By Prof. Regis Dericquebourg
HRWF (16.02.2012) – The report of MIVILUDES has been translated in English on http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,26706.0.html
The translation of this report is a positive step because many people outside France and French-speaking countries will have access to first-hand material showing how social panic can be artificially created in a European democracy. The latest attempt is to instrumentalize a prediction based on the Maya calendar that the end of the world would take place in December 2012.
Some people have been waiting for « a new heaven and a new earth » for thousands of years. Many religions are rooted in such an expectation (Jehovah’s Witnesses or Seventh-Day Adventists). They have kept and are still keeping alive the hope in a world where justice, wealth, sharing, love and health will prevail. The Catholic Church has also experienced the intense expectation of the coming back of Christ and its perfect Kingdom but has given it up. There was such a hope in the year 1000 and also in 2000. Now, some have another year in mind: 2012.
It is a good opportunity for the opponents of sects to revive their arguments on the risks of such an expectation. They recall that before the year 2000 “suicides” or “mass suicides” of some groups took place in the past, their aim being to increase the social panic. Why? For them, it is vital to survive financially and in the media. The social panic allows them to justify the grants they have received and to ask for more on the ground that this imminent danger threatens everybody, including children. For example, they announced that 60,000 children are under threat of mistreatment while a wide survey carried out by the Ministry of Social Affairs says “maybe two”. What is more dramatic is the fact that 100,000 children in France do not get enough to eat and that people die from the cold on the street when it freezes, and “sects” have nothing to do with that.
Social panic also targets healers and alternative therapists although the death toll to be attributed to these healers is unknown. What is known however is the number of medical errors in France: 100,000 per year 4,000 of which are lethal.
Noteworthy is the fact that MIVILUDES and anti-sect activists keep silent about Muslim sects in France and violent Islamic sects abroad. It is easier and safer to accuse an isolated yoga teacher and to submit him to fiscal control. It is also easier to denounce the gas attempt by Aum Shinrikyo in the metro of Tokyo than the one perpetrated in the metro station “Luxembourg” in Paris by the GIA (Armed Islamic Group) some years ago. At their trial, opponents to sects failed to support the victims by instituting a civil action and left them helpless.