France in the Time of the Witch Hunt: Christian Singer on the 2001 Law

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.