France Has Been Fighting Minorities Obsessively for Thirty Years, without Safeguards

France Has Been Fighting Minorities (Called “Cults”) Obsessively for Thirty Years, without Safeguards

Éric Bouzou (February 2012)

The “cults” as targets Let us lift once and for all the veil on the hypocrisy of the pseudo “fight against dérives sectaires”. France has not ceased fighting the cults (a term synonymous today with criminal group, designating pell-mell the spiritual, educational and therapeutic minorities) since the beginning of the 1980s. The creation of the MIVILUDES (Interministerial mission of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires) in 2002, replacing the MILS (Interministerial mission for the fight against the cults), was dust in the eyes, in order to give a connotation more respectful of the rules of a State of law to a veritable enterprise of institutionalised discrimination. This fight combines a spirit of intolerance, duplicity of language, verbal violence and repressive violence. The cosmetic effects of language, deceiving only those willing to be fooled, are as unsubtle as their enunciators: thus, certain anti-cult activists, restraining themselves with great difficulty from pronouncing the term “cults”, will speak of “movements with dérives sectaires”, of “cult organisations or movements”, etc. And if only one recent clue were to be retained, not the least would be the new name of the MIVILUDES website: www.derives-sectes.gouv.fr. The notion of “dérive sectaire” as a subterfuge for continuing to fight the “cults” If a fight against “excesses” (independently of memberships), and not a priori against groups, could have had a certain legitimacy, the deliberately maintained vagueness and ambiguity of the notion of “dérive sectaire” removes all credibility from the action of the public authorities.

For some ten years, the MIVILUDES (and before it the MILS) relied on a list of criteria to define the “dérive sectaire”. The ineptitude of this heteroclite list (which nevertheless made it possible to classify arbitrarily as a “cult” a good number of minorities) certainly led the MIVILUDES to attempt a new definition; the dérive sectaire would henceforth be “a perversion of freedom of thought, opinion or religion which infringes public order, the laws or regulations, fundamental rights, the security or integrity of persons. It is characterised by the implementation, by an organised group or by an isolated individual, whatever its nature or activity, of pressures or techniques whose aim is to create, maintain or exploit in a person a state of psychological or physical subjection, depriving him of a part of his free will, with damaging consequences for that person, his circle or society”. We have amply shown the intellectual fraud constituted by the notion of mental manipulation, rebaptised “psychological subjection” in the About-Picard law. The accusation of mental manipulation being the spearhead of anti-cult action, it is therefore not surprising that this notion, under different names, should now be at the centre of the definition of a “dérive sectaire”. Several pseudo-scientific concepts (and described as such by a majority of researchers) – “psychological subjection”, “loss of free will” – are thus made official in the anti-cult lexicon of the public authorities, including that of the magistracy, since the prosecutors have received from the chancellery a circular in similar terms inviting them to harden their action in the matter of dérives sectaires (and we are told that justice is independent in France). With the criteria of dérives sectaires, the MIVILUDES imposed itself, stealthily, as a de facto censor, applying these criteria only to the groups designated as “cults” by its own care. But it was easy to show, insofar as one granted any meaning to these criteria, that the environment of the company and that of the family, among others, were among the principal crucibles of such excesses; we have for example applied these criteria successfully to the financial system and to France Télécom.

With this new definition of the “dérive sectaire”, the danger of a totalitarian skid is multiplied tenfold, and it is worrying to see that so few commentators seem to have noticed it. To give citizens or a public authority the means of stripping other citizens of their responsibility, by invoking for oneself or others a psychological subjection capable of altering freedom of thought, opinion or religion, is the door open to every abuse. It is the end of the value of consent between responsible adults (one of the pillars of private-law relations and of the law of liberties according to Patrice Rolland, professor at Paris XII), which could be declared invalid following a loss of free will, with the endorsement of false experts sitting on the Orientation Council of the MIVILUDES.

The “dérive sectaire” is not a new form of excess that had gone undetected in 2,500 years of the evolution of law. It is a dishonest tool of stigmatisation against a category of citizens declared irresponsible or victims and claimed to be mentally manipulated: namely the spiritual, educational and therapeutic minorities. Why those minorities? Because they broach a theme which is a pathological French obsession: the spiritual and the religious, and because they call into question two sanctuaries of the republican religion: education and health. The anti-cult casuistry is thus celebrated against a background of perverted secular values. In any event, it is not acceptable to judge citizens a priori (whose practices are listed as dangerous in an official référentiel) on the basis of their supposed excesses. This practice automatically arouses a negative judgement, a suspicion, a feeling of fear towards these citizens. It is even less acceptable to place at citizens’ disposal an online denunciation form to track down the alleged “dérives sectaires”, as the MIVILUDES has just done on its website.

Let us imagine an interministerial mission of vigilance and combat against the excesses of political personnel – which one would have taken care to rebaptise “political skulduggery” – equipped with a nominative référentiel placed at the disposal of associations fighting political malpractice and of any body wishing to guard itself against the deviances of this or that party or political actor. A few commentators would popularise the term “schemer” and, given its success, one would end up no longer using the term “politician” but its new synonym “schemer”. Of course, on the television sets, the fine minds would agree that the term “schemer” is a little “loaded”, but given its common usage, they would agree to keep using it. Would we accept that? No. Then why do it for another category of citizens?

The villain, the false good guy and the others In this progressive crumbling of reflection and good sense, there is the vicious villain: the MIVILUDES, and the timorous good guy: the Ministry of the Interior. The Ministry’s moderating action in the matter of the anti-cult fight, notably through the Central Bureau of Religious Affairs, may have had an effect. But the insistence on the importance of relying on “concrete elements, proven and criminally reprehensible facts” to fight against dérives sectaires (source) no longer holds water with a definition of the dérive sectaire as delirious as the one proposed by the MIVILUDES. From then on, the positioning of the Ministry of the Interior, which has lost the battle of communication in this domain, voluntarily or not, far from tempering the repressive frenzy of the MIVILUDES, becomes its endorsement (even in action, with the anti-dérives-sectaires cell CAIMADES become the armed wing of the MIVILUDES): this repression can hide behind words respectful of the rules of law. How could the whole of the political, media and intellectual personnel (with rare exceptions) have let itself be caught in the net of the anti-cult pensée unique, either by espousing it or by remaining silent? Historical and opportunistic reasons, presented by rare sociologists, historians and actors of society, explain why France is favourable soil for the anti-cult doxa (see their interviews or works on our site). One can also advance three particular reasons explaining this intellectual impasse. The first reason is that in this period of severe crisis, of the collapse of society, fears are gaining on everyone. These fears touch deep layers of the person, from which one emerges only by a work of voluntary introspection. It is not certain that many of our “elites”, lost in the superficiality of things – their principal preoccupation being to maintain themselves in their elite status - have taken the time to go and look at these zones of interior tumult. The second reason is an extension of the first, on the particular subject of “mental manipulation”. The temptation of “manipulation”, and effective manipulation, are doubtless at the heart of our interpersonal relations and of our desperate quest for love, recognition, power, pleasure. If a theory is presented to us, even one evidently false, claiming that certain persons (the “cult gurus”) have a particular power of “mental manipulation”, not available to the common run of mortals, capable of perverting our free will (which doubtless nobody knows how to define precisely), it is probable that fear will prevail over reason, independently of IQ and diplomas. There again, one gets out of these ruts only by a work of deepened awareness. The third reason is linked to the “success” of the anti-cult fight, probably exceeding the hopes of its most virulent protagonists, who profit from the ill wind they have in their sails. The “cults” are beyond the status of “scapegoat”; they have the qualification of public enemy (they are an “axis of evil” according to the ethnologist Maurice Duval). The common scapegoats (immigrants, Muslims, Roma, etc.) today have their detractors but also their defenders. It can pay, for a politician or a prominent intellectual, to position himself one way or the other towards a scapegoat. Denouncing the unjustified construction of a “public enemy” is on the other hand professionally suicidal (Emmanuelle Mignon, for a time director of cabinet of President Nicolas Sarkozy, learned this to her cost when she stated that the cults were a “non-problem” in France). The “cults” being perceived only through the deforming prism of the anti-cult fight and of reports in the form of regulated lynching, their members have no flesh (one sees only those presented as victims), no positive visual consistency such as would be aroused by curiosity and openness of mind and would lead people to end up asking questions about their status as pariahs. In the absence of these realities, who then will go and “delegitimise” himself to help virtual “cranks”? As for the general public, as on many subjects, it is still rather passive. If it is pulled upwards, it will willingly go upwards; if it is pulled downwards, as the MIVILUDES and the principal media do, it lets itself be dragged along without reacting. And the “cults” in all this? If one sets aside those who ride the anti-cult wave, there remain only very few effective activists: a handful of officials at the MIVILUDES paid (how much, by the way?) to find cults and who therefore find them (they do not lack zeal), a handful of officials at the Ministry of the Interior and in the Prefectures who, until now, have rather dragged their feet but now seem to be getting caught up in the killing game, a few prosecutors and investigating judges sensitive to Georges Fenech’s lobbying, a few “cult-obsessed” parliamentarians, to take up the expression of Father Jacques Trouslard, and the quasi-officials of the anti-cult associations (ADFI and CCMM) financed by the State. In all, a few hundred people at most. Facing them, more than 500,000 people supposedly members of “cult communities”, according to the MIVILUDES. How do a few hundred people manage to seal the fate of hundreds of thousands of others? Let us advance two reasons. The first is that the anti-cult reflex – “the cult is not me, it’s the other” – is still strongly present in the very ranks of those who are labelled “cults”. The same fears touch everyone. As long as these reflexes are not understood and modified, there is little chance a change will see the day. The second reason is that there is no massive movement of solidarity to defend spiritual, educational and therapeutic liberties. Most groups defend their own chapel, and one can hardly reproach them for it once they are subjected to the anti-cult steamroller. However, to shed a qualification as “public enemy”, solitary actions have little chance of succeeding. Even the scathing condemnation of France by the European Court of Human Rights for violation of article 9 on religious freedom, in its trial against the Jehovah’s Witnesses, has not in the least dented the anti-cult hysteria. Our petition proposing the abolition of the MIVILUDES and its replacement by an independent observatory gathered in two years fewer than 2,800 signatures, which is derisory. Knowing that political personnel are truly sensitive to only one thing: the electoral weight of the people facing them, it seems nevertheless that a movement of solidarity at once individual and collective, beyond the chapels, would be of a nature to bend their policy. 100,000 people expressing themselves serenely but firmly through a petition (or an action of the same type) to say that “enough is enough, alternative life choices must be respected” would probably have the beginnings of an impact. Until today, CICNS has not managed to arouse this movement, either among enough prominent actors of society or among the minorities, which leads one to say, somewhat provocatively, that the said “cults”, taken as a whole, consent for the time being to the situation that is theirs. The spark that can change things is doubtless in other hands, but it is not impossible that it will be preceded by a still more ferocious repressive period.

Read: France fights against minority groups (called the “cults”) and not against dérives sectaires: demonstrations, with supporting quotations