2010 MIVILUDES REPORT

Laura

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Galahad is in the process of translating the 2010 MIVILUDES report so I think I'll post it here as it is completed. It's just too good to wait...

PLUS WATCH THIS VIDEO: Scientology, the CIA, and MIVILUDES: Cults of Abuse

[In order to convey the wordy and pseudo-scientific language of the Miviludes report, we are translating the report fairly literally. While the awkward phrase “groupes à caractère sectaire” might more simply be translated as “sectarian groups”, which would lighten the text considerably, such a translation would not convey the bureaucratic flavour of the report. Almost every time these groups are referred to in the text, this clumsy phrase is used, be it for “groups of a sectarian character” or “movements of a sectarian character”, terms which reek of what we might call “scientifology”, that is, a pseudo-scientific façade over an ideological content.]

MIVILUDES 2010

A Word From the President

Who doesn’t remember the tragedy of the Order of the Solar Temple in December 1995, those 16 charred bodies, including 3 children, discovered disposed in a circle in the forest of Saint-Pierre-de-Charennes (Isère), in Vercors.

This sinister group “voyage” through death was supposed to liberate the soul of the adepts in order to attain a place of purity and absolute knowledge represented by the star Sirius, home of “light beings”.

All in all, from 1994 through 1997, 74 people died in Switzerland, in Canada, and in France, carried away by a self destructive craziness, convinced of an imminent apocalypse.

Fifteen years later, we are forced to admit that apocalyptic movements are registering an unprecedented activity. The year 2012 appears to be particularly promising for all the “prophets” of misfortune.

[Except, if you look at the data they have collected from around the world, there is nothing at all to be worried about.... more about that further on.]

The precise date of 21 December 2012 is put forward, based upon an interpretation of the Hotzkin calendar of the pre-Columbian Mayan civilization and in conjunction with, at the same time, a certain number of astrophysical phenomena, such as, the alignment of our sun with the centre of the Milky Way, the inversion of the Earth’s magnetic poles, the changing of the Earth’s axis or even an overactivity of sun spots.

In the face of the risk that such predictions can be used to gain a hold over the most vulnerable people, MIVILUDES needs to anticipate the probable consequences of such anxiety-ridden discourses. This must be done to warn our fellow citizens, at worst of the risk of new tragedies such as that in Vercors, and in any case of tendencies for individuals to disengage themselves from their family life, their professional life, and their life as citizens because they have become convinced that any effort will be useless.

In this perspective, Miviludes has sought to better identify the size and reality of the phenomenon, first internationally, with the efficient aid of our diplomatic agents, and also on the national territory from elements gathered from departmental services of general information. From the results of this unprecedented investigation, the public powers, and in the first place the Inter-Ministerial Mission, which has the vocation, have more than ever the duty to deploy their efforts of prevention towards our fellow citizens, leaning notably on the network of associations, the useful and indispensable prolongation of the public powers.

In this regard, a particular homage must be paid to Jacques Miquel, president of the Centre Against Mental Manipulations [Centre contre les manipulations mentales], who recently left us after having devoted his energy to defending the principles of liberty and tolerance on which a democracy is founded.

President
Georges FENECH


INTRODUCTION

Conforming to its founding decree, Miviludes produces an annual report that is given to the Prime Minister and is made public.

This present report is the 4th given to the Prime Minister since the beginning of this legislation, and the 8th since the creation of the mission in 2002.

It comes at a moment when the role and the activity of the Inter-Ministerial Mission are recognized by the whole of concerned public powers, but also by public opinion and the media which manifest a growing interest every year for its content.

How could it be otherwise as this report has as its goal to inform the public on the risks and, in certain cases, the dangers which sectarian drifters (dérives sectaires) expose them to?

But this report comes this year at a particular period and context.

Ten years ago, 12 June 2001, the law “tending to the prevention and the repression of sectarian movements which harm the rights of man and fundamental liberties” was passed. Adopted with a strong political consensus, the law marked the firm will of the legislature to take into consideration the victims of groups of a sectarian character.

The law instituted as well a certain number of infractions, including that of fraudulent abuse of the state of ignorance or weakness “of a person in the state of psychological or physical subjugation, resulting from serious or repeated pressure or from techniques apt to alter his judgment, to bring this person to commit an act or an abstention that are seriously prejudicial to himself.” Anniversaries are always an occasion to make an assessment and the year 2011 will certainly be marked by diverse manifestations around this event. It therefore appeared to us more opportune to evoke the balance sheet of the About-Picard Law in the next report on the activity of the Inter-Ministerial Mission for 2011. However, it is difficult to not allude to the anniversary in this report. For that reason, the release of the 2010 report coincides with the ten year anniversary of the law of June 12, 2001.

The context of the elaboration of this report is also marked by the publication of a poll that Miviludes, in association with the Government Information Service, commissioned from Ipsos in September 2010. Its results are weighty with information on the reality of the sectarian phenomenon on our territory and its perception by the French. This poll, which will be presented and commented upon in the prelude to this annual report, demonstrate that, far from constituting a marginal phenomenon, the actions of movements of a sectarian character, ever more numerous and varied, demand a heightened vigilance from the public powers, which Miviludes has not hesitated to defend since its creation.

Traditionally, as well, Miviludes devotes a central dossier of the annual report to a theme it esteems to be of particular interest in regards to current events or the activity of the movements it has been charged to observe.

This year, this dossier is devoted to the resurgence of apocalyptic messages associated with the approach of 2012. It seems to us that it is particularly useful, a year before the date announced by certain oracles of the “end of the world” or the “end of a world”, to work for a heightened awareness on the part of institutions and public opinion in the face of the instrumentalization of the fears provoked by these anxious messages, in order to better establish a hold on these people. The risk of these movements (dérives), far from being negligible, are very real, as is demonstrated by certain dramatic precedents which France, as other countries in the world, have been confronted with. In order to ensure that such extremes do not repeat, a reinforcement of preventative and repressive action of the public powers in this area seems necessary. Miviludes will indicate certain areas of reflection in this regard.

The sectarian movements in health offer the theme for two other studies conducted by the permanent secretary of the mission, consecrated, on the one hand, to the solicitations those suffering from cancer can be subjected to, and on the other hand, the difficulties presented by the teaching and the instruction of unconventional therapeutic practices. We end with a presentation of the organization of the sectarian movements’ networks.

The 2010 balance sheet of the activity of the ministries in the matter of the struggle against sectarian movements, as well as the objectives for 2011, constitutes the third part of the report, preceding the account of the activities of the Inter-Ministerial Mission

This year, as announced in the 2009 report, particular developments were devoted to the organization and modernization of the mission with the adaptation of control panels for activity and the pursuit of reflection on the creation of an office of internal order.


ADDED: Links to articles about MIVILUDES and their nefarious doings (and related):

Sarkozy: Visiting 'hate and terror websites' will be punished

The Medical Inquisition and Human Rights Violations in 21st Century France

French Mayor Alerts MIVILUDES to New Age COINTELPRO

Big Agri-Business, Big Pharma, Arms Trafficking, Suicide Cults and MIVILUDES - The Truth Behind France's Cult-Hunting Policies Exposed

VIDEO: Big Agri-Business and Big Pharma - The Truth Behind France's Cult-Hunting Policies Exposed


MIVILUDicrous! Mass suicide fears as French cult predicts end of world in Dec 2012

Australia: CultBusters: Who you gonna call?

Georges Fenech of the MIVILUDES: "The economic crisis, a fertile ground for cults"

New Sott Report: MIVILUDES, Cults, & the Protection of Scientology

French government encourages doctors to report suspicious and cultish behaviour of alternative and traditional therapists

The U.S. Congress signal the dangerous politics of Miviludes

Miviludes and the Pharmaceutical Lobby

European Court of Human Rights Condemns MIVILUDES

France: Deviations of MIVILUDES: Raid of 70 policemen on a biodynamism centre

France puts itself on suicide watch: MIVILUDES vilifying 'cults' to justify its own existence


SATIRE: The Adventures of Miviludes


The 2010 MIVILUDES report on cults available in English


MIVILUDES and the Ministry of National Education take new initiatives against "sectarian drifts"

President of French anti-cult organization MIVILUDES condemned for defamation

MIVILUDES: Some Truth and Lies in France's witch-hunt against 'subversives'

MIVILUDES: The most dangerous 'sect' in France

France: Libel and lies in MIVILUDES' report denounced

Georges Fenech of MIVILUDES, Nemesis of the Scientific Method

France follows Fascist Italy into the history books by creating the crime of "mental manipulation"

Fascist Inquisition: France Approved Anti-Cult Law on May 30, 2001 - Seven Things You Can Do Immediately About the French Law: A Manifesto

Beyond the Dutroux Affair: The reality of protected child abuse and snuff networks in a world ruled by psychopaths


Monsters among us: Ritual child abuse in France


The Pedophocracy

Dutroux Cover-up Protected Pedophile Networks
 
Ipsos/Sig Poll for Miviludes: Almost 15 million French are concerned about the sectarian problem

An Ipsos/Sig (Government Information Service) Poll was carried out by telephone from the 10/11 to the 24/25 of September 2010 for Miviludes with a sample of 962 people.

The results of this poll are eloquent on the strong perception of the sectarian phenomenon by the population, even though it was undertaken when there was nothing in the daily news about the subject.

It notably indicates that youth feel particularly threatened in their family circle and with friends. As well, the French do not err when they consider the sectarian phenomenon to be a menace to democracy.

It is reassuring to Miviludes and the public powers in their essential role of information and prevention against the sectarian movements that each individual can react in a conscious way in their families, their friends, or at work.

A quarter of the French say they know of Miviludes. It is an encouraging number after only eight years of existence with an acronym that is difficult to remember.

A Concrete reality for more than one French person in five


A quarter of the French (more than 15 million people) say they have “been personally contacted by a sect or members of a sect”, of whom 15% more than once. Women and the elderly are a little more numerous in this case.

More than 20% of the French, that is, one in five (almost 13 million) personally know “in their family, among their friends, or at work one or more people who have been victims of sectarian movements”.

A Perceptible Threat

Sectarian movements represent an important threat:

- for democracy, for a large percentage of the French (66%);
- for their family and friends (42%): a threat perceived particularly by the young: 18-24 years (almost 53%) and those under 35 years (47%);
- for themselves (30%).

Perceived need for the public powers to do more

44% of the French estimate that the public powers “aren’t doing enough” in regards to the sectarian movements, against 39% who feel they are “doing what they should”.

A Quarter of the French know Miviludes

7% of the French know exactly what it is and 19% do not know exactly, that is 26% of the population know of Miviludes.

The notoriety of the mission is stronger with men and among those 60 years and older (30%, of which 10% know what it does), upper management (38%, of whom 11% know what it does), those with diplomas (45% of those having a diploma equivalent to the bac +3, of which 17% know they it does).

The complete results of the poll are reproduced in the appendix.
 
Part One

The Resurgence of Apocalyptic Discourse as we Approach 2012: the myth of the end of the world and the reality of a higher risk of sectarian movements


Introduction

The idea of an “end of the world” is ancient. In a certain way it is one of our cultural and religious references. This quest, often associated with the hope of a better world, is found throughout human history, in all societies and in all mythologies.

In The Myth of the End of the World. From Antiquity to 2012, the historian Luc Mary points out that “the end of the world has existed as long as the world exists. Since the night of time, […] the most agonizing quest for man concerns his destiny and the destiny of the world in which he evolves. He seeks reassurance through an endless quest about his approaching future […]. Being present at a condensed version of the end of the world can prepare him psychologically for the worst in a playful form in order to exorcise the worst. Apocalyptic fear has a social function; it can put our own worries into context, toning down our anxiety. But this endless quest can also end up by making such a destiny even worse […]. From the invasion of the barbarians to the agony of the III Reich, we cannot count the number of forecasts that have announced the final year of humanity. While not becoming a reality, the end of the world has become an inevitable myth of our long history.” [Luc Mary, Le Mythe de la fin du monde. De l’Antiquité à 2012, Paris, Éditions Trajectoire, coll. « Les mystères de l’histoire », 2009.]

Thus, no matter what epoch, all sorts of predictions have anticipated the inexpressible fears of man in the face of his destiny. The date of 2012 is nothing but the 183rd end of the world identified in the history of man since the collapse of the Roman Empire.

What has changed since the last century is the acceleration of the prophets of cataclysms and more recently the fact that the modes of destruction have greatly evolved:

“After wars, epidemics, famines, atomic explosions, it is nature itself and its corruption by man that will bring on our extinction: global warming, melting of the ice packs, tsunamis, inversion of the poles, planetary collisions” Luc Mary tells us.

The 2012 End of the World is also characterized by the role of new information technologies and telecommunications which amplify the phenomenon and which lead to a certain canalization of the most extreme apocalyptic discourses which reinforces the climate of fear. In December 2010, 2.5 million Internet pages on this theme were references by an American search engine. This number will only increase as we approach the fateful date.

Finally, the current public perception of fragility in a period where climate catastrophes and economic and financial crises follow one after the other, in the eyes of some, gives a supplementary reason to believe in the end of the world scenarios. This feeling of uncertainty and fear is greatly exploited by those who promote these messages, but also by those who see in the phenomenon a profitable opportunity. We have lost count of the ways the “end of the world” brand has been used commercially, in all domains: arts, literary and film productions, conferences and seminars, video games, derivative products, anti-apocalypse shelters, survival kits…

Without wishing to stigmatize anyone or appearing catastrophic, while also remembering the respect for beliefs of all types, Miviludes wishes, in conforming with its mission, to inform about the dangers and risks brought on by apocalyptic or Millennarist discourses in the light of previous experiences. History is in fact marked by precedents that call for a duty of vigilance.

Remember only the drama of the Order of the Solar Temple which led to the deaths of more than 70 people in Switzerland, Canada and France between 1994 and 1997, contributing to the heightened awareness on the part of the authorities of the dangers to which sectarian movements can expose their citizens. The heightened awareness led in France to the foundation of this mission.

The approach of the end of the world announced for 2012 can also be an occasion for actions which are harmful for people or the social body. No one can be certain that such acts will occur. Obviously, no one wants them to.

[This is a recurring motif. Given there is little evidence of such a great danger for society as a whole, Miviludes must always couch the threat with phrases such as “No one can be certain that such acts will occur” followed by a pathological desire to know and control everything.]

If by its role in warning the public powers and by coordinating their preventative action, Miviludes can contribute to preventing such extremes, it will have fully succeeded in its mission. If no such activities of this type occur, it will have accomplish its duty to inform. The worst would be a serious attack on people that the services of the State were not in measure to respond to through prevention or vigilance, even though they had been aware.

[Miviludes succeeds no matter what happens. Even if there is not threat, we must act as if there is a threat and encourage an environment of suspicion and paranoia.]

In the face of the risk that the multitude of theses announcing the final cataclysm for the year 2012 can be used to get a hold over people, it seems useful to use to distinguish what is true and false in these theories.

The myth of the end of the world for 2012 is propitious for the resurgence of apocalyptic and ancient Millennarist discourses, but it is also, even essentially, inspired by the New Age current. A semantic effort and a presentation of these different notions is therefore necessary, before evoking on the basis of some recent examples, the ends to which these doctrines can lead, to the harm of physical people or of society as a whole.

After looking at the issue internationally, the report sums up the situation regarding the potential risks these messages represent for France. Finally, conforming to its mission of information and prevention, Miviludes wishes to put in the hands of the public and institutional actors concerned some indications of the perception of risks and proposes some paths of preventative action for public powers in this area.
 
The End of the World in 2012: Willingly Anxiety-Ridden Interpretations

Humanity has always been fascinated by chronicles of the end of the world. The non-realization of an announced apocalypse has never discouraged the belief in new predictions of this type. 2012 doesn’t appear to avoid this rule.

What seems to characterize “this end of the world” are the number of theses more or less serious or verified that, without any relation between them, converge artificially on the date of 21 December 2012 or somewhere in 2012 as the end of the world or the end of a world. “In the previously announced chaos, we evoke one catastrophe at a time; but this time we have put everything into the pot and end up with an incredible hodgepodge.” [Alain Cirou, 2012. La fin du monde n’aura pas lieu, Paris, Saint-Simon, 2010.]

This first part will therefore be devoted to a rapid presentation of the numerous theories put forward to explain the 2012 version of the end of the world (mystic, religious, pseudo-scientific, astronomic, astrologic, or related to the New Age).

In a general way we will see that the prophecies concerning end of the world in 2012 are almost always founded upon anxiety-ridden interpretations of phenomena that are really observed or established. If it isn’t part of the competence of Miviludes to appreciate the well-foundedness or not of these theories, which we leave to the scientific community, it is our role to alert on how these theses can be used to get hold of fragile or vulnerable people. It is therefore essential to unscramble the probable from the fantastic, the serious from folklore, the true from the false.


{So, they aren't going to comment on whether or not there is anything really going on here on the BBM, they are just going to point out how it can be USED. That's a slick weasel out excuse for attempting to control what people are allowed to think.}

Why December 21, 2012

The Mayan Calendar

Numerous hypotheses have been put forward concerning the date of December 21, 2012. Those that come up most often concern the so-called predictions which come from the Pre-Columbian Eschatology of the Mayan Calendar and the Aztec Calendar, which are suppose to announce “the end of the world” or the “end of a world”.

The first reference to this idea of the end of the world taken from the Mayan Calendar is in fact quite contemporary. It came from a work in the 70s titled “Mystic Mexico” [Frank Waters, Mexico mystique. The Coming Sixth World of Consciousness, Ohio University Press, 1975, repr. 1992.] written by Frank Waters, self-proclaimed expert on Mayan society. In fact, this author only gave his own interpretation of what the Mayans had seen in the future.

This theory was then largely popularized by New Age currents and notably by José Argüelles in his book The Mayan Factor, which appeared in 1987.

According to Jean-François Mayer: “The predictions linked to 2012 have a genealogy, even if their propagation is recent. Since the beginning of the modern propagation of the idea of a New Age, beliefs in a transformation of the world - sometimes by apocalyptic events - have been very present. Through the distribution of the 2012 theme, the New Age as an aspiration for planetary transformation has become the taste of the day. The ‘harmonic convergence’ of 1987 organized by José Argüelles was conceived as a first step towards the future perspectives of 2012.”

Therefore, for this current of thought, 2012 doesn’t mean the end of the world but rather a “radical transformation of the world to arrive at an age of light and wisdom”.

In 2002, Carlos Barrios, from Guatemala, who presents himself as a historian, also confirms, on the base of a study of the calendars of the ancient Mayans, that “2012 will be a crucial year for the world”.

On the basis of these non-verified interpretations, other theories have announced an end of the world for this date. For example, “alarmists” base themselves on this calendar in order to establish that December 21, 2012 (December 22, 2012 at 00:32 for France, because of the time zone difference) will be the end of the fifth sun (fifth cycle of the sun) and the physical end of the world, with tidal waves, hurricanes, eruptions, floods and fire… These are the elements that greatly inspired Roland Emmerich’s film 2012.

In fact, recent studies by recognized archaeologists, astronomers, and scientists have demonstrated that the date 2012 doesn’t mean an end of the world for the Mayans. No Mayan source announces such a destruction, not of the universe, not of humanity, at the end of this cycle.

“In the way the Mayans think, this will only be a cyclic period that ends,” say José Huchom and Guillermo Bernal of the Mayan Study Center of the Autonomous National University of Mexico. They add, “after this cycle, time continues and there exists another stele in Palenque, in Mexico, that cites another date much further into the future”.

“The 2012 prediction based upon the Mayan Calendar is nothing but a another fantasy because it is based on a calculating error and an incomplete calendar, which in reality only ends one or two centuries later (in 2220, or 208 years later)”.

As J-F Mayer concludes, “the Mayan calendar was in part revised and corrected for the needs of the cause. Any use which is made comes largely from the Western imagination relying on ancient and exotic references. We therefore observe an appropriation of the Mayan heritage in the service of modern Western beliefs, with a subsequent return then to populations of Mayan origin. Globalization marks the whole world, even the Mayans. Note that this use of elements taken from different non-Western cultures and selectively incorporated into the new constructions and then distributed into contemporary culture is a very frequent phenomenon.” [Jean-François Mayer, La fin du monde en 2012 ?..., op. cit.]

The Symbolism of Numerology

21.12.2012 seems to have also inspired some numerologists and other predictors who desire to use the identity of the numbers in this date and the symbolism of the numbers 12 or 21 inverted: 12 being equal to 2 x 6, the date of 21.12.12 or of 21.12.12 for example being linked with 666, the symbol of the Anti-Christ and Evil.

{Well, there's a thought! No end of the world, but the imposition of totalitarianism across the globe with the help of MIVILUDES!!!}

This explanation of the fateful date announcing the beginning of the Apocalypse is not held by scientific specialists. In fact, if the symbolism of numbers played a role, it would have been the same for an end of the world that should have occurred on 06.06.06.

{Wrong logic, but who's counting?}

Recourse to Astrophysical Phenomena

Other natural catastrophes have been predicted for December 21, 2012 caused by the winter solstice, the alignment of our sun with the centre of the galaxy (the Milky Way), the inversion of the earth’s poles, and the changing of the earth’s axis.

It is true that, in spiritual traditions, a particular cosmic conjunction can be the sign of a new era. In Antiquity, celestial alignments were considered as portents of great events.

However, according to scientists, the inversion of the poles is not about to happen because the modifications of the earth’s magnetic field are slow and largely observable in advance.

{And if you idiots were paying attention, you would know that this IS being discussed in scientific circles, as well as the strong probability that it can happen very, very fast!}

This is what is evoked in the film 2012 by Roland Emmerich (an inversion of the earth’s magnetic field provoked by a split in the earth’s crust, itself caused by the heating of the core of the earth because of strong solar eruptions) and is nothing but the pure fiction of a cinematic hypothesis.

As well, other astronomical explanations (winter solstice, the alignment of the Sun and the planets) have been officially discounted by Nasa.

A Single End of the World or Several Ends of the World in 2012

“2012 will thus be a new age accompanied like any birth with blood, with suffering, but also of hope and promises.” [Lawrence E. Joseph, Apocalypse 2012. Une enquête sur des catastrophes annoncées, Paris, M. Lafon, 2007.]

2012 is the year of every danger and all possibilities; perhaps there could be several apocalypses in the same year? Other announcements of the imminent end of the world have been advanced, not for December 21, 2012, but for during the year, without giving specific dates…

Other cultures coming from other ancestral traditions or other peoples have also been called upon to validate the concept of the future apocalypse.

From the Hindus, for example, Lawrence E. Joseph, in his previously cited work, bases himself on the predictions of Kalki Bhagavan who, from his ashram near Madras, announced the end of the dark age of Kali Yuga, the age of Kali, that is to say a dark age of the “degeneration of the world” for 2012, on precisely June 6, and this based upon the calendar of Hindu mythology. The dark age of Kali will continue until around 2324, “after a titanic battle between the forces of good and evil”.

Tibetan Buddhist texts took over this imagining of the end of the world in 2012 from the prophecies of Kalachakra (“the world of time”), according to a collection of teachings attributed to Buddha.

Other predictions are contained in the I Ching, both a well-known Chinese treatise of wisdom and a book of prophecies, or from American Indians, talking of a change of climate and catastrophes to come in 2012.

The recourse to natural or climatic phenomena is also widespread:

The Case of Solar Eruptions


Solar eruptions feed numerous predictions and Roland Emmerich’s film 2012 speaks of it as one of the multiple factors of the end of the world. These solar phenomena will have repercussions, via transmitted heat waves, radiation, and magnetic waves, on our communications systems and could provoke the destruction of our atmosphere and our planet by fire.

To this day, scientists have demonstrated the inexactitude of this analysis. In fact, even if the more intense activity of the Sun does really exists (the 10-12 year cycle of solar activity), these cases of solar eruptions have already occurred without any notable repercussions on daily life on the Earth.

{Boy, are you people ever in the dark!}

Hypothesis of an amplification of natural catastrophes demonstrating the imminence of a coming apocalyptic end

In this domain, particularly, all scientists have a tendency to share the idea of climatologists that the natural catastrophes are not more dangerous or deadly today than before, even if they seem more numerous.

{ALL scientists? Oh boy, caught them in a big lie here!}

Thus, on France Info in January 2011, they announced that in 2010 “there were 954 natural catastrophes around the world, thus 50% more than the yearly average over preceding years. These catastrophes, due in part to the disordered state of the climate, also caused the deaths of 295,000 people in 2010.”

To put the character, presented as exceptional in this number, into context, it will be useful to remember the great catastrophes of the past century, or even more recent, which didn’t feed a discourse on the end of the world at the moment they occurred:

-1920, China earthquake: 180,000 deaths
-1976, Chinese earthquake: 242,000 deaths
-1985, Colombian eruption: 24,000 deaths
-1991, Indian cyclone: 138,000 deaths
-2003, European heat wave: 50,000 deaths
-2008, Burmese cyclone: 138,000 dead and missing
-2010, Haitian earthquake: 250 to 350,000 deaths according to sources

{Notice they are just counting deaths, NOT increasing numbers of events!}


Some natural catastrophes are used for proselytizing ends: thus, for numerous apocalyptic groups and Evangelical Churches in the US, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March 2011 confirmed the approach of the Day of Last Judgement, fixed by some for May 21, 2011.

Black Hole Hypothesis

The absorption of our planet by a “mini black hole” was also predicted from 2008. The same year, in August, there was an allusion on the Net to galaxy M87, situated more than 50 light years from Earth and that that time contained a giant black hole.

Taken up again in January 2011 on several Internet sites, the information took on a new dimension, the knowledge of the existence of “a black hole, made up of several black holes, made of 6.8 million suns, that is, a mass so important that it implies an enormous gravitational field from which nothing can escape, light and planets included….”

{I never heard of this one. Their examples are really cherry picked.}

There again, scientists have not confirmed these hypotheses. Movements in the galaxy are very studied these days and are known in advance: no event of this type has been announced on the horizon of 2012.

A Collision of the Earth with an asteroid, known or unknown.

This hypothesis is advanced by Zecharia Sitchin, author of controversial pseudo-scientific theories , that evokes the existence of a Planet X, or Nibiru, situated out of the plane of the ecliptic and, thus, outside of the solar system, discovered by the Sumerians and to which he makes reference in his book “The Twelfth Planet”.

The Sumerians were instructed by the “Annunakis”, extra-terrestrial divinities who were behind the the origin of the creation of the human race and who came to Earth.

Studies have, however, demonstrated that the Sumerian civilization has left very few documents treating of astronomy and that a priori it didn’t know of the existence of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The Sumerians also didn’t understand that the planets turn around the sun, an idea being developed in Greece two thousand years later.

Other authors have tried to take over for their own use the existence of this planet, such as Marshall Masters or Nancy Lieder, at the head of a group Zetatalk who claims to receive “extraterrestrial messages that warn of the dangers that this planet could brush or collide with the earth”. The catastrophe was initially foreseen for May 2003, but as nothing happened, it was put back until 2012.

{Ooooh! Nancy Lieder got an honorable mention!}

It is only recently that this theory has been linked to that of the Mayan Calendar and the Winter Solstice of 2012 to artificially increase the number of causes of a true catastrophe at this date.

There, again, Nasa scientists have responded to these worries, that come from fiction, by refuting one by one the arguments presented by those who support the existence of this planet.

Other Ends of the World after 2012?

The announcement of a coming apocalypse in 2012 is today largely contested. Some speak of a cycle of predictions for… 2036, 2072 or 2076.

For example, the pseudo-scientific theses that evoke an end of the world for 2036 after the discovery in 2004 of an asteroid with a diameter of 270 metres and a mass of 27 million tons, called Apophis. According to these theses, equally not validated, it will brush the Earth within 30,000 km in 2029 and a collision with our planet will occur on April 13, 2036.

{Notice that they do not even mention the probable real cause of the "End of the World as We know it: Climate Change, probably a descending Ice Age and mass starvation across the globe.}

What Conclusion Can We Take? What are the real consequences for people?

“The numerous scenarios for 2012 almost without exception appear today as not realistic for scientists.” [Jean-François Mayer, La fin du monde en 2012 ?..., op. cit.] They rest in fact most often on speculative events, without reality for the future and without scientifically proven elements of proof.

But is the essential there? No matter the force of the scientific arguments advanced to refute these hypotheses of the end of the world, the problem is elsewhere.

These multiple scenarios could in fact give birth to mystic or religious beliefs that will also find the basis necessary to situate their apocalyptic theses. In feeding an anxious climate by referencing pseudo-scientific elements, even not verified, these beliefs use in reality these collective fears to better exercise a true hold over people, which can lead, in extreme cases, to a vital risk for members of the group or to a putting into question society by actions more or less violent against the social group.

This risk is all the more large that with this multitude of prophecies of the end of the world we find ourselves today in a situation where apocalyptic messages are banalized.

[Here we see the pathological projecting out his own needs, fears, and actions onto others. For isn’t Miviludes spreading fear and hysteria about a non-existent threat to social order in order to better control society?]
 
THE END OF THE WORLD IN 2012: A MYTH PROPITIOUS TO THE RESURGENCE OF APOCALYPTIC DISCOURSE

Since the 1950-60s, numerous movements across the world have appeared which refer to theories more or less conceptualized, which mix the galaxy of the New Age with doctrines from the Great religions, their dissidents or the new-born “new spiritual minorities” that integrate the semantics previously used by only the great monotheist religions: Apocalyptic, Millennarist, Parousy, eschatology, salvation, and Last Judgement….

In fact, if some of these theories find their sources in great sacred and religious writings (more or less literal in their interpretation and more or less removed), others come from numerous classic esoteric traditions (Theosophy, Eastern currents….) or come from the imagination of a guru who sees himself invested with a mission of redemption or salvation.

Certain specialists speak also today of a veritable “grab-bag of apocalyptic doctrine” mixed together in a pseudo-syncretism of religious, esoteric, and historical influences, without any relation one to another (for example the Neo-Phare group, the Mandarom group, the Aoum group, the People’s Temple in Guyana).

Given the variety of the theses, the apocalyptic movements announcing the end of the world are also varied :

- Certain foresee a precise date for the the end of the world (or several dates that are each pushed back);

- others foresee the end of the world without forecasting the date;

- others speak of the coming of extraterrestrials, of a golden age, the Age of Aquarius, etc and are preparing without giving a fixed date;

- others again, even if they don’t make any predictions, can nevertheless shift from one day to the next, with no foreboding, to an apocalyptic vision of their future and to action.

[Here we have the catch-all final category, the one that collects every not included in the above. Any group could change from one day to the next, so they all need to be watched and controlled.]

In this regard, the 2012 Apocalypse appears as the “logical” follow-up to previously announced apocalypses because it proceeds from the same excessive interpretive mechanism of events, real or predicted. But this “2012 vintage” also highlights its own concepts and doctrines that make this next deadline for the end of the world a bit more unique.

One of the first ends of the world, that of 1000

There has often been made reference to the great fear of the year 1000, made up of particular religious and mystical beliefs that engendered an “apocalyptic fever” in all of Europe in 999. Everything has already been precisely described: comets, earthquakes, horrible epidemics (leprosy and cholera). However, it was largely theories that appeared after the year 1000 that justified these great fears in order to serve their own beliefs.

In fact, for historians, the fear of the year 1000 is nothing but a legend. There are large numbers who agree that the majority of people were in no way aware of of the end of the first millennium. It was only later, with the Renaissance, that the “fear of the year 1000” is mentioned as the true apotheosis of the eschatological fear of the period.

The end of the world in 2000

At the approach of the following millennium, certain “thinkers” assured us that the “real”
end of the world would be January 1, 2000. This confuses the fear of the end of the millennium with Millennarism. “Speaking about the end of the millennium does not equate with taking a Millennarist position. There can exist serious worries of all sorts and strong emotions when arriving at a turning point in history, but without a heightened Millennarist expectation.”

For the first time, in 2000, apocalyptic foundations coming from other sources than purely religious started to emerge, to the degree that New Age precepts developed, which translated into a “wave” of eschatological and cataclysmic predictions.

By way of this, the collective suicides perpetrated by particular sectarian groups and linked to the New Age, such as the Order of the Solar Temple or Heaven’s Gate, reveals the anguish that can take hold of certain people at the approach of deadlines that appear to them to be apocalyptic. This feeling seems widespread in the West. In the US for example, 59% of the inhabitants are waiting for this period of imminent catastrophes.

[This says a lot about the US, but what does it say about Miviludes? But they don’t give a source. But the high level of fear does indicate that there is a threat to the established order, but it isn’t coming from a belief in the Mayan calendar; it comes from the rule of the pathocrats who aren’t content to take a little. They want it all.]


The Next Apocalypse: 2012 or the New End of the World

This time, largely inspired by the New Age, the end of the world in 2012 discourse is equally distinguished by three factors:

- first, a phenomenon of amplification, that is, the canalization of these fears in a globalised society and bathed in the new communication and computer technologies, notably, the Internet;

- then, the actual climate of the economic crisis, ecological alerts, uncertainty about the future and a profound crisis of society’s values, which offer a fertile terrain for these alarmist subjects.

- Finally, the use of these predictions for commercial ends, which has attained a paroxysm in all domains (art, literary and film productions, conferences, video games, derivative products, sales of anti-apocalypse shelters…).

Resurgence of Millennarist fears and the ancient apocalyptic discourse

The Apocalyptic “Doctrine”

In current language, the term “apocalypse” evokes almost systematically massive destruction, almost unimaginable chaos and suffering. Thus, to speak of “apocalyptic doctrines” in contemporary language evokes mostly the idea of the immanence of the end of the world, that is to say, the partial or total destruction of the Earth and its inhabitants coming from a global cataclysm.

However, at its origin, the term “apocalypse” comes from the Greek apokalupsis that literally means “the revelation” of hidden truths, “pulling back the curtain”, or “unveiling”.

Moreover, according to texts that make reference to the Apocalypse , if this includes images of death and destruction, its symbolic understanding gives it a different meaning, the announcement of happy news regarding a possible hope: the “unveiling” of a final victory over evil. “In fact, side by side with the morbid and hopeless aspect of the apocalyptic prediction can appear the hypothesis of the possibility of a redemptive salvation.”

In the follow-up of these developments, we remark that the Biblical writings were often deformed and made the object of multiple false interpretations to better assure a hold over individuals, leading the manipulated adepts through a climate of anxiety to an exacerbated proselytism, that is to say, acts dangerous for themselves and others.

The “Millennarist” Doctrine

It represents an apocalyptic “doctrine” having as its particularity announcing cataclysmic events and then the return of a messiah for an era of 1000 years, or a “Millennium”, that will constitute a new order of Justice and happiness for the faithful.

In this way, the thousand years of the Apocalypse can thus forge this idea that at the end of each thousand years, or at precise dates, something important will happen, bringing on eschatological expectations or perspectives of the end of the world.

Millennarism, according to specialists, comes from a literal interpretation of the Bible. {footnote} In a traditional church, we generally compare the different versions of the Bible trying to find the intitial text in terms of linguistic studies. However, the text when taken literally gives way, on the contrary, to all sorts of fundamentalisms and to certain interpretations that could appear sometimes as inappropriate or inexact because they are too precise and too categoric in their meaning and interpretation.

[Oh yeah, France - and the Catholic Church (traditional church) is really on top of religious studies! Not. Sheesh. They still drink the blood and eat the body of Christ fer crissakes!]

For example, the term “thousand years” as it appears in the Bible should not be taken as an indication of a corresponding period of a thousand years, but seems to signify a very long, indeterminate period beginning with the return of the Saviour for the reign of the Church. “The number a thousand years in the Bible is considered as a generic term, indicating an order of magnitude, an important quantity but not rigorously calculated.” [J.-P. Prévost, op. cit.]

Because of this, the term “Millennarism” should be understood not as the expectation of catastrophes called to mark the year 1000 or the year 2000, for example, but rather as the hope for many years (not necessarily 1000) of earthly happiness. In fact, we speak of the “sociology of expectations” to define the dynamism of certain Millennarist groups. But there exist differences between the pre-Millennarist and post-Millennarist, “the prefixes serving to situate the moment of the return of the Saviour in relation to the establishing of the 1000 year reign.” [Ibid.]

The pre-Millennarists see the coming of the Messiah as the indispensable condition for the inauguration of the 1000 year period of earthly happiness.

The Messiah thus acts as the creator of the Millennium. Without him, nothing is possible and nothing can be done (which gives a more ‘passive” attitude to these groups.

For the post-Millennarist movement, the return of the Messiah will happen after the thousand year reign. It militates for the construction of a happy world before the coming of the Messiah.

In this case, man can act on his and the planet’s destiny in order to favour the more rapid coming of the Messiah by working actively towards his coming.

But, in every case, the thinking of the Millennarists presupposes the imminence and the inevitability of the end of the actual world and the installation of a marvelous world coming from a superior essence.

During the XXth century, there was a rebirth of Millennarist perspectives, which has permitted them to become more popular and more diverse.

Several movements integrated Millennarism into their predictions, such as the “Assembly of Brothers”, the holders of “dispensationalism” , the Darbyist movement and the Students of the Bible.

Today, Millennarism is at the heart of a doctrine that prevails notably in the Jevovah’s Witnesses, among the Adventists and the Mormons (Church of Christ and the Latter Day Saints}], as well as in the majority of the Protestant movements.

Also, there exists since the end of the XXth Century, (1960-70) a Millennarism that is largely detached from Christianity and religion and that is found in the nebulous New Age (see below).

Some currents admit to a “black messianism” linked to other ideologies with religious connotations but professing the coming of the fallen angel, Satan.

Finally, on the margins of currents of religious thought there exists a different form of messianic thought claimed by groups for which the millennium represents exclusively the foundation of a New Order based on the cult of a superior race. In this category, we find the Aryans, the Aryosophists, who mix occultism with Nazism, such as those in the Identity Movement in the United States.

With these last dissidents, we arrive at confusion between the various movements (Satanism, Luciferism, Aryanism, Catharism and groups linked to medieval and chivalry influences), which give themselves cramps to give birth to doctrines more linked to heroic fantasy than to traditional and religious dogmas.

The borders between these groups are not always clear, and the ideologies often poorly defined are born from and nourished by very different influences.

Therefore, Millennarist doctrines have progressively evolved to new forms, constituted via impressions from diverse traditions they have nothing in common with other than the use of identical terms, but within different intellectual schemas.

By altering the original meaning of the Millennarist message, this slide will finish at a mixing of genres rendering difficult the understanding of the origin and functioning of these groups as well as the creation of multiple dissident groups around the notion of “pessimism”.

Messianism

Messianism can be defined as the religious belief in the coming of a redeemer who will put an end to the actual order of things, either in a universal way, or for an isolated group. There will thus be the installation of a new order of justice and happiness.

Classically, Messianism covers of part of Millennarism. The three monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) share the idea of the figure of the Messiah who will appear at the end of time to rid the world of confusion, of violence, and of injustice.

“In fact, the two terms ‘Messianism’ and ‘Millennarism’ are often used one for the other.” However, this doctrine is narrower than that of Millennarism because it is focused on the coming of the Messiah and not on more the global objective of collective salvation. In other words, Messianism does not refer to the period of the thousand years. It can also be part of self-proclaimed movements and not only linked to the Millennarist doctrines coming from the monotheistic religions. These traditional “Messianic” movements linked to the great religions will know in their turn contemporary Messianic forms, via for example New Age doctrines (with the return of the “ascended masters”) and the tenants of theses more UFO-based (the coming of the “light beings”) of which certain humans may be their representatives on Earth.

Often, the demand for the statute of “Messiah” is accompanied by:

- the self-deification of an individual leader;

- a true cult of the personality for him or her who is embodied in the new Messiah.

The “pretender Messiah” will thus pass, in the eyes of his adepts, from human status to that of a divinity, which, in extreme cases, can end in the danger of submission to a “spiritual guide”.

Recent sectarian history is rich in new Messiahs : from the cosmoplanetairy Messiah of Mandarom and his Knights of the Golden Lotus, Arnaud Mussy and Neo-Phare, passing by David Koresh (sect of Waco), today’s Messiahs are garbed in aspects of a Messianic movement more inspired by paranoia, schizophrenia and sometimes with a heightened business sense than by the voice of the prophets…

Adventism

Adventism designates a doctrine issued from a branch of Protestantism centered on the return of Christ in the end times, on the last day. This doctrine possesses a meaning in common with the Millennarism by the affirmation of a knowledge of the end of the world taken from Biblical interpretation and Prophecy.

In parallel, this specific doctrine takes into greater account the recognition of the negative evolution of Man (a consequence of the level of corruption of man and the degradation of society) than the relation with the Earth and ecological concepts.

For the Adventists, today, faced with a degrading human and societal situation, it would be sometimes legitimate to see the hope for the imminent end of the world, corresponding to a punishment in the face of the admission of the negative evolution of man.

Among the descendants of classical Adventism born in 1841 in the United States and the numerous schisms that followed, we find the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Adventist Churches, the Universal Church of God and the Mormons.

Realization of the Apocalyptic Theses from the angle of the New Age

The New Age is not only made up of theories about 2012. The concept of the “New Age” is actually older and refers to a variety of dogmas. For those who live in this hope, the Aquarian age of paradise focuses all positive hopes that man has dreamed since time immemorial, and this in order to confront the philosophical moroseness and ambient pessimism of our societies.

In this way, since the 70s, we have seen an explosion of New Age themes, with Millennarist and apocalyptic discourses, be they political, economic, ecological, or linked to the arts.

What is the New Age?

“The New Age is not a structured movement but a nebula of beliefs and practices that develop common aspirations and make possible an amalgam of concepts from diverse origins. Everyone can adapt them to their own aspirations; but a common trait is the transformation of consciousness and a holistic vision of the world seeing the interconnection between all things.”

New Age Millennarism distinguished itself from the religious Millennarism we have already looked at in that the coming changes will not be so abrupt and violent, nor will it come from a superior and divine force, and it will necessitate, at least in part, the agreement of human beings.

This mixture of areligious doctrines appears to constitute today a nebulous category, complex, and with poorly defined borders.

According to Renaud Marhic: “In the New Age, we shouldn’t search for a unique being or a guru in chief, nor a headquarters for these movements. It is rather another form of thinking, a different way to see the world, a new paradigm .”

This very particular way of thinking, strongly impregnated with “psychedelic mysticism” , permits the New Age to be born in the United States and Great Britain, carried by diverse themes such as “personal development, new forms of gardening” or with expressions like “transform oneself to better transform the planet” (see the doctrines of the New Age by Spangler, from those of Caddy at Findhorn).

The movement then popularized in the West certain Hindu themes that had been transmitted by Theosophy such as past lives, reincarnation and the “possibility to have access in one’s daily life to spiritual entities to be guided on the right path of life.” These “light beings”, these “ascended masters” or “Wise Masters” to whom they often refer in these theories are nothing more than representations of the Christ figure realized and detached from the great religions.

Other sources for the New Age already existed in 1911 with a revue that appeared in England titled “The New Age” (where there were mixed very different genres) and in 1937 with the book The Age of Aquarius by Paul Le Cour which introduced the taking into account of astrology.

In the very large category of the New Age, we also find other holistic and global methods such as telepathy, the power of crystals, and strange concepts such as “indigo children” and “channeling”.

{Footnote: Channeling is a process of communication between a human and an entity belonging to another dimension, which could be compared to mediumship. The information, messages, and revelations received could come from angels, divinities (as in the Ramtha group) or other assimilated entities like the Elohim or extra-terrestrials.}

The New Age also integrates particular theories born of “ethnico-religious neo-paganism” such as neodruidism and neoshamanism or linked to Wicca and philosophies of nature.

{Footnonte: Wicca is sometimes considered as a religion, sometimes as a philosophy. It includes elements that we find in a number of beliefs such as shamanism, Druidism, and Greco-Romain, Slavic, Celtic, and Nordic mythology. Its adepts, the Wiccans, favour the cult of nature which they call the “ancient religion”.}

We can finally join to this nebula other doctrines coming from the sphere of healing and personal growth (with the development of transpersonal psychologies and the human potential movement. )

{Footnote: These notions of personal development include generally activities to develop a knowledge of self, the valorizing of one’s talents and potential, with the realization of one’s hopes and dreams.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Age }


Thus, this current serves as a unique category for a heteroclyte package of independent authors, diverse movements or varied groups with a shared vocation to “transform individuals via spiritual awakening and, as a consequence, change humanity.” From this postulate the New Age will affirm the expectation of a coming or present new age, that of a world of peace and justice issued from the Californian counter-culture of the 60s.

The New Age in 2012

The entry in a new age, that of Aquarius, has been prophesied for different dates depending on the school of thought. For some, it began in 1962 (See the works of Samaël Aun Weor), but the year 2012 emerges now for some time as the culmination, if not the true beginning, of this period of transformation or “ascension” to a new era for humanity.

“In distinction to the apocalyptic prophecies that have always existed, those holding to 2012 come almost exclusively from the New Age movement and are passed on by individuals coming from extremely varied horizons.”

“It is essentially the New Age, ‘the multiform spirituality’, that picked up this apocalyptic and Millennarist belief to come to its aid and which spreads it today across the Earth via its groups and networks. In 2007-8, already 10% of the inquiries received by the CIAOSN concerned groups of the New Age type. Each year since, these request have increased, indicating that the interest for 2012 grows to the degree we approach.”

The reaffirmation of the concepts linked to the New Age via the announcement of the end of the world in 2012 could help the use of these modern Millennarist fears to engender domination, physical or psychological hold over individuals for the seizure of their financial goods.
 
The End of the World in 2012: A Myth that Could Create Very Real Dangers

It is not the apocalyptic or Millennarist discourses themselves that should be prohibited. Numerous Millennarist, apocalyptic or New Age groups exist today around the world and obviously all of them do not incite their members to commit serious criminal acts, extreme violence or individual or collective suicide. It is therefore important to remember that a sectarian group that that announces the end of the world in its doctrine does not automatically produce a tragedy. “In fact, we must not see in all apocalyptic currents ‘self-destructive ferment’, millions of believers in the world adhere to a so-called ‘Millennarist’ conception without inevitably plunging into violence.”

While respecting in an absolute way the freedom of belief, it is useful to maintain a certain vigilance in the face of these theories, that, in certain circumstances and in extreme cases, can lead to dramatic events for the group members themselves, and for society as a whole.

Without taking on the role of Cassandra, Miviludes wishes to recall a certain number of former historical events that can only incite prudence with the approach of 2012.

These events shine light on the dangers that these types of anxiety-ridden discourse can contain. For a better comprehension of the risks, we can put them in four categories:

- dangers linked to the apocalyptic or Millennarist doctrines themselves when they become the central axis of belief for the group;

- dangers linked to the paranoid personality of the charismatic leader of the group;

- dangers linked to the use of the apocalyptic theses to better ensure their hold over the group members;

- dangers linked to a desire to destabilize the democratic values and foundation of the society.

Because of its very specific characteristics, rich in lessons for the future, a particular development of the drama of the Order of the Solar Temple will be undertaken.

Dangers linked to the apocalyptic or Millennarist doctrines themselves when they become the central axis of belief for the group

Without stigmatizing any beliefs at all, it must be underlined that the Apocalyptic and imminent End of the World theme can become an essential element of the doctrine of certain groups, encouraging the passing over to criminal acts, and testifying to a true process of gaining a mental hold over the individuals-adepts.

According to Elisabeth Campos, “the extremist doctrines held by these groups, these communities or these particular individuals are not criminal in themselves, but these types of apocalyptic theses such as we find in most of the sectarian groups can be the origin of a potential for psychological or physical violence pointed at the adepts and/or society” which can be observed with different dramas.

In spite of the high number of groups associated with this type of discourse, it is possible to uncover a certain number of doctrinal points in common, which lets us better target thermal threats and risks for the “member-adepts” and external society:

Ever Present Dualism in the Discourse

Two irreducible principles, good and evil, are always part of this type of doctrine and this recurrent dualism sometimes risks to call up violent reactions due to the stigmatizing opposition created vis-a-vis the exterior.

Thus, the New Age Heaven’s Gate group, part of the UFO movement, was led by a guru who was convinced after a coma that he was “an extraterrestrial who had come to bring the Good Word to humanity.” According to him, “terrestrial life is fundamentally corrupted by Evil, civilization is condemned, the Apocalypse is close. Only a small minority of the elect, selected by the ‘level above mankind’, will be saved. They will thus leave their bodies, these ‘temporary containers of the soul’, will embark in a UFO and will be reincarnated on another planet.” This vision explains the dramatic acts that followed.

In VHS documents, the adepts had declared “that it was time for them to leave their bodily envelopes.” Some members of the group had declared shortly before the drama that they were “angels sent to Earth”. They presented themselves also as “monks” and called the residence where they lived their “temple”.

The Imminence of the end of an irreparable world

These movements often express in their speeches and writings the last days they believe they are currently living. Thus this brings them to take without delay the steps necessary to insure their salvation, which can rapidly deviate towards criminal tendencies, even deadly, in the case of a bad interpretation of present events or the words of their guru.

Fear plays an important, if not fundamental, role in the birth of such psychoses or anxiety within these groups. It is undoubtedly how the apocalyptic doctrine serves most often as a catalyzer, because it promotes the idea of an inevitable or close end. This fear will be all the more anxious because the end is foreseen with a short delay.

According to psychologists and researchers engaged in the study of these manifestations, “the phenomenon of collective anxiety experienced by a group will provoke a process of regression, bring with it a weakened critical sense and intense passionate states. Everything becomes dramatic and the end of the world discourse is there in order to put pressure on the individual adept. The group can easily therefore pass from one extreme to another.”

The emotional and passionate element here is important because it will limit judgement and reason while exacerbating the will to act. They must absolutely reach the ideal that they have fixed, no matter what. According to Elizabth Campos, “groups as with individuals can experience these exceptional situations of anxiety and collective psychosis which can lead them to moments of destruction and self-destruction. Particular modes of functioning and organization seems to foster this risk of ‘collective deflagration’ and we find them often in certain types of sectarian groups and apocalyptic beliefs that quicken the fear of tomorrow and the imminence of the end of the world.”

The suicide of thirty-nine adepts of Heaven’s Gate, evoked above, was directly inspired by the doctrine of the group that thought that the world was due to be destroyed.

Another example can be given with the drama of Waco, home of the Davidian community which had rebaptized their domain “The Ranch of the Apocalypse”. Vernon Howell alias David Koresh (the reincarnation of Cyrus, King of Persia), born in 1959, had a divine revelation in 1985 announcing the return of Christ ten years later, in 1995. He founded his own church in 1985 and “reigned” in 1990 over a hundred or so adepts. Showing proof over the years of growing authoritarianism, he prepared his faithful for the end of time starting in 1992, his thirty-third year, notably by stockpiling arms. Alerted, the police began a siege which reinforced the group in their apocalyptic ideas; 87 people were killed, including 73 adepts (including 17 children) and 14 police.

- The Persecution of the Elect Implies that the Salvation of the Group and the Suppression of the Enemy Can Only Come Through Conflict

These movements consider themselves sometimes as “prophetic pioneers” in their doctrines, belonging to a chosen elite, but feeling themselves persecuted by “perverse and tyrannical forces” that push them to take dangerous concrete measures to defend their sacred, if not divine, status. To the degree that the salvation of the group depends entirely on the direct participation in the apocalyptic struggle, which the doctrines of these groups expose generally well, the group is always waiting for confrontation. This can thus authorize them, for example, to take whatever means necessary to prepare for conflict (notably stockpiling weapons) with the goal of eliminating evil and suppressing the enemy.

The example of the Davidian group, discussed above, is very revealing in this way. An armed militia developed and the community was guarded night and day. Contacts with the outside were more and more reduced. In order to be ready for the final battle, tons of munitions and weapons were purchased, which finally alerted the service that controlled arms and weapons. (Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms). In 1993, during the siege of the community at Waco (Texas), which lasted a month and one-half, many adepts were released, including women and children, but this didn’t prevent the human tragedy during the final assault by the police force.

- Isolation From the Outside World

The fact of thinking one holds an absolute truth and of feeling chosen to be an “elect” (which is valuable both for the leader and the adept) pushes the individual, in time, to rely on himself within the comforting (but finally imprisoning) framework of the group, and thus to focus uniquely on the community.

Others and the outside world can in consequence rapidly become dangerous (a reversal of systems of thought and value) because they put into question the integrity of the group and the contents of its doctrine, even if, potentially dangerous in itself, it postulates the imminent cataclysm of the end of time.

The fact of living in isolation or even of living in a virtual world they have constructed (and the new phenomena of the hold of the Internet are from this point of view unnerving) only reinforces the will to break with the external world to save, in appearance only, a particular choice of life.

A notable example is given by the orthodox Russian sectarian group “The Illuminated of Penza”: In 2007, south-east of Moscow, thirty-five adepts, mostly women, and four children including a baby of one year and a half, sought refuge in an underground shelter to await the end of the world, an apocalypse foreseen for May 2008. They threatened to blow-up their refuge if the authorities intervened. Their group dug 4 km of underground galleries and stocked enough goods to maintain a long siege. It lasted at least six months. They proclaimed themselves the “true” Orthodox church and denounced the diabolical practices of the “warped patriarch of Moscow”. Several of the adepts were former armed soldiers. The guru was a forty-four year old man, a building engineer, from a very pious family who was taken over by a “messianic delirium” several years before. In fact, he suffers from schizophrenia and had the habit of sleeping in a coffin…. He succeeded in indoctrinating thirty or so people into believing in the imminence of the Apocalypse “by studying the stars”. All the members of the group believed in prayer as a means of healing superior to that of doctors. From March to May 2007, almost all the adepts progressively left the shelter following the collapsing of some walls due to important rain storms. Two people died during the underground sojourn due to lack of medical care. The local police force hadn’t foreseen this situation: to avoid a drama similar to that in Waco, they resigned themselves to do no more than a siege of the underground shelter and wait for the adepts to come out either because of exhaustion or weariness.

- Determinism in their positions and actions

Some groups believe so fervently that their doctrine can carry the “final battle” that they estimate they have no choice other than to set off the Apocalypse by violence, if and when they judge that the cataclysmic scenario is in the process of happening or is not far off.

With social and geographic exclusion more or less rapidly comes severance from reality. The group will thus interpret reality and events for itself in the dualistic sense that fits them the best.

The basic apocalyptic discourse and the daily anxiety engendered, heightened by the apprehension of a group that is more and more dogmatic, can only produce the arrival of a situation that is more excessive and highly dangerous.

At this point, different criteria can help identify the essential notion of the “severance from reality” , the last possible phase before passing to criminal acts:

- adepts and leaders are looking for clear truths, simple and absolute, not ideas that don’t bring answers to their questioning;

- cultural regression of the adepts with a reduction of language;

- reinforcement of the hold by research of a “second state”, with the possible multiplication of rituals, making the adept more fragile.

For Elizabeth Campos, “it is during this period that the apocalyptic sectarian groups risk becoming more fanatic, because there will be a sort of contagion that will envelop the group. The fact that there were conflicts within the group (the OST in 1993-94) or tensions with the external world can also increase the paranoia of the group, even more if the end of the world seems imminent… The passing to the act then seems to be THE solution to resolve all the problems of the group.”

An example is provided by the French group Neo-Phare.

The Phare-Ouest association was created in 1989 by “André” Auguste Bouguenec. Within this group, twenty-one “apostles” were given the task of rewriting the Bible by analyzing the precepts of the guru, and then, after the apocalypse, of propagating the good word. The doctrine of this group borrowed from diverse sources: esoteric, Christian, spirit and apocalyptic. September 11, 2001 thus became the first step towards the apocalypse. The process of sectarian closing in on itself and gaining a mental hold was thus begun. First, the adepts decided to live together on an isolated farm after having stocked up on stores for the apocalypse. During this period, several people were always in a trance and became the channel for the dead charismatic leader.

Arnaud Mussy proclaimed himself the “reincarnation of Jesus Christ” and considered himself to be the only “channel” by which God expressed himself. He foresaw a new date for the apocalypse, October 24, 2002, the anniversary of the death of André Bouguenec. July 14, 2002, an adept killed himself. Several days after this drama, two other people tried to put an end to their days. One of them explained later that she was searching for the “prince” that should accompany her to another planet… The group was then only six people living in a pavilion in the region of Nantes, in almost total autarchy. Arnaud Mussy was condemned by the court of appeal in Rennes on July 12, 2005 to three years in prison, which confirmed the decision of the court in Nantes. He was found guilty of fraudulently abusing the state of ignorance and weakness of several people who were in a state of physical and psychological subjection, an infraction foreseen by the About-Picard Law of June 12, 2001.

Taking into account the importance of determinism in the doctrine of these groups, the non-realization of the announced events can be the object of diverse interpretations.

Often, the failure of the prediction will in reality be reintegrated as a factor of credibility vis-a-vis the imminent end of the world, only it will be put off.

“Is a group condemned to disappear when a prophecy doesn’t occur? Not necessarily. Paradoxically, it can even be transformed into a success, that the prayers or action of the elite group enable a respite.

“In a Millennarist scenario, if the expected event doesn’t occur, there are two possibilities: either push back the event to a later date, or else insist something happened, not the visible event we expected, but on another level, which amounts to ‘spiritualizing’ the announced event.”

According to Jacky Cordonnier, “after the non-arrival of announced cataclysmic prophecies, a particular five-point process can occur:

“1) a short period of general deception;

2) A re-examination of the texts on which it was based and the discovery that something happened but it was invisible for those people who aren’t initiated or who are insufficiently prepared and formed;

3) Taking up parts of the erroneous prediction in order to put them into the schema of the next prophecy;

4) An insistence on the catastrophes and problems of the present world to demonstrate that the group is still correct to announce that the end of the world is soon. Texts written before the prediction are therefore modified to correspond to reality;

5) The error becomes a supplemental reason to believe, because it is a clear sign that God, the messiah, or the master has given an increase of truth.”

Thus, for example, in 1976 the Heaven’s Gate group, presented above, was already preparing for a trip in space in Colorado, but nothing happened. The disappointment was immense for the fifty or so adepts, but by and large they remained united and in solidarity. After several weeks of doubt, the group got stronger and reinforced itself. According to them, it was the lack of energy and faith of the members of the community that led to this failure. The movement lived during a certain period an initiatic wandering in order to grow stronger. Twenty years later, their passage to a new world constructed to their own vision, and organized according to a precise ritual, was accomplished.

Another example can be given by the Aoum sect , that had, before the attacks perpetuated in Tokyo in 1995, four dates for the end of the world, of which some were changed by the leader Shoko Asahara even before the predicted date had arrived.

Inversely, in other cases, dramatic consequences could have followed due to the failure of the predictions. Thus, in March 2000, a number of burned bodies were found in Uganda after a fire at a cult site of an apocalyptic group called “Movement for the restoration of the Ten Commandments of God”. Certain people among the 924 dead had been burned alive in a church, others killed by blows of a bat, others stabbed, strangled or poisoned. The investigators attributed these crimes, considered first as a collective suicide, to the leaders of the group. They had organized these massacres in the face of the reaction of the adepts who wanted to recuperate, in vain, their goods which had been sold by the heads of the community in preparation for an end of the world announced for December 31, 1999. The bodies of the leaders were not found among the victims.

It must be said that even if the predictions have been systematically taken apart in the facts, new generations of new prophets continue to come forward and announce other dates of the apocalypse.

Dangers Linked To the Paranoid Personality of a Charismatic Group Leader

For certain psychologists who are specialists in the matter of sectarian movements, “Millenarian” is sometimes a synonym for “explosability” when it is incarnated in and propagated by charismatic leaders who are seeking to:

- Be taken for the Messiah;

- Make a link between the Millennarist destiny of a human being and their personal evolution within the group;

- Diabolize their opponents to build up their own image.

According to certain authors, “there is no guru without paranoia. It is this psychosis that gives the feeling of being different from the rest of humanity; it is this paranoia that will give him the conviction that he will have the role to play of leader and guide”.

{In France, the U.N.A.D.F.I. (Union Nationale des Associations de Défense des Familles et de l’Individu- The National Union of Associations for the Defense of Families and the Individual) is dedicated to fight against cults. As noble as they sound, in their view, any organization whose teachings do not conform to the Catholic faith is a cult. Some of their “Human Rights Defense” is based on highly questionable psychiatrists. For instance:

Ted Patrick: former U.S. military psychologist, who adopted the brutal methods of “deprogramming” to reintegrate in the right way members of “sects” (kidnapping, violence…).

Dr. John Clark: Mind Control Specialist and former assistant of Dr. Lindemann of the CIA has been sanctioned by the Council of the Medical Association of Massachusetts for a person forcibly interned because of his religious beliefs. In 1983, he proposed a plan to get rid of the “new religions”. Clark denounces legal barriers and liberal democratic societies that stand to thwart his personal views. His work is often cited in ADFI publications.

Margaret Singer: a military psychologist who had problems with the American justice system, which held that psychiatric reports were “value judgments disguised as expert opinion.”

Dr. Louis West: He advocated the sterilization of blacks and Hispanics in the fight against crime. He is often quoted in ADFI publications (e.g. Bulles).

The arguments put forward by these psychiatrists raise the indignation of American psychiatry, who point out the obvious: they are marginal people with no genuine professional standing or expert status.

Dr. Robert Lifton: A strong advocate of “deprogramming”, he is the author of a book on the ambiguous practice of doctors in Nazi concentration camps.

The A.D.F.I. was founded in Rennes (France) in 1974 at the initiative of Dr. Champollion and the Psychiatrist André Badiche. She immediately declared its commitment to the pseudoscientific theories of American psychiatrists: John Clark, Margaret Singer and Louis West, with the goal of the normalization of the society that would be in jeopardy because of new sects or religions.

[Sectes, religions et libertés publiques by Christian Paturel, Édition La Pensée Universelle 1996. Taken from L'UNADFI - enquête sur la « secte anti-sectes »
]

It’s just amazing that these French groups are basing their ideas and policies on rejects from the American psychological sciences!}

Then, it is often the conjunction of reasoning like “it is us against them” (a dualist vision of reality and the world) and of “they are all united against us” (paranoid vision) that will bring with it a hostility and a growing distrust towards the external world. These feelings can be reinforced by:

- the fact of believing that one holds the truth and the solution to all humanity’s ills, which will engender the belief in the necessity having to triumph; in the case of the Order of the Solar Temple, which will discussed more fully below, the members of the group affirmed they were “the bringers of justice mandated by a higher order”.;

- the presence of a persecution delirium, making reference equally to OST, certain minor incidents were able to take a disproportionate importance, confirming thusly the paranoid suspicions of the group and brought them to passing into action under the direction of the leaders.

This power of the leader will manifest via a certain number of elements:

- Strong Control over the members of the group

Beyond the reference texts, the guru will take hold of the daily life of the members of the group and subject their systems of values to rigid dogmas, removing them from the more democratic constraints of external society. The leader will then be well placed to demand of his disciples to commit acts, even violent, that they wouldn’t commit in normal times.

For the specialists, it is the attitude of the leader, his orders and his initiatives that in the end risk to bring about the end of the group.

{Here comes the "People's Temple" example, which anyone who has paid attention now knows was nothing but a CIA psy-ops, experiment and the CIA murdered all those people.}

The example of the People’s Temple of the Reverend Jim Jones, in the United States, is the most perfect illustration. This church was founded from an earlier community called the Christian Church of the Assembly of God or Evangelic Church of the Temple of God in 1953. Among the converted, there were people on the margin, the old age, people on welfare, but also people who were well-off and instructed, “seduced by the possibility of realizing an ideal of fraternity, of social justice in a harmonious community, with people of all races”. The social realizations of Jim Jones were cited as examples in all countries in the 1970s: dispensaries, social restaurants, workshops, daycare, reinsertion of the marginal, drug addicts, and help to delinquents. Nearly 20,000 faithful were associated with this cult at the height of the community and the press reported all their work. In 1977, the Reverend Jones decided to install his community in Guyana in South America, and the community rented 11,000 hectares of land from the government of the time to build barracks and its town: Jonestown. Behind the curtain of the humanist and solidarity community, there was another reality: strong incitation to give all of one’s salary to the movement and to work for free for the group, threats on disenchanted adepts, exhausting work in a hard climate, little food, cruel physical punishment applied even to children… that is to say, sexual violence.

“Behind the facade of radical harmony, of help for those left behind, of a joyful life within a big family, there reigned in fact a constant brutality: verbal, psychological, and physical violence, drubbings for those who fell asleep during the interminable sermons of the pastor that lasted all night, public confessions, parents separated from their children, often badly treated and undernourished, submitted to an intensive indoctrination, without speaking of favouritism, arbitrariness, and the sexual fantasies of the chief”.

Jim Jones was paranoid and haunted by the spectre of a nuclear apocalypse. He saw enemies everywhere, conspiracies mounted by the CIA or the FBI, and the Nazis ready to take power in the United States and to destroy the “coloured races”. Pastor Jones thus instilled in his disciples his own persecution mania through his writing and speeches, which was all the easier in isolation, with no contact with the outside world, without information that could contradict the speeches of the “father”.

As it happened, all the community’s inhabitants were persuaded that if they quit Jonestown, the camp in Guyana, their lot would be awful and that “death would be preferable to what awaited”. Moreover, passports were under lock and key in the safe of the master and Jim Jones himself touched the old age pensions of his disciples. This being shut in strongly contributed to passing to the act of generalized suicide by the adepts of the People’s Temple in 1978, in which 923 people (including 274 children) died.

- No Attachment to the bonds and norms of established society

As well in the doctrinal texts we perceive the cutting off of the group from the rules of society and its simple and unique submission to the laws of the community, according to its own social code and it own rules of behaviour. In this sense, authority can be exercised in a violent, arbitrary, and absolute way, even outside of the group.

We remember the case of the group “The Family”, created in the United States by Charles Manson in the 1960s. Convinced that the title of a Beatle’s song, Helter Skelter, was the code name for the beginning of the apocalypse, Manson thought that a generalized conflict between whites and blacks would occur and that the Apocalypse would follow. Only a few of the elect, members of the “Family” who had taken refuge in the Californian desert would survive this nuclear apocalypse. Preparing for this imminent end of the world, the members of the “family” undertook preparations based on his instructions: they purchased rifles, knives, and maps to locate themselves in the desert after leaving the city. Seeing that several people of the group had been arrested for minor offences, Charles Manson was convinced the hour had come. On August 9, 1969, he took the decision to order five murders (including the actress Sharon Tate) and to place the responsibility on the Black Panthers.


- A life in retreat from the world and a strong cohesion of the group vis-a-vis the outside world

Strongly linked with the writings of these groups, these movements generally inspire incomprehension and hostility on the part of society. Often, in the reference texts, they themselves mark their defiance vis-a-vis society, which pushes them to live even more outside, materially, socially, and psychologically.

The power of the leaders finds itself growing, along with the homogenization and dependence of their disciples.

The texts can thus foresee that the group living on the margins of the society must expect at some point to fight against ambient hostility and persecution; from there flows the necessity to mobilize themselves against the end of time by acquiring for example the means to defend themselves and weapons.

Among the numerous example of this type, we can cite this very recent example of the Australian group “Agape Ministry of God”. In May 2010, containers filled with arms, munitions (20,000 cartridges) and explosives were found on the twelve properties belonging to this community, a sectarian and apocalyptic sectarian group known to local authorities and linked to the Australian guru Rocco Leo.

In all probability, the members of this group planned to install themselves on a desert island (in Fiji or Vanuatu) to survive until the end of the world and the Apocalypse announced by their chief. “The 54 year old spiritual guide presented himself as a great healer and believe himself to be very charismatic. He attracted people and made them believe that he had the answers to all their questions”, recounted a witness. He called himself “brother Rock” and preached that there was no Jesus, no God, no saints, nor angels. “There is only the Lord and ‘brother Rock’ who is the man anointed by God”, expressed an old adept. Former community members think that the diversion of funds from donations could amount to millions of dollars, as the members had to give over 10% of their revenue.

Dangers Linked to the Use of Apocalyptic Theses to Better Control Group Members

Certain reasons can push individuals to join a sectarian group: looking for security, to feel protected, looking for a safe place, for recognition, intellectual or esoteric curiosity, protection in regards to the outside world and society.

Moreover, the adept can want to research absolute truths or a new sense of his destiny, more profound research into his existence. He can also be incited to join the group to feel strong feelings, that is, to respond to a spirituality other than that proposed by the great monotheistic religions or by society as a whole.

In reality, in all these situations, the adept will submit to a process of enrollment that will make them adhere to the dogmas of the group. He will obtain, certainly, in appearance, all the desired advantages, but at the price of renouncing his own identity while totally abandoning his critical sense and freedom.

“One of the particularities of the sectarian dimension consists of replacing the wanted and searched for individual project with the expectations that go with it for a group project that requires a change of belonging and a full and complete submission to the community.”

In this goal of belonging and recognition in the group, the theses of the origin of man and the end of his destiny can be particularly attractive for new adepts. Certain groups have well understood this mechanism and can be tempted to use the apocalyptic and Millennarist concepts to better ensure their control on people and to bring them to acts prejudicial to themselves, but beneficial for the group or the leader.

From this point of view, it isn’t the apocalyptic doctrines themselves that can present a danger for people, but the opportunist use made by the group to attract favours from new adepts, notably financial.

We can cite here a lot on theories inspired by the New Age.

The fact of proposing to man the possibility of searching for a mystic wisdom, or a forgotten ideal while assuring him of happiness can be an extremely attractive enticement...

Also, there is a risk that current societal themes (like ecological inspiration) can play on anxieties and fears: frustration in the meaning of life, solitude, anonymity and ambient individualism, lack of interpersonal communication and social recognition, need for the religious and the sacred in one’s life, refusal of a suffocating mode of social life.

“The dream of the New Age of seeing the actual world transformed and of marching towards a more harmonious world corresponds very well to a type of Millennarist hope. In this way, the theme of 2012 appears as the revitalization of the dream of the New Age, whether or not this label is used.”

The expectation of an imminent cataclysm, constantly announced and always deferred puts the most fragile people in a state of psychic, that is physical exhaustion such that it can bring them to self-destructive behaviour or to acts that are reprehensible to outside society.


{Ummm.... isn't that what MIVILUDES is doing here? And the psychopaths running the world and waging pre-emptive wars, destroying the economy etc, have been doing for a long time? You know, those folks that are the "constituted authorities" that MIVILUDES would have us believe have all the answers to all our problems on the planet!}

“The violent currents observed in groups like the OST and Aoum are exceptional and are often linked to the very particular individual psychological profiles of their leaders. It is always possible that a non-apocalyptic group in its origin could come up with a criminal scenario of this type and graft its suicidal plan to a date touching a coming apocalyptic prediction. This corresponds to a real potential danger in the New Age today.”

Above the financial prejudices, psychological prejudices can be devastating for individuals, notably for the children who are members of the group.

According to Sonya Jougla, “generally all it takes is to see the very expressive drawings of children to perceive the confusion they are subjected to and their irreperable serious traumas”. Jean-Pierre Jougla adds for his part that “the minor who goes to live in such a group will only have the landmarks that were inculcated into him. H ewill have been formated during his entire childhood in the vision of he sectarian group and can, for example, be eventually persuaded of being a child of the age of Aquarius (according to the dogmas of the New Age), or a cosmic child, an “indigo” (half-human, half essence of extraterrestrial_ or one who is charged with a divine mission... Often his wishes will not be requested. He’ll simply follow the movement and the group decision.”

{Wait a minute... isn't that what MIVLUDES wants the "traditional churches" and government to be able to do with no choice or input from the parents?}

The testimony given to Miviludes by Amoreena Winkler about her childhood spent in the community of the Children of God, is eloquent in this regard: “Beginning at the earliest age in our community, we shouldn’t show the slightest attachment to people, places, objects or aspects of our person. Moreover, having been born and raised with the view of an apocalypse, we were certain as children that we would never become adults. I didn’t have (not me, nor the other children around) the means to project myself towards the future, to imagine any possibility but to die for our faith, serving the Lord. Death by execution, by bombardment, or in the terrible cataclysms that will come and batter the Earth. As a minor, this perspective crystallized a state of inner terror already installed by violence, maltreatment, and mental control subjected by the group.” [Voir aussi Amoreena Winkler, Purulence, Angoulême, Ego comme X, 2009.]

{But it's okay to accept all suffering for the sake of Christ because then, you will be rewarded IN HEAVEN! And if you accept the lies and thievery of your government, you will get a pension... maybe!}

The Particular Case of the Order of the Solar Temple

There exists groups where it is impossible to determine the apocalyptic origins and that can shift into such extremes without any visible precursor signs. It is difficult thus to not reserve a paricular development in the OST drama, such as its specificity is important.

According to Jean-Pierre Jougla, “a purely apocalyptic or Millennarist classification is not in itself meaningful for danger. A group like the Order of the Solar Temple can for example shift from one day to the next to an apocalyptic solution although its initial declared plan (ecology, natural care) was more within a logic of survival. The death instinct is more linked in large part to a group dynamic at a certain time, to the age and health of the guru, to the perception of the outside world of the group, that is to say, to pressure put on it... A group reputed to be or self-proclaimed as apocalyptic can very well never pass over to the act, that is, to self-destruct, while a group that has never had the dimension of belief in the return of Christ can very well fall into chaos from one day to the next. The OST became deviant and criminal under the influence of several factors: personal problems of the leaders (illness of the leader Jo Di Mambro), group financial difficulties, discovery on the part of the adepts of fraud on the part of the gurus of a nature that puts into question their beliefs, reinforcement of delirium linked to the doctrinal teaching, development of internal dissent in the group and reorganization because of it.”

For specialists, the OTS can not be considered as an apocalyptic group from its beginnings. Its members became sensitive to these ideas well after its creation because of events which were essentially internal to the group. A “Settling of accounts” concerning certain dissidents within the group has been generally mentioned, dissidents who contested the two charismatic leaders and who were the object of assassination in September 1994 (the execution of the couple Dutoit and their baby) in Morin Heights, Quebec and in October 1994 (the execution of Robert Fallardeau, all this right before the first transit. [Élisabeth Campos, Sectes et millénarisme..., op. cit.]

The justification of the passing to the act as it was presented within the group is obviously completely different: “As well, in the face of the general incapacity on the part of the whole of the leaders of nations, facing their outrageous dishonesty cupidity, those who proclaimed themselves defenders of liberty and the rights of man, facing the increasing valorization of lies and manipulation, facing the systematic persecution of the bringers of light (J.F. Kennedy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King), facing the debasing of the human race, unable to control their destructive impulses, and above all facing the intimidations of the police and all those of whom we are continually the victim..., we have decided to retire from this world in full lucidity and in the fullness of our consciousness.” [Testamentdel’ordreinitiatiqueduTempleSolaireinChristopheLeleu,LaSecteduTempleSolaire.Explications autour d’un massacre, Paris, Claire Vigne, coll. « Documents », 1995.]

These are the propos, taken from the Testament of the initiatic Order of the Solar Temple, that are supposed to have brought 74 people, including eleven children to commit “suicide” [We should rather speak of “killings-suicides”.] in three successive waves between 1994 and 1997 in Switzerland, Canada, and France.

“The Knights of the order leave without regret this world that they consider condemned. They therefore prefer to leave before the final deadline that they have themselves fixed between 1992 and 1999.” [́lisabeth Campos, Sectes et millénarisme..., op. cit.]

According to Jean-Pierre Jougla, this group voyage, passing by a death that should not really be a death, was suppose to on the contrary liberate teh souls of the prepared adepts to attain a place of purity and absolute knowledge represented by the star Sirius, place of residence of beings of light. The members of OST were persuaded that their mission consisted to raising themselves spiritually and to operate the passage between man of the 4th reign (Age of Pieces) and that of the 5th reign (Age of Aquarius).

A particular protocol and perfectly orchestrated planning were necessary to help “the uncoupling of the adepts’ souls to liberate the necessary energy for the ascension process” which were brought to light through the writings found during the judicial investigations:

- the necessity of annihilating the exterior perceptions of the adepts to avoid the onset of effects that could deviate the group’s plan. To have that, the adepts had to ingest diverse anesthetics , their heads covered in plastic bags so they couldn’t see, which also rendered them anonymous to the eyes of the “brother executioner”;

- the liberation of the soul of the adept by a shock to the skull by means of the shot of a bullet;

- partial burning of the bodies to transform the death into a “propulsive energy” for the “rising of the soul”. [J.-P. Jougla, op. cit.]

This “crazy” protocol is difficult to accept today for common sense, even if it follows a certain “coherence” with the internal logic of the group.

The fact that two charismatic leaders of the group died during the first wave of suicides in 1994 shows the power of the mental control realized on the whole of the members because, once the leaders were dead, the group could have dissolved and/or stopped the suicidal process.

“It is essential to have clear ideas on the OST drama. This dramatic example sheds very important light on the criminal reality of certain sectarian groups. If the inherent risk in these groups that have a process of sectarian dependence is not seen for its true value, it is strongly worrying that other dramas of the same nature will occur again in the future.” [Ibid.]

Dangers Linked to the Will to Destablize Democratic Values and the Foundations of Society

Apocalyptic Announcements of the end of the world by religious groups or groups linked with the New Age are susceptible of introducing desocializing attitudes, ending with a disengagement from all social life by members of the group.

These doctrines can equally lead to putting into question the rules of life in society in order to replace them by standards belonging to the group.

The extreme cases can take the form of serious troubles to the public order, revealing a willingness for violent confrontation, that is, the destruction of democratic societies.

Disengagement of the individual from his life as a citizen

Apocalyptic discourse bears within a form of incitement to disengage from civic life, from all social life outside of the group.

In effect, what interest will they have to participate in the life as a citizen iff society as a whole will soon disappear? What’s the point of voting?

But this disengagement from life in society, in the form of “decline of the citizen” can also take other aspects: why work if the end of the world is arriving? Why not break the law if we can’t be condemned by the justice of men and the existing system anyway?

According to Jean-Pierre Jougla, “the apocalyptic and criminal plan of a groups risks to accelerate the situation of the rupture of individuals vis-a-vis society: for example, as that adept, who was led to increase his bank loans because the future apocalyptic disorders mean he won’t have to pay them back, could “increase the pressure” on his guru when the bank starts to demand repayment when the date of the end of the world is passed.”

This way of thinking can only engender the putting into place of other values, less democratic or falsely democratic, that definitely hide a subjection of the individual and the true negation of his rights. This brings with it equally a recentering of the individual on the elected community and a disinterest, or exclusion or rejection of all those who aren’t a part.

The Superiority of Internal Dogma Over the Rules of Social Life

This opposition between the principles of the group and the rules of civil society can contribute to engendering a very delicate position of a quasi-schizophrenic nature for individuals of the community. In effect, they find themselves facing the difficulty of reconciling that which can not be reconciled: the preponderance of obligatory internal discourse from the community with the social and intellectual contributions from life outside the group.

“All these remarks establish the fact that the apocalyptic dimension is only one part of the sectarian danger. In fact, examining only the lethal (deadly) risk of a group means ignoring or denying the ‘social toxicity’ that a group can have vis-a-vis the social codes of the outside world.” [Ibid.]

These groups thus develop a mechanism of power and control over individuals that are aligned in a perspective of “breaking up social ties”. Under cover of pseudo spiritual or New Age discourse connected with the end of the world, they try to undermine society’s rules in order to substitute their own precepts.

The example of the Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in Guyana, presented above, is an extreme illustration of the mode of thought and social organization certain apocalyptic doctrines can lead to, with the institution of rules of life and penalties proper to the community, in flagrant contradiction to the laws and the much stricter respect of individuals and human dignity.

Will to destroy the democratic values of society

In certain extreme cases, apocalyptic beliefs can lead to unprecedented acts of violence no longer focused against members of he group themselves, but against the social body as a whole, with the desire to undermine the democratic foundations of the systems in place.

It is difficult today to evaluate the risk of serious violence that could be committed by the apocalyptic or Millennarist groups in France or other countries because there are few studies available on the subject. This deficiency of data could be harmful to preventive action on the part of the public power in the face of this, certainly exceptional, type of risk but it would be dangerous to underestimate the dramatic consequences for the population.

It is impossible to avoid a reference here, regardless of its actual specific, of the group Aoum, emblematic case of a sectarian movement classified among the most dangerous groups: parallel to a well-known apocalyptic discourse, it deliberately tried to make problems for and constitute a menace for the surrounding society. “This group combined apocalyptic ideas and doctrines with the paranoid expression and hatred of its leader for Japanese society.” [Élisabeth Campos, Sectes et millénarisme..., op. cit.]

It is a priori the only case of a sectarian movement associated at the same time with the realization of “terrorist technicality” and the development of religious theses. In fact, the apocalyptic initiative came from the group that decided, by these violent and spectacular acts to precipitate the events that would lead to Armageddon. [David Kaplan, Aum, le culte de la fin du monde. L’incroyable histoire de la secte japonaise, Paris, Albin Michel, 1996.]

It is also why certain specialist say “that the group Aoum could not be understood or exported outside the Japanese framework and context” [Roland Campiche, Quand les sectes affolent. Ordre du Temple Solaire, médias et fin de millénaire, Genève, Labor et Fides, 1995.]; but opinions are very divided on this point.

No matter the cause, what remains particular with Aoum is the fact that this violence appeared without objectives and specific demands. It thus constitutes the symbol of the emergence of an extreme violence charcterized by religion and nihilism, that is, “with no other objective than the destruction of the other, that which is different and is part of society outside of the community”. [Amaona, Frédérique, Asahara, gourou mal-voyant, aspiré par le néant. Le chef de la secte Aum est passé du yoga, symbole de paix, à l’apologie de la destruction, Libération 25 avril 1995. www.liberation.fr/ monde/0109138380-asahara-gourou-mal-voyant-aspire-par-le-neant-le-chef--de-la-secte-aum-est-passe-du-yoga- symbole-de-paix-a-l-apologie-de-la-destruction.]

Founded in 1984, Aoum (in Japanese Aum Shinrikyo: “Supreme Truth”), starting as a simple yoga group, became in 1989 a religious association recognized by the Japanese State. It integrated certain sectarian Buddhist and Taoist currents and Christian doctrines mixed with a mysticism linked with tantrism and yoga, and was part of and extremist thought that promoted Hitler...

In the middle of the 90s, the group had tens of thousands of members in Japan, Russia, Germany, the US and several other countries...

It developed an apocalyptic logic proclaimed from 1987 linked to the imminence of nuclear conflict. A new end of the world was announced for September 1999, then for 2003 [À ce titre, seuls les élus et adeptes seront sauvés de la destruction finale qui anéantira le Japon avant l’an 2000.] by the guru Shoko Asahara [Né en 1955, il fut professeur d’acupuncture et de yoga. Poursuivi pour exercice illégal de la médecine, car ayant ouvert sa clinique sans diplôme, il fut condamné à une amende.], whose real name was Chizo Matsumoto. [Philippe Pons, « Quatre ans après, la secte Aum se reconstitue et prospère », in Le Monde, 12 mars 1999.] Promoting an extremely paranoid vision [Le gourou se proclama «messie divin» et se dit «choisi pour conduire l’armée de Dieu» après avoir reçu une vision dans l’Himalaya en 1986.] of the coming world, Asahara recruited a number of scientists in order to build an arsenal of chemical weapons readied to be used and to head studies on the culture of bacteria and gas, specifically the gas sarin that provoke death by paralyzing the nervous centres and which was employed during the Second World War. [Ce gaz fut ensuite interdit par des conventions internationales.]

On his instructions, the group also bought a important stock of arms. Asahara then revised again the date for the start of Armageddon and placed it in 1996 rather than 2003.

On January 17, 1995, at 5:46, a violent earthquake hit the city of Kobé, killing 5,500. Asahara saw it as the beginning of the Apocalypse and affirmed that the US had provoked the earthquake “by voluntarily modifying the Earth’s magnetic field”. [éférences aux théories du complot et aux prophéties du New Age sur les changements climatiques, utilisées encore aujourd’hui dans les prédictions apocalyptiques pour 2012.]

On March 14, 1995, they passed to action, killing twelve people. Six thousand others were intoxicated. March 22, over a thosand police officers wearing NBC [Suits treated to resist Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical attacks] suits raided the headquarters of the group. They discovered among the arms and the gas human remains, the remnants of recalcitrant former members of the group. On May 5, 1995 a new attack in the Tokyo metro, using Zyklon B, was foiled.

On May 16, 1995, Asahara was called in and imprisoned along with a number of adepts. Condemned to death, he continues to lead the group from prison even though his son was selected to take his place.

Today, the group has refounded under the name of Aleph and is implanted over thirty or so sites in Japan. [AFP, avril 2009.] It continues to prosper and to recruit, on campuses for example, even if the number of members has shrunk: 11,000 people in 1995, 7,000 in 1998 and 1,500 in 2009. The group owns a number of companies and computer stores and real estate. The Japanese government maintained a surveillance on the group until 2009. Nevertheless, the persistence of this movement, in spite of its convictions, continue to raise real worries among Japanese officials.

A more recent example of the desire to destroy society is given by the Hutaree militia in the United States. [Voir différents articles sur les sites suivants : www.la-fin-du-monde.fr/2010/04/hutaree-la-milice-de-la-fin-du- monde/; http://observers.france24.com/fr/content/20100330-etats-unis-hutaree-milice-extremistes-chretiens- guerre-antechrist-armes-michigan]

Located in Michigan, this Christian apocalyptic group planned violent anti-government acts in March 2010, forcing the authorities to make arrests. The Department of Justice said the group was charged with “conspiring to organize an anti-federal uprising and an attack using arms of mass destruction”.

On the group’s web site [ www.hutaree.com, consulté en novembre 2010. Ce site n’est plus consultable au moment de la mise sous presse du présent rapport.] we can read that “all police are considered as a footsoldier of the Federal state against which we demand armed struggle.”

This group is not only a new case of a militia, of which there are many in the United States. It has developed an indoctrinating discourse, both extremist but which also present a very particular dialectic touching religion in its eschatological aspects. Among other things, the members say that “Jesus wants us to be ready to defend ourselves by the sword and that we should be equipped to remain alive”. According to the elements gathered during the first investigations and provided by the FBI to the press, the group was preparing for “the battle of the end of the world in order to conserve living of testimony of Jesus Christ”. To do this, they stockpiled explosives that were found t their headquarters, identical to those used during attacks in Iraq.
 
End of the World in 2012: The World Situation

Miviludes wanted to paint a picture which would allow us, on the world scale, to measure the reality and intensity of the resurgence of apocalyptic and Millennarist messages as 2012 approaches, to indicate, if they exist, the branch movements brought about by these messages and to look at the measures envisioned by the authorities for responding.

To do this, Miviludes questioned diplomats stationed in the countries that could be the most concerned.

This part is an exhaustive presentation of the responses furnished to the interminterial mission. For facilitate the reading, they have been grouped into three parts:

- the thirteen European countries where the messages have been observed;

- the situation in the United States and Canada;

- the situation in Australia and Japan.

The Situation in Europe

In Switzerland, where religious questions are primarily the concern of the Cantons, the federal authorities are little preoccupied by the sectarian movements.

The “fateful date” of 2012 doesn’t seem to be a worrisome problem for Swiss Internal Security. Therefore, during their last meeting on August 26, 2010, the members of the Conference of Cantonal Police Commanders of Switzerland (CCPCS), questioned by their president on the topic, responded that they hadn’t received any information on the subject. On their side, both the Federal office of the police and the security service of the Confederation said they were not qualified to treat this theme.

The Intercantonal Centre for Information on Beliefs (CIC) - which is in Switzerland the only institution capable of bringing forward information about the potential threat of sectarian movements - is serene on the subject. With its seat in Geneva, the CIC is a private, not for profit foundation, established on the basis of Article 80 and follows the Swiss civil code. Created after the Order of the Solar Temple affair in 1994, it is financed by the cantons of Geneva, Vaud, Valais and Tessin. It carries out research only in these four cantons in order to bring together and distribute information on the doctrines, organization and activities of religious communities and spiritual, religious, or esoteric groups. Its work is realized for the profit of individuals, cantonal and communal administrations, schools, and private organisms and the media. No similar structure exists in the other cantons.

As of today, the CIC has not been informed of the presence of religious or spiritual organizations that have been established in its cantons that distribute apocalyptic messages. Nor has it received any information about a reappearance or rebirth of all or part of the Order of the Solar Temple.

The different Swiss scientific research institutes, notable the Religious Observatory at the University of Lausanne - collaborating closely with the CIC -- not the Zentrum für Religion Wirtschaft und Politik (created at the intiative of the Universities of Basle, Lausanne, Lucerne, Zurich, and the Collegium Helveticum and dedicated to the research and teaching of the reciprocal interfaces and influences between religion and the economy and politics), have not undertaken studies on apocalyptic messages put out by religious groups or spiritual movements.

The cantonal authorities of Geneva, Vaud, Valais and Tessin have not written a report on apocalyptic messages encouraging the phenomenon of mental control.

In the Romand Press, several mostly critical articles appeared at the end of 2009 about the Apocalypse in 2012 following the film 2012 of Roland Emmerich, but none mention an authenticated risk of sectarian movements:

- October 28, 2009, the daily Le Temps published an article titled “2012, promise of the End of the World” that denounced the commercial dimension of the announced apocalypse of 2012: “Hoax Fed by the Publicity Around the Hollywood Film”;
- December 5, 2009, L’Hebdo, in an article entitled “What is Hidden Behind a Date and a Catastrophic Scenario” was interested in religious or spiritual movements that spread messages about the end of the world, such as, one the one hand, New Age and esoteric movements, and on the other hand, certain evangelical and Catholic currents. The article gave the points of view of a theologian at the University of Lausanne and a scientist from the Astronomical Observatory at the University of Geneva;

December 11, 2009, the weekly L’Issustré published a dossier titled “2:38 to be done with the Earth” where it presented the points of view of an ethnologist and an astrologist on the prophetic value of the Mayan calendar at the origin of the Millennarist phenomenon. The article also cites some famous prophetic authors: Paco Rabanne, Nostradamus, the leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple. It ends with the opinion of Jean-François Mayer, specialist of the “new religious movements”, on the meaning of the prophecies in the New Age movements. Since, the media have remained silent on this subject.

Swiss bookstores are “surfing” on this wave proposing a number of works that spread apocalyptic messages, particularly for 2012:

– Lawrence E. Joseph, Apocalypse 2012. Une enquête sur des catastrophes annoncées, Paris, Michel Lafon, 2007 ; – Sylvie Simon, 2012, le rendez-vous. De la crise à l’avènement d’un nouveau monde, Monaco, Alphée, 2009 ; – Victor Miller, La fin du monde. 21 décembre 2012 : 100 questions et réponses sur ce qui peut arriver, Montréal (Québec), Edimag, 2009 ; – Gilles Sinquin, Se préparer pour 2012, Paris, Éditions Lanore, 2009 ; – John Lee Fox, Les Prophéties mayas. 2012. Les bouleversements du monde à venir... Le déclenchement des plus grands cataclysmes de notre histoire..., Neuilly-sur-Seine, Éditions Exclusif, 2009 ; – Bernard Baudouin, 2012. Chronique annoncée d’un autre monde, Genève, Ambre Éditions, 2009 ; – Antoon Leon Vollemaere, Apocalypse maya 2012. foutaise ou science?, Saint- Zénon (Québec), Louise Courteau, 2010 ; – Jean-Michel Pedrazzani, 2012. L’apocalypse maya. Éviter et survivre à la catas- trophe annoncée, Paris, Alcina, 2010 ; – David Douglas, La prophétie maya 2012. Apocalypse ou ère nouvelle ?, Paris, Véga, 2010 ; – Peter Ruppel, Maya 2012. Savoir secret et prophétie, Paris, Véga, 2010 ; – Olivier Manitara, Évangile essénien, volume XVII : 2012. L’heure du choix, Ultima Publishing, 2010.

SPAIN

Even if in Spain there are no important phenomena of mental control linked to apocalyptic messages, there exists an organized group that is active in the domain: El grupo de supervivencia de España 2012.

The welcome page of their Internet site plays carefully on a pseudo-affiliation with the Government, leading one to believe there is a pretended “public utility”: the use of the logo of the Civil Security and the bandorol of the Government.

Reqding the documents on the site and the forum leads one to think that it is a movement with weak representation, but which uses all possible means to appear stronger than it is.

It talks today about the construction of a “bunker” in the Madrid Sierra, north of the capital, to protect themselves from the end of the world announced for 2012, as well as any other event that could come about before then: a biological and nuclear attack or any natural risk.

The spokesman for the movement, Jonathan Bosque, assures us the “bunker” will be finished in several months and indicates that another is being constructed in the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia. An article in the Courrier international of December 17, 2009 already alludes to the construction of this Andalusian “bunker”. The group claims to have 170 adherents in all of Spain, the majority from the communities of Madrid and Catalon, as well as several Italians. Fifty of them participate in the construction of the “bunker” and each brings 3,500 euros. Their objective is to enlarge ehir base and to construct even more “bunkers”.

To do this, they have undertaken a campaign to get signatures to transmit a proposition for a law to Parliament so that the public administrations will finance this type of placement. They highlight that the Deputies have their own refuge situated under the Palace of Moncloa, seat of the president of the Government.

In the Netherlands, messages of the apocalyptic or Millennarist type that are spreading more and more with the approach of December 21, 2012 have prospered with growing intensity, as everywhere else, since 2009 with the American film 2012.

The services of the state admit the absence of an official taking account of this phenomenon. Historically, the sectarian phenomenon has never been encompassed by any regulation.

The local penal code can only surround the deviances that could be linked to them in a marginal way. A very thin jurisprudence testifies to a lack of interest on the part of the public powers. A collary is that neither the police service (KLPD), nor the security service (AVID) have carried out any study whatsoever on the “2012 phenomenon”.

[Can you read between the lines and feel the displeasure in the Dutch lack of concern?]

In the press and on the Internet, certain articles evoke nevertheless the interest in this “apocalypse” and a preparation for the “post 2012” on the part of several thousand Dutch. However, these affirmations should be treated carefully and seem to come more from sensationalistic journalistic research than from an established reality.

Thus, the main articles have as their primary source and report by the journalist Claire Maupas entitled “The End of the World in Four Years”, published in 2008 in the daily De Volkskrant and reprinted in Courrier international. The other source is a feed from United Press International in June 2008 that evokes the phenomenon by citing the previous article.

The scientific Internet sites www.wetenschap.infonu.nl and www.natutech.nl appraoch the question from the angle of the study of the Mayan calendar and contradict the Millennarist theory.

“Blogs” massively refer to the case of Mme Petra Faile, an inhabitant of Haarlem, who was cited in the article of Claire Maupas. Researching Internet “links” demonstrate that only a few people are interested in the question.

Finally, the single sectarian movement that integrates a form of apocalypse in their doctrine is the Jehovah’s Witnesses who have about 31,000 faithful in the Netherlands in 2010. However, they do not call for any action to be undertaken now and don’t refer to the deadline.

In conclusion, even if incidents or troubles against public order are always possible, they will happen more so on an individual level than collective according to the local authorities consulted.

Belgium has not seen the development of Millennarist movements, but remains vigilant.

The activities of the “Centre for INformation and Opinion on Harmful Sectarian Organizations (Centre d’information et d’avis sur les organisations sectaires nuisibles (Ciaosn)) are largely determined by solicitations from the public. Individuals and associations come to te Centre in function of the problems encoutnered, which conserve in the long term, in the eyes of the president, characteristics that are largely similar. In this context, the Centre has not noticed an increase in the Millennarist phenomenon.

This phenomenon doesn’t put on any new character and its importance remains relative, compared to the movement of the Jehovah’s Witnesses or pentacostal groups, or the taking off of groups in the domain of health, therapy, or well-being.

Nevertheless, the Centre devoted a whole chapter to the impact of the Year 2012 on Millennarist groups in their report 2007-8.

This report indicated that about ten percent of the complaints received dealt with Millennarist-style movements and that this pehenomenon could build with the approach of 2012. This affirmation can today be partially allayed.

Only a minority of New Age style groups envisage a coming apocalypse.

The Centre estimates that these groups are nevertheless to be closely watched because they incite behaviour that could harm the well-being of people, that is to say, of their integrity.

[There is no threat but people need to be closely watched.]

In Germany
, apocalyptic-type messages that announce the end of the world are a phenomenon that play an important role in a number of neoreligious movements and sectarian groups.

Because of the possibility of important actions these messages offer, the expectations linked to the end of the world are part of the elements of reflection put in exergue by the different structures of prevention, be it the state, religious or private. On the other hand, these apocalyptic messages are equally the object of debates in work groups, seminars, and colloquia organized regularly under the theme “Sects and Psycho-Sectarian Groups”.

Reports and articles published in Germany, as well as Internet forum discussions on the Mayan calendar have multiplied recently in an important fashion.

This is particularly clear if we observe the numerous new publication of books and esoteric magazines, television reports, films - such as 2012 and the growing Internet activity in this domain - all these vectors of publicity are in strong progression.

Similar phenomena have previously appeared:
- notably in 1999 with the changing of the Millennium and in reference to the prophecies of Notradamus;
- in a less important way in 1997 during the passage of the comet Hale-Bopp followed by the collective suicide of the members of the group Heaven’s Gate near San Diego in the United States.
-
- It was a sectarian type group cofounded by Marshal Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles which disappeared with the appearance of the comet Hale-Bopp on March 26, 1997 when Applewhite convinced 39 adepts to kill themselves.

According to the Bundesverwaltungsamt - Sogenannte Sekten und Psychogruppen (Federal Administration Bureau, Sects and Psychogroups Service), the German authorities and religious and private institutions mandated to follow “sects and psychogroups” undertake following the “2012 - End of World Type Scenarios” in the freamework of their activity of documentation, information, awareness, and prevention.

To illustrate this action we can cite, for example, articles regularly published in the magazine Materialdienst of the Protestant information Centre for questions linked to the vision of the world (Evangelische Zentralstelle für Weltanschauungsfragen).

No other measure or initiative is foreseen in the framework of “Apocalypse” prevention because, even if the subject merits the attention of the authorities, they do not foresee forming a specific “study group” in the absence of elements of concrete danger.

Acting on the fears that are often linked to messages announcing the end of the world, individual or collective suicides, the information drawn from passed events demonstrate that it is extremely difficult for those outside of the “group” to uncover signs of suicidal intentions in a certain fashion.

Events such as those of the attempted collective suicide linked to the “therapist” Heide Fittkau-Garthe in 1998 on the island of Tenerife [Le 8 janvier 1998, la police espagnole était intervenue pour empêcher un suicide collectif programmé. Trente-deux membres (dont des enfants) d’un groupe ésotérique mené par Heide Fittkau-Garthe, psychologue allemande âgée de cinquante-sept ans, avaient projeté de mettre fin à leurs jours en raison de la fin imminente du monde.] have shown that above and beyond a major policy of information and awareness it is primordial that the immediate environment of the members belonging to these “groups” - parents, friends, information and support services, administration - observe and uncover all evolution and all development susceptible to to constituting a danger for said members and to inform the authorities mandated for public security.

In Italy, the threat of major actions on the part of groups with the active ideology of the apocalyptic types does not seem to constitute an effective risk viewed through the actual data, even if the approach of the prophetic date of 2012, accompanied by pseudo-scientific fears relative to the arrival of imminent planetary catastrophes are present in this milieux.

However, we can not exclude an improvised action by a charismatic guide at the head of these groups and organizations, affected by a paranoid personality.

[!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is totally crazy. “There is no threat, BUT”]

A film made by one of the charismatic heads of such a movement, Giorgio Bongiovanni, leader of the religious and pseudo-religious cult ”Non siamo soli” (“We are not alone”) gives a more precise idea of the genre of apocalyptic messages distributed. It can be seen on the Internet site” www.giorgiobongiovanni.it “Messaggi dal cielo alla terra” (“Messages from the sky to the earth”).Finally, it is important to underline the strong growth of post-Templar or neo-Templar orders, imprinted with a strong gnosticism. In certain of these new Knightly movements, the date of 2012 seems to be accompanied by the birth of either the Anti-Christ or the return of Christ.

In Poland, in the absence of public structures, only the Polish Church tries to ensure a following of Millennarist messages. An interministerial study group was created in the early 2000s before being dissolved.

Centre for the Struggle Against Psychological Manipulation in Wroclaw and the Dominican Centre of Information on New Religious Movements and Sects are both dependent on the Polish Church. According to these sources, only one movement identified in Poland would be susceptible to favoring mind control with the approach of 2012. It is the Mission Pharaoh or the Mission for Saving Earth and Man 2012 which has its headquarters in the US but who home page on its Internet site - www.missionpharaoh.com - translated into Polish.

The movement, founded in Chicago by Mme Lucyna Lobos-Brown, a Polish citizen, maintains she has contacts with a more advanced civilization in Orion’s Belt. This civilization built, 6000 years ago, the Egyptian pyramids in anticipation of the risks of the unleashing of a catastrophe in 2012.

The Wroclaw Centre says it has knowledge of a recent case of mental influence. A woman adept of Lucyna Lobos-Brown had decided to give up her actual life to go to Egypt and find the tomb of the Pharaoh Cheops. Her daughter, distraught, came to the Centre in the hope of dissuading her.

In Russia, more than elsewhere, the apocalyptic idea has its own place in history. Embedded in Russian thought and unconscious, this idea goes well beyond the sectarian movements of which it doesn’t have the monopoly. [Why point out it doesn’t have the monopoly? The previous sections on other countries indicate the threat is almost non-existent!] Its historical pregnancy explains without a doubt why the approach of 2012 doesn’t crystallize irrational fears as much as in the United States or Europe.

[But from their own report, Miviludes demonstrates that in Europe there is negligible “crystalization of irrational fears”.]

Sectarian-type movements that exploit and raise apocalyptic fears nourish themselves in effect in several fields that are today largely independent of the “2012 phenomenon”.

Obscurantist sliding out of control of the established religions constitutes without doubt, for Russian society, the first source of the dangers. [And in the US where this type of sliding out of control is going on in one of the two major parties. Of course, the Orthodox Church is held in contempt.]

An example is Orthodox radicalism. [You’ll notice that when they turn to the US, they do not refer to American Christian groups as “radical”. A subtle use of words.] More than the disapproving milieu of the “modernist” or ecumenical initiatives of the Patriarch of Moscow, minority groups break off regularly - and generally temporarily - from the official Church. This was the case in 2008 with Bishop Diomede, head of the diocese of Tchouckota (Far East), excommunicated after having brought along to his dissident position several thousand faithful frightened by the precursor signs of the arrival of the Anti-Christ, beginning with the generalization of “bar codes” used by the Russian administration to classify taxpayers. These small communities can be the site of violent out of control movements. Russian opinion is aware of this after an episode that was widely spread in the media in 2008: thirty-eight orthodox adepts of the guru Piotr Kouznetsov, who had announced the end times, were gathered in a ravine garnished with dynamite for months in the region of Penza ( 600 km from Moscow) which finished with two dead, through a lack of medical care.

Manichean messianism of the decalssée who hope to become “Pure”

Beginning with the Cathars and the medieval “flagellants”, Russian history has had its waves of religious dissidence among populations who have broken with the established order. This represents, up till the end of the 19020s, a numerically important reality - several hundreds of thousands - to the point of raising the interest of the Bolshevik chiefs, beginning with the revolutionary sociologist Vladimir Bontch-Brouevich who left some particularly interesting testimony on the Christian movements of the “flaggellants” (Khlysty and the “castrati” (Koptsy) who practised mutilation of the genital organs.

No actual movement aligns itself directly in this heritage. It is nevertheless undeniable that the success of the Jehovah’s Witnesses - often estimated at 300,000 adepts - is a new phenomenon: the existence of disoriented populations by the violent mercantile evolution of a post-communist society where money is king and moral values uncertain.

Even if this faith has not brought on collective violence in Russia, its repercussions - prohibition of blood transfusions that bring on death - shock public opinion. It legitimizes in the eyes of a large part of the Russian people, the spontaneously repressive attitude of the authorities who are prompted to move forward with limiting the activities of the cult: refusal to rent meeting rooms, fussy fiscal and sanitary controls, condemnation for “extremist” publications, etc.

Neopagan shamanism, or salvation through a return to nature

Several communities are part of a movement to return to “Pan-Theism” today, in a country which offers to individuals who have broken from society immense and isolated spaces which can serve as “Arks of Salvation” when “time will be consumed”.

Precursor signs are not lacking in the discourse of these groups: climate change, the earthquake in Haiti, the “black tide” in Louisiana, and even the smoke of ashes from peat fires that sometimes render the atmosphere of Moscow strange. These communities elect as their domicile far off zones in Siberia, Altai, the the far East.

The Anastasia movement of the sectarian type, born about twenty years ago, established itself in the region of Krasnoiarsk and proses to its adepts the recipe of a Slavic neo-Shamanism, founded on the invocation of a fairy who runs naked in the taiga, who would have revealed to man the benefits of products with a cedar base, a Siberian tree with virtues of salavation.

The Dolgolete movement, as far as it is concerned, installed itself inthe region of Vladivostok becaue of its “positive vibrations”, the reality of which - for its adepts - was recognized by Vladimir Putin himself because he chose the capital of the Russian Far East as the seat of the APEC summit in 2014. [Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation]. This group proposes to its faithful, at the cost of finance and confiscation of their cell phones, vectors of “negative waves”, seminars of “aromatherapy”, night seances to learn how to walk on hot embers and collective meditation that will permit them to attain the “Ocean of Love”.

Other groups, which more directly exploit the fear of the 1012 deadline by systematically using the latest ecological catastrophes, attempt to form in the urban milieu and try - mainly via the Internet - to recruit adepts: these are the “Metasynthesis” groups. It is difficult at the present time to evaluate their reality.

“Theosophy”, Port of Entry to Buddhist Eschatology

Born at the end of the 19th century in France, Russia and the United States, the theosophical current is not a marginal phenomenon in Moscow today. Painter and explorer Nicolas Roerich (1874-1947), an unusual and charismatic personage, with his spouse Elena the father of the doctrine of “Living Ethics” - enriched the Russian Theosophical school with an apocalyptic and messianic dimension by integrating the Buddhist myth of Shambhala. An underground world in the Himalaya’s, whose location is unknown, people by “wise men” and enlighted people, this kingdom is called to resurge after a war where all nations are engaged.

Partially forgotten, the myth of Shambala was reactivated by the tribulations of the earthly lamas between 1900 and 1930: Tibet, Mongoloia and, in Russia, Kalmouky and Bouiatia. It is well known by the Russians because of the acitiviy of numerous “Rperich Societies” existing in most of the large cities, the dream of Nicolas Roerich to “unite communism and Buddhism” which earned in the Soviet epoch a tolerance of the movement.

Having a cultural and philosophical goal, without a sectarian character, the association today are perfectly inserted into the Russian landscape. They conduct cultural activities, jhvae museums and are n=financed by a large bank founded in 1922, the Master bank or “Bank of Mahatma”.

Roerich;s thought also serves at the point of departure for several esoteric and pseudo-Buddhist groups who preach isolation in a commnity while waiting for the arrival of the kindgom of Shambala. This is particularly the case in Altai, the heart of Eurasia for which the painter predicted a luminous destiny for the new humanity. This mountainous region thus harbours several adepts of the Rikla group who took reg=fuge there, not without announcing the coming disappearance of Moscow and Saint Ptersburg under water and the displacement of the Russian capital to Vladimir.

The mth of Shambala also feeds, independent of the Roerichian theosophic current, several communities inspired by oriental spirituality, such as the sectarian movement of the Ashram Shambala, also called the Academy of Happiness, which reduces their adepts to quasi-servitude in “Ashrams” while awaiting the “Great Event”. It recently had a setback with the arrest of its gurus.

Space Messengers

“UFOlogy” (the study of unidentified flying objects) disposes of a century-long and original tradition in Moscow: not wholly rejected during the Soviet epoch, the extraterrestrial hypothesis there is, more than elsewhere, compatible with progressive political and social convictions. “Communist biocosmists” expressed freely in the Soviet press at the beginnings of the 20s their hope of becoming “citizens of space”.

The Russian approach remains very marked by the work of the physicist Konstantin Tsiolkovski (1857-1935): having never doubted of a “cosmic destiny” for the human race called to multiply interplanetary migrations, this specialist in aerodynamic propulsion was set up post mortem - during the Khruschevian space conquest - as the model of the progressive scientist. It remains less rare - and maybe less ridiculous - than in France to hear scientists or political personages speak of their extraterrestrial convictions. The president of the republic of Kalmoukie, Kirsan Ilioumjinov, recently related his “meetings” with “being from elsewhere” to the press.

This context explains the large number of sectarian-type movements that integrate Ufology in their doctrine, irrespective of the spiritual current to which they adhere. It is thus in the case of the Neo-Pagan sectarian type organization Anasyasia for whom the Siberian cedars are “cosmic captors”. It is also the case of the “Church of the Last Testament” of Vissarion, a former policeman who decided to become divine by founding a “City of the Sun” near Kransoiarsk, or also the movement led by the “Messenger of Sirius”, Tatiana Mikouchina, in the region of Omsk in western Siberia who, under the pretext of speeding up the coming of a new gneeration of humans, targets pregnant women and child of a young age via “pre-natal programmes” as well as the “awakening of babies”.

Generally speaking, Ufology is not used by the Russian sectarian-type movements in an apocalyptic sense - preparing for an extraterrestrial invasion - but constitutes, in the vision of most, a positive reality: learn to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence, favor “cosmic education”, identify “indigo children” imbued with particular powers of communication with the cosmos.

Apocalyptic Prophecies Often Spare Russia

The growing spread of apocalyptic prophecies among a large public constitutes the most visible manifestation in Russia of the “2012 phenomenon”.On this topic, bookstores offer particularly well-furnished rows of works of prophecy, Nostradamus to American New Age literature - Edgar Cayve, Mayan Prophecies, etc. - but with a notable specificity: the large credit accorded to the prophecies of Vanga, the Bulgarian seer who died in 1996 and who is very popular today among Russians. Attributed to him - often in an imprecise way - prophecies with a due date that dangerously approaches: the dislocation of the United States into several states “under a black president”, the unleashing of a Third World War in November 2010 that will attain a nuclear and chemical phase in 2014, the establishment of contacts with extraterrestrial intelligences and the borth of a new religion.

These prophecies feed less sectarian type movements than they give arguments to movements of Russian identity. And this for two reasons: Vanga’s announcements permit confirmation of the danger of the “Muslim peril”, a theme almost totally shared by the Russian elites. Our country {France} is often presented in this context as the centre of the future “dhimmie Europe” (non-Muslim but having concluded a new treaty of surrender with the Moslems.), particularly since the publication in 2005 of the Russian best-seller The Notre Dame de Paris Mosque. Year 2048 by Elena Tchoudinova, whose cinematic adaptation is now evoked.

The content of these prophecies preserve as well the myth of a Russia with a singular destiny and which will, in spite of the coming tribulations, be “saved”. We give to Vanga as well the announcement of an era of peace and prosperity for Russia, under the conduct of a providential man often assimilated by the interpreters to Vladimir Putin. He was recently the object of a cult in the region of Nijni Novgorod, in the community of the “Mother Fotinia” who saw in the Prime Minister the reincarnation of Solomon, of Saint Paul and Prince Vladimir of Kiev, a joke the authorities could hardly stomach.

Even if all risk of a violence can not be excluded, the tragedy which was avoided in Penza in 2008 being an alarming signal, the apocalyptic sects in Russia remain a marginal and minority reality. Attention remains however focused on two movements: Satanism, a phenomenon raised in public opinion by the unending affairs of “ritual murder”, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses who, according to experts, constitute nearly one-third of the members of sectarian-type movements in Russia.

Russian authorities remain lessened and globally little efficient in the prevention of sectarian offshoots, of which the regulation is principally assure by the repressive organs - the Public Prosecutor, Investigation Committee, the FSB. [Notice that when they refer to the same organizations in the European countries above, there is no reference to them as “repressive organs”, yet the security and information gathering organizations of all countries are repressive.] An ad hoc committee created in 2009 in the Ministry of Justice seems to be without activity today. It is thus the Orthodox Church which, via its dense networks of associations working for the prevention and help for victims of sectarian-type movements and charismatic persons, such as the very active Father Andrei Kouraev, fills the space left empty by the state and incarnates, in the eyes of the majority of Russians, the principal recourse in the face of sectarian offshoots.

However, we constate a strong success, for historical reasons, of the apocalyptic idea and prophetic messages. Apocalyptic sects are numerically very small but cover the whole of the spiritual landscape: Islam and Orthodox, Eastern religions, Neo-Paganism, occultism. On the other hand, the “final” deadline of 2012 put forward by New Age prophets is not accompanied by the flourishing, at this stage, of new movements.

There are no apocalyptic style messages put forward currently in Norway with the approach of 2012.


If certain Millennarist movements have a real representation in the society - the community of the Jehovah’s Witnesses claim up to 15,000 members and the Mormons claim 4,100 people - the imminence of the end of the world and the last judgement is not the object of particular predictions.

The press notes with curiosity, in old articles dating from 2008, that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012, withot it having raised a reaction in society. It estimates that the debates were more animated with the subject of the prophecis of Nostradamus at the approach of the year 2000.

If the media in Finland have echoed the different “predictions” about 2012, it hasn’t raised any interest in the population. The Protestant groups in Finland represent several dozens of thousands of faithful and distinguish themselves as much by the rigour of their religious practice as by their good integration in Finnish society. They do not insist in their discourse on apocalyptic themes.

The French embassy in Denmark indicates that the stock taking of the movements of a Millennarist or apocalyptic nature, susceptible of being the origin of mental influence over people, came to no results in this country which observes in respect to “spiritual movements” a great tolerance.

Likewise, no group of the Millennarist nature was registered in Sweden. This country traditionally shows itself of a great tolerance with regards to “spiritual movements”. The authorities proceed with surveillance only in the case where penal infractions could have been committed.

In Portugal, the Interior Ministry, solicited by the Embassy, indicated - after consulting with different forces of security - that there exists no information, no events, no complaints in relation to the phenomenon of apocalyptic messages.

Talking about Europe, you can almost hear the frustration that the various governments aren't using the police and security services to spy on the sects. Then they talk about Russia and refer to the "repressive organs being used... the same organs that aren't being used in Europe, and which apparently aren't repressive! And their frustration reaches the limit in the US and Canada where people are way too tolerant of these strange and dangerous ideas. Only in France do they accurately and cunningly perceive the threat!
 
The Situation in the United States and Canada

In the United States, apocalyptic Millennarist messages are part of the sectarian landscape. They have already given, in the past, offshoots that are violent and spectacular, both abroad - more than 900 deaths at Georgetown in Guyana in 1978 - and on the territory of the United States - 80 deaths after the siege of Waco, Texas of the sectarian type group the Davidians in 1993.

At the approach of 2000, the FBI concerned itself with this brief and compiled a report consecrated to the risks of Millennarist violence (Megiddo Report) which included not only groups of a sectarian character but also extremist political groups.

However, nothing permits us to think that any particular attention has been paid to this phenomenon, including the perspective of 2012. The general evaluations carried out in the “Megiddo Report” remain often pertinent.

More broadly, the treatment of movements of a sectarian character is apprehended in a different fashion in the United States than in our country. The preeminence of freedom of belief and freedom of expression results in a situation where the work not only of prevention, but even of information on groups of sectarian risk - whether it comes from the fact of the authorities or even of association for the defence of human rights - rests very limited.

Referring more specifically to movements of a sectarian character that put an accent on the year 2012, prevention is not easy against the activities of authentically dangerous movements and agitation caused or stimulated by the release of the film 2012. Numerous videos and “clips”, as well as numerous books, also feed in the United States, beliefs about 2012, for example A Guide to preparing for and surviving Apocalypse 2012 by Lawrence E. Joseph.

However, a deeper analysis conducted by the General Consul of Houston reveals the spread of movements of a sectarian character with real effects is not far, but to whom the media give new capacities of influence. The examination of the apocalyptic messages spread in the States rising from the circumscription of the General Consulate in Houston permits us to identify several movements. These groupings often appear to be carrying messages spread or initiated in other regions of the United States, whether it is the announcement of the next world cataclysm such as that already announced by the Jehovah’s Witnesses tour times, for 1874, 1914, 1925, and 1975, or references to the Apocalypse of St John, the Hindu doctrine of “cycles”, or, again, more recently, the Mayan Astral calendar.

In Texas, the head of the movement House of Yahweh in Abilene, Yisrayl Hawkins, proclaims himself the “Biblical Witness” of the return of Jesus Christ.

This group lives in a camp in Abilene where Hawkins and his adepts await this return. In his latest information bulletin, Hawkins prophecises: “The world is headed for destruction”.

The Tehachapi UFO cult is the name of a Millennarist group that operates in the United States, in Canada, in Switzerland and in Liechtenstein. The encampments of this group are located in the north-east of Texas and the ideological seat for the US is in Tehachapi in California. It is identified by certain responsible people as a movement with a high risk of collective suicide.

It is founded on conspiracy theory: there is no one that can be trusted. The Earth is in the hands of egocentric manipulators and the fall of civilization is imminent. Even if it is possible that terrorist acts could be brought out by the doctrine of the movement, the main objective is to leave the planet. This will be accomplished by collective suicide in the manner of the Solar Temple or Heaven’s gate.

It is also founded on cosmology and the passage, every twelve thousand years, through “Photon’s Belt”. This passage, that lasts two thousands years, will arrive at the height of its force in 2011, producing the passage of the three-dimensional to a fourth-dimensional level in order to enlightenment individuals. According to certain responsible people, the risk of mass suicide will be particularly high before the end of 2011.

[Does it seem to you, dear reader, that Miviludes is doing exactly what they claim these various groups are doing: running around making dire prophecies when there is no data to back them up? Or does it fall into the realm of “sociology” because everything is couched in weasel words?]

In Oklahoma, Elohim City is another fundamentalist armed group. We find them close to the border between Oklahoma and Texas (Adair County); it has around 70 to 90 residents. The ideology of Robert Millar, former Mennonite, the founder of Elohim City in 1973, is based on an apocalyptic vision of the world imbued with racism. “The Asians will invade America and A civil war is brewing in which we must deal with the Jews. It is a time of reckoning for their pact with the Devil.”

Robert Millar has frequented personalities from the extreme right such as Mark Thomas, former head of the White Supremacist movement. He died in 2001. His son John Millar became the leader of Elohim City.

There exists another movement called the Community of Christ. It is a fundamentalist group that is a dissident branch of the Mormons and practices polygamy.

It is very active in Oklahoma with twenty-five centres spread out across the state. According to certain observers, this movement of a sectarian character could have recourse to violence and could manifest a profound contempt for the Federal Government.

In 2009, six members of this movement - including certain of its chiefs - were arrested for kidnapping, slavery, sexual relations with minors, beastiality and murder.

In Arkansas, the Living Church of God is an apocalyptic movement possessing six centres in this Atate. It’s chiefs reject the prophecies according to which December 21, 2012 is the date of catastrophes of an extraordinary magnitude, and, for some, the end of the world. They affirm that this date, taken from the Mayan calendar, has not basis, including scientific.

However, they base themselves on the Book of Revelations for announcing Armageddon and entreat mankind to prepare for the advent of a “new world”.

Another sectarian type group, from the Evangelical movement, lives in a centre situated near Fouke: Tony Alamo Christian Ministries.

Founded by Tony Alamo, this centre was the scene of a police raid in 2008 following an investigation that lasted two years regarding sexual abuse of minors and pornography. Alamo was condemned to the maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.

His adepts distribute tracts containing his teaching, including his prediction for the end of the world and the coming of Armageddon. The tracts condemn Catholicism, the Pope and the Government, which carried out a diabolical conspiracy which was the origin of the events of September 11.

The Embassy of France in Ottawa raised the difficulty of measuring the violence in Canada which eschatological religious movements could foment and the threat they represent for public security because of the lack of demographic data and other information held by the Canadian authorities on the subject. It states however that the instability and unpredictability of certain movement of a sectarian character represent a real menace for Canadian public security.

Among the new questions linked to the information gathering for national security, the study and following of religious movements which have as their essence a belief in non-traditional values, constitutes for the Canadians a real challenge because of a very liberal approach to sectarian type movements and religious movements in Canada.

If certain groups could be considered as eschatological religious movements, with hostile views and potentially violent behaviour, the threat they represent is taken into consideration by the Canadian information and security services whose action is nevertheless restricted and limited by the legislation in effect. As they can’t intervene upstream, the Canadian challenge consists today of identifying as fast as possible the triggering factors of violent actions by these groups.

In the province of Quebec,, in particular, the theme of violence within and by extremist religious groups increased during the last years following the multiplication of violent or terrorist acts supported by religious justifications: Larsson in 2004, Bromley and Melton in 2002.

However, there is no official position in Quebec by the Government regarding movements of a sectarian character and no ministry is charged with the risks linked to sectarian offshoots. The only tool for struggling against these offshoots is an independent association funded by the Ministery of Health: the Cult Info Association who direct is Mike Kropveld.

There is no specialist “bureau” in the Police services. Only certain agents and analysts occupy themselves particularly on these questions if susicions weigh on a religious organization. Information in this area is not not made public and is therefore difficult to obtain.

Several important personalities in the political and business world are members of these “new religious movements”, and have their own buildings. In Quebec City, for example, the Scientology movement occupies a beautiful space downtown.

According to Mike Kropveld, even if a number of religious groups evoke the end of the world, the threat do not exist and are very slight with the approach of 2012 and nothing indicates that there is a risk of violent movements. The situation can be compared with that which proceeded the year 2000.

On the other hand, we can note the multiplications of non-governmental actions in reaction to the intensification of the rumours concerning 2012, largely spread by the Internet. it is mostly activities of information and reflection. We note:

- A cycle of conference titled “Mayas, Nibiru, and the end of the World in 2012. Myth and Reality” organized by the astro-physicist Robert Lamontagne during the summer of 2010;

- a cycle of conferences called “2012. How to Survive Pseudo-Scientific Discourse?” organized in the schools by Sebastien Gauthier, a scientific commentator specialized in Astronomy.

These events of popularization had as their goal to scientifically demonstrate the baselessness of the fears linked to 2012.
 
Good lord....its really tempting to print the whole thing out and use it smack one of these nut-jobs on the nose....wow! :mad:
 
It does get deep. Here's some research from Perceval:

In 2001, the 'About-Picard' law was passed by the French legislature. The full title of the law reads 'Loi n° 2001-504 du 12 juin 2001 tendant à renforcer la prévention et la répression des mouvements sectaires portant atteinte aux Droits de l'Homme et aux libertés fondamentales ('Law number 2001-504 of June 12, 2001 intended to reinforce the prevention and repression of sectarian (cultic) movements that infringe on human rights and on fundamental freedoms').

About-Picard was passed largely as a result of justified concern about 'doomsday cults', the most famous of which (in France) was the Order of the Solar Temple (OST). In 1994, 54 people (including children and infants) in Switzerland and Quebec, Canada, either committed suicide or were killed. The aims of the Order of the Solar Temple included: establishing "correct notions of authority and power in the world"; an affirmation of the primacy of the spiritual over the temporal; assisting humanity through a great "transition"; preparing for the Second Coming of Jesus as a solar god-king; and furthering a unification of all Christian churches and Islam. Members apparently believed that through their deaths they would "move to Sirius".

One very curious aspect of the 'Solar Temple suicides' was the report that another massacre (allegedly related to the OST) took place during the night of the 23rd December 1995. According to the official report, 16 people were shot in a field, in Vercors, France, and their corpses burned. Authorities later claimed that 2 people shot the others and then committed suicide by firearm and immolation. Note that these 'suicides' occurred over 1 year after the main group of 54 suicides in Canada and Switzerland. As it happens, some very curious and disturbing things were happening in the months of December and January 1995 in France.

1) 11th July 1995 the French National Assembly sets up a Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France following the events involving the members of the Order of the Solar Temple in late 1994 in Switzerland and Canada. The Commission reports back in December 1995.

2) On December 15th 1995, a team of supposed French TV journalists visits an agrarian group/community that was growing 'giant' organic veggies without pesticides etc. The journalists ask the group if they can make a short film about their activities, assuring them that the report would be 'friendly' and about 'organic farming'. When the farmers view the final edited report as it will later be broadcast however, the group are horrified to realise that sentences have been cut, questions and answers had been deliberately mixed up in such a way that the group look like total nutcases.

3) One week later, on December 22nd, the report of the Parliamentary Commission on Cults presents its report to the Parliament, and its list of 172 'cultic movements' is ratified unanimously and published. Out of a total of 577, how many MPs were present? Seven. Furthermore, the 172 alleged 'cultic movements' are examined in just 50 minutes, or about 20 seconds to determine that each 'movement' was 'cultic'.

4) One day later (December 23rd), those 16 corpses are discovered in the Vercors region. On the spot before everyone else, conducting 54 interviews in 48 hours, 'directing the investigation' and categorically informing the French public that we were dealing with a mass suicide is a government-appointed 'anti-cult psychiatrist'.

5) 12 days later (January 4th) a major national television station broadcasts a prime time special program on cults. Two topics are dealt with: the so-called Vercors 'mass suicide' (allegedly associated with the previous year's Order of the Solar Temple suicides) and the manipulated report on the agrarian group, who were condemned as a 'cult' for growing large vegetables. Of course, the government-appointed 'anti -cult' psychiatrist is given center stage on the programme. Strangely however, he forgets to mention that each of the 16 Vercors corpses all had several bullets and were burnt with a flame-thrower. That little detail would only come to light five years later.

On January 5th 1996, (capitalising on the 'dangerous cults' documentary the night before) the French gendarmerie and police raid numerous minority movements classified as 'cults' at 6am. The raids are conducted as a result of 'rogatory commissions' where the Ministry of Justice instructs the Public Prosecutor's office to instruct local area judge to give the necessary warrants to the police or gendarmerie to carry out actions for which the PP's office has no obvious justification. In this case the lack of justification is that no complaint of any kind has ever been made against any of the 'minority movements' to be raided. But here's the problem; the 'rogatory commission' process, involving communication back and forth between the Ministry of Justice, the Public Prosecutor's office, the local area judges and the police and gendarmerie takes at least 3 weeks. Which means the Ministry of Justice's initial order to open an investigation was issued BEFORE the Vercors 'mass suicide'. The 'mass suicide' that went a long way in justifying, in the public mind, the TV show and the subsequent raids against the farmers. Does anyone else smell something rotten here?

I am not suggesting that the Order of the Solar Temple was not an abusive cult, but something definitely seems a little too coincidental with the above series of events. And the implications of course, almost don't bear thinking about.

Nevertheless, we at Sott.net can fully understand why a law, of some description, would be passed in an effort to deal with cases such as the OST, but the problem, as many critics of About-Picard have pointed out, is that even the wording of the title of the law - "intended to reinforce the prevention and repression of sectarian (cultic) movements that infringe on human rights and on fundamental freedoms" - is extremely vague as is the definition of the word "sectarian" (cultic). As a result, About-Picard is wide open to interpretation based on any possible bias of any state investigating body or individual.

Notable new points introduced by the law include:

'In the case of certain crimes, the law extends legal responsibility from individuals to organizations (corporations, associations, and other legal entities...). Courts can order the dissolution of organizations if they or their executives have been found guilty of these crimes.'

The law has six chapters:

Chapter 1 says that a court can order the dissolution of organizations when they or their leaders have received sentences for specific crimes. These crimes include endangering the life or physical or mental health of a person, illegal practice of medicine, and fraud or falsification in violation of consumer-protection laws, among others.

Chapter 2 extends the responsibility for specific criminal offenses to organizations.

Chapter 3 specifies that a court may only order the dissolution if the sentence pronounced for the crime is at least 3 years in prison or a fine of 45,000 €.

Chapter 4 specifies that organizations that have had legal action taken against them or whose executives have been sentenced several times for the specified offenses, are forbidden to deal with young people and can be fined if they do.

Chapter 5 defines fraudulent abuse of a state of ignorance or weakness and gives supplementary punishments for organizations that engage in this sort of activity.

Chapter 6 specifies necessary modifications of the penal law.

Of note here is that the law does not define any new crimes, except in association with existing crimes, because any and all possible crimes that have been, or might be, committed by a 'cult' are already punishable by existing laws. The problem with About-Picard then is that it provides for the establishment of state-sponsored 'inquisition-like' groups tasked with 'preventing and repressing so-called 'cultic movements'. Groups like MIVILUDES.

21st Century Witch-Hunt

MIVILUDES stands for 'Mission Interministérielle de VIgilance et de LUtte contre les DÉrives' which translates as 'Inter-ministerial Mission for Vigilance and the Fight against any group that deviates from what is considered 'normal', and is a body within the French executive established by a presidential decree on 28 November 2002. To get an idea of how MIVILUDES operates, check out this short video.
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/235398-MIVILUDES-Some-Truth-and-Lies-in-France-s-witch-hunt-against-subversives-

Georges Fenech - High Priest of the French thought police

The current president of MIVILUDES is Georges Fenech, a former member of the French parliament. Unsurprisingly, Fenech is an outspoken advocate of 'zero tolerance' policies that forbid authorities from exercising discretion or changing punishments to fit the circumstances. Zero tolerance advocates would have pre-determined punishments imposed regardless of individual culpability, extenuating circumstances, or past history.

Fenech has been at the forefront of action against 'sects' in France and has, as evidenced in the above video, shown a profound investment in the prosecution of anyone labeled a 'cult'. He has made it clear that having 'wrong beliefs' can get you put in prison or denied access to your children.

During a French TV show, Fenech was asked about the definition of a 'cult' and 'cultic abuse':

"We know what a cult is, in the common sense of the word. We know what it is ... it's a group that detaches itself... Ok. And a cultic abuse, a cultic abuse... today we have identified what a cultic abuse is ... It's a grouping which leads to what? To family breakups, to exorbitant financial demands, to dangerous therapeutic methods. It is organizations which are often in trouble with the law, which have an anti-social discourse. Here you have a number of criteria which allows us to intervene in order to exert an alert signal, and eventually take over the legal authority."
Note that the mere existence of a "group" figures largely in Fenech's definition of 'cultic activity'.

Fenech himself was prevented from seeking re-election to the French parliament in 2008 due to his violation of campaign finance laws. He has also been implicated in the 'Falcone Affair' (weapons sales and smuggling to Angola). We believe there is a technical term for individuals who pretend to be crusaders in defense of some segment of society, all the while garnering money and power to themselves: 'snakes in suits'.

On November 10th, 2000, following the 1998 publication, in the Professional Association of Magistrates Review, of an article by Alain Terrail, the latter, as well as Georges Fénech as the director of the review, were judged guilty of "public racial insults". Terrail had written in the union's magazine: "Lévy goes to the oven so often, that in the end he ends up getting burnt", an attack against the Magistrate Albert Lévy. Levy, it would appear, is Jewish, hence the conclusion by the court that Fenech's sanctioning of an article referring to "ovens" and Lévy getting "burnt" was essentially racist. With the claim that anti-semitism is on the rise in France, it seems strange that French Jewish groups (as representatives of a minority religion) are not more pro-active in voicing concern about the policies of MIVILUDES and the attitude, approach and suitability of its president. One might even wonder about the 'attack' by MIVILUDES on Opus Dei, considering the barely-veiled pro-Catholic position of the former. Playing both sides against the middle perhaps?
 
:shock:

what a colossal waste of time & resources.
there are much more pressing issues in the world than what a small group of people believe or don't believe in.

have these people been absent from their History lessons ?

what happened last time certain "humans" decided to weed out anything that wasn't "normal" ? and the time before that ?

it's been solidifying in my mind recently that this whole "being normal" deal should be put to rest.
there is no such thing as "normal". period.

what-is-acceptable not only changes all the time, but obviously, it varies from place to place and from group to group even in the same time frame.

"complete order on the surface of the planet" - what a delusion.
 
Yes, it seems that total control over human beings is being experimented in France and elsewhere. But in France, it has a particularly nasty taste. Here's what Atriedes wrote about it that we had on SOTT but took down at our atty's suggestion.

Are you now, or have you ever been ...

..a member of an alternative group? That's what we are facing, and I use "we" in the broadest sense, because it isn't just SOTT that is staring into the face of a bare-naked attempt to institute widespread thought control, it's the entire world.

What is 'normal'? Who gets to decide, is there some kind of golden mean checklist, or clever DSM-IV entry that can help us know what exactly it is that we should be doing, or not doing, thinking or not thinking?

There is no 'normal'. No two people are entirely alike in affect or dignity, regardless of how dearly our dear politicians might wish it were so. And there is no universal measuring stick against which a person can be compared. We hold these truths to be self-evident.

If I could write a constitution, or a declaration of independence, or a bill of rights, it would begin with the sacrosanct mandate to be weird, and the absolute protection of your right to be an iconoclast. Go against the grain.

Socrates was murdered for this stuff; you should think about that. Meletus falsely accused Socrates of impiety and corrupting the youth. Doesn't that sound a bit like what is happening here? Heresy. Witches were persecuted because they liked herbs a little more than Jesus said you should; in the end, that's what it's all about: The wrong beliefs. The current policies and doctrines of the French state and its collusion with Catholic-backed private organisations reads like the Witches Hammer, or the accusations against Socrates, or a thousand and one other false accusations against freaks, iconoclasts, and minorities throughout history. Same dance, different tune.

Human civilization has a long history of persecution: pagans, witches, minorities; the Salem Witch trials, NAZI Germany, McCarthy-ism, the current persecution of alternative groups, where just having unique dietary requirements can get your name submitted to the wrong sorts of people. You know what I mean by "the wrong sorts of people"; those individuals who are just as happy being petty tyrannical bureaucrats as they would be strapping you to the wheel. I am holding my breath for the first live TV broadcast of a stoning.

Heresy has always been a problem to those in power, both religious and political, because it has the slightest hint that maybe the power elite and their followers chose wrong; maybe their way isn't the only way? Maybe we aren't doing things the best we can; in fact, maybe society as a whole is doing things all wrong. I hate descending into relativism, but saying that there is more than one way to skin a cat, religiously or philosophically speaking, is not saying that every way is a right way, just that you have more than 1 or 2 options, you might at least have 3, and I like to think that you probably have 42.

Obligation to the state. Some thinkers having analyzed the NAZI movement, F.A. Hayek in particular, find that the root of National Socialism was a kind of fundamentalist belief in an obligation of the individual to the state, like some bizarro unconditional love. It's an Authoritarian Follower's understanding of what unconditional love means: Unconditional loyalty, patriotism, the government can do no wrong' for better or worse, you do what the state says. But that's not what states are for, they are created by people, for people, or at least that's what we're repeatedly told.

And now a word from Socrates

In the end, Socrates was killed because he couldn't just go along to get along. What is right, is right, and there is no use compromising with psychopaths and Authoritarian Followers; you only lose when you deal with them, but you lose more if you don't stand up to them. It is always a zero-sum game. Not because that is the intrinsic nature of the universe, but because psychopaths and Authoritarian Followers are consummate cheaters. They are like malevolent magicians, wherever they go, they create systems of lack, like some twisted card routine where they shuffle people around into groups of haves and have-nots. They create poverty and suffering and injustice because they can't conceive of having something unless they are taking it from someone else; the concept of creating things never dawns on them. When you interact with them, they distort reality and morality and language so that just to communicate with them you must accept their rules of engagement. They are the mob. Life with Authoritarian followers is like being trapped with a 2 year old in a large room full of self-destruct buttons.

People sometimes ask me if I believe in the end of he world, or comets, or climate change. I say I don't know about all that mumbo jumbo, but I am pretty damned sure that if the universe doesn't destroy us, psychopaths and Authoritarian Followers will. It's not right and it's not fair, but it IS. So there. I tend to make "is-ness" my business.

Witch hunting for fun and profit

Being a witch is kind of this ambiguous thing: no one really knows what it is, but when the time comes to grab the pitchforks and kindling, everyone is pretty sure who they are going to burn; it's the one person they don't like, and that's a serious issue.

The Salem Witch trials are often used as a cautionary tale of the terrible ends of mass hysteria, false accusations, and a state's violation of due process. In the end, 34 people were murdered; one man, Giles Corey, who refused to enter a plea, or even entertain the proceedings, was stoned to death. The message seems to be that fighting lies and slander gets you killed and ignoring it and expecting the Truth to stand on its own also gets you killed.

Whether we are talking about the Inquisition of Torquemada or the Court of Oyer and Terminer in Salem, what we see is that, in times of mass hysteria, the state representatives, the established authorities, ostensibly put in place to protect the people, are usually the first in line to light the pyre.

Doesn't it strike you the least bit strange that police, as representatives of an entire state, are so terribly interested in a website served from another country, in another language? One that has, until now, maintained a hands off policy when it comes to the many instances of abuse of power that have recently come to light in said state? All we can say is: "Man, we must have hit a nerve that is bigger than politics!"

Possession of vitamins with intent to shag

For some bizarre reason, the main focus of these persecutors is just what kinds of vitamins we might be taking. To be honest, this is so surreal, so beyond anything Orwellian, that I am myself flabbergasted. Who cares what vitamins I take, or don't take?

Some of the questions members of our household were asked were about finances, but SOTT is not rich, and has never been. We live in a broken down house in need of constant repair, for which we do the work ourselves because we generally can't afford to pay professional contractors. We are so far away from driving Ferraris and wintering on the Riviera, or summering, or whatever "ing" you do there, that accusing us of making millions and living some kind of "lifestyle" is beyond ludicrous. Everyone is a volunteer, no one is getting paid, and no one is getting rich.

The other impertinent and offensive questions we are being asked are who is sleeping with who. It's a rather bizarre line of questioning. There are no children involved with SOTT, and guests are reminded to NOT bring their children if they visit. Considering that the headquarters of SOTT is staffed entirely by consenting adults (21 and up), and that the websites and forums are 18 and up (the generally accepted international Age of Consent, despite the fact that none of SOTT's content is of a sexual nature), then what takes place between consenting adults is none of their effing business.

SOTT and the forums have never been about sex, we have gays, straights, virgins and sluts and we don't care, because the philosophical topics that we deal with usually don't have anything to do with sexuality in general or in particular. This puerile line of questioning is the product of a truly deranged mind.

Tying it all together

The fact of the matter is that after the invasion of France by the Germans, the French, for the most part, became a pet state of the Nazis. There are signs at the train stations here in France reminding people that this station was used by collaborators to ship Jews to concentration camps. It was the iconoclasts, the weird people, the independent thinkers who formed the French Resistance that is so famous, which is used by the French state as a way of deflecting from what they really were, collaborators. Because, in point of fact, the Resistance was composed of way fewer individuals than we have been given to believe.

That's the way it goes, the state is always an accomplice. As it was with Socrates, with the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, and the Holocausts, and a thousand and one other genocides, gulags, and on and on. Right now, in France, there is a policy of persecution of minorities, ethnic and religious. The truth of the matter is that this harassment of SOTT is nothing more than the unfortunate collateral damage of Sarkozy and his right wing cronies' personal war on thought freedom. Who cares if someone wears a burqa, or takes vitamins, or wants to feed their kids fresh vegetables from a garden? Obviously the state does, because in each of those instances, that fact was used to press criminal charges against individuals, or at least give cause for the state to split up families.

Women are being arrested for willingly wearing the burqa! Thanks to the idiocy of the French state, they have made it a symbol of a socio-spiritual revolution; you don't even have to be a Muslim, you just wear it as a big F-U to the state. The common idea about the burqa is that women were forced to wear it; no one ever bothered to ask them if they wanted it or not, and even if they didn't, they will now, because it's part of their identity, an identity under attack by the French government. (While I'm on the subject, what about those weird hats and curls that Jews wear? Shouldn't they be similarly banned? What about dog collars and modified evening gowns worn by priests? I mean, fair is fair!)

Parents have lost their children to the state for the crime of only buying bio-brand food, or growing a garden in the back yard. I am so totally serious! You have no idea how bad it's gotten! Then again, neither did the Germans. They were horrified to find out that there were concentration camps, that people were being murdered while they made strudel and drank coffee. You begin to wonder, just what is France hiding from us? Could there already be internment camps, filled with Roma, and women in burqas, and people who read Deepak Chopra? Or is that still a year or two down the line?

I am not so worried about SOTT, they can't stop the signal, you can never stop the signal. I am worried what it means when a powerful state has the time and resources to allow their Police captains such wide ranging ability to harass a small website which, until forced to defend themselves, had little vested interest in the politics and policies of the French state. What are they gonna do, put us in prison? Do you have any idea how much our books would be worth if they did that? We won't even need to run fund raisers just to buy food anymore. Damn, they put Nelson Mandela in prison and now he's president, is that what's in store for Laura or Ark? A LOT of people know us, and know our work. Hundreds of people have been guests in our house. They know that any criminal charge against SOTT would have to be falsified, something for which the French Police are now rather famous. We are quiet, friendly, hard working people, kind of like Quakers, but with iPhones.

The people who work on SOTT aren't a real minority, most of us are Scientists and researchers and history buffs, SOTT is such a loose collection of people from all over the world who contribute small amounts of time that we can hardly be seen as an attackable institution. There's nothing instituted to attack. Don't worry about SOTT, but worry about what this means for the real minorities, for the Jews and Muslims, and yes, even the Hare Krishnas. Just because I don't believe as they believe doesn't mean that I won't fight tooth and nail for their God(s)(ess) given right to believe whatever quackery their little hearts desire. Because it's no skin off my nose for them to run around pushing flowers on people at the airport, but I'll be damned if I sit by and watch a new Nazi State be born right under my nose.

But that's what we are witnessing right now, the birth of Global Fascism, hell we are drowning in the afterbirth of the new Master Race, though now it's not the Master Race, it's the Master Belief System.

Now I think I'll go deep fry a toxin free pork chop and wash it down with some Vitamin C.
 
Here is part of what I wrote on SOTT related to MIVILUDES plus other similar organizations and their health and psychology policies. In good faith, I removed everything that was related to the police interview:

http://thefrenchconnection.eu/112/english/the-medical-inquisition-and-human-rights-violations-in-21st-century-france/

The Medical Inquisition and Human Rights Violations in 21st Century France

Since the 1990s, there have been several legal entities created in France that are supported by the government whose sole purpose is to mandate what people can think and believe. These organizations have the capability (expressly designed into them) of bypassing and/or superseding any rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. These French organizations, for instance MIVILUDES, are essentially full-spectrum Fascism created and run by psychopaths and their Authoritarian Followers. Anybody who is discovered to have the slightest tendency to adopt alternative views is seemingly a danger because they are undoubtedly going to turn into an “apocalyptic cult” at any moment! The examples of the mass suicides of the People’s Temple, the Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate are trotted out at the beginning of the 2010 MIVILUDES report, thereby making the label “cult” as scary as “Muslim Terrorist”. (Never mind that those events were CIA PsyOps designed as a sort of ’9-11′ against non-mainstream thinking, the way 9-11 was designed to initiate the War on Terror.)

Particularly targeted by these organizations are any and all individuals or groups which advocate practices such as alternative medicine (including nutritional approaches to getting and staying healthy), non-mainstream cancer therapies, yoga, meditation and other stress-relieving techniques, especially if such discussions include scientific support. Additionally targeted are any individuals who discuss ‘conspiracy theories’ (especially about 9-11, but also including economic collapse and NWO topics), UFOs/aliens, psychology other than Freudianism (especially if such discussions include cutting edge scientific support; Jungian psychology is especially targeted), Earth Changes and cometary bombardments (especially if it includes scientific support), increasing earthquake and volcanic activity (especially if it includes scientific support) and more. All of these activities, or even thoughts about these activities, will get you labeled as a cult or a follower of a cult and subject to some pretty frightening procedures designed to “help” you reorganize your thinking more in line with what is accepted by the mainstream authorities such as the American Medical Association (AMA), Big Pharma, Big-Agri, NASA and certainly the CIA. Anything that is not handed down from those authorities is labeled “pseudo-science”, no matter how credible the scientist or how accurate the research. In short, it is as much a war against real science – as opposed to the corrupt science that has dominated the world for the past 100 years and is used to support wars more than anything else – as it is against religious beliefs. Moreover, if you are researching religions (Bible scholars beware!), mysticism, ancient wisdom and alternative history, you are also a cult. And if you have no apparent cultic beliefs, it’s just a ruse; you are just trying to appear like a researcher to lure people in, waiting to turn into an apocalyptic cult at any moment. The whole approach is reminiscent of the Bush gang’s claims about WMDs vis-a-vis Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and I think you all realize what that kind of rhetoric led to.

The 2010 MIVILUDES report tells us:

The fact of offering people the possibility to search for mysticism, wisdom and a forgotten ideal world, all the while assuring them of happiness, can be an extremely efficient bait.

There exists as well the risk that current social topics may be used (such as ecological aspirations) in order to play on people’s anguish and anxiety such as: frustration concerning the meaning of life, solitude, the pervasive anonymity and isolation, the lack of interpersonal communication and social acceptance, the need for the religious and the sacred in one’s life, refusal of a crushing social way of life.

By feeding into this environment of social anxiety via the use of references to pseudo-scientific elements, even those which have not been verified, in reality these beliefs are a tool that promotes collective fear, with the purpose of exerting more power over people and, in extreme cases, this can possibly lead to a vital risk [risk of mass suicide!] for the members of the group, or to questioning mainstream society through more or less violent actions.

I think that the perceptive reader can see what this organization is set up for and what it is they are really afraid of: they are afraid of people waking up and recognizing that the lunatics have taken over the asylum! It is clear to any normal person with empathy that the authors of this report are inquisitors set up to defend the status quo of the rule of a pathological elite who are not fit to rule as evidenced by their psychopathic behavior and intolerance towards anything truly human and who are able (and have been able) to get away with the most outrageous human rights violations in modern day France.

Did you know that alternative medicine and homeopathy are labeled as cults in France? People have gone to jail and have had their children taken away from them for giving alternative treatments to their children even when they were told in advance by their doctors that the child’s case was terminal and they would die even with the mainstream treatments (chemotherapy and radiation?!). The parents were destroyed for seeking something, anything, that might save the life of their child or, at least, not subject them to the horrors of modern cancer treatments. (See Maître Jean-Marc Florand, avocat de monsieur et madame de M, in French.)

The fact is that it is the psychopaths who rise to the top who have no stress. Normal people who feel empathy and who have a conscience are the ones who are being crushed in this pathological society. To whom do French people turn to in order to get help for their sufferings and wounds? As it happens, the psychological sciences in France are as backward as almost everything else; they still consider Freud to be the only psychological authority! How Dark Ages is that? Most psychology in the rest of the modern world is NOT Freudian and more and more psychologists are coming to the realization – as Jung did – that Freud was a psychopath himself. Which means that psychological help in France can only add to people’s suffering.

Worse than that, did you know that Jungian psychology or other non-Freudian psychotherapies can potentially be labeled as a cult in France? Yet it is books written by Jungian psychologists like Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Woman Who Run with the Wolves, that are helping millions of women around the world. If you are a woman who has been a victim of a psychopath – which is increasingly common in these times – then France is the last place to be because not only will you not get help, you will be blamed for being a victim of an intraspecies predator.

Anti-sect organizations in France apparently think that literally everyone is “vulnerable” and “fragile in mind”, especially if they are not satisfied with the mainstream answers and are looking elsewhere for answers! They think that you are basically so stupid that you better have nothing to do with any information that is contrary to their edicts of what is or is not “normal”. It could be a cult! Their descriptions are, in fact, so arbitrary and broad that any criticism of any established authorities can lead to being labeled a cult! As clinical psychologist, Andrew Lobaczewski wrote, when psychopaths take over a government, the whole system has nowhere to go but down, because in their efforts to micro-control everything they end up doing little more than repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot!

Laws enacting restrictions on supplements and herbs is not all there is to it. At this rate of things going really south so quickly, you – the reader – will probably be experiencing cult accusations first hand in the near future.

Science Inquisition

Salem witchhunts or McCarthy-like prosecutions will kill science. Science flourishes only in freedom… The only way definitively to establish conflicting results is to reproduce them. It may be that all of us are wrong in good faith. This is no crime but science as usual.’ – Jacques Benveniste

The Conseil National de l’Ordre des Médecins, the equivalent of the American Medical Association, was sending e-newsletters as early as 1996 to doctors telling them to be suspicious of alternative medicine and homeopathy because they are all cult recruiters. Between 1996 and 1997, the first French victim of the hepatitis B vaccine who ended up with multiple sclerosis appeared on French TV to expose the dangers of the vaccine. Also on the show was then Minister of Health Bernard Kouchner who said that his information was coming from a cult. So the possibility of preventing thousands of people from developing neurological disorders due to unsafe or inappropriate vaccines was doomed from the beginning, because – according to the constituted authorities – the information about this was being propagated by a “cult”. You see, those who dare to speak a word against Big Pharma and the dangerous side effects of their drugs are labeled as cult in France. Those who see their lives destroyed by side effects of dangerous chemicals are silenced by being labeled as a cult. It’s the handiest propaganda tool that France has ever developed in concert with the American CIA!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4OvuNwDIu8&feature=player_embedded

Renowned scientists who have treated cancer and AIDS with cost-effective treatments not sponsored by Big Pharma have seen their lives and their work completely destroyed. The case of Prof. Beljanski from the Pasteur Institute comes to mind. The place where he lived with his wife and secretary was raided by 80 members of a French special forces army unit, with helicopter and all. They told him “Monsieur, vous-êtes une secte” (Sir, you are a cult). They were only three people!

Natural approach for cellular protection from environmental toxins

[...] Dr. Coles tells the fascinating story of Dr. Mirko Beljanski (1923-1998), whose most important and controversial scientific discoveries were made during his 25 years of research at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Beljanski discovered that cellular DNA experiences a change of conformation in the presence of pollutants, carcinogens (mutagens or not), and many other molecules. Beljanski showed that all precancerous and cancerous cells contain DNA that has been destabilized to various degrees. He also discovered that two rain forest plant extracts, Pao Pereira and Rauwolfia vomitoria, act at the cellular level to help the body rid itself of cancer cells. Beljanski published 133 peer-reviewed journal articles over his lifetime, including some articles describing clinical studies that demonstrated profound benefits to cellular DNA following ingestion of these plant extracts.

Dr. Coles illustrates how Beljanski’s groundbreaking discoveries brought him scientific and political opposition beginning with the director of the Pasteur Institute, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Jacques Monod. Beljanski’s greatest challenge came after French President Francois Mitterrand was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1992, during his second term in office. By 1994, Mitterrand’s doctors had predicted he had three months to live, and he was in great pain and had started radiation therapy. At this time, Mitterrand learned about the Beljanski formulas. He began to take Beljanski’s natural extracts of Rauwolfia vomitoria and Pao Pereira as well as a unique formula of RNA fragments recommended by Beljanski. To everyone’s surprise, Mitterrand’s strength and vigor returned and he survived beyond the end of his term.

Dr. Coles recounts that as French public interest in the Beljanski formulas started to grow, the French government shut down Beljanski’s laboratories and confiscated his products from French citizens who were using them, which led to protesting in the streets. Tragically, Dr. Beljanski died before the European Court of Human Rights had ruled unanimously that his right to a fair trial had been seriously violated.

From The Secret Health History of François Mitterrand:

In a climate full of jealousy, pettiness and rivalries, it was impossible for Mirko Beljanski to ever be acknowledged as a contributor to the welfare of humankind. The establishment could not accept that one totally independent scientist could be recognized for his discoveries. They decided to take harsh action by depriving him of the one thing that he needed: his laboratory, “because,” as Monique declared, “they could no longer deny the truth in results that proved to be so efficacious.”

At 6 a.m. on the morning of October 9, 1996, the GIGN (The National Gendarmerie Intervention Group), trained to deal with violence, riots, and terrorism, in what was clearly an over-the-top operation involving one helicopter and 80 antiterrorist soldiers, struck. Interestingly enough, the GIGN were not the police but a French Army Special-Forces Unit (this implies the order came from the highest levels of the government). The GIGN, wearing flak vests, carrying machine guns and clubs, leading police dogs and blowing whistles, padlocked the entrance doors and closed down the Beljanskis’ laboratory.

In an egregious abdication of their particular responsibility, members of the French media observed what was happening but remained silent. No effort was spared to humiliate Mirko or his research staff. But it was Mirko who was being martyred. The 73-year-old scientist was roused from bed, placed in handcuffs, and held for questioning for 24 hours with a bail set at an amount much higher than his entire retirement pension. He was not given information about his rights nor with what he was being charged. His wife and scientific collaborator at the Pasteur Institute, Monique, was put under house arrest in Paris, unable to leave the premises, use the phone to ask for legal aid or to know what was going on with her husband.

Again, before due process of law that would allow for charges and evidence and a chance to defend one’s self – a fundamental human right – was allowed to take its course, the French Assistant Attorney General’s Office issued an order recommending immediate destruction of all Beljanski products. As for the AMM filing documentation, the police went to the offices of the special consultants who were putting the finishing touches on the market authorization files and took them all.

The Beljanski products were ordered to be taken out of the homes of the people who were using them. The French authorities made their way from home to home using any information gleaned from doctors as to who was getting the capsules. They broke into homes, terrorizing ordinary citizens battling contentious illnesses, turning them into criminals. This marked an outrageous violation of basic human rights. The people would not have it. Confiscations occurred so that cancer patients were left without their support and unfortunately, some died so soon after their treatments were taken that the deaths can be argued to have occurred as a result of this basic violation – all occurring without any proceedings in a civil or criminal court.

All this happened without a chance for Mirko to defend his work. He was deprived of his basic right to confront his accusers. He was deprived of a basic human right to have a hearing before an impartial judge, and to confront his accuser (or accusers) and he was deprived of a basic human right as a result of the destruction of his laboratory with absolutely no due process. His passport was confiscated allegedly so that he would not be able to travel to another country, where he would have the freedom to continue his safe, nontoxic approach – something the French government denied its citizens.

By decree of bureaucracy, the biologist was forbidden from speaking publicly, from publishing his research, or from writing for the press. But this would not stop the public outcry or the advancement of real science. After having their Beljanski capsules taken away, patients flocked in overflowing crowds to protest, demonstrating in the streets of Paris and Lyons while carrying signs demanding: “We want the Beljanski products!” Beljanski was set to be put on trial without a date in violation of his basic human rights, but most tragically, he died waiting for a fair trial.

It is not only the most outrageous betrayal of Human Rights in modern-day France, it is also the most outrageous betrayal of Science. The French government shoot themselves in the foot by going after their very own scientists of the Pasteur Institute who had developed cost-effective treatments and solutions for incurable modern day diseases.

This is pure pathological behavior!

Who Exactly Are They?

Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Christian cult in horror.
Tout homme sensé, tout homme de bien, doit avoir la secte chrétienne en horreur.
- Voltaire.


In France, the U.N.A.D.F.I. (Union Nationale des Associations de Défense des Familles et de l’Individu- The National Union of Associations for the Defense of Families and the Individual) is dedicated to fight against cults. As noble as they sound, in their view, any organization whose teachings do not conform to the Catholic faith is a cult. Some of their “Human Rights Defense” is based on highly questionable psychiatrists. For instance:

Ted Patrick: former U.S. military psychologist, who adopted the brutal methods of “deprogramming” to reintegrate in the right way members of “sects” (kidnapping, violence…).

Dr. John Clark: Mind Control Specialist and former assistant of Dr. Lindemann of the CIA has been sanctioned by the Council of the Medical Association of Massachusetts for a person forcibly interned because of his religious beliefs. In 1983, he proposed a plan to get rid of the “new religions”. Clark denounces legal barriers and liberal democratic societies that stand to thwart his personal views. His work is often cited in ADFI publications.

Margaret Singer: a military psychologist who had problems with the American justice system, which held that psychiatric reports were “value judgments disguised as expert opinion.”

Dr. Louis West: He advocated the sterilization of blacks and Hispanics in the fight against crime. He is often quoted in ADFI publications (e.g. Bulles).

The arguments put forward by these psychiatrists raise the indignation of American psychiatry, who point out the obvious: they are marginal people with no genuine professional standing or expert status.

Dr. Robert Lifton: A strong advocate of “deprogramming”, he is the author of a book on the ambiguous practice of doctors in Nazi concentration camps.

The A.D.F.I. was founded in Rennes (France) in 1974 at the initiative of Dr. Champollion and the Psychiatrist André Badiche. She immediately declared its commitment to the pseudoscientific theories of American psychiatrists: John Clark, Margaret Singer and Louis West, with the goal of the normalization of the society that would be in jeopardy because of new sects or religions.

[Sectes, religions et libertés publiques by Christian Paturel, Édition La Pensée Universelle 1996. Taken from L'UNADFI - enquête sur la « secte anti-sectes »]

It’s just amazing that these French groups are basing their ideas and policies on rejects from the American psychological sciences!

People have had their children taken away without due process (or with very dubious due process), have been defamed and had their reputations destroyed, and have been driven to commit suicide as a result of the persecutions of this organization.

For instance, psychotherapist Bernard Lempert, a specialist in child abuse, and his association L’Arbre au milieu was blacklisted as a cult. Among those who accused him of being a cult was a founding member of the local association from the UNADFI. Bernard Lempert treated a young woman who was anorexic and who was the daughter of one of the founding members of one of the ADFI groups. After her treatment, the young woman decided to move to another town to escape her mother who was clearly part of the reason she was anorexic. Said mother was convinced that Lempert was a guru that took her daughter away. Even when the parliamentary commission on cults recognized its error and even when a court judgment cleared Lempert’s name, to this day he has still trouble participating in seminars about child abuse regardless of his solid reputation. (See The New Witch Hunt by Thierry Bécourt, in French) If your partner or a family member is even slightly deranged, you can become the target of this anti-cult organization. Just look at what family members or neighbors are encouraged to report as aberrant, cult-like behavior:

Information sheet of informers and surveillance (according the ADFI)

Warning

How to recognize a person in danger?

It may be that in your life or your family, you know a person’s behavior is unethical. The ADFI has compiled a list of symptoms that will confirm your suspicions:

Modification of behavior, dress, vocabulary, interests.
Movements in France and abroad.
Meetings on weekdays, weekends.
Numerous phone calls, abundant e-mails.
Spending a lot of time reading or meditating.
Diet.

So if that person shows one or more of these symptoms, please check with the nearest ADFI to be able to help.

Actions

Record the names, addresses and telephone numbers of persons linked to the activities of the suspect.
Keep a log of events concerning the relationship of the suspect.
Observe the reading, vocabulary, schedules, names and surnames of those in the environment of the suspect.
Monitor places and suspicious activity.

Esoteric bookstores, yoga, health food shops, conferences and trade fairs, homeopathics and alternative medicine, Jungian psychoanalysts, sexologists, personal development, prayer groups, accompanying the dying, ufology, farming, religious communities, private schools, the course of artistic expression, Eastern spirituality, media, social scientists and independent scientists…

That is to say, any psycho who envies you or doesn’t like you can denounce you! By the way, they also work closely with the secret services.

ADFI is only one of the anti-cult organizations. Another one is MILIVUDES:

https://www.sott.net/articles/show/235398-MIVILUDES-Some-Truth-and-Lies-in-France-s-witch-hunt-against-subversives-

MIVILUDES (Mission Interministérielle de VIgilance et de LUtte contre les DÉrives) is an agency of the French government tasked with seeking and harassing, and ultimately prosecuting, any group it deems to be ‘fond of ideas not commonly shared by society’. And who decides which ideas are and are not ‘commonly shared by society’? The MIVILUDES, of course…

Indeed, it disturbs pharmaceutical companies and the governments that make money from them; they don’t like people healing with therapies that don’t involve the use of expensive surgeries and prescription drugs. As MIVILUDES itself has written in its report (this excerpt comes after they have described why ‘PNCAVT’ are so cultic and dangerous, two of the provided examples being Vitamin C and sodium bicarbonate used in the treatment of cancer):

From the examples and analyses provided in this text, we can summarize as follows the common characteristics of the PNCAVT (Pratiques non conventionnelles à vise thérapeuthique, or “Non-Conventional Practices for Therapeutic Purposes”):

Lack of scientific proof
“Simple”, or even simplistic, explanations provided for complex processes
“Unique” means of diagnosing, allegedly self-sufficient
So called “natural” treatments, without secondary effects and relatively easy to put into practice, which can be cheap in comparison with traditional treatments, reasons for which the pharmaceutical industry condemns them
Methods put into place by a single therapist who does not feel the need for multidiscliplinarity
Promises of healing even in cases where conventional Medicine has failed

There is also FECRIS which is an organization that has 18 branch offices spread across most European Countries. The roots of FECRIS began in the 1970s. It used methods at that time and through the ’80s, ’90s and up to the latest case in January 2003, which are both extremist and illegal such as kidnapping and false imprisonment (for purposes of “deprogramming”):

While on the surface there seems to be little to worry about, there is a great deal going on in reality under the surface, which is pulling away the carpet of human rights right under the feet of Europe.[...]

Words such as “sect” and “cult” have successfully been used to scare people to look the other way. But now the ground is getting to bumpy to walk on for anyone. The label “sect member” is today applicable for virtually anyone who is disliked, since there is no scientific definition of the word, and thus the dystopia of Orwellian thought police can be said to happen right in front of our eyes. It is time to look under the carpet.[...]

France is nevertheless the first nation in Western Europe that has successfully bypassed human rights and created a law where you can be imprisoned for the wrong belief.[...]

French MP Philippe Vuilque told the National Assembly on May 30, 2001, that: “The next battles will be delivered against more professional, more discrete, more difficult to identify enemies… I think of certain NGOs, the networks of psychotherapists, certain groups which cure or fight against the devil gathered around a charismatic leader who refers to the Bible, to the Koran, to the Talmud….” [...]

FECRIS member groups record of discrimination throughout the years, with documented violence, restriction of liberty, verbal threats and derogatory statements is not that different from other hate groups[...]

Shadows of ponerization during Nazi Germany!

Wherever a society has become enslaved to others or to the rule of an overly-privileged native class, psychology is the first discipline to suffer from censorship and incursions on the part of an administrative body which starts claiming the last word as to what represents scientific truth. – Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes by Andrew M. Lobaczewski

Ties with Big Pharma and Monsanto

Some of these anti-cult organizations such as MIVILUDES, whose president is Georges Fenech, are not only unleashing a fight against spiritual minorities. They have other agendas. There is clearly much more to it than just that. It has become a matter of defending the interests of the pharmaceutical industry which is increasingly reviled by the public for very good reasons. God forbid their future profits will be jeopardized if people realize that they are sick thanks to the foods our governments recommend, the pollution and destruction which big corporations inflict on our environment, and the anti-physiological drugs that only compromise our health further by not dealing with the root problem. The small-mindedness that prevails in mainstream medicine, which has a hard time recognizing environmental medicine, nutrition and psychology as part of their education, is not a coincidence.

For Fenech “everything that is natural can be suspected as a cult.” This remark should tell you what he thinks of the organic foods that grow everywhere in France as part of a growing trend toward an alternative vision of food, hygiene, health and society. The greatest danger for the major food groups, such as Monsanto and Limagrain, is the movements that promote healthy eating, wellness at all levels, organic products that are GMO-free, and alternative medicine.

Pierre Pagesse, president of Limagrain, founded an association named Momagri (movement towards a global organization of agriculture) in 2005, the main objective of which is to promote, among other things, agriculture based strictly on GMOs. One of the founding members of Momagri is none other than Georges Fenech – president of the anti-cult movement MIVILUDES. Are we surprised?! Other members have clear ties with the arms and war industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the anti-cult movements. In short, they are all in bed together.

In their 2010 report, the anti-cult organization MIVILUDES says that “natural” methods of treatment with no side effects and which are relatively simple to implement, are inexpensive in respect to conventional treatments and which are criticized by the pharmaceutical industry are often implemented by cults and their doctors and practitioners. In a mocking tone, they refer to cult gurus and practitioners who say that there are effective alternative healing methods that are suppressed by the pharmaceutical industry as “deluded and dangerous”. You see, suggesting ties to BIg Pharma is a conspiracy theory that is based on delusions and is also evidence of being in a cult!

In short, any critical thinking or stance is regarded as cultic and incriminating. The majority of the members and associations who can be qualified as being a cult in France are precisely those who are less cultic than the average. Basically, if you are not an Authoritarian Follower, then you are a member of a cult. Despite the reckless disregard of basic Human Rights by France and the denunciation of such by the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations, France continues with its fascist plans of enforcing its pathological thinking and ways on the entire population. In fact, according to this lawyer, (a lone ranger in this awful system), French anti-cult organizations have actually accused the UN of having been infiltrated by a cult because of its critical stance against violations of basic human rights by France!

Yeah, read that again. It’s the truth.

At the end of the day, it appears that France is a country where millions suffer and not only are their sufferings created by their government, they are discouraged from the simplest things that could help them become fully well, physically and psychologically: eating the foods or undertaking the therapies and stress-relieving methods that would ease their lives.

It is truly heartbreaking.

My advice is to NEVER come to France. You don’t know how good you actually have it where you are! Also, share our story with anyone and everyone: it’s France today, it will be on your doorstep tomorrow.
 
transientP said:
- Spending a lot of time reading or meditating.

my oh my oh my !

Just you wait! It actually gets worse than that.... Have you noticed how they manage to distort every single thing, full of paramoralisms, and pseudo-science (well, even worse than that), and a few comments here and there on how, if you think any differently from what the authorities consider "normal" and "safe", you are a cult? It is pathetic, sick, and it really doesn't bode well for France's (and Europe's) future... :curse: :cry:
 
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