, had the aim of defending… employment [18]. Who infiltrates whom?

Faced with these practices, common enough for an elected official to dare defend them publicly, the attacks on the “cults” appear as a smokescreen laboriously dissimulating the true (dys)functionings of the State. The criterion of “infiltration of the public authorities” has in effect the advantage of preserving the image of an administration pure of all outside influence, commanding society with loftiness and independence. This children’s tale is probably believed by a number of parliamentarians, and perhaps still by a few senior officials. But, like Edgar Poe’s famous hidden letter, what should be sought has become so familiar that nobody sees it any more.

It is this long-standing intimacy with the State apparatus that the Church of Scientology still lacks. The latter, particularly targeted by this accusation of infiltration, appears as a convenient scapegoat, capable of revivifying in opinion the old demons of the plot which the secret services have always known how to manipulate [19]. Indeed, even if the Scientologists’ intention of infiltrating the State apparatus is hardly in doubt any longer for the police services, their organisation, which gathers about two thousand followers in France, cannot seriously be perceived as a major menace. A contrario, the “pantouflage” of senior officials into large companies is henceforth considered a normal practice, which no longer deserves to alert the public authorities to the infiltration of which they are the object.

One never hides better than in broad daylight. Thus, rather than tracking alleged occult powers, our parliamentarians would do better to open their eyes to the visible - and nevertheless quite real - powers.

We have seen that, taken one by one, none of the criteria retained by the Commission of inquiry has any real consistency. One thus sees all the more poorly how the convergence of these elements, devoid of the slightest cognitive value, could show anything whatever of the character of an association: the product of zero by zero being always just as null.

It is perhaps this observation that pushed the MILS, in its report for the year 2000, finally to produce a definition of the cult, that is to say of what it has claimed to be combating for several years. The cult would thus be an “association of totalitarian structure, declaring or not religious objectives, and whose behaviour infringes Human Rights and social equilibrium”.

By “totalitarian structure”, the Mission understands complete submission to an authority exercising itself without control. Yet, that individuals should freely desire such submission ought to concern only themselves, provided their alienation takes on no legal value. Indeed, if the law has the role of preventing anyone from renouncing his liberty, notably by a contract of servitude, it cannot however force anyone to exercise it. This type of association ought therefore not to interest the public authorities. On the other hand, the fact that many employees are forced, in order to live, to join companies endowed with “totalitarian structures” ought to worry the government strongly. The analyses of Christophe Dejours [20], director of the Laboratory of Work Psychology, have nevertheless received no echo from them.

The anti-cult fight makes us take the tree for the forest. In effect, the stigmatisation of the cults above all makes it possible to trace an official line of demarcation between the world of free labour and the world of enslaved labour, good professional training and indoctrinating training, as well as between good employees and dangerous employees. It thus spares the public authorities from calling into question the manipulative practices of the army, as well as of numerous companies, which manage to make their members act in a way they would ordinarily have condemned.

A society devoted to the cult of transparency but which finds at every level zones of persistent opacity, a society devoted to the cult of efficiency but which observes its devastating effects each day, a society devoted to the cult of liberty but which constantly experiences the implacable character of the liberty of the powerful alone - such a society can only be tempted by the denial of such manifest failures. In forming from whole cloth the notion of the cult, the parliamentary Commissions of inquiry and the MILS did not resist it. Indeed, as we have attempted to demonstrate, this notion catalyses ills present to various degrees in the whole of society, which is the very function of the scapegoat.

That is why the necessary excesses of the anti-cult fight ought to be of stronger concern. For example, in its report for the year 2000, the MILS suggests the necessity of applying, in the interest of the child, the “precautionary principle” against teachers whose membership of a “cult” has come to the knowledge of parents. These are teachers who could never be reproached with confusing professional activity and personal beliefs: the MILS thus endorses the reaction of parents of pupils who withdrew their children from the state school on the pretext that the schoolmistress was a Jehovah’s Witness. Already implementing the same principle, certain companies, like EDF, have received instructions concerning the recruitment of their personnel and recourse to subcontracting companies linked to Scientology and the Sokka Gakkaï. A system of discrimination founded on private convictions is thus in the process of progressively installing itself, in total contradiction with the code of the public service and the Declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen. This encouragement of the “witch-hunt” is thus in no way in conformity with the republican tradition the government intends to protect from the cult menace.

It is nevertheless this alleged French model that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs invokes in the face of the numerous international reactions [21], notably American. But this proclaimed opposition between French-style laïcité and the Anglo-Saxon approach to religious liberty is purely rhetorical. For if there are many ways of enslaving, there is only one way of being free: it consists in living in conformity with one’s convictions while enjoying the same rights and duties as all other citizens.

In the matter, it must therefore be recalled that there can be only one principle: “The liberty of every adult individual, man and woman, must be absolute and complete: liberty to come and go, to profess openly every possible opinion, to be idle or active, immoral or moral, to dispose in a word of one’s own person and one’s property as one pleases, without accounting to anyone; liberty to live either honestly by one’s own labour or shamefully by exploiting private charity or trust, provided that charity and trust be voluntary and be lavished on him only by adult individuals. Unlimited liberty of every kind of propaganda by speech, by the press, in public and private meetings, with no other brake on that liberty than the natural salutary power of public opinion. Absolute liberty of associations, not excepting those which by their object are or appear immoral, and even those whose object would be the corruption and destruction of individual and public liberty. Liberty can and must defend itself only by liberty; and it is a dangerous contradiction to want to infringe it on the specious pretext of protecting it” [22].

[1] The consensus, of course, had already formed upstream of the vote. Thus, this bill was first presented by the centrist senator of the Yvelines (affiliated Républicains Indépendants), Nicolas About, then, after a few reworkings, at the National Assembly by the socialist deputy of the Eure, Catherine Picard. This latter bill, “tending to reinforce prevention and repression against groupings of a cult character”, was adopted, on 22 June 2000, at first reading by the deputies. The parliamentary shuttle thus resumed, and a new text, prepared jointly by M. About and Mme Picard, was presented to the Senate on 25 January 2001.

[2] The programme Envoyé spécial (France 2), for example, acquits itself with zeal of its mission of informing the public about the danger the cults are said to present. Several associations have thus paid the price of its way of presenting elements known to all as revelations, or of dramatising the most anodyne facts: the Jehovah’s Witnesses (1998, rebroadcast in 2000), the Sokka Gakkaï (Sokka Gakkaï, la secte du XXIe siècle, 08/06/2000 at 8:55 pm), or again the Raelians (21-12-2000).

[3] This information, and much else, is found in the article by F. Lenoir, “Controverses passionnées à propos des sectes”, in Le Monde diplomatique, May 1999.

[4] Les sectes en France, report no. 2468 of the Commission of inquiry of the National Assembly, A. Gest and J. Guyard, Paris, 1996.

[5] According to the Annuaire pontifical of 1994.

[6] “Garde blanche du Vatican, la troublante ascension de l’Opus Dei”, F. Normand in Le Monde Diplomatique, September 1995.

[7] La Croix, 22 June 2000.

[8] “L’irrésistible perversion du besoin, consommateurs sous influence”, F. Mazoyer in Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2000.

[9] The title of this bill is quite astonishing, since the parliamentarians claim to reinforce repression against the cults when it is the first legislative text specifically targeting this type of organisation. Although, strictly speaking, such a formulation is not mendacious, since one can only reinforce a non-existent legislation, it nevertheless leads one to presume a continuity where there is pure and simple rupture with the republican tradition. Unless our parliamentarians recognise here that the repression of the cults did not wait for the vote of a law to install itself. Which amounts to saying that certain groups have been the object of a deliberately more rigorous application of the existing laws than the others - which amounts to recognising officially the rupture of the fundamental principle of the equality of all before the law.

[10] Thus, French case law has already given value to the Guyard report by retaining it as an element capable of supporting the findings of the trial judge: O.c.C.-Cass Civ2-25.06.98 ruling no. 1064D.

[11] “In February 1995, Educinvest, which manages 250 private schools and then has an annual turnover of 850 million FF, becomes 70% owned by the Générale des Eaux (today Vivendi) through its subsidiary, the Compagnie immobilière Phénix (CIP)”. Source: Les Echos, 21 February 1995, cited in Tableau noir, résister à la privatisation de l’enseignement, G. de Sélys and Nico Hirtt, éditions EPO, Brussels, 1998.

[12] M. Knight, CEO of Nike, thus declared: “I was shocked to discover, on 14 April at 9 in the morning, that the University of Oregon had joined the Workers’ Rights Consortium. By this initiative, the University takes a position against the new global economy which allows me to earn my living. (…) Henceforth, as far as I am concerned, Nike will make no more donations, of any kind, to the University of Oregon. The bonds of trust we maintained have been cut.”

[13] Read Mots à maux, dictionnaire de la lepénisation des esprits, P. Tévanian and S. Tissot, Editions Dagorno, Paris, 1998.

[14] It must however be remarked, with the professor of public liberties Jacques Robert, that this decision of the Conseil d’Etat ought to have obliged the administration to refer the matter to the Public Prosecutor with a view to having the nullity of the ACTJ declared by the Tribunal de Grande Instance, in conformity with articles 3 and 7 of the law of 1 July 1901. Now it took good care not to do so, since such a restriction of the liberty of religions would have led to the reconstitution of the recognised religions to which the law of 9 December 1905 precisely intended to put an end. One may thus regret that the administration did not have the courage to carry its action through to the end, since the contradiction between the abusive use of the notion of public order and the principle of the separation of churches and State would thus have been made manifest.

[15] In two rulings delivered on 23 June 2000, the Conseil d’Etat reversed its case law concerning the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Conseil in effect recognised their character as a de facto worship association, which will allow them to benefit from the property-tax exemptions for places of worship under article 1382 of the Tax Code. On this occasion, the Conseil considered that the refusal of blood transfusion did not constitute an offence of “failure to assist a person in danger”. It thus considered that there was, in the case, no disturbance of public order. That the Conseil d’Etat had the courage to go back on its own judgments only demonstrates the better the totally arbitrary character of the notion of the disturbance of public order.

[16] The Jehovah’s Witnesses seem moreover to be beginning a timid revision of their doctrine in the matter of blood transfusion. Thus, in June 2000, the executive body of the Jehovah’s Witnesses decided that “the faithful of the Watch Tower who accepted blood transfusions will no longer be automatically excommunicated”.

[17] La vie du rail, 23 February 2000.

[18] Source: Bulletin des Conseillers Régionaux Lutte Ouvrière du Nord-Pas-de-Calais, 5 May 2000.

[19] The model of the genre remains the drafting of the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion by an agent of the Okhrana (tsarist political police). Having become totally autonomous of its authors, this text is still widely diffused around the world, though the proofs of the mystification are no longer in question. On this subject: Une mystification mondiale, H. Rollin, éditions Allia.

[20] Read Souffrance en France, la banalisation de l’injustice sociale, Christophe Dejours, éditions du Seuil, collection Points, January 1998. The author poses the question of how ordinary men can commit evil without the slightest bad conscience. Relying both on his own fieldwork and on H. Arendt’s analyses of the banality of evil, he explains the weakness of moral resistance to the suffering inflicted in the world of work by the totalitarian structure of certain companies. Despite the scientific character of his research, the promoters and the user firms of the new modes of management have never been suspected of cult behaviour by the MILS.

[21] Let us recall that the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (an NGO affiliated to the OSCE) sharply criticised French policy, while the UN, in its report of 1 June 2000, condemns the About-Picard bill by which the government arrogates to itself the right “to dissolve or prohibit any unpopular association”. As for the American State Department, it has regularly called France into question for its “discriminatory” practices.

[22] Michel Bakunin, Catéchisme révolutionnaire, published by Daniel Guérin in Ni Dieu ni Maître, anthologie de l’anarchisme, p. 190, éditions La Découverte, June 1999.

Read also the article by maître Perollier on this law.

RG Dossier

The Renseignements Généraux

after an investigation by Pétrarque on a site that has since disappeared

Preamble:

Political regimes, monarchical or republican, have always had recourse to special services to ensure the security of the state. The current Renseignements Généraux watch the slightest deeds and gestures of any citizen leaving the beaten track, especially if he belongs to a 1901-law association (1).

Portrait of the institution

THE RENSEIGNEMENTS GENERAUX (R.G.)

OF THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR

The Central Directorate of the Renseignements Généraux (D.C.R.G.) is placed under the authority of the General Directorate of the National Police (D.G.P.N.)

The Central Directorate of the Renseignements Généraux (480 officials) is located at 11 rue des Saussaies, 75800 PARIS.

Order of 6 November 1995 on the organisation and missions of the Central Directorate of the Renseignements Généraux and its devolved services (Official Journal of 08/11/1995):

Article 1:

The Central Directorate of the Renseignements Généraux comprises central services and devolved services: regional directorates and departmental directorates. It is charged with the research and centralisation of intelligence intended to inform the Government; it participates in the defence of the fundamental interests of the State; it contributes to the general mission of internal security. It is charged with the surveillance of gaming establishments and racecourses.

IN PLAIN TERMS

The stated objective is to inform the government better on new potential dangers and the great problems of society, and to abandon what was the pride of the service: the monitoring of political parties, except those qualified as far right or far left.

Article 2:

The central services of the Central Directorate of the Renseignements Généraux are composed of four sub-directorates:

1 The Sub-directorate of Research: Charged with the research and centralisation of the intelligence necessary for the prevention of and fight against terrorism, as well as the surveillance of at-risk groups acting on the national territory.

IN PLAIN TERMS

Charged with the surveillance of at-risk groups on the national territory; concerns, among others, that of the French branches of Cults such as: Church of Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Raelian Movement, etc.

2 The Sub-directorate of analysis, prospective and facts of society: Charged with the analysis and synthesis of intelligence in the social and financial domains and the facts of society.

IN PLAIN TERMS

Charged first and foremost with following and forecasting agitation in the towns and banlieues. Also missioned to sound out public opinion, and not only in electoral periods. Three tools are assigned to this task: the rule-of-thumb estimate, computer simulations and the opinion poll via the R.G.’s own polling body, namely the Central Office of Statistics and Polls (OCSS). Note that the D.C.R.G. has the Salamandre system, a powerful computer program which permits fast and reliable exploitation of partial voting results.

It is interesting to know that this Sub-directorate publishes every fortnight - or on a precise request from the government - an “opinion note” which synthesises the notes drawn up by some fifteen local correspondents.

3 The Sub-directorate of resources and methods: Charged with the management of human resources, logistical means, documentation, and the monitoring of budgetary devolution.

IN PLAIN TERMS

Charged with the management of the three files:

1. The manual file
2. The automated file of associations
3. The automated file of individuals

The manual file of the R.G. catalogues either individuals or associations.

The automated file of associations manages those which have attracted the attention of the authorities by reason of activities of a nature to disturb public order, or supposed to be such.

The automated file of individuals comprises three distinct applications:

· the “departmental dossier” application

· the “racing and gaming” application.

The information collected relates to:

· the identity of persons

· their address and profession

· their social label (political, trade-union, etc…)

· their departmental or central dossier number.

4 The Sub-directorate of racing and gaming: Charged with the surveillance of gaming establishments and racecourses. They also comprise a general staff which fulfils an operational role of liaison and coordination with the General Directorate of the National Police, the devolved services of the Renseignements Généraux, the Prefecture of Police, and the other Administrations and authorities, and an Operational Technical Inspection charged with ensuring respect for ethical rules and favouring communication.

Article 3:

The central services of the D.C.R.G. are charged with animating, orienting, evaluating and controlling the activity of the devolved services.

Article 4:

The Departmental Directorates of the Renseignements Généraux implement the instructions of the Department Prefects, and, under the latter’s authority, those transmitted by the Central Services and the Regional Directors within the framework of the attributions defined in article 5, first paragraph.

IN PLAIN TERMS

Concerned: 23 Regional Directorates and 103 Integrated Services of the Departmental Directorates (2,700 agents).

Article 5:

The Regional Director of the Renseignements Généraux animates, controls and coordinates the Departmental Directorates of the Renseignements Généraux established within the bounds of his region, and transmits to them all instructions emanating from the Central Echelon under the authority of the Region Prefect, and, for the Ile de France, of the Prefect of Police.

He may have at his disposal, in case of need, specialised units whose vocation is to exercise their activity within the geographical limits of the Region.

IN PLAIN TERMS

This makes it possible to create, outside the official structures, small informal teams to which confidential missions are entrusted, verbally: these are the “boss’s brigades”.

Article 6:

The Regional Director of the Renseignements Généraux residing at the chief town of the Defence Zone centralises the information relating to affairs within the competence of the Zone Prefect. For the execution of this specific mission, he coordinates the activity of the other Regional Directors of the Defence Zone.

Article 7:

The Director General of the National Police is charged with the execution of the present order, which will be published in the Official Journal of the French Republic.

The files of the R.G. are subject to the control of the C.N.I.L. (National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties), which verifies every five years the soundness of the nominative information they contain. The same for the wiretaps which, for the time being, are limited to the monitoring of dangerous persons and subject since 1991 to the authorisation of the C.N.C.I.S. (National Commission for the Control of Security Interceptions), presided over by the Conseiller d’Etat who each Wednesday goes through the register of those tapped and the products produced.

In fact, wiretaps “legal or not”, 100,000 people are listened to each year in France. This more than honourable score asks only to be improved! (example: by “scanner”).

D.C.R.G. ANNEXES

Wiretaps for the benefit of the Renseignements Généraux:

The transcripts of administrative wiretaps of the G.I.C. (Interministerial Control Grouping) falling within the quota attributed to the Ministry of the Interior are typed. According to the particular case, the D.G.P.N. communicates their tenor to the D.R.G.

On each wiretap card figure:

· 1) at top and bottom the mention: Secret Source

· 2) at top right the code number attributed to the official who established it,

· 3) at top left the pseudonym of the person placed under surveillance (often a name beginning with the first three letters of the surname, for example MARSEILLE for MAR(?), an investigator on the Order of the Solar Temple).

· 4) Then figure on the left the hour of the conversation and opposite it the (summarised) text of it.

Functioning of the “actives” of the Renseignements Généraux:

Professionals of intelligence and today provided with selective diplomas obtained at the Police School, the men of the R.G. do not carry out judicial-police missions and therefore repression.

They do not depend on the authority of an investigating judge but solely on the administrative authority. The some 2,700 “active” agents spread over the whole territory, with a minimum of seven or eight men in the smallest departments, carry out, for 80% of them, work “in an open milieu” and therefore legal “stricto sensu” for the benefit of the Ministry of the Interior.

To do this, they create for themselves a personal network of more or less voluntary informers, attend trade-union, political, religious, indeed UFOlogical meetings, collect leaflets and publications, analyse the press. In this work “in an open milieu”, they have little difficulty gathering information. In principle, only information whose multiplicity of sources attests its interest reaches the Parisian general staff. That said, every day, from the smallest Prefectures as from the largest conurbations, more than five hundred notes on every possible subject come up to the Services of the Central Headquarters, rue des Saussaies.

After skimming, the information the Central Director of the Renseignements Généraux judges essential for the government becomes the object of four or five synthesis notes on the principle “one sheet, one subject”. Assembled, they constitute the “minister’s dossier”, distributed in a dozen copies and delivered, with the information coming from the D.S.T., every evening of the week, around 6:30 pm, to the Cabinets of the Minister of the Interior, the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic.

The other, more “sensitive” information becomes, according to the case, the object of notes on white or green paper, devoid of any service letterhead (fewer than fifteen a day), which the Central Director hands personally to the Minister, sometimes accompanied by information transmitted orally.

The rest of the daily notes is archived for all useful purposes for the intermediate echelons which, on one ground or another, believe they need to know. For example, currently, in the PACA region, all the doings of the cults, which are counted there by the dozen, must be catalogued in the Database of the D.C.R.G. specially concerning them.

Of course, the men of the R.G. do not only work “on their own initiative”; they must sometimes also answer the precise questions posed by the authorities of the State, from Ministers to Prefects.

To satisfy these at a moment’s notice, the R.G. have an exhaustive and continually updated documentation. In work “in a closed milieu”, the actives of the R.G. are asked to “manage”, if possible avoiding providing the Authorities with precise information on their methods of penetration and the names of their informers, so as to implicate nobody in the upper hierarchy.

Note finally that the very great majority of the officials who enter the “big ears” (R.G.) accomplish the whole of their professional career in the service.

Recruitment and management of the R.G.’s “informers”:

At the Renseignements Généraux the operational work of recruiting informers falls to the “Operations and Specialised Research” section of the Sub-directorate of Research of the Central Directorate of the Renseignements Généraux.

Still within this Sub-directorate, the “Intelligence Processing” section deals solely with the administrative management of informers, that is to say their dossiers opened after a “trial period” of three months.

The note placing an informer on trial is drawn up by the service concerned and transmitted for information to the Central Director of the R.G. by the head of the Service in question. If he has given satisfaction, this informer will be registered.

The registration note, also drawn up by the service concerned, will mention the complete civil status of the person concerned, his address, possibly his profession, the pseudonym given to him, and his registration code number. The pseudonym is left to the total initiative of the handling service.

The code number comprises four figures: the first two are the number of the department concerned, followed by a number increasing as registrations accumulate. When an informer ceases his activity, the service concerned draws up a striking-off note.

During the informer’s activity, the handling official draws up at each meeting a contact note. This is a report bearing the informer’s pseudonym, his code number, and five headings:

· - conditions of the contact: the date, hour and place of the contact, as well as the pseudonyms of the official(s) present (each official handling informers has a pseudonym).

· - result of the contact: the official mentions all the intelligence provided by the informer at the meeting.

· - exploitation of the intelligence: the official specifies the exploitation made of the intelligence provided as well as any transmission to a section of the R.G.

· - opinion of the handler: this heading mentions the official’s opinion on the work and state of mind of the informer (example: good collaboration from petit-gris!).

· - sum handed over: the official indicates the sum of money he handed, if need be, to the informer.

All these notes and the informer dossiers (trial periods, registrations and strikings-off) are centralised at the “Intelligence Processing” section of the Sub-directorate of Research of the D.C.R.G. (this holds for the whole metropolitan territory and overseas territories).

Persons having access to the identity of an informer:

The Central Director, his deputy, and the Sub-Director of Research. To this must be added the officials of the “Intelligence Processing” section and, if the informer is handled in the provinces, the handling officials, the Departmental Director and the Regional Director concerned.

(1) Créer son association, by JF Collinot: éd Milan, collection “les essentiels Milan”.

Read also “RG, la machine à scandale” by Patrick Rougelet, published by Albin Michel.

Read information about your rights

Read also http://www.renseignementsgeneraux.net/rg.php

in particular how to request access to the files concerning you

To read the continuation of this dossier, click here

RG Dossier

The Renseignements Généraux (2)

Their bad reputation goes back a long way. “Watch everyone except me!” Napoleon is said to have recommended to Fouché, who was presenting his new “special commissioners” to him.

Their current name - the “Renseignements généraux” - is a Vichy invention, which does not help matters. For decades this heavy ancestry has weighed on this curious police service of political information answering to the Ministry of the Interior. For the RG seem to have been a little too regularly subscribed to the Republic’s dirty tricks. The list is long, from the kidnapping of Ben Barka to the murder of Pastor Doucé, by way of the Markovic scandal.

The function of the RG There are 3,893 “RG”. New recruits are trained at the Gif-sur-Yvette centre. Today this police force concerns itself with everyone Operational research:

Surveillance and identification of potentially dangerous individual or collective activities. Violent far right and far left, drug trafficking, skinheads, Islamism.

Analysis: Study of the great facts of society and their impacts on opinion. French Islam, cults, drugs, urban violence, the world of telematics, dubious money, charitable associations, the world of exclusion, art trafficking, anti-abortion circles, the environment. They have recently reinforced their research on the associative world (in AIDS, in drug addiction and in exclusion). Their function has thus been transformed: it is no longer only a matter of watching known actors, but also of helping the government to identify and understand new phenomena and actors. Tasks closer to academic analysis than to police work. The database on cults, with its classification and its multiple entries, designed by Commissioner Laurence Affres thanks to a network of 50 correspondents in the provinces, has thus become a reference. Local presence constitutes the RG’s best asset: a mesh of 2,700 agents spread across the whole territory, with a minimum of seven or eight men in the smallest departments. “This network has no equivalent; it is a guarantee of proximity and of composure in the face of events, explains a commissioner. That is why our information is often more reliable than that of the media, who investigate less and less and work more and more in a closed circuit”. Every day, from the smallest prefectures as from the largest conurbations, more than 500 notes on every possible subject come up to the central headquarters, rue de Saussaies. After skimming, the information the central director of the Renseignements Généraux judges essential for the government becomes the object of four or five synthesis notes, on the principle “one sheet, one subject”. Assembled, they constitute the “minister’s dossier”, distributed in a dozen copies and delivered every evening of the week, around 6:30 pm, to the cabinets of the Minister of the Interior, the Prime Minister and the President of the Republic. Other information, more sensitive and often drafted in the conditional, becomes the object of the famous “white notes”, devoid of any service letterhead (fewer than ten a day), which the central director hands personally to the minister, sometimes accompanied by information given orally. The control of the masses The RG continue to measure opinion. Three essential tools are assigned to this task: the “gut feeling” estimate, computer simulation and the true opinion poll. First, every fortnight, the service publishes an “opinion note”. Drafted by the commissioner responsible for the “analysis and prospective” section, it synthesises the notes drawn up by some fifteen local correspondents. The latter are chosen according to a subtle weighting between their geographical location and their individual competence, due to knowledge of their town or region, but also to their nose - their particular gift for sensing opinion simply through a few well-selected conversations. After a televised intervention by the President of the Republic, for example, they make telephone calls among their acquaintances in the Chiraquian, centrist and socialist electorates, among civil servants, shopkeepers, elected officials, trade unions, then draft two or three pages. At rue de Saussaies, in Paris, these are synthesised into one or two sheets. Since the election of Jacques Chirac, the government has asked, in addition to the twice-monthly notes, for a few specific opinion notes, notably on government action, the nuclear tests and reactions to the terrorist attacks. Next, for 4 years the central Directorate of the RG has had the Salamandre system, a powerful, fast and reliable computer program of partial voting results. Thanks to a good selection of polling stations, this highly sophisticated system makes it possible to give a global estimate (at 2 months, 1 month and one week from the polls), often prompter and above all surer than the polls. That was the case at the last presidential election. And Salamandre had given, before the referendum on Maastricht, a good forecast, when the polling institutes could not decide. Finally the heavy artillery: the Central Office of Statistics and Polls (OCSS). Behind this discreet acronym hides a polling body of the RG’s own. An enormous, costly machine, but serious and particularly reliable. For the OCSS works on large samples: from 2,000 to 4,000 people, whereas the private polls published by the press rarely concern more than 1,000 people. And the OCSS does not work by telephone, but at the home of the person polled, its agents passing themselves off as subcontractors of institutes well known to the general public. The OCSS, which can only be activated by the cabinet of the Minister of the Interior, is no longer limited to electoral polls, but interests itself in questions of society, more or less precise, such as “the image of the CRS with the public” or “The perception of insecurity”. To read the third part of the dossier, RG, the scandal machine?

after the book by M. Rougelet, click here

Read also http://www.renseignementsgeneraux.net/rg.php

“RG” Dossier

The Renseignements Généraux (3)

Extracts from the book by Patrick Rougelet: RG la machine à scandales, published by Albin Michel

The extracts presented concentrate on the description of the functioning of the RG as described by the author. We refer the Internet user to the highly instructive reading of the book, to learn of Patrick Rougelet’s personal affair as well as the numerous examples illustrating his argument. The hyperlinks in the quoted extracts were added by CICNS

(…) Who knows the RG in France? Beyond the popular image of policemen charged with informing the prefect and investigating the morals of provincial notables, who knows the extent of their investigations? Who knows that they stock hundreds of thousands of cards on citizens, famous or unknown? At the RG, I learned all the methods of collecting and processing intelligence in domains as varied as politics, the press, the economic world, the trade-union or judicial universe. I was raised in the school of “not seen, not caught” where any means are good. I myself took part in a good number of reprehensible operations, crossing for the needs of the service the yellow lines that morality or the penal code reproves. Each time, I was congratulated and even promoted by my superiors. (…) I have chosen here to evoke only a series of dossiers for which I have solid information. They prove the dangerous excess of the renseignements généraux. (…) Every prefecture houses its renseignements généraux service. For once, the name really means something. The intelligence there is as general as can be. Surveillance of demonstrations, surveillance of opinion, surveillance of local elected officials, of the atmospheres of municipal councils, of the electoral map, of personalities at official events: the RG serve as the prefecture’s maid of all work. (…) Traditionally, before each election, the local RG are all mobilised for a life-size poll… So many mothers of families are needed, so many executives, so many liberal professions, unemployed, young people… Generally, the old hands of the RG fill in the forms alone at a bistro table. I saw it done several times… In their defence, by dint of rubbing shoulders with opinion and describing all its states of mind in interminable reports, the old campaigners end up knowing it a little. (…) In the same register, the local officials are also called upon for a whole series of field inquiries. In the Paris region, for example, the central office regularly demands an opinion note on the sensitive subjects of the moment. If a big company makes redundancies, a note. If the department is shaken by judicial affairs, a note. These service notes, atmosphere notes, land at the central office. Then - it is the rule - the official knows nothing of their addressees. (…) The daily life of a departmental service is also the monitoring and counting of demonstrations. Everyone knows the formula, “100,000 demonstrators according to the organisers, and 10,000 according to the prefecture” - in fact, according to the officials of the renseignements généraux. The stake of a demonstration is the number of people it mobilises to occupy the street. For the power in place, the greater the number, the stronger the warning. All governments therefore use the RG, first to know, secretly of course, the real number of demonstrators, then to minimise that number in the eyes of opinion. (…) At the RG, the daily round is also “faire la bulle”. In our jargon, the expression has nothing to do with its neighbour “coincer la bulle” [to laze about]. On the contrary, “making the bubble” means surrounding a personality during an official visit. (…) In 1941, France is under German occupation… The state of mind of the occupied French, of families cut in two, must be measured… It is indeed in this context that the RG are organised in the modern fashion. (…) the RG use different methods… The most widespread is the method of “immersion” in the milieu… When it is impossible to introduce a police official into the organisation to be watched, the service sometimes has recourse to indirect entryism. It does not hesitate to use a relative or friend of an official, already in place, who will inform indirectly. (…) The functioning of the RG obviously depends on the couple formed by the director on one hand and the Minister of the Interior on the other. (…) In May 1981, many of us then thought the left was going to abolish the RG purely and simply. Which, I must confess, scandalised us! The socialists, who had suffered from the service’s surveillance during twenty-three years of opposition, were pushing in that direction. Paradoxically, their unpreparedness on arriving in power saved the renseignements généraux in that delicate period. Result? Not only were the RG not abolished, but the service, since 1981, has changed course. Rapidly, the left wanted to use it to know what lay beneath the cards. (…) In the current system of blancs [editor’s note: anonymous notes drafted by the RG] whiter than white, anything can be written. Without any control. Without any proof. The politicians in power - the left, then the Chiraquians - threw themselves on this supposedly confidential information. Who sleeps with whom? Who has relations in business circles? Who has troubles with the tax authorities? One must have read white notes, sometimes several pages long, to measure the talents of imagination of the officials. And their extraordinary subtlety. For example, in the 1980s, rather than say that such-and-such a boss of a luxury company was homosexual, it was fitting to use the formula: “likes the English lifestyle”.

The RG, thanks to their blancs, quickly made themselves indispensable. The politicians even began to “place orders”. The world upside down! Perverted to the extreme, the system ran on empty. A director of central administration, little desirous of receiving two petitioners, demanded that a white note be addressed to him indicating that the two persons concerned were not respectable… This administrative prose makes wide use of the conditional, and its authors, I can testify, do not hesitate to practise amalgam, without the slightest restraint. Sometimes one even forgets to mention facts possibly contradicting the demonstration… It suffices to have been incarcerated, even for a few days, in preventive detention, to benefit from the mention “has done prison” without further precision! One can equally write that the person concerned “is the object of reserved impressions in banking circles”, quite simply because one of his accounts is overdrawn, or that “his morality is placed in doubt by his circle”, or even that he is liable to “be in liaison with a foreign power” because he travels a lot. (…) Today, manifestly spurred on by a political power that trusts them, the RG no longer even have to bring the slightest proof of what they advance. (…) France is, to my knowledge, the only democratic country to maintain policemen whose sole activity is to occupy themselves with the media. In the United States or in England, punctually, the FBI or MI5 “attend to” journalists when the latter take a close interest in a terrorism affair, for example. But never have they spied on or tried to manipulate editorial offices in a permanent and systematic manner. (…) The press section [editor’s note: of the RG] is a capital instrument for the power in place. Its mission is to act, by trying to control the press and manipulate journalists, to make them say what one wants. (…) The famous journalists’ cards are stored in two different places… The official cards, presented to the National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties (CNIL) when it asks for them, pile up in a big Bristol cabinet… The occult cards, which will feed the notes requested by the authorities, are much richer. When I was there, the service counted in total 53,000 dossiers, updated daily!… The cards “which do not exist” are locked away with a double turn of the key in the archives room. If need be, in case of a surprise visit from representatives of the CNIL - it has never happened, for they have the kindness to give notice when they come by -, the dossiers can be transported to another service. (…) By dint of rubbing shoulders with journalists at cocktails, press conferences, ministerial trips, lunches, breakfasts, the officials of the press section seek to make friends. The journalists slip them information in the hollow of the ear… In his turn, the RG official passes on to him what another journalist has taught him… Lured by such a good “source”, so rich and so accessible, more than one journalist has not seen the trap close on him. First, in exchange for a new tip, he agrees to “drop” a piece of information obtained elsewhere which he is asked, amicably, to set aside. Next, the journalist will consent, because he will have been asked “not to harm an ongoing affair”, to mention only part of it. Finally, he will agree, unbeknownst to himself or not, to tell a truncated story. In every case, he will have been manipulated. Within the press section, the subject “who manipulates whom” often came up. Some think, precisely to avoid thinking about it, that everyone manipulates everyone. Others assert, and I believe them more readily, that at the game of cat and mouse, the journalists are often the losers. The most extreme think outright that as soon as a journalist pokes his nose into the RG, he is manipulated. (…) More recently, after the carnage of the Order of the Solar Temple, in the winter of 1995, the subject of the cults kept the media in suspense. The RG, on the question, did not have much. In a rush, a “report” had to be manufactured. An official took charge of compiling the work done by others, notably by the gendarmes. A report had already been written, notably by the Interministerial cell for intelligence research and exploitation of the centre-east zone (CIRER). It was in great part “copied out”. The RG report on the cults then flooded all the editorial offices, as a reference document. A few weeks later, certain associations, filed in the urgency as bloodthirsty cults by the renseignements généraux, obtained redress before the courts. The trials took place, without cameras this time. (…) Why has the power of the RG, a secret political police, been so much reinforced? Quite simply because the services they render to politicians to smother affairs have made them, over these last twenty years, untouchable. How to make enemies of people who know the underside of the cards so well? Why renounce using people so zealous, indeed servile? (…) A few figures: intelligence in France counts about 10,000 officials. Half of them soldiers, who answer to the Ministry of Defence, and the other half policemen who answer to the Ministry of the Interior. Defence heads the DGSE, “organ of external intelligence”, in plain terms our espionage service, our own CIA… The Interior heads the DST, about 1,500 officials, charged with counter-espionage, that is to say with fighting, within the Hexagon, against the actions of foreign agents… France distinguishes itself from its European neighbours, however, with the RG. The truth is that this service has no true counterpart except in dictatorships. The Ministry of the Interior employs 3,800 officials charged with spying on their fellow citizens… It is in the name of the reason of State, a most useful pretext, that our fellow citizens are often spied on. (…) Pierre Joxe is the only contemporary Minister of the Interior who really attempted a reform. But he did not manage to modify the machine. The whole apparatus resisted. The administrative machine demonstrated that it was stronger than the ministers. Even Charles Pasqua, under Balladur, pressed to act by the scandal provoked by the RG’s spying on a secret meeting of the PS, initiated, for a time, a reform. It gave birth to a mouse. All these attempts demonstrate clearly that in the current state, given the men at their head, the RG are not reformable. The only effective reform would be their closure… If one adds to the journalists the parliamentarians, the elected officials - including those who sit on the most modest municipal councils -, business circles, intellectuals, what are called opinion leaders - in Paris or in the provinces -, one obtains the figure of at least 500,000 people on file, and doubtless as many again on whom the service has had occasion to collect data, legally or not (candidates for an administrative competition, for example)… How many more scandals will it take for our leaders to renounce maintaining an army of officials charged with rummaging through the country’s dustbins?

Return to the first part of the dossier or the second part Read also http://www.renseignementsgeneraux.net/rg.php

The Sacrificial Rumour

by Jean-Luc Delfin

Behind the varnish of our modern culture and our supposedly rational behaviours are hidden a number of archaic workings. So it is with those rumours whose aim is to stigmatise a scapegoat whose sacrifice — real or symbolic — makes it possible to exorcise the problems of the collectivity.

The shaman of ancient times put himself into a state of trance in order to meet the spirit of the animal hunted by the tribe and to kill it in a symbolic manner. Every “witch hunt” works in the same way: the rumour induces a state of collective trance that makes it possible to denounce and to sacrifice an expiatory victim on the altar of social consensus.

According to Edgar Morin (1), rumour expresses “the part of archaism intrinsic to modernity”. Our era is one of an existential crisis and void that give rise to malaise and unease. One of the functions of rumours is to catalyse these floating anxieties which “give rise to fantasies, seek an archaic refuge and thereby give rise to mechanisms of expulsion and of purification: the immolation of a scapegoat” (1). Such is the origin of the sacrificial rumour.

Beyond the polished aspect of our modern education, there lives in us an archaic memory, hundreds of thousands of years old, for which survival and the struggle against predators were essential preoccupations. That survival depending closely on that of the clan, any attack on the cohesion of the social group and on the collective identity is then experienced as an aggression. In every society there therefore survives the gregarious instinct of the prehistoric horde. This gregarious instinct generates an imaginary of repulsion towards all those who, perceived as strange or foreign, represent a potential danger for social cohesion: eccentrics, foreigners, the “abnormal” or nomads. It is among them that the scapegoat will be chosen whose ritual sacrifice will replenish the collective identity. René Girard has dismantled with talent all the workings of this expiatory mechanism (2).

Narratives of demonisation

Inspired by the sacrificial ritual, there exists a permanent model of persecution against the scapegoat, found in all times and across all cultures. Founded on a series of stereotypes that gravitate around the fantasy of conspiracy, rumour always forms part of the scenario of persecutions, whoever the religious, political or ideological actors may be. He who wants to drown his dog accuses it of rabies: rumour is there to explain — through the mouths of self-proclaimed specialists — how and why the dog caught rabies…

Faced with the complexity of social problems and the feeling of powerlessness it generates, it is tempting to find people responsible to condemn. According to the sociologist Liliane Voyé (3): “At the heart of the rationality that modernity claims to affirm, there insinuate themselves myths and irrationalities which testify to the existence of problems and crises that this rationality succeeds neither in elucidating nor in overcoming, and which seek an ersatz elucidation in occult forces and underground plots with inextricable ramifications.”

Sacrificial rumours are therefore narratives of demonisation that aim to transform a victim of social violence into a scapegoat. These rumours have the function of inducing a collective trance during which the public, fascinated by a narrative that answers the unconscious needs of the collective imaginary, loses contact with its habitual references, frees itself from its prohibitions and its moral censorships in order to express a symbolic or real violence.

A collective trance

The three phases of the collective trance generated by the sacrificial rumour — derealisation, fascination, sacrifice — correspond to the three stages of its diffusion analysed by Edgar Morin: incubation, propagation and metastasis.

Derealisation

During the period of incubation, the imaginary feeds on an impassioned atmosphere propitious to confusion and to the surging up of the sacrificial rumour. The fantasy of conspiracy is the décor in which the actors of the rumour move about. By destabilising the habitual references, this climate tends to efface the critical spirit, the faculties of judgement and the anchoring of the collective consciousness in the real.

This process of derealisation is at the origin of a state of trance. According to Bernard Lempert (4): “What interests rumour is not to state the real, but to substitute itself for it. Its elusive character seeks to make people believe in return that the real is unknowable and that it is useless to try to circumscribe it and to fix it by thought. From the instant that facts, as such, are considered as always bound to escape us and therefore to disappoint us, one might as well turn away from them and no longer concern oneself with their contours.”

Fascination

Then comes the phase of propagation of the rumour. Destabilised, cut off from the real, the collective consciousness is carried away in a phenomenon of trance founded on suggestion and fascination. During a trance, consciousness is focused on a single object, forgetting all the rest: “Having no external object left that could contest it in the slightest, rumour follows a sovereign course. It is certainty par excellence, precisely because it is accountable only to itself. Nothing could contradict it, since it claims to know nothing that is external to it. The recall of facts does not trouble it, since the facts do not concern it, so far do they unfold light years from its own course. The real is for rumour a beyond that leaves it indifferent.” (4)

This indifference to the real and this state of fascination are the typical marks of the state of trance. Like a river irrigated by all its tributaries, the further the rumour moves from the source that gave birth to it, the more it swells, feeding on the way on the fantasies of those who carry it. Fed by intolerance, rumour is the anonymous weapon of a silent majority which often has nothing else to say but to repeat the stereotypes and slogans that are the stock-in-trade of media propaganda. Subject more and more to the imperatives of competition, the role of the media is above all to answer the needs of collective psychology. With the development of the media and of the Internet, rumour uses the media as they feed on it. Thus finding a new force and legitimacy, a simple rumour can transform itself into a collective psychosis.

Sacrifice

Finally comes the period of the metastases that spread through the whole social body. The induction of a state of trance permits the neutralisation of censorships and the expression of violence. It is thus that, in the particular state of trance induced by rumour, the scapegoat is symbolically killed, in the course of an expiatory sacrifice. The American psychologist Ralph Rosnow analyses the functioning of this social violence: “It is useful to represent rumour activity in the same way as one loads a revolver and fires. The rumour’s audience is a handgun, the rumour is a bullet, which is loaded in an atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty. One presses the trigger when one judges that the bullet will hit the mark.” In our democratic societies, rumour is a new form of assassination: “In totalitarian regimes, one eliminates an adversary by firing a bullet into his head. In democracies, the most formidable political weapon is the use of rumour.” (5)

In our era, the expiatory sacrifice can take the form of media lynching, which corresponds to a ritual of black magic during which a very powerful psycho-energetic charge is focused on the scapegoat, the result of a concentration of consciousness of millions of individuals.

How does one get out of it?

One could not reduce the complex field of rumour to one of its modalities, that of the sacrificial rumour. Other forms of rumour exist, which obey other laws of the imaginary and of the collective unconscious. What makes the specificity of the sacrificial rumour is that it is a destructive social violence of which all those may be victims who, involuntarily, are pushed onto the public stage to play, in spite of themselves, the role of scapegoat. The sacrificial rumour tends to operate a veritable bewitchment that seizes the personal intimacy of an individual in order to reduce him to the functional role of scapegoat in an expiatory scenario.

Among the victims, some find inner resources and a circle around them that allows them to resist this bewitchment. Those who come through then know that what does not kill you makes you stronger… There are, by contrast, those who will have great difficulty recovering from this trauma: some will somatise and trigger a grave illness, sometimes fatal. Others, transformed into desocialised zombies, may live through one or several depressive episodes or are destroyed for life, sometimes even going so far as to commit a fatal act, as Pierre Bérégovoy did, for example. The victims of such violence can reconstruct themselves only by understanding the archaic processes at work in this phenomenon: collective trance, expiatory sacrifice, black magic… Therapists specialised in this type of social violence ought to be trained to help the victims of the sacrificial rumour to understand and thereby to advance on the path of healing…

(1) Edgar Morin. La rumeur d’Orléans. Seuil (69).

(2) René Girard. Le Bouc Emissaire, la Violence et le Sacré… Le Livre de Poche.

(3) Liliane Voyé. Des sectes : de la rumeur aux valeurs. Cesnur website. http://www.cesnur.org/testi/des_sectes.htm

(4) Bernard Lempert. Le Retour de l’Intolérance. Sectarisme et Chasse aux Sorcières. Bayard.

(5) Frédéric Lenoir and Nathalie Luca. Sectes, Mensonges et idéaux. Bayard.

To read:

Adam Crabtree. Nos états de transe au quotidien. Le Souffle d’Or

Pascal Froissart. La rumeur. Histoire et fantasmes. Belin

Jean-Noël Kapferer. Rumeurs. Le plus vieux médias du monde. Seuil, coll. “Points”.

Laurent Hincker. Sectes, rumeurs et tribunaux. Psychose collective et dérive de la République. La Nuée Bleue.

Le lynchage médiatique, edited by Guy Coq and Charles Conte, in Panoramiques, Ed. Corlet.

Another text by Jean-Luc Delfin on the page /library/cicns/medias/

Nicolas Sarkozy

La République, les religions, l’espérance

A book written in the form of an interview between Nicolas Sarkozy, Thibaud Collin (agrégé in philosophy) and Philippe Verdin (Dominican religious). It deals above all with the place of Islam in France and with what was put in place during the period from May 2002 to March 2004, a period when Nicolas Sarkozy exercised at once the function of Minister of the Interior and Minister of Religions. A few passages concerning “the cults” and spiritual hope seem to us interesting in the context of our work. If M. Sarkozy remains prudent, one nevertheless senses a more measured gaze on the question of the spiritual minorities.

Extracts

The questions put to Nicolas Sarkozy are in italics.

Page 145

Today in France, should one have concerns about dérives sectaires?

In the current state of affairs, we have no indication of a wave of dérives sectaires submerging France, nor even of an extension of the phenomenon. Certainly, it is fitting to remain vigilant and to show no weakness. I wonder, however, whether at times we have not gone too far, to the point of showing a certain sectarianism of our own! Far be it from me to accept just anything, or even merely to be lax. But from there to pursuing with one’s vindictiveness every organisation, including the most inoffensive, there is a step that must not be crossed.

It is not easy to draw the line between the tolerant cults and those that must be dissolved. Mental manipulation, for example, is difficult to assess.

I do not believe so. I even think it is fairly simple: it is a criminal-law problem. Believe me, it is not very difficult to see when people are raped, when their assets are squandered, when children are not given medical care, when the most fragile have been abused. It is not impossible to discern, to understand and to analyse.

Page 146

You say one must not go too far in the witch-hunt. But families are worried for their children, as they can be with dealers.

I understand that worry. That is why those who exploit, who debase, who deprive the most fragile of their free will must be punished severely. That is why constant vigilance must also be exercised. That is the role, notably, of the interministerial mission of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires. But that worry does not justify an all-out and measureless fight against the slightest new spiritual movement. I add that this worry is one more reason to give the great religions the means to do the spiritual work that can best answer the needs, the enthusiasms, the anguishes of all those who aspire to a spiritual approach. The existence of cult movements is parallel to the retreat of the influence of the great religions. That is another facet of the interest, for the Republic, of the capacity of the great religions to answer all these expectations.

Page 138

A moral definition of religion, in the sense that there would be good ones and bad ones, is at the antipodes of what I think effective, as a public official. That does not prevent me from having convictions on the value of this or that confession, of this or that discourse, and from attempting to draw the difference between charlatanism and the inspired word.

How should the State approach the new spiritual movements?

Beside the great religions there are, I believe, two categories of spiritual movements. Those that help people to live: whatever “the seriousness” of the message, the State has nothing to say about it. Each finds the answer to his worries, his anguishes or his weaknesses as he can. For some it will be a walk in the forest, for others listening to Gregorian music, for others still it may very well be gathering one’s weaknesses with others to make of them a strength. There is no judgement to pass or comment to make. The only limits the State must enforce are those of public order. Then there are the movements organised for the exploitation of people’s weakness, sexual abuse, mental manipulation, physical violence and constraint. One is then confronted with the second category, which, of course, must be fought. I want to recall that, barring aberrations, it is not the rabbis, the imams or the priests who abuse their parishioners or exploit their faithful financially by making them believe they will gain the life hereafter! One cannot place in the same category some guru who rapes all the members of his cult, and the ministers of religion of our great religions! The differences do leap to the eye! One must be struck with blindness or particular bad faith not to measure it.

Respect for individual liberty, and for freedom of thought, are also pertinent tests. In his homily, the priest will say that one must do good and reject evil, but he is not going to interfere in family life to decide, in people’s place, on the education of the children or the advisability of going on holiday.

Transparency is yet another objective criterion. When you enter a Catholic prayer group, you know from the start that you are in the Catholic Church. The dangerous movements advance masked.

Page 136

The great religions of France are therefore Christianity, Judaism and Islam… I believe in individual liberty: if people want to be Jehovah’s Witnesses, that is entirely their right. As long as their activities are not contrary to public order, I do not see in the name of what one would forbid them. The Jehovah’s Witnesses do not for all that constitute one of the great religious currents of the world, or of France… If one wanted to try to find a definition of religion as against the cults, I think one of the most pertinent criteria would be that of historical permanence, for one must agree that the authenticity of the spiritual message is in a way legitimised by its permanence across the generations… The Jehovah’s Witnesses are not quite of the same nature in terms of secular permanence, the Raelians still less, Scientology no more.

Religion is not a phenomenon that passes, that is merely conjunctural. It is anchored, rooted, and withstands centuries of history… There can notably be cult-like aspects at the confines of our religions and, conversely, a sincere religious commitment in belonging to certain recent and autonomous spiritual groups.

Does the criterion of the universality of the message not seem sufficient to you?

It plays a role. It cannot however constitute an exclusive criterion, because a great number of cults also lay claim to universality. Moreover, universality is not by itself a guarantee of democratic practice, of respect for human rights and freedom of conscience. Marxism gave us a striking proof of that. Finally, I do not wish to put the accent on universality because it is a criterion that risks contradicting the necessity of promoting a national organisation of religions.

Page 127

Today, when a confession wants to benefit from the tax advantages provided by law in favour of worship associations, the administration verifies that it fulfils the legal conditions. That is equivalent to a de facto recognition. This recognition certainly poses the problem of the criteria of distinction between the religions and “the rest”, generally designated under the term “cults”.

Page 11

Doubtless I would have had less strength and felt less interest in the exercise of my functions if this question of hope and its relations with religion, society, the Republic had not constituted, for a long time, an important dimension of my personal reflections. My long-matured conviction is that the need to hope is consubstantial with human existence; and that what makes religious liberty so important is that it is in reality the liberty to hope.

Page 13

I lived my responsibilities as Minister of Religions fully. Unlike a certain number of my predecessors, I did not profess a polite indifference towards the religions; I never apologised for being Minister of Religions; I on the contrary claimed that charge. I consider that, in all these last years, the importance of sociological questions has been overestimated, while the religious fact, the spiritual question, have been very largely underestimated.

The spiritual question has existed exactly since man became conscious of his particular destiny, that of being human. The spiritual question is that of hope, the hope of having, after death, a perspective of fulfilment in eternity. Since man has been conscious of having a destiny, he has felt the need to hope.

Page 14

I add that the maintenance of public order, which is the first responsibility of the Minister of the Interior, is not an end in itself, but the condition for the exercise of liberties. It is often forgotten that the Ministry of the Interior is first of all the ministry of the great liberties: freedom of assembly, freedom of demonstration, electoral freedom, freedom of association, freedom of movement, local liberties…

Religion concerns itself with “the essential”, that is to say with the meaning and the why of life… To the religions, the spiritual; to the Republic, the temporal. The balance is the duty of harmony between the two!…

The faithful of the great religious currents ask nothing other than the liberty to live their faith. They find it hard to accept being perceived as a menace, indeed a danger. They do not understand the natural tolerance of society towards all sorts of minority groups, affiliations or behaviours, and the feeling of mistrust towards the religions. They live this situation as an injustice!…

Page 15

The religious fact is a primordial element in that it inscribes “life” in a process that does not stop with death. That is why I do not have a sectarian conception of laïcité. Not even the vision of an indifferent laïcité. I believe in the religious need for the majority of the women and men of our century. The place of religion in the France of this beginning of the third millennium is central…

The Republic guarantees a common laïcité, which means that it falls to public officials, and more particularly to the Minister of Religions, to ensure that all the religions can live in the Republic, express themselves and transmit themselves, but in conformity with the rules of laïcité, that is to say in complete equality.

I therefore believe in a positive laïcité, that is to say a laïcité which guarantees the right to live one’s religion as a fundamental right of the person. Laïcité is not the enemy of the religions. Quite the contrary. Laïcité is the guarantee for each person of being able to believe and live his faith.

That in no way means that the Churches must dominate society, impose their rules on it, fix a morality for it and even a calendar. First, because the religious fact can be independent of the Churches. One can “believe” without belonging to any “organisation”. Finally, because the right not to believe is equally a fundamental liberty. To recognise the importance of the religious fact for man is in no way contradictory with the wish to see society free of all dominations, including of a Church…

But laïcité respects and even defends the inalienable right of each person to practise his religion. Laïcité is at the service of the liberty of each citizen of the Republic to live a religion or not, and to transmit it to his children as he sees fit. This right to live one’s religion is as important as the right of association, freedom of expression or the right to the presumption of innocence. Finally it is the recognition of a universal right to hope.

Page 18

Everything that gives meaning to life, everything that can make one think that life is not a good for immediate consumption, everything that helps one understand that for every effort there is a recognition, that duty accomplished is a factor of flourishing, is enriching for our society. I do not believe a society needs to be religious to exist, but I think that the religious, spiritual women and men, people of faith, are a calming element. Dare I say a civilising element? Moreover, what is a man who believes if not a man who hopes? This hope is capable of offering, in the collective dynamic of a society, a perspective of mobilisation for the common good and an acute sense of life. I am convinced that the religious spirit and religious practice can contribute to calming and regulating a society of liberty.

Page 20

The question of hope, that of the meaning of life, is doubtless the most important question of existence. It remains a central question for our fellow citizens.

Page 21

Spirituality is lived more and more as an individual itinerary, a personal quest punctuated by the painful stages of life such as the loss of a loved one.

Page 29

Now, faith is not explained, is not discussed: it is lived. It imposes itself as self-evident on the one who answers its call. Faith is of the order of conviction… There is a personal effort of commitment in welcoming faith. It is an intimate encounter with God, the feeling of an election, of a call. This individual and unique experience does not necessarily lead to dialogue. A self-evident truth, which imposes itself on oneself, is not naturally a school for learning exchange. It leads rather to assurance, to the affirmation of certainties, possibly to proselytism.

Page 35

Can one live without hope?… There is a need for hope consubstantial with human life. Man is not made to bear and assume despair. Doubt is already hard enough to live with. So the certainty of nothingness… That would be far worse!

Page 36

Religion is a quest for the absolute… Applied to oneself, the absolute is not a danger for society. Imposed on others, it becomes a danger.

Page 43

To feel an immediate need to get out of trouble and to have recourse to God in desperation does not make a man a believer! It is rather in situations of joy, of peace, when one has the feeling of being fulfilled, that the desire to turn to God in prayer is the most sincere.

Page 44

The true stake, which doubtless corresponds most deeply to my nature, is to be useful through my action, by going forward. To serve. I like this well-known sentence of Jaurès: “It is by going towards the sea that the river is faithful to its source”. Conversely, the expression in which I recognise myself least is: “The urgency of a return to the sources”.

Page 52

To pose as a postulate that there are religions superior to others, or different from others by reason of their values, is to pose the postulate that, if God exists, there would be, well separated in heaven, the domain of the Jews, that of the Muslims and that of the Christians. This vision, in a way “partisan”, is in no case mine.

Page 119

I have always told myself there was arrogance in the certainty of divine non-existence. I hope everyone has in him that share of doubt which allows one to keep hoping.

So everyone is a believer?

Certainly not, but it is doubtless the attitude of François Mitterrand that best embodies what many of our fellow citizens live in the matter of faith. He believed in something difficult to define, a force, a supernatural power. It was a way of believing without formulating it. It was above all a way of refusing the hopelessness of the void. Finally, it is perhaps easier to believe than to live with the conviction that nothing exists in the hereafter. In a way, there is not so much merit in believing. It is so sinister to have no prospects.

Page 131

Believing, living one’s faith, are liberties that must be defended. The faith and commitment of believing citizens are positive for the nation. They are neither risks, nor menaces, nor excesses.

Page 133

Preventing someone from practising his religion, or disturbing the exercise of worship, have moreover been specific offences since the 1905 law itself.

Page 141

It seems to me in fact that the best way of avoiding slippages would be for the great religions to have the wisdom to let a greater diversity organise itself within them. I think one must trust the great spiritual currents which have proved themselves across the centuries to organise, and even encourage, diversity in their ranks. The renewal of practices, the answer to the bubbling expectations of certain new faithful in search of the spiritual, could proceed from the organisation of a greater diversity within the religions that have crossed history, which supposes for them opening the doors a little more to liberty. That presents moreover the advantage of preventing the religions from being taken hostage by a rigid or extreme pensée unique.

Page 163

Republican morality is respect for the law. What conforms to the law is moral. In the spiritual domain, one is not situated in the same order. What respects the law is not necessarily moral, and what does not respect it is not necessarily immoral. One is in another logic, and I think the two answer each other, complete each other, balance each other and enrich each other by living in interaction. Spiritual life generally constitutes the support of human and philosophical commitments that the Republic cannot offer, it which knows neither good nor evil. The Republic defends the rule, the law, without attaching them to a moral order. It says what is authorised or what is forbidden; it does not say what is good or what is evil. Religion, on the other hand, can bring that dimension.

Page 171

He who does not believe is not indifferent to the question of God, since he expresses a conviction about it. He makes of his doubts a certainty. He thinks man is the fruit of chance and of his own end. I do not judge that attitude. I ask myself, however, about the possibility of living without truly having any hope in the register of last ends. What is important in my eyes is that each person contribute to building a society of tolerance: tolerance between the religions, tolerance of the Republic towards the religions, tolerance of the religions towards the Republic and laïcité… I aspire also to a better understanding of the world of those who believe by those who do not believe, and reciprocally… My intuition is that there is in each of us a man who believes and another who doubts.

Page 172, the last lines of the book

Politicians, in particular, must not speak only of the economy, of the social, of the environment, of security. We must also broach spiritual questions. Our society suffers from an absence of dialogue and from a lack of places of encounter between the religions themselves and between believers and non-believers. Now, the religious question is a question consubstantial with man, including the man who does not believe. It is his choice to hope or not to hope, but it is perhaps simply a form of salvation to speak of it…

France Fights against Minority Groups (the “Cults”) and Not against Dérives Sectaires: Demonstration, with Supporting Quotations

Georges Fenech, current president of the MIVILUDES

In a press communiqué signed on 27 June 2005 by Georges Fenech (then a deputy), he justifies the use of the list of cults from the French parliamentary report of 1996: “A reference for the work of prevention and of fighting against dérives sectaires” (source).

In a document entitled “La justice face aux dérives sectaires” (La documentation française) of which he is the author, Georges Fenech specifies that the notion of the cult has no “legal definition” (page 20). Why then does there exist within the national police a reference investigation group on “cults” in liaison with the MIVILUDES (page 25)? Why does the MIVILUDES work in close partnership with anti-cult associations of which Georges Fenech indeed specifies that they are structures of “defence against the cults” (page 39) – for example Catherine Picard, president of UNADFI, is a member of the Orientation Council of the MIVILUDES –? Why does Georges Fenech advocate the creation of a “European observatory on the cults” (page 47)?

Interviewed on 19 December 2008 on Paul Vermus’s set (VSD) in a debate around integration and the cults, Georges Fenech specifies: “If I give you the names of the cults I have in my crosshairs, I am in for a lawsuit within the hour… Not easy to put five hundred cults and communities under surveillance; that concerns five hundred thousand people, including eighty-five thousand children” (source).

In the 1 pm news of the radio station France Inter, 15 June 2011, the journalist Claire Servajean questions Georges Fenech: “Does that mean the cults can attack anyone and that nobody is safe?”; answer of the president of the MIVILUDES: “Nobody, nobody is safe” (source).

The journalist Robert Ménard, I>télé, 15 June 2011, points out to Georges Fenech that the UN criticises France’s action in the matter of cults; – G. Fenech: “These are NGOs which are front organisations of these cult organisations, which are accredited to the United Nations” – R. Ménard: “Now that, that’s too easy when it’s the United Nations calling you into question” – G. Fenech: “No, it’s not the United Nations…” – R. Ménard: “What, they’re infiltrated by the cults?” – G. Fenech: ”… These are NGOs which are fronts, once again, which are accredited to the Council of Europe, to the UN, to the international bodies; they do an extraordinary lobbying (…)” (source).

In Lyon Capitale, 30 September 2011: – Georges Fenech: “I am a magistrate. I currently preside over an interministerial Mission”; – Journalist: “…which fights against the cults”; – Georges Fenech: “Which fights against the cults”.

At the same period, interviewed by Robert Ménard, I>télé, 15 June 2011, Georges Fenech does not hesitate to assert: “Me, I do not know what a cult is, I have no list, you ask questions, I answer you. There is no legal definition of a cult, I do not fight against the cults” (source).

Television programme Envoyé spécial, France 2: Georges Fenech claims that “there is no authority in France that labels: ‘you are a religion or you are a cult’.”

Parliamentarians

Statement of deputy Jacques Myard, at the hearing of M. Jancovici during the parliamentary Commission of inquiry of 2006 on the theme “L’enfance volée”: ”(…) Monsieur, you alluded to two cults, one of which had already made headlines in the past, (…) and the other which I did not know because indeed, they are swarming (…)” (source). As a reminder, Georges Fenech chaired this parliamentary Commission of inquiry.

Statement of deputy Jean-Pierre Brard (member of the Orientation Council of the MIVILUDES), at the hearing of M. Rufo during the parliamentary Commission of inquiry of 2006 on the theme “L’enfance volée”: “We (…) have been working on the cults for some time, most of us here, to preserve individual and collective liberties (…)” (source).

Between January and September 2009, 51 questions concerning dérives sectaires were put to the government by parliamentarians. In the database of the National Assembly, the questions are categorised by a field called “Tête d’analyse” which has the value “sectes”. Of these 51 questions, 44 contain the term “sectes” in the text, and certain questions were systematically put to every Ministry (Assemblée Nationale).

10 February 2009 – question to the government from deputy Robert Didier – “Concerning the cults, he would like to know the measures envisaged to control and prevent the diffusion, publication and free sale on the national territory and on the francophone Internet of works published or written by persons identified as belonging to and promoting these cult movements” (Assemblée Nationale).

2 June 2009 – question to the government from deputy Michel Zumkeller – “M. Michel Zumkeller questions the Minister of higher education and research on the annual report on the cults, published by the MIVILUDES (Interministerial mission of vigilance against dérives sectaires). This report describes the methods employed by the cults to install themselves in the ‘new niches’. He would like to know the actions carried out to fight against the hold of the cults in the domains within her competence” (Assemblée Nationale).

23 February 2008 – Jean-Luc Mélanchon, French political leader – speaks of the MIVILUDES as the “Interministerial mission of vigilance and combat against the cults” (ContreInfo).

“I have just been appointed Rapporteur on the protection of minors against the influence of the cults at the Council of Europe”. Thus speaks Rudy Salles, deputy of the Alpes Maritimes, and he adds: “I recognise that a difficult and long-haul work awaits us, Georges FENECH and me” (source).

Ministers

28 July 2009, answer of the Minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries to a question to the government – The minister specifies that he “implements a policy” aiming notably to ”(…) develop towards his staff an information to help them understand the organisation of the fight against the cults and dérives sectaires in France, as well as the steps to take as soon as they find themselves facing a suspicion of dérive sectaire, or indeed a proven one” (Assemblée Nationale).

15 July 2009, Laurent Wauquiez, Secretary of State – “I can testify to it (…) on my own territory, certain cults have instrumentalised professional training bodies” (Assemblée Nationale).

23 September 2009, Laurent Wauquiez specifies, during a sitting at the Senate: “For the year 2010, the principal stake will be to purge professional training of the cancer of the cults, a phenomenon tolerated for too many years. The Government will conduct a pitiless hunt in the matter!”

15 September 2009, Michèle Alliot-Marie, Minister of the Interior, announces in the Figaro: “I am going to table, on the occasion of the next penal text, a measure which will indeed make it possible to dissolve notably associations, groups or cults which have engaged in fraud.”

Anti-cult activists

On the programme C dans l’air of 3 August 2009 on France 5, entitled “Secte ou pas secte”, on which Georges Fenech was present, Jacques Miquel, president of the CCMM, and then a member of the Orientation Council of the MIVILUDES, expressed himself on the subject of the MIVILUDES’s référentiel: “There was talk at one point of a référentiel on movements with dérives sectaires and I heard that it would unfortunately not be given to the public. I would like to point out one thing which does astonish me greatly: in this country, nobody has the idea of going mushroom-picking without a flora, and believe me, I am an amateur mycologist, the movements with dérives sectaires are far more toxic than mushrooms”.

Journalists

If the bankruptcy of the media counter-power on the question of the said “cults” is in no doubt, one can at least grant the journalists that they have not let themselves be deceived by the subterfuge of the “fight against dérives sectaires”.

On 7 April 2010, Europe 1, Marc-Olivier Fogiel questions Georges Fenech: “Today, there is no list on which all these cults would appear? It would surely be simpler for all those listening to us. Isn’t that a lack, isn’t that a deficiency?”.

On 8 April 2010, the programme C à dire, France 5, Thierry Guerrier observes, as a self-evident fact, that: “The work of hunting down the cults in France is not about to stop”.

On 10 April 2010, the programme Revu et corrigé, France 5, the journalist Paul Amar presents the MIVILUDES at the start of the programme as “the mission against the cults”; probably alerted to his blunder, he corrects himself later in the programme.

On 7 April 2010, on RTL, Vincent Parizot speaks of “the release of the MIVILUDES report on the cults”.

On 15 June 2011, Le Journal du Dimanche presents the MIVILUDES as “The Interministerial Mission for the fight against the cults”.

On 14 June 2011, Le Figaro entitles an article: “End of the world: the alert of the anti-cult mission”.

On 16 June 2011, the programme Ça vous regarde, LCP, Antoine Guélaud, editorial director of TF1 and a guest on the programme, gives his opinion: “On prevention, me, I remain persuaded that the public must be informed still more and that a list of the cult movements must absolutely be established. (…) The cults today are everywhere and people must know it”.

On 31 July 2011, L’Indépendant headlines: “The mayors face up to the dangers of the cults”. The article mentions “specialists in the fight against the cults” and quotes public officials and the MIVILUDES.

On 22 September 2011, L’Est Républicain entitles an article: “Morano hunts the cults”.

On 21 October 2011, LyonMag declares: “The prefecture launches the hunt for the cults”.

On 9 February 2012, Le Figaro asserts: “1,500 training bodies infiltrated by the cults”.

On 9 February 2012, L’Express warns: “Professional training infiltrated by cults”.

Etc.

France in the Time of the Witch Hunt

A trenchant analysis of the context in which the anti-cult law of 2001 was voted

by Christian Singer (astrologer, former member of the Thébaïde community)

Extracts.

An iniquitous and unheard-of law, which completes the dishonouring of the French state, was voted by its parliament on 30 May 2001. It is a text of circumstance and of exception, perfectly scandalous and dangerous, since it tramples underfoot the principles its authors claim to lay claim to, and since it proves at once very precise and very vague.

On the one hand, it targets a very special and quite separate category of people and groups; but on the other, it abstains from defining it clearly, so as to be able to include in it all the nuisances, associations and communities the official authorities may wish to be rid of. This calls to mind (the dates invite the comparison) the famous “May Laws”, those measures of religious persecution that Bismarck had adopted by the Reichstag and of which one of his partisans had asserted that they fell within the framework of a Kulturkampf, that is to say a “combat for civilisation”. We shall see that the French parliamentarians employed identical words, speaking of progress, of the Enlightenment, etc. Fifty years later, an obscure Austrian born at Braunau am Inn took up for himself the same German term meaning “combat”, made it the title of his book, then a frightening reality destined, among other things, to eliminate undesirable minorities. They would have been well inspired to wait a dozen days before palming their villainous legislation off on us. They would thus have commemorated fittingly, by an analogous act, the 207th anniversary of the famous law of Prairial, that of the Suspects, which likewise stripped the accused of any real guarantee and made it possible to condemn them on simple presumptions and on proofs that were purely… “moral”, supplied in abundance by the government of the Terror to the detriment of those from whom it wished to separate by separating their heads from their trunks. Only one small snag: since that era, the guillotine has been abolished which would efficiently have shortened the “cults”. What a pity!

(…) All the great States, the French one like the others, were born of violence and continue to practise it, in all its forms and in the most execrable manner, either among themselves or to the detriment of the groups and individuals who compose them (…). To evacuate discontents, to overcompensate frustrations, to use the unemployed aggressions that could legitimately turn against the ruling class, the latter, with consummate skill and hypocrisy, throws to the unfortunates it leads astray individuals and groups who will serve as scapegoats, will be treated as pariahs, nailed to the pillory and delivered to public vindictiveness. In acting thus, not only do the people in place preserve themselves and put themselves out of harm’s way, but they give themselves appearances of virtue by carrying out salutary cleansings that will ensure the unity and the “purity” of the realm. The camarillas have always exonerated and absolved themselves on the backs of the guilty parties they choose and doom to perdition by making them play the role of fixers of the filth they themselves produce and of the hatreds they arouse. It is thus that a particularly virulent “witch hunt” began in France, and which has strode blithely through all the centuries to come and inundate us with its innumerable activities, fertilised by an inexhaustible imagination.

(…) French laïcité presents itself under two aspects, each as execrable as the other:

First the “passive” and timorous form which identifies itself with “neutrality”, a term signifying “neither one nor the other” (nor the rest!) and which expresses an attitude of non-engagement and even of exclusion on all essential questions, under the pretext of respecting consciences and intelligences. Everything outside the norms is eliminated. A great number of movements of ideas, of authors, of works are passed over in silence or barely mentioned. Anastasia’s great scissors exercise their talents and their ravages especially in literature, in history and in philosophy. (…) The other face of laïcité, active and aggressive, which may be called laicism and which has raged more than ever these last few years.

(…) We live in a “democratorship”, that is to say in a de facto dictatorship concealed under democratic appearances. At most one may say jokingly, as one of Michael Larsen’s characters does in his novel “The Sydney Serpent” (p. 109), that “the only superiority of democracy over a totalitarian power is the right freely to choose a dictator”.

(…) The totalitarian aim, pursued for centuries, obstinately remains the same and is not very difficult to define: it is a matter of bringing the totality of pseudo-citizens to think and to behave in a totally identical manner in the totality of the sectors of their public and private life. As the philosopher Baudrillard excellently says, cited by E. Morin in his book “Pleurer, aimer, rire, comprendre”: “What the West henceforth wants to impose on the whole world, under cover of the universal, is not values, it is precisely its absence of values. Everywhere that some singularity survives and persists, some minority, some specific idiom, some irreducible passion or belief, and above all some antagonistic vision of the world, a different order must be imposed… We generously distribute the right to difference but, secretly, and this time inexorably, we work to produce a bloodless and undifferentiated world.”

(…) How many people are condemned on extremely tenuous and fragile clues, on more or less gratuitous hypotheses, on imaginary reconstructions unsupported by facts and proofs, and following botched and oriented investigations in which the guilty party is designated as a matter of course and from the outset rather than really sought, in which certain witnesses are set aside, lines of investigation deliberately neglected, expert reports refused, that might undermine the theses prefabricated by the prosecution!

(…) The first manoeuvre consists, as I have just recalled, in fabricating in every domain ready-to-think products which 99% of people will be brought to endorse by being made to believe (and this is the height of it!) that they express their… personal ideas! A marvellous discovery, amusingly rendered by the title of another work by F. Brune: “The media think like me!”.

(…) The designation of pariahs and scapegoats, the creation of collective psychoses, come at just the right moment to feed an inextinguishable thirst for informing which will “broaden” into a witch hunt and into persecution. These are behaviours as banal as can be, adopted by every government worthy of the name, which cannot subsist without electing black sheep destined to bear the weight and to pay the price of its constitutive deficiencies. They will be thrown as a holocaust and as fodder to public opinion, to the media and to judges (investigating judges in particular) who will know perfectly well how to hound them, in contempt of all justice and with complete impunity.

(…) The State and the pack of its rabid dogs attack everything that departs however slightly from the current model and appears to contest it, even in a very limited sector. The vigilantes become paranoid: they no longer tolerate the slightest deviation and keep an eye on a considerable mass of suspects, of people whom it is affected to consider and to denounce as potentially dangerous. It is thus that there prospers in France a police regime that ceaselessly fills out and consolidates itself, and that knows how to make “respectable people” “swallow” anything at all, to make them accept its excesses and its overflows by means of a sledgehammer argument: the continual reinforcement of repressive measures and actions has no other justification than their own interest!

(…) I should like to pin down groups or isolated individuals whose machinations seem to me still more odious. I allude principally to those associations bringing together people who, without any mandate or any particular competence, have proclaimed themselves vigilantes, usurping from the outset upon the public power, behaving as para-police agencies, in order to track down the “cults” or those alleged to be such, to collect in the shadows information or gossip concerning them, to intervene cravenly behind their backs with administrations, colleagues or relatives in order to harm them. How can a State that calls itself democratic tolerate such practices? But it has done far worse. It has granted several of these commandos, constituted outside the law, a veritable legitimacy by paying them, by recognising them as being of public utility and by giving them the right to substitute themselves for the victims (?) of the “cults” in order to attack them before the courts.

(…) Mistrust of vaccinations, attraction to vegetarianism and fasting, even wisely practised, the refusal of hyper-medicalisation, of pharmaceutical excess, of abusive analyses and examinations, the will to give birth at home, the preference accorded to gentle medicines, etc., are perceived by the “officials” either as the dangerous fancies of a few unwitting victims of cranks or shrewd charlatans, or as acts of quasi-dissidence.

(…) It is thus that the “experts” will advise you to be extremely vigilant, as well as to make “pressing” interventions, if you observe changes, even imperceptible ones, in one of your relatives. If he begins to distinguish himself by some singularity, a stop must be put to it at once! If he modifies more or less abruptly his habits, for example of food or of dress, or his physical appearance; if he no longer properly assumes his stereotyped duties of production, of consumption, of relations, of distractions, of communications (mobile phones and all the rest of the paraphernalia); if he tends to isolate himself in order to read, dream, reflect, meditate or, worse still, to give himself over to superstitious gestures or rites; if he receives too often mysterious letters or visits; if he lets himself go to unidentified appointments; if he frequents dubious groups, it is because he is probably under the hold of a “cult”.

(…) Everything can be summed up by this formula, as savoury as it is pertinent: “Speak well in order to say nothing and think well in order to reflect on nothing” (p.67), which could be adopted as a motto by the mortally boring buffoons (politicians, wheeler-dealers, fashionable “thinkers”, trendy artists and entertainers, etc.) who succeed one another without interruption on the airwaves and on the screens, and who fill the whole of journalistic and book publishing, not counting the Internet, with their indigestible and insipid salads. In every case, it is a matter of implanting in psyches reflexes, instincts and tropisms that will operate mechanically and take the place of conscience, of reasonings and of personal judgements.

(…) The good apostles of anti-cultism have always sworn to us by all that is holy that they were too respectful of “beliefs” to allow themselves to judge and attack them. Now, that is exactly what Picard does (and she is not the only one) (Catherine Picard, the deputy at the origin of the 2001 law), when she allows herself to stigmatise “the pseudo-religious, pseudo-philosophical or pseudo-spiritual intellectual swindles” committed by the “cults”. She even goes so far as to speak of “spiritual alienation”: that is worth its weight in gold! I should like to know what competence and what personal experience this woman can lay claim to in order to venture with such assurance into assertions so hazardous. Sutor, ne ultra crepidam! Let there be no mistake: the government is waging an ideological combat inspired by atheist or agnostic scientism.

(…) Since the eighteenth century, pre-humanity has continued to sink into savagery and barbarism. The “events” recently occurred, from the very first year of the 21st century, show clearly that this progression continues unabated, that one may expect the worst horrors in the course of the hundred years to come, which will be (unless a miracle occurs that nothing at present allows one to hope for) far more frightful than the previous hundred, themselves much more terrible than their predecessors.

(…) As Topaze says: “Better to choose the guilty than to look for them”. Especially if one absolutely needs a scapegoat!

(…) When a group asked the inimitable Gest to be struck off his list of the reprobates, he replied invariably, using that priceless official style intended to impress you favourably by its apparent rigour: “As you know, the existence of the parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults having ceased by the very fact of the publication of its report, it henceforth falls within the competence of no parliamentary authority to make any modification whatever to the content of that report”. In these impeccable and so courteous words one detects, as is often the case in administrative documents, a hint of underlying irony that could be translated by a much less polite injunction, of the kind: “You can go to hell”.

(…) How many parliamentarians are aware of the injustices and violences (flagrant and brutal or, on the contrary, insidious and concealed) which, coming from the police, from the justice system, from administrations excited and driven by the anti-cult cults, have, for five years and in the most iniquitous fashion, struck, in their professional activities and in their private lives, hundreds of irreproachable people, ruining their reputations definitively because they are victims of an ineradicable rumour, breaking up their families, obliging them to move house or to leave France (some did so as early as ‘96), sometimes leading them to ruin, to despair and to suicide? Even those who have not (yet?) known such extremities have had to endure all sorts of unpleasantnesses in their daily lives, not to mention the media attacks. I shall certainly not be exaggerating in asserting that our “elected representatives”, in their great majority, could not care less, and that they have no wish whatever to be informed of the existence of such ill-treatment. Even and above all when they suspect it, they have no desire to know more.

(…) “The risk of arbitrariness is present in every will to protect individuals against themselves”. Bravo, Domi (Dominique Bussereau, deputy)! And then immediately afterwards, he shows his true colours by showing that his warnings were only pure clauses of style: “I know however that things are clear for the supporters of the text, who consider that it can harm only the cults”. Well of course! Since they assert it, one can only take them at their word! What has become of your requirements? Well, they resurface: “(Let us not vote) laws which, good today, could tomorrow… become villainous. Let us take care not to have, in the name of liberty, liberticidal behaviours”. You are surpassing yourself, Domi! And then, catastrophe: it was only a last spasm of his conscience before the final “fall” that at last brings him appeasement: “Knowing the excellent work of the drafters of the law, I have no anxiety”. I hope the reader will have savoured the dramatic progression and the contrasting phases of that terrible inner debate.

(…) “The threat is tangible: henceforth, the slightest alternative spiritual, educational or medical practice is judged suspect. And liable to criminal sanctions”. In a first phase, an attempt is made to eliminate all those who refuse to adhere to the rationalist dogmas promoted and imposed by the government and its supporters. That is where we are. But, in a second phase, the religious institutions will be attacked, on the pretext that they shelter “dérives sectaires” within them. Of course, Judaism and Islam will be spared, for reasons of political opportunism and in order to sow division.

(…) Let it be understood: henceforth, the unfortunates who feel called to transform “society” radically will be suspected of being dangerous madmen, so much will their objectives appear insane, exorbitant, perverse and, quite simply, unjustified, because, after all, were it not for the presence of those filthy cults, we would be living in a more or less perfect world.

(…) It is at that precise moment, at that crucial instant that, on the ruins of hope, there can arise Hope, fruit of a “heroic determination of the soul… that overcomes despair” (Bernanos), and which, bearing a message emanating from the transcendent Person, warns us on Its behalf that It will know how and will wish to draw a Good from the disaster in which pre-humanity will have been engulfed, to whom it will tirelessly be proposed to make use of it, until it issues an acceptance or a refusal without appeal.

A Wretched and Fearful Society

that seeks to smother the spiritual impulse…

After twenty years of media hammering about the cults, the effects of the conditioning are being painfully felt in France.

Today, the greater part of the French believe they know what they are talking about when they evoke “the cults”. So much so that the most widespread understanding is that one ought to “have done with it” by force. A friend was telling me yesterday how his neighbour had come and confided to him through the open window of his house how he “would kill the Jehovah’s Witnesses if he came across them in the street”… and that he had hesitated until then only because he feared the courts would punish him for it (and even then, he did not seem entirely sure of undergoing such a sanction!).

Others have already moved to action by planting bombs (1) in front of premises designated by the media as the meeting place of a spiritual minority (Moon in Paris in 1996, Scientology in Angers in 1997; 3 months earlier, a representative of the ADFI declared on Europe 1, on the subject of the Reverend Moon’s visit: “Really, I understand if people plant bombs!”. The AMORC centre in Toulouse was entirely destroyed by arson on the night of 24 to 25 June 2007), and a man was even murdered in the street by his father-in-law (2) because he was said to have belonged to a “cult”!

Disinformation prospers on general ignorance and propagates itself in a form of violence that ought to alert us all.

At the present time, nothing of the sort. The scapegoat is designated and the authorities complaisantly accept — when some are not fanning it — that the situation should degrade to the point of creating a new form of segregation. “People” know nothing about spirituality and what motivates it. And yet we must all today endure the stupidest and most hate-filled statements on a question that demands the greatest subtlety.

It is necessary and urgent that this situation should change. Our site contains information to be widely diffused in order to counterbalance the ambient defamation and informing. If “people” do not know what they are talking about, and are inclined to lose their temper without discernment, they also have a desire to know the truth and not to undergo “brainwashing”.

It is high time, even if the task is great, to restore a little common sense, subtlety and spirituality to this debate, currently sclerotic and unhealthy.

Read on an anti-cult forum ( source ):

What I would like to know is “how do you get someone you know out of a cult????” My case is simple: my boyfriend left me to invest himself in the church he has been going to for 5 months!!! And from what he told me, it really is a cult and I remain totally powerless. He knows my point of view on the subject but persists in telling me that I am mistaken and that it is not a cult!!!!! Dialogue is impossible! So I would have liked to have the testimony of people who have found themselves in the same situation!!! I have already made contact with the ADFI!! Thank you for your help!

Do you not find this cry of distress “exemplary”? It shows the confusion in which the greater part of the population in France finds itself, as well as the so convenient “recuperation” that is made of the cult psychosis. It is interesting to note how this person utters her cry of distress with the certainty that one can “get people out” of where they are, against their will… especially those “who have left us”, of course, “the cult” being then an ideal party to hold responsible, since it is condemned in advance (if he had left for the army, she would have had to find other arguments). But still more revealing of the climate: she is just as certain that “dialogue” means “making the other see reason” (“dialogue is impossible!”). Her pathetic appeal for help is in the image of hundreds of others that arrive in the letterboxes of the ADFI, which takes pleasure in “bringing help” to all these “victims of cults”. I hope that one day we shall be able to smile at this masquerade.

Another extract, unfortunately more serious (source):

The seminar “Cults and Laïcité” took place from 8 October 2003 to 23 June 2004 at the Ministry of Research. Its realisation was carried out with the assistance of the office of the Minister of Research (…) Anne Fournier was the organiser of this seminar (…) The approach was intended to let divergent opinions be freely heard. This choice brought to light the gulf that separates the discourse of all those who work in the field and have had to deal with the direct and indirect “victims” of the cults, and the discourse of those who approach the subject only on an “intellectual” plane, often putting forward freedom of opinion and freedom of association. The approach undertaken by the MIVILUDES has only confirmed the differences of approach in this domain between France and the United States.

Numerous people today take advantage of the collective psychosis skilfully maintained around the spiritual minorities and present themselves as victims so that such an argument may be admissible. The question of “victims” is too important to be used in so unscientific a manner. If thousands of people claimed to be victims of the Republic, would the same discourse be held?

In her conclusion, Anne Fournier declares that “faced with the demanding obligation to respect public liberties and individual rights, faced with the sufferings demonstrated by the doctors and the psys and by the complaints of the victims [of the cults], the State has a legitimacy to act, and therefore so does the MIVILUDES.” Referring to Condorcet, she recalls that every “new truth” must pass “through the sieve of law and of reason”.

A new cult: “law and reason”?

If we are citizens subject to the law, we are not obliged to subscribe to the beliefs of Madame Fournier, nor of any other representative of the State, which, let us recall, and by its own will, is not supposed to intervene in religious or spiritual questions.

France is decidedly in great need of fresh air

Are certain opportunistic politicians seizing on the question of the cults to give themselves publicity or to compensate for their shortcomings elsewhere? Be that as it may, they are doing our society great harm and we have little hope that they will become aware of their aberration today.

The media feed terror and disinformation and have, in their great majority, moved so far away from the precious role they are supposed to hold that we expect nothing from them either.

Our attention is elsewhere, in the direction of the “general public”, which is truly the sap of our society, and which the CICNS works to inform, denouncing the lies in an attempt to breathe a little oxygen into the vitiated air of (single-track) thoughts and (conditioned) fears.

We live in a society where spiritual experience, absent from the foundations and from political choices, is moreover daily denied. Anyone engaged in a spiritual approach to the point of having made it the heart of their existence knows, deep within themselves, that their choice is today threatened, as in the worst times of the witch hunt or of McCarthyism; that the meaning of their life is designated as an error, an illness or a crime; and that the “sanction” will not be long in coming. To testify to a spiritual quest or experience is perilous today and, to read the hatred well orchestrated by the statements of the anti-cult camp (and if the most furious among them did not try to control themselves, we would not be very far from the time of the arenas and the lions)…

Daily injustices, scandalous judgements, mendacious crusades occur every day. Many, in the spiritual movements, are informed of the crudeness of the anti-cult activists, of the ignorance of the UNADFI’s arguments, and yet, despite this sword of Damocles hanging by a thread over the heads of spiritual seekers, the latter’s choice is still to hide, thinking that the sword will fall less quickly if they remain in the shadows than if they show themselves. You are perhaps one of those who have made that choice, and we do not doubt that you have numerous rational or more subtle arguments to justify it. But, in the survey of our contacts, it has been observed that it is in fact fear that is at the origin of this choice. Now, at all times when minorities have been thrown to popular vindictiveness, fear has prompted withdrawal. It has always been necessary for the drift of these attacks on fundamental liberties to reach considerable proportions before the people concerned sketched out some semblance of a response. Doubtless we are not there today, because a handful of people gathering to defend the essential foundation of humanity is little, too little… Today, observing that men draw no lesson from the aberrations of the past, we shall nevertheless pursue our action for an education of the victims of the anti-cult crusade, for information on the means of not yielding to it and, we hope, for a growing dynamic among those concerned in order to create a popular movement, representative of what man has best to propose to our disenchanted societies with their obsolete and reductive principles. The world is waiting for us to wake up, not for us to doze with the inert masses, hypnotised by fear and by the slogans of materialist “well-being”. There must be in each of us a feeling of living through an era that presents us, as in the past, with a set of points: either withdrawal into fear, or the affirmation of our natural rights to live the essential part of the project this existence proposes to us.

Yesterday someone said to us:

“But all the same, the cults really do exist?!”

The word “cult” has the power to animate impassioned debates. Everyone has their “idea” on the question.

Too few of the people concerned, however, question the origin of their “ideas”, which they take for “new” thoughts when it is most often a matter of a knee-jerk reaction or of the recitation of the most widespread commonplaces.

In the calmest discussions, one always finds someone who expresses their disagreement in the following manner: “I agree, but… the cults exist all the same!?”

Where does this certainty come from? What then is a “cult”?

We hear things said by the media that we never verify and that the greater part of the population takes at face value. People speak of the cults as they used to speak of the beast of Gévaudan. Those who had never seen it often had a precise description to give of it and, in any case, everyone had something to say about it.

When several million people, as is the case in France, begin to assert things they have heard as if they knew what they were talking about, we are dealing with a collective conditioning… and with its unhappy consequences.

But if we judge the consequences unhappy, they are not so for everyone. We then discover that the germ of division that has been planted a little everywhere, and not only by the wind (even in spiritual circles), is in full growth.

Next, one hears it said that “the cults are dangerous”. That is the precision that follows from the preceding assertion. A source of danger has been found and it would be a pity to abandon it! There thus hovers in the air of France a certainty about malevolent entities, ready to snatch us up should we approach them, and incarnating every risk that a civilised human being could fear: “they” are after your money, your sex and your power. Apart from the cults, the tripod of the ego’s life is safe.

In fact, the human being without consciousness is dangerous. The way he speaks of the cults demonstrates it. The dangers belong no more to spiritual groups than to any other human assembly.

That is where the manipulation begins.

If we accept quite willingly to deliver to Justice those who commit crimes (although Justice would certainly deserve to be better inspired as well), we can no longer accept that the amalgam be made between criminality and any group whatever with a spiritual vocation. As I said elsewhere, when firemen themselves set fire to a forest, as we saw a few months ago, one does not invent a “cult of firemen” in order to dissolve it or take it to court. When police officers or teachers commit suicide (the greatest number of suicides occurs in those institutions), the Police and the National Education system are not designated as dangerous suicidal cults!

This masquerade must therefore cease and, first of all, within the spiritual or therapeutic movements, where the conditioning is the most out of place and the most damaging.

The spiritual quest has a legitimate place in our societies, just as much as firemen or teachers. If that were not called into question by people or groups who have an interest in doing so, the spirituality-criminality association would not be so popular.

Someone else proposes a definition of the spiritual minority to us:

“A cult is a gathering of people free to come and go as they please around one and the same spiritual interest… no notion of unhealthy attachment”

This notion of “unhealthy attachment” forms part of the “negative culture” on the subject of the cults. Attachment, whether to a spiritual teacher, or to one’s parents, one’s husband or wife, one’s children, one’s profession, etc., may be judged unhealthy equally in all these domains. There is as much possibility of abuse in a family “of blood” as in a “spiritual” family, as there is as much possibility of healthy teaching and of love. The fact of playing up abuses, which we know to be very rare, in fact, in relation to what goes on everywhere in our societies, manifests an intention to discredit precisely where the human being questions himself most seriously about the important questions of our existence. Why this intention to discredit the spiritual approach? That is what we are trying to answer.

Someone asks us: “Why do we not question more those who have left cults of their own free will?”

One or several people leaving a spiritual minority, an established religion or a political party and having remarks — positive or negative — to formulate do not really constitute a reliable “database”. We have learned that for research to be called “scientific”, far more numerous and impartial criteria are needed.

It is unfortunately the contrary attitude that one sees most often in the anti-cult fight: a “former member” is brought onto every television set, as if he represented all present or past “followers” and, following a serious briefing (his language suddenly resembles that of anti-cultism strangely closely), he finally reveals “the truth”. My God! (permit me the expression.) For this suggestion to have a real pedagogical scope, it would be necessary for those who proclaim it to undertake to gather several hundred or thousand former followers, and for the questions put to them to respect the impartial rules evoked above. This somewhat forbidding work would certainly have the effect of dispelling the smoke and mirrors of the “made-to-measure apostates” presented to us at every opportunity in the traditional media.

Someone makes this comment:

“It is useful to know how to discern between an opinion and the knowledge of something. Thinking and having an opinion can serve as an approach to and a preparation for knowing, but knowledge is deeper, more accurate.”

We ask no one to have a “knowledge” of all the spiritual minorities and their motivations. Tolerance will suffice. The spiritual minorities do not ask to be understood but to be respected and, in particular, that people should stop harassing them for reasons that generally do not concern them.

We do not neglect the pertinence of this suggestion in saying that, but we know that not everyone will understand or seek really to “know” approaches they have judged eccentric and that they have been taught to believe dangerous for 20 years.

But it seems right to us to ask, in a country like France, that the diversity of orientations be respected.

Another remark from a visitor to the site:

“There are also abusive and dangerous groupings. Dangerous because their aim is not spiritual but to promote the ego of a founder, the accumulation of money, the abuse of goods or of bodies. It is important to recognise that too.”

Anti-cult activism is founded on this popular argument. It is a way of stoking fear and it seems to me that we have better things to do than to participate in the collective psychosis. The excesses are dealt with by the competent authorities. The fact that an excess occurs in a restricted spiritual circle ought not to lead to condemning the spiritual approach in general. That is nevertheless what happens, and it is on the basis of that observation that the CICNS was created.

In reality, who among us really knows whether a dangerous group exists? We hear it spoken of, we repeat what we hear and we thus participate unconsciously in the enterprise of destruction.

The first vigilance is here, in my view. Let us not participate in the lie, and let us gather our forces and our consciousnesses to restore the truth. The amalgam between criminal affairs and spirituality is already amply served up by the media. Do you not think that we could move on to something else, on “our” side?

A question is put to us: “How does one distinguish a religion from what is not one?”

We are not here to define something for others. We do not have to protect the other from a possible “error”. That is what is called “freedom of conscience”. Our conception of error often issues from our fears and our conditionings. It is thus that the “rationalists” would like to see religion disappear. The anti-cult camp wants to see the spiritual quest extinguished. And you would like to sort the wheat from the chaff. On the basis of what certainties? A little humility is therefore needed on this question.

The liberty of the human being is also that of making mistakes. It is for each person, in their soul and conscience, to make their choices. Today, we are supposed to believe that the choices of the anti-cult camp would be better inspired than those of spiritual teachers, for example. That is false. It is precisely because the “right choice” cannot be determined with certainty that we must affirm that the spiritual approach is an invitation to come closer to it. The criminal act today is to want to smother the spiritual quest and to participate more or less consciously in that crusade.

To which this person replies: “I have the right to want to protect children from abuses they have no idea of! That is my liberty too. As they say: ‘The liberty of some ends where that of others begins’. I have the right to inform, to give my opinion, so that people can make an informed choice. Especially the children.”

The right to protect is not called into question. But what protection are we speaking of? If you are afraid of something, you will instinctively want to protect those close to you from that same thing. But where does this fear come from? If you are afraid of butterflies, you will certainly transmit that fear to your children. There is no doubt about that. And if only someone runs a skilful campaign about the risks of butterflies, you will even have arguments to support your fear (there exists a theory in physics, chaos theory, which says that the beating of a butterfly’s wing in Australia can produce an earthquake in Japan!).

If the media have succeeded in feeding a psychosis on the subject of the cults, parents will soon all express themselves as you do and will say: “I have the right to protect my children from the cults”. But it is then only a matter of raw fear, not of a conscious choice based on reflection or on a genuine knowledge of the question. Consequently, “the right to give one’s opinion (…) so that (others) can make an informed choice” has little chance of being a good source of protection. “Opinions” are more often shaped by the media today than by wisdom. And to want to protect one’s children on the basis of collective fears has nothing wise about it, even if one may speak of a “right”. An informed choice never issues from unreasoning fears or from influences. Now, most of the people who believe they “think for themselves”, as is generally claimed, do nothing but repeat pre-digested arguments.

A great part of the “abuses” reproached to the cults, for example, are denounced on the basis of opinions that can be debated. When the government asserts that “the cults” cut people off from society, it starts from the principle that society is the source of all goods and that there is nothing to add or subtract. That is just an opinion. And the government can take itself for an “enlightened parent” by depriving its “children” of the new forms of spirituality.

Do you understand the interest of a new way of looking, which asks each of us to consider with humility a conditioning whose consequences we have all undergone, even while thinking ourselves “sincere” or “enlightened”?

Do you understand how people engaged in a spiritual quest ought to be the first seriously to revise the “compulsive opinions” they express daily, playing into the hands of the collective manipulations? Our energy ought to be devoted to restoring a healthy way of looking, without the weight of those unreasoning fears, come from the depths of the ages, and that some know how to awaken at the desired moment.

A final reply from the same person: “If one says: ‘There is ONLY the government that raves about dérives sectaires, because they do not exist at all’, one lacks objectivity. If one says: ‘All spiritual movements are dérives sectaires’, one also lacks objectivity. One must find the middle way.”

Yes, but it seems to us necessary to stop circumscribing “excesses” to the spiritual phenomenon, as if that had to remain a point of focus. Whether in a positive or negative manner, or more in the “middle way”, the fact of associating the spiritual approach with excesses is already a lack of objectivity in itself. It is a confinement. The debate tends to be confined (our dialogue is somewhat the demonstration of it) within this perspective, and that is why we invite people to broaden the debate.

It is the natural place of spiritual research in our society that suffers from this situation, and we have better things to do than to maintain this closed vision… And to reverse the process by saying that spiritual research has nothing to do with criminality does not seem to me an excess in the times we live in. It is just against the current of “single-track thinking”.

(1) The explosion of a bomb in front of the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church in the 14th arrondissement in 1996 was treated thus by a journalist of Le Figaro: “This a priori minor affair relaunches the debate on the proliferation of parallel churches in the capital”. In the same box, the journalist had listed “57 addresses in the sights, across 17 arrondissements of Paris.”

(2) On Tuesday 28 July 1992, in Lyon, Roger Dorysse, a 62-year-old pensioner, coldly fired several rifle shots at Jean Richard Miguères. His victim collapsed, hit in the legs. Roger Dorysse calmly returned to his car, reloaded his gun and coldly finished off his victim at point-blank range. Jean-Richard Miguères was the founder of a UFOlogist movement. He was Roger Dorysse’s son-in-law, and the young couple had just moved into a district of Lyon. The Dorysse couple are said to have been ardent militants of the ADFI Lyon, the CEIRUS being catalogued as a dangerous cult and, according to the declarations of its president, in the “sights” (sic) of the association. Moreover, as soon as the murder was revealed in the press, the president of the ADFI is said not to have hesitated to overwhelm Jean Miguères by accusing him of being a dangerous and malevolent man, without expressing the slightest condolences for his widow. The CEIRUS had never been talked about in the region and its activities were limited to the regular organisation of lectures on the subject of UFOs. Madame Dorysse declared to the press: “My husband of course regrets his act, but he is completely relieved and serene. He did it with a single aim: to save our little girl from the clutches of this dangerous character.”

Read also: What is freedom of conscience? What is a spiritual minority? What is an amalgam? What is the government’s intention? What is an apostate? What is communitarianism?

Read also “Petit traité de manipulation à l’usage des honnêtes gens”, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble (PUG), which demonstrates brilliantly how our daily life is saturated with manipulations, never denounced and often encouraged.

Régis Dericquebourg: The Sociologist’s Point of View

Régis Dericquebourg[1], do you cultivate a certain sympathy for the sects you study, without of course adhering to them?

• It is quite simply the researcher’s sympathy towards “the field”. It is necessary, otherwise this profession is impossible to practise.

Are the great institutional churches not sects that have succeeded?

• Yes, but while succeeding, they made compromises with the world, they softened their demands on the faithful, and their hold was thereby diminished. What characterises the sect, by contrast, is its indifference towards the State, its animosity or its hostility towards it. Certain sects refuse to vote; one renders “unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” — in other words, one does not meddle in the affairs of the State. That is not the case with the churches, which are engaged in the world and some of which have made compromises with the State.

How do the principal sects evolve? Do they seek social recognition at all costs, and do they achieve their ends?

• Every sect is at first radical. It tends to grow calmer as generations of faithful succeed one another, and it accommodates itself to the world in which it ends up settling. But it may also be that the sect disappears; many have known that fate. The quest for recognition is variable; certain groups, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses whom I have studied closely, do not concern themselves with it. Yet they are expanding, and engage in proselytism. Other groups, by contrast, seek to pass for churches, whose status they claim. For a secular State the problem is legal and political. It is the recognition of a religious pluralism that is at stake.

Minority religious groups and the State

Let us dwell on the relationship the State maintains with the various religious movements. You write somewhere that in the end there is no legal definition of the sect. There are indeed reports, but do they not remain a dead letter?

• At the level of the European Parliament there exist, among others, the Cottrell report (1984-85) and the Hunt report (1991). Some wanted to place the accent on children’s rights, but that never resulted in legislation. If it did, one would also have to impose it on the Churches. The question is not simple, doubtless because our democratic States rest on notions of tolerance and religious freedom. Pluralism is at the basis of the democratic idea.

The great institutional churches: sects that have succeeded? Sects or churches therefore exist as associations, quite simply.

• Yes, because there is no legal definition of the sect or of the minority religious group. We do have legal documents, such as those of Jacques Robert for example. Case law also exists, but is the jurist in a position to define what a religious minority is? In France few minority religious movements are recognised as religions, coming under the law of 1905. That can hamper some of them in their quest for recognition.

When a State calls itself secular and does not recognise the existence of a God or of any belief whatever, how could it be capable of granting a status to religious movements?

• At the limit I would say that a pluralist State does not have to manage the religious, nor to say what a good or a bad religion is. It must concern itself with public order. If movements, whatever they may be, break legal rules, they must be judged. There is not even any need to put in place a specific jurisdiction; our legal arsenal is sufficient to condemn groups that commit abuses against persons or seizures of property. What would worry me more is the strong hold over persons. That said, one must nuance: in minority religious groups the “turnover”[2] is considerable.

Without wishing to labour the point, one is obliged to note that the State maintains privileged relations with institutional Churches, with the leaders of the great religions such as Islam or Judaism, or with figures given media coverage such as the Dalai Lama received by the President. There is there a de facto recognition in which minority religious movements do not share. Is that normal within a society that would wish to be fully secular?

• I understand you well. Let us recall that in France we live on the ruins of the hegemony of a great church which, through the process of secularisation, gradually lost its hold. It has had to share the terrain with other churches. And it does indeed seem that the State currently recognises only those churches and religious movements that can situate themselves — indeed impose themselves — in a relation of force with political power.

On the causes of the sect phenomenon

You have a basic training in psychology. Can you say why this or that person is led to enter a sect?

• A difficult question, which would moreover deserve to be refined: why this sect and not that one? There are basic sociological conditions. 1) One enters certain religious groups when one belongs to a disadvantaged social stratum. Some movements have no middle or senior managers. 2) One also enters a sect because one is engaged in a search for spirituality to which the churches cannot respond. 3) For certain emigrants, the sect works as a mechanism of integration. I saw it in the North with the Poles who entered the Jehovah’s Witnesses en masse. That can also correspond to a quest for identity, when one is caught between two cultures. 4) One must see, moreover, that the sectarian proliferation is linked to the phenomenon of the counter-culture of the years 68-70. At that time one saw an expansion of the sect phenomenon. In a society still in full economic expansion, suspicion hung over all the great values. Many people found themselves disarmed, at a loss, and they went looking for values in religious movements. 5) Certain religious groups have also played the role of catalysts; they have channelled an aggressiveness towards society. That is the case for the movements that attract people of the middle class. These have knowledge but no power, and few economic means. Minority religious groups allow them to live in a world apart, and to contest society globally. That is what is called “socio-religious protest”.

For certain emigrants, the sect works as a mechanism of integration.

From a strictly sociological point of view, do minority religious movements have their place among us?

• A functionalist sociologist would tell you that they can perhaps participate in the integration of individuals into society. Other sociologists will tell you that they destabilise the family or other structures of the said society.

Nothing new under the sun

Is man for ever homo religiosus?

• No society lives without religion, and when it believes it has rid itself of it, it invents “analogical religions” for itself, to use Jean Séguy’s expression — that is to say, substitutes for religion. The countries of the East are the flagrant illustration of it.

What is your view of these new religious manifestations grouped under the term “New Age”?

• The phenomenon of minority religiosities is nothing new. In the Middle Ages as much as in the nineteenth century one finds a religious proliferation that our so-called “new age” era would be tempted to cultivate and renew. That said, it is certain that if the public leaves the institutional religions, that does not mean that the religious disappears, but that it passes by other paths, and notably by minority religious groups. The exit from the churches is not accompanied by a global atheism, although that “exit” is itself to be qualified. The personal religious quest depends on numerous determinations; that is doubtless why we shall never have finished studying this phenomenon, and why it is not satisfied by a simplistic analysis.

[1] A senior lecturer at the University of Lille and a psycho-sociologist, Régis Dericquebourg studies minority religious groups, and in particular those that claim to heal. His doctoral thesis was on the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

[2] “Turnover”: the rate of turnover. Followers remain in a sect on average 4 to 5 years.

http://www.paroles.ch/lire/cert/SECTES/socio.htm

Read also Régis Dericquebourg’s article: De la Mils à la Miviludes. La politique envers les sectes en France après la chute du gouvernement socialiste and the video of his interview conducted by the CICNS

Sociology of the Cults in France

France Culture programme – La suite dans les idées, by Sylvain Bourmeau – Tuesday 7 July 2009 – 11 a.m. to 12 noon (extracts from the programme)

Guests

Arnaud Esquerre.

Sociologist, attached to the group of political and moral sociology (GSPM) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales; he taught at Sciences Po Paris from 2005 to 2008. Author of La manipulation mentale : sociologie des sectes en France (Fayard, May 09)

Marcela Iacub.

Jurist and researcher at the CNRS. Author of numerous works, including Le crime était presque sexuel et autres essais de casuistique juridique (reissued by Flammarion, March 2009) and Par le trou de la serrure : histoire de la pudeur publique, XIXe - XXIe siècle (Fayard, 2008)

Jeanne Favret-Saada.

Ethnologist, director of studies at the École pratique des Hautes études, section of religious sciences. She has notably published Les Mots, la Mort, les Sorts (Gallimard, 1977), with Josée Contreras Le Christianisme et ses juifs (Le Seuil, 2004), and most recently Désorceler (Ed. de l’Olivier, 16 April 2009)

La suite dans les idées today concerns a book by Arnaud Esquerre, La manipulation mentale, sociologie des sectes en France, which appears in the Histoire de la pensée collection at Fayard.

Arnaud Esquerre: Faced with an object like this one, the great question is obviously always to know who names this object and from what position.

I put “cult” in quotation marks because one of the problems of this question of the “cults”, in sociology, is that it was long treated by the sociology of religions, and therefore always attached to religion. We missed, in the analysis of the “cults” by sociology and the human sciences, a very important evolution that takes place in the 1970s, at a time when the expression “new cults” began to appear. What was changing was the manner in which they were designated and who designated them. Before the 1970s, the people who principally designated the “cults” were, in France, from the Catholic Church. One formulated what a “cult” was in relation to the Catholic Church and, to simplify, a “cult” was a false Church. The point of support was the practices of the Catholic Church or the texts to which it referred. One could say that the “cults” were groups that read the Bible badly.

In the mid-1970s, associations of victims of “cults” are set up and, at the beginning of the 1980s, the State takes over from the victims’ associations. From the moment when it is victims’ associations and when the State engages in the fight against the “cults”, the points of support change, because the State cannot say that a “cult” is people who read the Bible badly. That is more complicated to say, from the State’s point of view.

The point of support that is found is mental manipulation. A “cult” becomes, to simplify, people mentally manipulated by a guru.

It is thus that a new fight against the “cults” is set up. It designates “new cults” but, in reality, we find the expression “new cults” as early as the 19th century. The idea that one denounces “new cults” and proliferating “cults” is an absolutely recurrent discourse. Already the abbé Grégoire at the beginning of the 19th century, in his great Histoire des sectes, denounced a proliferation of “cults”.

That is the great rupture. From the moment when you change the conceptual point of support for designating the groups, you no longer designate the same groups either. By taking as a point of support a psychological concept, which is mental manipulation, you introduce two things:

On the one hand, people to give expert assessments of it. In relation to Scripture, you had theologians and priests. Here, mental manipulation will have to be assessed, so these will be professionals of the psyche, that is to say psychiatrists or psychologists. As a result, you also introduce the idea that the groups in which there is mental manipulation may be groups more linked to psychotherapy or, since it is a matter of mental manipulation, to politics or to a philosophical reflection. You draw into it combats that would seem quite strange if we placed ourselves before the 1970s, and which are in reality combats between professionals of the psyche — notably the idea that psychotherapy must be regulated.

Jeanne Favret-Saada: (…) I found it altogether interesting that a sociologist should be placed in exactly the situation I had been in with witchcraft, where it is a public, accusatory discourse that constituted the phenomenon. In witchcraft, a bewitched person never speaks of it and would never pronounce the word witchcraft. In the case of the “cults”, only the accusers of the “cults” speak of them. The people who are in a “cult” do not say: “I am a member of a cult”. They say: “I am a member of a community, of a group; I am the pupil of Mr So-and-so”.

I found very interesting the entirely original way (…) in which he constituted this phenomenon. His book consists in (…) dismantling entirely the public discourse and the discourse of authority, the discourse of accusation. He chose, which as an ethnologist I like very much, field situations, cases extremely well found in relation to the different elements of his deconstruction. Then we realise that not only is the official concept of “cult” totally deconstructed, but we see very well who the people are who seek to be in this type of group. They are very diverse and have very different objectives; some fall into extremely dangerous traps, for which laws exist that do not need to be the law on mental manipulation in order to get them out; and we see how the State manages in an extremely crude fashion, with services fighting one against the other, bills that never work quite well and that result in inapplicable texts. We see, which an ethnologist cannot do but which I read for the first time from a sociologist, a vision of the State at once as an enormous power but endowed with an indefinite capacity for entropy.

His analysis of the State seems to me absolutely essential and bound to found a school, in particular in sociology; but also, when one thinks of power, it is enough to say that there is power everywhere and that there is none anywhere. The way in which he shows it, perfectly localised and contradictory everywhere, is for me altogether fascinating.

Arnaud Esquerre: The important starting point was that one had to reflect on who designates the “cults”, and therefore to take seriously what the actors say. If people say that a “cult” has nothing to do with a Church, one must take that seriously. One must not tell oneself and absolutely connect, as is done in the sociology of religions, the “cults” to the Church, by saying that people are mistaken in speaking of “cults” where there are none. I start from exactly the inverse postulate, that is to say: we take seriously what people say.

The second difficulty was that the debate is extremely polarised. If you are not against the “cults”, that means you are for them, from the point of view of those who are against. I could not go into a “cult” and present only that point of view. That would mean that I would then place myself in a posture of strong denunciation, which did not correspond to what I wanted to do, or in something for which I would have been accused of naivety or of too great empathy. In order to be able to deconstruct what is happening, I had to hold all the points of view together. The sociological method I had to use was to take those who have relatives entering “cults”, those who fight the “cults” from within the State, and those who are in “cults”.

I took three types of group, in order to show the variations: a group that everyone agrees in calling a “cult”, the Church of Scientology; a group over which there is a conflict of interpretation, the Rose-Cross; and a group that nobody calls a “cult”, Narcotics Anonymous. I worked by holding all these points of view together, focusing on very precise elements, through cases which, indeed, are not much used in sociology but are much used in Law (…), in psychoanalysis, in ethnology and in anthropology. (…)

The other point was to pay great attention to language, (…) given that language has an enormous importance in designation through the question of the “cults”, and to reflect on how statements are formulated and who utters them. I was working in the line of an article by Luc Boltanski on denunciation, based on letters of denunciation to the newspaper Le Monde. The idea was: how does one succeed in an accusation of manipulation, for example; or: how are relations of force engaged through language? The relations of force are obviously very different according to whether one has with one, or mobilises, categories legally supported by the State, or whether you are all alone and are going against those types of category.

Marcela Iacub: Among its other qualities, I think this book can be very useful for making a history of that period of the revolution in mores of the 60s and 70s, in which there is indeed the setting in place of a new schema for organising life. (…) Perhaps that allows us to think about something rather curious: this society that was set in place in the 1970s — that is to say the family revolution, with all the new family and sexual rules, (…) — had begun in a way to be very anxious about something which, in my view, appears in this book: will one be able to organise society on the basis of new forms of life? For example, concerning the family, it is not simply the fact of being able to choose to be married, cohabiting or homosexual, but could one live several together? In my view, these questions of the revolution in mores, of multiplying forms of life, are a sort of unthinkable.

This book in any case gives matter for reflection on this question, because I think that it is in the end the legitimate forms of life, the family, that set about accusing the other forms of existence.

(…) I have followed the newspapers a little lately with the stories of the “cult” trials and, unfortunately, the journalists have not read Arnaud Esquerre’s book; it would have been very useful because the whole discourse around mental manipulation goes far beyond the question of the “cults”. There is a sort of calling into question of consent in numerous domains. The State considers that individuals are not capable of making choices. I quite agree that human liberty is always an extremely relative notion, but I think that a State that sets about protecting us against our own stupidity — that is to say the fact that we may have chosen things that are perhaps not good — and that then lets us go back on it, that really creates a very considerable arbitrariness. I think there is a sort of transfer of the theory of domination into the legal world, and people think that all that goes without saying, that it is normal, that someone said yes and in the end it is no… I am thinking of that story of the Scientology trial. That it should be abnormal, for example, for someone to spend money on a “cult” and not on a Vuitton bag or on going away on holiday, and for people to get into debt, etc. I say that these are self-evident things. At the same stroke, since it is bad, the person was not free.

These are two questions — domination and consent, and forms of life — on which this book allows us to reflect.

Sylvain Bourmeau: Marcela Iacub has spoken of the family. (…) There is certainly the Catholic Church, certainly the State, but between the two, chronologically too in a way, even if all these actors continue to be present, there is the family — the families of victims of “cults” — who played an important role in the way the debate was articulated.

Another thing is that historical moment, since she was speaking of that revolution in mores. You explain well how the way in which we supposedly tipped into “new cults” is always related back to May 68. Founding popularising books appeared on this, one notably signed by a journalist who long covered the religion beat at Le Monde, Alain Woodrow, but also personalities such as Roger Ikor, who were at the origin of the creation of associations for the defence of victims of “cults”. Fundamentally, each of these actors, in the 1980s, related this cult phenomenon back to what had happened around the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s. It is indeed in this historical sequence that we can situate the way the debate took shape.

Arnaud Esquerre: What is very striking, and I think we forget it, is that, when one rereads the writings on the “new cults” — the books of Woodrow or of Roger Ikor, who was at the time a well-known novelist, he had the Prix Goncourt — it is an extremely strong reaction against May 68.

The new fight against the “cults”, which takes mental manipulation as its point of support, calls May 68 into question and deplores the absence of authority. In the book by Roger Ikor, who created the Centre against mental manipulations, an anti-cult association that still exists, his whole discourse is a revalorisation of authority within the family. When one rereads the book he wrote at the beginning of the 1980s, because his son had died and had been in a cult, what he contests is the lowering of the age of majority to 18. That seems incredible, but that is what it is.

This movement against the “cults”, as Marcela rightly said, is a movement against other possible forms of life, ones that would not be supervised. It aims at revalorising authority, and notably authority within the family. Fundamentally, authority is a reassuring relation of power. As soon as these are no longer relations of power organised around authority, that is where mental manipulation, which is a sort of default category, can appear. One no longer quite knows what it is, so one will say: it is mental manipulation.

Marcela Iacub: We had thought that after the revolution in mores there were no longer any illegitimate loves. It is the ways of inventing forms of illegitimate love that are persecuted, I believe.

Arnaud Esquerre: What is very astonishing, in the manner in which the discourse is set in place, is that it is against May 68 but while reusing part of its argumentation. In critical theory, there exists a denunciation of mental manipulation, with the idea that we live in societies that are like totalitarianisms. Except that here, all at once, that is going to be diverted and applied to the “cult”, which is going to be the “cult” conceived as a totalitarianism in which people are mentally manipulated.

In the definitions given of the “cults” at the beginning of the 1980s, one says that it is a totalitarian movement.

Jeanne Favret-Saada: It is a matter of giving oneself the good authority, that is to say the family. All the other authorities are totalitarian — as if the family were not totalitarian, as if the Church had not been a totalitarian authority. It is implied that any new form of authority we give ourselves, to which we freely consent, can only be bad since we consent to it freely. Authority — we must adhere to it.

Sylvain Bourmeau: (…) You took three groups in order to try to see what united them, what they might share and, on the contrary, perhaps also the differences there might be between them. What does this approach yield, which makes it possible to call into question the very mechanism of designation, of labelling as one says in sociological theory, of these groups as cultic or non-cultic?

Arnaud Esquerre: It makes it possible to think the groups in terms of organisation. By taking one pole, Scientology, and at the other pole, Narcotics Anonymous, we see differences appear very clearly. For example, in one case a founder organised the group, whereas at Narcotics Anonymous, precisely, people are anonymous. Someone was a founder but we do not know who he is, so that remains a little mysterious. At Narcotics Anonymous, one can come in and go out, whereas in Scientology people are held back when they want to leave — at least that is what emerges from the 1996 trial against the Church of Scientology.

Then there is the question of financial cost. In the Church of Scientology, it is put forward, during the trials of 1996 and recently, that it costs extremely dear, that the Scientology products have a very high cost, and we see people getting into debt to pay for the products they consume — the books, the sessions with a therapeutic aim or allegedly therapeutic. At Narcotics Anonymous, the financial cost is reduced to a minimum: you have free access to the literature on the Internet, which you can download; you pay nothing except the cost of hiring the room, but with a collection, that is very little. So in one case, access to the literature is free and in the other it is paying, it is controlled. And then you can, again at Narcotics Anonymous, freely choose your sponsor, the person you can have as a reference, and you can change if you do not get on with them, whereas that is not the case in Scientology.

If we take these two types of organisation, we see two models appear very clearly and we see very well what can pose a problem in the case of the Church of Scientology; and, at Narcotics Anonymous, the reasons why this group — which is a group in which one finds a certain number of principles one could imagine in a cult, that is to say a group with a therapeutic aim (to stop being dependent on drugs), in which one can go to meetings regularly, with a system of stages, texts, rules one can follow, etc. — and at the same time, despite that, how it absolutely escapes the accusation of being a cult. One sees clearly why: by that flexibility, by the fact that one is anonymous, that one does not give one’s name, etc.

Marcela Iacub: It is perhaps also the fact that it is not a matter of loving a particular authority. It is not conceived as a group with a longer vocation. It does not present that form of love or of authority that one does not want.

Arnaud Esquerre: It does, because one can go to Narcotics Anonymous even when one has stopped consuming drugs. For years, one can continue to go regularly to a group, because it creates an equilibrium and one is happy to see the people. We see the distinctions clearly in terms of organisation.

At the same time, one must be conscious that, insofar as the point of support for designating a “cult” is mental manipulation, in ordinary discourse and also in the discourse of the people who fight the “cults”, these things can always be a little fragile, in reality. I am thinking of the latest report of the interministerial mission for the fight against the “cults”, which points to Satanism. When one reads the part of the report on Satanism, one has difficulty understanding what would gravely threaten society, since the principal reproach is desecrations of places of worship; but when one looks precisely at the figures, one realises that out of 266 cemeteries, places of worship and calvaries affected, only 22 present a proven satanic character. One wonders what the others are and why one does not fight them with the same force.

(…) One concludes with a precautionary principle that consists in saying that minors must be protected from everything concerning gothic culture. So we see clearly how these types of thing can extend in a very large and very fragile manner.

Sylvain Bourmeau: The question, Jeanne Favret-Saada, Marcela Iacub, is that of exceptional legislation, that is to say: are the “cults” a social fact that necessitates creating particular laws, or can they be places in which a certain number of delictual things happen (…) but for which there exist texts of law that ought to make it possible to settle the question?

Jeanne Favret-Saada: There is no need for any law or any new concept. (…) The articles of law we had before were entirely sufficient. Besides, we cannot apply the new ones. That is what Arnaud’s book shows very well, and those responsible for applying these articles in the ministries say that we cannot prosecute on that basis.

Sylvain Bourmeau: So they are not effective.

Jeanne Favret-Saada: Family associations pushed for a public debate and parliamentarians wanted to make a good impression. That is why there were these laws, which are inapplicable.

Sylvain Bourmeau: We would be entirely in symbolic politics? Marcela Iacub?

Marcela Iacub: There is also the fact that at the present time we do not manage to understand that, if we had to make illegal everything that displeases us, we could hardly do anything at all any more. Today, (…) there is a process of confusing Law with morality and sometimes even with aesthetics. (…) It is not the only form of social norms for regulating society, and the Law. There is morality, etiquette — there exist numerous other forms of regulation, and I think one ought to allow society to have several levels of regulation and not have everything we consider bad be illegal.

Today, however, I have the impression that we do not manage it. We are so afraid of a pluralist society. A pluralist society, of which one speaks so much in a democratic society, is a society in which people with different moral and aesthetic values and different codes of politeness can coexist, with minimal rules to organise them. In short, we are completely at the opposite of what we can call a pluralist society.

Arnaud Esquerre: The texts of law were voted in response to a demand (…). In fact, it is above all a matter of one text, which was in the law of 2001. The initial idea was to create an offence of mental manipulation, which would have been something quite incredible. That posed many legal problems and problems about the consequences of knowing what one was going to do with this offence of mental manipulation. Finally, we modified an article of the Penal Code that already existed, on the fraudulent abuse of a state of ignorance or of weakness, into which we introduced the notion of psychological subjection. This notion did not exist in the Penal Code.

First, this article is little applied and, when it is, it is applied in cases that are not “cult” cases. It may be a matter of an elderly person, of whom a couple will take such good care that they will in fact sequester her and take her savings. At that moment, this article will be invoked by saying that this person was placed in a state of psychological subjection. This notion, which had been introduced in order to fight the “cults”, is used in other types of situation. It is a sort of diversion and a story very different from what it was supposed to be.

Sylvain Bourmeau: On the other hand, we can make use of other texts of law to condemn the “cults”, such as on fraud, as we saw recently.

Arnaud Esquerre: Of course, and besides, in any case, we understand why the Church of Scientology was convicted in 1996 for fraud. When acts are committed, there exists a whole panoply and we do not lack articles in the Penal Code for convicting people.

Jeanne Favret-Saada: It is above all that, if we set about speaking of mental manipulation, one has to see where the limits are of propaganda, of advertising, of teaching, of the direction of souls in the Church, of psychotherapy. At that moment, it opens a highway for controlling everyone.

Arnaud Esquerre: We forget — and the sociology of religions has completely occulted it because it refers principally to Weber in speaking of the “cults” — that at the end of the 19th century, another sociologist, Gabriel Tarde, was also reflecting on the “cults” and used the notion of suggestion. At that time, in the 1890s, the great menace was the anarchists, who were designated, by those who fought them, as a “cult”.

We see clearly what happens from the moment when we take notions such as suggestion or mental manipulation to designate groups. If political action turns towards this type of group, we can designate political groups and other types of group, in order to fight in another manner and for combats that are political, in reality. It is always the question of knowing where it stops and how it balances out.

The Uncertain Fruits of a Historical Journey through France after 1789

To read the complete article with its footnotes:

http://www.miviludes.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/Intervention_de_Airiau_seminaire_Sectes_et_laicite.pdf MIVILUDES/Research Seminar - 2003-2004 - Psychosociological and historical aspects Positions of the historians M. Paul Airiau To approach as a historian the question of “cults and laïcité” is not obvious at first sight. In the first place because the association of these two themes is in itself problematic. A simple rapid journey through the literature devoted to the cults shows in effect that laïcité is far from being the dominant angle of approach to the “cults” phenomenon. Next, because historical studies, while not negligible as concerns laïcité, are on the contrary cruelly lacking when one broaches the “cults” in the period opening in 1789. (…) The first operation, then: establish the chronology of the current questions of “cults” and “laïcité”. To avoid an extensive exploration of two extremely vast subjects, it was chosen to use the lens of the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. There were thus systematically recorded the books whose title contained the words “sectes”, “secte”, “sectaire”, “sectaires”, “sectarisme” from 1900 to 2002, and “laïcité” from 1945 to 2002, excluding electronic editions and certain works in which the words appeared only as a key or as the title of a collection (that is notably the case for a collection of the Free University of Belgium, “Laïcité”). If the catalogue may not contain all the books published in France with the selected words (for that, the Bibliographie annuelle de la France would have had to be used), if it may contain duplicates or data-entry errors, it nevertheless returns data exploitable in a sufficiently rigorous manner. One thus obtains 376 titles, whose chronological distribution is not without interest. (…) The finding is simple: before 1945, the question of the “cults” is almost non-existent. The subject makes a first appearance in the 1950s, reappears after 1965, and enters a new period from 1976 (89.92% of the titles, or 223). Production from that moment is always equal or superior to the maximum of the 1950s, and unfolds in two cycles: 1976-1989, 1990-2002, with the apogees of 1985 and 1996-1997 - one will even note that the period 1994-2002 alone concentrates 49.6% of the production. The discriminated corpus makes it possible to bring out better the rupture of the 1970s. The production of the 1950s appears very weak, and the explosion after 1976 is much clearer. One then enters a new period during which the “cults” become a social question. Let us however partially relativise the results. Book production in France has grown since 1900, and the increase in the number of titles devoted to the cults might simply reflect this growth of book production. However, even if this factor may play a role (one thinks in particular of the development of the testimony book, which opens a space for the testimonies of former members of the “cults”), the growth recorded from 1976 cannot simply be imputed to it. Something really happened in the 1970s as regards the “cults”, which grew more pronounced after 1995. The publication in 1997 and 1998 of a series of ten detective novels by Didier de Saint-Aubin on the “cults”, in a series entitled “L’Empire des sectes”, amply manifests it. A rapid analysis of the books on the sects and the “cults” allows one to appreciate it. Let us take first the titles with the words “sectaires” and “sectaire”. Before 1914, these words refer exclusively to the polemic between Catholics and radical republicans, notably around the law of Separation of the Churches and the State (1905). “Sectaires” or “sectaire” is then synonymous with intolerant. At the end of the period, the terms are exclusively used to speak of the “cults”. “Sectarisme”, in its occurrences between 1970 and 1980, has a purely political connotation, the refusal of the split and exclusivism between socialist or communist organisations. After 2000, the term refers to the “cults”. The mutation is seen also with “secte” and “sectes”. In the years before 1945, these words evoke dissident religious groups, essentially non-Western (Orthodox, Japanese or Buddhist ones). In the 1950s, besides the sociological and descriptive use, one sees appear the Catholic polemic against the non-Catholic religious groups expanding in France: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, Baptists, Mormons, essentially. Two authors distinguish themselves here, Fr Chéry and Maurice Colinon, both concerned to distinguish between truth and error. The polemic is in effect essentially doctrinal. The titles from the 1970s onward testify to a mutation, symbolised by Alain Woodrow’s book in 1977, Les nouvelles sectes. One then passes to the presentation of minority religious groups, soon accompanied by their denunciation as totalitarian associations in a religious mask, while Catholic discernment progressively dawns (beginning of the 1980s) and sociological analysis unfolds (essentially after 1995). Several affairs punctuate the growth: the Amadeo affair in January 1976 (kidnapping of a young Moonist by her parents, in front of the television cameras), which brings an FR3 report in April; the suicide of a young Moonist, Patrick Esnault, in 1977; in 1978, the self-destruction of Jim Jones’s group in Guyana, the conviction for fraud of Lafayette Ron Hubbard and the Château affair (kidnapping of a young Moonist by her parents); in 1982, the Turpin affair (kidnapping by his parents of a young adherent of the Universal Association of Krishna Consciousness). It is above all the affairs of the 1990s that mark the media: in 1993, the FBI assault on the Davidians at Waco (Texas); in 1994 and 1995, the self-destruction of the Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland, France and Canada; in 1997, the self-destruction of Heaven’s Gate in California. In parallel, the associations hostile to the “cults” structure themselves. In 1974 is born the Association de Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu at Rennes, founded by parents whose children had become Moonists. It ramifies until the beginning of the 1980s and obtains at the same time recognition from the public authorities: a subsidy from the Ministry of Health in 1977 and then in 1978 which allows it to open a reception centre and a permanent secretariat, to hire permanent staff, a subsidy from the DASS, from the Fondation de France, from the Ministry of Youth and Sports, accreditation from the Ministry of Free Time. In 1982, the ADFIs federate into UNADFI. If UNADFI situates itself in the perspective of the defence of the family and human rights, the Centre Contre les Manipulations Mentales has a more secular optic. It was founded in 1981 by Roger Ikor (Goncourt prize 1955), who had in 1979 denounced the cults in Je porte plainte, following the death of his son, a member of a zen-macrobiotic group. Finally, desiring to be at the interface of the associations fighting the “cults” and the academics working on the subject, two former members of the CCMM, Michel Onfroy and Anne Fournier, found the Group for analysis and research on the cult phenomenon (GRAPHES) and publish La dérive sectaire in 1999. The action of these associations is relayed and supported by the parliamentarians. In 1974 and 1975, two projects for a parliamentary information mission are launched, but do not succeed, and it is within the framework of the laws commission that an information action is launched in 1978. Alain Vivien, deputy of Seine-et-Marne, is the parliamentarian most involved in the subject. But the dissolution of the National Assembly in 1981 interrupts the work begun. However, as early as 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy commissions a report from Alain Vivien, completed in 1983 but made public only in 1985. The media repercussion is strong in 1986 - even Michel Polac devotes an issue of “Droit de réponse” to the “cults”. In 1988, the partial banning by the courts of the broadcast of two reports on the “cults” that were to be shown by Antenne 2 arouses a small agitation. But one must in fact await the great affairs of the 1990s for the public authorities to launch an organised action: the interministerial Observatory on the Cults in 1996 following the report of the parliamentary commission of inquiry on the cults in 1995; the founding of the interministerial Mission for the fight against the cults in 1998, which delivers two reports in 2000 and 2001; the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the finances of the cults, which publishes a report in 1999; the so-called “Royal” law of 1999, further controlling the content of teaching given outside the structures of National Education; the so-called “About-Picard” law intended to reinforce public control in 2001; the transformation of the MILS into the Mission of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires (Miviludes) in 2002. This historical approach to the debate on the “cults” makes it possible to bring out the progressive construction of the debate, and the mutations that have occurred. The French society that debates the cults in 2003 is no longer the same as that of 1960, when the Catholics were the principal denouncers, and no longer that of 1980-1990 either. Within the very debate on the cults a change has occurred, which the late introduction of the theme of laïcité, from 1999 (as will be seen below), allows one to perceive. (…) The chronology of laïcité is therefore not that of the debate on the cults. The convergence really appears only in the 1990s. But, it must be noted, no book title to this day associates a word of the “secte” family with “laïcité”, whereas other fundamental themes of the fight against the “cults” are present from the first affairs: fraud, alienation and political aims under a religious mask. The reformulations that take place in the 1980s aim to “scientificise” the discourse in the psychological domain (“mental manipulation” replaces “brainwashing” or “psychic rape”) or to broaden the social field (rupture with the environment and society succeeds the accusation of capturing young adults and destroying the family), without however bringing in laïcité. As for the explanations for the development of the cults, they are present from the outset in R. Ikor, and know little later evolution: crisis of civilisation, loss of meaning and bearings, search for communal warmth. (…) As for the means of facing the “cults”, it is not laïcité but the regime of religions, characterised by freedom of conscience, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, within the framework of respect for public order, the liberty and rights of others and respect for the principle of laïcité3. The 1997 report of the interministerial Observatory on the cults includes no allusion to laïcité4. As for the ministerial circulars that pass on the 1995 report, they are situated on an essentially legal plane and do not make laïcité the touchstone of the action advocated, whether those of the Ministry of Justice (29 February 1996, which inscribes the fight against the cults “in respect of the founding principles of the Republic” - freedom of opinion, freedom of conscience, freedom of worship, non-recognition of any religion, equality) or of the Interior (7 November 1997, which, after an introduction insisting on laïcité as a legal framework preventing the definition of “religion” and “cult”, presents principles of action which are simply information and the strict application of existing law)5. (…) Laïcité thus does not function until then as a principle of action or reflection, but essentially as a legal framework. It is from 1998-1999 that the public power puts it forward in the denunciation of the “cults”. The Royal law, on the protection of childhood, in 1998, intends to control the schooling of children belonging to establishments that have not established a contract with the State. Notably, the necessary conformity of the programmes to education in citizenship and to scientific knowledge is put forward. The theme is however practically absent from the report on the money of the cults of the parliamentary commission in 1999, which evokes the 1905 law only in the framework of the analysis of the practices of the “cults” for obtaining financial advantages, as well as in its recommendations for better controlling cult activities10. A rupture seems to occur at the beginning of 1999. In the preface he gives to the book by the magistrate Georges Fenech, Face aux sectes : politique, justice, État (published in May 1999, but whose drafting was thus doubtless completed at the beginning of the year), A. Vivien, president of the MILS, does not mention laïcité but the imprescriptible rights of the human person, social equilibrium, and the fundamental role of the law in bounding the liberty which consists in being able to do what does not harm others. On the other hand, at the European colloquium on the cults piloted by the MILS in April 1999, A. Vivien puts forward laïcité as the framework of State action, the law of Separation making “official ideological totalitarianism impossible” and conferring tax advantages on worship associations on condition that a transparency “imposed by democratic institutions” be respected11. He had already insisted on the subject in an article in Regards sur, the bulletin of the CCMM, the previous March: “in the name of [the] equality of all confessions, the secular law has the duty of stigmatising every civil deviation”, “the true combat against the cults […] is that of the preservation of laïcité and democracy”, “The law of 1905 […] puts each individual on the same level in the matter of religion and belief […] preserves from the possible fundamentalist persecutions of a majority confession […] recalls to a citizen’s attitude”12. The opposition to the policy of the USA towards what is qualified in France as “cults” is very clear. The United States is indeed called into question for its too extensive conception of religious liberty. Its policy is thus infiltrated by “cults”, notably Scientology, which can put both France and Germany on trial for their anti-”cult” activity13. In 2001, in the ample dossier devoted to laïcité by the review of the League of Human Rights, Hommes et libertés, he again develops comparable positions, which are found partially in the MILS report of 2000, laïcité being present through the reference to 1905 and to the republican tradition of fighting the obscurantism menacing human rights, being equally cited as needing to be presented to future secondary-school teachers in the framework of their training14. UNADFI partially relays this discourse in Bulles, which publishes an article on “Sectes et laïcité” in its issue of the third quarter of 1999. It denounces the instrumentalisation of laïcité by the cults and insists on the incompatibility of the cults with laïcité: violation of “the liberty of the individual”, “rejection of society”, “project of hegemony and conquest”, “elitism […] antinomic to equality”, “asocial behaviours [excluding] from the field of citizenship”15. The 2001 law “tending to reinforce the prevention and repression of cult movements infringing human rights and fundamental liberties” intends for its part, if its rapporteur Catherine Picard is to be believed, to place itself under the sign of the Republic, following the bill adopted by the Senate in 1999 on the initiative of Nicolas About, wanting to apply to the “cults” the 1936 law against combat groups and private militias. C. Picard underlines that the Republic is more than a legal order, that it is a project: “The Enlightenment, education, progress, emancipation and citizenship”16. If the word laïcité is absent, the idea is present, and intends de facto to organise the bill. Yet the MILS report of 2001 evokes laïcité only a little, distinguishing among the “cults” according to their relation to democratic principles and human rights. The most developed passage is in fact drawn from the publication of the French government’s answer to the special rapporteur of the United Nations on religious liberty or belief17. 2002 can be considered the moment when laïcité becomes the strongly foregrounded grid of approach, with the participation of Anne Fournier, as an expert of the Miviludes, in the FECRIS colloquium in Barcelona on children and the cults. Her intervention, like that of Hayat El Mountacir, research officer at the CCMM, is placed entirely under the sign of laïcité18. As for the current study seminar of the Miviludes, which replaced the MILS in 2002, it is explicitly placed in the optic of laïcité. And the ambitions displayed both by Jean-Louis Langlais, president of the Miviludes, and by Marie-Françoise Courel, president of the EPHE, manifest how much laïcité is henceforth considered by the public authorities as one of the priority angles of attack on the question of the “cults”. Laïcité is here presented by J.-L. Langlais as the only possible legitimation of a “vigilance against cult groups”, and by M.-F. Courel as “a common morality that can be shared whatever one’s affiliation, and beyond that, whatever one’s sexual preferences or the colour of one’s skin”, an “attempt to break individualism, and its corollary, communitarianism” which preserves one from having to “run after an identity that […] fanaticism would give” or to “belong to a group that makes itself a pressure group”19. Thus laïcité erupted into the debate on the “cults”, promoted first by the political and social actors opposed to these associations. But the role of the sociologists cannot be neglected. As early as 1996, in the collective volume Pour en finir avec les sectes, directed by Massimo Introvigne (director and founder of CESNUR, the Centre for Studies on New Religious Movements) and John Gordon Melton, and highly critical of the 1995 parliamentary report, Régis Dericquebourg puts “cults” and laïcité in relation, situating himself in the perspective of Jean-Paul Willaime and Jean Baubérot, so that the new, partially pulverulent religious landscape may be managed within the framework of a cultural laïcité assuming deliberation. He here partially echoes a jurist, Philippe Gast, who underlines that laïcité does not prevent defining a cult or a religion, but imposes equality of their treatment20. The 1999 collective directed by Martine Cohen and Françoise Champion, Sectes et démocratie, thus sees laïcité very present, notably through the intermediary of Jean Baubérot, a specialist on the subject21. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, for her part, in 2001, in La religion en miettes ou la question des sectes, concludes on the necessary renovation of laïcité, a theme already very present throughout her reflection, placing herself in the lineage of Jean Baubérot and his Vers un nouveau pacte laïque? of 199022. This involvement of the sociologists in the social debate, in order to help produce a social contract valid for a not negligible duration, proceeds in part from a reaction of academics who on the whole took rather badly being marginalised by the public authorities in favour of the associations hostile to the “cults” or of intellectuals assuming, both judicially and in the media, the role of experts on cults. The question goes back at least to 1994, and to the publication of the Guyard report, which was reproached for its absence of scientific rigour by a number of sociologists or specialists in religions, notably by way of the collective piloted by M. Introvigne and J. Gordon Melton. But besides this desire for social recognition and status - after all, these academics are indeed paid by the State for the work they do and are yet not solicited by that same State when it would be necessary -, one must take into account the tradition of French sociology of religions. It suffices to refer here to Émile Durkheim, whose sociological activity is inseparable from his republican and secular commitment, or to the EPHE, whose section of religious sciences was founded after the suppression of the State theology Faculties in 1885, within the framework of republican secularisation. One will only note that this tradition is today reactivated by sociologists (J. Baubérot, D. Hervieu-Léger) belonging to a religious tradition that benefited from this secularisation, or within which they defend, against the dominant logic, a secular positioning. The understanding with the public authorities remains however problematic, as the debate organised in June 2001 by the Protestant weekly Réforme and Le Monde shows: the positions of A. Vivien and of D. Hervieu-Léger and Jean-Paul Willaime are not the same23. Thus, the “cults and laïcité” debate is a historically situated, relatively recent debate. If one wanted to be provocative, it would even be possible to consider that the foregrounding of laïcité in the contestation of the cults is a form of anti-Americanism. In effect, laïcité is only really invoked from the moment when the USA very strongly calls into question the French policy of fighting the cults, in the name of religious liberty. The French tradition of laïcité then comes as the first and obvious answer, having a foundation as assured as the United States tradition. Another element supports this perspective: the insistence placed on the transnational dimension of the “cults”, on their participation in liberal globalisation, on their strong anchorage in the USA, on their alignment with the model of the capitalist enterprise. It is possible to refer here both to the book by C. Picard and A. Fournier, Sectes, démocratie et mondialisation (2002), and to an article in the Monde diplomatique of 2001 entitled “Les sectes, cheval de Troie des USA en Europe”24. Thus, to broach the cults by way of laïcité is, within the framework of recurrent interrogations on laïcité and of the contestation of globalisation, to propose an alternative, a French way towards liberty. It is also to refuse evolutions, French and worldwide, whether social or economic, which disturb the habitual frameworks, or at least those considered stable and which one discovers are henceforth less pertinent and less able to guarantee daily existence. (…) It was inevitable, for structural reasons, that laïcité should be summoned against the cults, once the school was concerned. Likewise, the deep logic of Franco-American relations, characterised by a fascination-repulsion linked to the difference of historical rooting, to the national mythologies, and to the differences between two paths of access to liberal democracy, makes the opposition between the French Republic and the American Republic surge up - and therefore the difference between laïcité and absolute religious liberty. Laïcité is therefore not only the expression of an anti-Americanism; it is also, deeply, the manner in which France thinks the religious. (…) The debate on the “cults” was progressively constructed - the word is here taken in the sociological sense, not the normative sense. As such, it refers to a social reality which did not appear brutally, which developed progressively, and which has known inflections. The appearance of the theme of laïcité is part of it, just as much as the affirmations of individual and family suffering put forward by the opponents of the cults since the 1970s - while knowing that the relation of these same facts results from a formulation through the ideology (in the neutral sense of the term) of these same opponents - and just as much as those social groups one tries to delimit by the word “cult” - it remains however to be known whether these groups are new, or whether it is the mutations of the social environment that make them be perceived as new, or that bring out dimensions until then not perceived. Finally, this assessment makes it possible to put forward one point: the various actors all intend to restore a particular state of society or to propose an organisation of French society to come - republican laïcité for A. Vivien, laïcité for the 21st century for M.-F. Courel, the proposal of a High Council of laïcité for D. Hervieu-Léger. The question is therefore political, in the very precise sense of the term. It is thus the future that is at stake. (…)

Paul AIRIAU, Graduate of the IEP of Paris, Doctor in History - Former resident of the Fondation Thiers

Journey to the Heart of French Specificity

by Christian Decoeur

The story of the Chevalier de La Barre, a young man keen on philosophy who was beheaded in 1765 for not having uncovered his head before a religious procession, has become the symbol of certain holders of a “hard and pure” laïcité. But in 2003, awkwardly, it is two young girls who are expelled from their lycée for having refused to uncover their heads. This shortcut illustrates well the complete reversal of “dominant culture” that has taken place in two centuries. We are putting our finger there on what the historian Olivier Dupont calls “Republican sacrality”, which wanted to and did succeed in replacing the Catholic Church of former times, notably with its “educational temples” and its taboos.

Certainly, France has fine resources… behind it; but today, when France readily sets itself up as champion of Democracy, as the “country of Human Rights”, indeed as the “Country of absolute freedom of conscience” (MIVILUDES dixit), other countries grimace. When some wish to justify the at best obscurantist behaviour of certain institutions, they invoke a certain “French specificity”, linked to a French “history”, which would be applicable to numerous domains, among them that famous laïcité. Now, if one reviews this French specificity, is it so glorious?

French historical specificity

If the American Constitution, bearer of all our modern values, came into being peacefully in 1797, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen engendered a veritable bloodbath, engulfing the aristocrats, followed by nearly 5,000 refractory priests executed, by the political opponents, and finally by the revolutionaries themselves who ended up killing one another (Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just). Anyone who has seen the film “Danton” will recognise in this collective psychodrama a rehearsal of the future great totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. There followed the turbulences of one of democracy’s worst pupils: Napoleon sacking Europe, the Restoration, a few revolutions, the Second Empire, “modern” colonialism, the Third Republic under “fraternal” influence, the expulsion of the congregations in 1909, the anti-Semitic campaigns in the press, Vichy, torture in Algeria, ballot-stuffing, the atomic tests in Oceania, radio and television news under tutelage until 1980, the repeated parliamentary self-amnesties. All in all, a veritable free-for-all, including between “secular” groups, rather than the appeased reign of reason. All this has created an almost pathological relationship of the French with politics, a domain where the irrational and bad faith seem entirely legitimate, to the stupefaction of our neighbours who look at us with a mixture of incredulity, zoological curiosity and sometimes rejection, so much does the real resolution of problems seem the last of the objectives. To cap it all, France is one of the only developed countries not to be a true Democratic regime, according to article 16 of its own Declaration of the Rights of Man. Indeed, by leaving Justice under the control of the executive Power, the Constitution of 1958 violates the rule of the separation of powers. One then sees a Minister of Justice send a helicopter into the Himalayas to save the skin of a politician; sanctions are taken against magistrates who dare to raise their heads and break the “instructions” — see L’Omerta française by Sophie Coignard and Alexandre Wickam. By its constitutional status, French justice is therefore not independent: another French specificity.

When one looks further, one finds yet other French specificities:

The country of artificial happiness: France is the country of record consumption of “legal” psychotropic drugs. That nine million French people (including children, indeed babies) should be placed in a chemical straitjacket is less important than two hundred adolescent girls’ headscarves. The manoeuvres to close thousands of alternative psychotherapists’ practices would only reinforce this absurd consumption. The anaesthesia of consciousness raised to a national sport!

Neo-colonialism and double talk? It is easy to denounce American economic imperialism and its oil interests, but what are we doing in Africa; what regimes have we supported for decades, under the banner of “Human Rights”? And still today?

Drug circuits and politics: More and more investigations bring to light the relations between drug trafficking — to which are added the trafficking of recycled arms from the East — and the financing circuits of “Republican” parties (the famous “circle of reason”). See the excellent film “Le Cousin”. Reason of State?

A dogmatic medicine, withdrawn into itself: Certainly, our “national” medicine has had its moments of glory; however, one observes that it is today more occupied with defending the dogmas established by its Nobel laureates, with financing dubious research on the “all-genetic” and with chasing royalties. When the Institut Pasteur affixes its seal to a brand of washing powder, one measures how far the initial spirit has degraded. Instead of taking a sincere interest in the good that new research and all the new medicines can bring to humanity, by testing them honestly and by seeking to integrate all the therapies that heal (is that not the primary aim?), orthodox French Medicine hurls anathemas; and one saw for example in 2000 the President of the Ordre des Médecins come and testify in a trial in which a doctor, Professor Hamer, was convicted for “refusing to abjure the New Medicine and to return to school medicine” (sic). Other totalitarian methods are sometimes employed to reduce certain independent researchers to silence. In the majority of cases, this medicine denies the links between matter and mind, whatever definition one may have of them.

Science without conscience…

The school, witness to a civilisation in collapse

The school is indeed sacred in France ever since Jules Ferry assigned it the mission of educating the people to give them access to culture (our neighbours did the same without trumpets). In what Christian Coten names “the Great Cult” (whose clerics, entered by force at the age of 4, never leave, except in a coffin ordered from the CAMIF), these temples of knowledge are sacralised in long, flowing speeches, ignoring the terrible reality of this ship that never stops sinking. But instead of making sanctuaries of them, temples of the Republic, ought one not rather to advocate a simple application of the law “of the Republic” in school establishments? Why accept inside what is sanctioned outside? (Violence and rapes against pupils and teachers, racism and/or sexism, fires and vandalism?) What is this hyper-abstract “school” content, amputated of knowledge essential to life, cut off from social exchanges, demanding a sort of hypnotic fixation on tons of information to be swallowed? “The pupil”, for more than 15 years, will be diverted from the direct observation of life, from responsibilities and from social exchange. One prefers to fire on all cylinders at the alternative schools that offer a framework permitting the apprenticeship of liberty, responsibility and conviviality, because their mere existence and results constitute an unbearable calling into question.

…Is but the ruin of the soul

Ecology, gentle medicines, and pesticides

Let there be no mistake: against these new sensibilities and visions of the human, one finds the same people who fight against “the irrational”. The ADFI, Dr Abgrall, Dr Grunwald, many of whom are present within the MIVILUDES Steering Council, attack without restraint naturopathy, agro-ecology, essential oils, massage, meditation, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, yoga, sophrology, aromatherapy, prayer, etc., etc. None of these activities escapes the guillotine sanction: “dérive sectaire”! Meanwhile, France is the second consumer of pesticides after the United States, with a record rate of contaminated foodstuffs (50% against 39% for the rest of Europe). The links with different types of cancer are now statistically proven, often generating a “genotoxicity” transmissible by cell reproduction (Le Monde, 30 October 2003). Meanwhile, France is the European country where the male mortality rate from cancer is the highest, and where the increase in the number of cancers is the greatest! The organic sectors, since 1970, were born of a concertation between producers, consumers and associations of enthusiasts, centred on the sciences of life. The French State has just carried out a veritable hold-up, by planning to merge the control bodies for “organic” and for “reasoned” farming — “moderate chemical” — a sector under the thumb of the pesticide producers (science of death)!

Hands off my shrink!

The cancer of intolerance is gradually spreading through the whole activity of personal development and psychotherapies. Illustration: in 1998, Alain Vivien said that “the cults” used valid techniques, such as NLP, in order to “recruit”. In 2003, he asserts that NLP constitutes in itself a dérive sectaire “at the limit of democracy”. Eloquent! Who is next on the list? The general tendency has moved from the denunciation of supposed offences (theft, murders) to pure offences of opinion and of heresy. The idea itself and its propagation constitutes an unbearable offence. To assert that one has been healed by this or that practice is an offence (see the Beljanski trial). Soon, the mere fact of existing will constitute an offence. Which is moreover what the communist-affiliated deputy J.P. Brard advocates. Through opportunism, through the influence of “transversal” lobbies or through concern for doctrinal coherence, one makes sure to put into the same bag everything that, from the most “scientific” to the most “spiritual”, by way of ecology (the health of the earth and of nature) and physical and/or mental healing, does not follow the few official dogmas often inherited from the nineteenth century — poorly understood and systematised.

An absurd contradiction: one insists on the equality of citizens, exempt from differences inside the frontiers, and one claims a French specificity outside them, demanding a treatment and rules different from those of others. These French “cultural” specificities, which constitute subtractions rather than added riches, often lean on a last redoubt of “rationalists”, thus justifying the arbitrary by a pseudo-rational philosophy that is losing ground, if only in Europe.

A very strange national-philosophy:

Let us observe closely one of these currents at work. If one studies attentively the theoretical foundations of the Union Rationaliste and its various writings, which welcomes into its journal people such as Alain Vivien or Anne Fournier, one finds from the outset a direction: “to fight against all the forms of the irrational, ancient or modern”. At least, that is clear. Yet the same people regularly lose themselves in circumlocutions during their interventions, hand on heart, to explain “that they respect all beliefs”, etc. For the “fundamentalists of laïcité”, the child born on French soil is not really French; he becomes so in the course of a process of schooling in the “Temples of the Republic” that the teaching establishments are. This process has as its mission to “tear him from his milieu of origin” (sic) — in order to combat the “communitarianism that would enrol the individual by force”. There is therefore indeed a catechism, and the wholly theoretical affirmation that parents have the right to educate their children according to their convictions belongs to pure wooden language in view of recent years (social harassment over vaccinations, removal of children, etc.). What remains is a naive faith, of another century, in a happiness brought by scientific progress alone and by an ultra-reductive conception of “reason” — a materialist method of explaining the world. One has to have discussed with the holders of this philosophy to see how narrow their intellectual framework often is, incurious and unopen, a canvas from which creation is absent, wholly absorbed in the defence of a few certainties of former times. This current does not hesitate to present itself as an option on the same footing as other religious options. In this, when they claim to monopolise the debates on laïcité, they are at once judge and party. Recently, the Grand Orient, which claims paternity of the 1905 law, asserted that, since that law, France is the “Country of Absolute Freedom of Conscience”! An expression curiously found again in the introduction to the seminar that the MIVILUDES is organising over 6 months, baptised “cults and laïcité” — knowing that this body counts within it several holders of that particular fundamentalism. In any case, one gathers that this conception of liberty is not troubled by scruples, when one sees the difficulties numerous movements or associations have in expressing their opinions or practices without reprisals.

The cultural creatives:

One may very aptly cite Pascal, one of the “inventors” of the experimental method, showing that only concrete experience of material and spiritual events, and fidelity to the facts, can advance personal and human knowledge. On this point he opposed Descartes, who advocated the superiority of reasoning over facts. That too is the Age of Enlightenment. In the United States, 20% of people are considered “cultural creatives”, who create their own references and ways of life without waiting for “instructions” and prohibitions from the State, experimenting and advancing culture “in the field”. The future of our civilisation lies with these pioneers.

Conclusion

Far from the proclaimed French-style universalism, which nobody wants beyond our frontiers, we discover rather a besieged fortress which, according to a wholly Pasteurian theory, wants to protect itself from microbes and viruses coming from abroad, indeed from the “internal enemy”, each country being affected by “defects” liable to damage our secular genetic heritage. Every person born on French territory must be vaccinated by 15 years of school — knowing that there exists in parallel a systematic attack against all the schools taking other paths, such as the Steiner schools. A stiffening similar to that of the Catholic Church of the nineteenth century, besieged by modernity, which hurled anathemas and excommunicated by the cartload.

Blacklists, witchcraft trials, charlatanism, convictions for “thought outside the norms”, broken families and businesses, confiscation of research material, are the modern paths of the French inquisition.

Specific? Yes, this society, and those who have seized the levers of power in all the brotherhoods and bodies that count, has numerous specificities that are often liberticidal. But one cannot silence liberty and truth indefinitely. Let us recall this sentence of the chemist Paul Bert, in 1872: “We are in the domain of conscience, at whose threshold the law of the majority stops.”

As in the time when the Protestants, Voltaire and Rousseau had to take refuge abroad in order to continue thinking freely, while some died on the scaffold, were sent to the galleys or were imprisoned in the Bastille for a play or a pamphlet, one sees more and more today all our best philosophers, educators, researchers and doctors, a few agrarian or spiritualist communities, therapists and educators constrained to leave their countries — not for lack of love, but simply in order to exist and to live according to their conscience and to what they know.

France, country of the enlightenment (today extinguished), wake up!

On the Use of the Stade Bollaert of Lens by the Jehovah’s Witnesses

Exclusive interview with the former mayor of Lens, André Delelis, by Régis Dericquebourg

Source: Régis Dericquebourg, Interview with André Delelis, Blog of Fabrice Desplan [http://sociologiser.hautetfort.com/], published 4.02.2007.

News about religious groups is often polemical. Concerning the Jehovah’s Witnesses, far from sharing their doctrine and vision of the world, I regretted in a previous note the stigmatisation of which they are victims, especially as it prevents thinking about and analysing French religious diversity. I asserted, and I insist again, that they are victims of a vision of the religious in terms of “social pathology” on the part of opponents of religious plurality. Now that the media gaze has turned away from the hiring of the Stade Bollaert by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I give you the interview with André Delelis carried out on 26 August 1998 by Régis Dericquebourg, when the A.D.F.I was already agitating around this question. The interview is preceded by a short presentation by Régis Dericquebourg. I invite you to take note of the logic developed by this socialist who can without fear refer to Guy Mollet, far from the right/left, religious/irreligious straitjackets, in a constructive vision of laïcité in the Republic which completes the debates on the hiring of the Stade Bollaert to the JWs. Note in passing his deep respect for the JWs, his constituents and the opponents of his strategy operating through the ADFI. My thanks to Régis Dericquebourg for this exclusive interview which urges respect for religious difference beyond impassioned shortcuts. Interview with Monsieur André Delelis concerning the loan of the Stade Bollaert (Lens) for the assemblies of Jehovah’s Witnesses, gathered by Régis Dericquebourg (Université Charles De Gaulle-Lille3, Groups, Societies, Religions and Laïcité, CNRS) Monsieur André Delelis has been: mayor of Lens (constantly re-elected), deputy, minister, Senator. He is a likeable man, notes Dericquebourg, open, who displays a “humanism”. He has had a political career remarkable for the number of functions he has obtained and for his political longevity. He has always remained faithful to the socialist party. R. Dericquebourg indicates that “The interview was granted without reticence at a moment when minority religious groups were controversial among the socialists. We thank him for it with all our heart. The interview was recorded and faithfully transcribed. M. Delelis authorised us to divulge it.” From the outset, he declares: A. D: In laïcité, we retain what the ancients, the secularists teach us, and what democratic socialism and humanism have taught me. I have always been tolerant towards all. I am an atheist. My parents raised me so and I have never adopted a religion. I have nevertheless been the mayor open to all religions. I had a mosque put at the disposal of the Muslims. I had the churches renovated, here the communal church by virtue of the law; the commune assumes all the maintenance costs of the building, and the other churches, which were Catholic, were built by the mining companies in former times. And I had them renovated under the credits which served to renovate the mining basin following the end of mining. I have always granted the halls in agreement with the municipality (we meet every week, my deputies and I, and we have always given, without discussion, to all organisations including organisations of a worship character, the premises they wished to have, and free of charge, for we have always considered that our duty as elected officials was to be at the disposal of all without distinction of origin, or of political, trade-union or religious opinion, and that from there, being the elected representatives of all, we had to protect those who wanted to exercise the religion of their choice. Guy Mollet said: “I am an agnostic but I will fight to allow the Catholics, the Protestants and all the others to be able to enter the places of worship”. We have always considered that the associations to which we gave communal halls had to be associations not prohibited, and I have always answered the Association of Madame Charline Delporte (note by R.D.: ADFI of Lille): “Madame, when you have had the Jehovah’s Witnesses prohibited by French law, the Jehovah’s Witnesses will no longer be able to use the Stade Bollaert. As long as this association is not prohibited, it will use the Stade Bollaert as it sees fit, in conditions we shall determine. There is no doubt about that. Have them prohibited, and afterwards we shall bow before the laws of the French Republic. I listened to the arguments of all sides. I received them. The adversaries of the Jehovah’s Witnesses put forward family problems of children who had gone off to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and had thus turned their backs on their family’s feelings. Some had fallen out with their families. Once adult children freely make the choice of their adult life, it is none of my business. That such-and-such a parent did not accept that their child could find himself among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, that the Jehovah’s Witnesses themselves might not vote in elections - well, admit, Madame, that you cannot accuse me of electoralism. That they forbid blood samples and transfusions is their problem, it is not mine. Me, as mayor, I do not have to discuss the choices of my constituents. They do what they want, and as long as what they do is not forbidden by the laws of the Republic, it is not for me to oppose anything whatever.” I gave the same answer to those who came asking me to ban the posters on condoms, asking me to think of the children, or who wanted to ban the showing of pornographic films in the cinemas of Lens etc.… I have always answered: “I do not have to be the taskmaster of the town, to make the round of the billboards and the cinemas. As long as it is not forbidden by law, personally, it is none of my business. It concerns each person’s conscience. Everyone does as he wishes.” In the municipality, I have only one deputy who does not agree with what we do, and yet he is himself a secular socialist. He thinks what he wants, I respect his opinions, but he does not bring the conviction necessary for me to renounce my ideas of tolerance. I have no desire at all to discuss the manner in which the Jehovah’s Witnesses use the Stade Bollaert. I pay homage to the spirit of organisation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, to the very great rigour they apply in the use of our facilities. They return them in a better state than the one provided to them, that is to say everything is clean. Everything is cleaned. Everything is fine. Everything is in place. In addition, they pay a rent freely set in amount and which increases each year. Given the difficulties we have with a certain number of people. I observe moreover that the inhabitants of Lens who oppose the Jehovah’s Witnesses represent some ten people, one of whom was a Front National candidate, and I observe that the others, in my opinion, have a mentality which must lead them to vote F.N. It is their right to oppose the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is their right to go and demonstrate at the gates of the stadium when the Jehovah’s Witnesses are there. I simply asked the Jehovah’s Witnesses to respect the demonstrators, and for certain of their followers not to taunt, from one side of the fence, those who might be on the other side of the fence, to turn their backs on them, that there be no provocation. I do not want this affair to be a battleground between the two sides. The right to assemble exists in our country, the right to demonstrate exists. I do not have to discuss it. I must say that the Jehovah’s Witnesses have always given us satisfaction in the recommendations we made to them. So people say to me, “the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult”, and I have always asked what a cult was, for I do not know, myself, what a cult is. Nobody has managed to define for me what it was, and I saw a first deputy X from whom I asked for the parliamentary inquiry report on the cults. I read it. I heard the observations of my first deputy and he was like me. He said: “I learned nothing from the parliamentary inquiry report. They did not manage to define what a cult was.” They did not manage to bring sufficient testimony against the Jehovah’s Witnesses to decide to have them prohibited. After all, parliamentarians have the freedom of the legislative proposal, and the communist deputy-mayor of a town in the Paris region… R. D: Brard? A. D: Yes, who was part of the commission, who appeared to me an extremely objective man, wrote to me saying: “You give your stadium. What are the considerations that led you to give it, because me, I ask myself questions about the Jehovah’s Witnesses and I have not managed to make up my mind on this subject?” I answered the person concerned and he seemed satisfied with the arguments I have set out to you, and he never returned to the charge. I imagine that, like me, he continues to ask himself questions. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are often compared to other cults which I call “the bloody cults”. Those which have crimes to reproach themselves with. I have never found any possible rapprochement, nor any points of comparison. On the other hand, we have here in Lens bodies derived from the Catholic Church. We have a handful of fundamentalists. We have the community La Source. We have people who move away from the Church while still believing in the dogma. I studied their case. I saw them. I questioned them. They invited me. They received me kindly. They explained to me. I have nothing to say except that, if the Catholic Church does not manage to keep its followers in the Church, it is for it to recover them, since they are outside the Church to cultivate their religion. I had the same problems with the Muslims who at one point, in gratitude for having put a mosque at their disposal, invited me to the mosque, and when there was contact between their leaders, the Imam, and the executives of the town hall, it appeared to me very quickly that there was a minority of fundamentalists who demanded that we take off our shoes, who did not want elected women councillors in the delegation visiting them. I said: “Take it or leave it. If you want us to come, we do not take off our shoes, we come with the women councillors. Otherwise, we do not come. We are not coming to your place to adopt your religion, your dogmas and your practices. You receive us as elected officials. We are paying you a visit of friendship because we wish for fraternity between you and those who do not believe as you do. We have our roles as elected officials of the left, secular, republican, socialist, whatever our personal convictions. Our role is to bring the inhabitants closer together and to avoid antagonisms, and we operate likewise with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and with the others. What bothers some people is that the Jehovah’s Witnesses pay us significant sums for the hire of the Stade Bollaert, and one day they published the sums they paid, and immediately we received letters from Lens residents saying that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were paying money to the Racing Club de Lens; How could a club with a lot of money accept the money of the Jehovah’s Witnesses? I answered that it was the reimbursement of services. What bothers people is that the sums go up to two hundred thousand francs (about thirty-five thousand euros), and some told me it was laundered money, ill-gotten money from people who owe millions to the French tax authorities. A few towns got in touch with us because they granted their stadium to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and we compared our opinions and we agreed, except Strasbourg, I believe. That is its affair. If it suffers pressure from people who are not tolerant, that is the municipality’s affair. We, we continue quietly and peacefully, and we give an account to whoever wants one. The Lens population adheres to our point of view, and the inhabitants, ten or so excepted, have never reproached us. Moreover, if they did reproach us, it would change nothing in our position. We are elected for six years, and if people are not happy with what we do, it is for them, by their electoral choices, to say so. Me, I am proud of what I do. I say to my deputy, who is a lycée headmaster, that he does not set a good example: “I am a secularist. You owe it to yourself to teach the lycée pupils tolerance and laïcité. There is no compromise for a public authority in putting its establishments at the disposal of religions. I do not see in what way we would have failed in our mission. These establishments were paid for by the taxes of all the taxpayers, and if the Jehovah’s Witnesses do not vote, they are taxpayers like the others and they have the right to use the common facilities. Any prohibition would be an exclusion, and our mission is to fight against all exclusions whatever they may be. That is what we think. R. D: Did the A.D.F.I intervene? A. D: Yes, on numerous occasions. R. D: And for the exhibition on the deportees? A. D: No, nobody contested that exhibition. I went to it. I greeted them with respect, for I have read publications. I know that the Jehovah’s Witnesses were punished by the Nazis in the same way as the Jews, the Freemasons and the communists, and many others, and personally I respect the sacrifices of the Gypsies, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the other persons. I read the book of Charline Delporte and her followers. Her books only take up the arguments I already knew: complaints from parents of adult children. I have always fought against totalitarianisms. France honours itself in respecting this or that religion when there is nothing to reproach them with. Those of the OTS are criminals, that is not tolerable. R. D: Do you receive letters from the A.D.F.I? A. D: Charline Delporte writes to me every year. Madame Ovigneur came too. I told her: “File complaints”. They came to demonstrate in front of the town hall. The one who shouted loudest was the Front National candidate for the town hall. He was the most virulent. I do not have to obey Madame Delporte. Guy Mollet asked me in former times to lend communal halls to the communists and to the right. He was transparent and unassailable on tolerance. They have a Vichyite temperament. There are very few elected officials who support them. I have known demagogic elected officials who had a field day because the Jehovah’s Witnesses did not vote, but they were few. One day Derosier asked me if I could receive Charline Delporte. One day I saw him. He said to me: “She is pestering me, I had to send her to you”. I said to him: “Me, I do not espouse her theses”. He answered me: “Me neither, you must not follow these people. Careful!” “I said to Charline Delporte: You want the Stade Bollaert (for your meetings), you have it, but a telephone box is enough for you!” Note: The Jehovah’s Witnesses have permitted themselves, according to their conscience, to take part in elections since 1998. M. Delelis was not aware of this element.

La société des victimes by Guillaume Erner (éd. La Découverte)

CICNS reading report

In this work, Guillaume Erner analyses the preponderant place that “victims” of every type occupy in our society. According to the sociologist, the “victim” has become, for the worse most of the time, the measure of political action, of the treatment of information in the media, of the reflection of the “compassionate” intellectual.

If Guillaume Erner does not address the question of the “cults” explicitly, the French anti-cult fight would nevertheless be a prime example to illustrate his analysis. French policy in the matter, compassionate and victim-centred to a fault, has been built around the account of the “victims” to the exclusion of any other consideration. In the own words of a former president of the MIVILUDES, Jean-Michel Roulet: “Were there but a single victim, the action undertaken is justified!”

Below, a few extracts from Guillaume Erner’s book:

The best way to understand an era is to take an interest in its obsessions. Ours is obsessed with victims.

(…) But what is a victim? Pain alone is not enough to transform an individual into a victim. A sportsman suffers martyrdom during the effort and yet he remains an athlete. In reality, the victim is above all a social category. The consequence of a system that is built around her and that promotes her. It is useless to look for a biological or psychological norm that would make it possible to distinguish its characteristics: in this exercise, it is the gaze of the other that plays a determining role.

(…) The creation in France of a state secretariat for victims’ rights in March 2004 is the ultimate indication of this propensity to gather within one and the same condition all those who suffer.

(…) In a secular and democratic society such as ours, where each man sees in the other man a fellow, pity no longer has its place. Between equals, such condescension would add to the pain of injustice the suffering of humiliation. Pity has therefore given way to compassion, an emotion provoked by the pain of one’s fellow.

(…) Among the scourges he [Alexis de Tocqueville] feared for times to come, he imagined an immense power, at once far-seeing, mild and omnipresent, reducing “each nation to being no more than a herd of timid and industrious animals whose government is the shepherd”; this power would be so benevolent towards its subjects that it would seek by every means to “remove from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living”*. The spectacle of our “society of victims” gives these words a prophetic echo.

* Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, volume II, Garnier-Flammarion, Paris 1981, p208-210

(…) The victim justifies everything: it is in her name that war is waged in Iraq, or the war against paedophiles. (…) The qualifier of victim confers a new dignity on the one who bears it. The rights of those who suffer may end by endangering human rights. Engendered by humanism, the society of victims leads to victimism. In humanism, it is man who is the measure of all things; in victimism, it is the victim.

(…) Victims are, as one says, innocent. They cannot be held responsible for an evolution that is beyond them and that they undergo in part. Let us specify, even if it goes without saying, that it is not a matter of denying their sufferings, whether these be psychological or physical. However, it matters that we understand how this society of victims reconfigures our social consciousness, the practice of law and the functioning of our institutions. What is at stake is not solely the appearance of a new social category. The compassionate consensus comes to constitute a threat to republican values.

(…) If our society has adopted the religion of victims, it is because it lends to suffering the faculty of sacralising. Our relation to suffering is of the order of the mystical, a secularised version of the virtues formerly attributed to martyrs and saints.

(…) The cause of the victims has become so powerful that it is instrumentalised at the gravest moments in the life of a people, to overthrow a regime or to declare war. For, henceforth, nothing great is done in this world without the sufferings of individuals being invoked to justify the action undertaken. Nothing is better for shaking a public opinion than to exhibit victims. When the sufferings do not seem spectacular enough, the temptation is strong to invent more convincing ones.

(…) What is being constructed is a victim-centred and therefore binary conception of the world. On one side, innocent individuals united in suffering and, on the other, a power that oppresses them.

(…) The dazzling success won by the expression “moral harassment” is likewise revealing of the psychologisation of suffering. In the space of five years, this notion has become familiar to all. Its popularisation is the work of a psychiatrist trained in victimology, Marie-France Hirigoyen, whose work Le Harcèlement moral appeared in 1998.

(…) Moral harassment poses the question of the dignity of man. The psychologisation of the victim rests on the idea that the new forms of suffering are linked to the absence of recognition, to the feeling of being flouted. The problem: how is one to appraise that legally when this sensation is above all subjective? More: from the moment when any loss of autonomy can be experienced as illegitimate or intolerable, how is one to envisage the functioning of a hierarchical organisation without seeing cases of moral harassment multiply? By according such importance to forms of psychic suffering, our society runs the risk of feeding a victim epidemic.

(…) The fact of preventing an individual from carrying out an activity under the pretext that it would be harmful to him, when he himself has decided otherwise, is at best paternalism, at worst an interference in the existence of others that is difficult to defend. That is why, under the pretext of defending victims, it is perhaps a conception of good and evil that is being imposed*. Moreover, by multiplying inconsiderately the number of victims, one also contributes to giving credence to the idea according to which our world would be composed first of all of martyrs and torturers.

* See Ruwen Ogien, La Panique morale, Grasset, Paris, 2004

(…) Television has offered misfortune sound and image: it has transformed the sufferings of others into a prime spectacle. Voyeurism is nothing new. “Let there be a body lying anywhere and people come running”*, Saint Augustine already lamented. The novelty is the existence of a media stage that henceforth makes it possible to satisfy, in a practically unlimited manner, the voyeurism of individuals. (…) The media play a decisive role in the diffusion of the culture of suffering that surrounds us. (…) On the major roads, cars slow down to take in the accidents; but on the information superhighways, the world’s misfortunes reach us in a continuous jet. Every television news bulletin brings with it its quota of victims, going even to fetch them, if need be, in lands that in normal times arouse not the slightest interest.

* Saint Augustine, Confessions, x, 35.

(…) The aim of the operation is simple: to manufacture ratings out of pain, to profit from the distress of victims in order to offer the spectacle of misfortune. What else can a mother who has just lost her child — victim of a bomb or of a criminal — show but her suffering? Drunk with pain, the family at best shows itself dignified, at worst launches appeals for vengeance which, if they are not heard by the population, are perfectly grasped by the politicians.

(…) Beneath compassion, hatred: that is the mechanism made possible by aggressive pity. Beyond the victim, it is the guilty party, or the person responsible, who is targeted. And if the victim is supposedly neutral, the choice of the guilty party betrays a representation of the world.

(…) One no longer governs by jutting one’s chin; compassion has become the ideal form of ruse in politics. (…) Since always, the politician seeks first of all to conquer and to keep power; that is why very few would renounce operating a lever as powerful as that of compassion.

(…) Of course, the Western democracies are not despotic regimes. And yet, each time we make, in the domain of the city, a choice dictated by fear, we find ourselves in the situation of infrapolitical subjects: fear weighs with all its weight on numerous current debates.

(…) Apart from the — real — risks of instrumentalising the victim, to use compassion to govern opinion is to expose oneself to numerous perverse effects. As we know, the occasions for compassion are so numerous that it is difficult for public opinion to mobilise in favour of a cause. From then on, compassion fatigue obliges one to justify the action by the spectacle of ever more spectacular sufferings.

(…) Schematically, consequentialism is a moral doctrine according to which an action must be considered good or bad according to its effects on the world. (…) In these conditions, one understands that the critique of compassion can be conducted in a consequentialist perspective: this sentiment could very well be recognised as good for the individual, while proving harmful on the collective plane. A common morality cannot rest solely on principles. These principles must also be made to undergo the test of reality — in other words, one must ask whether the concern for victims benefits society as a whole.

(…) Compassion is not in its place in the political field. Certainly, in our personal existences, it is a precious mark of humanity. As a principle of government, on the other hand, it is superfluous and even harmful. A great many sentiments indispensable to our existences become dangerous as soon as they enter the state sphere; love or fidelity were venerated by the totalitarian regimes. An individual who did not feel compassion would probably be a monster; a compassionate government is, at best, an imposture. More: the obsession with victims contradicts at once a value essential to the French conception of the Republic — Justice — as well as the principle on which it rests — Reason. Some might be tempted to believe that a form of government forged two centuries ago has had its day. In these conditions, let the partisans of compassion declare publicly their will to change the regime. But who really wants to live under the reign of emotion and of exceptions?

Landmark Education - Right of Reply - France 3

What follows was written in reply to the France 3 programme Pièces à Conviction broadcast on 24 May 2004:

We consider your programme on Landmark Education, and the declarations and representations made about our company, extremely regrettable. A great number of these declarations, notably the most serious ones, were inaccurate, and in many cases they were tendentious and devoid of any foundation. We are sending you this communication to re-establish the truth of the facts and to supply accurate general information about our company. We thank you in advance for being good enough to read it as we have prepared it, without making modifications to it, and without adopting a negative tone or adding special effects. Landmark Education is an international company with an educational vocation, created thirteen years ago, specialising in training and personal development. Its programmes are available in more than 20 countries in the world. Without its knowledge, Landmark Education was placed on the cult list of the French parliamentary report. It received no prior notification and made this discovery after the fact. The government never made contact with Landmark Education, and did not give it the possibility of explaining itself or refuting these allegations. When Landmark Education got in touch with the government, it was told that it could never be struck off this List because the parliamentary Commission that had compiled it no longer existed. Because the Commission was abolished, this problem persists to this day. In reality, Landmark Education is not a cult. Its programmes are not of a psychological nature, and the many experts from all over the world who have taken part in them have declared them risk-free and useful. And we would even add that, beyond this risk-free character, a great number of professionals recognise the value these programmes represent. Landmark Education’s programmes offer their participants new tools allowing them to bring about important changes in their lives, in terms of effectiveness, quality of relationships, communication or productivity. Seeing the way France 3 made this programme, it is clear that it never had the intention of presenting a fair and objective report on Landmark Education. France 3 violated the personal rights of the individuals filmed without their knowledge with the aid of hidden cameras. France 3 ignored a whole series of pieces of information coming from recognised experts, as well as from other people testifying to the absence of risks and to the advantages of Landmark Education’s programmes, and this despite the fact that this information had been supplied to it. Furthermore, France 3 chose not to include the favourable comments gathered from the Landmark Education clients it interviewed. Landmark Education gave France 3 every opportunity to speak with a leader of the Landmark Forum, as well as with many of the company’s clients. In exchange for its full cooperation, France 3 promised Landmark Education to include in the programme a simple and unmodified declaration emanating from the company, and to make an objective report. France 3 took advantage of Landmark Education’s full cooperation, but did not keep all its promises. France 3 did not present viewers with honest and professional journalistic work. The programme asserted that Landmark Education’s programmes are harmful, and showed a woman who claimed to have been the victim of verbal aggression during a seminar. However, after seeing the programme, the woman in question made the following declaration: “My face is hidden, but my voice is not masked. I feel betrayed by this journalist, who did not respect the confidentiality required in this programme. And furthermore, by showing only part of the conversation, he draws conclusions that make me feel manipulated. From that conversation, which I admit was difficult, I derived a considerable benefit. It allowed me to live better and to have a better relationship with my daughter. And I owe that to the conversation we had during the Landmark Forum.” The reality is that the woman who appears in that sequence, like many other participants, publicly acknowledged that she had had a positive and valuable experience. It was insinuated that Landmark Education was earning large sums of money on the backs of the people who work for the company in France, and furthermore that Landmark Education was not declaring all the income it received in France. The journalist estimated its receipts at 1.5 million euros per year. This is pure invention. Landmark Education’s income in France has not exceeded 590,000 euros per year, and the company has operated at a loss for the last three years. Moreover, Landmark Education has declared, and continues to declare, all its income to the French government. Landmark Education does not employ volunteers. In fact, fewer than 2% of its clients take part in what we call the Assisting Program. This leadership programme gives free access to courses and seminars and develops the participants’ aptitudes in matters of leadership, capacity to contribute, and management. These aptitudes directly help these people to improve their effectiveness in the professional activities they exercise alongside their training at Landmark Education, as well as in their personal relationships and other domains of their lives. Assertions were made on the subject of a tragic suicide and a homicide, attempting to implicate Landmark Education. In the case of the suicide, it took place 7 months after the person had taken part in a programme, and it is well known that this person was under the pressure of considerable stress - which had no connection with Landmark Education. In the case of the homicide, it is admitted that the person responsible suffered from imbalances well before taking the courses. Although Landmark Education feels compassion for these two people, it is in no way responsible for their acts, and these two tragic accidents cannot be attached to our company. Mental-health professionals respected throughout the world have taken part in Landmark Education programmes and observed them. They have found them risk-free and effective. Like other institutions with an educational vocation, Landmark Education has developed, with the help of health professionals, an effective and responsible selection process to ensure that all the people who take part in its programmes are of sound mental balance. To answer these unfounded accusations, Landmark Education cites the experts from all over the world who have studied its programmes and issued the following conclusions: Dr Norbert Nedopil, head of the department of forensic psychiatry at the University of Munich, carried out a study on Landmark Education in 1996 and declared that he “could discern no form of behaviour that would liken the Landmark Forum to a so-called [psycho] cult. On the strength of empirical research, one can say that to a very large extent, Landmark Education presents no risk to the health, free will and legal integrity of its participants.” Dr Nedopil added furthermore: “There is no evidence indicating that the Landmark Forum can cause any harm whatsoever.” Dr Raymond Fowler, Ph.D, retired President of the American Psychological Association, declared in a report reflecting his own opinion: “In my opinion, the Landmark Forum is neither a cult, nor anything comparable to a cult, and I do not see how a reasonable and responsible person could say the contrary. I observed nothing at the Landmark Forum I attended to suggest that it could be harmful to the participants.” As for the fact that the French government placed Landmark Education on the cult list, Dr Fowler declared: “In my capacity as an expert in this field, I am certain that once the French government has the opportunity to examine this question more closely, it will conclude that Landmark Education was wrongly placed on the cult list.” Even as Landmark Education strives to dispel the confusion reigning around its seminars in France, the company enjoys an excellent reputation in most regions of the world. In fact: “In 2002, HR.com/James MacNeil ranked Landmark Education among the top providers of leadership and training programmes in the world.” Landmark Education carries out a constant re-evaluation of its programmes to guarantee its clients’ satisfaction. As an international company, it is committed to understanding and respecting the different legislations and commercial practices of the countries where it operates. The declarations made in the programme are a deliberate attempt to destroy the credibility of Landmark Education and of the more than 8,500 people who have taken part in the Landmark Forum in France. Contrary to what the programme claims, the surveys show that 94% of Landmark Education’s clients say that “the Landmark Forum made a profound and lasting difference in their lives.” 26 May 2004 DISLOYAL TACTICS AND AN INACCURATE ACCOUNT DISCREDIT LANDMARK EDUCATION

FRANCE 3 REFUSES TO INCLUDE THE TESTIMONY OF EXPERTS PROVING THAT LANDMARK IS EFFECTIVE AND CARRIES NO RISK. PARIS, 26 May 2004 - The broadcast of the France 3 programme Pièces à Conviction on 24 May constituted a disloyal attack against Landmark Education, an international training and development company offering personal-development seminars in 60 offices spread across 21 countries. France 3 acted irresponsibly and in contempt of the accepted norms of television by using tactics such as lying and manipulation, as well as illegally obtained material. This is a flagrant case of abuse of the public’s trust. The programme adopted a sensationalist point of view, distorted the facts and gave false information, evidently in the hope of driving up its ratings for the first prime-time broadcast of Pièces à Conviction. The editor-in-chief of Pièces à Conviction, Pascal Richard, made the following remarks, which were quoted in the press: “The result is the only thing that counts”, and according to the people interviewed, the programme for which he is responsible refused to give the floor to many participants in the Landmark Forum who had only positive things to say about our company. Landmark Education supplied Pascal Richard and his team with a great deal of information, and answered all the questions put to it. We worked diligently with France 3 and its reporters so that a fair and objective documentary could be made. Founded in 1991, Landmark Education is an international training and development company. It was recently ranked “among the best providers of leadership and training programmes in the world” by HR.com/James McNeil. Landmark is an employee-owned company that offers educational and professional-development programmes in the fields of professional success, communication and productivity. Landmark Education’s activities are the product of thorough research into the effectiveness of individuals and organisations and into communication. Landmark Education uses a cutting-edge educational method to help its clients produce notable results and to improve the quality of their lives. Landmark Education agreed to cooperate fully with France 3 and, having received the assurance that the programme would be objective, gave the channel the right to film, to conduct interviews and to have access to all its information, on condition, however, of protecting its clients’ confidentiality. But France 3 did not keep its word. For example, a round-table discussion was organised in its studio. The only person invited to speak well of Landmark suddenly found herself set upon by a group of interlocutors speaking ill of it. That says much about the tone and approach adopted in the France 3 report. Furthermore, France 3 used confidential content filmed without our knowledge by a reporter who falsified his references and filmed these images in violation of the agreement he had signed regarding the protection of the confidentiality of the seminar participants. “The rights of all the people who took part in the seminar were violated by this reporter and this television channel,” declared Art Schreiber, Landmark Education’s lawyer. France 3 secretly filmed an interaction between Alain Roth and a participant during the Landmark Forum and showed that conversation out of its context. In that scene, the participant seems to be verbally attacked by Alain Roth. In reality, that person subsequently declared in public that she had had a very positive experience and has continued to this day to take part in Landmark Education’s programmes. France 3 also implied that Landmark Education was earning large sums of money by having recourse to volunteers in France. In fact, Landmark loses money every year in France, but keeps its centre open for its participants. France 3 estimated Landmark Education’s receipts at nearly 1.5 million euros per year, whereas in reality they do not exceed 590,000 euros per year. Although Landmark Education is manifestly not a cult, the experts recognise that even cults have fundamental rights, which were not respected in this case. Unfortunately, considering that the fines to be paid for a violation of the media’s code of ethics are minimal, France 3 decided that it was better for its ratings to pay these symbolic fines than to offer the public the fair and objective report it was entitled to expect. The declarations made in the programme are a deliberate attempt to destroy the credibility of Landmark Education and of the roughly 750,000 people who have taken part in the Landmark Forum. Contrary to what the programme claims, the surveys show that 94% of Landmark Education’s clients say that “the Landmark Forum made a profound and lasting difference in their lives.” Jean-Claude Sabatier, a former elected official of Paris, took part in Landmark Education programmes in February and March 2004. He declared: “During the whole time I followed these programmes, I never had the experience of being part of a cult. At no moment did I think I could not leave the room. What is more, I asked Landmark not to call me, and my request was respected to the letter. I never brought guests, and I was never pressured to do so. I do not support France 3’s views.” France 3 knew perfectly well that Landmark Education had received no prior notification of its inclusion on the cult List of the French parliamentary report, and that no tangible proof had been supplied to justify that decision. The government’s regulatory provisions nevertheless stipulate that an organisation must be informed that it is targeted by this measure, so that it can respond to the allegations. Landmark Education attempted to discuss with the French government, but was informed that it could not be struck off the List because the Commission that had produced it had been dissolved and no longer existed at present. To answer these unfounded accusations, Landmark Education therefore turns to eminent experts from all over the world, whom France 3 chose not to consult, and who have studied its programmes. Here are their conclusions: Dr Norbert Nedopil, head of the Department of Forensic Psychiatry at the University of Munich, carried out a study on Landmark Education in 1996 and declared that he “could discern no form of behaviour that would liken the Landmark Forum to a so-called [psycho] cult. Relying on empirical evidence, one can say that to a very large extent, Landmark presents no risk to the health, free will and legal integrity of its participants.” Dr Nedopil added moreover: “There is no evidence indicating that the Landmark Forum is harmful.” Dr Raymond Fowler, Ph.D, retired Director of the American Psychological Association, declared in a report reflecting his own opinion: “In my opinion, the Landmark Forum is neither a cult nor anything comparable to a cult, and I do not see how a reasonable and responsible person could say the contrary. I saw nothing at the Landmark Forum in which I took part that could harm the participants. In my capacity as an expert in this field, I am certain that once the French government has the opportunity to examine this question more closely, it will conclude that Landmark Education was wrongly included on the cult list.” Dr Jean-Marie Abgrall, the principal expert on the cults in France, declared, concerning the ten elements identified by the parliamentary Commission as constitutive of a cult: “None of the six major elements relating to the cults applies to Landmark Education.” As for the four remaining elements, Dr Abgrall remarked that they are “minor characteristics which could equally be found in many conventional organisations.” Landmark Education will vigorously contest the unjustified allegations and disloyal practices of France 3 and Pièces à Conviction, in the name of the company itself and to protect its many clients throughout the world. In the interest of fairness, Landmark Education once again asks the French government to give it the possibility of being heard, in order to supply the proof that it was placed on the cult List in error. Source: http://www.landmarkeducation.fr/menu.jsp?top=20447&siteObjectID=21551

Comment on the France 3 forum, about the programme on Landmark Education And what if it were not a cult? Posted on 26-05-2004 at 11:50:39 And the television, can’t you see it’s manipulating you? With shock images, carefully edited, hand-picked guests, a skilful mixture that includes dramatic news items with nothing to prove their connection to the course in question! Media specialists now know that the more natural and amateur the images look, the more impact they have. A stolen image, with a little camera, now that looks true as true can be… Where are the witnesses, on Landmark’s side, to bring, perhaps, another point of view? Except that poor girl who breaks down, and who is, as if by chance, the only Landmark Education witness kept in the edit? Because people close to the event told me of several former clients interviewed for the programme who were positive about Landmark. Their testimonies are not in the programme. A participant in this France 3 forum explains that she is afraid of being manipulated. It is true that there is a real paranoia, in the media, about the shrinks, the coaches, the gurus who brainwash you. An amalgam is also immediately made with another subject of fantasies, the cults. What a windfall for the programme: two sellable subjects at once! A bit of bloody news items, and accusations tossed in the air to attach them to the subject, and there’s a hit story. But who explained the modern and scientific methods of psychology (Transactional Analysis, NLP, etc.) on which the Forum rests, like hundreds of personal-development courses? Above all, who verified, and that would be real journalism, on what criteria the original accusation of being a cult was founded? Now, from what I have seen, 90% of the THOUSANDS of clients of the Landmark Education course are satisfied after their course. It lasts 3 days. They leave it free as air: they are not prisoners of a cult. They are even enthusiastic, since their close friends and relatives often sign up too, and freely. And they have never felt the sensation of being in a cult. And they know the experience from the inside, they are well placed to know what they have lived through. It’s not a TV programme, it’s their experience and their life! And there are perhaps a THOUSAND of them a year in France, and that for more than 10 years! and they were not given the floor! and they feel defamed, because the people around them look at them saying they learned on television that they belong to a cult! and the people around them believe it hard as iron, since they saw it on television! And in a terribly effective and credible programme! and these participants, who, like me, are very independent-minded and followers of no movement, feel soiled by an unanswerable media manipulation! You are right to be afraid of being manipulated! But this programme was like a trial judged in advance, and if you didn’t see that, it’s because this manipulation was very, very effective! Ask the media for a real, objective in-depth enquiry, with testimonies from both sides. With an impartial presentation of the course, and not 2 extracts of a few seconds, out of context. Ask for an enquiry into the cult designation, for there is perhaps an unqualified civil servant who filled in a cult file, without competence on the subject of personal-development courses. A civil servant to question is perhaps that one too, at the origin of what is an injustice and a quasi-judicial error for 90% of the people who took part in the Forum. http://forums.france3.fr/france3/pac/Et-etait-secte-sujet-158-1.htm

The Tragedy of St Paul

The slide towards the thesis of the international cult

On Friday 27 August 2004, the police of St Paul, on Mauritius, made a macabre discovery: ten corpses in a house, including three adolescents…

By Emile d’Albret

On 1 September, L’express-Maurice headlines: “Tragedy of St.-Paul: the investigation turns towards the Eckankar cult”, and continues:

“The thesis according to which the cult, whose headquarters are located in Minnesota, is at the origin of the death of ten people on Friday, is being considered. A number of clues tend towards this lead.”

It would seem that the Madagascar, Réunion, Mauritius region is one where the theme of the cults is very often taken up. Indeed, nearly half of the French-language press articles speaking of the subject come from there.

One can compare the situation there to the great years of the French “anti-cult fight”, when the subject was in fashion, even if the context is appreciably different (there, the evangelical churches taking an active part in political life are the major preoccupation).

It is thus an opportune occasion for analysing the way the media and the investigators treat such an event under the inspiration of the French model.

I believe that the kind of statement found in the article’s title and introduction has been so thoroughly banalised that it must be restored to its context in order to grasp its gravity.

Eckankar is a legally declared non-profit religious organisation, established since 1965, which has been the object for some twenty years, and above all since the appearance of its name on the famous list of 172 of the parliamentary report, of the attention of the authorities of various countries as well as of people openly hostile to it.

The authorities have as yet found nothing to reproach them with, and even their detractors have against them only vague suspicions, propped up by confused testimonies, steeped in the bitterness of family dramas which are not the exclusive lot of people on a spiritual path.

I will not cite here the openly hostile and defamatory groups, which already have enough space in the Internet landscape, but I will nevertheless recommend a page taken up by several “anti-cult” sites (for want of worse, certainly): http://www.religion.qc.ca/Fiches/fiche016.htm, which is the descriptive sheet of the Quebec Centre de Consultation sur les Nouvelles Religions, whose content shows the distance that separates the reality of Eckankar from the vision the journalists of the Mauritian Express are trying to impose.

One finds, moreover, scattered across forums and sites, an abundance of positive testimonies about Eckankar, as well as their profession of faith, which is anything but apocalyptic or suicidal. See their site: http://www.eckankar.org/whatis.html

No concrete fact, at the present time, thus allows one to imagine that behind this name there is anything other than people like you and me, on a peaceful religious path.

These people find themselves today publicly associated with the dramatic death of 10 people, and suspected of being responsible for it.

Here now are the clues authorising the journalists and the investigators to launch such accusations:

Two medallions bearing the initials EK were found on the bodies of Crithika Mawooa and Rajesh Dhayam. These clues led the investigators to the hypothesis according to which the Eckankar cult is said to be behind the death of ten people at Béchard Lane, St.-Paul.

If they had worn crosses as pendants, would the suspicions have fallen on the Pope?

“The investigators are thus setting about seeking more details on the functioning and rituals of the Eckankar cult. They are also seeking to establish the identity of the principal leaders. A man suspected of having attended gatherings of this cult on several occasions is currently undergoing a tight interrogation.”

This last sentence makes of every participant in Eckankar’s activities (even an occasional one) a suspect liable to a “tight interrogation”.

At this stage, Eckankar, along with all its followers, is thus already condemned by the journalist to suspicion and distrust.

One can even say that the fact of Eckankar being a criminal organisation is posed as an established fact, a little as in the aftermath of the attack in Spain, when it is asserted that the E.T.A. or another terrorist group “did the deed”, without questioning whether they are capable of it.

If in the case of the E.T.A. history explains this attitude, in the case of St Paul the justification rests only on an extravagant montage which associates murder and suicide with the practices of spiritual minorities.

This montage was supplied “turnkey” by the anti-cult organisations some thirty years ago, the journalist has only to let herself be guided.

One thus finds here all the devices of the parliamentary report, the juxtaposition of the same dramatic and mediatised cases, WACO, the OTS, AUM, “Heaven’s Gate” and the Peoples Temple, with innocent spiritual movements, even though it has long been demonstrated that the political and mafia implications are so evident within the aforementioned affairs that no investigative journalist, sociologist or even judge of the law would today risk issuing the simplistic and erroneous conclusions the journalists of the Express dare to.

The rest of the article takes up the commonplaces of rumour and denunciation offered by the ADFI. These reflections of the relatives are the fruit of the seeds planted by the French parliamentary report, an orientation of minds towards the search for a belonging defined arbitrarily by criteria broad enough to be applied, as needed, in almost any circumstances.

“Meanwhile, numerous clues gathered by the investigators at the scene of the tragedy tend towards the cult thesis. Notably the discovery, at the Mawooa home in St.-Paul, of a letter from Maya Jhowry, one of the victims, addressed to Crithika Mawooa. Dated the month of June, the correspondence evokes Maya’s admiration for and total devotion to her ‘guru’.”

“Numerous testimonies gathered demonstrate moreover that Crithika constantly spoke of ‘spirituality and the philosophy of life’ with members of her family. ‘She frequently lost herself in interminable debates on the different religions but indulged in her own interpretations,’ asserts Vinod Mawooa, Crithika’s cousin. He adds that she expressed herself in an ‘unusual’ manner and that ‘the influence she was under could be seen just in the way she expressed herself’.”

There is the ferment of family suspicion, the one that makes of all those who speak of religion and spirituality, and above all of those who express themselves in an unusual manner, of those who “indulge in their own interpretations”, people in danger of suicidal, indeed criminal, drift.

“According to one hypothesis of the investigators, the ‘master of ceremonies’ is said to have made the other victims believe they had to swallow water to purify their bodies and souls in order to find peace and happiness again. But at the end of the ritual, death awaited them. For their glasses of water contained a certain dose of cyanide, sufficient to cause a quasi-instantaneous death. The master of ceremonies is then said to have taken his own life as he had programmed in advance.”

We learn there that the Mauritian judicial investigators count talented novelists in their ranks.

It is astonishing that they are less inspired by the themes offered by other clues in the investigation. For example:

IDENTIFICATION

Hervé Janvier, the 10th corpse

He had been missing since 20 November 2002. And Hervé Janvier, 49, was finally identified yesterday as the tenth corpse found on Friday in one of the two bedrooms located on the ground floor of a house at Béchard Lane, St-Paul.

The victim resided at the Flats Bhunjun, Quatre-Bornes. He was known in the brokers’ milieu around the Emmanuel Anquetil building in Port-Louis. His name was cited in the framework of the investigation of the Anti-Drug and Smuggling Unit (ADSU) in the Vinay Deelchand affair.

On the day of his disappearance, he is said to have been in possession of several documents and diskettes concerning the sale of land. Hervé Janvier was moreover wanted by the Central Criminal Investigation Department for an affair of a false identity card.”

In conclusion, one can say that the journalists do not burden themselves with the concern for coherence and plurality of opinion. They have, in fact, no contradictor. The consensus is such that it is accepted, and almost legal, to pin the blame on a spiritual minority without any proof.

It is interesting to see that the process feeds itself on the principle that calumny, even later refuted, always bears fruit.

Each suspicion is an occasion for reinforcing reflexes of fear in public opinion towards certain signs of non-conformity or certain words, which amplifies the psychosis and the denunciation and makes new supposed cases spring up.

There is here a human mechanism that tends to transfer the cause of our unease, of our worries, of our difficulty in living, onto a vague entity, fairly distant and rather marginal. From the “Jews” to the “gypsies”, from the “Arabs” to the “cults”, it is the same anger expressing itself, the same ignorance that one sees taken up and exploited by the media and by those who have a personal score to settle with the said entities or with what they convey.

It is quite obvious that we in no way anticipate the conclusions of the investigation and the real role Eckankar might have in the tragedy of Saint-Paul. We are defending here only the presumption of innocence.

Read the interview with the head of Eckankar in Mauritius

Read also the development of the investigation in our News section and, once again, the evident haste of the media and the investigators seizing on the spectre of the cults…

The Theme of the “Cults” in Broadcast Debates (chapter 1: 2004 - 2007)

… on television and radio.

Go to chapter 2 (2008 - 2011)

The American media have introduced two rules into their relationship with the general public:

The “Fairness doctrine”, which obliges television channels not to limit themselves to a single point of view in the presentation of a controversial public question.

The “personal attack rule”, which requires the channels to send, within eight days, a copy of the programme concerned to all those who have been attacked by name on air, so that they can defend themselves.

In France, as in many other countries, the world of television generally believes itself obliged to present truncated debates to satisfy an undemanding public fond of the sensational. A real debate on the spiritual minorities, in such a context, will therefore never take place.

These soulless programmes, flattering the basest instincts of human nature, unscrupulously digging the ditches of division, cannot be watched without a pang. But we can certainly cast on them a gaze that will help ensure intolerance is not the only voice heard.

Programme “C dans l’air” of 6 January 2004

Programme “Pièces à conviction” of 24 May 2004

Karl Zéro programme, January 2005

Teva programme of 9 May 2005 - Open letter to the makers

Our experience at “Radio Ici et Maintenant”

Programme “Le téléphone sonne” on France Inter of 5 September 2006

Report “Jonestown” on France 3 of 6 February 2007

Programme Zoom Europa on Arte, 11 April 2007

Jean-Luc Delarue programme on France 2, 13 June 2007

Programme about “Waco” on France 2 on 29 August 2007

Jean-Luc Delarue programme on France 2: 19 September 2007

Programme on Canal + on 8 October 2007

Continued on page 2

Reply from the CSA in April 2011 about a programme on “the cults"

"C dans l’air”, France 5, 6 January 2004: “The cults strike back!”

A programme of disinformation in the habitual style. Three virulent adepts of the anti-cult lodge set out, with controlled intolerance, their mendacious discourse, stimulated by a presenter full of primary certainties on a question completely beyond him.

A single contributor, labelled moreover “pro-cult” and for that matter a “rationalist”, is present. He is a sociologist who says he feels “like a dog in a game of skittles”, but whose words are somewhat drowned in the sarcasm and evasions of the other panellists.

The filmed reports interspersing the dialogues are constructed so as to present a folkloric image of the minorities in question.

The programme begins with Mathieu Cossu’s assertion about the “173 proven cults”, referring to the defamatory parliamentary list, a libellous but still much-used tool. The wearisome use of this illegal assertion is, however, no accident or involuntary error.

One then hears that “The cults are litigious!”. A tragicomic reversal of the situation which the uninvolved viewer will not notice. The poor lawyers and psychiatrists of the crusade suddenly become victims of the spiritual minorities, which have nevertheless endured for more than twenty years, without flinching, continual attacks and unjust amalgams.

“The cults are dangerous, the religions, they, are organised!” affirms with conviction the invited psychiatrist (a member of the Miviludes). If being “organised” becomes in his mouth a guarantee of seriousness or protection against abuses, the same “organisation” is reproached against the “big cults” as a sign of their dangerousness! The manipulation is thus omnipresent, but between people of such “credibility” it is doubtless considered “fair game”.

The invited lawyer (a specialist in the anti-cult fight), whose stock-in-trade, doubtless flourishing now, is directly linked to the crusade, suddenly pulls out of his hat “a little girl in a satanic cult in the depths of the Ardèche!”. If the emotional effect is guaranteed, the veracity of the statement is not. But the well-dressed crudeness of these people betrays above all their awareness of speaking to viewers with the certainty that they will not question what is asserted to them.

This is, then, once again the now traditional saraband of arguments without depth, in the complicit atmosphere of a meeting of bandits (the three panellists address each other familiarly, smile at each other, and the poor sociologist - the dog in the game of skittles - is regularly scorned in his role. “Faced with so serious a subject, we are not going to indulge in sociological considerations!” the presenter exclaims when the invited sociologist asks that the appellation “cult” be defined).

One may note that the debates seem more polished in appearance than a few years ago. But the attacks are more underhand. Watching the strings pulled by one witch-hunter or another, one may wonder whether the famous “gurus” have not changed sides.

There is unfortunately still just as little to hope for from television as a contribution to a deep and serene dialogue on the essential question of the spiritual minorities.

”Pièces à conviction”, France 3, Monday 24 May 2004, on: “Journey to the land of the new gurus”

Two reviews

Read also Landmark’s right of reply

This programme is an enterprise of destruction of the company Landmark Education, of a kind we have already seen many times on television. As always, the will to discredit the new forms of the spiritual or therapeutic quest is at work and, as always, the guests are principally anti-cult activists. A former Landmark trainee nevertheless, despite the pressure of the presenter and the other guests, maintained her positive assessment of her Landmark courses.

The citing of the parliamentary report as a reference dictionary of the cults continues, despite the illegality of this procedure. The groups listed are not necessarily cults in the criminal sense of the term. This has been confirmed by several court decisions. Having asserted several times that Landmark Education is a cult because it appears in that parliamentary report should therefore expose FR3 to being condemned in its turn by the courts.

Throughout the programme, enthusiastic trainees express what they discovered at Landmark Education. But rather than listen to them, FR3 prefers to listen to a few self-proclaimed specialists, veritable cult-obsessives, with the sole aim of discrediting Landmark Education without supplying any proof.

Every year thousands of people die violent deaths, murder or suicide. Even when Christians are concerned, faithful or clergy, the Christian institutions are not called into question for all that. Likewise the psychiatric hospitals are not called into question when one of their residents commits a crime.

We therefore ask FR3 the cause of this insistence on associating Landmark with a horrible murder and a suicide.

The presumption of innocence is part of French law, not the beginning of a proof has been supplied, but the consequences of this calumny are already at work.

Landmark Education and Scientology have nothing in common. Why the amalgam between these two groups? Was FR3 short of arguments against Landmark Education, and did Scientology have to be called to the rescue to feed the fear? Or was the opportunity to be taken to tarnish Scientology’s image a little more?

2. The programme is well named (“pièces à conviction” - “exhibits for the prosecution”), since it presents Landmark Education (L.E.) from the outset as a dangerous organisation. An association is made between their teaching method and criminality. The rest of the programme is the development of a judgment without appeal. The journalists draw the link between a murder, a suicide and L.E.’s method. The accusation being “grave”, one expects to see “exhibits” presented. There is nothing of the sort. One is astonished that the courts, like the State, did not carry their investigation so far.

The programme’s title: “Journey to the land of the gurus”.

The atmosphere is anguishing, music and shock images set the tone, the fear is maintained by extracts from interviews taken out of their context but which, shown in this way, aim to feed the cult psychosis. The programme is billed as “special”.

Equipped with a micro-camera (a shirt button), a journalist, Laurent Richard, infiltrates the L.E. organisation and takes part in one of their courses, called the Forum. All the faces are hidden by digital masking, except that of the leader, Alain ROT. A contract is shown which the trainees sign before starting. It stipulates that they are free to take part in the course and that they are of sound mind, no one who has been under psychiatric care being accepted:

“Each client declares that he assumes all the risks of physical and psychological damage and emotional disturbance that may arise during or after the forum”… and “releases L.E. from all liability”

An example of group work is shown. The method is presented as a psychological violence the trainees undergo. The journalist associates it with mental manipulation, the trainee is “put in danger” by the words of the coach, Alain ROT, who does not hesitate to make the person cry. A lawyer on the programme’s set says that the contract’s clauses are abusive, for the course coach provokes in the person a “mental destabilisation” and could find himself liable for the consequences.

It is an argument put into images, attempting to draw the relation between L.E.’s methods and the tragic events set out subsequently.

Then comes the presentation of L.E. It is associated with a “cult”, and the occasion is used to show other spiritual movements. The list from the 96 report is shown, L.E. can be seen listed among other movements. “Le suicide des rives” and “the clan of supermen” surround L.E. and are named. Interview with Jean-Marie Abgrall, who made a report on L.E., he does not take a position on whether the organisation is a cult or not. The journalist’s questions push him to say that it is indeed a cult.

In his report he says that L.E. seems to have a scientific approach, and that the clients are not under constraint, but deplores the lack of follow-up afterwards, a criticism expressed several times in the course of the programme. Jean-Marie Abgrall, who is a psychologist and adviser to the ministry of justice, is said to have been paid 45,000 € by L.E. to make a study of them. The journalist does not cite his sources. The deputy Jean-Pierre Brard makes a gratuitous association with the money, saying “you can see very well that it’s a cult, it’s obvious!” without advancing the slightest argument to prove it. Up to this point nothing in the report corroborates his words.

Once again, we find ourselves back at the course. An example is shown in which the coach questions a trainee without gentleness.

A former trainee kills his mother with a pitchfork, the family holds L.E. and Scientology responsible.

At the trial, a psychiatrist presents a report asserting L.E.’s responsibility. The criminal is committed and declared not responsible, he himself says that the only ones who can help him in his distress today are L.E.

The lawyer of the killer’s brother evokes a procedure of the courts, “intimate conviction” in criminal matters.

That is to say: does there exist a grave, concordant link implicating these parties, the killer and L.E.? If that is proven, conviction follows.

One of L.E.’s members, Jocelyne Berthelot, is interviewed on the set and remains almost until the end of the programme. She is the only person providing a counterweight in the programme, acting as counsel for the defence. She appears as the living example of the effectiveness of L.E.’s methods by her sincerity in being herself. The others, such as a psychiatrist, will try to make her out to be a naive woman who has not seen that she has been manipulated. A certain pity is shown towards her, with remarks of the kind “Madame, when one is manipulated by the cults, one no longer has the capacity to reason objectively for oneself”.

At this stage of the programme it emerges that F3 has rushed into a gap in L.E.’s educational system to justify the claim that L.E. is indeed a dangerous cult. And this despite the affirmation of several former trainees who would like to continue the courses, though they were roughly handled.

The reports show a point of view… at the opposite pole from what the L.E. member Mme Berthelot lives. She is touched and begins to cry.

The association with Scientology is made, a former follower testifies to it: “the vocabulary and the methods are exactly the same between the two organisations.” Then comes the relationship to money, the journalist infiltrates L.E.’s administrative offices, dialogues are heard between the volunteers and Alain ROT, there is talk of “enrolment” to find new trainees, vocabulary used by the members. The cheques being banked are shown, an estimate of 60,000 euros per course is advanced, or a turnover of 1.5 million euros per year. The question is where this money goes, since only volunteers work there. The labour inspectorate and the finance ministry have made no check since the announcement of the report on the cults in 96. L.E. makes no declaration of its income to the chamber of commerce as the law requires.

The deputy Jean-Pierre Brard denounces the non-actions of the tax administrations, and says that this film shows there can be abuses.

Once again, no argument as to what he means by abuse, or the association he draws between what is seen and what he says. It is as if he were mistaking his target, but profiting from the climate of fear generated by the programme to attack every spiritual path in itself.

Still with his camera, the journalist lunches with a trainee doctor, who admits that he advises his patients to take these courses.

In passing, we see that the course of the interview was edited. The plate of crème brûlée the journalist is eating is half-finished at the start of the interview and full at the end. An inversion of the interview was therefore made. It is common practice in the audiovisual world in order to condense and make the discourse comprehensible. Doctors are thus proselytes. An interview with the deputy secretary of the council of the order confirms that there are 3,000 of them in France.

A trainee kills himself, testimonies from his parents and his wife confirm that the L.E. training is at fault. Of course, no concrete argument to support the accusation, other than an emotion of sadness and anger.

Then the tone changes in the programme, ending with a panel with Mathieu Cossu, Catherine Picard, a print journalist and Gilles Bottine, secretary of the MIVILUDES. Gilles Bottine was trapped by F3 in his office, believing the camera was off, he says that the State has taken no action against Landmark. He is roughly handled on the set.

We find ourselves as if in an arena with a “coach”, the presenter, who will try by force to demonstrate that the State is irresponsible. F3 having successfully infiltrated, the courts ought to do the same in order to dissolve L.E. Gilles Bottine defends himself by saying that these are not the State’s methods.

The presenter Elise Lucet reveals herself, the initial bias is confirmed.

Comments: My general feeling is that this programme was carefully prepared. The objective was to attempt to demonstrate that L.E. was a dangerous cult. It is difficult to say that the images seen are not reality, since the journalist was passing himself off as a trainee, the course is shown as it takes place in its most intense moments. But as the images are taken out of context, what one retains of them is only the intensive character, and not the possible benefits some participants may experience. In this programme a dialogue could have been born, the actors were present for it: Jean-Marie Abgrall, who made a constructive remark concerning the lack of follow-up during the courses. Jocelyne Berthelot, an L.E. member testifying to something lived.

The secretary of the MIVILUDES, Gilles Bottine, who does not let himself be carried away into the panic of “the cult must be destroyed”. One would have liked more thorough interviews with the trainees, it would have been interesting for example to go and see the one who was crying during an exercise, and not merely show him as proof that L.E. makes people crack and that it is therefore dangerous. As for knowing where the money goes, the deputies rightly point it out several times, but it is as if they were mistaking their target. The thesis that holds the personal-development path responsible is seriously in need of revision. If the State does not enforce the very simple law that says accounts must be filed every year, there are surely other interests at play that have nothing to do with personal development.

It is easy to see the commitment of those who denounce, we are often confronted with the anti-cult associations, which maintain their combat without any questioning of their starting point, and this does not escape the rule, the report having been begun with a bias, it was difficult for them to question their judgement, despite the openings often offered by the answers of the interviewees, who express satisfaction whatever the emotional content of the courses. The doubts expressed in the course of the programme are quickly evaded, like the veracity of the relation between the murder and the suicide and L.E.’s methods. Once again this practice, which consists in associating certain tragic events with L.E.’s methods, as with every spiritual path, in order to discredit them, is at work in a demonstration mounted in images. All of it tending to demonstrate that the claims of the anti-cult movement must be taken into account.

It was easy for F3 to make a programme that feeds viewers’ fears.

The doubt over the recruitment of trainees and the use of the money was an occasion for embroidering, rather than deepening a question which is, all in all, a matter for the tax services and falls under French law.

Any number of profit-making companies do exactly the same thing and are not accused of manipulation. Here, because we are touching on spirituality, it is the path of all the movements that is called into question. Fear and ignorance are the masters. Finally, we witness a live mental manipulation at the end on the set, where Gilles Bottine is roughly handled before the violence of the presenter’s words. In the end, she took her example from the methods she reproaches L.E. with.

”Le vrai faux journal” on “the false prophets”, January 2005, with Karl Zéro

End-of-year spectacle: Karl Zéro strokes the collective unconscious with the grain for an hour and a half, on the theme of the “cults”.

Children often tell each other grating stories to make each other laugh or to frighten each other. It is a way for the teller to show off before the audience of his classmates, to attract attention. Very often their stories mock or slander a racial, social or religious minority which remains for them a very abstract object of joking. They may for example innocently tell the worst racist jokes, ignorant of a real dramatic context of exclusions, conflicts, human tragedies and a terrible past. Then these children grow up, and become gradually conscious of the reality of beings and the power of words.

Can the same presumption of innocence be granted to television and to some of its actors?

That is what one may ask oneself after watching Karl Zéro’s programme “False prophets”, on 26 December on Canal+.

These interviews where everything is done to destabilise and ridicule the interviewee are too easy, the intentional selection of facts to draw the public into indignation and dread is disrespectful of the public itself, in its aspiration to understand and truly approach what is foreign to it.

The principal clichés are there in caricatural form: money, sex and power. Karl Zéro pulls on the universal strings of human nature to make his public dance like a docile puppet. That might be acceptable, if this dance did not trample some of the most beautiful aspirations, along with innocent people, in a crude amalgam.

I remember with emotion the interview with Commander Massoud, on this same programme, and the profoundly human approach to that figure. Was that the best of the “Vrai-Faux Journal”? I return to this programme only today, for this “false prophets special”, where I observe the worst.

Beyond the veracity of the facts set out, which we shall not linger to question, there are, in the manner of presenting them and in the comments accompanying them, induced and sometimes very explicit conclusions which, for their part, must be exposed and examined without concession, along with their implications and consequences.

These conclusions could be summed up thus:

• The cults are places of perdition where collective suicide is to be feared at any moment - The gurus are swindlers and/or paedophiles, - The healers are charlatans - Esotericism and the minority spiritual movements are the privileged sites of every abuse - Those who speak of Jesus and God outside the traditional frameworks are megalomaniac madmen or manipulators - The Catholic Church remains a safe value and the refuge of a reasonable faith in the face of the folly of the marginal movements.

These are traits that fall within the very particular French context in which the State has for some fifteen years been conducting, under the appellation of the “fight against the cults”, a genuinely liberticidal policy. It has already claimed many victims and led, a little more each year, to the narrowing of the framework for expressing spiritual, therapeutic or educational life choices.

The CICNS was born from the observation of this situation and works to bring into the light of day the worrying reality of a discriminated population and of the violation today, in France, of the human rights to freedom of religion, belief and convictions.

Each programme of this type adds a stone to a shameful edifice of propaganda, and represents an insult to the direct victims of this policy, but also to the millions of people who find or have found within the spiritual minorities a comfort, and often a genuine awakening to a broader understanding of human existence, of which the art of living together in respect and openness is a fundamental value.

There would be a fine subject there for a programme or a report, for courageous journalists concerned with truth.

The public, we are sure, deserves it and awaits it.

Teva, “Cults: simple community or organised manipulation”

For the attention of the makers of the programme:

“Cults: simple community or organised manipulation”, broadcast on Monday 9 May 2005 at 8.50 pm

On 6 May 2005 we sent you a letter of reflection on the announcement of your programme. We were struck by the announcement text of your dossier, which started from a question but gave the answer to that question, without detour, in the announcement itself. After seeing the programme, the conclusion is distressing. No word is severe enough to describe a dossier that claims to remain factual and open while omitting so crudely, on several occasions, to present the complementary testimonies for each situation.

You may have a settled position on the phenomenon known as “the cults” and everything it covers, but then announce clearly that it is an opinion. Your dossier as a whole leaves no latitude for reflection. It starts from an a priori that gives the viewer the final answers. Is that your idea of journalism?

Let us take the sequences one by one.

1 Introduction

The introduction by Marielle Fournier (presenter of Teva’s dossiers) sets the tone. From the first minute of the programme, the viewer is warned that the cults recruit, destabilise and manipulate. At no moment of the programme will you give the alternative opinion a chance. How could it be otherwise, the word “cult” in its new acceptation (although there exists no current sociological or legal definition of the word) is synonymous with crime. The very title of your programme is an intellectual fraud that unfolds throughout the reports. Understand clearly that the everyday meaning of the word cult is not a problem. It is its inconsiderate use that is at issue, towards everything that disturbs, without any need for justification once the word has been pronounced.

2 First report: the cults profit from catastrophes to proselytise

Scientology is said to have profited from the AZF catastrophe in Toulouse to offer its help and gain new followers. Scientology is the emblem of the scapegoats among the cults. Not a programme goes by without this name being pronounced like a scarecrow. The only tangible proofs of this movement’s dangerousness would be proofs either legal or based on a sociological study. Who today possesses such proofs to support their words? Who is prepared to undertake that work of study, which would seem natural in the face of a movement that triggers so much fear? In the absence of that sociological or ethnological gaze, every accusation is abusive.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs) are said to have profited from the floods of November 99 in the south of France, by helping the victims. The journalist’s attempt to wring from the various witnesses a word that could confirm that the JWs sought to proselytise is pathetic…

A centre director testifies simply: the JWs offer her help, at first anonymously, she agrees, then they specify who they are, she sees no problem and she testifies formally that there was no attempt at proselytism.

A couple testify to their interaction with the JWs in the same tone. Faced with this simplicity, the journalist looks for the crack: “But if one day they call you back and say, you remember, we helped you, can we come and see you?” - ‘No thank you, that’s all’, “You didn’t feel like making a donation?” - ‘no, I won’t give’. At the end of the interview the husband of this couple states that he does not think we have much to fear from these cults.

Only the Mayor of Cuxac d’Aude meets the unavowed expectations of this report: he states that he is under no illusions about the JWs. The Mayor tells us of his case of conscience: he saw himself obliged to accept the JWs’ help given the situation, and despite his reluctance towards this group.

The report ends with these words: “For 3 years the cults have been present at catastrophes: a priori nothing to be said against this generosity, but what is really the aim of this voluntary work? The JWs move considerable sums of money, do the catastrophes end up paying? How many people do they allow them to seduce, yesterday or tomorrow, impossible to know, but the threat is real… Officially, the cults are there only to help, in reality they often see behind each victim a potential future follower.”

Our reflection is the following: we do not know, at the end of the day, what the intentions of the Scientologists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses were during these events. Must we necessarily imagine them negative? What perversity, however, drove the makers of this report to degrade to this point the impulse of mutual aid of certain people, even granting there was an ulterior motive, in order to feed their argument about the fear of the cults? What were the ulterior motives of the people who did not help on the ground, must we judge them too?

3 A couple destroyed by a cult

This is a case that is becoming classic now. A couple tears itself apart and the membership of one of them in a spiritual minority is used against them to obtain custody of the children.

The report takes up the husband’s cause. This man suffers from the break-up of his couple and from no longer seeing his children as much, that is certain. Is his suffering a sufficient reason for the report to pass a verdict without appeal on his rightfulness, and on the guilt of his wife, when one judgment and then a second confirmed that the mother could keep her children?

What fault, then, has this woman committed?… She belongs to a cult. This membership is not proven, but no matter.

The movement accused of being a cult is the Sri Ram Chandra Mission. Two journalists visit a centre of the movement at Augerans. They are forced to acknowledge that the people seem peaceful, but, according to them, the leisure does not last, the time for meditation comes. In two sentences, the journalist manages to evaluate the group’s philosophy and to show the danger it makes its followers run.

Another proof advanced of the dangerousness of the Sri Ram Chandra Mission is its presence in the Gest-Guyard report. No mention is made of the conditions, contrary to the elementary rules of a democratic country, in which that report was made. No mention is made of the communiqué of the Ministry of the Interior specifying that this report has no normative or legal value. Since this movement is in the report, it is a dangerous movement.

A farmer’s wife is questioned about the movement: her first answer is to say that she sees no problem with these people. The journalist promptly puts her back on the right path by asking her whether she knows it is a cult: yes, one of the worst, it seems, replies the lady.

So, the mother of the children, who belongs to this supposed “cult”, makes the children run a grave danger. The father states that he is worried about the children’s health, that he sees them getting thinner. Intervention by Janine Tavernier who, in the name of the ADFI, thinks they are in danger, without any other justification.

The report makes outrageous use of moments of tenderness between the father and his children, implying that this “guilty” mother is putting them in peril. The emotional fibre is used without restraint to point the finger at a culprit designated in advance for her choice of spiritual path, and this in spite of two court decisions.

Editor’s note: Mechanisms

Concerning these two reports, a word should be said about the techniques employed.

The accusations, the trials of intent, are brought without proof. They call on the testimony of apostates.

We are presented with a testimony from Alain Vivien without anyone taking the trouble to specify that he was president of the MILS, which no longer exists and was replaced by the Miviludes; the interest of his testimony, however, is that it allows publicity to be given to the two French anti-cult associations, the ADFI and the CCMM.

Throughout the report we benefit from the enlightened comments of psychologists specialising in the question of the cults; and of a lawyer who explains that the members of a cult deceive the magistrates because they are serene, unlike certain unrecognised victims who show their distress and thus lose their powers of persuasion.

These techniques of argumentation are so similar to those employed by the ADFI and the CCMM that the source of this report’s information seems beyond doubt…

4 Waco

Doubtless the most objective report of the programme, on the Waco tragedy in the United States. An Anglo-Saxon report, to be taken as an example. The voice-over is sober and contents itself with describing the facts. All the parties express themselves. The viewer can form an opinion for himself. The responsibility of the FBI in the massacre seems crushing. You may think differently. You may also remember what you said of the event at the time of the facts, without taking precautions, like most of the media concerned. Who among the media makes honourable amends today for these past media errings? Who among the media makes honourable amends on the Guyana affair, a tragedy similar to Waco, where the files published by the FBI are damning against the American intelligence services? These events are at the origin of the development of the anti-cult fight by the French public authorities. One could give similar examples in France, where accusations are brought without discernment and at little cost. A rumour without proof on television is common usage. We recommend to you the interview with Maurice Duval, ethnologist, published on our site.

5 Colonia Dignidad

We will not pronounce on this report, not knowing sufficiently the context in which this movement evolved. Our feeling is that it is constructed in the same way. A question is asked at the start, but its treatment seems unequivocal as to the journalists’ opinion. Which, once again, is not a problem if it is clearly said that this is a subjective position.

6 Conclusion

Marielle Fournier concludes the programme with: “we have shown you the reality of these movements and their abuses”…

Our conclusion

Ask yourselves the question in conscience: who is manipulating whom with a dossier like the one you have presented? You lose all legitimacy to exercise the profession of journalist when you depart to this extent from an approach that presents the views of the different parties to a fact or an event. The impact you have on the public is great: that power must be earned.

There is one positive point in the dossier presented, quite in spite of you. It is the openness with which most of the people questioned (in the first report) speak of their encounter with the supposed “cults”, and sometimes even their incomprehension at this insistence on the danger incurred. The hope of a new, open, dispassionate gaze is there, in that simple acceptance of the other, even if one does not agree with him or he is different, even if his intentions can be questioned without rejecting him.

”Le téléphone sonne” on France Inter, 5 September 2006

A pretext of a title for a few of the artisans of anti-cultism to wallow in the crudest commonplaces. 45 minutes of an indecent tea party among friends of the crusade against the spiritual minorities, where everyone calls each other by their first names, free to drip contempt and lies in the absence of any contrary point of view (intended by the programme’s makers). A dismaying and surreal moment of pure disinformation. The strings of this “debate” seemed to us so enormous, and Alain Bédouet’s bias so flagrant, that we neglected to send a letter to the authors of this distressing programme. We have however received dozens of emails from people revolted by so much manipulation (testimonies carefully filtered on air, since only people won over to the anti-cult cause were able to express themselves). It is perhaps the only positive effect of this programme, and doubtless, by dint of indiscriminate hammering in the most evident bad faith, the spiritual minorities will feel the necessity of joining together in an impulse of solidarity.

Report on “Jonestown”, France 3, 6 February 2007

In the weeks preceding the programme, one could find on the France 3 website a five-page feature promoting the report: “Jim Jones, the murderous madness of a Guru”

Extract: “That day, almost all the followers of an American cult commit suicide or are murdered on the orders of their guru: Jim Jones. Toll: 913 dead, including more than 200 children. One of the deadliest tragedies of the cultic world.”

This link between the tragedy and “the cultic world”, which refers to the new expressions of spirituality as a whole, does not exist in the documentary. Why does it appear in the presentation? And why, exclusively, a list of anti-cult organisations and sites to support that presentation?

Many other sites on the Internet have examined the Jonestown tragedy in a much more specific way, but without this amalgam with the spiritual minorities designated by the term cults or dérives sectaires.

Why such a selection? Review of the documentary:

Generalities: a film that gives the impression of a B-movie, unconvincing actors, heavy-handedness… There is in particular a striking contrast between the fiction images, which show the supposed inhabitants of Jonestown prostrate and under the permanent influence of fear, and the period images and survivors’ testimonies, which evoke an entirely different reality (the apostate almost weeps as he speaks of his former brothers, all wonderful, and of their common dream).

As the principal theme: “The madness of a man of extraordinary charisma leads to the death of hundreds of people”

The raw material:

Witnesses:

• A man who wanted to leave Jonestown shortly after his arrival.

He describes Jonestown as “a camp under high surveillance where one felt a prisoner”. Later he nevertheless explains that he left his son there on his departure, to protect him from the racism he might encounter in America, saying that “Jonestown was better for him”. His testimony is that of a man tortured by the regret of having abandoned his son, and presents many incoherences. There are other survivors whose testimony can be found on the Internet and who have a more positive vision of life at Jonestown. Was it impossible to make them known? - A son of Jim Jones, Stephan, describes his father as a raving madman entirely responsible for what happened.

The director says: “Stephan refused to speak for 20 years. During all that time, the media of the whole world tried in vain to interview him. We arrived at the moment when he had finished mourning this tragedy and was ready to speak.” Yet several interviews with Stephan Jones can be found on the Internet, including one from 1984. A lie, or the simple approximation of superficial journalists?

• The testimony of a journalist who survived the shooting at the airport. He says at the end: “People wrongly spoke of collective suicide, it was a collective murder”. At the end of the film, scrolling text says “913 people died by suicide or were killed…”

One can still read today on the MIVILUDES site: “THE CULTIC PHENOMENON AND THE PUBLIC AUTHORITIES - HISTORY: 1978 collective suicide of 923 followers of the ‘Peoples Temple’ in Guyana”

Why this approximation from the MIVILUDES, when the truth has been known to all for at least a decade?

• The testimony of the father of a young girl who died at Jonestown. He was accompanying Ryan on his journey to see his daughter, who had been living with her mother at Jonestown since their separation. He brings to the film that emotional dimension which supplants investigation. Nothing in the documentary, or elsewhere, justifies the assertions of the summary presented on the France 3 site:

“The cult (…) has long since tipped over into totalitarian madness in the exclusive service of its leader. Rapes, tortures, embezzlement, capture of inheritances, forced labour, humiliation, blind obedience are part of daily life at Jonestown.”

The report’s introduction presents Jim Jones as a spiritual leader who transformed himself into a “guru”, followed by “followers” lost in a violent society in crisis. Throughout the documentary, what comes through first about the “Peoples Temple”, and what the experts on the question confirm, is its Marxist predominance.

Why, then, not speak of a revolutionary Marxist Pastor?

If the French-language Internet sites that speak of Jonestown tell more or less the same story as the documentary, the English-language sites reveal that the greatest specialists on the question, those who have spent years studying the subject, agree in saying that the affair is not elucidated, that there is not one history of Jonestown but several, quite different ones, and notably those which contradict with facts the simplistic vision advanced here (see our page on Jonestown).

The authorities first announced 383 dead, then, a few days later, 775 and, finally, 913. Either the military were grossly mistaken in their counts, or more than 500 people were indeed not dead at Jonestown and someone brought them there afterwards. In any case, the authorities concealed important facts.

Why not mention the CIA, intimately linked to the massacre?

How can they dare to assert in the documentary’s introduction: “We are going to tell you the story of the last 5 days of Jonestown”, as if they could hold a truth the experts do not claim to hold?

A strange lacuna in the film: Stephan Jones and the other members of the Jonestown basketball team were playing a tournament against the Guyanese national team. They refused to rejoin the camp at Jim Jones’s injunction on the famous evening, and went to take refuge at the United States embassy to “try to raise the alarm”. When they returned later to the cult’s house in Georgetown where they were staying during the tournament, the tragedy had taken place. The question left unanswered: “What happened at the embassy?”

Likewise, Leo Ryan briefly mentions the lack of cooperation he found from the United States embassy and from the local Guyanese authorities, who sometimes visited Jonestown and found nothing to say against it.

Why not investigate this strange and supposed blindness towards a group that displayed its hostility to the American government?

Jim Jones’s son says that the members of the congregation suffered from malnutrition, to explain their submission and their irreparable act.

No other witness or visitor, official or not, mentions this.

They all speak of people in good health. Should this contradiction not counterbalance Stephan Jones’s testimony?

What does this documentary bring?

No new fact, no analysis of the facts, no overall vision of the very complex Jonestown affair, on which the FBI has published more than 39,000 pages without supplying a definitive answer to what remains an enigma, probably owing to the fact that many elements are kept hidden by the authorities.

It supplies, in essence, a simplistic explanation that serves the French policy of fighting dérives sectaires at the precise moment (a chance of scheduling, no doubt?) when a genuine offensive is being conducted around the third parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults, and when the CICNS is releasing a film on the same subject.

A distressing report, in the great popular television tradition, which managed to zap the facts that contradict the version of the French anti-cult campaigners (the fact that the movement was just as assimilable to revolutionary Marxism as to the new spiritualities, and the fact that the version of a sole “collective suicide” has long since ceased to hold). To make up for this, the documentary’s presentation, automatically taken up by all the media, is the reflection of a crude, tendentious anti-cult discourse. Read our enquiry into the Jonestown massacre

”Zoom Europa”, Wednesday 11 April 2007 at 9.35 pm on Arte

“Zoom Europa. The zoom of the week: while the traditional churches empty, Europeans in search of spirituality are turning to other practices, sometimes very original ones. Are these new religions or cults? Reports from Bavaria, Greece and Hungary.”

The conclusion that flows from the editing and from the superior, ironic commentary is that abroad a dangerous “liberalism” is practised, while all these groups are “eccentric”, “worrying”, indeed “cultish”. The prices and profits were often underlined, as were possible disapprovals from the established religious authorities. In the middle of all this, a Pentecostal group and shamanic paganist groups in Hungary, a German Zen group and a Greek polytheist group, all with several thousand faithful. Quiet people, looking very happy with what they do, and happy to present it to the journalists. For the Pentecostal Church, an apostate, former number 2 of the Church, expressed the view that Pentecostalism in reality uses superstition for the benefit of a single superstar priest-leader. One can understand that it is hard for a number 2! We learn that in Hungary, a hundred signatures of faithful suffice to declare oneself a religious association and thereby receive the right to create dispensaries and schools and to benefit from certain tax reductions. These Hungarians are mad, one wonders how their country is not already in flames! The Greeks seem hardly more reasonable, since they have granted the status of religion to “originals” who go and prostrate themselves in temples which, according to a representative of tourist affairs, are not places of worship but ancient monuments evidently intended simply to be admired. Worshippers of Athena at the Acropolis, that would look a bit untidy after all, wouldn’t it? To close the series on the religious revival, a “synthesis” of Internet users’ reactions on the subject, in three testimonies from people in the 18-30 bracket, of which we transcribe the essentials here:

Testimony No. 1: The return of the religious? “In Germany, many came to see the Pope, but I think it’s just a fashion.” Testimony No. 2: The revival of the religious? “It’s mostly folklore kept up for tourist needs.” Testimony No. 3: The revival of the religious? “Meh, basically if they’re not hurting anyone, I’m for tolerance.” This programme faithfully reflects French opinion, which does not want to believe in the revival of the spiritual but believes in its dangerousness, entrenched behind its “reasonable” certainties and its anti-cult system unique in the world.

”Ça se discute”, France 2, 13 June 2007, with Jean-Luc Delarue: “Cults - Can we all be victims? / Who can be enrolled in a cult?”

A few guests, former “followers of communities”, or this father no longer having any contact with his two children, who left with his ex-partner overnight… Stories recounting family dramas, insisting on the classic syndromes of the “indoctrinated” person, the rupture with family members, the crazy ideas… In fact, no “cult” is clearly named in the programme, in order to guard against any risk of a defamation suit. The testimonies are those of people who chose to join some community or other; I did not note any notable amalgam, except this one: “these are people who eat exclusively vegetarian”… No comment and, of course, no correction of the generality by the journalist, who might have avoided drawing a link where there is none. In the end, I wondered what the programme was driving at, except to say: careful, we can all be victims of a cult, from near or far. A family member, or even a perfectly rational person of the type of that engineer, testifying.

”Un jour, Une heure”, 29 August 2007, presented by Laurent Delahousse: “Waco / in the hell of a cult”

A film by Paul Degénève. Edited by Alexandra Willot.

Read our enquiry into Waco

France 2’s presentation: On 19 April 1993, the world discovers the images of a ranch in flames; Waco, Texas. Inside, 87 people, including 22 children, are holed up. The FBI agents and the journalists present on the spot are in shock, the building burns in a few minutes. There will be only nine survivors. For six weeks these men and women had been living as recluses, all followers of a cult, the Davidians. Their guru is called David Koresh. And this man, who quite simply takes himself for God, will lead them to their death. What really happened inside the ranch? Why could the FBI do nothing? How could mothers go so far as to sacrifice the lives of their children?

This introduction is a faithful summary of what those who prepared this programme wanted to put across. A guru is supposed to be responsible for the Waco disaster, and this tragedy is supposed to demonstrate the danger of the “cults”, or “dérives sectaires”. These few lines are a manipulation of the truth that sends “a chill down the spine” when one knows a little of the reality of the events (see our page on the subject: Waco). To assert that “these men and women were living as recluses”, when they were under siege after having been attacked, some wounded and several of them killed by the ATF, is manipulation of the most odious kind which, by using the word “recluse”, aims to place the responsibility on a supposed behaviour of religious inspiration.

We noted in this film the pertinent question of Gilbert Picard, journalist at France-Inter, who says in substance:

“David Koresh sometimes went into town alone; He often went jogging, alone and unarmed… If they wanted to arrest him, why did they not take advantage of those occasions to pick him up?!”

Aberrations of this kind, though numerous, will probably not have reached the consciousness of the unwarned viewer, drowned as it was in the journalist’s one-sided discourse and the preponderant interviews with two people whose objectivity can only be questioned, since they are Byron Sage, the negotiator who assisted the FBI up to the dramatic epilogue, and Jean-Pierre Jougla, administrator of the UNADFI. The first, unsurprisingly, holds a discourse that exculpates himself and the FBI from what was objectively a tragic fiasco of the negotiations. The second is a long-standing anti-cult militant whose simplistic discourse on religious beliefs and the new spiritual movements peppers the entire film, ending with the assertion that what happened at Waco has the same cause as what is found in all the “cult movements” and in all the “gurus”. In short, he defends his position, his functions and his writings, which would lose everything if the Waco tragedy and membership of a spiritual minority were dissociated in people’s minds. For this abusive amalgam (like those of Guyana or the Order of the Solar Temple) is one of the pillars of a theory about the existence of a social scourge that the “cults” are supposed to constitute. The distrust and withdrawal of which the Davidians are accused stem from a very natural instinct in the circumstances endured by that community! But, according to Mr Jougla, they are simply an aspect of the fanaticism commonly encountered among the “gurus” and in the “cultic groups”.

According to the testimony of the few Davidians who survived the tragedy, nobody wanted to commit suicide, and David Koresh was not the raving madman depicted by the media. These people express themselves with emotion but with calm, and seem in full possession of their judgement. They would nevertheless have every reason today, having lost their loved ones and having been for years the victims of a rumour designating them as irresponsible victims, to disown their leader and their beliefs, if only to find peace. This fidelity, according to the French commentators, stems from “indoctrination” and “the incredible power of the gurus”. The programme’s presentation text, as well as Laurent Delahousse’s conclusions on the set, omit a capital fact, though clearly stated in the film: the final fire occurred following an assault ordered by the White House (President Clinton). To justify this recourse to force, Byron Sage explains clearly in the film that the Davidians had exhausted the authorities’ “patience”. Impatience, wounded pride, religious intolerance or an obscure “reason of State”? That could today be the honest title of a programme on the Waco tragedy. In conclusion of the documentary, the programme’s presenter declares, against a background of religious music and images of the famous painting “The Last Judgement”:

“The FBI agents underestimated the fanaticism of faithful convinced they were living the Last Judgement at the side of the son of God”

It should be underlined that Antenne 2 was not simply “presenting” a documentary that evening: the programme’s presenter was the voice-over of the documentary, whose different sections were linked by filmed comments on the programme’s set. There was therefore no precaution taken, no counterweight to the images and words, quite the contrary.

In contempt of the sufferings and the dead, but also of all journalistic ethics, here is the message delivered: spiritual inspiration, outside the great religious traditions, is dangerous.

This message is that of a public channel, at a prime-time hour. It is a worrying but, at the present time, unsurprising sign for the future of spiritual freedom in France.

”Ça se discute”, France 2, 19 September 2007, with Jean-Luc Delarue: “New cults, new gurus: Are we all manipulable?”

See also our video clip on the programme: “Are we all manipulable? The answer is yes. Demonstration by the example of the ‘Ça se discute’ team”

The CICNS was contacted at the beginning of July 2007 by an assistant of Mr Delarue, Virginie Dhers, with the aim of inviting our association to a new anti-cult programme (“your point of view would be interesting to balance our panel”, “We want precisely to open up the debate for the first time in the programme”, “your speech will be free”). We are accustomed to suspecting traps in this kind of programme, which never hesitates to resort to the crudest manipulations (even when it is a matter of denouncing them among the cults!) in order to warmly invite a contributor… who will unfailingly become, at his own expense, the programme’s ugly duckling. See below the statements of Virginie Dhers, sewn with lies (the programme was not live, contrary to her assertions, the day of the invitation was in fact that of the recording, the title was not the one announced (“the new religious communities”!) and the one that had been chosen - but not communicated to us - was in reality quite fixed, contrary to what she claimed, the debate was not at all “open” but slanted “for the prosecution” as usual, etc.). We chose to decline the invitation: “We keep an open mind and will watch your programme to see whether it reflects the openness you announce, but for our part, we place for the moment no confidence in the great majority of the media to truly give us the floor.”

From: Virginie Dhers

To: Admin@CICNS.net

Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2007 4:20 PM

Subject: Programme Ca se discute (France 2)

Hello,

My name is Virginie Dhers and I am a journalist on the magazine Ca se discute, broadcast on France 2 and presented by Jean-Luc Delarue. We are preparing a programme for 5 September on the new religious communities.

I have found your association’s name in numerous articles and I think your point of view could be interesting to balance our panel.

I wanted to know whether you might be interested in having a representative of your association take part in our programme.

I would very much like to be able at least to speak with you by telephone. For more information you can reach me on 01.53.84.31.28 or by email… You can also leave me your details and the hours when you can be reached.

Do not hesitate to let me know whether your answer is positive or negative…

Thanking you for your attention,

Virginie Dhers

Journalist, Ca se discute (France 2)

From: Cicns9@aol.com [mailto:Cicns9@aol.com]

Sent: Saturday 7 July 2007 14:41

To: Virginie Dhers

Subject: re: Programme Ca se discute (France 2)

Hello,

To answer your proposal, we did an Internet search which allowed us to find your announcement posted on the Vigi-sectes forum. Compared with the email you sent us, it indicates more precisely the orientation you envisage giving your programme.

Many programmes are broadcast on this theme, and among them very few give the floor to any voice other than that of criticism, derision, stigmatisation and defamation. The jurists and academics we have met, who have studied the question of the so-called “cults” in the field (which few journalists have done), agree in saying that it is not possible today in France to make heard, outside informed circles, a neutral and dispassionate voice that would come to balance this debate.

The CICNS has been working for three years to gather information showing that the question of the cults in France is treated in a partial manner, and that the received ideas about the minority spiritual movements do not objectively reflect the reality lived in the field. The procedures are always the same: gather a few “specialists” convinced a priori of the harmfulness and dangerousness of the “cults”, most of whom have never visited the incriminated movements; gather testimonies from former followers disappointed in their expectations who do not take responsibility for their own choices; and finally, refuse all dialogue with the persons or spiritual movements supposed to be the subject of discussion.

In these conditions, it is not conceivable for our association to take part in a programme whose object is to answer the question: “CULT, GURU, indoctrination: how does one fall into the trap of manipulation?”, for such a title is already, in itself, a manipulation. It takes at face value notions that have acquired weight in public opinion because they have been repeated by most of the media for more than twenty-five years, without, in the great majority of cases, the slightest legal or sociological proof having come to support the argument. Our research on the subject has led us to conclusions very far removed from the assumptions contained in your programme’s title.

We invite you to visit our website: www.cicns.net, notably the page http://www.cicns.net/FAQ.htm, as well as our video interviews with sociologists, jurists and various social actors, and the testimonies of discriminated people, on the page: http://www.cicns.net/Video.htm. The site also offers a wide range of analyses and reflections on the place of spiritual minorities in our society.

It is possible that you will then become aware of the partiality of which most journalists make themselves the instruments, perhaps often unconsciously, for want of having taken the time to reflect genuinely on the subject treated.

We recently made the first part of a documentary film, “120 minutes for spiritual freedom”, which presents the genesis of anti-cultism in the United States and in France, evoking in passing, from documents often unpublished in our country, the great collective-suicide affairs that made the headlines. This film is dedicated to the rehabilitation of the spiritual minorities, and its making was concerned above all with truth and openness. You will find a fuller presentation on the page http://www.cicns.net/Film1.htm.

The CICNS is also organising in Paris, on Sunday 30 September 2007 from 9 am to 7 pm, a colloquium entitled: “Cults: social scourge or scapegoat?”. Sociologists, historians, jurists and discriminated people will take part in this day. You can consult the colloquium page on our site for more information: http://www.cicns.net/Colloque_Paris.htm.

We would be interested in collaborating with you on any programme aiming to restore the place of the new spiritualities in our society. If it is possible for you to organise a live programme in which the CICNS would be free, for a sufficiently long time, to present another view of this subject, so sensitive and touching thousands of people in our country, we are open to any suggestion in that direction.

Thanking you in advance for the attention you will give our proposal, we send you our cordial greetings.

The CICNS team

www.cicns.net

In an email dated 09/07/2007, vdhers@reservoir-prod.fr wrote:

Hello,

First of all thank you for your reply. I entirely understand your reticence, but we do indeed want, for the first time in Ca se discute, precisely to open up the debate, and I find it a pity that you refuse to take advantage of this occasion to make your point of view heard.

• As for the programme’s title, what you saw on the Vigisecte site, we had started with that title at the beginning of the investigation but we do not yet know what the definitive title will be. We will adapt it when we have finalised our panel and when we really know what the content will be (basically, who will agree to take part…).

• As for the guests, we will have, as in the classic programmes on the subject, testimonies from former followers, and there will also be representatives of the ADFI or the Miviludes, I will not hide it from you. Nevertheless, as I was telling you, we also want to give the floor to people who have a different point of view. We are in contact with former followers who do not position themselves at all as victims and who also set out a positive vision of their experience. (I do not know whether you know Eddie Smigiel, a former JW, a teacher-researcher in Strasbourg) We are moreover in contact with Thierry Bécourt of the CalPC, who would agree to debate on our set. On the other hand we are encountering a sizeable problem, which is that the representatives of the anti-cult side bristle as soon as your association or the CalPC is mentioned…

• 3rd point, the programme is live, your speech would therefore be free…

If you absolutely do not wish to take part, could you point us to jurists, sociologists or other historians who could bring a different discourse on the new spiritualities? I spent a long time on your website and saw quite a few names… I am counting on your advice…

In any case, if you want to reach me to discuss it, I am at your disposal

Hoping to hear from you very soon

Virginie Dhers

Journalist, Ca se discute (France 2)

In an email dated 09/07/2007, the CICNS replies:

Hello,

We thank you for your reply, which seems to indicate a will to openness.

For 25 years in France, the minority spiritual movements have been the target of the most odious calumnies and the gravest accusations; the list is long and you doubtless know it as well as we do. Public opinion having been thus “formatted” throughout these years, the French today are either convinced that the cults are criminal and dangerous, or afraid to take up the question openly, even within the family.

The point of view of the associations fighting “dérives sectaires” is therefore perfectly well known, and the pan of the scales tips too strongly to that side for a balance to be restored within the framework of a programme like the one you propose. Without asking for equivalent speaking time (25 years!), we think it imperative to allow those who have never been heard to be heard, and that within a framework where their speech can express itself freely.

We keep an open mind and will watch your programme to see whether it reflects the openness you announce, but for our part, we place for the moment no confidence in the great majority of the media to truly give us the floor.

On 20 May 2005, we sent Mr Delarue an anticipatory reflection on the “Ça se discute” programme that was to be broadcast on 25 May 2005 on the theme: “How does one fall under the hold of a manipulator?” (a “classic” title, it seems?). That letter remained unanswered. We contacted Mr Delarue again on 1 June 2005, following the broadcast of that programme, with a letter in which we detailed all the points it was imperative to underline. That letter likewise remained unanswered. You will find these letters on the pages Courriers-france2-2.htm and Courriers-france2-1.htm of our site.

To be real journalism, the programme’s title should ask a real question to which the debate would help find elements of an answer, for example: “Beyond the received ideas, are the spiritual minorities really a social scourge for France?”. And from there, allow the viewer to hear the points of view of people who have to offer the fruit of their research, their studies, their experience of the subject, without bias or passion. The viewer will then be free to weigh that against what has been presented to him up to now and to decide for himself what he wishes to think.

We come back to our proposal: if you assemble a panel for a substantive programme allowing the realities of the situation of the spiritual minorities in France to be set out - which the programme of 5 September, as you present it to us, will not allow -, we would be interested in taking part. We could then propose to you a list of people who would be happy to share their knowledge.

Thanking you for the time spent reading our message, we send you our most cordial greetings.

The CICNS team

www.cicns.net

We received no reply from Virginie Dhers following this proposal.

The CICNS will publicise the details of these shameful procedures, as it will do from now on for every programme of this kind. Mr Delarue, who is not known for being a model of behaviour, has not gained in humility despite his recent troubles with the courts, and long ago lost the text of journalistic ethics which he ought nevertheless to reread before each of his programmes. Giving him a presenter’s role in a programme on so sensitive a subject is quite simply scandalous.

The programme needed “a second wind”, according to France 2 (source). What better than a story about cults, and even the departure of a guest who was given no possibility of expressing himself (Read Mr Labrique’s testimony + Read the list of cuts to his words catalogued by Mr Labrique)? Two million viewers in all witnessed the ritual lynching of everything that is not framed by the single-track thinking.

The detail of the programme:

Mr Delarue attacks from the introduction: “Their mere mention is enough to make those who managed to get out tremble”. The cults. There follows a short report, a masterpiece of anti-cult propaganda, in which Mr Roulet of the MIVILUDES appears. The programme continues in a very tense atmosphere which Mr Delarue attributes to people who have just been removed from the set because they allegedly tried to manipulate the programme. The witness-victims are questioned by the presenter in a palpable tension. Much demagogy, opportunism and genuine intent to harm in certain remarks.

A woman testifies at the very start of the programme, her adult daughter is in a “cult”. This woman opposed her daughter’s marriage by bringing in a bailiff. She was convicted for abusive opposition. This witness is not seen again for the whole of the rest of the programme.

A report:

Parents who are living very badly with the distance their daughter is taking following her discovery of, and enthusiasm for, an “evangelist” group (which the parents admit they very quickly hated), contact an anti-cult association. There they find themselves comforted in their worries. “The association will help them step by step for six months,” according to the commentary. One evening in 2005, the parents “help their daughter a little to fall asleep”, then hold her prisoner for a week in her bedroom despite her supplications (the mother: “It was hard, we had to push the tablets into her mouth!”) in order to “detoxify” her of her new beliefs and relationships. It is, it seems, the threat of sending her to the psychiatric hospital that finally overcomes her resistance and sees her disown her new faith (throughout the programme, the mother holds the daughter’s hand without letting go, which Mr Delarue notes, saying to her: “Now she is going to lead her own life, no, isn’t she over 20?”). Such acts are of course punishable by prison, they are crimes punished by the law. The journalist commenting on the report nevertheless concludes, in the name of the “dangerousness of the cults”: “The parents were right!”. Nobody on the programme’s set objects to anything or adds the slightest qualification to this conclusion.

Another conclusion, given by Mr Boisset: “Most of these movements do not break the law, but they are all dangerous because they prevent people from thinking for themselves”, and he cites as examples the great scarecrow “cult affairs”: Waco, Guyana, the Order of the Solar Temple.

Throughout the programme, everything always goes in the same direction, the few concessions to balance are drowned in 98% crude anti-cult discourse.

A report on the “happy followers” (Belgian followers of “Krishna Consciousness”) mocks them and makes them out to be harmless cranks. The attempt to speak in more depth about their experience on the set is “broken off” by Delarue, who then makes “broad jokes”.

(Then Mr Delarue questions Mme Katz, representing the MIVILUDES: “The MIVILUDES pinned the Krishnas in its 2005 report?” Mme Katz, hesitant, replies: “I respect all movements, as a magistrate.. Your movement is, er… very demonstrative, I believe, and by its dress habits… it awakened worries and was the object of a vigilance…” Delarue comes to her rescue and prompts her: “With regard to the children too, no?” She replies: “Yes, the children too… but I believe, it seems to me that your movement has long since ceased to make itself talked about in France… I am going to astonish you, but I entirely respect all movements and I tell you that you have every right to do what you want so long as you respect the law… and of course if the situation were to evolve, that could be reviewed.”)

A condensed version of the message the programme tries to put across about psychotherapy: “Psychotherapy cannot heal the body, those who claim it can are charlatans. All the alternative therapists are in this deviance, even when they say they are simply accompanying a process, or systematically enjoin the sick to continue their treatment.”

Anne Morelli: Her argument, “There are double standards here”, greatly embarrasses Mr Delarue, who does not let her express herself, and Mme Katz, who reacts viscerally to her presence. Anne Morelli is rather alone on her line of comparison with the great religions, Delarue points it out to her several times: “You have a problem with your Catholic background, no?” Anne Morelli says at one moment: “There are plenty of people who are happy in the said cults”. A former follower exclaims (apparently to contradict her?): “but I was happy for 15 years!”. Jean-Luc Delarue cuts in very quickly and moves on to something else. And, to finish, a rapid dialogue between Anne Morelli and Jean-Luc Delarue: “We have heard this evening only people who were unhappy in a cult, whereas there are plenty of people happy in cults, but obviously ‘I am happy in a cult’ would not make a good title!” “I assure you, on the contrary, that ‘I’m having a blast in my cult!’ would pull in the ratings,” replies Mr Delarue. Anne Morelli: “I can bring you witnesses…”.

The ratings! A god venerated by many television actors, and an incitement to every manipulation…

Read Anne Morelli’s account of her experience on the set!

Read also: Techniques of manipulation on television

Read the conviction of Jean-Luc Delarue following Baudoin Labrique’s complaint

Programme on Canal + on 8 October 2007

”Cults, children under the hold”

Made by Stéphane Haussy and produced by Story Box Press.

This programme joins the long list of television programmes on the cults which claim to inform through a slanted enquiry, and which fall within a process of systematic discrimination one might believe unconscious, so repetitive is it.

For thirty years, the spiritual minorities have been presented as dangerous movements, with a completely reductive vision of their life project, by means of an amalgam between their spirituality and criminal behaviour. The reduction consists in taking a human group and reducing its communal or worship life to a set of problems, real or fabricated, more or less serious, such as exist in every human group. The amalgam consists in considering all the adherents as de-brained, or as manipulators using spirituality, innocently or by design, as a screen for delinquent practices.

It is quite evident that this partial and biased treatment of reality leads to distrust on the part of the minorities concerned. Who has a taste for media lynching? It is then easy to accuse them of not wanting to cooperate with journalists’ enquiries. The astonishment of the latter at the reticence of the two communities cited, Tabitha’s Place and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, is either in very bad faith or deeply cynical.

Demonising people has never opened dialogue, which is the only way, need it be recalled, of resolving human problems. It is interesting to note, moreover, that the journalists’ insistence on the reference to Satan to designate the outside world, in the community of Sus for example, is in fact exactly their own attitude. From their point of view, Satan (a secular Satan, no doubt) is represented by Tabitha’s Place and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

A real dialogue is not on the agenda in this report, since from the start of the programme we are warned that the groups studied are dangerous and that they put our children in danger: the subject par excellence that fills everyone with anguish and will allow the viewer to be led where one wishes. Disappointed at the flat refusal of the people targeted, the journalists “force their hand”, using the subterfuge of a hidden camera and passing themselves off as pilgrims of Compostela, thus seeking to give the programme the touch of journalistic exploit that will allow the “evil” to be brought to light. Curiously, these dubious methods are less appreciated by the newsrooms when they are used by a Pierre Carles to take apart the collusions of modern journalism with the sphere of power.

This hidden camera will, moreover, be little used in the community of Sus, since the floor is principally given to apostates: the now classic method for discrediting a spiritual group as a whole. We have visited the members of Tabitha’s Place: http://www.cicns.net/Tabitha.htm. The CICNS’s role is not to assess beliefs but to take stock of the respect for spiritual freedom and democratic debate. It seems to us essential that civil society as a whole offer a voice to the spiritual minorities so that they may express themselves, speak of their life choices and give their version of the facts on the situations that challenge that society. At Sus, we met welcoming people, open to visitors, as Mr Georges Fenech himself acknowledged, off camera, during his visit to Tabitha’s Place in December 2006. If the journalists of Story Box Press could not obtain a direct interview, it is not because this community is closed to dialogue, it is because French journalists come with preconceptions, dishonestly concealed most of the time, and reaffirmed at the editing stage.

That the public authorities should concern themselves with the situation of the children of Tabitha’s Place is legitimate, but then let the enquiry be made calmly, without media agitation, not only with one or two apostate families, taking into account in particular the already available work of the people in the field who know the community; the children’s schooling situation and their general condition do not seem to alarm the Education inspector, Mr Wolf, or the social investigators who have been following them for several years.

Let us widen the field of investigation with an example, for this community was evidently used as a scapegoat during the third parliamentary commission of enquiry on the cults, when four deputies proclaimed themselves specialist analysts of children’s personalities in a three-hour visit. More than 60,000 young people make a suicide attempt in France every year, it is the first cause of mortality, and education in the broad sense is necessarily an essential component of this sad state of affairs. The real tragedy is there. What is done? The public’s attention is diverted onto a community in the south of France: “children under the hold in the cults”. Another example relating to the weakest? We are told that tens of thousands of elderly people are ill-treated in retirement homes and hospitals. There again, people prefer to make a din about the manipulations and coercions that supposedly exist within the cults.

As for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, by dint of media drumming they must by now be reduced, in the French collective unconscious, to child-torturers refusing blood transfusions and concealing paedophiles. Is that not a great deal of contempt for these 6 million people across the world? It is not a matter of denying the seriousness of certain facts mentioned in the report (acts of paedophilia said to have been concealed), but of denouncing the process of global discredit of this minority that accompanies the treatment of the subject. An evolution of mentalities and behaviour, within a legal framework, will only be possible if there is mutual respect. Let us also note that there are double standards. The problem of paedophilia has tarnished the image of the Catholic Church, but that does not prevent the broadcasting of reports which rightly show other faces of that Church.

Finally and, one might say, inevitably, the programme evokes the necessary work of the Renseignements Généraux, the insufficiently supported action of the MIVILUDES, and the incontestable contribution of associations like the ADFI. One remains stunned by so little critical spirit about the action of these various bodies, whose doings contribute to turning French society against a part of itself by feeding the anti-cult psychosis. We invite the reader to consult our analysis of the latest MIVILUDES report, our analysis of the hearings of the last parliamentary commission of enquiry on the theme “Cults and minors”, whose figure of 80,000 children in danger in the cults, refuted by all the government departments, was nevertheless taken up by the journalists of Story Box Press, without any further verification (a work of verification certainly less intoxicating than the techniques for hiding a camera). Unfounded and frankly ridiculous rumours are, in the end, all that remains of a parliamentary enquiry that was a new example of disregard for the adversarial principle.

The journalists of Story Box Press seem to pride themselves on a free will of which they think certain children are deprived. It is a social subject that deserves to be taken up. But these journalists would first have to question the nature of their own free will. When the quality of one’s listening to the other is so reduced that it becomes a simulacrum, can one really assert that one has one’s own freedom of thought?

Go to page 2

Teachers’ Points of View on the Anti-Cult Fight and the Real Dangers for Minors

CICNS received two testimonies from teachers following our commentaries (1 and 2) on the latest guide of the MIVILUDES: The protection of minors against dérives sectaires. These “field” points of view clearly put into perspective the needs of minors today and the dramatic absurdity of the anti-cult fight which, besides tarnishing the reputation of thousands of people, diverts attention from the realities.

Testimony of G. Professional status: specialised teacher. The testimony draws on experience within a support network for pupils in difficulty.

A reflection I want to share with you concerning the latest MIVILUDES guide on children. It comes from my experience and that of my two colleagues of the support network in meeting parents and teachers across more than ten state schools (the sector often shifted) from 1994 to 2009.

What I describe is the fruit of attentive observation but certainly does not have the value of a scientific study.

Beyond the irreducible individual educational specificities, we had come to consider that family educational models could be classified into three modes of functioning, each representing roughly a third (this division fluctuating according to geographical location).

The first third of families carries a precise model of education, there is an educational will, a reflection and an idea of the means to employ to implement it (this model can be alternative, but also, sometimes, a model of classic social success or a more specific one (families of musicians, of sportspeople…). Often these families, because they have ideas and defend them, have frictions with teachers. For our part, we considered that these were families one could work with, because one had an interlocutor who had his own coherence.

Another third of families pursues, without its being deliberate, a traditional model adjusted by the mood of the times. One carries on with the model of the education one received, with small adjustments. These are often families in which the extended family ties are active. The milieu is often rather reassuring for the child (and the teachers), one sometimes meets a certain inertia there.

The third third (which may be only a quarter or a fifth depending on the place) is much more worrying. These are the lost families, where the people, who find it hard to live for themselves, are overwhelmed by the commitment that a child’s education demands, where the child is experienced as something cumbersome (which does not call the emotional attachment into question) and where, in fact, his accompaniment is incoherent and sometimes insufficient.

It is this last “third” which is really worrying for the children (and their parents), all the more so as it seems to be gaining ground.

The families of the spiritual minorities, those the MIVILUDES targets, belong to the first third and, for those, as an actor in the field, there is no cause for concern. (That is why I believe the “MIVILUDES guide” will on the whole be a flop in the circles of those who work with children in difficulty, but there will indeed be a few people (?) to cling to it and to create situations bearing useless suffering.)

If the people of the MIVILUDES were really concerned to help children potentially “in danger”, they should look in the direction of the children who really live in difficult conditions, and reflect on the help that could be brought, first of all, to their parents.

Testimony of Catherine D. Professional status: Principal of a Collège

Across all my pupils, I have never had realistic concerns about pupils who might have been victims of a cult movement (teacher for 19 years and principal for 14). As far back as I search, I find nothing.

For an anecdote, I remember a family which chose, mid-schooling, to remove its daughter from the collège and have her follow distance courses because she was ill at ease in her class. Having learned that the family belonged to a particular Church, we worried a little, but it had no foundation, after some research. At the same time, I was hiring, with the greatest pedagogical happiness, someone I later learned belonged to that same Church.

I think back also to another example closer in time, of a family “with particular remarks and behaviours” which evidently has ties in a movement (unspoken) but of which I do not know whether it belongs to an esoteric or a far-right movement.

In every case, their children are shaped by the family beliefs and practices, but not to the point of being in any danger, shaped in a certain direction, certainly, but no more than others in other directions. Let us look at the “formatting” of children in National Education, declared healthier: we forget that we inflict a fair amount of pain on children through a lack of respect (language, marks, social discrimination, etc.). Let us sweep before our own door.

On the other hand, what is interesting around this recent example are the remarks of the collège’s administrative and school-life team: I was all but required to make a declaration of a child in danger, because “all the same he must belong to a cult” and “can you imagine, the children, etc.”. Until we dissected what we knew, the rumours, the real dangers, and what we were being told on TV.

From the Mils to the Miviludes.

The Policy towards the Cults in France after the Fall of the Socialist Government

Régis Dericquebourg

Group for the sociology of Religions and laïcité, Université Charles De Gaulle-Lille 3

(speech delivered at the Cesnur conference in Vilnius in April 2003)

On 21 April 2002, the French elected Jacques Chirac, representing the moderate right, to the presidency of the Republic for a second time, with the surprise we know: the head of the Front National came second, ahead of the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin, who had occupied the post of Prime Minister until his candidacy for the presidential election.

At the legislative elections which followed the presidential election, the French sent a united majority of the moderate republican right to the chamber of deputies, thus allowing Jacques Chirac to govern as he saw fit. He named Jean-Pierre Raffarin Prime Minister. The latter formed his government.

The outgoing coalition, comprising the socialists, the greens, the communist party and its affiliates, was known for its opposition to the cults and to the groups assimilated to them. The attempts at elimination, denied or not, of every form of non-conformist religiosity were criticised by international human-rights bodies, associations defending religious liberties, as well as foreign researchers and politicians. So the circles interested in the acceptance of minority religious groups in France, and certain groups themselves, awaited the first measures the French government would take with regard to the cults.

The overall situation in France

In France, the management of the religious rests on the regime of the separation of State and Churches, founded in law by the law of 1905. This translates onto the legal plane a philosophical conception of the links between the State and society called laïcité, a word impossible to translate into other languages. It expresses on the legal plane the social process by which religion little by little loses its influence on the individual and society, which has been called secularisation. According to the 1905 law, the Republic neither recognises nor subsidises any religion; it does not interfere in the internal affairs of the religions. With regard to the religions, it is concerned only with public order. For commentators on the law such as Professor Jacques Robert, this law does not authorise the Republic to establish a distinction between the established Churches and the cults. On the contrary, it opens the way to religious pluralism, since there can no longer exist official religions, or at least religions privileged by the State; this pluralism had been inaugurated by the Napoleonic Concordat in 1802, since it established the regime of recognised religions, limited at the time to Catholicism, Protestantism and, in 1808, Judaism. With the Concordat, the Catholic Church ceased to be the religion of France. A pluralism of the great confessions was established; the 1905 law made it possible to go further in pluralism. However, if the minority religious groups can, in principle, practise and develop freely, they do not necessarily obtain the full recognition as a worship association which allows them, like the established Churches, to receive gifts and inheritances, to visit prisoners and soldiers, to be exempted from certain taxes. This full recognition is granted by the Bureau of Religions of the Ministry of the Interior after a study of the file and at the request of the religious movement. No cult benefits from full recognition. In fact most of them have not asked for it. In France, the resources mobilised for the fight against the cults are disproportionate to the size of religious non-conformism. Indeed, the phenomenon of religious minorities is numerically small. The principal movements are: the Jehovah’s Witnesses (130,000 faithful + 70,000 sympathisers), the Adventists, the Evangelicals (Assemblies of God, Porte ouverte chrétienne, Gypsy Evangelicals), the Mormons (31,000 faithful), the Scientologists (4,000), the Soka Gakkai. Many groups stand at around 1,000 faithful (Antoinists, Christian Science, the Raelians, Aumism, Hare Krishna); The Family (ex-Children of God) has disappeared. Only 400 Moonists remain. Finally, there exist multiple, sometimes ephemeral circles of New Age followers. The total number of their faithful cannot exceed 400,000. Among the established Churches, the most important is Catholicism, followed by Islam, Protestantism and Judaism.

Does one observe an evolution of the policy towards minority religious groups in France?

In France the management of the religious falls in principle to the Bureau of Religions of the Ministry of the Interior. It has a legal function and it takes charge of processing requests for recognition. It is also the police of religions. However, under pressure from the anti-cult associations, the parliamentarians turned their attention to the phenomenon of the cults. A first report drawn up under the direction of M. Alain Vivien (socialist party) was submitted in 1983. A second report entrusted to Jacques Guyard (socialist party), entitled: Les sectes en France, was delivered to the government on 22 December 1995. It is useless to return to the methodology of this inquiry. It has been sufficiently criticised and discredited by numerous foreign and French researchers 1. However, the alarming conclusions it reached prompted the Prime Minister of the right returned to government, M. Juppé, to create an observatory of the cults placed under the direction of M. Guerrier de Dumast in 1996. Back in power, the socialist government created, in 1998, beside the central Bureau of Religions (but without official link to it) a body charged with fighting the cults, placed under the direction of the Prime Minister, called: Interministerial mission for the fight against the cults, whose head was Alain Vivien, a former leader of an anti-cult movement: the Centre against mental manipulations, founded by the rationalist writer Roger Ikor. The powers of this mission were badly defined. In principle, it coordinates the fight against the cults, which means that the Prime Minister of the time, Lionel Jospin, was making a combat against the cults official. This mission was composed of forty people. It maintained close links with the anti-cult groups, of which it was the official relay. It had an advisory role with the ministries in establishing a mesh of agents charged with countering the cults by way of anti-cult cells in the administrations of national education, youth and sport, and social affairs. On 10 June 1999, deputy Jean-Pierre Brard delivered a report entitled: “Les sectes et l’argent”, the fruit of the work of a commission of inquiry into the finances of minority religious groups.

The interministerial mission for the fight against the cults favoured the drafting of the About-Picard law (12 June 2001), which was judged severely by jurists and academics both in France and abroad, as witness this formula of the specialist in law Patrice Rolland: “In total, the law of 12 June 2001 is only a mediocre law which passively reflects the perplexities of French public opinion with regard to what are called the cults. Failing to understand its object and the meaning of these transformations of the religious, it risks either infringing fundamental liberty, or perhaps, because of the risk, remaining a dead letter. That is probably the best one can hope for.” 2 On 18 June 2003, after the fall of the socialist government, Alain Vivien resigned from the Mils and it was dissolved.

Confronted with the inheritance of the socialists’ management of the cults, the government of the moderate right found itself facing several choices: do nothing and entrust the management of minority religious groups to the Bureau of Religions of the Ministry of the Interior, revive the observatory of the cults created by M. Alain Juppé, or create a new commission. The new Prime Minister adopted this last possibility. He had the choice between placing it under the direction of the Minister of the Interior, in charge of religions, or keeping it under the responsibility of the Prime Minister. He adopted the latter solution. By a decree of 28 November 2002, he instituted “An interministerial mission of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires”.

In its object, the Miviludes has a role as observatory “of the phenomenon of movements of a cult character whose doings infringe human rights and fundamental liberties or are a menace to public order or are contrary to the laws and regulations”, of favouring the prevention and repression of these doings; of gathering information on these movements, of informing the public on the risks of dérives sectaires.

A president was named, M. Jean-Louis Langlais, a senior official of the Ministry of the Interior. The Miviludes is endowed with a committee (President and secretary of an executive steering committee which comprises members of the various ministries (project officers and sub-directors)) as well as an orientation council composed of diverse figures chosen by reason of their competence. The orientation council comprises three categories of members: the parliamentarians (8), the associations (8), the qualified figures (14). The mission is named for three years.

The Miviludes has given itself a first programme of action. However, a few reflections can be made about it.

1. The Miviludes concerns dérives sectaires and not the cults. M. Langlais asserts that the change of name marks the will to reassure the cults, which feared for religious liberty. The intention deserves to be noted. But very quickly, the Miviludes will be confronted with a sizeable problem: how to define “dérives sectaires”. If the sociologists can define the sect-like traits which constitute the elements of the ideal-type of the sect, if they observe that there are sect-like traits in the Churches and Church-like traits in the sects, how will the jurists treat this expression? French law knows nothing of the notion of “cult”; can it then know the “dérive sectaire” and give it a legal definition? As one sees, the problem is postponed but not resolved, and the commission risks debating the sex of angels. On the other hand, if the religious reference disappears, some will ask that “dérives sectaires” be attended to in all movements, including in the political parties. In an interview granted to Willy Fautré, President of Human Rights without Frontiers, International, M. Langlais shows he is conscious of this problem, and he asserts that he is aiming rather at groups which have delinquent behaviour or which place the “victims” in a state of subjection and hold. But how to prove these things in court? M. Langlais himself recognises the difficulty.

2. Does the composition of the Miviludes really differ from that of the Mils? It includes people already present in the latter. To them are added people known for their reservations or quite simply for their hostility towards the cults. The figures who were in charge of the question of the cults in the various ministries enter the steering committee. The parliamentarians named to the orientation council have distinguished themselves by negative public interventions towards the cults. One finds there notably: Jean-Pierre Brard, Alain Gest and Nicolas About, who is one of the authors of the About-Picard law. The anti-cult associations are represented alongside parents’ associations which have manifested their hostility towards minority religious groups. One finds among the qualified figures several people close to the Association for the Defence of the Family and the Individual, which strongly opposes the cults, as well as people close to the Centre against mental manipulations. In his interview with Willy Fautré (3 March 2003), M. Langlais justifies their presence by asserting “that there will be no sectarian attitude towards these movements”. Judging by its composition, the Miviludes ought to have a negative prejudice towards the cults. However, it is fitting to avoid trials of intention. The same people can take up the problem differently according to the programme they are given and the method of work they adopt. But, for their part, the minority religious groups may fear the return of the old reflexes.

3. The declarations of intention. In the press, the President of the Miviludes at once announced that the new mission would apply itself to the protection of minors and that it would have a vigilance no lower than that of the Mils (La Croix, 14/01/02), Vingt minutes (same date), Libération (same date). In an interview granted to the magazine La Vie (No. 2996, 30 January 2003), the President of the Miviludes asserts that the change of the mission’s name means that the objectives have changed: it is not a matter of fighting against the groups themselves but against the excesses to which they might let themselves go. He announces two projects: the protection of minors and aid to victims. The commentator of La Vie finds in this a new orientation: it is no longer a matter of repressing but of helping. The president of the Miviludes is presented as a man who is not part of the “anti-cult inner circle”. On the other hand, M. Langlais asserts that the Miviludes will continue to sensitise heads of educational establishments and magistrates, and that trainers will be trained within national education.

On 4 April 2003, we were informed by the Figaro of another position. At the first meeting of the orientation council of the Miviludes, Monsieur Pierre Steinmetz, director of the Prime Minister’s cabinet, is said to have asserted: “the Prime Minister wished that the task undertaken for years under the impulse of several parliamentarians (…) be pursued and if possible developed”. He added that the public authorities must not content themselves with sanctioning infringements of liberties, but also identify and denounce the behaviours which, upstream of the violation of a liberty, menace its exercise”. For the journalist reporting these facts, “this risks setting on edge the teeth of the leaders of the great confessions and of the sociologists of the religious fact, who consider the fight against the cults an infringement of the freedom to believe”. But, subsequently, having had in hand the whole of Pierre Steinmetz’s address, we found it fairly nuanced. On the other hand, in November 2002, the Prime Minister is said to have asserted that “the State’s vocation is not to fight against the cults”, and the Minister of the Interior is said to have asserted for his part that “the problem of the cults must not become an obsession”. One may conclude from these various positions that, with the phenomenon of religious non-conformists, the government is confronted with a delicate exercise.

4. The decree instituting the Miviludes was contested in court by the Church of Scientology.

The reactions of a few persons concerned

We tried to take soundings among persons concerned with religious liberties. The website of “LibertéSpirituelle” reproduced an article: the limits of public-relations actions, rather pessimistic on the relations between religious groups and the media, to launch a debate. A correspondent (signing: Capfrance 1) answers that this text reflects the climate that reigned at the end of the years 2000-2001, but that the situation has changed: “Throughout this year, the media stopped stupidly copying out the press kits slipped to them by the ADFI, the CCMM and the Mils, and began to publish the for and the against, almost systematically. One notes in the editorial offices a certain weariness with anti-cult extremism. The journalists no longer believe in it, even if they are strongly urged to blacken the picture. Some even admit in private that they manage to get other points of view through when the editor-in-chief is no longer there (authentic!)”. He adds, as proof of an evolution, that the Miviludes “is taking a rather different direction” (from that of the Mils). The author of this message adds also that he possesses detailed testimonies on the change (unless I am mistaken, the signatory speaks in the name of an association engaged in the fight for religious liberty). A religious group sent me, as proof of a will to transparency, letters and circulars concerning it, provided at its request by the administrations.

On the other hand, we carried out a small survey among 15 spokespersons of minority religious groups present in France concerning a possible change of policy of the moderate-right government towards minority religious groups. It is in fact rather a record of a few positions established from a brief questionnaire which these persons kindly answered by telephone or on the occasion of a meeting. This inquiry is being pursued to reach a more representative sample. As it stands, it must be considered provisional.

In a first survey of 15 minority religious groups present in France (Mormons, Raelians, Hare Krishna, Horus, Antakharana, Golden Rosycross, Mandarom, Evangelical Church of Besançon, Christian Science, Invitation à la Vie, Scientology, Reiki, Unification Church, Soka Gakkai, Alliance), a clear majority of movements (11/15) expected a change of policy with regard to the cults. To the question, “if yes, why?”, we had asked them to choose at most two of the following motives: 1) because the right has no anti-cult ideology, 2) because the right is more tolerant than the left, 3) because the right has no antireligious ideology, 4) because the right will attend to more important questions, 5) because the right will want to distinguish itself from the left, 6) because the right is less linked to the antireligious Masonic obediences. The choices fall on all the motives, with a major equal distribution over the last three (5,4,4). Those who answered no justify their answers by the fact that mentalities are impregnated with anti-cultism and because the right will want to satisfy public opinion or the voters. We then asked the spokespersons of these groups whether they had observed a change of attitude of the “government” towards their own movement; no tendency emerges: 6 yes and 6 no and 3 “Don’t know”. The affirmative answer is motivated principally by better contacts with the administrations (our letters are answered, a few decisions have been favourable). Certain DKs are accompanied by “yes in general”. One supposes that they have no troubles or that they have not attempted approaches on behalf of their movement. One negative answer is justified by the attitude of the tax services, which remains the same. When we question the movements on a change in the discourse on the cults in the media, we obtain: 6 yes against 9 no. Some note silence, a timid opening. Another says that “the thing has deflated”.

Thirteen groups against two have heard of the Miviludes; 6/13 know its organisation but few know the first appointments (3/12 and one non-answer). To the open question: what do you think of the Miviludes, the answers are negative, such as these: “everything is erased and we start again”, “I wonder about the list of decision-makers”, “the orientation council is a gathering of the most extremist anti-cultists in existence in France”, “the anti-cult lobby acted, Raffarin continued it”. Only one salutes the appointment of a senior official at its head and finds in the Miviludes a “narrowing of influence compared with the Mils”. Another limits himself to citing its aim: “to protect the children but not attack the groups”. When one asks whether the new majority will be more tolerant towards the cults than the left, less tolerant or the same, opinions are equally divided between “more tolerant and the same” (7-5-1 dk, 2 “other”). On the other hand, 4 choices fall on the proposition “the Miviludes will be a copy of the Mils”, 7 choices on “the Miviludes will be more liberal than the Mils”, 1 choice on “the Miviludes will be harder than the Mils” and 11 choices on the proposition “it is maintained to satisfy a certain public”. This last proposition is adopted both by those who think the Miviludes will be the copy of the Mils and by those who think the Miviludes will be more liberal. That is due to the ambiguity of the questions. One may think that the government maintained a commission to satisfy the public - those who have a negative prejudice towards the cults - but that it will attempt to be more open; others may think it will be the status quo (the same intransigence as the Mils in order to satisfy the anti-cult public).4 Finally, I proposed six expectations towards the government concerning minority religious groups:

the repeal of the About-Picard law wins (8), level with “the guarantee of religious pluralism”, level with “the creation of a representation of minority religious groups in France” (5), the recognition of all minority religious movements as worship associations (4), a selection of the dangerous cults and the others (2), and the creation of a commission to discuss their problems with the government (3) 5.

Conclusion

After the fall of the left majority, the minority religious groups expected a change of attitude from the moderate right towards them. Overall, they supposed there would be an opening. The creation of a new mission on the cults, or at least on dérives sectaires, surprised them, and its composition irritated them. They nevertheless continue overall to grant the right a credit of confidence, though some have already given up expecting anything positive. The repeal of the About-Picard law and the guarantee of religious pluralism would doubtless symbolise a change in their eyes. In asides, the minority religious groups confide that they nevertheless remain vigilant and always ready to continue the fight against the conduct they consider menacing towards them. It seems there is vigilance on both sides.

Régis Dericquebourg (see Books page):

Born in 1947, a psycho-sociologist, Maître de conférence at the University of Lille, he studies minority religious groups, and in particular those with a healing vocation. His doctoral thesis was on the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Religions de guérison, Paris, Cerf, 1988.

Les antoinistes, Turnhout, Brépols, 1993.

Croire et Guérir, Paris, Dervy, 2002. Boycotted by certain booksellers under pressure from the anti-cult movements.

See also our interview with M. Dericquebourg

Read also www.cicns-news.net/la-loi-17.htm

1 Cf. Massimo Introvigne, Pour en finir avec les sectes, Paris, éd. Dervy, 1996. Françoise Champion and Martine Cohen, eds.: Sectes et démocratie, Paris, Seuil, 1999.

2 Patrice Rolland: “La loi du 12 juin 2001 contre les mouvements sectaires portant atteinte aux Droits de l’homme; Anatomie d’un débat législatif”. Archives de Sciences sociales des religions, 2003, 121, January-March, pp. 149-166.

3 There are more group choices because I allowed a maximum of two choices.

4 Idem.

5 Idem.

Investigation into the Associations for the Defence of the Family and the Individual (ADFI)

ADFI and UNADFI

Part 2: The victims of the ADFI

Read the first part of the dossier

A dossier from http://www.geocities.com/unadfi/p1.html

In March 2000, we lost a friend! Doctor Yves Jullien, an upright man who had decided to devote his life to the care of drug addicts and of people in psychological difficulty, took his own life, the victim of a destructive relentlessness. His only fault was to be a little different and perhaps even to be more effective than certain of his colleagues.

The parents and friends of Yves Julien have had to resign themselves. But after a year, during which we have accumulated information, we can say that Yves Julien was the victim of a campaign of harassment and hatred orchestrated by the UNADFI/ADFI (Union Nationale des ADFI/Association pour la Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu) — a network of associations financed by the state to the tune of several million francs and, to crown it all, recognised as being of public utility (!).

The fact is that these associations, created originally to protect individuals and families from movements they accuse of being cults, rapidly experienced serious abuses. The UNADFI and the ADFI do not fight against so-called “cult” movements but against everything that is different and that presents an alternative to society as we know it. They have become a veritable parallel and dictatorial thought police.

Indeed, at first, following the death of our friend, we thought that the ADFI had itself also been a victim of the rumour. But the elements we have gathered since then demonstrate that the ADFIs are not on their first victim and that numerous individuals have seen their lives ruined, have killed themselves or have even been murdered following their campaigns or their activities.

We have tried to make this information known, but when we approached the administrations concerned so that the subsidies and the public-utility status of this association should be withdrawn from it, we received only a polite refusal which meant in substance that a few “slip-ups” were inevitable and that the various ministries and other foundations would continue to subsidise its activities.

That is quite simply intolerable!

We have consequently decided to devote all our free time to denouncing the activities of these poison-pen writers of the Republic and we demand that they be dissolved on account of the dangers they bring to bear on democracy.

This website is one of the means of action that we intend to undertake. We shall regularly publish the results of our investigations in these pages. In parallel, and if necessary, we intend to undertake a certain number of legal actions. But we need your support. This site is published in French and in English so that the many individuals and bodies concerned with individual freedoms throughout the world may know what the French State is financing to the tune of millions. You will also find at the end of this site the list of bodies to write to by post or by e-mail in order to demand the dissolution of this network of associations.

If you have knowledge of interesting facts or if you have been a victim of their activities, do not hesitate to send us your testimonies.

One last point. As very often, this type of organisation, intolerant by nature, bears criticism badly and resembles as two peas in a pod the associations it intends to combat. Anyone daring to denounce them immediately finds himself accused of being “part of a cult”, of being its “instrument”, becomes the object of a campaign of harassment in his professional or personal life and sees his life destroyed. If a journalist writes a negative article about them, he is immediately taken to court, not to mention the pressure received by his management from their political friends.

As some of us have already been the object of serious threats to their lives and to their own children by telephone, and as none of us wishes to see his life destroyed by campaigns of hateful rumour and to be ruined by repeated lawsuits (unlike them, we are not subsidised by the state), our group has decided to remain anonymous.

Case no. 1 – A suicide at the ADFI

As we asserted on our site’s home page, the ADFI, created at its origin by parents worried to see their children commit themselves to controversial religious movements, rapidly experienced serious abuses, certain of which have moreover never been revealed to the bodies which finance this organisation.

One of them is particularly significant because on the one hand a man died, but also because it dates from the beginning of 1982 — in other words, in the first years of activity of this network of destructive associations. We collected it from a woman who had worked as a volunteer on the ADFI’s premises in Paris. Here is her testimony as we have reconstituted it.

In 1981, a young man decided to join the Association for the Unification of World Christianity. His parents, not sharing his choices, decided to approach the ADFI of Paris, where the headquarters of the national federation of the ADFIs was then located, at 4 rue Fléchier in the 4th arrondissement of Paris.

At that time, the ADFI was engaged in experiments which consisted in using psychological pressure aimed at forcibly de-converting an adherent of a movement, whatever it might be.

Ted Patrick, the inventor of these techniques, a former marine with rigorous methods and a self-proclaimed “psychologist”, advised kidnapping, the confinement of the individual for several months in a secret place so that he should be subjected to various psychological and physical pressures, sometimes even sexual or degrading ones (Ted Patrick recommended having sexual relations with the person or wiping oneself in front of the kidnapped person with the image of the God in whom the individual believed, for example). Most often, the person was kidnapped or lured into a trap, deprived of his freedom, physically manhandled, and underwent for weeks incessant discourse almost night and day destroying the beliefs to which he had adhered.

He entitled his method “deprograming” by reference to computers, whose memory it suffices to erase in order to be able to reprogram them “correctly”. And even if not all attempts ended in this “de-conversion”, it is easy to understand that few individuals subjected to this kind of technique are capable of resisting for very long. In fact, numerous were those who turned against their former movement, at least at first. So: no complaint — no trial.

When he met with a failure, Patrick was only rarely prosecuted, for he arranged for the parents themselves to carry out the illegal actions (such as the abduction and the detention) and the judges could not bring themselves to convict the victim’s relatives. It is moreover quite significant to note that the first custodial prison sentence that Ted Patrick received was for possession of cocaine.

Ted Patrick’s business was therefore flourishing — his sessions cost the family concerned several thousand dollars — and numerous were the former de-converted, or various imitators (crooked private detectives, etc.) who saw there an opportunity to make easy money.

In the nineteen-seventies and eighties an impressive number of abductions were carried out by Ted Patrick or by his followers in the United States but also in Europe. And the ADFI was implicated in a certain number in France, less than three years after its creation. We shall speak of this again in a future article. But to come back to our case, it should be known that invariably, the victims, once “deprogrammed”, were placed in a host family and supervised by an ADFI staff member charged with the “therapeutic follow-up” of the adherent. It was a matter of ensuring by means of various pressures that the freshly de-converted person remained well disposed.

The person was obliged to frequent the premises of the ADFI and the UNADFI in Paris in order to “bathe” in this ferociously militant atmosphere until the ADFI could consider that it could trust her. At that time, the persons charged with this “follow-up” were two ADFI staff members whose salaries were entirely financed by the Ministry of Health — Marie-Christine Cordon, the future wife of a famous follower of Ted Patrick in Canada, Ian Hayworth, and a certain Alexandra Schmidt, of American nationality.

One can well imagine the moral suffering undergone by a person subjected to this kind of continual pressure. Torn between his former beliefs, the pressure exerted by his family and the psychological techniques of harassment dispensed daily by the ADFI’s watchdogs, many cracked and subsequently experienced serious psychological problems whose cause was obviously attributed to the movement to which the ADFI was opposed.

At the beginning of 1982, the affair was nevertheless more serious. A young man, during this period, went to his parents’ home, took his father’s revolver, went to the ADFI’s premises, met his two watchdogs and, in front of them, shot himself in the head.

The affair caused no stir. Calling on its political friendships, the ADFI managed to hush up the affair and no judicial investigation was opened. Of course, responsibility for this butchery was attributed to “the cult” and a little also to fate. The police concluded that it was a simple suicide before witnesses and the case was closed. Not a word to the press and above all not a word to the Ministries which allocated the fat subsidies with which we are familiar.

By way of precaution, Marie-Christine Cordon and Alexandra Schmidt (the latter having been troubled some time previously in another “failed” deprogramming affair) were requested to make themselves forgotten and disappeared from circulation, going, the one to Canada and the other to the United States. It was the first time that the ADFI caused, to our knowledge, the death of a man. But it was unfortunately not the last, as we shall see!

The fact remains that the official bodies which finance the ADFI and which were paying, already at that time, this young man’s killers, can no longer now claim that they are unaware of these facts, which it is easy for them to verify — the affair having all the same left a few administrative traces that are easy to find. Will the ADFI’s political friendships still suffice to protect them?

Case no. 2 – The murder of Jean Richard Miguères

On Tuesday 28 July 1992, at Lyon in the Croix Rousse district, Roger Dorysse, a 62-year-old pensioner, coldly fires several rifle shots at Jean Richard Miguères. His victim collapses, hit in the legs. Roger Dorysse calmly returns to his car, reloads his gun and coldly finishes off his victim at point-blank range. He would give himself up to the police some time later.

Jean-Richard Miguères was the founder of a UFOlogist movement, the CEIRUS, based at Lyon, and the author of several books on the UFO phenomenon. He gave lectures throughout the world and had taken part in a few television programmes. He was Roger Dorysse’s son-in-law and the young couple had just moved into a district of Lyon. Miguères, after leading a fairly eventful life, seemed to have found a certain balance again with his young wife. An eccentric, without any doubt, but who had done nothing that deserved this atrocious death.

Except that the Dorysse couple are said to have been ardent militants of the ADFI-Lyon and that for this association, any group whose ideas are different is eminently suspect. The CEIRUS is said to have been catalogued there as a dangerous cult and, according to the statements of its president, this group was in the association’s “sights”. Moreover, as soon as the murder was revealed in the press, the president of the ADFI does not hesitate to condemn Jean Miguères by accusing him of being a dangerous and malevolent man without expressing the slightest condolences for his widow.

In the Figaro Lyon, a journalist revealed that “the Dorysses had come to know of Jean Miguères’s suspect activities when they were in contact with the Association pour la Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu.” Not so suspect at that, since the CEIRUS had never made itself talked about in the region and its activities were limited to the regular organisation of lectures on the subject of UFOs. But, in France, the ADFI is at once expert, prosecutor, policeman and judge, and it grants no possibility of appeal or means of defence. When one knows the end of this tragic story and the murderer’s cold determination, one does not ask oneself what type of information and fanaticising brainwashing the Dorysse spouses must have undergone at the ADFI. These accusations were subsequently denied by the local ADFI.

To judge of it, it suffices to read Madame Dorysse’s statements to the press: “My husband of course regrets his act, but he is totally relieved and serene. He did that with a single aim: to save our little girl from the clutches of this dangerous character”.

In this story the “defenders of the family and the individual”, subsidised by the State, made several victims: besides Jean Miguères, an entire family was totally destroyed and a quiet pensioner was transformed into a murderer and sentenced to 6 years’ imprisonment.

Case no. 3 – The ADFI protects a paedophile

The ADFI sometimes maintains strange alliances. Bernard Lempert is a psychotherapist specialising in the ill-treatment of children who founded an association which he called “l’Arbre au milieu”. What was his surprise when he noticed that his treatment centre was catalogued in the report on cults by the socialist deputy Guyard as a dangerous cult movement!

Once his investigation had been carried out, he learned that it was the ADFI Finistère which had communicated his name and that of his association to the commission and that his name appeared in a secret RG report. He then remembered that he had treated for anorexia the daughter of the founder of that ADFI, Anne-Marie Favé, the former Mayor of Plouerden. The young woman, once cured, decided to settle in the south of France to flee a more than possessive mother.

Of course, in the mind of the founder of that ADFI, Bernard Lempert became a dangerous “guru” who had kidnapped her daughter from her. L’Arbre au Milieu, a formidable cult which had to be the object of surveillance and be destroyed by every means. As is its habit, the ADFI made the maximum publicity about this “affair” and alerted the press.

An investigation by the Rennes public prosecutor’s office would even reveal that the rumour came on the one hand from the ADFI with the complicity of a journalist, Renaud Marhic, a member of ADFI Bretagne, but also from a man suspected of paedophilia who joined an association bringing together parents accused of the same offences, directed by a far-right militant!

It took Bernard Lempert more than two years to extinguish the “pyre” lit by the ADFI. But although he was totally cleared of any accusation by the courts, still today he continues to see his participation in conferences on childhood refused, despite his excellent professional reputation in social and judicial circles.

Case no. 4 – The ADFI’s political scheming

The following affair is exemplary in more than one respect. No one died, but this victim of the ADFI suffered several heart attacks.

A brilliant Geneva economist, André Poulin, was accused out of sheer malice and on the basis of a homonymy of being a member of the sadly famous Order of the Solar Temple. Of course, without any verification and fanaticised by her own theories, Janine Tavernier, the president of the UNADFI, wrote a text in which she formally accuses André Poulin of being a member of the OTS.

Next, she alerts Jacques Guyard, a former socialist deputy and rapporteur of the National Assembly’s commission on cults, spreading the rumour that “this member” of the OTS was also a secret financier of the RPR in contact with a Libyan arms dealer. The UNADFI, having friendships rather on the left, sees there a good opportunity to play both sides and to create a new “scandal” which it will be “interesting to exploit”.

Immediately, Jacques Guyard, who at that time was having some trouble with the courts, tells himself that being appointed at the head of a new commission on cults could restore his reputation. He writes a letter to Lionel Jospin and, without any further verification, explains that he is worried about the “continuation of the OTS’s commercial and financial activities” and hints that André Poulin and his father would indeed have links with a Libyan arms dealer and that an investigation into the OTS would not fail to bring about “political repercussions” (in other words, to raise a matter of RPR financing!). And he requests the creation of a commission charged with investigating the financing of “cult groupuscules”.

Quite obviously, André Poulin underwent a cascade of troubles of every kind. He had two severe cardiac alerts, had to devote much of his time and money to two lawsuits which he won against the author of the rumours and against the press, had to resign from several mandates in order to defend himself, has lived ever since in continual fear of finding himself suspected by his neighbours or business relations, etc.

In short, as his father, himself a victim of similar harassment, says: “It is appalling, my wife is having a serious nervous breakdown, my son is destroyed”.

It is only after dozens of telephone calls and once his defamation case had been won that Jacques Guyard and Janine Tavernier, under duress, had to admit their error. But the harm, motivated by dark political scheming, was done. Fortunately André Poulin was a solid man. Others have not had that luck…

Case no. 5 – The death of Yves Jullien

“Story of a rumour that kills”… it is under this title that the newspapers reported the Yves Jullien affair. On 6 March 2000, this doctor, married and the father of four children, took his own life following the closure of the centre for the treatment of drug addicts and psychotics that he had created at the château de l’Isle sur Serein.

At the origin of this rumour, the UNADFI, whose president admitted during a television programme by Mireille Dumas that she had personally confirmed by telephone that one of the directors of Doctor Jullien’s centre was a member of the “cult” Sri Sathya Sai Baba.

This rumour was carried for several years in the Yonne, and this despite the innumerable contrary testimonies from patients, collaborators, friends or the nurses and doctors who worked in this centre.

Alarmed by the ADFI, the social services and the police made life a veritable hell for the doctor and for this centre, to the point that it was closed by the DDASS, thus ruining years of effort. He could not bear it and took his own life. It is only at that moment that the public authorities understood that they had been misled by the rumour. A little too late.

The ADFI, for its part, two months after the tragedy, circulated a laconic note which speaks for itself: after having cited by name 3 individuals including Doctor Jullien’s widow, the ADFI still asserts “3 people who were officers of Sri Sathya Sai Baba, an association considered as a cult by the parliamentary Report on cults.

These people held directing responsibilities of Seve Epinoia (Yves Jullien’s centre) , an association placed under a measure of administrative closure, henceforth dissolved following the death of doctor Jullien.”

Read also: An impossible mediation? The tendentious psychology of the ADFIs

Read “The UNADFI and the merchants of hope”

Investigation into the ADFIs

Associations for the defence of the family and the individual (ADFI) and National Union of the ADFIs (UNADFI).

Part 1

The ADFIs bear a pretty, misleading name: association for the defence of the family and of the individual. But their defence is in reality an attack. And numerous families and individuals have had to undergo their assaults and could not say that they were defended. To obtain the ADFIs’ favours, one must indeed be in the “right camp”: that of atheists, secular fundamentalists, even militant Catholics. From their point of view, the rest may be swept away.

The active members of these associations, often very uncultivated as regards spirituality, have initiated a veritable hunt for beliefs in France.

Their displayed refusal of all dialogue and their crusade against all alternative spiritual, educational and therapeutic approaches, without any kind of discernment, no longer deceives many people today. The dossier below brings to light the nature of this state-subsidised association.

A dossier originally published on http://membres.lycos.fr/balisedepaix/perso.infi/adfilasecte.htm

TESTIMONY OF A FORMER MEMBER OF THE A.D.F.I

THE TRUE FACE OF THE A.D.F.I.

THE A.D.F.I. ON CAMPAIGN

THE A.D.F.I. DISMISSED

CONCERNING THE A.D.F.I.

FRANCE AGAINST RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

CULTS and SURVEILLANCE OF THE POPULATION

SPIRITUAL MOVEMENTS The ignorance of the public authorities!

PRACTICAL SHEET FOR DENUNCIATION AND SURVEILLANCE (according to the ADFI)

Stop the right to persecute

A very powerful lobby: the anti-cult lobby

Read a testimony by Janine Tavernier, former president of the UNADFI

TESTIMONY OF A FORMER MEMBER OF THE A.D.F.I.

This testimony is the partial reproduction of a letter written by a former member of a local A.D.F.I. To avoid any reprisals, both against the author of this letter and against its addressee, we shall preserve the anonymity of the one as of the other.

“I am sending you a letter of information about my brief passage within the A.D.F.I. of … Certain points having seemed to me dubious, I take the liberty of informing you of them.

First of all, my first contact was made through a friend who was a member of the A.D.F.I., who proposed that I come and help them in their action.

He therefore proposed that I write to the headquarters of the A.D.F.I. of … A few weeks after sending my letter, I was summoned to the headquarters. I was given a series of documents on cults, and I was questioned about my motivations, my friends, my job, etc.

A few weeks later, I received a second letter summoning me to a meeting, but this time not at the headquarters. After a good hour’s wait, I was received before an assembly of about ten people who questioned me on very varied but always very personal subjects.

A few days later, I received a letter specifying my acceptance into the A.D.F.I. I had access to the file of all the organisations that the A.D.F.I. considered as cults, some having nevertheless been the object of no complaint.

Another thing: although I had been told that the A.D.F.I.’s members belonged to every religion, all those of the A.D.F.I. of … were Catholics, some even embodying the well-known dogma: “Outside the Church, no salvation!”.

The members of the A.D.F.I. of … never gave me their name and still less their telephone number. It was always they who contacted me. It was not rare for me to be advised to return to my home by always different routes, because the A.D.F.I.’s members said they were being followed by cult members.

It is for these reasons that I left the A.D.F.I.: suspicion, paranoia, relentlessness against certain associations despite the lack of proof,…”.

THE TRUE FACE OF THE A.D.F.I.

From “Sectes, religions et libertés publiques” by Christian Paturel

La Pensée Universelle Edition 1996

“Most European “anti-cult” movements are emanations of the A.F.F. (American Family Foundation). The A.D.F.I. moreover figures frequently in “The Advisor”, a publication of the A.F.F. This anti-cult organisation is composed essentially of marginal psychiatrists: Margaret Singer, Jolly West, John Clark, …).

Within this international structure, psychiatrists occupy a leading place. The latter are specialists in the control of the human mind (hypnosis, electroshock, injection of drugs), in techniques of crowd manipulation, in “deprogramming” which, through various and violent practices, aims to restore the “mental health” of the individuals concerned. Among these psychiatrists:

• Ted Patrick: former psychologist of the American army, who adopted the brutal methods of “deprogramming” to bring back onto the straight and narrow the members of “cults” (abduction, unlawful confinement, violence…).

• Dr John Clark: Specialist in mind control and former assistant to Dr Lindemann of the C.I.A. He was penalised by the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine for having forcibly committed a person on account of his religious beliefs. In 1983, he proposed a plan aimed at making the “new religions” disappear. Clark denounces the legal barriers of democratic and liberal societies which stand in the way of his personal conceptions. His works are often cited in the A.D.F.I.’s publications.

• Margaret Singer: She was a military psychologist and had problems with the American courts, which considered that her psychiatric reports were “value judgements disguised in the form of expert opinion”.

• Dr Louis West: He advocated the sterilisation of Blacks and Hispanic Americans to combat criminality. He is often cited in the A.D.F.I.’s publications (e.g.: Bulles).

The theses defended by these psychiatrists arouse the indignation of American psychiatry: they are marginals.

• Dr Robert Lifton: A relentless defender of “deprogramming”, he is the author of an equivocal work on the practices of Nazi doctors in the concentration camps.

The A.D.F.I. was born at Rennes (France) in 1974 on the initiative of Dr Champollion and the Psychiatrist André Badiche. It immediately declares its attachment to the pseudo-scientific theories of the American psychiatrists John Clark, Margaret Singer and Louis West, aimed at the normalisation of society which would be in peril because of cult movements or new religions.

One finds in the A.D.F.I. the ideas which animated the antisemitic and anti-Masonic movements which flourished under the Vichy government: denunciation of an occult minority which would hold the reality of financial power and which would be at the origin of society’s misfortunes. This attitude was brought to light by the C.F.S.D. (4 rue Burq 75018 PARIS). The cults have replaced the Jews and freemasonry, which has become unassailable because of its political power.

The A.D.F.I. is the transmission belt which conveys the totalitarian ideology of the marginal American psychiatrists. It advocates and uses the “deprogramming” methods of Dr Clark, which are similar to those employed by the Soviets in the heyday of communism to “treat” the “dissidents”.

The A.D.F.I. regularly attempts to impose its theses on the public authorities, on the media… It has its entrées in the Ministries. Moreover, it is a member of numerous bodies: the Commission Consultative Nationale des Droits de l’Homme (attached to the Prime Minister, France)!!!

The A.D.F.I. does not hesitate to employ the means it denounces in cults: disinformation, multiplication of repetitive messages, maximum exploitation of dramatic events (Guyana, Waco, the Solar Temple…). It thus engages in a veritable mental intoxication and exploits to the maximum the shaping of minds resulting from a secular domination by the Catholic Church.

The A.D.F.I.’s headquarters is much frequented by the clergy, by Father Trouslard who represents the Vatican there, but also by Mgr Vernette, Father Yvon Lemoine, and the bishop of Tours…). Originally, the A.D.F.I. benefited from premises graciously offered by a Catholic parish.

The A.D.F.I.’s pseudo-scientific foundation is not brought to the knowledge of its members, for the most part sincere. A discourse is disseminated to them. Thanks to an ingenious packaging, the message is rendered credible, attractive, even imbued with altruism. Behind this shop window there is in reality concealed an ideology of exclusion and of hatred.

The A.D.F.I. generally attacks groups carefully selected for their smallness and their pacifism. Its objective is to demonstrate the harmfulness and the extreme dangerousness of the new religious movements, in order to bring the strayed sheep back to the deserted fold of the Church. In fact, it forms part of the Church’s plan of re-evangelisation. It engages in a veritable Crusade.

The A.D.F.I. France is financed by subsidies from the Ministry of Youth and Sports (250,000 F - 38,000 €), the Ministry of Health (200,000 F - 30,000 €) and by numerous communes and departments. Such support is a republican heresy, other countries, for example Germany, refusing that an association of this type be financed by the state.

The A.D.F.I.’s approach is neither scientific, nor logical, nor republican, nor secular, nor altruistic, nor respectful of human rights. It is on the other hand historical, opportunistic and in conformity with a certain tradition of religious discrimination.

C. Paturel points out:

• the existence of a review: BULVAAR, which is a liaison Bulletin for the truth about anti-religious associations. Address: UNVAR, 15 rue des fermiers, 75017 Paris.

• a study by Pierre Barrucand (of the CNRS): “Les sectes antisectes” (The anti-cult cults), in which he sharply criticises the A.D.F.I.,

by the same author, (P. Barrucand), Haines d’hier et d’aujourd’hui, campagnes anti-juifs, anti-francs-maçons, anti-sectes (Hatreds of yesterday and today: anti-Jewish, anti-Freemason, anti-cult campaigns).

The review “Mouvement religieux”, B.P. 733 - 57207 SARREGUEMINES, concerning articles by Bernard Blanche on the A.D.F.I.

THE A.D.F.I. ON CAMPAIGN

Extract from “Haines d’hier et d’aujourd’hui” “Campagne antijuifs, antimaçons, …” by Pierre Barrucand

“When I see a movement like the A.D.F.I. (Association de Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu), I have the impression that one meets there above all people who are in the grip of an obsession, an intoxication. In other words, they undergo exactly the phenomenon they believe they must denounce — without the beginning of a proof — against a certain number of more or less minority religions. If there is mental manipulation, it is the doing of the A.D.F.I., whose members mentally intoxicate themselves.

…But what is absolutely astounding is to see a confidential and quasi-secret movement like the A.D.F.I. taken seriously by certain journalists, indeed certain official circles. It is the central pivot of a disinformation campaign. That is why this association is formidable and perverse. Indeed, it reproduces, almost word for word, the campaigns of the beginning of this century, those of Mgr Jouin, of Father Tourmentin and of many others. It founds its whole action, at best on nasty polemic, at worst on denunciation and disinformation. One finds there almost the accents of the newspaper “Au pilori!”, in the time of the Occupation.

One notes however a serious difference between the A.D.F.I. and the disciples of Mgr Jouin or of Father Tourmentin. This movement has managed to give itself a respectable image and has succeeded in deceiving the press and even sometimes the public authorities. This “cult” — in the most pejorative sense of the term — has thus arrived at a certain power, thus realising in part the shadowy ends it attributes to those it combats, skilfully uniting the atheist rationalism of some and the theological doctrinal intransigence of others, and above all managing to pass itself off as serious and objective.

In the case of the A.D.F.I., I had the impression of people who are truly intoxicated by their mythology and who live in a completely fantasmatic universe. I think that Mgr Jouin, even if he was a worthy priest in other respects, was certainly a character of this kind. I should like to add that the A.D.F.I. is perfect in its role of anti-cult cult: it is a kind of completely frozen structure.

Moreover, are the A.D.F.I.’s activities not in formal contradiction with the anti-racist law in force in France? It is inadmissible that there should be a “two-speed” reading of this law and that the press should agree to repeat the senseless accusations of an “anti-cult cult” composed of monomaniacs.

It is quite obvious that what I am saying could in no case justify the doings of this or that group which might engage in criminal activities. It is simply a question of the right to practise a religion and to express one’s convictions. The press and the public authorities must become aware of the true nature of the A.D.F.I.

A staff member of the A.D.F.I. went so far as to assert that “a member of a cult is not an authentic person”. In this sentence one may replace “member of a cult” by “practising Catholic, free-thinker, Protestant pastor, evangelical deacon, member of a political party…” (delete as inapplicable), without giving it any less veracity, indeed plausibility. And why not “member of the A.D.F.I.”?”

THE A.D.F.I. DISMISSED

On 12 September 1997, the Tribunal de Grande Instance of Paris dismissed the UNADFI’s action for defamation against Louis Pauwels, writer and editorialist, today deceased, and against the Publication Director of Le Figaro.

The association had deemed itself defamed in the article published in Le Figaro of 24 October 1996 under the title Cults: the spirit of inquisition, by the following passage:

“Since 1975, anti-cult associations have been established which globally accuse their adversaries of destructuring individuals and of threatening families. The most virulent of them is the ADFI (Association pour la Défense de la Famille et de l’Individu). It catalyses, if it does not promote, attacks against non-conforming spiritual groups. I learn that it draws inspiration from a current of American psychiatry aimed at the normalisation of society through the destruction of the new religions. […]

This war against cults reawakens the spirit of inquisition and resembles in many cases the witchcraft trials in which rumour took the place of proof.”

It is henceforth sufficient to accuse a marginal group of captation of the personality and mental manipulation for it to find itself ranked among the cults, and, by that very fact, to mobilise general opinion against it. This new witch hunt benefits from the State’s subsidies and, with rare exceptions, from the unreflecting support of the media.”

The Court held that the article expressed, “on the journalist’s part, a warning against excesses liable to undermine freedom of thought and expression, as well as an appeal for tolerance within the law. Now, in a democratic society, the manifestation of such a point of view must obviously be able to contribute, on the same footing as other positions taken, to the public debate on the cult phenomenon”.

CONCERNING THE A.D.F.I.

From “Les radis de la colère”, by Jean-Pierre Joseph

“Very discreetly, for several years, associations have been constituted in every region which have subsequently grouped together and which today form the very famous ADFI (Association de défense de la famille et de l’individu). This movement receives very substantial subsidies from various ministries and from local authorities. Through its intermediary, it is possible for any person claiming to be the victim of a cult to receive an allowance enabling her to reintegrate into society. It is therefore quite possible that the individuals who come to complain on television sets about the “manipulations” they are supposed to have undergone are those who have just collected subsidies. If such is indeed the case, we find ourselves in the unique and exceptional hypothesis of the witness who has “been to the cash desk” before testifying…

The A.D.F.I. is a reassuring body: a grouping of local associations, it puts forward its volunteer administrators, of a certain age, most often of an advanced age, who, although combating all sectarianism, warmly encourage “reintegration” through prayer within the Church (Catholic, of course). These calm and reassuring people use, without one realising it, the methods they denounce: canvassing, telephone harassment, both of the “victims” and of the “adherents”, encouragement of denunciation, lectures and propaganda speeches, etc.

A woman lawyer of the Paris bar was recently astonished at the presence on the national board of directors, to which she had been invited, of a former colonel of the French army’s secret services. For the A.D.F.I.’s rank-and-file militant, the subsidies received must indeed be justified by identifying a maximum of cults. For the one who subsidises, it seems that the aim is more subtle. Progressively, in the collective unconscious, there makes its way the idea according to which if there exists an association (of a “non-profit” purpose) which hunts down “cults”, then cults must exist and that must represent a real danger. The citizen therefore has no impression at all of being manipulated, since the rank-and-file militant does not himself have that impression. Furthermore, the rank-and-file militant believes he is doing humanitarian work and has no awareness at all of the enormous financial stakes which have led the government to promote his association.

The A.D.F.I. intervenes in an unusual manner with the public services (National Education, most often) to report that such and such a person is part of a “cult”. It intervenes with the courts by sending letters to magistrates, in the name of the defence of individuals. It even suggests, in the name of the defence of the family, that children living with their parents in a “cult” be placed directly in the care of the DASS. Thus, for several years, it has fulfilled its role: public opinion now thinks that there exist in France numerous cults, and above all that these cults are dangerous.”

FRANCE AGAINST RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

After the American State Department and the UN condemned France for its attitude towards spiritual minorities, the OSCE takes to task the “homeland of human rights” for violation of religious freedom. The OSCE — Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe — held in Vienna, on 22 March 1999, a conference on the theme of freedom of religion in Europe. Delegations from all the OSCE countries and more than 100 religious and non-governmental organisations took part. 70 delegations took the floor in this debate devoted to religious pluralism and to violations of religious freedom. On the occasion of this conference, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights presented its report “Religious discrimination and violations of the Helsinki commitments”. This report shows that European democracies are violating their commitments relating to freedom of religion and religious tolerance. Here is what this report says of the French situation: “Since 1996, a rise in intolerance and discrimination has been observed in France with regard to the new religions”. In January 1996, the National Assembly published the Guyard report, containing a list of 172 cults or religions judged dangerous. This report engendered calumnious press articles about religious minorities, circulated rumours and false information, and constitutes an incitement to religious intolerance. In this context, a multitude of situations and forms of virtual persecution have developed. Religious minorities have been publicly marginalised and stigmatised. The French government established an “Interministerial Mission for the Fight against Cults” — the MILS — headed by Alain Vivien, the figurehead of the anti-cult movement.

While other reports abroad — Sweden and Italy — recommend dialogue with the so-called “cults”, France has chosen open confrontation. This attitude has engendered calumnious press articles, job losses, religious discrimination on the part of the French authorities and the rise of intolerance on the part of civil society towards people from all walks of life on account of their religious beliefs. CESNUR — Centre for Studies on New Religions — thus gives an account of the OSCE conference: “Although Russia, Belgium, Greece, Belarus and Uzbekistan were also criticised, it is above all France, with its policy on “cults”, which found itself in the dock”. Taking the floor on behalf of France, Denis Barthélémy, secretary-general of the Interministerial Mission for the Fight against Cults, in a very emotional speech and in a frankly hysterical tone, declared that all the attacks against France “emanated from Scientology or from the Jehovah’s Witnesses”. This comment appeared ridiculous given that the criticisms of French policy and of the interministerial mission on cults (MILS) came from several governments and independent NGOs. Monsieur Barthélémy displayed the intolerance of MILS circles which not only substitute for discussion and dialogue a paranoid “conspiracist” attitude — all those who criticise the MILS are agents of Scientology! — but propose as France’s official position on religious freedom notions hostile to religion which go back to the anticlericalism of the 19th century.

CULTS and SURVEILLANCE OF THE POPULATION

To counter cults, the minister of justice, madame Élisabeth GIGOU asks the associations specialising in the fight to dig up affairs in greater number.

By the circular to the magistrates and judges of France of 01.12.98, the Keeper of the Seals presents the action of the new interministerial mission on cults while regretting the lack of complaints. There would not be enough denunciation to allow proceedings to be initiated.

To make up for this dearth of affairs, the minister of justice has charged the judges with working in closer collaboration with the ADFI and the CCMM, supposed to collect testimonies for the prosecution. The anti-cult associations are therefore officially mandated to record complaints and denunciations by way of their numerous branches throughout France.

The ADFI did not wait for the official green light, for it has for years been circulating a list of precise criteria making it possible to know whether a person in our circle belongs to an association, a group, a society or a club of any kind. The list of symptoms defined by the ADFI covers most non-conformist and private behaviours: “Change of dress style and of diet, abundant mail and telephone calls, outings and journeys, interest in a new cause, borrowing of money, long periods of reading and meditation…”. These criteria are in a brochure available in public bodies.

It is therefore advised to warn the ADFI or the Renseignements Généraux if one of our relatives presents one of these “symptoms” or a similar trait of non-conformism. When the “diagnosis” is established, the ADFI recommends discreetly watching the friends and relations of the suspected person. Their telephone numbers and addresses must be noted and a daily journal kept of their doings. The CCMM — Centre Against Mental Manipulation — has drawn up the catalogue of practices liable to fall under an offence of cultism. It is a matter of most non-conventional therapeutic methods such as naturopathy, fasting, sophrology, meditation and the techniques issuing from the “New Age”. Doctor ABGRAL, expert to the interministerial mission on cults, adds to it homeopathy: an occult charm without any effectiveness!!!

The ADFI has also identified the areas at risk such as yoga classes, parental therapy, lectures on UFOs and esoteric subjects… but also sensitive businesses such as spiritualist bookshops, vegetarian restaurants and organic produce networks.

How is one to ensure that the complaints collected are not motivated by intolerance, prejudice or malice? This question has not been debated.

History teaches that the French have a rather pronounced civic sense when it comes to denunciation, but it is henceforth lawful to accuse someone of belonging to a cult in order to declare him unfit to receive an inheritance, to cast suspicion on an unpleasant neighbour or a colleague whose post one covets, or to take revenge for a romantic disappointment!!!

After the “suspect parcel”, here we are moving massively to the “suspect man” if he explores non-conformist paths! That is the message France is preparing to bring to the world.

So get this well into your head:

if you change your dress style, your diet;

if you receive abundant mail and telephone calls;

if you make outings and journeys;

if you have an interest in a new cause;

if you have borrowed money;

if you have long periods of reading and/or meditation;

if you are treated by or if you practise the therapies and techniques not officially recognised such as naturopathy, fasting, sophrology, meditation, the “New Age” techniques (who can specify what exactly that is), homeopathy, yoga;

if you take an interest in these subjects or in that of UFOs or in esotericism…

You are suspect!

The message “love one another” is transformed in an innovative manner into “spy on one another”. You can make yourself useful by circulating this information among your friends and to your yoga practitioner, your sophrologist, your homeopath, your naturopath, your organic shop! For your good reflection and hoping that we shall be many in saying NO!

SPIRITUAL MOVEMENTS

The ignorance of the public authorities!

They want to bring everyone under the same yoke, into the same mould. Now, creation, human value live only through a surpassing; it is always the new, the action that ought to be advocated, but we have not enough strength for it and we do not sufficiently understand the interest of spirituality. Author of more than forty works on symbolism, director of several collections, Jean-Pierre Bayard is known for his contribution to the understanding of universal and particular traditions, such as those of freemasonry and of the compagnonnage.

J.L.: You regularly publish books on symbolism and initiatory societies. What is the meaning of your research at present?

Jean-Pierre Bayard: Traditional thought animates all my writings, some forty works. I have always wanted to show, on the basis of symbolic values, the surpassing of the man who is in search of himself. I have written an abecedary of the symbolic expressions which are found in masonry, the compagnonnage, the rosicrucians, celticism and in the thoughts which are at the basis of our spirituality. A work of course always to be completed. I have also undertaken, in the same line of thought, research on the black virgins by questioning the symbolic values which may attach to them.

J. L.: You speak of “traditional thought”. How would you define it?

J.-P. B.: We have only one tradition, unique, universal, from which everything emanates, and each people, each civilisation, each religion draws from it a particular point. Tradition is conveyed by myths, symbols, the art of memory, without being confused with popular customs which are exoteric elements and no longer sacred. That is why one sees many resemblances between all our traditions and why one finds the same symbols adapted to a particular use and to local customs.

J. L.: Your latest work deals with cults and secret societies. What is the definition you give of the cult?

J.-P. B.: At present one most often gives a pejorative connotation to the word “cult” without being able to give a precise definition of it. I would say that it is an assembly of people who think the same thing, who remain in a common thought which is given to them by a teaching, a morality, by external values. All Christians have the same thought about the Church. Another group will have another conception. There exist “New Age” groups claiming a neo-spiritualism, which unfortunately seek to separate the adherents from their circle, from society. Members established for life then profit from the material advantages and provoke ruptures when they ought to advocate only fraternity among all men.

But fortunately not all groups have these structures; most, faced with the void of our industrial civilisation, seek to unite for an improvement of man and to try to work in the best conditions. If they think they have found something worthwhile, they seek to transmit it. I think for example of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who depend on Christianity. They apply the scriptures to the letter and they transmit their message so that we may reach heaven, be among the elect. There is therefore a respect to be had before their beliefs which one is not obliged to share.

J. L.: What would you recommend to someone who wants to take part in one of these groups?

J.-P. B.: One must naturally be careful before committing oneself. But the person must set aside what may be said to her; she must judge for herself. To enter a group is to try to bring one’s spiritual aspiration into conformity with what is going to be given to one. There is therefore an inner study to be made to test the sincerity, the loyalty. One must also try to see what the group one wants to enter has as an external form and what it can transmit. The one who leads must be disinterested, there ought to be no question of money, no enrichment or cult of personality, but only a positive moral repercussion on the group as a whole.

J. L.: What do you think of the way the question of cults is currently approached?

J.-P. B.: Governments want to shelter themselves from the criticisms of public opinion, itself manoeuvred by slogans. They do not consider the groups on the spiritual plane and do not study the groups in the depth of their behaviour. The historian of religions must make studies and comparisons locally and on a world scale, sometimes over a whole lifetime, to penetrate a new spirit. Those who might know and who have studied these different movements are not sufficiently consulted. I think of those professors who are paid by these same governments, in the face of whom politicians will adopt, without much discernment, entirely opposed positions. For example, professors have made sociological studies on Nouvelle Acropole which show that its former members, those who left it, do not consider it a cult, but on the contrary a group which opens onto human fraternity. Yet it is presented in an entirely opposed way. There are many worthwhile works which are not taken into account.

J. L.: What seems to you to be the legitimacy of parliamentary commissions to deal with the question?

J.-P. B.: In France I made myself known to a parliamentary group which worked on this theme. I was answered, with thanks, that the members could get in touch with the people I was suggesting they contact, since they worked only among themselves, in secret. That is regrettable. These parliamentarians most certainly have solid human and political qualities, but they are not specialised in a complex field, difficult to understand. They have not the time for it and it is not their function. It is beyond their competence. They rely on the reports of the Renseignements Généraux, which do not have this mission and whose investigative values are different: the latter cannot be held responsible for judgements of interpretation. To take another example, I think of the Cultural Office of Cluny which was presented as a cult. This group, which is part of the Catholic Church, was not heard by the parliamentary commission, any more than was the Catholic Church. Among many other cases which deserve a more attentive study one may also cite the Golden Rosycross of Haarlem, connected also with the Cathar spirit. Everything which does not correspond to the dominant ideas is placed on the index, whereas we ought to have freedom of thought.

J. L.: What do you think of the parliamentary report in France?

J.-P. B.: The deputies’ report can bring considerable harm to certain groups judged, without real proof, as dangerous. In designating them one creates a movement against them when one was unaware of them and did not speak of them before the report… I myself in my book was embarrassed because I did not know whether I should cite them or give their addresses. Through an organised vindictiveness one arrives at disasters: for example, Nouvelle Acropole was attacked in its offices. Other groups placed on the index undergo the same fate, lose their reputation. All this because no effort is made to understand their real motivation, when our laws ought to suffice to charge them or not.

J. L.: What for you are the consequences of this situation?

J.-P. B.: When one wants to curb a movement without trying to understand its inner value, without being able to analyse it, there is an arbitrary measure and an infringement of individual freedom. Spiritual value and artistic value demand that there be the widest understanding. Artists, who are creators, are ahead of their time and are always placed on the index. Why should one not judge Picasso outside our society if one analyses him in terms of what was done artistically before? Likewise one must be able to judge serenely these “cults” which depart from a habitual mode of reflection.

J.-P. B.: One must hope that this division due to the cult phenomenon will be only of short duration and will have been only a “fashion”, that our civilisation which wishes to defend freedom and human rights will know how to rise above human quarrels in order to take an interest in and merge into the sacred, the true richness of evolved man.