The MIVILUDES Report: Dramatic Hysteria and Incompetence

CICNS (June 2011)

Part 1: The “2012” threat (read the report)

Better than a disaster movie: the MIVILUDES report

Georges Fenech, in his “president’s word”, sets the tone of this new hysterical report from MIVILUDES: “Who does not remember the tragedy of the Order of the Solar Temple in December 1995, those 16 charred bodies, including those of 3 children?”. A little further on he justifies this brutal introduction: “The Miviludes had a duty to anticipate the ever-probable consequences of such anxiety-inducing discourse”.

We judge it still more probable that the 1995 event (16 years ago already, and nothing similar since) reflects no significant tendency of beliefs in France or elsewhere, and that MIVILUDES’s own “discourse” is the most anxiety-inducing for the general public and for people holding different beliefs. MIVILUDES’s crudeness and disconnection from reality, in an alarming social and environmental context, give its remarks a surreal quality that would be laughable if it did not find so much echo in the media and have so much impact on the public mind.

MIVILUDES says it wishes to “foster a genuine awareness among institutions and public opinion of the risks of the instrumentalisation of the fears aroused by these anxiety-inducing messages”. We agree thus far, except that the messages Mr Fenech and his team denounce are unfortunately not their own, but those of the “New Age” (a major planetary threat well known to anyone concerned with the fate of humanity!), and all of this, of course, “without any will to stigmatise or to catastrophise, and while recalling respect for all beliefs”. No fewer than 27 groups or persons are mentioned in this single report, without the suspicion inflicted upon them being properly substantiated.

Very well done, as usual.

The report states: “The approach of an end of the world announced for 2012 may thus be the occasion for acts prejudicial to persons or to the social body. No one can of course guarantee that such events will occur. No one wishes it, obviously.” Should one detect in this somewhat surprising clarification the beginnings of an awareness of the exaggeration of this hype? We strongly doubt it.

But here is our own clarification: first of all, we have been able to verify that it is well known in New Age circles that the prospect of 2012 is approached as the possibility of a radical change in our society (it is the idea of the “new world”, in terms barely different from political jargon) and not of a collective suicide at the end of the world (what, moreover, would be the logic of a collective suicide if the world is coming to an end?). Next, the beliefs referred to are clearly (and always have been, throughout the history of humanity) the expression of a desire for renewal which the government is rather ill-advised to want to stifle in the present period, even if it is expressed in unconventional ways. Finally, the resolutely superficial and emotional approach to this question can only add weight to the case against MIVILUDES, whose objective is visibly not constructive despite the conventional formulas seeking to pass off bladders as lanterns (such as “without stigmatising any belief whatsoever”, etc.).

Spiritual, therapeutic and educational minorities, continuously harassed and defamed by the media and by MIVILUDES, will appreciate the following indication of a dérive sectaire in this context: “development of a feeling of persecution by the outside world and the surrounding society”. How could one not experience a feeling of persecution under these conditions? The snake can only bite its own tail!

Among MIVILUDES’s abusive criteria, let us note a newcomer: “resettlement in the countryside” (“this indication is often the sign of a withdrawal, at once physical and psychological, of the group from the outside world, resettlement in the countryside making it possible both to render surveillance by the public authorities more difficult and to reinforce cohesion within the group, so as to exercise greater control over all its members.”). It should soon be possible to suspect any person or family who might wish to live in a quiet place.

An intelligent approach (such as observing these groups without prejudice, if not ethnological immersion) would have allowed the MIVILUDES team to stop surfing on the personal prejudices and phobias of its members and to realise how disproportionate its discourse is to the reality on the ground. But do they want to know the reality? What, then, is the “agenda” of this Mission, which subsists on public funds despite the flagrant inanity of its action, the doubts expressed by various media about the probity of its president, the falsehood of its alarmist figures, the illegality of most of its descents on communities and the harm it represents for the most peaceable part of the population? At the heart of its campaign (a political one, this) lies a strong tendency to take people for fools or halfwits.

Will a century have to pass before History looks lucidly upon this aberration?

The end of the world in 2012: the situation in Europe according to MIVILUDES

Once again, MIVILUDES discredits its analysis of the supposed French problem of dérives sectaires by taking as an example the situation in other European countries, when they all show that the authorities of our near neighbours do not regard dérives sectaires and beliefs in an end of the world in 2012 as requiring particular action. Why then would France be the only country to act, considering that the same groups and beliefs are present? Two hypotheses:

France is the only country really to become aware of the danger to its citizens; the other European countries are improvident and neglect the safety of their nationals.
Our European neighbours have a pragmatic and lucid approach and do not create a phobia where there is no cause to create one.

There is scarcely any doubt that Georges Fenech leans towards the first hypothesis, he who believes that other nations envy us MIVILUDES. MIVILUDES has, to be sure, written the anti-cult song and sings it in every key, with a certain audience share; but this success comes solely from the ease of dragging people downwards. It is no small paradox that this MIVILUDES report, like the others for that matter, warns against those who would profit from millenarian fear while itself drawing on every device of an outrageous anti-cult fear fabricated out of whole cloth.

Part 2: “The dérive sectaire in the field of health”

The section on “health” is introduced by this statistic:

According to the WHO, “in wealthy countries, a growing number of patients turn to alternative medicines for preventive or palliative care. In France, 75% of the population has resorted at least once to complementary treatments; in Germany, 77% of pain-treatment services offer acupuncture and, in the United Kingdom, spending on alternative or complementary medicines reaches 2.3 billion dollars a year.”

The MIVILUDES drafter interprets these figures as an alarming sign: “all these figures must prompt us to exercise vigilance”, even though he says beforehand (without this seeming to affect his logic) that there is “a growing number of new patients (editor’s note: cancers), estimated at 358,000 in 2010, that is, +12% new cases”.

We did not expect an intelligent and rigorous study from MIVILUDES on the effectiveness of official treatments and on mortality compared with that of non-conventional medicines, but the case for the prosecution appears all the cruder with this introduction (denial of, and lack of respect for, the growing general interest in other methods of care and for conventional medicine’s failure to treat cancers).

The bare assertion “Three patients thus died because they had put an end to conventional treatment and had not even been able to benefit from palliative care”, without proof of the supposed causal link, is to be set against the refusal to confront the terrible mortality figures produced by the brutal official methods. An unsurprising procedure on the part of this outfit, unscientific, without sociological perspective, and with no will to approach the truth.

With evasive formulas such as “The ‘pseudo-therapist”s hold over the patient may be established”, it is obvious to any critical eye that “pseudo-therapist” may be replaced by “doctor” or even “therapist” without that changing the notion of mental hold, and that this merely instils the idea of a single permitted thought and of an absolute truth on the side of the system in place.

“Cancer frightens people, and pseudo-therapists exploit that fear to offer their methods” sustains the myth of the swindling, deranged therapist principally motivated by unwholesome intentions, as in a bad horror film. MIVILUDES’s style is indicative of its prejudice about the general public, manipulable a priori, and susceptible to the emotional power of words.

We do not think, however, that all improvised methods deserve to be respected; the question of health is important and demands genuine attention, but MIVILUDES’s Manichaean discourse only impoverishes the debate. In this regard, the following sentence is as crude as the previous one, it suffices, indeed, to observe where exclusion really manifests itself and who the gurus are, in order to laugh bitterly at it: “Alternative medicines are dangerous when they are exclusive and excluding. The cult practice, the discourse conveyed by the guru, is often to assert: “I shall succeed where conventional medicine has failed”

There follow criticisms of various alternative methods offered as treatment, with conflations that make it possible to discredit all those which might give an impression of credibility. We are a long way from the “identification of promising practices” which had been officially recommended by the Ministry of Health.

The list of offences set out in the Penal Code, used to repress alternative methods (“the theories and practices which advance no proof and enjoy no scientifically established validation”) and their promoters, only confirms the instrumentalisation of the judicial system by this police of thought and of consciences, as we have been able to observe over the course of our many interviews with the numerous victims of France’s brand of anti-cult campaigning.

See also our video interviews and articles on the same subject: The Guéniot affair Philippe Dargère Jean-Claude Guyard Tal Schaller “They killed my mother” Beljanski

MIVILUDES reports: 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

The MIVILUDES Report: Dramatic Hysteria and Incompetence

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