THE CULT DISCIPLE

My research on cults has convinced me they are full of elements endemic to society in general. Cults, it seems, are nothing more than an extreme example of the influences within society.
For instance, who joins a cult? The easy and most popular belief is that cult disciples are inadequates of low intelligence. But in her extensive study of cults, sociologist Eileen Barker has found the opposite.

PROFILE OF A DISCIPLE

The normal cult member is of above average intelligence and comes from a well-balanced, middieclass background. What appears to be happening is that, as modern life becomes more secular and materialist, an increasing number of intelligent people are finding life unfulfilling and meaningless.
Intelligence requires purpose, and if established religions fail to appeal to this increasing minority, then spiritual values are found in fringe cults – of which there are well over a thousand in Britain alone.
And once hooked, the follower’s search for meaning, combined with the guru’s charisma, leads to a psychological process that guarantees obedience.

BRAINWASHING?

Ian Haworth, who formed the Cult Information Centre in Britain, would put it more forcefully. A leading member of the anti-cult movement, he would argue that once a cult has been formed by a guru, individuals who feel a lacking in life are sucked into the madness of cultism through psychological coercion, brainwashing or mind control.
People joining cults usually argue such techniques would not work on them, but the favoured methods of meditation used by cults, combined with forms of sleep deprivation and bombarding the initiate with information, inevitably lead to, first, sensory overload, and second, obedience to the whim of a guru.
Clearly cult membership also leads to a rejection of family ties as the cult becomes the new family. Fears rising in the natural family of the member has led to the rise of the exit counsellor such as Haworth, who see it as their mission to ‘de-program’ members and return them to their loved ones.

DE-PROGRAMMING

The father of such techniques was Ted Patrick, an American born-again Christian who worked as a youth worker in 1960s California. Noticing the number of people joining hippy cults, he saved a young Hare Krishna member by locking him up and using physical intimidation.
The founder of Freecog, the first anti-cult organisation, Patrick was also the inspiration for the American Cult Awareness Network, one of who’s members received a sixteen month sentence in 1994 for kidnapping.
Ian Haworth’s techniques are much more sedate than this. Using a process of reason and providing evidence for the member that the particular cult is not what it seems, he claims some success.
However, Eileen Barker argues that such anti-cultism is part of the problem, building the sinister side of basically innocuous cults out of all proportion. With the media also jumping on the bandwaggon, the public end up with an incorrect impression of all cults descending into depravity and corruption, whereas, for the vast majority, no such impulses are present.

ISOLATION

So does this mean we have nothing to fear in such cultism? With the majority, it seems we do not – the natural family excepted. The danger comes, argues Barker, with the cults who attempt to cut off their members from the outside world.
This process can be either physical or psychological. It causes too much reliance on the truths of the particular cult. And in this direction, one could argue, madness lies. Indeed, it is through this process that nearly all the mass suicides and group violence of cults has arisen.
Cults are, of course, ’strange’, and we can all hope that family or friends are never induced to join a cult. But it seems that the central problem with a cult may not necessarily be the cult itself, but the sense of isolation they can occasionally feel from society.
Indeed, such isolation has been called many things in the past, including ‘alienation’. And this can usually be the prompter for strange or violent behaviour in society at large. It seems, therefore, that a cult, and its disciples, can tell us much about ourselves.

(c) Anthony North, February 2008

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THE COLD WAR

The Cold War was born out of the 1945 Yalta Conference to define areas of responsibility in a post-world war world. Stalin gained most, communist governments existing in Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania by 1947, with Czechoslovakia and East Germany to follow.
Yugoslavia became communist under Tito but retained independence. Berlin itself was split into 4 zones – the USSR, US, Britain and France – but was in East Germany, only accessible by a ‘corridor’ to the west.

PACTS AND THINGS

In 1948 the 3 western powers created the state of West Germany, the Soviet response being to blockade Berlin. The west responded with the Berlin Air Lift, supplying the city and daring the Soviets to shoot down the planes.
The blockade was lifted in May 1949. To stop further expansion of communism, in 1949 the west devised NATO, the Soviets responding with the Warsaw Pact, mass armies beginning to appear on both sides.
Continued migration to the west became a hindrance to the east, so in 1961, the Berlin Wall was built, extending to become what Churchill called the Iron Curtain, splitting Europe into two camps.
Hungary rebelled against Soviet domination in 1956, and Poland in 1968, both uprisings put down by the Soviet Red Army. But things nearly got out of hand in 1962.

THE NUCLEAR THREAT

In 1959 Fidel Castro won a revolution in Cuba, turning the country to communism and friendship with the USSR. The Soviets had become the 3rd nuclear power in 1949, and in 1962 a US spyplane photographed a missile site under construction in Cuba.
Kennedy put the island under naval quarantine and threatened nuclear war if the site was not dismantled. Powerless in naval terms, the USSR backed down, but began building up their navy from this point.
But a more rational form of diplomacy arose. Throughout the period MAD, or Mutally Assured Destruction, was the policy of deterrence, both sides having thousands of nuclear warheads, the idea being that neither side could win a war.

END GAME

In 1963 a nuclear test ban treaty was signed, followed by Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT. And whilst espionage was ripe throughout the period, relations settled down to detente.
By the late 1980s, the Soviets faced trouble. In Poland the trade union Solidarity under Lech Walesa rose to sweep away communism. In the Kremlin the communists of the Soviet Union had realised the west was spending their way to victory, the Soviet economy unable to afford the arms race.
Out of this realisation, Gorbechov, a more moderate leader, rose. The INF Treaty was signed in 1988, limiting intermediate nuclear weapons, followed by reduction talks. Spurred on by Polish freedom, peaceful uprisings erupted throughout the Warsaw Pact and in 1989, German youth ripped down the Berlin Wall, uniting the two Germanies.
The Soviet infra-structure began to break down, crystallised in Boris Yeltsin, who, after a communist hardline attempt to depose Gorbechov, spurred on the people to rise.
Communism was swept away, Yeltsin becoming the President of a new Russia.

TODAY

Today, that new Russia is democratic, but under Putin, old-style central control is raising its head once more. In the west, NATO struggles to find a role, peacekeeping the new ethos following the break-up of Yugoslavia and the ambitions of a Greater Serbia.
Following wars in Croatia, Bosnia and intrigues in Kosovo, NATO finds itself in a new form of protectorate, keeping opposing hatreds apart. However, communism affected more than just Europe, as we shall see in the next post.

© Anthony North, February 2008

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