Freedom of Religion or Belief · Spiritual Minorities · Global Advocacy
13 stories
Éric Bouzou dissects the 19 September 2007 France 2 programme on cults and gurus as three manipulations in one show: the pretence of treating a social issue, the simulacrum of balance, and a set turned popular tribunal. A 2010 postscript notes the presenter's own fall.
Éric Bouzou surveys the storm around Sarkozy's Latran and Riyadh speeches and the Mignon 'non-problem' episode, from Baubérot and Debray to the Protestant federation, and asks why France cannot debate laïcité calmly.
Éric Bouzou's enquiry into the France 2 hidden-camera programme Les infiltrés: why CICNS declined the panel, the three-to-one ratio of anti-cult voices, and what Chomsky, Bourdieu and the profession's own critics say about a journalism that cries wolf.
Éric Bouzou reads the MIVILUDES guide for local authorities as a paranoid manual that treats the 'cult movement' as an omnipresent enemy and legal protections as pitfalls, quoting the guide against itself.
Éric Bouzou's section-by-section commentary on the MIVILUDES president's 2008 report to the Prime Minister, from its opening word "teratology" to its unfounded child-victim figures.
Two CICNS commentaries on the MIVILUDES 2006 annual report: André Tarassi on the mission's academic screen, Éric Bouzou on its psychology of "mental hold".
Éric Bouzou on the MIVILUDES 2007 report: the mission cast as martyr, preterition as method, mental hold as an argument, and the missing figures.
Engineer and CICNS member Éric Bouzou surveys how French courts handle 'cult' cases, drawing on Vincente Fortier's case-law study and testimony from Raphaël Liogier and Laurent Hincker.
Éric Bouzou's history of the terminology shifts from MILS to MIVILUDES, the new subjection-based definition of dérive sectaire, the online denunciation form, and why a few hundred activists outweigh half a million citizens.
1 February 2012
Éric Bouzou reads the 2009 full-veil mission as the anti-cult playbook applied to an established religion: fear vocabulary, absent data, one veiled witness heard, and Guy Carcassonne's demolition of every ground but public order.
1 January 2010
Éric Bouzou's 2009 essay on the Fenech offensive: the propaganda mechanics, the veil mission and France Télécom as the cases the MIVILUDES was kept away from, the science of brainwashing revisited, and the About-Picard law's avowed hypocrisy.
1 December 2009
Éric Bouzou sets the parliamentary litany on 'the cults and money' against the 2009 financial system itself: the derivatives casino, debt money, the G20's mystification, and a thought experiment in which the MIVILUDES's own criteria are applied to finance.
1 May 2009
Éric Bouzou's May 2005 article on the Moëlan-sur-Mer trial: five people in the dock, but Kinesiology itself pointed at, and behind the amalgam a question of fear and power. With the AFP dispatch on the verdict reproduced and annotated.
1 May 2005