The State Is a Cult: Hervé Duray Applies the Parliamentary Criteria to the State

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’.”