Commentary on the 2005 MIVILUDES Report

Commentary on the 2005 report of MIVILUDES

Interministerial Mission of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires

by Patrick Le Berre

(see our interview with Patrick Le Berre)

What is one to make of a report by an Interministerial Mission of Vigilance and Combat against Dérives Sectaires which single-handedly employs the whole of the 9 existing cult mechanisms?

In this document MIVILUDES, which defends itself in relation to the Prefectures so as to remain the central organ of the entire French apparatus for the study of cults (p. 137), will be analysed as a whole comprising, to be sure, the central organ, but also by extension all the actors of the campaign. MIVILUDES’s habit of passing the ball to the decentralised organs will thus be short-circuited, since it must assume its responsibility before the citizen, before the Prime Minister and his State apparatus.

1 First, the fact of cutting itself off from a large part of society and from realities is a mechanism that generates the isolation of this State grouping.

Indeed, it is symptomatic that MIVILUDES itself detects a strong expansion of alternative therapies, which in 4 years have gone from 90 to 200 (pages 9, 27 and 31), at the same time as it records a worsening of the malaise of our society and of its individuals (page 27), without being capable of opening itself to that malaise and of encouraging the search for reliable and innovative solutions.

It is excessively acute, the fact that MIVILUDES cuts itself off from a whole section of the French population which seeks to live an awakening, a spirituality, a well-being, a transformation, by stigmatising each of these domains and systematically suspecting them of dérive sectaire.

It is this first dérive which leads MIVILUDES to develop a schizoid State social body, which recognises only the “left brain” mode and ignores, or indeed despises, the “right brain” mode.

2 Second, the fact of systematically criticising every domain that may disturb it is a mechanism of extremist judgement. The frequent use of the a priori value judgement, of easy conflation, of abusive generalisations, of artistic vagueness employed as implicit judgement, is present in more than 54 instances. This harmful attitude can only lead the State social body to a characterised state of psychosis.

3 Third, the fact of prophesying a rapid social chaos in the so-called “cult” domain without even having given a legal definition of it, and of doing so demagogically, is another of MIVILUDES’s tendencies. This tendency feeds and sustains fear. The conclusion of the report (p. 157), which must summarise as well as possible an overall document — especially for politicians who have little time to read 175 ambiguous pages attentively — sets the following tone: “No sector of our territory is spared, no type of activity is safe from cult risk. No business, no family can have the certainty that at a given moment it will not find itself exposed to dérives sectaires, with their train of dramatic consequences which we know only too well”.

This kind of attitude can only generate and propagate fear among those who listen to their message — certainly not give them the courage to see what it is really about. Fear of anything new in the psychological or spiritual field is pushed to its paroxysm, since no fewer than 72 themes or spiritual movements, alternative therapies and even a political party (p. 21) are put on the index, without the shadow of a conference by the MIVILUDES in charge of these problems, on their subject, to validate their harmfulness. And MIVILUDES declares, on page 31, that it is not citing (solely in the field of gentle medicine) the more than 200 alternative methods under the vigilance of the public authorities — while few complaints have been lodged (p. 34) and the associations collecting any complaints have developed strongly (p. 40).

This immeasurable degree of fear then imprints an acute paranoid state on the whole State social body.

4 Fourth, the fact of claiming a Mission, of promoting a social, political, philosophical, religious, scientific doctrine with a well-defined ideology of cult eradication so as to pass itself off as the Saviour organisation, all while employing untouchable dogmas is a thoroughly well identified cult mechanism in MIVILUDES.

That this mission should be unique and specific to France ought to surprise more than one person. The report notes a French apparatus which goes down badly in Anglo-Saxon countries (USA included), which prefer to employ the term cults rather than the direct English cognate of secte (“the actions [of France] are often not well understood by many of our [foreign] interlocutors, for whom the notion of secte is unknown”). It goes down just as badly in Europe, apart from certain sectors and on the part of certain political tendencies in Austria, Serbia, the Czech Republic, and in one German Land (Bavaria). The report further indicates that action no. 7 of 2004, to undertake a comparative study of foreign arrangements, was not carried through. That action has even disappeared from the 2006 action plan.

Where the shoe pinches at international level is when Asma Jahangir, the special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief at the UN Commission on Human Rights, sets out in the 2006 report her real disquiet at the French apparatus for combating cults (questions 107 to 114, see http://www.cicns.net/ONU2006.htm).

That the cult ideology should be based on no legal foundation ought likewise to surprise more than one person. Action no. 8 of 2004, which was to specify the notion of dérives sectaires, was not even carried through. It too has purely and simply disappeared from the 2006 agenda.

What is more, MIVILUDES claims this mission while distributing en masse the documents associated with this doctrine, as any spiritual movement of cult tendency would do (1,500 copies of the guide for the public official distributed throughout the administration (p. 115), even though its doctrinal content is open to question).

It is worth recalling that the origins of MIVILUDES’s creation lie both in a report of the RG and in a politico-business context manipulated by a few politicians well known for their totalitarian and intolerant stance. One sees the result 10 years later. This year, two thirds of the few questions put to MIVILUDES by Deputies of the National Assembly on the subject of the problem of dérives sectaires (9) came from only two deputies.

5 Fifth, a MIVILUDES system that plays a double game:

A total maternal dependence of religious, social, educational or training organisations on the State, or a total dependence of official therapies on the prevailing single dominant thought. This dependence is apt to generate an unhealthy feeling of impunity when each person can feel protected by the diplomas or approvals granted. It also generates its corollary: a loss of autonomy of existence and of thought.

A guilt for those who would defy the law of the Father State, from the moment MIVILUDES never stops, in its report, blowing hot and cold at the same time, the better to throw anyone off and to encourage them to keep quietly in the shadow of the Father’s single thought. This second method then creates an enslavement and a conditioning of our fellow citizens, who are consequently little inclined to react.

Playing the two hands at once makes MIVILUDES a cult organisation of the Father-and-Mother type.

6 Sixth, an apparatus — legislative, administrative, executive, judicial — employing coercive methods almost unique in the world (there is scarcely anywhere but China that goes further), where interventions by the police, gendarmerie or general intelligence services, administrative and tax harassment, and abusive judicial problems are ever more numerous (see the Essentiel affair). This apparatus makes MIVILUDES an organ of the coercive cult State (physical, emotional and mental coercion), contrary to what it claims to be.

For all that, the report itself reveals the disproportion between the cases rightly punished, the affairs suspected, and the groups or individuals under suspicion. The latter are thus pinned in a defamatory manner at least 24 times in the 2005 report.

This meagre record is rather remarkable, given the pressure of the MIVILUDES network as a whole and the associated manipulations and moral constraints. Thus, apart from 6 movements with “cult practice” that are supervised (Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Raëlians, The Exclusive Brethen, Sahaja Yogi, La Citadelle), and 2 individual affairs judged genuinely criminal in penal matters and punished in 2005 (Néophare and Ryke Hamer), the report can objectively record nothing else in connection with cultism of any kind. Very often these affairs are ordinary-law matters which, if transposed to other parts of society, would give far more material for criminal offence than here, where the situation is very calm.

Within the MIVILUDES apparatus, it is very characteristic to note a strong activism from only two large groups of ministries: that of the Interior and Regional Planning together with that of Defence (with a great deal of data and resources coming from the RG alone), and that of Employment, Social Cohesion and Housing, together with that of Health and Solidarity (with a great deal of data and resources coming from the Associations for the Defence of the Family and the Individual and above all from the Orders of physicians and pharmacists). Each of the two large groups of ministries shares out the two great so-called cult themes — that is, spiritual movements and alternative therapies — one might think each has an interest in defending its lobby…

The ministries of Justice, Foreign Affairs, the Economy, Finance and Industry, National Education, Higher Education and Research, and Youth, Sports and Community Life have for their part both a very meagre record of observations in cult matters and a weak activism with few sources of real data.

Moreover, no fewer than 51 instances of abuse of dominant position on MIVILUDES’s part appear in this report, sometimes with infringement of physical integrity (armed intervention by the French State in the affair of the false suicide of the Order of the Solar Temple, according to Yves Boisset’s 2005 French film, 70 minutes, broadcast on A2 on 2 February 2006) and incitement to denunciation (at least one admitted on p. 125, for health personnel undergoing training in new therapies).

7 Seventh, MIVILUDES’s egocentrism — passing itself off as the central organ, sole repository of competence on dérives sectaires, the inescapable leader (pp. 137-138) — leads it to impose a single thought without giving other currents of opinion the possibility of confronting it. This acute navel-gazing brings MIVILUDES to preach immobility and invariance in the sectors it regards as its own preserve (education, training, religion, the social sector), and to defend the medical, vaccine and pharmaceutical lobbies currently in place, at the risk of no longer having any autonomy of thought or action.

This seventh cult mechanism, which makes it out to be the sole healing “Guru” of the evil that cults are, is very much present in the State social body.

8 Eighth, the methods of persuasion and of media focusing of attention employed to make people believe in strong dérives are omnipresent. No fewer than 66 instances of mental manipulation in the report, and a vast training apparatus extended to the whole administration on the basis of the document produced by the RG — hence made solely from police criteria. On no account is there any study apparatus dealing with the content of the practices of spiritual movements or alternative therapies.

Since it is precisely France that passed the About-Picard law in 2001 — judged liberticidal at the Council of Europe — on the offence of fraudulent abuse of a state of weakness (or of mental manipulation, or of placing in a state of subjection, or of fraudulent abuse of a state of trust), it would be fitting for MIVILUDES to apply it to itself first.

9 Ninth, a normalisation of the initiatory or esoteric processes which spiritual movements or alternative therapies may experience, for purposes of manipulation or use in the world, is frequently employed. This normalisation shows MIVILUDES’s high degree of incompetence (see the vague definitions of the cult in the 2004 report, the erroneous criteria for assessing cult risk p. 64, the economic criteria for assessing cult risk p. 65, the far-fetched typology of cult groups and the new abstract typology of cult organisation p. 63). MIVILUDES permits itself to take up erroneous, truncated notions and concepts, to declare itself competent where it visibly is not (since its members do not, until proof to the contrary, do any spiritual or therapeutic work). It intervenes incompetently at least 30 times in the 2005 report.

It is also characteristic to see that action no. 6 of 2004, which consisted simply in establishing a link between the administration and university research (and that for proselytising rather than study purposes), was not even broached in 2005, and no longer figures among the actions for 2006.

In reality, the real need would on the contrary be to launch calls for tender to carry out ethnological studies on spiritual movements, and therapeutic studies on the new therapies in vogue in France.

That would make it possible to know certain practices better and to validate them if necessary.

Instead of which, MIVILUDES, in this ninth cult tendency, leaves the field open to every dérive, and does not even deign to make the first contacts.

Better still, it stigmatises the new therapies by declaring — without realising the stupidity of its own remarks — that these therapies are not validated (implicitly by the French State, which refuses to validate even a single one). MIVILUDES could not have done better to make them spread still faster and more widely…

How can one continue to trust such an organisation, which erects cult mechanisms into its war-horse and yet employs them all itself?

The conclusion goes to MIVILUDES, on page 6 of the 2005 report, which it should also say to itself:

“What is a defender of freedom worth whose mode of functioning, erected into a system, rests on the alienation of minds and of goods?”

Summary of the references in the MIVILUDES 2005 report

54 Conflations, value judgements, artistic vagueness, abusive generalisations:

Pages: 4 (2 times), 5 (2 times), 6 (2 times), 9 (4 times), 13 (2 times), 16, 19, 20 (2 times), 21, 22, 23, 25, 30, 32, 33, 39, 40 (3 times), 41 (2 times), 42, 43 (2 times), 47, 49, 51, 53 (2 times), 56 (2 times), 57, 58, 67, 72, 117, 123 (2 times), 124, 125, 129 (2 times), 130, 131, 135, 147

24 Defamations:

Pages: 16, 20, 21 (2 times), 22, 23 (2 times), 25 (3 times), 26, 29, 33 (8 times), 45, 47, 50, 53

51 Abuses of dominant position:

Pages: 4, 5, 9, 20, 21 (3 times), 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 (2 times), 31, 32 (2 times), 33, 35, 39, 42, 43 (2 times), 44, 46, 47, 51 (2 times), 52, 56, 57, 86, 88, 98 (2 times), 102 (2 times), 111, 115, 118, 123, 124, 125 (2 times), 126, 127, 131, 133, 139 (2 times), 147, 164

30 Erroneous definitions, incompetence:

Pages: 4, 12, 14, 20, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38 (2 times), 39, 41 (2 times), 42, 44, 45, 51 (2 times), 71, 72, 98, 99, 100, 129, 130, 132, 134 (2 times), 147

66 Mental manipulations:

Pages: 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 (2 times), 13, 19, 20, 21 (2 times), 22, 23 (2 times), 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 (2 times), 33, 34, 35, 39, 41, 42, 43 (2 times), 45, 51 (2 times), 55 (2 times), 57, 59, 67 (2 times), 80, 86, 93, 94, 98 (2 times), 101 (4 times), 111, 117, 118, 122, 123 (4 times), 125, 127, 128, 129, 132, 134, 144, 151, 157

72 Themes of mental manipulation with value judgements or conflation, abuse of dominant position and incompetence:

The 14 major themes:

Cults and divorce, cults and failure to assist a person in danger, cults and compulsory schooling, cults and children’s stays with yoga, role-playing games, discussion groups and gentle medicine, cults and suicides, cults and sacred sexuality, faith and mysticism, spirituality and consciousness, cults and the rights of the child – drug addiction – non-violence, cults and mental manipulation, cults and psychotherapists, cults and the sphere of well-being, cults and birthing centres, cults and coaching

The 51 alternative therapies:

AMORC’s foetal preparation, kinesiology, EMF Balancing/Kryeon, shamanism, traditional Chinese medicine, macrobiotics, the Hamer method, Reiki, “false” memory therapies, Mahikari, hygienism, energy medicines, holistic medicine, psycho-genealogy, bio-psycho-genealogy, psychophany and facilitated communication, the Simonton method, Beljanski’s methods, naturopathy, naturo-reflexology, healing practices borrowed from the druidic tradition, the SILVA method / energised water, diamond water, biotherapy, cellular memory, biological decoding, symbolic decoding of the teeth, osteopathy, family constellations, rebirthing, waking-dream therapies, the laying on of hands, the Be Happy method, mycrozymas medicines, instinctotherapy, fasting and hiking, massages in general, metamorphic massage, prenatotherapy, Ayahuesca, Iboga, vibrational therapies, Native American sweat lodges, therapeutic prayer, transactional therapy, sophrology, somato-relaxology, orthokinesiology, shiatsu, acupressure, naturo-reflexo-iridology-bioenergetics

The 6 spiritual currents:

Zen, Antroposophy, meditation, quantum physics and phenomena linked to the traditions of humanity, indigo children/Kryeon

The other suspect movements:

The anti-Bush political party Solidarité et Progrès

Commentary on the 2005 report of MIVILUDES

Interministerial Mission of vigilance and combat against dérives sectaires

Sources