The Business of Psychic Rape

...They detest the far-out sects' sermons but defend their right to preach them, observing that some of the older religions were, in their heyday, just as fanatical, as irrational and as intolerant as the People's Temple...

...posters advertising the same guru can be seen in the resorts of southern France and northern Italy, from Biarritz to Venice...

...But Qaddafi himself is not immortal, and he has made a lot of enemies...

...If easy profits were all these enterprises wanted, it might be unfair to pillory them...

...Qaddafi himself is said by leading Palestinians to have transferred "astronomic sums" to his private accounts in Switzerland, and they would not be surprised if the Libyan Army made an effort to persuade him to retire...

...I suspected at first that the youth were simply financing their summer vacations and that their organizations were bogus...

...They are unhappy, too, about his squandering Libyan resources on the subsidization of Trot-skyists, Red Brigaders, fascists, back-to-the-Koran reactionaries, and other extremists...

...To this, the Reverend Jim Jones would no doubt have said a hearty "Amen...

...The trouble with the sect-bosses is that they want minds and bodies as well as cash...

...One major misjudgment a week would discredit the average priest, pastor, rabbi, or political commentator...

...How the White House must long for some such key to the universe...

...If only Europe's Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist religions had done that...

...Yet how can one legislate against brainwashing or the inculcation of fanaticism, against ruthless proselytism or religious commercialism, without treading on the toes of the well-established organizations that most people now consider to be respectable, despite the fact that they still have some highly fanatical texts on their books...

...Some recruits are undoubtedly idealistic...

...As if to prove that Europe can still produce eccentric religious movements, a schismatic Catholic community at Palmar de Troya, near Seville, crowned its own pope??Gregory XVII ??a few weeks ago...

...I have seen groups of youths and girls in the main streets of European cities collecting money for obscure American religious organizations and handing out leaflets that read like the drooling of a halfwit...

...Others are reacting against the routine stodginess, superficiality and hypocrisy of older religious bodies...

...Thus if Morocco's many disgruntled Army officers find a leader, Hassan's throne could wobble as badly astheShah's...

...Most of the sects' victims appear to be weak, insecure, ignorant people, desperate to belong and to believe...

...No less significant a Churchman than San Ignacio de Loyola wrote: "Whoever lives in obedience to divine providence must become, in the hands of his superior, like a corpse which allows itself to be moved and treated in whatever manner those in charge of it wish...

...but they were a big enough crowd to discourage complacency about the superior wisdom of Europeans in such matters...

...Individuals who have succeeded in breaking away from them speak of brainwashing, Pavlovian conditioning and old-fashioned exploitation...

...The very weekend of the Jonestown exercise in necropolitics, nearly 200,000 Spaniards gathered in central Madrid to applaud speeches by nostalgic Falangists praising their party's founders, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, who advocated "the dialectics of fists and pistols," and Generalisimo Franco, who was responsible for many more deaths than James Jones...

...Stardust Western Europe's most flourishing fringe religion, with a more faithful public and greater press coverage than most churches, is astrology...

...North Africa looks like it will have a twitchy new year...

...African Horrorscope If thi- people in the State Department and elsewhere who keep an eye on North African affairs are consulting horoscopes, I can almost forgive them...

...A distinctive feature of it is the apparently inexhaustible willingness of its adepts to overlook the errors of their prophets...

...They pick fewer pockets and dangle fewer hopes of material gain than Europe's thousands of betting shops, casinos, investment funds, and other legal devices for parting fools from their money...

...sects are "colonizing" Columbia and other Caribbean and Latin American states...

...some are eager for knowledge, though it must be easily assimilable knowledge, offering (like Fascism and Communism) an instant explanation of everything...

...He will be cultivated by politicians, money will flow in??tax free??and unless he is unusually incompetent he can acquire a lush harem and a plush real-estate empire...

...He is also said to have earmarked about $500 million for the overthrow of President Sadat, and to have told Palestinian and other terrorist groups that a huge reward will be paid for the Egyptian leader's assassination...

...A growing number of Libyan Army officers resent his authoritarian manners and criticize him for "trying to buy popularity with the dropouts of the world," as a Libyan diplomat in London put it recently...

...We were told that nutty sects occupy several pages in California telephone directories, and that U.S...

...Worried parents complained that "unscrupulous" sects are establishing footholds in Western Europe, buying property and conning kids into collecting funds for them...

...Libya's western neighbors are similarly in danger of experiencing convulsions in 1979...

...The same texts are handed out in England, France and Spain...

...The psychic rapist who founds a nominally religious organization, invests in an adequate publicity campaign and captures a substantial following, will be addressed as Reverend even by unbelievers and as Bishop, Guru, Saint or whatever he wishes by his victims...

...The appalling moral and financial corruption of the regime is pro\ oking widespread discontent...

...In Algeria, Houari Boume-diene has just died, leaving a power vacuum...

...This community clings to the Latin mass and is building a basilica on a site where, it says, the Virgin Mary appeared to four girls...

...but how dull life would be if all aspects of it were really predictable in terms of celestial backgammon...

...Al Capone would have had no tax problems, and therefore no jail sentence, if he had had the sense to call his gang Capone's Temple or the Children ofAl...

...It is alleged by priests of the official Catholic Church to be led by homosexuals...

...A few Left-wing politicians and press commentators in Western Europe have called for legislation to protect potential victims of the nastier sects...

...They have already broken hundreds of families, splitting children from parents and husbands from wives by promises of eternal bliss, threats of divine punishment, peer-group sticks, and sexual or narcotic carrots...

...Colonel Qad-dafi of Libya is buying more military equipment from the Soviet Union and trying to buy nuclear technology from France (via Pakistan...

...The industry is, in short, well organized, and the take must be considerable...

...Whether or not the Reverend James Jones' People's Temple was the looniest sect in the business, we should be grateful to it for considerately wiping itself out before it became a major nuisance...

...Palestinian leaders are angry with Qaddafi for accusing them last September of transferring to their personal bank accounts in Switzerland about $100 million from funds he gave them in the fall of 1977 for the construction of military strongpoints in South Lebanon...

...Perhaps because they suspect the whole thing is nonsense and are secretly ashamed of being hooked by it, they dare not admit as much even to themselves...

...One would expect the many papers that run astrology columns to be inundated with letters complaining (say), "Your stargazer said Tuesday was a good day for financial and amatory adventures, and as a result of his advice I lost my shirt in the stock market and received a black eye from my wife's sister"??but they are not...

...10 wrong "predictions" a week merely bind an astrologer's followers to him...

...Apparently astronuts are not only an uncritical lot, they enjoy having Stardust flung in their eyes...

...These 200,000 were only a small minority of the Spanish people, of course, as the December 6 constitutional referendum showed...

...King Hassan of Morocco has, it is true, only a mild health problem, but he is reportedly worried about the loyalty of his Army...

...In Tunisia, the ailing President Habib Bourguiba is losing his grip...

...The idea sounds attractive, and the French interior minister has declared himself willing to set up a commission to examine it...

...In a day, they would easily collect enough to feed and lodge themselves modestly for the rest of the week...

...The Nazi leaders were firm believers in astrology, and at one point during World War II a British Intelligence unit employed an astrologer to write phony horoscopes and predictions that were fed to the German authorities (via Swiss intermediaries) in the hope of misleading them or driving them more swiftly round the bend...

...Today more than one gorilla with a seat in the United Nations consults stargazers before taking a major decision...

...After Jonestown, some European commentators who appeared to have forgotten this Continent's talent for breeding monsters treated us to predictable generalizations about the violence, psychoses and intellectual sloppi-ness of American life...

...But people with the leisure to observe them have told me that these groups are usually controlled by an organizer who deploys them carefully and takes over their cash .Sometimes they are bused to small towns where each member is given a street, a school or an office block, to prospect...

...The labor employed is cheap and docile, and no taxes or Social Security are paid...

...Liberals tend to prefer education to legislation...

...The mother superior of an order of nuns attached to the new church has said that it will probably canonize General Franco...

...This complaint appears to have some foundation...