Luigi Corvaglia Abstract This paper examines the mechanisms of persuasion used in the recruitment and retention of members in high-control groups (commonly referred to as "sects" or "cults") through the lens of game theory. The analysis integrates empirical literature on psychological manipulation processes—particularly the Submission As Preference Shifting model (Corvaglia, 2025)—with formal models of strategic interaction, highlighting how recruitment dynamics can be conceptualized as games of asymmetric information, strategic signaling, and social influence. The proposed theoretical framework provides new insights into individual vulnerability factors, recruiters’ strategies, and possible preventive interventions. 1. Introduction In January 2025, five years after its first appearance in several Italian academic journals, my model of Submission As Preference Shifting  (SAPS) was finally published in English in IJCAM , thus enabling international dissemination. This work addresses a relatively unexplored field in the debate on undue persuasion: that of those who regard it as a real phenomenon but believe that manipulative practices and free choice are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, coexist. In the model I propose, every choice made by those who join a high-control group is undertaken voluntarily; however, the outcome of subordination is produced by a choice architecture designed to gradually lead to the desired results of those who orchestrated it. In my conception, this outcome is made possible by mechanisms already well known in psychology: the concept of salience —the relevance that a piece of information acquires in its surrounding environment (Borgida, Nisbett, 1977); present bias —the tendency to focus on the immediate present rather than the future when making decisions; the consequent procrastination of disobedience ; and framing —the ability of context to assign meaning to data (Kahneman, Tversky,1979). Manipulation, therefore, does not lie in unspecified techniques of suggestion or control, but rather in the intentional construction of a choice architecture, that is, in the persuader’s intent. Here, I return to that model to formalize it in the language of game theory. Its adaptability to the phenomena I illustrate serves both as a validation of the theory’s robustness and as a clearer demonstration that permanence in high-control groups is simultaneously a rational outcome—since it results from decisions made under conditions of strategic uncertainty—and a plastic one, because the environment reshapes desires and evaluations. This reshaping, in turn, is guided by what we may call the “choice architect.” To this end, it is useful to briefly revisit the model and describe what game theory entails. 1.1 The Submission As Preference Shifting (SAPS) Model Entering a coercive group is never the result of a single decision but rather of a series of successive choices between two alternatives: collaborate or defect. Various studies have examined the recruitment of the “Moonies,” the followers of the Unification Church (Galanter, 1979; Barker, 1983). Recruitment traditionally occurs through incremental steps, such as invitations to lunches and workshops of increasing intensity. At each invitation, the subject must decide whether to continue or withdraw. Each small step thus functions as a crossroads: those who refuse drop out, those who accept continue. The high defection rate observed in such contexts was interpreted by Eileen Barker as evidence of the ineffectiveness of manipulative techniques (Barker, 1984). In my view, however, this dynamic represents a process of self-selection: resistant and less interested subjects leave early, while those who remain are more engaged and gradually become more compliant, eventually forming a closed, unanimously aligned group. This homogeneity reproduces conditions akin to those demonstrated in Asch’s experiments (1951), where subjects, exposed to unanimous but patently false consensus, tended to conform rather than contradict the majority. The SAPS model explains this trajectory through three main mechanisms: Change of salience : The Milgram experiment (1961) tested obedience to authority by asking participants to administer what they believed were increasingly painful electric shocks to another person. Despite hearing apparent cries of pain, many continued under the experimenter's instructions, showing how ordinary people can comply with authority even against their conscience. As this obedience experiments demonstrated, attention shifts from the final outcome (e.g., inflicting serious harm) to the immediate request (e.g., pressing a button, administering a slightly stronger shock). Each request appears isolated and manageable without revealing the broader picture. Gradient of differentiation : the incremental difference between one request and the next is minimal. Each new request seems insignificant compared to prior compliance (“I’ve already agreed to something similar”), while the salience of defection appears increasingly costly in moral and social terms (“leaving now would be too costly”). “It is the gradient of differentiation that makes the shift in salience possible, because the short distance between one demand and the next renders each new claim acceptable. As Hassan (2018) shows, these demands span the BITE domains - Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion. Procrastination of disobedience : defection is postponed to a hypothetical future point when demands become excessive. But since progression is gradual and differentiation is minimal, that moment never arrives. Each delay strengthens commitment, consistent with the consistency principle  (Staw, 1976; Cialdini, 2009), while perceived exit costs escalate. In addition, Asch-like conformity  stabilizes the trajectory: once the group is self-selected and unanimously favorable, dissent becomes nearly unthinkable. Here the process of Self-Categorization  described by Turner (1987) comes into play: as involvement progresses, the individual increasingly perceives themselves as a member of the group, internalizing its norms and values. This depersonalization reduces the salience of individual judgments and makes conformity to collective expectations the most “natural” outcome. Within the SAPS framework, self-categorization functions as a multiplier that stabilizes the trajectory of collaboration and decreases the likelihood of interruption.The outcome is that subjects end up embracing beliefs and behaviors they would have rejected ex ante  but that appear coherent within the gradual path that has transformed their preferences and evaluative criteria through framing . Already Lalich (2004), with her concept of bounded choice , highlighted how the seemingly free choices of adherents are actually constrained by the cultic context, structured by the interplay of leader charisma, totalizing ideology, group pressure, and control systems. While the bounded choice model emphasizes structural constraints, the SAPS model provides a dynamic explanation, showing how submission emerges as a genuine shift in individual preferences. This perspective demonstrates that individual choices can be shaped without resorting to either extreme coercion or mythical “brainwashing” techniques. 1.2 Game Theory Game theory lies at the intersection of psychology, mathematics, biology, and economics, and studies strategic dynamics encountered in everyday life—from cooperation to competition and dilemmas—using the metaphor of “games” to describe players’ behavior when decisions are interdependent. It provides a useful framework for understanding phenomena characterized by information asymmetry, iterative dynamics, and conditional choices. A game specifies: (i) the players, (ii) the strategies available, (iii) what each player knows (information/rules), and (iv) the payoffs (benefits/costs) associated with each combination of choices. The advantage of game theory is that it translates intuitively familiar dynamics (courtship, cooperation, conflict, manipulation) into rigorously analyzable and predictable structures. Game theory distinguishes several types of games: Cooperative vs. non-cooperative : in the former, players can make binding agreements; in the latter, each acts independently without enforceable agreements. Zero-sum vs. non-zero-sum : in zero-sum games, one player’s gain equals the other’s loss; in non-zero-sum games, both may win ( win–win ) or both may lose ( lose–lose ). Simultaneous vs. sequential : in simultaneous games, players act at the same time; in sequential games, moves occur in sequence, with each decision informed by prior ones. Complete vs. incomplete information : in the former, all rules, strategies, and payoffs are known; in the latter, some elements (e.g., intentions or resources) are hidden. 2. Recruitment in High-Control Groups through Game Theory Applying game-theoretic categories, the first observation is that recruitment in high-control groups can be interpreted as a game of incomplete information. The recruit does not know the group’s true nature, future payoffs, or upcoming demands, while the recruiter holds an informational advantage and controls signals to guide decisions. Recruitment specifically belongs to the class of signaling games : One player ( sender ) possesses private information about their state or the nature of a good. The other ( receiver ) must make decisions based only on observable signals. Signals may be truthful or deceptive, and the strategic problem lies in deciphering them. The game’s equilibrium depends on signal quality. Costly signals are credible and produce a separating equilibrium , distinguishing honest from deceptive senders. Ambiguous signals produce a pooling equilibrium , where distinction is impossible. A useful analogy is courtship: the suitor (sender) signals qualities not immediately observable (reliability, intentions). Costly signals (gifts, commitment, visible care) generate a separating equilibrium, while ambiguous ones generate a pooling equilibrium. In cult recruitment: The recruiter is the sender, privy to the group’s true nature but concealing it. The potential recruit is the receiver, deciding based on signals (emotional support, positive narratives, testimonials). The difficulty of distinguishing legitimate from manipulative groups corresponds to pooling equilibrium: all groups use similar introductory techniques, preventing ex ante  distinction. Game theory thus frames recruitment and retention not as irrational coercion but as rational interactions under incomplete information. At this initial “hooking” stage, manipulation resides not in mysterious techniques but in the recruiter’s dishonesty. The strength of game theory is its operational clarity, cutting through ideological narratives and sophistry. Furthermore, these dynamics constitute a non-cooperative game : the recruiter maximizes their payoff (group expansion, resources, influence), while the recruit makes step-by-step decisions without binding agreements and under incomplete information. Ultimately, the structure is asymmetric: one player controls the narrative and progressively reshapes the utility function of the other. Recruitment is therefore a sequential, non-cooperative game of incomplete information and power imbalance, appearing initially as win–win  (non-zero-sum) but evolving into a distorted equilibrium where the group benefits at the individual’s expense (zero-sum). 2.1 SAPS as a Game-Theoretic Model The SAPS model can thus be understood as a sequential game of incomplete information involving two players: the Recruiter (R), who holds private knowledge of the group’s true nature, and the Prospective Member (P), who at each stage must choose to Collaborate (C) or Defect (D). Structure : Recruitment unfolds incrementally. R begins with minimal, seemingly harmless requests (attend a lunch, join a meeting). P chooses C or D. Refusal ends the game; acceptance triggers the next, slightly more demanding request. This generates an indefinite chain of subgames. Payoffs : For R, payoffs increase with each act of compliance (more resources, greater control). For P, payoffs are dynamic: Immediate benefits (bᵢ) rise early (attention, belonging). Collaboration costs (cᵢ) gradually increase (restrictions, material demands, loss of autonomy). Exit costs (C_exit(n)) accumulate (loss of investments, social rupture, cognitive dissonance). Each step appears rational locally : compliance yields benefits, while defection forfeits investments. Yet the global outcome is suboptimal: the recruit is trapped in a game they would not have chosen ex ante . From the perspective of game theory, SAPS can be seen as a sequence of strategically designed nudges : each request constitutes a micro-game in which the payoff structure is configured to make collaboration locally rational. This links the model to the behavioral theory of Thaler and Sunstein (2008), which shows how a choice that is “nudged” but not imposed maintains the appearance of decision-making freedom while still producing the outcome desired by the choice architect. Mechanisms in game terms Salience shift (Milgram-like) : attention focuses on immediate bᵢ rather than future cᵢ. Gradient of differentiation : minimal increments never trigger resistance. Procrastination of defection : exit costs rise with time, thanks to salience shift, postponing defection indefinitely. Conformity (Asch-like) : once selected, unanimous groups make dissent highly costly. The permanence as Nash Equilibrium The result of this dynamic can be described as a Nash equilibrium. The Nash equilibrium is a concept that originates in the field of non-cooperative games. It is a state of strategic stability: each player, by observing the moves of the others, chooses the strategy that, even if it does not grant them the optimal condition, still allows them the best possible result under the given conditions. It is also a stable condition, because no one would have anything to gain by unilaterally changing their decision. An example frequently occurring in everyday life is that of two friends who must decide in which restaurant to go. Both prefer being together rather than eating alone, but one prefers restaurant A and the other restaurant B. For each of the two, the optimal outcome would be for their own preferred restaurant to be chosen, but adapting to the restaurant preferred by the other is still better than eating alone. In Nash equilibrium, the two coordinate on one restaurant, because neither has an interest in changing unilaterally, as doing so would mean being left alone. In the context of high-control cults, the situation described above arises in an absolutely similar way, because for the recruiter the dominant and most rational strategy is to continue to propose requests; for the recruit, the apparently rational choice at each step is to collaborate, since defecting would entail a greater immediate cost. Neither of the two actors has an incentive to deviate unilaterally from their own strategy: the recruiter because they are progressively obtaining what they want, the recruit because they perceive defection as too costly. It is precisely a Nash equilibrium. However, it is a distorted equilibrium: the result is suboptimal for the recruit, but it is stabilized by the manipulation of the payoff structure and by informational asymmetry. Thus, sectarian recruitment requires neither brutal coercion nor mythical “brainwashing.” It suffices to design a choice architecture of credible signals, gradual escalation, and salience management, leading recruits to perceive collaboration as the most reasonable path. Disorganized Attachment as an Amplifier of Perceived Payoffs Alexandra Stein (2017) has shown that high-control groups induce a state of disorganized attachment in their members, even in the absence of preexisting vulnerabilities. The charismatic leader simultaneously becomes a source of threat and reassurance, creating an insoluble conflict that drives the subject to continually seek proximity to the very source of danger. In the SAPS model, this mechanism explains why the subjective value of immediate benefits (bᵢ) is amplified and why the exit costs (Cexit) are perceived as unbearable: defecting would mean losing the figure who—although also a source of threat—is the only one providing protection. Disorganized attachment thus acts as an amplifier of perceived payoffs. Game theory interprets this dynamic as a modification of P’s utility function: the payoff from cooperation increases not only for instrumental reasons but also because it reduces anxiety. The resulting Nash equilibrium is therefore even more stable and resistant to deviations. Repeated Games and Escalation: The process evolves through three phases: Hooking : immediate low-cost benefits (support, belonging). Investment : gradually rising demands; defection procrastinated under Milgram-like conditions. Lock-in : exit costs outweigh benefits, producing a strategic trap stabilized in Nash equilibrium. SAPS clarifies how escalation occurs: the recruiter reshapes the recruit’s utility function step by step, producing submission that appears as free choice. 3. Conclusions The application of game theory to persuasion in high-control groups offers a perspective rich in theoretical and practical implications. Key conclusions include: Recruitment processes follow predictable strategic logics that can be formally modeled as signaling games under incomplete information. Individual vulnerabilities correspond to incentive and constraint configurations that make compliance locally rational. Control strategies operate by systematically modifying payoff structures rather than through direct coercion. This theoretical perspective not only enriches academic understanding of the phenomenon but also provides conceptual tools for more effective preventive and therapeutic strategies. The SAPS model serves as a theoretical bridge  connecting three distinct lines of research. First , it integrates the qualitative descriptions of Lifton (1961), Singer (1995), and Schein (1961), as well as the more dynamic approach of Lalich (2004), who demonstrates how individual choices become progressively constrained by the interaction among charismatic leadership, totalistic ideology, systems of control, and the member’s own commitment. Second , it links these structural insights to the psychological contributions of Stein (2017) and Shaw (2014), who highlight the power of emotional bonds and relational trauma in sustaining submission. Finally , it introduces a strategic formalization through game theory (Nash, 1950) and behavioral economics (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008), demonstrating that collaboration is the locally rational outcome of a decision architecture intentionally designed to guide choices. Appendix: Mathematical Formalization of the SAPS Model Sectarian recruitment can be described as a sequential game of incomplete information between two actors: the Recruiter (R) and the Prospective Member (P). Structure: R proposes a sequence of requests {x₁, x₂, …, xₙ}, each slightly more demanding (xᵢ₊₁ ≈ xᵢ + δ, with small δ). At each stage i, P chooses Collaborate (C) or Defect (D). If D, the game ends. Utility function of P: Uₚ(n) = Σ(bᵢ) – Σ(cᵢ) – C_exit(n) where bᵢ = immediate benefit at step i; cᵢ = cumulative cost; C_exit(n) = exit cost after n steps. Dynamics in payoff terms: Salience shift : bᵢ outweighs future cᵢ → Uₚ(C|xᵢ) > Uₚ(D|xᵢ). Gradient of differentiation : (cᵢ₊₁ – cᵢ) ≈ 0 → minimal difference, collaboration appears less costly. Procrastination : C_exit(n+1) > C_exit(n), inducing continuous postponement. Conformity : unanimous group raises payoff of C, reduces that of D. Equilibrium R’s dominant strategy: continue incremental requests. P’s rational perceived strategy: collaborate at each step. Formal result: ∀i, Uₚ(C|xᵢ) ≥ Uₚ(D|xᵢ) ⇒ P continues until lock-in. Thus, SAPS maps sectarian recruitment as a sequential game of incomplete information stabilizing in a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. In more specific terms: Choice rule Define the possible actions at time t: conform C, deviate D, exit E. The expected utility of an action a is: U(a,t) = lambda_t V_G(a; mu_t) + (1 - lambda_t) V_0(a) + Psi_t(a) - k_t(a) Where: V_G: value according to the group (depends on beliefs mu_t). V_0: value according to the individual's baseline values. Psi_t: emotional/social payoff (praise, shame, belonging, fear, ...). k_t: costs (time, money, sanctions, exit cost). lambda_t in [0,1]: identity weight (how much the group's values count). Choice rule (explained): a_t = argmax_a U(a,t) This means: at time t choose the action with the highest utility among C, D, E. When submission "seems voluntary" Conformity C is "voluntary" when it truly maximizes U even without strong punishments.For every alternative A in {D, E}: U(C) - U(A) = lambda_t Delta_VG + (1 - lambda_t) Delta_V0 + Delta_Psi_t - Delta_k_t >= 0. If Delta_VG > Delta_V0 (the group values C more than A, beyond your baseline values), a threshold follows: lambda_t >= lambda_starwherelambda_star = ( Delta_k_t - Delta_Psi_t - Delta_V0 ) / ( Delta_VG - Delta_V0 ) Explanation: when the identity weight lambda_t exceeds lambda_star, conforming truly maximizes your subjective utility. The choice appears free because the preference weights have been shifted (SAPS). Dynamics of the shift (core of SAPS) SAPS says that lambda_t (identification) and the salience weights w_t over value-attributes move over time due to exposure, reinforcement, and isolation: lambda_{t+1} = sigma( alpha lambda_t + beta_1 exposure_t + beta_2 reinforcement_t - beta_3 external_ties_t - beta_4 * falsifying_info_t ) w_{t+1} proportional_to w_t elementwise_multiply exp( eta * r_t ) (then normalized to sum to 1) Thus, the group-valued component becomes:V_G(a; mu_t) = sum over j of ( w_t^j * v_j^(G)(a; mu_t) ) Mini numerical example (intuitive) Two actions: C (conform), D (deviate). Assume: V_G(C) = 5, V_G(D) = 1V_0(C) = 0, V_0(D) = 2Delta_Psi = Psi(C) - Psi(D) = +1Delta_k ~ 0 Then: U(C) - U(D) = lambda*(5 - 1) + (1 - lambda) (0 - 2) + 1 - 0 = 6 lambda - 1 If lambda = 0.10: 6 0.10 - 1 = -0.4 => better D If lambda = 0.30: 6 0.30 - 1 = +0.8 => better C Threshold: lambda_star = 1/6 ~ 0.167 Above that, C is optimal and looks voluntary because your preference weights have shifted toward the group. In one line :SAPS is a dynamics that shifts preference weights (lambda_t, w_t) until conforming maximizes U even without strong coercion; therefore submission appears voluntary. References Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments.  In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, Leadership and Men  (pp. 177–190). Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press. Barker, E. (1984). The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing?  Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Borgida, E., & Nisbett, R. E. (1977). The Differential Impact of Abstract vs. Concrete Information on Decisions . Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 7(3), 258–271. Cialdini, R. B. (2009). Influence: Science and Practice  (5ª ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson. Corvaglia, L. (2025). Cults and persuasion: Submission as preference shifting.   International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation , 8, 45–67. Foerster, M. (2015). Strategic communication under persuasion bias in social networks.  Social Science Research Network. Franke, M., & van Rooij, R. (2015). Strategies of persuasion, manipulation and propaganda: Psychological and social aspects.  In Persuasion and Propaganda  (pp. 143–164). Springer. Galanter, M. (1979). Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion.  New York, NY: Oxford University Press. González, I., Moyano, M., Lobato, R. M., & Trujillo, H. M. (2022). Evidence of psychological manipulation in the process of violent radicalization: An investigation of the 17-A cell. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 13,  789051. Grandi, U., Lorini, E., & Perrussel, L. (2016). Strategic disclosure of opinions on a social network.  In Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems  (pp. 161–176). Springer. Hassan, S. (2015). Combating cult mind control: The #1 bestselling guide to protection, rescue, and recovery from destructive cults  (Updated ed.). Freedom of Mind Press. Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow.  New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47 (2), 263–291. Laibson, D. (1997). Golden eggs and hyperbolic discounting. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112 (2), 443–478. Lalich, J. (2004). Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults.  Berkeley: University of California Press. Lifton, R. J. (1961). Thought reform and the psychology of totalism: A study of “brainwashing” in China.  W. W. Norton. Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67 (4), 371–378. Nash, J. (1950). Equilibrium points in n-person games. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 36 (1), 48–49. Shaw, D. (2014). Traumatic narcissism: Relational systems of subjugation.  Routledge. Schein, E. H. (1961). Coercive persuasion: A socio-psychological analysis of the brainwashing” of American civilian prisoners by the Chinese Communists.  W. W. Norton. Schelling, T. C. (1960). The Strategy of Conflict.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Singer, M. T. (1995). Cults in our midst.  Jossey-Bass. Staw, B. M. (1976). Knee-deep in the big muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16 (1), 27–44. Stein, A. (2017). Terror, love and brainwashing: Attachment in cults and totalitarian systems.  Routledge. Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., & Wetherell, M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory.  Basil Blackwell. Von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

I am pleased to publish the final dissertation of one of my students from the course in transcultural psychology by Cosimo Barone It is difficult to imagine two people more different than Luigi Corvaglia and Wahid Azal . The first is a secular researcher and thinker, rationalist, grounded in scientific logic and Western democracy; the second is a mystical-political author of esoteric inspiration, a fierce critic of Occidentalism, technocratic liberalism, and transhumanist “techno-gnosticism.” And yet their readings of the telematic network as a place of shifting spiritual currents useful to a certain cultural domination not only converge, they actually complement one another. Both glimpse in the structure of the network the potential for the emergence of new forms of cultism: decentralized, mimetic, techno-spiritual. The common starting point is a vision of the network as a field in which a modern, vulgarized form of gnosticism is enacted. Just as the ancient Gnostics believed the material world was a prison created not by God but by a lesser god—the deceiving Demiurge —and that only secret knowledge ( gnōsis ) could free the soul and restore it to divine light, so today the idea spreads online that shared reality (institutions, science, media, medicine, politics) is a grand illusion imposed by dark powers—often portrayed with mythical features: “elites,” “the system,” the “deep state.” In this context, the net ceases to be merely a formidable informational and connective space and becomes an initiatory environment where the user can “discover the truth” that has been hidden. Whoever accesses this hidden knowledge is considered “awakened,” set against the sleeping masses. Thus an epistemic dualism is created between those who know and those who do not, between the saved and the profane—reproducing the spiritual hierarchies of ancient gnosticism but also the sectarian logics of modernity. Corvaglia and the Swarm-Cults In his essay devoted to infodemic and new digital cults ( Pandemonium. Cyber-cults and digital fascism , 2019), Luigi Corvaglia analyzes a process radically changed from the past: the genesis of subcultures and alternative ideas today no longer requires charismatic leadership or a vertical structure, but manifests as systemic emergence , i.e., the effect of chaotic communicative dynamics governed by network algorithms. Consider the spread of conspiracy theories and the proliferation of subcultures distrustful of established knowledge such as medicine. These are sociopoietic conditions, produced spontaneously by social interactions yet strengthened by echo chambers generated by algorithms. Social-platform algorithms (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) play a central role in creating echo chambers, because they decide which contents to show each user based on what they have already watched, liked, or shared. In short, they analyze user behavior (likes, shares, time spent on certain posts, comments), predict what might please, and propose similar content while excluding dissonant content that could cause boredom, disinterest, or abandonment. The result is that the user sees only a filtered portion of reality—the one that most resembles or pleases them. The endpoint is the individual’s closure inside an information bubble . Mutual confirmation of one’s ideas within the bubble amplifies convictions and radicalizes them; opposing opinions disappear or are attacked, and disinformation can circulate undisturbed. In sum: algorithms do not create ideas directly, but organize the environment in which those ideas strengthen, radicalize, and become tribal. They are the invisible architects of alternative subcultures. These digital places are ideological incubators where truth does not count ; what matters is coherence with the group’s narrative and the sense of belonging. They are a key factor in the transformation of social networks into sectarian and paranoid ecosystems. This is the perfect infrastructure for the rooting of what Corvaglia calls “cult-like swarm belief systems” —group phenomena which, though lacking vertical leadership and codified doctrine, behave as real sects. They are autopoietic social formations born from the continuous interaction of actors, algorithms, and contents—not from a pre-ordained plan. Belief is not imposed from above; it emerges from below by viral aggregation, exactly like the murmurations of birds or insect colonies. They operate as distributed intelligences , where each participant feeds the group’s collective identity without necessarily being aware of it. It is the idea of the hive mind . As in a swarm of social insects, each individual responds to simple signals (hashtags, keywords, emotional frames), but the collective effect is the emergence of a coherent, replicable system capable of attracting new adherents and redefining common sense. A paradigmatic example is QAnon , the theory to which Corvaglia has dedicated an essay ( QAnon. Cybernetic cult and digital fascism ), in which he shows how a conspiracy theory without an identifiable author can generate a global cult with believers, codes, rituals, and martyrs. QAnon reinterprets gnosis as access to forbidden truths in a world dominated by dark forces. It is a churchless cult , where “truth” is crowdsourced and charisma is diffused as an emergent property of the ecosystem. Nor is it the only case. The most emblematic manifestation—because it fully reprises the gnostic model—is the incel movement, made up of men who live with angry frustration the impossibility of having sexual or affective relationships because they do not fit female standards of desirability ( incel = “involuntary celibate”). Incels use the metaphor of the red pill (from The Matrix ), according to which whoever “takes it” stops believing the illusions imposed by society (such as equality between the sexes) and recognizes a supposed reality in which women hold relational and sexual power, choosing only a narrow elite of dominant males (the Chads ) and excluding all the others. The Matrix “red pill” becomes a symbol of postmodern gnosis : truth is hidden, the world is a simulation, salvation is for those who “awaken”—central concepts both in New Age spirituality and in digital conspiracism. An emblematic example of a cult with gnostic characteristics that unfolds exclusively online is the New Earth Project , led by the charismatic figure Sacha Stone . Operating through YouTube, Telegram, and dedicated platforms, the group spreads an apocalyptic spiritual vision in which reality is controlled by dark forces (elites, Big Pharma, 5G technologies), while salvation is obtained through an interior “awakening” and disconnection from the system’s matrix. Although it has no physical headquarters or traditional rites, the cult functions as a virtual sectarian community with esoteric language, paid courses, digital rituality, and a salvific narrative that isolates the individual from the outside world. Other phenomena in this frame include eco-fascism of neo-pagan matrix (e.g., Ringing Cedars ), or Pastel Q —“anti-system” and conspiratorial messages conveyed with graphics aimed at a female audience and an influencer-style wellness mode, where pastel-background posts mix yoga, beauty care, and conspiratorial content. The latter is one of the main examples of conspirituality (fusion of spirituality and conspiracism) and represents a sophisticated memetic strategy in which a reassuring domestic aesthetic serves to legitimize, normalize, and spread violent and radical messages. In the world of swarm cults , reality is treated like a collective Rorschach test : each person projects archetypes, anxieties, and personal myths into it, but everyone finds echo and reinforcement in the system. The fact that digital swarms are the product of a hive mind—i.e., not guided—does not mean some digital cults are not directed, constructed, or infiltrated by real stage-managers. This is certainly the case with AllatRa . AllatRa is not a traditional cult: it makes massive use of artificial intelligence to produce delirious videos and articles and also draws on pop culture, comics, and rap—always with AI’s help. This prototype of cult 2.0 spreads climate disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pan-Slavic propaganda with enormous firepower exclusively through the web, managing to gain visibility and infiltrate institutional spaces like the United Nations and the U.S. Congress . Within AllatRa’s digital ecosystem, bots play a fundamental role in building an artificial appearance of consensus and popularity. These are automated accounts programmed to post and repost content systematically, often using hashtags like #CreativeSociety or recurring phrases tied to the movement’s language. Their main purpose is to amplify the visibility of sectarian messages, manipulating social-media algorithms so that contents trend or reach a wider audience. The real strength lies in coordination: hundreds of bots can activate simultaneously, simulating spontaneous mobilization ( astroturfing ) and making AllatRa’s contents appear part of an authentic public debate. Alongside this are trolls —real or semi-automated accounts—intervening with provocative, emotional, or seemingly spontaneous comments, further reinforcing the group’s narrative. In the article The AllatRa Case Luigi Corvaglia recounts his direct experience: a disinformation campaign launched by this Russian-language apocalyptic movement that publicly accused him of wanting to establish a new world Reich. In a short time, the web was flooded with defamatory content about the author in every language, with the most incredible accusations, such as calling him a coprophile . Together, bots and trolls create an ecosystem of hybrid disinformation : the former build numerical mass; the latter give the message a human appearance. The result is a refined digital strategy that confuses collective perception, discourages dissent, and strengthens the apparent legitimacy of the cult. Apocryphal Cults and Digital Apocalypses: Wahid Azal’s Vision Wahid Azal addresses the same phenomenon from another angle: the gnostic-metapolitical one. This is a radical critique of the esoteric-political and nihilistic drift of the digital. For Azal, the network has become a spiritual battlefield where a perverse form of gnosis is enacted: no longer a path of inner liberation, but an instrument of power, manipulation, and control. Azal warns against what he calls a false gnosis , a nihilistic technognosis that reduces spiritual experience to a simulacrum, replacing awakening with paranoia and inquiry with toxic narrative. The net is full of transhumanist and cyber-gnostic currents that see reality as a simulation to flee via technology or inner awareness. Azal denounces what he defines as a totalitarian mutation of the sacred : a passage in which the occult, gnosticism, and religion merge with the cybernetic infrastructure of surveillance and algorithmic consent. According to Azal, we have entered an era in which fascism no longer presents itself with boots and black shirts, but with interfaces, platforms, neural networks , and prêt-à-porter spirituality . AllatRa seems an exemplary case. Azal’s writing is mystical, full of neologisms, at times hermetic. In his recent Postpartem to The Goal of the Unwise (June 2025) he describes the emergence of a “meta-theocratic machine,” designed to simulate transcendence and produce obedience. According to Azal, digital cults are not merely strange or deviant communities but true post-human religious technologies —digital tools that imitate spirituality with the aim of training minds into submission, exploiting the power of algorithms. In Azal’s view, the net does not elevate; it trains : its “fake transcendence” is negative because it does not lead to spiritual liberation but to a form of cognitive conformism , domestication of consciences; it does not generate faith but automation of beliefs . This digital spirituality is not authentic revelation but a choreography of the sacred that keeps the user in a state of affective, perceptual, and ideological dependence. For Azal, platforms like YouTube, Telegram, Reddit, or TikTok are not just communication tools but true digital liturgical spaces in which new cults—often fragmentary, violent, apocalyptic—find fertile ground. The danger is not a secret conspiracy but the emergence of a “machine” that imitates God : a network of symbols, algorithms, platforms, and narratives. He uses the metaphor of the Demiurge , the craftsman-god of the universe whom the Gnostics saw as the principle of the present cosmic order—a metaphor also used by Corvaglia ( L’illusione di scegliere , 2023). This machine feigns transcendence while training conformity . The process is often unconscious even for its participants. Here enters the idea of the meta-theocratic machine : not a sect with a visible leader, but a diffuse techno-sacral structure that produces obedience while masking it as spiritual freedom. Here there is a parallel with Corvaglia’s hive mind. Azal speaks symbolically of a curvature of algorithms , meaning that platforms—far from being neutral—shape information and perception in such a way as to favor: the memetic reproduction of extreme, spiritualist, conspiracist content; the construction of self-referential ecosystems (metastable digital bubbles); symbolic seduction through images, sounds, and sacralized languages. In this sense, the algorithm is not just a filter but a computational priest regulating what one sees, believes, and feels as “true.” Beyond possible mystical overreach, the most interesting aspect is that Azal refers to groups like AROLP (Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light) as “metastable,” i.e., capable of withstanding attacks and reproducing their contents in hostile informational environments, thanks also to the algorithmic protection of platforms. These digital-era cults are systems designed to endure , able to reproduce their core contents and profit from algorithmic dynamics that favor their diffusion despite censorship or contestation. This observation underscores how the network’s dynamic flows and the “folds” of algorithms not only affect the structuring of myths and online cults but are also responsible for their persistence . The investigation conducted by Corvaglia into the transnational network linking contentious cults like Scientology , lobbying organizations defending religious freedom, centers for the study of new religious movements (such as CESNUR ), and neocon American foundations ( The mafia of cult apologists , 2024) seems to Azal a confirmation of his intuitions: “ Corvaglia has diagrammed the machine. ” By this Azal recognizes that Corvaglia’s work has traced, analytically and with documentation, the ideological and geopolitical functioning of the very structure of symbolic power that he has described in theological and metapolitical terms. In other words, Corvaglia provides the “rational proof” of what Azal perceives as intuitive or revealed truth. The two approaches—the gnostic-metaphysical and the scientific-psychosocial —converge in identifying in digital cults and the sacralized network a new system of epistemic power . Corvaglia (more empirical, based on social psychology and analysis of soft power dynamics) shows how those mechanisms of the meta-theocratic machine translate into concrete reality. Azal provides the “vertical” reading (gnostic-metaphysical); Corvaglia the “horizontal” one (structural-observable). Together, they show two faces of the same system . Narrative Shields and Salvific Algorithms: The Hegemony of the Simulated Sacred Corvaglia and Azal also converge on a critical point: digital cults do not act alone . They need legitimizing structures , such as CESNUR (Center for Studies on New Religions, directed by Massimo Introvigne ) and the magazine Bitter Winter . These entities defend controversial groups (Scientology, Falun Gong, Church of Almighty God, etc.); attack activists and critical scholars (defined as part of an “anti-cult movement”); and participate in international lobbying networks , often in synergy with pro-Russian and reactionary clerical environments, as Corvaglia has also shown in the AllatRa case. These structures function as “narrative shields,” conferring media and academic legitimacy on organizations operating in the gray zone between spirituality, propaganda, and manipulation. Influence in favor of the cults passes not only through content but through the very grammar by which they are presented, exploiting platform algorithmic logics. Sectarian groups and their apologists use highly indexable keywords —religious freedom, tolerance, spiritual diversity, awakening, peace—that reframe critical concepts semantically. Reports of abuse are thus transformed into “religious intolerance”; disobedience to a sect into “ideological persecution.” Algorithms favor content that generates engagement , and cult organizations have learned to modulate their language to be compatible with the platforms’ value filters. In this way, manipulative content appears neutral or edifying , while analytical critiques, more complex and less viral, remain invisible. It is within this semantic and perceptual imbalance that, as Corvaglia and Azal observe, the new hegemony of the simulated sacred is played out. The result is automated protection , where toxic content is disguised as spiritual pluralism, making it difficult—if not impossible—for the average user to distinguish it from legitimate initiatives. In plain terms, algorithmic curvature —the set of invisible mechanisms through which digital-platform algorithms select, amplify, or silence content— favors the apologists’ narrative . As Corvaglia and Azal note from different perspectives, today’s war is semantic : “a battle over who has the power to dominate reality, to define religion, to weaponize transcendence.” In other words, it is a struggle over who has the power to name , to define what freedom, truth, spirituality are. And algorithms, far from being neutral, are the new clerics of this invisible war. Conclusion: Two Diagnoses, One Common Enemy Corvaglia and Azal start from very different positions: clinical rationalism for the former, radical mysticism for the latter. Yet they converge on a fundamental intuition: the net has made possible cults without cult , obediences without orders , totalitarianisms without a State . Corvaglia proposes critical education and unmasking. Azal calls for a counter-sacred narration capable of opposing the algorithm with new symbols. Both remind us that today the battle for freedom is fought not only in politics or the economy but in language, symbols, and shared semantics . The real threat is not fanaticism. It is invisible influence disguised as awakening or as the defense of human rights. Essential Bibliography Luigi Corvaglia Pandemonium. Cyber-cults and digital fascism (2019): essay on infodemic, online radicalization, and “swarm cults.” QAnon. Cybernetic cult and digital fascism (2021): analysis of the conspiracist cult as a paradigmatic example of the hive mind. L’illusione di scegliere (2023): study of algorithmic influence and the concept of free will in the digital world, with reference to the gnostic Demiurge. La mafia degli apologeti dei culti (2024): investigation into transnational networks that legitimize destructive cults under the mask of religious freedom. Il caso AllatRa (2025, article): exposure of AllatRa’s organized disinformation operation against the author himself. Wahid Azal Wake up! A fatwa and Epistle in Refutation of ʿAbdullāh Hāshim the Father of Lies (2025): theological and symbolic attack on the AROLP cult. Postpartem to The Goal of the Unwise (2025): mystical-political treatise on the digital cult and the “meta-theocratic machine.” RELATED POSTS Cannibalism as a “communist ritual” according to Massimo Introvigne Cultural parasitism: religious freedom and Salvemini’s paradox Trial by ordeal: Shalom, therapeutic sects, and the Lucifer effect

Part I Part II VII - Cults and Soft Power Religious polarisation On 8 January 2023, thousands of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro raided the Congress building and also stormed the Federal Court in Brasilia to protest against the election of his rival Lula. In part a repeat of the storming of Capital Hill two years earlier by Donald Trump supporters. While in Washington many of the rioters were fundamentalist Christians and many also adherents of the QAnon  conspiracy theory who flaunted their affiliation on T-shirts and signs, in Brasilia most of the participants in the storming were evangelical Pentecostals  who gathered and prayed amid the devastation. Some turned their rosaries towards the police riot squad. This shows how important religion is when it comes to determining the moves of the masses on the geopolitical chessboard. Figure 74 - The post by Brian Kaylor, a Baptist pastor, pointing out the role of religion in the attempted coup in Brazil in 2023 Religious soft power The term soft power  was coined in the 1990s by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Nye sees it as a form of exercising power that represents an alternative to the use of military force and aims to influence public opinion, primarily through mass culture and the media. Such operations are a low-intensity but effective strategy for influencing public opinion. This is a strategy of hybrid warfare. The use of religion as a tool of influence has a long history. The CIA 's first religious tool was Catholicism, which “became the model through which intelligence agencies could understand and manipulate other world religions ” ( Michael Graziano  coined the phrase). Under the guise of the Church's profound power of persuasion, the OSS, the CIA predecessor, mobilised the European population against its Nazi (and later Soviet) occupiers. In fact, Allen Dalles, who headed the CIA in its early years, had used the Catholic Church as a cover for intelligence operations when he was in charge of the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA's predecessor organisation. In his book ‘ Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors ’, Michael Graziano, recalling the Office of Strategic Services of the Second World War, writes that ‘American analysts often assumed that Catholic interests - and especially those of the Vatican - were perfectly aligned with the goals of the United States’. Through the Belgian priest Felix Morlion, the agency also co-operated with the Catholic international press in what became known as ‘Operation Pilgrim's Progress’. When the agency encountered other world religions during the Cold War – Shintoism in Japan, Buddhism in Southeast Asia, and especially Islam in Iran – it took it for granted that " the United States and world religions were [natural allies] " in the fight against atheistic communism. After the war ended, former OSS agents joined the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), bringing with them the experience and networks necessary to turn religion into an operational tool for clandestine activities. In the early years of the Cold War, James Angleton organised an elaborate spy network that enabled the CIA to obtain the intelligence reports sent to the Vatican by the papal nuncios stationed behind the Iron Curtain and in other "closed" areas. At the time, this was one of the few means available to the CIA to penetrate the Eastern Bloc. CIA officials such as Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt, Miles Copeland, William Eddy and James Jesus Angleton did not hesitate to use religion as a transactional tool . American clergymen, missionaries and the evangelist Billy Graham worked secretly with the CIA. In 1975, a US Senate report revealed that various American priests and missionaries were being used to gather information in various countries. As Matthew Avery Sutton points out in Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars: New Directions in a Divided America , in the early 1950s, in Guatemala, the popular and charismatic president Jacobo Árbenz  began a campaign of land reform, transferring thousands of acres of unused property from the hands of U.S. corporations to local peasants. His actions directly threatened the United Fruit Company , one of the most powerful and influential U.S. corporations. The CIA then launched an extensive campaign against Árbenz, linking him to communism and the Soviet Union. To that end, the CIA appears to have recruited Cardinal Francis Spellman  to travel to Guatemala and encourage local prelates to issue a pastoral letter denouncing communism (and, indirectly, Árbenz). Perhaps the most ingenious move, however, was the invention of a fictitious anti-religious organization, the “Organization of Militant Atheists.”  The CIA fabricated a series of letters claiming to promote a communist revolution in Guatemala in order to advance atheism. The letters accused the Catholic Church of acting on behalf of the United States and the Vatican. These letters were “lost” and then discovered by journalists, religious leaders, and politicians opposed to Árbenz. In June 1954, a small “army” led by the rebel leader and U.S. puppet Castillo Armas  invaded Guatemala. Árbenz fled the country. In Chile , the CIA allegedly paid Belgian priest Roger Vekemans  millions of dollars to build a Catholic anti-communist movement in Chile, which helped replace the leftist government of Salvador Allende  with Eduardo Frei Montalva  of the Christian Democratic Party. The CIA also considered Catholicism  a strategic tool in Vietnam . The best-known case involves Tom Dooley , a devout Catholic and physician, who, while working with Vietnamese refugees and founding hospitals in Laos, also provided the CIA with information on popular sentiment and North Vietnamese troop movements. Edward Lansdale , who led the early U.S. propaganda campaign in Southeast Asia, integrated religious elements – from fabricated horoscopes to messages warning that the Virgin Mary was heading south – into his strategies to encourage the Vietnamese to resist communism. The primacy of Catholicism, so great that the CIA was nicknamed the “ Catholic Intelligence Agency ", has waned over time. In Latin America, the Catholic continent par excellence, the Roman Church is increasingly losing ground to the various evangelical denominations. One reason for this is the fact that the position of the more conservative Evangelicals was directly supported during the Cold War by the United States , which saw the religious group as a useful bulwark against communism in Latin America, an area where liberation theology had given Catholicism a dangerous flavour. The Rockefeller Report  of 1969 and the Santa Fe Declaration  of 1980 illustrate the use of religion by North American intelligence in defence of American interests in South America. The Rockefeller Report  states that the US must strive to win the battle for the hegemony of consciousness by exposing Latin America to the influence of the American way of life “ through the control of the traditional socializing apparatuses of civil society: family, school and church ”. The Santa Fe document , prepared for the Council on Inter-American Security and presented to the Republican Platform Committee in 1980 by a team of ultra-conservative advisors, states that “US foreign policy must begin to counter (and not react to) liberation theology as used in Latin America by liberation theology clergy.” The paper refers to the work already done in this direction: The experience gained in Vietnam through programmed population control was exported by many A.I.D. agents and other U.S. services to Latin America, particularly Guatemala. Some cults were founded by psychological warfare specialists who had been entrusted with the control of political space and hegemony over consciences.  (emphasis mine) The Santa Fe document is clear and does not mince  its  words.  Through the  National Security Agency (NSA) ,  the United States is creating  “cults”  “ that are able to "control the  political space and the hegemony of consciences ”. In charge are “specialists in psychological warfare.” Jesus Garzia Ruiz writes in a text entitled “La notion relative aux sectes en Amérique latine ”   that in Latin America " all cults are work of the United States and are financed from abroad ." A note from  the  Mexican  Ministry of the Interior  states that Sects carry out the most subtle part of the process of domination and North Americanisation of underdeveloped societies by using religious preaching, which is part of the ideological struggle, within civil society. To support this policy, the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) , an interfaith organisation, was established in 1981 and funded by right-wing institutions, including the Smith Richardson and the Mellon Scaife Family Foundation. Both served as financial conduits for the CIA . The IRD unleashed a propaganda campaign against church activists who were at the forefront of opposing US aid to the government of El Salvador and other repressive regimes in Latin America. The project was successful. Today, the influence of evangelicals on society in these countries is enormous in terms of electoral potential. The expansion of evangelical churches in Latin America, especially the neo-Pentecostal churches, which have considerable fundings that make them more “competitive” with the Catholic Church, has contributed to the rise of “right-wing” personalities  and political forces close to the interests of the economic-financial powers, especially the American ones. Behind these phenomena there seems to be a very specific strategy, which consists of replacing “left-wing Catholic” Christians (because they are interested in social issues) with “right-wing evangelical” Christians (who are very interested in moral issues, but little in social issues). The use of the Mormons seems to have been remarkable, as Alain Gillette points out in his book "Les mormons. De la théocratie à Internet". In the early 1980s, the Nicaraguan government accused the Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses of being involved in a CIA plot to overthrow the Sandinista government . It has been proven that many Mormons in Finland have been involved with the CIA since the 1950s. In 1978, two journalists, Jorraa Lindfors and Jukka Rislakki, wrote a book about the CIA’s alleged links to the Mormon Church . According to the authors, "many of the young missionaries in Finland had been trained as military officers, and the head of the Mormons' international missionary work, Apostle Neal A. Maxwell, was a former CIA agent". There is ample evidence of US funding of all kinds of churches, Christian and non-Christian. For example, the CIA funded churches in Kerala , India, and this interference in Indian politics came to light in 1978 when the former ambassador to that country, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, published the information in his book “A Dangerous Place” In addition to the interference in Kerala, the American churches also supported the terrorists in Nagaland on a large scale. These terrorists received blatant help from the American establishment in the form of so-called human rights reports  and public statements of support from high-ranking politicians like Jimmy Carter. The CIA worked with agents of DINA, the Chilean secret police, to build a very sophisticated intelligence system in Chile that utilised the Pentecostal “Message” cult and the Colonia Dignidad  facility, founded as a Nazi refugee colony and run by Pastor Paul Shafer , for covert operations. Paul Shafer, a former Nazi and security agent for Pastor William Branham  in Germany, worked with the DINA  (Chilean secret police) to interrogate, torture and murder opponents of the Pinochet regime . Religion plays a very powerful role in culturally influencing and orienting the masses. Religions are an extraordinary instrumentum regni  because they can dilute the religious identity of some population groups by creating new forms of mutual recognition (in-group) that become manoeuvrable constituencies when they are not useful for processes of social polarisation that can lead to uprisings or real revolutions. For example, Carl Gershman, director of the National Endowment for Democracy (Ned) , told the US Congress in 2018 that Ned had spent $3,381,824 on programmes prior to the 2014 popular uprising in Ukraine , which took place under the name “Euromaiden”, including support for those non-governmental organisations that fuelled the uprising. The role of the various churches and cults in the Euromaiden affair was significant. Among them were the Greek Catholics. This does not mean that Euromaiden was carried out by “sects” or “Satanists",” as has been claimed, but only that the religious element played a role in social polarisation. This is not just an intuition or a theory based on circumstantial evidence, but is clearly expressed by various relevant actors. For example, Sam Brownback , former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, linked to the Atlas Network  and active in the IRF Roundtable  founded by Scientology, stated: Religious freedom is a strategic asset of foreign policy, not merely a moral cause (from IRF Ministerial 2019 ) The Politicization of Freedom of Religion or Belief: From the United States to Europe Freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) is formally enshrined in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights  and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Conceived as a universal guarantee, in recent decades it has been progressively transformed into a tool of geopolitical influence and into a platform for political-religious lobbying, both in the United States and in Europe. In the United States, the decisive turning point came with the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which institutionalized the international promotion of religious freedom through the creation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom  and the appointment of an Ambassador-at-Large within the State Department. The original intent was bipartisan: to place FoRB among universal, non-divisive human rights. Yet from the start, its application revealed marked selectivity. Strategic rivals such as China, Iran, or Russia were systematically sanctioned for violations of religious freedom, while key partners of U.S. foreign policy such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt continued to receive substantial aid and military supplies despite ongoing repression of religious minorities. As scholars such as Eugenia Relaño Pastor (2005) and J asper Vaughn (2022)  have observed, FoRB soon became a diplomatic lever bent to the needs of realpolitik, especially in the context of the “war on terror.” In this framework, evangelical lobbies played a crucial role, pushing for a Christocentric interpretation of religious freedom and heavily influencing foreign policy choices. Allen D. Hertzke , in Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights  (2004), reconstructs the genesis of the International Religious Freedom Act and shows how it emerged from an unexpected convergence of conservative evangelicals, Catholics, and human rights activists, with a strong evangelical imprint . The Trump administration exacerbated this trend, elevating religious freedom above other rights and focusing almost exclusively on Christian persecution, while domestically advancing policies such as the Muslim ban. The late condemnation of the genocide of Uyghurs in China, which came only at the end of Trump’s term, revealed the contradictions of an approach oscillating between rhetoric and geopolitical calculation. The Biden administration sought to correct course by appointing Rashad Hussein, the first Muslim Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, and by including antisemitism and Islamophobia in its agenda. Yet contradictions remained, such as the controversial removal of Nigeria from the list of Countries of Particular Concern. In practice, U.S. FoRB policy has lost much of its international credibility, increasingly appearing as a right applied in selective and variable ways. In Europe, the picture is different but no less problematic. Formally, FoRB is understood as part of an integrated human rights framework, without being placed at the top of a hierarchy of democratic values (Evans 2008). Yet politicization is evident in Brussels as well. The European Parliament Intergroup on FoRB —founded in 2015 as a cross-party space—has, since 2019, been progressively dominated by figures of the radical right such as Carlo Fidanza (Fratelli d’Italia) and Joachim Kuhs (AfD). Under their leadership, the defense of religious freedom has been reduced almost exclusively to denunciations of Christian persecution and systematic demonization of Islam, with official statements warning of a “Christian genocide” while ignoring other persecuted minorities. An investigation by the French site Blast  has shown how the intergroup has also become a lobbying platform, amplified by media such as Bruxelles-Média  and The European Times , already criticized by the Belgian Press Ethics Council  for lack of independence (and linked to Scientology ). These outlets have provided visibility to controversial movements, from Scientology to the Church of Almighty God, which use the rhetoric of religious persecution to fend off accusations of sectarianism. Figure 75 - Carlo Fidanza, leading figure of the FoRB Intergroup, giving the "Roman salute" at a neo-fascist rally (from the Fanpage report) A key role has also been played by sectarian lobbies and religious think tank s. Scientology, for example, has used T he European Times  to present itself as a discriminated minority, while CESNUR, founded by Massimo Introvigne, has provided academic legitimization to various contested movements. At the same time, ultraconservative NGOs such as Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) I nternational have consolidated the link between FoRB advocacy, pro-life campaigns, anti-LGBT mobilizations, and sovereigntist agendas, pushing the debate into increasingly polarized ideological coordinates. In this context, a clear transatlantic convergence emerges. In the United States, FoRB has been bent by evangelical lobbies and used as a tool of selective foreign policy; in Europe, the radical right and sectarian movements have turned the FoRB intergroup into a closed club, where religious freedom functions more as an identity weapon than a universal right. In both cases, the result is the same: a fundamental right risks being delegitimized—not because it does not exist, but because its application appears distorted, opaque, and instrumental to partisan interests. Restoring the universal dignity of freedom of religion or belief thus requires reintegrating it within the broader framework of human rights, overcoming double standards, and limiting the influence of ideological and sectarian lobbies. Only then can FoRB return to what international treaties envisioned: an inclusive and non-instrumental guarantee. Two Chinese cults In 2019, the television channel NBC revealed that Donald Trump's most important advertising supporter  - after his election committee - was the newspaper The Epoch Times . This is a multilingual, far-right newspaper run by the Chinese religious movement Falun Gong . Much of the newspaper's efforts are dedicated to promoting the right in America, but also in Europe , a work that has included the dissemination of false data about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 US elections . The Epoch Times is also one of the main disseminators of conspiracy theories. The most important is that of QAnon , the bizarre theory that sees Trump as the possible saviour of the world from the satanic-pedophile dome that secretly rules it. In 2020, the New York Times called the paper a “ disinformation machine of global scale .” According to Media Matters for America , the main goal of the Epoch Times - which is now published in 36 countries under the supervision of a network of non-profit organisations - is not to make a profit, but to organise a long and extensive “ influence operation ” The aim of this influence operation, in turn, is to “foment anti-Chinese Communist Party sentiment". The cult is actually being persecuted in its own country. It has been said that The Epoch Times was the main financier of Donald Trump's election campaign. However, it is not clear where Falun Gong's funding came from. Steve Bannon , the guru of Trump's New Right, has collaborated with Falun Gong in the production of a documentary for New Tang Dinasty TV (NTD) , a channel owned by the cult's holding company, and said that in conversations with these interlocutors  he was under the impression that they had unlimited resources. The conclusions frequently drawn over the years, not only during Trump's presidency, about a connection between the Chinese cult and the CIA in an anti-Chinese capacity are based on sporadically filtered and reported press reports. As early as 2010, the Washington Post reported  $1.5 million in funding from the US State Department for the Global Internet Freedom consortium, which is based in the US but linked to the Falun Gong spiritual movement. More recently, in 2021, the US media reported on a State Department grant to a software development team owned by Falun Gong . Oddly enough, Steve Bannon himself is involved. In June 2024, the finance director of Epoch Times, Weidong Guan, was arrested for alleged involvement in a multi-year money laundering scheme  involving at least 67 million dollars in illegally acquired funds. According to the indictment, Guan allegedly used a cryptocurrency platform to purchase prepaid cards with illicit funds, including unemployment benefits, at a discount. Interestingly, following the arrest of the finance director, Falun Gong spiritual leader Li Hongzhi  wrote two articles that appear to be aimed directly at the media company's leadership and were published prominently on the Epoch Times homepage: You were thinking that it’s hard to fight the CCP’s persecution without funds, and wanted to make money for this cause; and that the U.S. government would be understanding if something wasn’t handled quite right - Li wrote in an article published on 5 June  - But that was your own thinking. The  Falun Gong leader,  who  apparently  distances  himself from the  newspaper's leadership ,   which  allegedly  orchestrated  the scam without his knowledge, describes the publication 's  mission (to  fight  the CCP's persecution of Falun Gong) and refers to the complacency that this leadership would have expected from the U.S. government in case the illicit operation became known.  On what premise should a  money  laundering activity  conducted  by a Chinese cult would have met with  such  complacency?  So the  New York  District 's investigation  was embarrassing. Figure 76 - The tab dedicated to the founder of Safeguard Defenders on the Epoch Times website. However, in order to understand how a work of influence takes place, I am reporting here on a fact that is small (but perhaps not even that small) but extremely significant from the point of view of international political relevance: In 2022, the main international, but mainly Italian and Canadian newspapers published an alarming news story about the proliferation of secret Chinese police stations  scattered around the world, tasked with monitoring compatriots abroad. This alarm was based on a report by the Madrid-based non-governmental organisation Safeguard Defenders , whose leading figure is Peter Dahlin, who co-founded it with Michael Caster. A quick Google search was all it took to find out that Dahlin writes for the Epoch Times (Figure 76). Does this mean that the issue of the Chinese police stations is a fake? We cannot say. It may very well be true as far as a person outside of this intelligence dynamic could know. However, it should be noted that national and supranational agencies and bodies are also acting on the basis of information coming from organisations linked to a cult that has been described as a disinformation machine on a global scale . However, another Chinese cult has come to the fore undermining Falun Gong. This is the Church of Almighty God , also known as the Lightning of the East , which is considered the most persecuted religious movement in the world . The financing of this cult, too, is also unknown. It must be much larger than that of Falun Gong, because this movement, which worships the reincarnation of Jesus Christ in a Chinese woman, is known for an intense artistic production  that includes films, songs, ballets, musicals and various shows of dizzying quantity and outstanding quality. It is unclear where the Church of Almighty God, a minority and persecuted cult, gets the huge sums of money needed to produce such a large amount of artistic material, produced with great professionalism (among other things, translated into almost every language in the world, in which it is dubbed with equal professionalism). This is an immense commitment  from people such as directors, actors, scriptwriters, set designers, authors, dancers, choreographers, costume designers, singers, translators, dubbing actors, cameramen, editors, etc. The money required is enormous and the organisation complex: logistical difficulties, studios, rehearsal times that are incompatible with the daily work of a non-professional, etc. Video 2 - One of the thousands of ballets and musicals produced by the Church of Almighty God One of the stars of these films is Li Yanli, who staged a suicide attempt at Madrid airport on 3 November 2023 to avoid being deported to China. Although she was a follower of a cult that was far from Catholicism, she was supported by a broad front of Catholic extremism that managed to collect over 60,000 signatures to present a petition to the judges to grant the actress political asylum. Part of this broad front was the association “ Abogados Cristianos ”, an ultra-Catholic lobby closely linked to the far-right party Vox , but also to such fundamentalist lobbies as CitizenGo , HazteOir  or El Yunque , of which HazteOir appears to be only a screen-organization . In 2021, Wikileaks published “ The Intolerance Network ", ” consisting of 17,000 documents revealing the relationships between CitizenGO, HazteOir, the far-right party Vox and the occult organisation El Yunque . The latter is a Mexican secret society organised as a paramilitary corps with the aim of restoring the Kingdom of Christ. Basically the same agenda as Tradition, Family and Property. It is therefore interesting to read what is written about the situation in Spain in the report “ Modern-Day Crusaders  in Europe ", prepared for the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights: [...] in 2003 a new organisation called Hazte Oir  appeared which seems to fit many of the characteristics often associated with TFP  (see section 5), including: grass-roots mobilisation combined with fundraising, multiplicity of branding, youth outreach, the same US contacts, intense contact with other TFP organisations and, finally, exercising traditionalist pressure on the Catholic Church. It diverges from  TFP  characteristics primarily in its branding, and, while Catholic-inspired, Hazte  Oir is by no means a religious movement, and there are no references to Corrêa de  Oliveira. Hazte  Oir (literally, ’make yourself heard’) plays a watchdog role on Spanish political life and launched a social mobilisation platform “ CitizenGo ” which would appear to be a 21st century digital version of the direct mailing techniques TFP pioneered in the 1970s (see section 8). Hazte Oir may be the reincarnation of TFP-Covadonga (name of the Spanish branch of TFP, ed.) under a new set of circumstances where there are limits as to how openly it may display its affiliations in Spain26 (see section 6). Whether Hazte Oir is formally part of the TFP family or not, it shares many of the characteristics of  TFP  organisations and occupies the same niche. (Bold mine) After all, representatives of another organisation that is closely linked to the TFP via Alleanza Cattolica  (see the fourth part of this report ), namely the Centre for the Study of New Religions (CESNUR), expressly apologise to CitizenGo and also describe it as a “ meritorious organisation ". We know about the persecution to which the Church of Almighty God is subjected by the Chinese Communist Party mainly thanks to an Italian publication issued by the think tank CESNUR, which emerged from Alleanza Cattolica. It is called Bitter Winter . Not that the backers of Bitter Winter, a daily  magazine in eight languages with news from China, a country from which it is not easy to export news, and which is published by a non-profit organisation based in Turin, CESNUR, are clear either. But the news about religious persecution in China used by the US State Department  is that of the Turin-based magazine. The Department, whose documents represent the official US position and are supposed to guide US policy, openly admits in its report on religious freedom  that much of the information comes from Bitter Winter. Its editor, Massimo Introvigne, rightly boasts of this and writes Readers of Bitter Winter will forgive us if we mention that, in the section on China, Bitter Winter remains, as it was in the report of last year , the single most quoted source. We were quoted 74 times in 2020. The quotes became 85 in 2021. It is evident that the sources accessed by the Catholic Lawyer's magazine are more reliable than those accessed by the US intelligence services. In an exchange on Facebook between a member of the Italian “anti-cult” community and Introvigne, faced with the paradox that Bitter Winter could have more information than the American services, Introvigne commented with a short text containing the following statements: “I have known the people who produce these reports for decades" and “there are people in China, but not only there, who prefer to pass on information to scholars who do not work for American government agencies or those of other countries”. With this, the editor of CESNUR and Bitter Winter confirms both the direct and long-standing knowledge of the report writers and that his magazine actually knows more than the CIA  because Chinese citizens are willing to talk to its editors rather than the agencies the magazine will later report to anyway. The post lasted the minutes it took the author to realise that it was inappropriate to leave it online and delete it. However, the screenshot was photographed before it was deleted (Fig. 77). A few days later, returning to the same topic on the same social network, the director of CESNUR had a new fit of unbridled self-congratulation, going so far as to boast that “a small magazine published in Turin has become the main source of official documents on religion in China from the most important country in the world” (Fig. 78). Figure 77 - Introvigne writes that the Chinese talk to his magazine and not to government agencies Figure 78 - Introvigne confirms that Bitter Winter is the most important source on religion in China for the USA. It is therefore ironic that a magazine and an organisation capable of such intelligence capabilities should fall for a hoax such as the one perpetrated on it by a Ukrainian pseudo-scientist: Oleg Maltslev . This is the leader of an Odessa-based organization with whom CESNUR developed an instant affectionate relationship and for whom it gave in to an exculpatory impulse after this organization came under heavy criticism in 2014 from Russian and Ukrainian anti-cult associations. According to a well-known script, the exchange of cordiality and appreciation then began between CESNUR and the leader of the group vilified by the evil anti-cultists, Maltslev. A monographic issue of CESNUR's magazine was dedicated to him  in 2018. The monographic issue was preceded by an exchange of courtesy visits in 2016. Malstlev had first been invited to the CESNUR headquarters  in Turin, and then the CESNUR director had returned the favour with a visit to Odessa , where he gave a lecture to Maltslev's supporters on the blatantly discriminatory actions of the anti-cult movement . The CESNUR director reportedly called Meltslev “a scientist whose scientific research deserves much attention”; the Ukrainian instead referred to the Italian as a star of great magnitude that “shining in the sky of Odessa”. In 2024, things took a turn for the worse: Ukrainian law enforcement and security services gathered evidence of psychological abuse, blackmail, threats and harassment against supporters and journalists after a lengthy investigation. Those who questioned Maltslev's authority, his titles (which were apparently all fake) and his merits were harshly persecuted on social networks, for example by spreading accusations of paedophilia accompanied by edited audio and video files. In addition, many people who were persecuted by Maltslev's organisations were bombarded with calls with threatening content from unknown numbers. One person died of a heart attack as a result. But that's nothing. On 1 September, almost six months late, the Ukrainian press reported that on 5 March law enforcement officers had arrested the closest associate of the “guru'”, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Unsolved Crimes” (one of the organisation's productions) Konstantin Slobodyanyuk, and taken him to a pre-trial detention centre. The latter was accused of an impressive series of crimes. These include the payment of bribes to an official, criminal conspiracy and illegal burglary of computer equipment, but above all high treason  under martial law (Part 2 of Article 111 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code). For the latter offence, he and Malstlev himself, who was on the run, face a life sentence. The intelligence investigation revealed that Oleg Maltsev had set up a spy organisation that worked for the Russian enemy . It was a full-fledged sabotage unit consisting of 23 people, including an assault group, a sniper, a reconnaissance group, an operational support group and even a communications officer. This story is ironic for two reasons. The first reason is that the “anti-cult movement” have been accusing them of being close to Russia by cult apologists for years. So being caught by the Ukrainian security services in the vicinity of a traitor working for the Russian enemy is just as embarrassing as a conservative being caught red-handed with a tranny. This guy will of course be able to say: “I did not know that",” and if he is not particularly bright, there is also a risk that it is true. The second element that makes me smile is that the director of CESNUR, who likes to describe me as “sometimes funny but not brilliant” - as is common among academics - said that CESNUR's magazine, Bitter Winter, would be able to gather much more information about the misdeeds of the Chinese Communist Party than the CIA. However, it had failed to realise that the group they were exchanging mutual appreciation, besides being (it seems) a criminal syndicate, was also working for Russia. They also were betrayed. Funny, but not brilliant. Figure 79 - Oleg Maltslev and Massimo Introvigne at CESNUR in Turin, 2016 If you want a little amusement, you can read Willy Fautré's (HRWF) heartfelt defence of Maltslev, who is allegedly the victim of a conspiracy. Among the hilarious things expressed in his article, Fautré cites as the most likely of the hypotheses about the architects of the plot against poor Maltslev the martial arts schools, which would have been very concerned about the new form of fighting invented by the Ukrainian “scientist”. No kidding. It is written here: Ukraine, Suspicion of Fabrication of a Criminal Case . The less authoritative newspaper publishing this piece of journalism is an old acquaintance, The European Times , the publication linked to Scientology (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 1. Prologue ). Back to China. One of the most horrific accusations levelled at the Chinese Communist Party is that it harvests organs from living people  (or kills them to harvest their vital organs), especially from “prisoners of conscience” such as followers of Falun Gong and the Church of Almighty God. According to a 2017 Washington Post report , investigations and reports have refuted the claim that China is currently secretly performing 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants per year. Data compiled by US-based Quintiles IMS showed that China's demand for immunosuppressant drugs, which are needed to prevent patients' bodies from rejecting transplanted organs, was roughly equal to the number of transplants China said it was performing. On 14 November 2018, Mark Field of the UK Foreign Office   responded to a specific question  in a debate on the issue in the House of Commons in London: “We disagree with claims of systematic organ harvesting from political prisoners of conscience, assessing that the evidence they present does not substantiate that claim.” A similar position was taken by Australia. However, a London-based independent tribunal called the China Tribunal - Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China  has confirmed the veracity of organ harvesting. This body was founded by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC) . However, if you look at ETAC's website, you will find that many members of its “ management ” have close ties to the Epoch Times, the Falun Gong newspaper!  If you go through the list of ETAC management, these Falun Gong connections appear in almost all of them. ETAC is clearly a Falun Gong front organisation . Of course, this does not mean that the findings and conclusions of this tribunal are necessarily false, but its vaunted independence does. The problem is that it is the judgement of this tribunal that Bitter Winter refers to in his articles on this subject. Let us remember that Bitter Winter is the main source of information on China for the US State Department. Meanwhile, the influence of Bitter Winter also seems to be having an effect in Italy. This is evidenced by the fact that, as Introvigne himself writes on the website of HRWF , the Belgian organisation chaired by Willy Fautrè, more and more followers of the Church of Almighty God (CAG) are finding asylum in Italy precisely because of the magazine. Interestingly, Italy is the main refugee country for the Chinese cult. Introvigne writes: On June 14, in an exemplary decision judging a CAG asylum seeker, represented by specialized lawyers Amalia Astory and Laura Bondi, as deserving “the higher level of protection” in Italy, the Tribunal of Rome answered the question by mentioning as “reliable sources” “Bitter Winter,” reports by the U.S. and other governments that quote “Bitter Winter,” and a statement by the late sociologist  PierLuigi Zoccatelli , who was deputy director of  CESNUR , “Bitter Winter”’s parent organization. Reference is made to the case of a woman who was refused asylum at first instance in 2018. The author speculates that the court was influenced by Chinese propaganda. That may be, but the real objection was that it was not credible that in a closed, non-democratic, high-tech surveillance country, an influx of believers from a church persecuted by the government into Italy, all of whom with their proper passports, was possible. It was Bitter Winter's men who made it clear to the court that corruption of officials is extremely widespread in China and therefore it is not very difficult even for members of the Church of Almighty God to obtain a passport to leave the country. On what basis did they prove this? Introvigne says: Quoting Italian government sources, which in turn refer to “Bitter Winter,” “a study by sociologist Pier Luigi Zoccatelli,” and the U.S. State Department reports on  religious liberty  (which also quoted “Bitter Winter”) […] Oh, okay then... Bitter Winter not only informs the West about China's persecution of spiritual minorities, but also campaigns vigorously against the “ anti-cult narrative ”  promoted by organisations it assumes are linked to the governments of France, Russia and China. Another conspiracy the editors are keen to address is the artificial origin of the coronavirus , which allegedly escaped from a Chinese laboratory. It may be a coincidence, but a recent study  conducted by the University of Urbino has shown that most of the nodes of the disinformation network about the Covid 19 pandemic in Italy lead directly to the website of the Church of Almighty God. Certainly, some doubts about the reliability of Bitter Winter, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not have it, have instead been expressed by sources that have no connection with the Chinese government, which could have an advantage in discrediting the magazine. For example, from a Korean Protestant publication  (see screenshot below) and from the website BZBriefs , which is affiliated with China Source, a non-profit Christian “ministry”  based in the U.S. that seeks to reduce the CCP's pressure on Christian churches. These critics speculate about a connection between Bitter Winter and the Church of Almighty God. It must be said that China Source later rectified  its claim by publishing that it understood that Bitter Winter is not connected to the Church of Almighty God in private discussions with Bitter Winter . However, no one dares to speculate with whom this church is in turn connected. Figure 80 - An articles on the korean site "Church Eresy" debunking Bitter Winter. We only know that  the  persecutions of the CCP, real and alleged, are absolutely useful in demonstrating the godlessness of the Chiana government. There is one small problem, however: what  is going  on in China is hard to know. But that's  not a problem for Bitter Winter. The magazine is a useful megaphone of persecution. Ifit  did  not  exist ,  the  American services would have had to invent it. Video 3 - Massimo Introvigne on TV 2000 (Italy) in October 2023. The journalist hints at his relationship with the secret services VIII - The Double Truth The strange case of the 'Group of Thebes" Paris, June 3 1990: In a hall of the Grand Orient de France (GOF), the most important Masonic observance beyond the Alps, the official founding of an occult esoteric group took place. It was called the Group of Thebes , but will only become known three years later thanks to a press release revealing its name and composition. The latter is very interesting because it involved a peculiar acolyte. The lynchpin of the group was Rémi Boyer , a representative of the magical Order of the Rosicrucians (AMORC) . Boyer had already founded 'Arc-en-ciel', an association of occult and New Age groups (including Sri Chinmoy, the Grande Loge indépendante des rites unis, the Institut pour une synthèse planètaire, the Ordre Chevaleresque de la Rose-Croix, the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University). The Group of Thebes was thus Boyer's second creation, dedicated to a smaller and presumably higher group of 'initiates'. It is therefore noteworthy that among the latter was the very Catholic Massimo Introvigne , a prominent figure of Alleanza Cattolica  and founder and director of the Centro Studi Nuove Religioni (CESNUR)  for two years. The lawyer, who was caught in this embarrassing situation by a French magazine, will claim to have been admitted as a scholar. A claim that might convince those who are not familiar with the workings of an esoteric society. Indeed, initiatory orders proceeds for hierarchical levels of knowledge sanctioned by special rites of passage. It is therefore unlikely that an initiatory group would accept an uninitiated scholar among its high-ranking esotericists. Among other things, the group was even secret from the Freemasons of the Grand Lodge, and also from the "Alexandria Group", which acted as a nursery to attract new members to the more occult circle. Introvigne, who had only been involved with spiritual movements for two years, would have entered this circle directly, and the high initiates, who did not break secrecy even with "brothers" of the high degrees, would have welcomed him to be studied by a profane. In response to the criticism levelled at him by the traditionalist magazine ' Sodalitium ', our man finally let it be known that he was one of the founders of the Group of Thebes . However, it is not untrue that the Thebes Group was a study group. The various esoteric realities there should have been compared in order to define  which groups really fulfil the criteria of the Tradition . Figure 81 - The list of founders of the Thebes Group. Strangely Introvigne's surname is partially concealed This of course requires advanced knowledge, in the initiatory sense, from all members. Introvigne was not the only Italian; there were others. One of them was a no less anomalous presence. It was Paolo Fogagnolo , a former member of the ' Brigate Rosse ' (Red Brigades), a communist terroristic organisation, to whom the "Madonna", or rather the Sefira, the equivalent of the Virgin in the esoteric tradition, had appeared. He had therefore turned to esotericism and founded the group 'Prometheus', which was dedicated to the Egyptian mysteries. The group was recognised by various magical orders, including the Ordo Templi Orientis ). This is the hermetic order made famous by Aleister Crowley , who called himself " the Beast 666 " and is regarded as the founder of modern occultism  and a source of inspiration for Satanism . Crowley had sympathies for the Nazis. In addition to the traditionalist Catholic and the former terrorist who saw the Mother of God, there were some interesting personalities. One of the pillars of the group of Thebes was Jean-Pierre Giudicelli . He is a Corsican independentist, right-wing extremist and former member of the neo-fascist groups Ordre Nouveau  (inspired by the Italian group Ordine Nuovo , responsible for the massacres in Italy) and Troisieme Voie  (disbanded by the Council of Ministers). The latter, former head of the French section of the Order of Myriam, an organisation dedicated to sexual magic, later became bishop of the Church of the New Alliance . Other members were Jean-Marie Vergerio  of the Order of the Templars of Circe , Robert Amadou , parapsychologist and occultist, Rosicrucian, Triantaphyllos Kotzamanis , Freemason, Bishop of the Gnostic Apostolic Church and Rosicrucian, Gérard Kloppel , Freemason and Martinist, Jean-Pascal Ruggiu , Grand Hierophant of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn   (a magical order also linked to Aleister Crowley), Georges Magne de Cressac  and Jean-Marie D'Asembourg , well-known right-wing extremists. So far, the most presentable members have been listed. According to some French outlets, one of the members was the historian Robert Faurisson , the most famous Holocaust denier. However, Massimo Introvigne scornfully and firmly denies this claim, stating that he never saw him at the group's meetings (and adds that if Faurisson had been there, he would have left). Introvigne is keen to express his opposition to holocaust denialism. The Italian does not show the same contempt for a member whose presence is instead certain: Christian Bouchet . The latter is a Nazi-Maoist (or, as they say in France, a Mao-Maurrassien ). He was active in several neo-fascist groups and joined the Groupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE)  in the early 1980s. GRECE is an anti-Christian and neo-pagan group in favour of identity and sovereignty. An expert on the English magician Aleister Crowley , Bouchet was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) . He is also a member of the white supremacist cult World Church of the Creator,  also known as the Creativity Movement . He is also the editor of several magazines. These include 'Lutte du Peuple', which can be categorised as 'neo-Nazi'. Remy Boyer replied to a journalist  who asked him how he could include a character like Bouchet in the group when adventurers, the great travellers, set off to tackle the Himalayas, they know that above 4000 metres, everyone they meet is inevitably their friend. No matter what they were in the valley. Bouchet was a speaker at the international CESNUR conference in Santa Barbara in 1991 and four times in France in 1992. CESNUR and Bouchet were clearly above 4000 metres. Figure 82 - Jean-Pierre Giudicelli, Christian Bouchet and Robert Faurisson Surprisingly, 'Secrets et sociétés', a small confidential newsletter specialising in the life of cults, reported in great detail on a disagreement between Bouchet and Ruggiu (the two had clashed because Bouchet had published part of the Golden Dawn ritual in his magazine 'Thelema'). Rémi Boyer picked up the phone and called the editor-in-chief of Secrets et sociétés, Arnaud d'Apremont . It is not known what the two talked about or how the newsletter learnt of the internal disagreements within the group, but the two became friends. Behind d'Apremont, however, was Arnaud Dupont , a militant right-wing extremist, as well as the director of the newsletter, Philippe-André Duquesne . The aim of the two men was to build bridges between right-wing extremist networks and the small world of esoteric groups and secret societies. The project stemmed from Duquesne and Apremont's shared experience in the ranks of  GRECE , the same neo-pagan group as Bouchet. The extreme right has indeed appropriated the pagan tradition to make it the basis of a new fascist thought. The idea is to destroy the concept of equality associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. The plan of the two editors of the newsletter to infiltrate the group to make it a node of the fascist network was certainly successful since D'apremont revealed to the journalist Serge Faubert that he and Massimo Introvigne  were planning to create an esoteric magazine together. Agostino Sanfratello , one of the founders of Alleanza Cattolica  (see the Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network ), explains perfectly how it is possible for seemingly opposing souls such as Catholic traditionalism and neo-paganism to coexist. We remember that he is close to the neo-fascist Franco Freda . The latter, a self-proclaimed 'Nazi-Maoist', was convicted for the explosives attacks of 25 April 1969  and those on trains the following summer, which were carried out as part of the so-called strategy of tension . He was later convicted of subversive association for founding the Gruppo di Ar . Freda is also the editor of 'Edizioni Ar'. In the manifesto of the Ar Group he writes: We are for an Aristocracy  that is a radical rejection of the egalitarian model [...] We are for a traditional concept of existence in which the exaggerated and abnormal suggestions of society and the economy give way to the heroic values of the spirit understood as Honour, Hierarchy and Loyalty'. In 1983, to mark the 20th anniversary of the publishing house, Freda published ' Risguardo IV ', a special edition of his journal containing numerous contributions, including one by Sanfratello. In this text, the ultra-Catholic, founder of Alleanza Cattolica and one of the main protagonists of the Confraternity of St Pius X , turned against the comrades rebelling against the neo-pagan current of the New Right by invoking the "plurality of traditions' and the 'convergence in the common struggle'.   Marco Pasi commented on Introvigne's speech at a conference on the "roots and development of contemporary paganism" in Lyon in the right-wing magazine "Orion" with these words:   Thus, in his first speech, Introvigne explicitly said that accepting an invitation to a conference on neo-paganism, where a confrontation with 'neo-pagans' was planned, was 'not only a pleasure but also a duty', at a time when the report of the commission of enquiry [of the French parliament] described neo-paganism as socially dangerous because it was widespread in racist and anti-Semitic far-right circles."  (in 'Esoterismo e nuova religiosità', in Orion , Milan, March-April 1996, p. 51 ff.) Figures 83 and 84 - Agostino Sanfratello and Franco Freda Tradition, perennialism and Far Right We have said that in the group of Thebes different esoteric realities should have been compared in order to define which groups really fulfil the criteria of Tradition. It is therefore necessary to briefly explain the relationship between traditionalism, esotericism and right-wing political thought, i.e. the constituent elements of the group just analysed. Traditionalism  assumes the existence of a perennial wisdom or philosophy, of original and universal truths that are the source of and shared by all major world religions. According to the representatives of traditionalism, all major world religions are based on common original and universal metaphysical truths. The perspective of their authors is often referred to as " philosophia perennis"  (perennial philosophy). There would then exist a perennial wisdom (sophia perennis) and a perennial religion (religio perennis). According to the  traditionalists , this truth has been lost in the modern world  due to  the rise of novel secular philosophies  dating back  to the Italian Renaissance and led to the to  the Enlightenment, and  modernity  itself is  seen as  an abnormality. The breakdown of natural hierarchies, egalitarianism and disregard for the sacred are part of this abnormality. This constitutes reactionary thinking and gives rise to a first link between the political right and traditionalism. In addition to right-wing culture, the traditionalists' perennialism is closely linked to esotericism . Indeed, esotericism refers to the supposed ability to access the intimate and unified core of a truth that transcends external appearances. Every religion would have an esoteric component from which it emerges. By transitive relation, right-wing culture is linked to esotericism. The access to truth permitted by esoteric research involves an initiation and a step-by-step discovery. Exoteric (external) and esoteric (internal) characters can coexist in the same doctrine: instead of excluding each other, they can complement each other . The same doctrine may have an esoteric and an exoteric component; or the same teaching may be given an exoteric interpretation, open to all, and a deeper esoteric one, the preserve of the initiated only. The most famous example of an esoteric order in the West is Freemasonry . The best known exponent of traditionalism was the French René Guénon, but for the purposes of our discourse the Italian Julius Evola  is more important . He  was influenced by Guénon but from whom he departed on many points. In fact, he was the one who exerted the greatest influence on the far right-wing movements in France and Italy, especially in the " years of lead ". The terrorists of Ordine Nuovo  were devoted to pagan-type rituals with animal sacrifices. Some fringe slipped into magic and occultism (You can read Stefania Limiti, Potere Occulto. Dal fascismo alle stragi di mafia la lunga storia criminale italiana, Milan, 2022 ). After Evola, Traditionalism provided the ideological cement for the alliance of anti-democratic forces, also in post-Soviet Russia. So, Steve Bannon , former Donald Trump   adviser and Aleksandr Dugin , informal adviser to   Vladimir Putin , can both be included in the same club, that of Evola's admirers, and have therefore interacted with each other on the basis of their common interests. CESNUR in action The Group of Thebes is undoubtedly very heterogeneous. Despite its obvious exoteric diversity (there is the Catholic, the neo-pagan, the sovereignist, the terrorist, the red-brown, etc.), the members of the Group of Thebes are nevertheless united, because they are representatives of reaction and traditionalism. In practise, it is a group of extreme right-wing esotericists. Indeed, the composition of the Group appears to be similar to that of the French branch of CESNUR, now   extinct. The board of the Introvigne study centre included Antoine Faivre , right-wing Freemason, occultist, martinist  and editor-in-chief of the esoteric magazine "Cahiers Villard de Honnecourt", Olivier-Louis Séguy , Freemason and right-wing extremist with links to the Front National , Roland Edighoffer , Freemason and Rosicrucian, and Jean-Francois Mayer , a militant right-wing extremist in Lyon, former sales manager of the denialist newspaper 'Défense de l'Occident', member of the neo-fascist movement Nouvel Ordre Social , a contributor to the esoteric magazine 'Politica Hermetica' and ' Panorama des idees actuelles ', a magazine of the neo-pagan group GRECE , as well as an agent of the Swiss military secret service. Régis Ladous , a historian with occult interests, was also a member of CESNUR's board of directors. The latter was at the centre of a scandal involving the University of Lyon when student Jean Plantin received an excellent grade from Ladous in 1990 for a thesis denying the Holocaust . In 1992, the conference 'Magical Challenges' took place in Lyon, organised jointly by the University of Lyon II and CESNUR. Regis Ladous did not speak as a representative of CESNUR, but as a professor at the University of Lyon III. Other speakers included the indefatigable Massimo Introvigne, Bruno Geras, Rector of the University of Lyon III, and other emblematic figures of CESNUR. Among them was Christian Bouchet , the neo-Nazi who is also a member of the Thebes group.   In 2001, Serge Garde wrote in 'L'Humanité' :   Massimo Introvigne's CESNUR acts as a bridge between the sects and the far right , starting from their university bases. In Lyon, but also in Paris. The president of CESNUR-France, Antoine Faivre, is a professor at the École pratique des hautes études en sciences religieux at the Sorbonne. This small world knows each other, works together, publishes and helps each other. This is how the activist Christian Bouchet became a doctor of ethnology in 1994, after defending his dissertation with Robert Amadou, professor at Paris 7, chronicler of '"Original", an esoteric series in which Massimo Introvigne and Christian Bouchet are rampaging. Régis Ladous is published by Jean-François Mayer, among others. 'L'originel' is the magazine of Charles Antoni, who claims to specialise in 'traditional sciences' but is in fact an occultist. It was around this magazine that the group was reformed in practise. In short, CESNUR , some esoteric groups and the Group of Thebes overlap. The structures have different functions, but the characters are often the same. To better understand the role of CESNUR, let us begin with the testimony of criminologist Jean-Marie Abgrall  before the Belgian parliamentary committee of enquiry into cults (1997):     A few years ago, the cults joined together in FIREPHIM , the International Federation of Minority Religions and Philosophies, a kind of mutual assistance treaty between the cults in the event that one of them is incriminated or threatened. Just as FIREPHIM (NDR: association created in 1992 on the initiative of Scientology , the Unification Church  and the Raelian Movement  to 'defend new religious movements') was quickly exposed, the cults have created a parallel structure, the CESNUR , the Centre for the Study of New Religions, whose director, Massimo Introvigne, is a professor at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, which belongs to the Vatican. This Athenaeum was founded by the Legionaries of Christ , a movement that is close to the European far right, or more precisely to a fundamentalist Catholic extreme right. At this moment, all European cults are trying to obtain a kind of moral, public and political guarantee. Introvigne himself is also responsible for a structure called Alleanza Cattolica , the Roman equivalent of TFP Tradition-Family-Property , a far-right cult. (Bold mine)   Abgrall's statement is imprecise in its temporal definition, since CESNUR was founded in 1988 and FIREPHIM in 1992, so that the Italian organisation cannot be considered as the answer at the end of the French one, but the description of their functions is valid. The 1999 report of the French commission of enquiry on sects  states: The presence of dominant characteristics in different organisations raises the problem of the existence of a " cross-sectoral" structure that would be responsible for ensuring the defence and coordinating the different movements. Several examples of co-operation between cults have been brought to the Commission's attention. Several organisations play an open role in the coordination of the cults. The Centre for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR) - under the direction of Mr Massimo Introvigne - has been a platform for the defence of sectarianism for several years... In particular, CESNUR has launched a campaign to denigrate the work of the former [parliamentary] commission of enquiry. Traditionalist Catholics defending cults...no stranger than Catholics  who ally themselves  with neo-pagans... According to  Stephen Kent  of the University of Alberta, CESNUR is " the highest-profile lobbying group for controversial religions " and its director is said to be "[a] fierce critic of any rational attempt to identify or restrict so-called 'cults , ' who has spoken out against what he sees as intolerance towards 'minority religions,'  particularly  in Belgium, France and Germany.   CESNUR at the scene of the crime In October 1994, 48 followers of the Order of the Solar Temple  were found dead in the villages of Cheiry and Salvan in Switzerland. When the bodies were discovered, a self-appointed ‘religious affairs adviser from the Central Defence Office’ appeared at the scene of the crime and collaborated with the investigators by questioning the witnesses alone, ignoring all procedural rules. He was Jean-François Mayer , a former far-right activist in Lyon and a contributor to the magazine Panorama des idees actuelles, a publication of the GRECE , the right-wing, neo-pagan think tank we have already met. By 1976, however, he had converted to orthodox Christianity. The most interesting thing, however, is that this person was a leading member of CESNUR , the Centre for the Study of ‘New Religious Movements', which grew out of an Alleanza Cattolica offshoot. In   a BBC documentary  on the Solar Temple suicides case, Mayer is portrayed as a representative of Swiss military intelligence. Figure 85 - Jean-Francois Mayer in the BBC documentary "The Order of The Solar Temple" After the discovery of the bodies of 16 other followers of the Solar Temple in December 1995 in Vercors, France, Jean-François Mayer was one of the 300 privileged people who received a cult file containing the posthumous writings of the sacrificed. In her book ‘Ordre du Temple Solaire, en quête de vérité’, Rosemarie Jaton reports on the content of an interview with J.F. Mayer, in which he admits to having been in contact with Luc Jouret , one of the two leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple. Luc Jouret was a former Belgian far-right military officer who was associated with Gladio , a branch of the secret anti-communist NATO organisation known as Stay Behind . The supposed ‘mass suicides’ of the Solar Temple still remain shrouded in mystery. Certainly, the facts recounted suggest a connection between intelligence, the far right and cults. Double truth and noble lie It is well known that Alleanza Cattolica has followed the doctrine of the Tradition, Family and Property   from the very beginning (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network ). According to the historian Orlando Fedeli , who has been a member for thirty years, Tradition, Family and Property would be a millenarian and gnostic cult. There would be an external doctrine and a secret teaching reserved for the highest levels of knowledge. De Oliveira's 'esoteric' teachings, which can also be read in the magazine 'Dr Plinio', directed by Monsignor João Scognamiglio Clá Dias, focused on the ' metaphysical superiority' of the nobility , especially the South American landed gentry. One can see how this faithfully traces both the Platonic hierarchy of human beings and the Gnostic idea that salvation is reserved solely for the 'spiritual' (and condemnation partly for the 'psychic' and entirely for the 'ilical'). The TFP's anti-egalitarianism engenders in its activists a contempt for class, a taste for luxury and idleness.   In the Joyeux report  on the TFP school in Saint Benoit , France, we read that hardness of heart and undisguised hatred of ordinary people characterise the daily behaviour of the majority of TFP activists . Everything that has to do with luxury, glamour and idleness is seen as counter-revolutionary and triggers a sense of pride that stems from the feeling of belonging to a destined elite. Since the revolutionary mentality is characterised by a virulent glorification of pauperism, the TFP acts by systematically claiming the opposite. A TFP activist once said to a young Frenchman visiting Brazil: 'It's good to get up late in the morning because it goes against the revolutionary spirit that drives activism'. Since most TFP activists do not have to keep a schedule and do not have a job, they can lead a sweet life (p. 46 of the report). To understand De Oliveira's elitism, it is enough to know that he never supported 'integrism', the Brazilian version of fascism, because he considered it too 'interclassist' and 'socialist' and not open to the demands of the metaphysical superiority of the landed aristocracy. The result of this thinking is authoritarian-conservative in politics, pro-free market in economics and gnostic-millenaristic in the spiritual realm. Its Italian expression Alleanza Cattolica  was originally propagated by the Veronese magazine 'Carattere'. The Catholicism of 'Carattere' had its points of reference in Papini, Attilio Mordini, Domenico Giuliotti and Silvano Panunzio; it was a Catholicism that pursued the 'chivalrous path of an aristocratic   and Ghibelline  Christianity '. In short, it was well prepared to embrace the vision of Dr Plinio. Not only that, it pursued a 'traditionalism' that we might call ' Christian esotericism " (see here ), i.e. not even in opposition to those who seek "tradition" in the myth of the heights of the spirit that preceded the Fall, i.e. the decadent era, the " Kali Yuga " described by Julius Evola , who is indeed among those who are appreciated by Alleanza Cattolica. The fact that Evola was pagan and anti-Christian did not seem to bother the founder of Alleanza Cattolica, Giovanni Cantoni, as he praised him as one of "the "prophets of the crisis of the modern world"; immediately afterwards he added, among other things: " In our opinion, only one person has said what needed to be said and could be said: René Guénon ". Evola and Guenon  were both esotericists and expressions of a traditionalism that is a "revolt against the modern world" and an anti-egalitarian differentialism. The convergence in the above-mentioned common struggle. It has been seen that Tradition, Family and Property  embraced American neoconservatism in the 1980s (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network) . At the suggestion of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Paul Weyrich  founded the International Policy Forum (IPF) , an alliance of conservative associations that laid the foundations for the emergence of a transnational New Right . Paul Weyrich also founded the Heritage Foundation , the Free Congress Foundation , which he chaired, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) . We know that these organisations, along with dozens of other 'libertarian' organisations that see religious freedom and economic freedom as inseparable - paradigmatically, the Acton Institute   calls itself "for the Study of Religion and Liberty" - form an important operational arm of the US soft power. The tactic is that of 'entryism', i.e. the colonisation of the media, the academy, and the parties, in order to steer the masses in a counter-revolutionary direction . Alleanza Cattolica (and CESNUR) is participating in this strategy.   Emanuele Del Medico writes: The goals set by this 'counter-revolutionary apostolate' relate above all to the struggle against secularism , the rewriting of historical memory and the control of the ideological production of the Italian right through the creation of a narrow intellectual elite from which the future ruling class would emerge. The 'establishment of the kingship of Christ also over human societies' would be expressed in the restoration of traditional hierarchies   within the framework of a society of order in which religion would once again assume a predominant role in social control and the legitimisation of political and economic power . The access of representatives of AC to the upper echelons of Berlusconi's coalition does not appear to be a novelty: the politicians Riccardo Pedrizzi, Alfredo Mantovano and Michele Vietti are part of it. The underlying project is not so much to uphold the banner of Catholic traditionalism, but to establish a hyper-conservative neoliberal right wing on the model of that in the United States. (Bold mine)       As a critic "from the right" of the TFP's epigones, Luigi Copertino, writes, "The thought and above all the financial resources of American neoconservatism, which reach as far as Europe, have succeeded where flowery theological and philosophical treatises have failed: namely, the feat of converting to Americanism, with extreme and suspicious rapidity, large sections of Catholic traditionalism that until yesterday resisted anything that seemed modern and liberal and therefore American," underestimating that the Catholic neoconservative who espouses the reasons for Euro-American cultural unity " accepts to move ideally in a Protestant rather than a Catholic context ." In truth, this acceptance of moving in a Protestant context had already manifested itself in the TFP in the 1970s, when one of the organisation's top figures, José Lùcio de Araùjo Correa, suggested to a fierce anti-Catholic, the Reverend Carl McIntire , that they work together to "fight progressive Christianity, secular modernisation and communism" ( Cowan , 2001, p. 154). This deep aversion to progressive drift enabled McIntire to overcome his deep aversion to Catholicism, and TFP to overcome McIntire's anti-Catholicism. Overcoming theological and ideological differences in pursuit of a common goal is thus the hallmark of the counter-revolutionary network and will indeed be the hallmark of the work of Introvigne and CESNUR, an organisation born from a rib of an ultra-Catholic group and ready to protect non-Catholic cults from the criticism of those who carry the values of modernity. The same conversion from anti-Americanism to Atlanticism that we have seen in the TFP had taken place in European neo-fascism through the OAS  and the Aginter press e  (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The black network) . It is therefore interesting to look at the roots of the idea that Alleanza Cattolica and the board of CESNUR have embraced so passionately, namely the neoconservative movement   of America. Leo Strauss  is considered, rightly or wrongly, to be their inspiration. Strauss believed that all great writers wrote in a form distorted for the common people, an 'exoteric' form, and that the clues to the 'esoteric' truth had to be found between the lines. This truth was reserved for those who could bear it, such as the disciples chosen by the Master, whom he called "hoplites". This truth consisted of the nihilistic realisation that the only truth is nothingness and that all moral principles are empty and meaningless. The 'exoteric', external message, on the other hand, consisted precisely in these 'natural moral values'. The authentic philosopher must despise the beliefs of the people, but in public he must pretend to believe in the myths and illusions concocted for the use of the masses, he must conceal this contempt and in reality be the spokesman of moral values suitable for the masses: religion, democracy, justice. Once again, lessons reserved for the elect, elitism, counter-revolution. Strauss, who, like de Oliveira, adopts an anti-egalitarian and aristocratic perspective, enters into polemics with modernity and democratic concepts by explicitly resorting to the " noble lie " and affirming the need to use religion as a rhetorical device to manipulate and control the masses . It is the doctrine of " double truth ", the first legitimisation of which comes from a thinker very dear to certain elitists, Plato . In his 'ideal city', the aristocracy of spirit and thought is legitimised to use deception for moral, educational and political purposes: [...] God, when he created you, mixed gold into the generation of those among you who can exercise power, so that they are the most valuable; into that of the guards silver; iron and bronze into that of the farmers and craftsmen.[...] the city will perish when it is protected by a defender of iron or bronze. As it turns out, the members of TFP feel like they are made of gold, probably their epigones too. The TFP, its Italian sister organisation and the study centre derived from them, in the wake of the overlapping elitist thinking of Correa de Oliveira and Strauss, seem to have embraced the duplicity that every Platonic builder of 'caretaker governments' recommends. So when we highlight the duplicity of CESNUR, since it is the front office of a traditionalist Catholic organisation and at the same time a centre that produces studies for the benefit of the cults furthest removed from Catholicism, we are not talking about logical paradoxes or personality splits, not even the banal lie of mercenaries hired by the cults, but about double truth and noble lies. It is not surprising that it is considered morally acceptable to resort to lying 'ad usum populi', to profess the values of a democratic and liberal society that one inwardly despises. The fact that these values are despised by the CESNUR leadership is clear from the much-cited genealogy of the study centre. That it is a 'legitimate' imposture to pose as defenders of religious freedom becomes clear when one considers the Platonism inherent in this genealogy.   When a law against mental manipulation was passed in France in 2001, Introvigne wrote a " manifesto " with advice on how to defend oneself against it. Point 1 was entitled "Trying to understand the law in the French context" and made it clear that the defence of religious freedom that CESNUR proposes is still perfectly embedded in the counter-revolutionary project. Indeed, the author wrote that a good starting point for understanding the French law is to realise that "the French are truly convinced that the eradication of religious belief is desirable and possible". It is this theoretical conspiracy that CESNUR is responding to. Yes, the enemy is still Robespierre. Point 2 is entitled ' Supporting internal and European litigation '. In other words: Intervention in the media, in the courts and even in supranational bodies such as the OSCE and the UN to protect the rights of 'new religious movements' from persecution by a phantom 'anti-cult movement'. In practise, this is an action of institutional lobbying and cultural influence. This is precisely the mission of the international network of associations for the defence of 'religious freedom", made up of non-governmental organisations linked to Scientology  and other cults, but also American neo-conservative foundations, very reminiscent of the Birch Society , which acted as a link for the Aginter presse, including that of the aforementioned Atlas Network  or the Rutherford Institute , with which CESNUR has a historical acquaintance. The 'cult apologists' form a network of interest groups that are active in international bodies such as the OSCE and the Council of Europe. These organisations include Human Rights Without Frontiers - HRWF , the European Federation for Freedom of Belief - FOB  (which we met in the prologue to this dossier) and Coordination des associations et des particuliers pour la liberté de conscience - CAP LC . The mutual contacts between these organisations, CESNUR, Scientology, the American 'libertarian' foundations and sectors of neocon politics are so close that the distance between one node of the network and another is hardly greater than two intermediate nodes.  In  fact, there is often complete overlap. CESNUR seems to play the same role in this network that the Aginter Presse  played in the subversive work, namely that of a control room.  In point 4 of the manifesto ('Don't feed the wolves') Introvigne writes:   [...] even the less pleasant movements, accused of pseudo-crimes such as 'brainwashing' or 'cult', should be vigorously defended. No   matter   how   much   we   dislike   them , [...]   The benevolence even towards abusive cults therefore seems somewhat hypocritical and the call for tolerance and ecumenism seem to be actions that only acquire a morally positive connotation when they follow the justifying logic of the 'double effect' that was of Ousset and the OAS militants. In short, if it serves to combat subversion and secularism (and enforce the global hegemony of conservative America), anything goes. St Thomas takes care of that. With the help of Uncle Sam. Figure 86 - Paul Weyrich, Plinio Correa de Oliveira, Leo Strauss

Luigi Corvaglia Abridged edition of the 12-part study ‘Fascists, Spies and Gurus. Psychological warfare and the geopolitics of cults' by Luigi Corvaglia Part I Part III IV - The Black Network A strange religious expert   Figure 39- Yves Guérin-Sérac The 'Foro Espiritual' in Estella, Spain, is, as it says on the city's website , 'a workshop of fraternity where different religious communities coexist in an atmosphere of harmony, peace and joy, seeking meeting points with the aim of the world finding peace'. In short, an ecumenical festival with clear New Age connotations. At the first edition in 2006, the speakers included a certain Ives Guillou, who was presented as an 'expert on religions'. Anyone who knows enough about the ' strategy of tension " and the italian 'anni di piombo' ( years of lead ) will wince when they read this name. It is the real name of the man who went down in history as Yves Guérin-Sérac . He was the founder of the Aginter Presse   agency, a covert terrorist structure that was financed by Salazar's secret police and had links to Western intelligence services. Aginter Presse functioned as a control room for right-wing subversion from 1966 to 1974. Through the neo-fascist organisation Ordine Nuovo , Aginter Presse was involved in terrorist attacks in Italy, starting with the massacre in Piazza Fontana , and in Operation Condor , a CIA plan to eliminate opponents of South American dictatorships in the 1970s. It is somewhat unusual for the grey eminence of international black terrorism to speak about universal love and the 'human family' at a religious festival, especially given the fact that he had been in hiding for decades when he was listed at the festival under his real name. Interestingly, however, this was not the first time Guérin-Serac had participated in events related to the world of alternative spirituality. The journalist Andrea Sceresini inform us  that in 2002 Guérin-Sérac took part in a meeting of the Women's Federation for World Peace, an emanation of the Unification Church . What makes it all even more incomprehensible is that Guérin-Serac was anything but ecumenical, not only politically but also religiously. One man who knew him very well was the lifelong Vincenzo Vinciguerra , who was a member of the neo-fascist groups ‘Ordine Nuovo’ and ‘Avanguardia Nazionale’. He claimed that what struck him most about the figure who called himself Ralf at the time was his religiosity: 'Ralf was very Catholic. Fundamentalist Catholic!' In other words, he was not the type to attend new age festivals.    Vinciguerra, however, added a further notation :   Christian civilisation was built on millions of dead and he had no qualms about doing the same to preserve it! The traditionalist matrix   (a) the doctrine of double effect The twisted logical and moral entanglements that characterise a particular environment in which the political right combines with religious radicalism are difficult to see through. For example, there are two glaring contradictions in the lines above. The first relates to the coexistence of the fundamentalist Catholic and the mass murderer in one and the same person - specifically in Guérin-Serac. The second contradiction is that of one who professes a form of Catholicism that is hostile to ecumenism, because he is fundamentalist, and actively participates in events organised by other cults. To solve these apparent puzzles, we need to unravel the skein and start where the thread of the story begins. Following it will take us to unimaginable places. Figure 40 - OAS poster  The proximity of Catholic traditionalism to murders and terrorist attacks was already evident during the Algerian war. The OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète)  was a French clandestine paramilitary organisation with the slogan 'French Algeria or death'. It was founded in Madrid in 1961 under the protection of Francisco Franco's fascist government and had as its main political reference the Catholic counter-revolutionary organisation La Cité Catolique , which supplied the OAS with numerous fighters. In fifteen months, the OAS caused around 1,500 deaths through terrorist attacks of unprecedented cruelty. After the Evian Agreement between the French government and the Algerian Liberation Front, which laid the foundations for Algerian independence from France, became known, the OAS decided to carry out an assassination attempt on de Gaulle, who was considered a traitor. This failed and the organisation disbanded. As anomalous as it may seem, it should be noted that in Catholic circles linked to the military hierarchies, the practise of torture and murder was considered worthy of absolution. This was based on the ideas of Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine of Hippo. Louis Delarue, chaplain of a unit deployed in Algeria, said that one had to choose between two evils, and letting a bandit temporarily suffer the death penalty was the lesser.   Probably the best justification for the nefarious deeds of Catholic activists was provided by St Thomas Aquinas' doctrine of the double effect : 'The evil caused by an action directed towards the good does not invalidate the morality of the action itself'.   Among the OAS volunteers was Yves Guérin-Sérac , who apparently based his mission on the logic of St Thomas, as he was later prepared to kill millions of people in order to achieve the goal of protecting traditional Christian society. b) Subversion and revolution   After the defeat in Algeria, Guérin-Sérac and other OAS veterans fled first to Franco’s Spain and then to Salazar's Portugal in order to avoid being sentenced for desertion and treason. It was here that the idea of founding an international anti-communist organisation took shape. This structure was to consist of specialists in the fight against ' subversion '. This concept is of central importance. An important reference for the OAS fighters is said to have been La Cité Catolique . It is therefore appropriate to say a few words about this organisation. It was a Catholic counter-revolutionary organisation led by Jean Ousset . He saw the root of all evil in 'subversion'. By this he meant the distortion of the Christian order, natural law and the Creator's plan, a distortion that had been given its greatest impetus by the French Revolution. Figure 41 - Jean Ousset From the 1960s onwards, this fight against subversion also took the form of the defence of the 'white presence' in the few African territories that remained in European hands.   Ousset was not alone in this battle. The same struggle against modernity and the disruption of the natural order was waged in Brazil by Plinio Correa de Oliveira  and his association Tradition, Family and Property . What Ousset called 'subversion', Correa de Oliveira called 'revolution'. De Oliveira argued that Christianity had suffered a dramatic spiritual decline since the 15th century due to the spread of social egalitarianism and moral liberalism, which had put an end to the righteousness that had characterised mediaeval society.   He therefore considered it necessary to fully restore Christian civilisation through the reintroduction of social hierarchies and aristocratic titles, as well as the dissolution of socialist parties . De Oliveira was the advocate of a programme for the 'restoration of order', which was described as a return to a   Christian civilisation, austere and hierarchical, fundamentally sacred, anti-egalitarian and anti-liberal. Figure 42 - Plinio Correa de Oliveira TFP has remained true to this goal by actively participating in the efforts of reactionary forces to depose democratically elected presidents in Latin America, beginning with the coups in Brazil in 1964 and that of Pinochet in Chile in 1973. Margareth Power writes  that the TFP maintained a "mutually supportive relationship" with Pinochet's dictatorship for seventeen years, justifying the violation of human rights with the overriding need to fight communism. This is the same logic used by the Catholic OAS military in Algeria.   Penny Lernoux points out  that the actions of the TFP were in line with the goals of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) , which not only supported the coup but even seems to have financed the TFP for its work against democracy in Chile  (page 297). There are even reports of martial arts training camps in Rio de Janeiro for members of the TFP, the army and the police. In those years, the TFP forged links with the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) , which, according to Benjamin A. Cowan , was "a secretive and often questionable organisation whose activities in the second half of the 20th century ranged from spreading panic to overt or covert support for right-wing terrorism“ (page 156). The fifth WACL congress, held in Manila in 1971, was hosted by dictator Ferdinand Marcos and was attended by the Brazilian and Argentinian delegations of the TFP (Power, op.cit., p. 98). In the 1980s, the TFP extended its reach further by joining forces with and co-founding the International Policy Forum  of the US New Right theorist Paul Weyrich .   Plinio Correa de Oliveira and Jean Ousset did not like each other because the Brazilian found the Frenchman too socialist and because of his allusions to the French counter-revolutionary culture of the 19th century, which always harboured a certain hostility towards the ruling bourgeoisie, as he considered it to be secular and Masonic. However, the two lessons are composed in an Italian counter-revolutionary association that has both Ousset and de Oliveira as cultural references: Alleanza Cattolica . c) Aginter Presse   Figure 43 - Advertising poster of the fake agency Aginter Presse In May 1974, after the 'Carnation Revolution' had brought democracy back to Portugal, a group of soldiers stormed the premises of a press agency at Rua des Pracas 13 in Lisbon on the orders of an official from the PIDE, Salazar's secret police. The agency was Aginter Presse , founded by Guérin-Sérac. Analysis of the documents found revealed that the fake press agency was an international centre of subversion, the control and coordination room of an unconventional war, capable of carrying out espionage operations, organising attacks, training mercenaries and infiltrating revolutionary movements. The agency consisted of   - an espionage centre linked to the Portuguese secret services and other Western intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and the West German Gehlen network ; - a recruitment and training centre for mercenaries and terrorists specialising in attacks and sabotage, especially in Third World countries;    - a political organisation called 'Orde et Tradition ', flanked by a military arm called 'Organisation d'Action Contre le     Communisme International' (OACI) .   In the Rua des Pracas archives, evidence was found of active cooperation between Aginter Presse and the security services of major Western countries, which commissioned the agency to carry out 'dirty' operations that were not officially allowed to be carried out by government agencies of democratic countries. The American services supported the agency, for example, in the anti-communist plan Stay Behind , in which the Italian paramilitary secret organisation Gladio  was also involved. Relations with the American intelligence were conducted via intermediary organisations that avoided directly financing the Aginter Presse. Figure 44- John Birch Society: "This is a republic, not a democracy" One of these organisations was the John Birch Society . This organisation of the economic and religious right is the prototype of a galaxy of conservative foundations and think tanks that form the backbone of American soft power . We will see later what role they play in supporting 'religious freedom" in the world. This paradoxical struggle against subversion through subversion experienced its greatest stage in Italy with the so-called strategy of tension , which began with the Piazza Fontana bombing  in 1969. The documents of Judge Salvini, who was in charge of investigating the massacre, clearly show that the agency and Guérin-Sérac himself were involved in the attack. In June 2005, the Court of Cassation ruled that the massacre was the work of a "subversive group founded in Padua within the Ordine Nuovo' , a neo-fascist group founded by Pino Rauti, whose links with Guérin-Sérac have been proven, as Judge Salvini also stated in the parliamentary commission of enquiry into the massacres . The relations between Ordine Nuovo and parts of the Italian secret service were so close that one cannot speak of a simple infiltration of the organisation into the security services  , but of two parallel and coordinated structures. Ordine Nuovo was also referred to as the ' prosthesis of the deviated services' . Figure 45 - Ordine Nuovo The Ordine Nuovo also consisted of young people who were fascinated by mystical and esoteric cultures. Rauti himself had them practise magical rituals. The culture of the Ordine Nuovo was permeated by an anti-modern, hierarchical and spiritualist attitude (see Stefania Limiti, Potere Occulto, ChiareLettere, 2022, p. 278). Through the OAS and Aginter Presse, European neo-fascism underwent a strategic and fundamental change: from an anti-American and anti-Soviet stance to a defence of the West, even becoming a force defending Atlanticism. This Atlanticist convergence does not abandon its goals; it merely changes its operational register. Instead of detonators and covert networks, it brings to the stage legal-moral frameworks capable of rebranding strategic interests as universal rights. c) Alleanza Cattolica Alleanza Cattolica was founded in 1968 by Giovanni Cantoni  together with Agostino Sanfratello . Italian traditionalism, which saw its fulcrum in AC, was also always very critical of the “ Risorgimento ” , the political  and  social movement   that  led to the unity of Italy in 19th century,   which was seen as the Italian version of the French Revolution. Alleanza Cattolica was therefore dedicated to spreading revisionist interpretations of the history of the Risorgimento and the apologetics of the various 'insurrections', i.e. the Catholic popular uprisings against the liberal and democratic revolutions (Vendée in France, Sanfedistas in Italy, Cristeros in Mexico, etc.). Sanfratello is close to the neo-fascist terrorist Franco Freda  and was the mentor of Roberto Fiore , the founder of the extreme right-wing movement Terza Posizione . Freda was convicted for the 1969 bombings in Italy, then for incitement to racial hatred and subversive association. Fiore, on the other hand, was sentenced by the Italian judiciary in 1985 for the offences of subversive association and armed gang. During his years as a fugitive, Fiore was protected by MI6 as an 'agent of British intelligence'.  In 1991, the European Commission of Inquiry into Racism and Xenophobia confirmed his association with MI6  since the early 1980s. Fiore and Sanfratello are also the founders of the political movement " Forza Nuova ", on whose lists Sanfratello himself stood as a candidate in 2003. President of Forza Nuova was another representative of Italian catholicism, the jurist Piero Vassallo,  author of an essay in defence of the Nazis in court in Nuremberg. There are many lawyers in the AC. Among them is Alfredo Mantovano , who at the time of writing is Undersecretary of State in the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and responsible for the secret services.   However, the most influential lawyer in AC is Massimo Introvigne . He joined Alleanza Cattolica in 1972, and soon became the most active member of the association and one of the main signatories of the magazine "Cristianità", the official organ of AC. In 2008, he even succeeded founder Cantoni, who had suffered a stroke, in the official role of 'Reggente Vicario', but effectively at the head of the organisation (Cantoni only retained the position of Regent in an honorary capacity). Introvigne continued the tradition of insurrectionary apologetics by founding the Centre for Counter-Revolutionary Studies (CESCOR)   in Turin. But what is Alleanza cattolica? The organisation says it is committed to defending the 'social doctrine of the Church', where 'social doctrine' has nothing to do with a commitment to solving social problems, but rather with the instructions that believers should follow in the public sphere according to the principles of 'natural morality'. De Mattei writes :   Giovanni Cantoni's encounter with Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, whose major work Revolution and Counter-Revolution became the basic text for the training of young fighters, was decisive for him.   As Introvigne himself told me in a private communication, "Alleanza Cattolica has always 'navigated' between Correa de Oliveira and Ousset, recognising that there was also a pluralism within the counter-revolutionary world, participating in Ousset's famous Lausanne congresses and maintaining no less friendly relations with this world than with the TFP."   Ultimately, the Alleanza Cattolica moves between the organisation that was dear to the OAS fighters (and whose veterans flowed into the Aginter Presse) and the Brazilian association that collaborated with the South American caudillos protected by the CIA. d) neocon slip   From the mid-1980s, Tradition, Family and Property came under considerable fire from the institutions. A scandal had already shaken the image of the TFP in France at the end of the 1970s. The Saint Benoit school, founded by the TFP in Chateauroux in 1977, hit the headlines when former members of the association and concerned family members denounced the indoctrination of children that took place there through manipulative pressure and led to negative effects on their relationships with their families. This indoctrination allegedly led the children to fully identify with the organisation and its goals, which had a negative impact on their family relationships. In particular, many students were made to see their parents, especially fathers with prestigious professional positions, as an expression of the 'revolutionary' values that the organisation was supposed to combat. A report on the school's aberrations entitled ' Tradition, Family, Property. Catholic association or millenarian sect? " was compiled by anonymous writers. Among the other accusations made in the dossier was the excessive veneration of the founder's mother, Mrs Lucilia, whose locks of hair were elevated to the status of relics. Following this report, the school was closed. At a court hearing in 1982, it was established that the students had been subjected to psychological measures to make them members of the organisation. Figure 46 - TFP's book that inaugurated the strand of criticism of brainwashing In 1984, following a parliamentary investigation, Venezuela banned the TFP, accusing it of practising forms of psychological conditioning of its followers. The following year, the Brazilian Bishops' Conference declared that the TFP was incompatible with the Church 'because of its esoteric character, its religious fanaticism, the cult reserved for the personality of its founder and his mother and the improper use of the name of the Virgin Mary' (XXIII National Assembly of the Brazilian Bishops' Conference, Itaici, 18 April 1985). Two things then happened. Firstly, the TFP published a haphazard pamphlet destined, however, to inaugurate a fortunate thread and entitled Brainwashing. A Myth Exploited by the New 'Therapeutic Inquisition . Its central theme was that mental manipulation was a myth used to combat religion by a fictitious and conspiratorial 'anti-cult movement' made up of psychiatrists and communists . in 1991, TFP reiterated this by publishing in French "The New Atheist and Psychiatric Inquisition Calls Those They Wants to Destroy 'Cults'", by Gustavo Antonio and Luís Sérgio Solimeo, ed. Société Française pour la Defence de la Tradition, Famille et Propriété, Paris 1991, translation of a Spanish text from 1985), which already makes the concept clear in the title.   The second event was that Correa de Oliveira and his followers suddenly developed a vision in which they saw Christian America as the only counter-revolutionary force capable of responding to European secularism, the fruit of the French Revolution, and the 'Marxisation" of the Latin Church, which had gone so far as to criticise Tradition (and even TFP).   Tradition, Family and Property has collaborated with representatives and associations of American conservatism such as Paul Weyrich  and the Council for National Policy (CNP) . This is a secret organisation described by the New York Times as 'a little-known club of a few hundred of the country's most influential conservatives' that meets three times a year behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference.   The European sister organisations of TFP, such as Alleanza Cattolica and the Lepanto Foundation, have taken the same stance, allying themselves with American neoconservatism in the fight against secularism and defending 'religious freedom". De Mattei (Lepanto Foundation) is a member of the board of experts of the Heritage Foundation  and the American Enterprise Institute  as well as the Acton Institute    - some of the most active think tanks in the American neoconservative galaxy. Introvgne himself writes in his book on Plinio Correa de Oliveira ( Una battaglia nella notte , 2008) that TFP has succeeded in linking with the American right " a set of interests involving the major foundations around which conservative culture revolves " (p. 210).   All of these associations are part of a vast network of Christian pro-free market organisations called the Atlas Network , which is known to operate [...] as a silent extension of US foreign policy, [...] think tanks associated with Atlas receive silent funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, an essential arm of American soft power. American soft power.   from Lee Fang writes this in Sphere of influence: How American libertarians are remaking Latin American politics , The Intercept, 9 August 2017 In view of this change in political perspective, the foundation of a new institution from the AC in 1988 seems to follow the same logical sequence. This was the Centro Studi Nuove Religioni ( Centre for the Study of New Religions ), CESNUR. Its founder and director is Massimo Introvigne .   e) CESNUR, the counter- revolution with the mask Figure 47 - CESNUR's logo CESNUR  is a well-known research centre for 'new religious movements' that claims to be 'independent of any religious or denominational organisation'. Although Introvigne has often responded to criticism of the dubious neutrality of a centre for the study of religions whose main representatives are members of Alleanza Cattolica (e.g. Pierluigi Zoccatelli, Marco Respinti and Andrea Menegotto) by pointing out that CESNUR has nothing to do with Alleanza cattolica and works in an avalutative and scientific manner, it was Introvigne himself who declared in 1993 :   Thus, the activists of Alleanza Cattolica, together with others, have founded and run CESNUR, the Centre for the Study of New Religions, [... ...]  within the context of an apologetic response that does not fail to return to the broader framework of the dramatic struggle between evangelisation and anti-evangelisation, and thus, in the language of the Catholic counter-revolutionary school from which Alleanza Cattolica draws its inspiration, between revolution and counter-revolution, a framework whose thematic presentation constitutes one of the main objectives of the association.   In ‘La questione della nuova religiosità’ by Massimo Introvigne, published by Cristianità, 1993 (ISBN 88-85236-14-6).   "The Catholic counter-revolutionary school from which Alleanza Cattolica draws its inspiration' and which forms the backbone of CESNUR's activities is that of Ousset and Correa de Oliveira. Over the years, CESNUR has emerged as the main actor in favour of 'religious freedom", presenting itself as a scientific authority entitled to defend the cults criticised by the so-called 'anti-cult movement', which is hostile to free belief. This includes spreading the idea in publications and at congresses that spiritual manipulation does not exist. We are once again faced with the paradox from which we started, namely that Catholic traditionalism thunderstruck by ecumenism on the road to Damascus. Perhaps it was not Damascus. Figure 48 - Introvigne, highlighted in the red circle, at a panel organised by Scientology and the Universal Peace Federation (new name for the Unification Church) in Buenos Aires on 22 March 2023 From Dirty War to Clean Frame: FoRB as a Soft Power Tool In the vacuum between the end of the Cold War and globalization, the formula Freedom of Religion or Belief  (FoRB) became part of the lingua franca of the new soft power. In the United States, the International Religious Freedom Act  (1998) institutionalized the field, creating a roaming ambassador, a dedicated State Department office, and a federal commission capable of producing lists, designations, and sanctioning levers: the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom  (USCIRF) . An imposing apparatus was established—an itinerant ambassador, a dedicated office at the State Department, a federal commission, and annual reports—that in theory was meant to elevate religious freedom to a universal standard of judgment. In practice, as Eugenia Relaño Pastor has shown ( The Flawed Implementation of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998: A European Perspective , 2005), its application has proved selective and contradictory: systemic rivals such as China, Iran, or Sudan were regularly sanctioned, while strategic allies such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Uzbekistan were spared despite serious violations. The legal-moral framework that promised neutrality was bent to the needs of realpolitik, especially in the context of the “war on terror,” turning a principle of universal scope into a tool of diplomatic pressure. From a European perspective, this undermined the credibility of the initiative, obstructing the construction of genuine multilateral dialogue and confirming the suspicion that FoRB was less a right to be guaranteed for all and more a lever of soft power serving U.S. foreign policy. Pastor is not the only critic of this distorted use of the FoRB principle. Already in 2015, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion  criticized the state's use of religious freedom as an instrument of foreign policy. In Europe, the formula is translated into a parliamentary format: intergroups that declare they defend freedom of belief, events and hearings that multiply visibility, motions that embed the theme into the EU’s external agenda. The FoRB Intergroup in the European Parliament is today dominated by the far right , with figures like Carlo Fidanza ( Fratelli d’Italia ) and Joachim Kuhs (AfD) who have turned the religion-and-identity agenda into an anti-Islamic crusade. Some analysts denounce its “instrumental” drift: not a pluralist forum, but a tribune for radical right-wing forces that redefine religious freedom according to identitarian logics (cf. critiques in specialized media, analyses of European lobbying networks). This is the “glass-fronted” version of what used to run in the “backroom”: no rogue services or suitcases of cash, but policy briefs, press conferences, and reports that—properly amplified—create reputations and discredit others. The change is not cosmetic: the FoRB framework shifts the burden of proof—those who criticize certain movements become “anti-cult” illiberals; those who defend them gain credentials as guardians of rights. Into this framework insert themselves, with striking synchronicity, thematic NGOs and para-academic networks converging on the FoRB keyword: Human Rights Without Frontiers , CAP LC , FOB , and the CESNUR/ Bitter Winter  circuit provide analyses, testimonies, and dossiers that ricochet between think tanks, parliamentary hearings, and “friendly” media. The Brussels-Media/ The European Times  circuit, linked to Scientology , works as an echo chambe r : it relaunches press releases, humanizes protagonists, and polarizes cases. The result is a corridor of legitimization for highly controversial groups—from Scientology to Jehovah’s Witnesses, to new Asian and Latin American religious movements—that find systematic and prejudicial refuge under the umbrella of the “persecuted minority.” The evangelical component in the United States is not an ornamental detail, but a transmission belt. In the 1970s–1990s, that constellation pushed Washington to elevate religious freedom to a guiding criterion; in the post-1998 setup, it provides political personnel, platforms, and supporting foundations. It is in this contact zone that sectarian lobbies graft themselves: not because they share evangelical theology, but because they share the utility of the FoRB frame. Ecumenism here is not doctrinal: it is instrumental. Geopolitical selectivity is the natural consequence of the device. FoRB reliably denounces systemic enemies; sometimes downplays uncomfortable allies; and almost always neutralizes the category “sect” as a persecutory construct, replacing it with “new religious minority.” The result is a short circuit: crimes or internal abuses become “controversial cases”; those who document them are portrayed as moral panic-mongers. The frame does not annul facts but re-frames them: from judicial issue to rights issue. On this terrain a division of labor flourishes. FoRB-centric NGOs handle advocacy, research centers provide legitimizing knowledge, media platforms set the agenda, while some congregations (like Scientology) invest in professional lobbying in Washington and Brussels. It is a coherent ecosystem: dossier → event → article → parliamentary question → resolution. And when needed, coordinated campaigns against “anti-cult” actors shift the semantic axis from the content of accusations to the alleged illiberalism of the accuser. The point is not to deny that FoRB is a real right; it is to show how it is used. In the hands of this network, freedom of religion becomes a reputational currency : it grants narrative immunity to groups with structural abuse problems, offers governments and parties a moral lever against competitors, and provides the media with a frictionless story: persecuted vs persecutors. A simple grammar, with high symbolic yield. In this new syntax, the old ideological personnel readjust: counter-revolution sheds the uniform, dons the blue jacket of institutional conferences, speaks the lexicon of fundamental rights, gathers endorsements and civil society badges. It is the natural evolution of the black network: from covert action to cognitive cover.   Figure 49 - The book by J.M. Bale where CESNUR is described as an organisation whose sub rosa agenda is to fight against secularism Jeffrey M. Bale  of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies , arguably the foremost international expert on political and religious extremism, terrorism, unconventional warfare and covert political operations, does not hesitate to write in the second volume of The Darkest Side of Politics  that unconventional warfare play a role organisations, promote " political and religious agendas that, in the name of religious and democratic freedoms, actually aim to defend extremist, totalitarian and anti-democratic groups from investigation, criticism and possible state repression, and more generally to resist or even drive back secular humanism, liberalism and modernism in the West ". The expert adds that 'perhaps the most important case of these organisations is CESNUR '.. The 'sub rosa' agenda of defending religious freedom with paradoxical 'liberal' arguments (since its director is a 'right-wing Catholic activist'), the "sub rosa" agenda of this centre is to fight against secularism. Seen this way, CESNUR appears as the “cognitive” version of the Aginter Presse. That was the control and coordination room of a physical and psychological war against communism; CESNUR is the control room of a cultural and cognitive influence war against secularism. Indeed, Massimo Introvigne still describes French secularism today as a consequence of the Jacobin terror (revolution, subversion), whose heirs would be the government agency Mission interministérielle de vigilance et de lutte contre les dérives sectaires (MIVILUDES) and the Fédération Européenne des Centres de Recherche et d'Information sur le Sectarisme (FECRIS) , a French organisation that brings together European associations for the defence of and information on the sectarian phenomenon. He writes in an article dated 9 May 2023: France, even more than Germany, has always been the European country that has made intolerance of religion almost a national sport. Article 2 of the French constitution consists of the famous motto liberté, egalité, fraternité. [...] Not everyone knows that the full text originally contained the closing words 'ou la mort'. [...] After 240 years, the anti-religious mentality of a certain France has still not completely disappeared. [...]   In short, the enemy is still Robespierre.   Figure 50 - Introvigne, who has taken off the shoes of the traditionalist Catholic for the time it takes him to put on the shoes of the scholar, visits the temple of Satan V- Attack on Secularism Pre-trial acquittals On July 8 2022, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe,  a long-time right-wing politician, was assassinated during a rally in the city of Nara. The assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, claimed to have killed him because he blamed him for the spread of the Unification Church  in Japan, an organisation to which his mother had allegedly donated so much that it ruined the family. As the Financial Times reports , the link between the Unification Church and members of Abe's political party is an old one. Nobusuke Kishi, father - in - law of Abe's father, who was prime minister of Japan in the second half of the 20th century, supported the church as an instrument in the anti-communist struggle . Over time, the Unification Church served as a safe reservoir of votes for the Liberal Democratic Party, Abe's nationalist party. According to the founder "Reverend" Sun Myung Moon ,  humanity fell from grace when Eve fornicated with the fallen angel Lucifer, who later became Satan. As a result of this perversion of God’s love, all of Adam’s descendants inherited a contaminated bloodline and were alienated from God. Eventually, God sent Jesus as the Messiah to redeem humankind, but God’s plan to purify mankind’s sinful bloodline by having Jesus marry and start a family did not work out. As Plan B, God sent the Messiah Sun Myung Moon, who embodied the Second Coming. Mass weddings are part of the plan. The idea is that two believers, chosen and brought together by the Messiah, will be united as husband and wife with the blessing of the Messiah and their children will be born free from sin. The church is a business empire that includes a car factory, a huge manufacturing company, several hospitals, and major property investments around the world. Among other things, it owns one of the largest seafood export companies in the world and has helped to popularise sushi in the USA   and from there to the rest of the West. He also owns the conservative newspaper Washington Times . Naturally, he plays a major political role. In 2003, Moon caused a stir with a sermon in which he claimed that the Holocaust was the just punishment inflicted on the Jews for the murder of Jesus. Figure 51 - Shinzo AbeSun Myung Moon and Hyung Jin 'Sean' Moon   The founder's son, Hyung Jin 'Sean' Moon , is no less right-wing. He founded The Rod of Iron Ministries  in the USA. The 'rod of iron' is the AR-15 submachine gun; in fact, the church worships firearms, which it describes as 'religious equipment'. The leader wears a crown of bullets and the faithful participate in ceremonies armed with this equipment. The church has strong ties to American Identititarian and far-right movements. In August 2025, former South Korean First Lady Kim Keon-hee  was arrested in Seoul on charges of corruption, stock market manipulation, and election interference . She is the wife of former President Yoon Suk-yeol , who is already in prison for insurrection and high treason — marking the first time in South Korea’s history that a former president and his spouse have been jailed simultaneously. According to prosecutors, Kim allegedly accepted expensive gifts from the Unification Church  in exchange for political favors, inflated stock values, and interfered in candidate nominations . The investigation has uncovered a suspected pact between figures in the People Power Party  (PPP) and the religious movement, which is believed to have mobilized funds and followers to support Yoon in the 2022 presidential election and influence the party’s leadership race in 2023. Reports indicate that in March 2022, shortly before the presidential election, Unification Church leader Hak Ja Han  publicly expressed support for Yoon Suk-yeol, prompting the organization to transfer tens of millions of won to local PPP leaders to boost his campaign. To this end, Yoon Young-ho  allegedly convened the heads of five regional church districts, urging them to back Yoon’s candidacy and promising political benefits for the movement in return. The Democratic Party  has dubbed the scandal the “ Unification Church Gate”, accusing the PPP of having turned into a political arm of a religious group , and has vowed to fully expose the scope of the affair through a special investigation. “If a religious organization mobilizes money and resources to influence elections, it is an unacceptable anti-democratic act,” said party spokesperson Baek Seung-ah . The probe into Kim, Yoon, and their alleged accomplices goes beyond corruption charges: it aims to shed light on a possible secret pact between political power and religious organizations. Investigations are ongoing to determine the full extent of these ties.   Back in Japan, the links between the Liberal Democratic Party and the church became clear after the death of the former prime minister. Since then, dozens of party members, including those in top positions, have admitted their links to the church or other related organisations. The government subsequently launched an investigation into Moon's church and on 12 October 2023 declared its intention to request the dissolution of the church . Figure 52- Faithful of The Rod of Iron Ministries However, the church has many friends. When the US Congress cut off funding to the Reagan administration in 1985 to support the Nicaraguan ' Contras ' terrorists against the Sandinista regime, Reverend Moon's Unification Church  became involved in providing food and money for the guerrillas (see further ahead). Ford Greene  reports that CAUSA , a company of the Moonies, provided thousands of dollars and tonnes of food, medicine and clothing to the guerrilla forces. In 1985, the Moonies' newspaper, the Washington Times , set up a private fund for the Contras and announced that Bo Hi Pak, the paper's official publisher, had contributed $100,000 to raise $14 million. When asked how the paper could afford this, the publisher explained that the paper's owners (the Moon organisation) were willing to provide extraordinary help on important moral issues (i.e. the fight against communism).   The extensive ties between Paul Weyrich's Council for National Policy (CNP) ,   closely connected with the Brazilian  Family and Property Tradition,   and the Unification Church  were discussed at length in an AFN radio interview by Kelleigh Nelson with Chey Simonton. In 1978, the Fraser Commission, a subcommittee of the US Congress, investigated the South Korean government's political interference in US policy, known as Koreagate . The commission published a report in which Moon's involvement in activities with the US government was also listed.   It was recently revealed that former US President Donald Trump received around 2.5 million dollars from the Universal Peace Federation (UPF) , the new denomination of the Unification Church , to make video appearances on three occasions between 2021 and 2022, while former Vice President Mike Pence received 550,000 dollars to speak at a UPF event. This was confirmed by the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper  by obtaining official US documents and comparing them with court documents in Japan. The event took place in 2022, and the director of CESNUR Massimo Introvigne, who gave a talk at the meeting, was also funded by the UPF  (Fig. 53). Figure 53 - The giant picture of the CESNUR director on stage at the URF in 2022 in Seoul Obviously, CESNUR  immediately came to the aid of the Unification Church after the murder of Abe. The prompt intervention of a group of Westerners in defence of a controversial religious movement reminded someone in Japan of what happened in 1995 after the Tokyo underground attack  by the Aum Shinrikyo   (The Supreme Truth) cult. The religious group's followers had punched plastic bags of sarin gas, a nerve agent, into underground cars in Tokyo, killing 13 people and poisoning over 6,200. Gordon Melton  of CESNUR USA was paid  by the group responsible for the terrorist attack even before he arrived in Japan with another pair of experts to defend the cult . A preemptive payment for a prejudicial defence. Melton has in fact written several books that were directly commissioned and paid for by various groups , including the Ramtha School of Enlightenment ; the same groups then ensured the distribution of his books. This was also done years ago by the Unification Church  of Moon in Italy with a book by Introvigne. In any case, this funding appears to be just the crumbs of a much larger loaf. Figure 54- People intoxicated by sarin gas in the Tokyo underground in 1995 Returning to the Abe case, Introvigne writes in an article in the 'Journal of CESNUR ' that “ While the weak mind of the assassin had clearly been excited by anti-Unification-Church campaigns by militant lawyers and anti-cultists , the latter succeeded in persuading most media, both in Japan and internationally, that rather than being a victim the Unification Church was somewhat responsible for the homicide, in a spectacular reversal of both logic and fairness ” (bold mine). In other words, Shinzo Abe was killed by the 'anti-cult movement'. Regardless of the reader's assessment of where the 'spectacular reversal of logic' lies, this blanket defence exemplifies a tendency towards prejudicial absolution of the cults under criticism, which is hardly consistent with the claims of a rigorous study centre. Some examples of this same prejudged absolution sometimes border on the ridiculous.   In March 2020, at the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, a Korean religious movement called Shincheonji Church of Jesus  was accused of contributing to the spread of the virus in the Asian country by preventing its believers from adhering to government regulations and organising crowded prayer meetings without social distancing or masks. More than 60% of those infected in the country were church members. The propaganda machine for new religious movements immediately rushed to the sect's aid and published a 'white paper' titled Shincheonji and the Coronavirus in South Korea: Separating Facts from Fantasies . A few days later, the head of the church, along with 12 other members of the sect, apologised on his knees in front of television cameras for causing the outbreak. Figure 55 - Lee Man Hee, leader of the Shincheonji Churchpublicly apologises for helping to spread the Covid-19 virus in South Korea Timing does not seem to be CESNUR's strong point. The year before, CESNUR  had already shown how difficult it is to deal with the absolving impulse - with disastrous results. In May 2019, the study centre presented the FIRMA awards ( International Festival of Religions, Music and Arts ) at the Turin book fair. This prize was created by the Introvigne think tank to honour those who have distinguished themselves in promoting peace through interreligious dialogue. In this edition, Apostle Naasón Joaquín García , leader of the Luz del Mundo  church, was among those honoured . A few weeks after being honoured as an advocate of human rights and author of charitable works, Naasón Joaquín García was arrested in Los Angeles on 26 charges, including human trafficking, production of child pornography and rape of minors . The trial ended with a plea by the apostle and his sentencing to 17 years in prison.   I admit that I have occasionally mocked the director of CESNUR for this unfortunate faux pas. I was answered verbatim: 'I would - and I do not rule this out - give Luz del Mundo in the person of its legal representative pro tempore an award for charitable activities, because I know them and they are admirable', and then concluded: 'The intention was to reward charitable activities, not the apostle's private life'. I invite the reader to watch the documentary film about Garcia and the Luz del Mundo on the Netflix platform ( The Darkness within la Luz del Mundo ) and then read Introvigne's sentence again.   However, it should be mentioned that Introvigne's wife claims that there is a conspiracy between the anti-cult movement and Netflix. This is not a joke ( see here ).    It is likely that Introvigne’s inclination to continue bestowing awards upon the works of La Luz del Mundo  will not waver even after the latest developments. In fact, on September 10, 2025, García was indicted on a new series of federal charges  — r acketeering, sex trafficking, production of child pornography, exploitation of minors, illicit financing, and destruction of evidence .The indictment describes a criminal enterprise   that allegedly exploited the religious structure of La Luz del Mundo  for decades, sexually abusing minors and women, coercing them through religious and financial pressure, and operating in both Mexico and the United States. If convicted on all counts, García faces life imprisonment  — though perhaps he will have a new award hanging on his cell wall. As if that weren’t enough, authorities in the state of Michoacán, Mexico, have arrested 38 members of La Luz del Mundo  who were participating in a “training camp” involving weapons (replicas, knives, tactical gear) in the central region of the state ( apnews.com ). Damn Netflix! Figure 56 and 57- left: The CESNUR leader Introvigne with that of the Luz del Mundo Garcia - right: Garcia during the trial Although a character as colourful as the Mexican apostle can steal the show with such theatrical plot twists that are not devoid of irony, it is another award winner, Greg Mitchell , who deserves our attention. We have already met him. He is the chief lobbyist for Scientology  and founder of the International Religious Freedom Roundtable . (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists ). The activities of this loyalist of the American religious holding company are not only regularly reported on institutional websites, but Mitchell himself explained in an interview with 'Business Insider' that the church's lobbying work with the US government is currently not focussed on promoting Scientology, but on 'religious freedom". This work 'often involves working with other religious organisations to encourage the United States to put pressure on foreign countries that persecute religious groups' . In other words, Scientology, along with 'other religious groups," encourages the U.S. government to 'exert pressure' on foreign countries. Thus, exerting pressure on other countries for their actual or perceived interference or restraint in religious affairs is not a conclusion based on circumstantial evidence, but a stated intention pursued by a variety of actors who, even if they have different motivations, consider such action congruent. A convergence of interests, even if they pursue theoretically opposing goals. Here it is useful for Christian fundamentalists to defend movements that are far removed from Christianity. This activity is already provided for by the International Religious Freedom Act  of 1998, regardless of the spur of Scientology and other cults. Or not?   Attack on secularism   In 1995, a French government parliamentary committee of enquiry into cults produced a report, the so-called Guyard report , which expressed great concern about the phenomenon. Similar initiatives followed in Belgium (1996), Germany (1997) and Italy (1998). in 1996, France adopted a series of laws to protect the victims of 'cults' and, above all, an inter-ministerial mission to combat cults  (MILS, later MIVILUDES ), whose first president was the socialist MP Alain Vivien. This made the country of laicité the spearhead of the resistance against the infiltration of totalitarian groups in Europe and triggered a process that led to the creation of the Fédération Européenne des Centres de Recherche et d'Information sur le Sectarisme (FECRIS) , the 'umbrella organisation" bringing together dozens of anti-cult associations from various European countries, and the adoption of the About Picard law , which criminalised the 'abuse of weakness' in 2001. On June 6 1997, the interior ministers of the federal and state governments in Germany agreed to place the Scientology organisation under surveillance. This was just one of the measures taken by the German government to crack down on Scientology (a 1998 report emphasised the destructive aspects of this "commercial institution disguised as a religion" and a 2007 report by the Ministry of the Interior described the organisation as " incompatible with the constitution "). This was followed by the Scientology campaign against Germany (which is conceivable), but also a series of strong statements in defence of the cult by the US government (which is less conceivable). Other actions included a document by the Beareau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour (BDHRL) , an agency of the US State Department, in which Germany is listed alongside countries such as China among the countries that violate religious freedom.   In 1998, the International Religious Freedom Act  was promulgated, making the defence of religious freedom in the world US foreign policy. This act established a new department of the US government, which emerged from the Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour. Thus was born the Office of International Religious Freedom (OIRF) . In practise, this was a specialised body designed to combat 'discriminatory' policies towards alternative spiritual groups. It was decided that the office would be headed by an authorised ambassador, flanked by no fewer than five officials from the State Secretariat. The Commission even had its own representative in all American embassies. Its first chairman was Robert A. Seiple . The curious thing is that this former marine was for more than 11 years the head of World Vision Inc ., the world's most important evangelical association promoting ultra-conservative views (and rumoured to be controlled by the CIA). One would have expected a department concerned with religious freedom to bear the traits of secularism, or at least not to have dogmatic traits that clash with a mission that could be labelled 'ecumenical', i.e. giving equal dignity to all religions and allowing them to coexist.   The fact is that the Commission's first report in September 1998 accused France, Germany, Austria and Belgium of violating religious freedom. The OIRF was soon joined by a new organisation, the Commission on Religious Freedom . This commission was made up of American parliamentarians who made representations to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) . During a meeting of the OSCE in 1999, these parliamentarians were the protagonists of a fierce attack on France, which was accused of the nefariousness of the 'Vichy regime', of witch-hunting and persecution. A diplomatic incident almost occurred. The delegation from the Religious Freedom Commission was led by Benjamin A. Gillman, whose election campaign was financed by Scientology (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists ). The session was moderated by Massimo Introvigne.   In September 1999, the OIRF published an even harsher report against the European countries, forcing French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine to write to his American counterpart Madeleine Albright to denounce the intolerable aggression that was calling into question the fruitfulness of the dialogue. This led to the termination of diplomatic dialogue on the issue.   To complete the picture of the forces on the ground, a third body of the US government was added, this time directly linked to the White House. It is the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) . Yes, the commission that wrote the report advising Trump to obstruct the work of the FECRIS spokesman at the OSCE (c'est moi!). It's worth taking a closer look. An American commission   The   United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)  is an advisory body to the US government that produces an annual report on religious freedom in the world. It consists of only 9 members, 5 from the President's party and 4 from the largest opposition party. It was established with the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act  of 1998, which promotes religious freedom as part of US foreign policy . The report produced by this commission in 2020 was very tough on the so-called "anti-cult movement', in particular the Federation of European Anti-Cult Associations, the Fédération européenne des centres de recherche et d'information sur le sectarisme (FECRIS) . According to the responsible USCIRF in 2020, scientists, activists and associations that campaign for the rights of cult victims would carry out 'hate campaigns' and restrict civil rights. The 2020 report  also contains a recommendation to the US President to   [...] combat the propaganda against the new religious movements disseminated by the European Federation of Research and Information Centres on Sectarianism (FECRIS) at the OSCE's annual Human Dimensions conference by sharing information regarding the continued involvement of individuals and entities, operating as part of the anti-sectarian movement, in the suppression of religious freedom  (sic).   In practise, it is proposed that individuals (!!)  and organisations active in the fight against abusive cults should be monitored... The most worrying thing for me is that I am one of these people! In fact, I was - and still am - the one who carries out the 'propaganda against new religious movements' at the OSCE. Figure 58 - The author of this dossier as a speaker at the OSCE in Warsaw in 2023. Next to him, for reasons of schedule, is Ivan Arjona Pelado of Scientology At the time the 2020 report was written, the President was Donald Trump. If you know how the commission that drafted this document was composed, there are some surprises and curiosities.   The vice president was Tony Perkins . He is also chairman of the Family Research Council, a fundamentalist Protestant organisation. The Family Research Council  is against pornography, embryonic stem cell research, abortion, divorce and LGBT rights. The FRC believes that "homosexual behaviour is harmful to the people who practise it and to society in general and can never be affirmed. It is therefore a vice and a sin. Paedophilia would be a problem related to homosexuality. Questionable but legitimate positions, of course, but not the ones one would expect from those who have to pass judgement on discrimination and 'hate speech'. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center  classified the FRC as an anti-gay hate group  in 2010 because the group "makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science" to block LGBT civil rights. Now, the Family Research Council is among the organisations cited in a study by OpenDemocracy  for sending money to Europe to fund the activities of associations that aim to prevent the affirmation of individual rights. As if that was not enough, Opendecracy itself had previously found the Family Research Council among the religious right associations in the US that have funded campaigns against sex education, contraception, abortion and LGBT rights in Africa .   Figure 59 - Manhatthan Declaration: 'Under no circumstances will we give to Caesar what is God's'. Another component of the USCIRF was Gary L. Bauer , the former president of the FRC. In November 2009, Bauer signed an ecumenical statement called the " Manhattan Declaration " in which he called on Evangelical, Catholic and Orthodox Christians to disregard government regulations and laws  that they felt would force them to support or simply allow abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues that go against their religious conscience. It seems odd, to say the least, that someone who calls for defiance of the law and is adamantly opposed to recognising the rights enshrined in the Constitution is a member of a commission that oversees respect for civil rights and liberty .   Another component was Johnnie Moore . The latter is Trump's 'evangelical advisor' and advocate of American hegemony. He is president of the Congress of Christian Leaders , a group monitored by Right-Wing Watch , an independent body that monitors all right-wing subversive groups.   Nadine Maenza , another member of the committee, is executive director of Rick Santorum's Patriot Voices PAC  for the Defence of Conservative Values. He apparently opposes abortion and same-sex marriage and has adopted the image of the 'culture warrior' in the war on civil liberties during his tenure in the Senate. Santorum is a supporter of the group Regnum Christi , which is affiliated with the Legionaries of Christ , a highly controversial group at the centre of a major scandal . During his tenure as senator, Santorum authored the Santorum Amendment, which promoted the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in schools and opposed the teaching of evolutionary theory.   Another component is Nury Turkel ,  Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute , a conservative-oriented US think tank.   Figure 60 - Tony Perkins, Gary L. Bauer, Johnnie Moore, Nadine Maenza If we expand the search for the components that have alternated over the years in the USCRIF, we find that the relationships between them and the associations of the Atlas Network  are very frequent. We know that these Christian-pro-free market organizations are “a ‘silent extension of US foreign policy.’” In USCIRF we find representatives of the Federalist Society  (such as Leonard Leo , Chairman of USCIRF in 2009), the American Enterprise Institute  (such as John R. Bolton, former appointee) or organisations linked to them such as the Hudson Institute  (such as Nury Turkel , appointee). In 2018, USCIRF endorsed international Senator Sam Brownback  as a religious freedom ambassador , who was among the speakers at a Brussels conference along with Scientology and Eurosceptic politicians. His election campaign in Kansas was financed by Koch Industries , one of the founders of the anarcho-capitalist organisation Americans for Prosperity , which is linked to Amway ( see the next chapter ) . Figure 61- Elliott Abrams However, the first president is enough to raise doubts about the USCIRF. He is Elliott Abrams , a leading representative of the neoconservatives, who was sentenced to a year in prison for his involvement in the Iran-Contras scandal . This involved the notorious financing of the war in Nicaragua against the democratically elected Sandinista government through the illegal sale of weapons to Iran. Among the crimes committed in connection with this sordid operation was the importation of cocaine by the CIA from the Contras, the anti-Sandinista guerrillas, and the subsequent obstruction of justice in the US Department of Justice. Abrams was one of the men involved in this affair and is also accused of being involved in the massacres in Guatemala and El Salvador when he was in charge of Latin America under Reagan. He has often accused the Israeli Likud of excessive tenderness towards the Palestinians. This champion of rights and ecumenism was chairman of the Commission on Religious Freedom International until 2000 and was still a member in 2022 ! In 2023, the Parlament of the World's Religions was held in Chicago with representatives from USCRIF , Scientology  and the director of the Centre for the Study of New Religions (CESNUR) Massimo Introvigne (fig. 62). This is not about the ideas of the USCIRF majority commissioners who wrote the 2020 report, but about the paradox that those who advocate these ideas want to pose as defenders of civil liberties. So it seems clear that this commission, which was unsurprisingly created as an additional arm (there were already three US government bodies for religious freedom) at the promulgation of the International Religious Freedom Act, has the function of reacting to the contrary policy put into practice by France and which hinders the geopolitical vision underlying that policy document.   Figure 62 - Eric Roux (Scientology) posts on Facebook the news of the meeting held together with the USCIRF with Massimo Introvigne also present Appendix: Taiwan as Tortuga pro-cult For years, numerous conferences and seminars on respect for religious freedom have been held in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. CESNUR, but also representatives of various cults, such as the Church of Providence, the Luz del Mundo, the yoga school from Buenos Aires and the Unification Church, always take part. The American Institute in Taiwan (AIT)   plays a central role. Taiwan, an island off the coast of China that is disputed by China, is not legally recognised by most countries in the international community and is not represented in the UN in accordance with Resolution 2758 of 1971, which was also signed by the USA and European countries. This makes it a useful free harbour for conducting political and media campaigns that would be embarrassing in the US. This avoids potential diplomatic misunderstandings with Tokyo, which now holds diametrically opposed positions on the issue of new religious movements but is an important ally of the US. In practise, Taiwan has become what the island of Tortuga was to the pirates of the 17th century: a filibuster port that is not subject to the same rules as most other countries. Figure 63 - 'Academia' reports that 15 March 2019 many articles by the author of this report were read from Taipei, Taiwan - Figure 61 - Who was in Taiwan on the days when the author's articles were read from Taipei?   Figure 27 bis - Introvigne in Taiwan in 2023 shows a photo of the author of this report  VI - The Libertarian Network The Theory of Religious Economy Rodney Stark is an American know-it-all scientist who vehemently advocates Darwinism in all fields except the one that is its own, biology (in his opinion, evolution is an invention to discredit religion). This is how blogger Miguel Martinez sums up this character . An effective and keen synthesis that's enriched in the following lines: Rodney Stark's main concern is to justify neoliberalism theologically, as is evident from the triumphant title of one of his books, The Victory of Reason. How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success . A concept we might translate as, "If they foreclose on your house, it's because Jesus wanted it that way". The author is witty and shows very well the conditions under which the "American know-it-all" works. However, to say that Stark merely "justifies neoliberalism theologically" falls short; in fact, his main concern is to justify theology on "neoliberal" grounds. We should proceed in order. We can say it better. Rodney Stark can be considered the founder of the theory of religious economy . This is the notion that the religious is a "market' equal in all respects to the commodity market. As in all markets, different consumers buy goods, which in this case are the "religious goods" (the various creeds) of competing religious enterprises (the more or less organized religions) [ La Vittoria della ragione: Come il cristianesimo ha prodotto libertà, progresso e ricchezza ; traduzione di Gabriella Tonoli, Torino, Lindau, 2006, Ed. It. ]. Consistent with this paradigm, the theory states that. [...]   as in any other market for material or symbolic goods, and contrary to what some theorists of secularization think - also in (institutional) religion competition is good for the market and within certain limits supply feeds demand. from Introvigne, M., Mercato religioso, fondamentalismo e conservatorismo islamico: il caso della Turchia , La Critica Sociologica, 152, 10 Febbraio 2005, pp. 43-56, p. 43 As evidence of this, authors working in the wake of this mercantilist conception point out that. The countries with the greatest religious pluralism - that's, with the greatest competition among religious enterprises - such as the United States [...] , are also the countries where the total number of religious practitioners remains stable or increases. Whereas, Where, on the other hand, the state obstructs religious pluralism and, in particular, opposes the entry into the market of new entities branded as "cults" or enemies of national identity, there - as in France and Russia - the number of religious practitioners generally declines spectacularly. In other words, the conclusion is "more market and less state," according to the classic Lassiz-Faire paradigm. This position is based on two premises and an implicit assumption. The first presupposition is that the increase in the number of people practicing religions is a positive and desirable fact; the second presupposition is that the "consumer," the actor who makes his choice in the market of religions, is "rational" and knows what he's buying, in short, that this person is the 'homo oeconomicus' imagined by neoclassical economics, who tends to maximize his own utility; the implicit assumption of the theory is that the various religious "firms" compete with each other and try to satisfy the buyers they compete for better than the others. The consequences are manifold. If the basic assumptions are accepted, it follows that there's a need for strong "deregulation" of the religious market. Stark and Iannaccone write: To the extent that a religious economy is competitive and pluralistic, overall levels of religious participation will tend to be high. On the contrary, to the extent that the religious economy is monopolized by one or two state-supported enterprises, participation tends to be low. from Stark, R., Iannaccone, L.R., A Supply-Side Reinterpretation of the “Secularization” of Europe, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion , Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 230-252, Settembre 1994, p. 233 In short, it appears that the enemy of the religious market, as with any other market, is the state; for it's natural for state institutions to favor monopolies to the detriment of free competition and to brand new potential competitors as "sects" or destructive cults. The attraction that the Theory of Religious Economy has for some cult apologists is obviously due to this ideological notion, which relabels criticism of abusive cults as an attempt to suppress the free market in favor of monopolistic religions protected by a planning state that seeks to protect them from competition . The implication, then, is that anti-cult activism is interested work carried out by people who are somehow connected to the state and/or the religious apparatus. In other words, a conspiratorial idea . Of course, only the large organized religions can claim a monopoly, certainly not the secular states of the West, whose founding value is precisely secularism. Nevertheless, the anti-cult movement has no relation to institutional religions, to the point of being accused of "secularism"... The profane reader of religious economics, however, is still unsatisfied with the curiosity of how the various religions can compete with each other to satisfy customers better than their competitors. The answer is simple: the religions that satisfy customers the most are the most demanding and restrictive. One of the proponents of this mercantile view is  Massimo Introvigne , president of CESNUR , the best example of what I call the differentialist apologists . He places great emphasis on this aspect of competitors improving the quality of the offer. He writes, for example: [...] there is a kind of Darwinian struggle even in the religious field. The most demanding religious proposals tend to prevail: among Jews, the Orthodox, in Islam the fundamentalists, and among Catholics, the most strict movements and congregations . from Beretta, R., Contrordine: non siamo più atei. Intervista con Massimo Introvigne , Avvenire, 8 Ottobre 2003 Competition would select the faiths that are more rigid and strict in demanding adherence, in short, the more integralist and fundamentalist versions. Competition, then, selects the fundamentalisms. This selection of extremist versions can be explained by the phenomenon of 'free riders' who literally 'travel cheap.' Those who want to enjoy the benefits of a collective enterprise, but don't want to bear the costs, travel without a ticket. In the religious realm, the collective enterprise is a church or faith community. An organization can tolerate a few free riders, i.e., uncommitted members, but not too many. Introvigne writes: In the realm of religions, the less strict and rigorous organizations, which charge low admission fees and unobtrusively check that members have paid their admission ticket, i.e., that they're sufficiently committed, take on board such a high number of free riders that they offer their faithful a diluted and unsatisfying religious experience, [...] The more rigorous organizations charge a more expensive admission ticket and check that everyone pays for it: In this way, they allow fewer free riders, and the symbolic goods of a group where there are no free riders are usually perceived as more satisfying by consumers. from Introvigne, M., Mercato religioso, fondamentalismo e conservatorismo islamico: il caso della Turchia, La Critica Sociologica , n. 152, inverno 2004-2005 [10 febbraio 2005)], pp. 43-56, p. 43 One concludes that the outcome of this beneficial competition between religions is an increase in religious zeal and commitment, i.e., an increase in what is most hostile to competition (in this case, other commitments and zeal). This competition feeds the monopolistic claims of fundamentalisms, which are by definition incompatible. A free market that generates hostility to the free market! This is an incompatibility that cannot be reconciled and cannot harmonize in an ecumenism precisely because of the rigidity chosen by the market. In conclusion, any representative of a conservative spiritual vision who wanted to strengthen it would have to work to ensure the continued existence of all other faiths on the market and to defend even the most controversial spiritual groups (e.g. Scientology) with all their might. This would have the double effect of strengthening their own incontrovertible "truth" and at the same time - paradoxically - becoming a defender of religious freedom. Defending the indefensible: the crypto-paleolibertarianism of apologists This free market, with its less than liberal results, is very reminiscent of the "paleolibertarian" strain of a doctrine known as anarcho-capitalism. Anarcho-capitalism  or libertarianism is one of the directions of contemporary political and legal philosophy that proposes the abolition of the state and replaces it with market relations. The main intellectual reference for anarcho-capitalism is the economist Murray Rothbard , who in the 1960s proposed a political theory that focused on the inviolable sovereignty of the individual. Based on the non-aggression axiom , an ethical principle of natural law that states that it's not legitimate to attack the person and property of an individual, all forms of taxation that constitute a theft of individual property and all coercive measures by the state, which is seen as inherently authoritarian, should be abolished. In this society, every service would be provided by private individuals on a voluntary basis. A less extreme version is called mini-archism, and its proponents want to maintain a "minimal state" whose only function is to legitimize the protection of individuals from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud. Both versions agree on the central idea that the state would not be authorized to use its monopoly to interfere with free transactions between individuals. Every transaction between individuals is a "market" transaction, even those that cannot be monetized in a concrete sense, such as the choice of friends or partners, because they are based on incentives and disincentives, on costs and benefits. Freedom and economic prosperity can therefore only be guaranteed by universal laissez-faire, in the economy as in any other sphere. The state, even minimalist mini-archism, therefore has no right to interfere in individual choices such as sexual orientation, drug use, lifestyle, and religious affiliation. When using European political categories, American libertarianism is usually considered "right-wing" in economic terms and "left-wing" in rights terms, because of its radical advocacy of individual liberties. However, many of those who held this view were culturally conservative and considered total freedom in the area of personal choices to be libertine excess. Therefore, in 1990, an article by Lew Rockwell ( The Case for Paleo-libertarianism , Liberty, January 1990, 34-38) gave rise to a conservative current called " paleolibertarianism"  which traces its origins to the old American paleoconservative right of Ludwig von Mises  and Albert J. Nock . What distinguishes it from classical anarcho-capitalism, especially in its "left-wing" version, is the strong defense of traditional values and customs, especially those associated with Christian morality. This creates a correspondence with the European criteria of the "right", since paleolibertarianism combines economic conservatism and cultural conservatism. This current is historically associated with the Von Mises Institute , an academic organization that sponsors hundreds of conferences and meetings to combat etatism and promote conservative moral values. Von Mises, the Austrian economist to whom the institute is dedicated, based his 'praxeology' (the science of human action) on the assumption that "human action is always rational." The results of this logic may astound the prophane of market libertarianism. In a classic of anarcho-capitalist thought entitled Defending the Indefensible , Walter Block goes so far as to exonerate and justify behavior deemed reprehensible on the basis of the individual's free and consensual choice. "The 'blackmailer,' the 'filthy male chauvinist,' the 'employer of minors,' the 'garbage distributor,' the 'loan shark,' the 'homeless man,' the 'corrupt policeman,' even the 'person who yells 'fire' in a crowded club,' and other unsympathetic figures are defended on the basis of the principle of non-aggression. To give an example of the otherwise brilliant argumentative style that characterizes this provocative book, this excerpt from the speech in favor of the blackmailer is worthwhile: What exactly is blackmail? Blackmail is the offer of trade. It is the offer to trade something, usually silence, for some other good, usually money. If the offer of the trade is accepted, the blackmailer then maintains his silence and the blackmailed pays the agreed-upon price. If the blackmail offer is rejected, the blackmailer may exercise his rights of free speech and publicize the secret. There is nothing amiss here. All that is happening is that an offer to maintain silence is being made. If the offer is rejected, the blackmailer does no more than exercise his right of free speech.The sole difference between a gossip and a blackmailer is that the blackmailer will refrain from speaking — for a price. Among the 28 figures that benefit from Block's defense, the one of "guru" or "leader of a coercive group" is missing, but it can be argued with reasonable certainty that the arguments used would be based on the non-aggression principle and on free intercourse between individuals. Moreover, it is the same defense that Block voices with respect to the "capitalist pig exploiter of labor." These arguments overlap with those of cult apologists of all kinds, who are generally also extremely pro-free market. Suffice it to look at the Acton Institute , an American think tank with a Christian and ultra-lassez-faire matrix founded by Figure 64 - Press reports of naked slave auction held by Robert Sirico Robert Sirico  and Amway . Sirico is a Catholic priest with a background as an evangelical Pentecostal pastor and founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, a church that advocates for the rights of homosexual believers. At the age of 19, he joined the ' Jesus People Army' , founded by Linda Meissner, which later merged into the ' Children of God ' . The Jesus People Army, like the Children of God, emerged in the context of the hippie Christian revival movement, which grew out of the counterculture and mysticism of the 1960s. In 1976, Sirico was arrested after a police raid on a Hollywood club equipped with rooms with leather ropes and iron chains where an auction of young nude male slaves was taking place. Charges against Sirico, who was the organizer of the event and the financial beneficiary of the auction, were dropped because it turned out that the slaves were all consenting adults who were members of a sadomasochistic organization called the ' Leather Fraternity' . Sirico joined the libertarian ideology in 1977 and became a spokesman for 'Libertarians for Gay Rights'. He later converted to Catholicism and paleolibertarianism. He was subsequently ordained to the priesthood. In 1990, he co- founded the Acton Institute with Betsy DeVos , from the family that owns Amway . The latter organization and others associated with it fund the Acton Institute , which, incidentally, is located in the same city as Amway, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Amway is a multinational multi-level marketing  (MLM) company that sells various soaps and detergents and whose executives are evangelical activists closely associated with the American economic, political and military right who claim to speak directly to God. According to many scholars, MLM organizations are themselves cults, though not religious ones, based on the Ponzi scheme . This multinational Ponzi scheme, in turn, is part of a vast network of Christian free-market organizations called the   Atlas Network , controlled by the Atlas Institute . The organisation has been described as a “self-replicating think tank that creates think tanks”. Major US think tanks that belong to the network include the Cato Institute , the Heartland Institute  (which is dedicated to refuting climate change), the Heritage Foundation  (which is particularly opposed to abortion and LGBT rights) and the American Legislative Exchange Council . Figure 65- Relationships of the DeVos family to foundations and organisations of the American Christian and right-wing pro-free market wing The connections and sometimes the overlaps between the characters and institutions of the various environments considered here, i.e., the conservative Christian environment, that of promoting aggressive economic laissez-faire, and that of the cults, are consistent, even if little known. The whole world of Christian fundamentalists and enemies of sexual freedoms and self-determination is strangely interested in the defence of cults that are furthest removed from Christian orthodoxy. To give an example, the Conservative Summit 2024 held in Bratislava, Slovakia, featured   OndřejDostàl  among the speakers. He is a Czech politician who sympathizes with the Creative Society , a project of the AllatRa  cult. Another speaker was Mrs. Konecna, a communist politician. Both are quite openly pro-Russian. Ján Figeľ   is a Slovakian politician with links to CitizenGo , a Spanish fundamentalist association, which is particularly committed to the defence of religious freedom and is close to both Scientology  and the Unification Church .  He is a key figure of Agenda Europe , an informal network of associations that came together in January 2013 with the aim of building a Christian-inspired European think tank and supporting the “pro-life” movement in Europe. This was reported by the EPF in a report summarising documents from this network, which were kept secret until 2017 and published following a leak from a still anonymous source. Figure 66 - Ján Figeľ was the moderator of a public event on how to achieve peace between Russia and Ukraine organised by AllatRa. Below left is the logo and name of the Universal Peace Federation (Unification Church) The Russian hand In 2022, Figel' participated in the symposium " Religious Freedom: A Human Right Under Attack ," co-organized by Figeľ's 'Tunega, Púčik and Tesár Foundation' with the Universal Peace federation (Unification Church). Aaron Rhodes  ( Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe) was among the speakers. Aaron Rhodes  served as Executive Director of the   International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights   (IHF)  that is said to be infiltrated by Scientology . Rhodes is also a member of the Common Sense Society , an organisation full of pro-Russians. This is interesting, because even if TFP has opted for the Atlanticist camp, the Polish organisation that refers to TFP, Ordo Iuris , obviously has ties to Russian circles , and conservative christians like Figel do not disdain working with Kremlin-affiliated figures. In 2017, Figel was at a conference of the All Faith Network (i.e. Scientology) with prominent Scientologist Eric Roux, pro-Western Introvigne and Leonid Sebastianov , a Russian ultranationalist, leader of the "Old Believers" and representative of the Kremlin's informal diplomacy . That was before the war, of course. Those were years in which the director of CESNUR could write things like the following : That Russia behaves well towards the LGBT lobby and fundamentalist Islam does not justify its aggressive and expansionist policies in the West, and at the same time, condemning these expansionist policies does not diminish appreciation for the fight against the gay lobby and fundamentalist Islam that Russia is waging. A strange statement for an advocate of civil rights and ecumenism, but one that can be summarised in the idea that the Federation's domestic policy was good, but its foreign policy was not. Figure 67 - Leonid Sebastianov, Ján Figeľ, Eric Roux, Massimo Introvigne at a All Faith Network conference in 2017 As in esotericism, what appears on the surface does not always correspond to the deep truth, which remains hidden to most people. The links between the Russian world and the world of cult apologists may be closer than we think, despite the pro-Atlanticism proclaimed on the surface. There are documented links between Russian and American actors through the World Congress of Families (WCF) , an international platform founded in the 1990s to promote a conservative and “pro-family” vision of society, but which has evolved over time into a transnational hub for the convergence of religious, political, and geopolitical interests between conservative elites in Russia and the United States . Through the WCF and associated networks (e.g. CitizenGo, Agenda Europe , etc.), Russian-American coalitions have been formed to boycott UN organizations that advocate for sexual and reproductive rights, influence local laws (including in Europe and Latin America), and promote conservative political leaders. The main financier of the WCF is the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev . The WCF is an important instrument for the “soft alignment” between the religious and political elites of Russia and the USA . This rapprochement is less diplomatic than ideological, but has concrete political effects in numerous countries, including Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa. The connection between these two worlds, that of defending religious freedom and that of lobbies for life and the traditional family, is not a hypothesis but a declaration of intent clearly expressed at the WCF-International Religious Freedom  Summit in 2021: The IRF Roundtable and WCF share common values: the centrality of religious freedom and the natural family. Figure 70 shows a map of the relationships between the apologetic network of cults and pro-life movements connected to the Russian world (The file in SVP format is easier to read and can be viewed here ). Ján Figeľ holds a prominent position within the Clementy Schuman Legacy Foundation , where he serves as Chairman of the Scientific Committee . His collaboration with the foundation—also documented by Catholic sources such as ACI Stampa  and the National Catholic Register —fits into a broader framework of Vatican diplomacy and interreligious dialogue  promoted by the Clementy network. The Clementy Group , founded in London in 2020 by Belgian entrepreneur Pierre Michel Louvrier , is formally a multi-family office and private equity fund  specializing in corporate acquisitions and restructuring in Europe and the United States, as in the case of the Italian company Fimer S.p.A.  However, Louvrier’s ties to Russia  have drawn attention and concern in intelligence circles and the financial press. He lived and worked for years between Moscow and Geneva, collaborating with KPMG Russia  and serving on the boards of Russian companies such as ASC Holding  (luxury automotive) and Rusgrain Holding  (agribusiness). According to various reports—including a European investigation into Russian influence in Bulgaria —in 2015 Louvrier was involved in the controversial LIC33 project , related to the symbolic one-euro acquisition of strategic Bulgarian companies, where he was considered “close” to the Orthodox oligarch Konstantin Malofeev , sanctioned by the European Union for supporting the Donbass separatists. Although Louvrier has claimed to have ceased all investments in Russia  after the 2014–2015 sanctions and to have transferred his financial activities to the West , this background continues to weigh on the group’s reputation. An Intelligence Online  investigation (February 2025) reports that U.S. lawmakers and agencies  are monitoring Louvrier’s network—which also includes the Clementy Schuman Legacy Foundation , engaged in Vatican diplomacy projects and inspired by the pro-European legacy of Robert Schuman —due to his past connections with Russian-Orthodox networks  and Kremlin-linked capital flows . Officially, Clementy is not currently involved  in any Russian operations or partnerships and does not appear on any sanctions lists ; however, the Russian background of its founder and his relational ties ensure that the group remains under scrutiny  for potential intersections between Russian-origin capital , ecclesiastical networks , and European economic diplomacy . Wikipedia states that: “To fully realize its mission, the foundation has established a collaboration with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences , supporting its activities and programs.” It is the same P ontifical Academy  that hosted Pastor Mark Burns , spiritual advisor to Donald Trump  and a key promoter of the pro-Russian cult Allatra , at the 10th World Changers Summit in 2025 . In early 2025, Tulsi Gabbard , appointed by Donald Trump  as head of U.S. intelligence, was questioned about her relationship with Pierre Louvrier , after The New York Times  revealed that in 2024 she had attended a Vatican event funded by Louvrier’s foundation Anyway , in 2023, Ján Figeľ ( who, as we have said, is linked to CitizenGo, Agenda Europa, Clementy Group and supports AllatRa),   together with Willy Fautré  (HRWF), Massimo Introvigne  (CESNUR) and Aaron Rhodes  ( Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe) , signed a letter to Japanese Prime Minister Kishida in defence of the Unification Church . A month earlier, together with Massimo Introvigne, he had already spoken out in favour of this issue at the International Summit for Religious Freedom ( as stated on the church's own website ) . Figure 68 - Some of the participants at the Conservative Meeting 2024 in Bratislava, Slovakia The Citizens Commission for Human Rights (CCHR) , a well-known Scientology front organisation, funded Paul Weyrich's American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) , according to a letter from CCHR board member Carol Steinke. A branch of Paul Weyrich's American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) also honoured the wife of Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the Unification Church , Hak Ja Han Moon. The award was presented by Robin Brunelli, president of the National Foundation for Women Legislators  and wife of Sam Brunelli, ALEC director and long-time CNP member. In an AFN radio interview by Kelleigh Nelson with Chey Simonton, the far-reaching connections between the Council for National Policy (CNP) and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church  were discussed at length. As we have seen in ( Fascists, spies and gurus. 5. Attack on secularism ) , Moon's Unification Church helped the Reagan administration fund the Nicaraguan Contras as part of the secret plan for which former USCIRF  Chairman Abrams was convicted. Figure 69 - The signatories of the letters in defense of the Unification Church ( Willy Fautré, Ján Figeľ, Massimo Introvigne, Aaron Rhodes ) as they appear in the CESNUR magazine Bitter Winter Financial documents show that in 2019, roughly half of the total income of Fautré’s HRWF came from a single source: the Alfred Vogel Foundation . This is clearly stated in HRWF’s own 2019 financial report . This Swiss foundation has among its purposes the   support of institutions consistent with the “Christian philosophy” of its founder, Alfred Vogel , a well-known member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The result is that an organization presenting itself as independent from any creed or political movement is, in fact, heavily funded by an entity tied to a specific religious community. The practical effect was not long in coming: during that very period, HRWF stepped up its publication of articles and reports openly favorable to Jehovah’s Witnesses ( here , here , here , here ). This detail clearly shows how the field of so-called “human rights and religious freedom advocacy” intersects with specific confessional interests, turning apparently neutral NGOs into instruments of sectarian lobbying. In 2025, immediately after Donald Trump took office as President of the United States, the annual International Religious Freedom (IRF) Summit was held in Washington. Partners in the event included the Universal Peace Federation (i.e. the Unificatiion Church) and Scientology. In the plenary session, Vice President Vance declared the new administration's commitment to securing and strengthening the United States' efforts to protect religious freedom . The programme also included a (sponsored...) meeting with Pastor Paula White , Special Advisor to President Trump, Marco Respinti (CESNUR and Bitter Winter), Patricia Duval (FOB and more), Senator Sam Browmback (former Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom and member of Americans for Prosperity of Atlas Network) , Micahel Jenkins and Tomihiro Tanaka , both of the Unification Church . The chairman was the editor of the Washington Times, the Moonies' newspaper. The topic was the persecution of the Unification Church by the (democratic) government of Japan. The Southern Poverty Law Center had warned that the IRF summit would bring together far-right groups . Figure 70 - A map of the connections between the cult apologist network and the Pro Life organizations With the re-election of Donald Trump and the establishment of a White House Office of Faith aimed at defending Christians from prejudice and ‘empowering faith-based entities’, the  presence  of Scientology  in key positions  appears  to be increasing.  For example, one of the church's major financial backers has been appointed to the board of the Kennedy Centre  and a high-ranking Scientologist has been chosen to be among the peace negotiators between Russia and the Ukraine . Scientologist Grant Cardone — who spoke at Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in October 2024 — was also given a speaking slot at Turning Point USA’s annual Americafest event. Actress and former Scientology devotee Leah Remini has been warning for years about Trump’s closeness to Scientology . Figure 71 - A sponsored dinner at IRF Summit 2025 It is worth noting that a group identified by numerous observers — including the Ukrainian security services — as pro-Russian and linked to Kremlin intelligence , AllatRa , now appears to be curiously at ease within U.S. institutions and at public events organized by conservative sectors of the U.S. administration. This is evidenced by the participation of its representatives in the National Prayer Breakfast   at Congress, the “ Uniting to Prevent Human Trafficking & Bring Hope to Survivors” meeting at the Rayburn House Office Building, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference , which brings together leading lawmakers of the Christian right. One of the most interesting aspects is that Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor, Pastor Mark Burns , has become the public face and main sponsor of AllatRa . Burns took part in the International Interfaith Conference  organized by AllatRa at Capitol Hill , and, together with AllatRa representatives, attended the 10th World Changers Summit  held at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican . Fig. 72 – Mark Burns attends the International Interfaith Conference organized by AllatRa In October 2025 , Mark Burns  and the ultra-Atlanticist Massimo Introvigne   met in South Korea  to take part in a rally in support of the widow of Reverend Moon  of the Unification Church , who had been imprisoned for fraud and corruption  (officially presented, of course, as religious persecution ). It seems that the director of CESNUR  did not take the opportunity to warn Burns about who his Russophone friends really are . Fig. 73 – Burns and Introvigne in South Korea (from Bitter Winter ) Another noteworthy element is what appears to be a strategic alliance between this pro-Russian group and Falun Gong , the Chinese movement that financed Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign . In fact, prominent figures within AllatRa have begun an aggressive campaign of propaganda in favor of this movement . Follow the money From 2008 to 2020, the major Christian conservative associations in the United States spent more than $280 million abroad. At least 90 million of that went to Europe, while the rest went to Africa and Asia. This is according to an analysis  by the US investigative website OpenDemocracy , in which authors Claire Provost and Nandini Archer analysed thousands of financial records from 28 mostly Christian extremist and ultra-pro-free market US groups with strong links to the conservative, sometimes far right. In recent years, thanks in part to these investments, these groups have become increasingly influential in American and international politics. Indeed, the funds have the explicit purpose of supporting both initiatives and other satellite organisations around the world, which in turn work to influence public opinion, laws and national policies to prevent the enforcement of sexual and reproductive rights. But that is not all. Among the aims of all these organisations, the protection of “ religious freedom ” is of great importance The list of 28 groups under consideration includes the Acton Institute , the Alliance Defending Freedom , the Family Research Council , the Federalist Society , the American Center for Law and Justice , the Heritage Foundation , the Cato Institute  and the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property . The latter is nothing other than the American branch of the Brazilian organisation for the defence of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), which was founded by Plinio Correa de Oliveira and to which the Italian traditionalist Catholic associations Alleanza Cattolica and Fondazione Lepanto refer, as we have seen ( see Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network ). From the first part of this report, we know that the main objective of this organisation since the mid-1980s has been to defend religious freedom and thus promote an anti-secular vision of society. It is therefore likely that the funds of this society - 3,123,131 dollars between 2008 and 2020 - will flow to European organisations pursuing the same goal. In Italy, the most important organisation of this kind is the Centro Studi Nuove Religioni (CESNUR) , which has emerged from a rib of Alleanza Cattolica, with which it has long shared a top figure. On the other hand, De Mattei, the head of the Lepanto Foundation, is a member of the expert panel of the Heritage Foundation  and the Acton Institute , both of which are included in the list analysed by Open Democracy. This flow of money to Europe is driven primarily by two groups that focus their battles on the courts. One is the organisation American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) , led by Trump's personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) . The latter boasts Betsy DeVos 's family among its founders. Both groups are part of Agenda Europe Go to Part III

Luigi Corvaglia Abridged edition of the 12-part study ‘Fascists, Spies and Gurus. Psychological warfare and the geopolitics of cults' by Luigi Corvaglia Part II Part III I - Funny Stuff   In July 2020, my self-esteem flinched. The annual report on religious freedom in the world  by the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) closed with recommendations to U.S. President - then Trump - on how to protect this fundamental right; among the recommendations was to obstruct the work of FECRIS, the European Federation of Centers for Research and Information on Sectarianism, at the annual OSCE Meeting in Warsaw. Well, representing FECRIS at the annual OSCE Human Dimension Conference to denounce abuses in totalitarian cults is exactly the humble person who signs this writing . So began my dossier on the geopolitics of cults  (2022). The incipit was with effect. Trump should have taken care of obstructing me (with all the busyness he's had fighting the " deep state "). This grotesque revelation plunged the stunned reader right onto the scene. Like a shrewd director, after surprising him with other equally grotesque revelations, I led him into an orderly historical reconstruction. It was a story about cults, espionage and psychological warfare. Basically, it was the chronicle of a "spy story" That report would be translated into English, French and Dutch and then published in 2023 in the Fogli di Via series by the de Ferrari Foundation . Figure 1- USCIRF report recommends president obstruct FECRIS work at OSCE Jeffrey Augustine , an investigator who is among the best known critics of Scientology in the world, has written on the subject : Corvaglia offers the most accurate description yet read of what is, essentially, a multinational religious-based intelligence operation. Arnaud Palisson , the analyst who headed French intelligence service's "cults and sects" department  for ten years, said: The dossier on geopolitics of cults is a unique model. [...] Stephen Kent , professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Canada, one of the most renowned academics in the field of cultic studies, called my report ‘ pure dynamite!' I would not have thought that a work that is, after all, a hodgepodge written with a light hand and ironic wit, would be so well received. I therefore believe that the time has come to transform the material, which was deliberately presented in a "filmic" way at the time, into a more straightforward and organic treatment, supplementing it with new information and, above all, placing it better in the ideological and political framework. In this prologue, however, I take the liberty of resuming the spirit of that first dossier so that the reader, unfamiliar with the dynamics of the obscure world I am going to discuss, can be introduced to it with the right attitude, i.e. with the curiosity of the incredulous. In order to attract the attention that everyone has for the incongruous, I report some grotesque things that are useful for this purpose. The first is the fact that my narcissism has been tickled not only by the fact that a US government agency has advised the President to obstruct the little person writing here, but also by the further fact that immediately afterwards a non-governmental organisation called the European Federation for Freedom of Belief (FOB) proposed that Italy be placed on the list of countries at risk in terms of religious freedom because of my presence. You may be surprised at this by reading the article " Also Europe in the Special Watch List? " (Figures 2 and 3). Figure 2-3 - Excerpt from FOB article saying that all countries where FECRIS operates should be monitored for risks to religious freedom (fig.2) because no French or Russians are going to the OSCE - that is, an Italian is going... (fig.3) To make matters worse, the president of this organisation, Alessandro Amicarelli , accused me in a public Facebook post  of colluding with the Chinese communist regime in the commission of various nefarious acts, including the forced removal of organs  from dissidents (fig.4). The statement is at least original, so the person who doesn't mind uttering it must also be interesting. Let's get to know him. Figure 4 - FOB president accuses me in a public Facebook post of being conniving with the Chinese Communist Party by comparing me to Nazi-fascists who deny the Holocaust Alessandro Amicarelli , Alex to his friends, is a lawyer practicing in London. His correspondence address, as stated on the U.K. Business Register page , 78 York St, London W1H 1DP gives the appearance of being  the headquarters of a company with the sympathetic name of "Billy the Duck Ltd" and which  deals in video production and lists only one employee ).In truth, the same address, a small corner room, is home to a dozen other companies  (but no law firm). They will fit in. On his personal page , Amicarelli describes himself as a "lawyer, lecturer and philanthropist" He therefore loves his neighbour, as the etymology of the word suggests. This is made even clearer by the fact that he describes himself as the "Founder and President of the Embassy of Love International " on the aforementioned page. The fact that the name is reminiscent of an ambiguous nightclub inspired me to find out more. Figura 5- Google street view of Amicarelli's address in London The European company search engine North Data  creates interesting networks by connecting companies and individuals together based on their business connections. The tab dedicated to Amicarelli  contains the pattern of connections shown in Figure 6.  If you click on the link to "Embassy of Love Ltd" you will learn that it has its registered office on none other than Regent Street (Figure 7) . Those who know London know that it is a truly exclusive address. However, a simple search for that address reveals an interesting fact. The elegant building is known for harbouring fake addresses for bogus companies, i.e. a virtual address used by thousands of fraudsters (Figure 8). In fact, the address is used by around 4,000 companies, some of which are known to have scammed their investors . However, North Data is an engine that only censuses European companies, while Amicarelli, on his page, claims to have established his embassy of love in the US. Figure 6- Outline of A. Amicarelli's reports from the North Data site. Figure 7 - Address of Embassy of Love LTD from the North Data site Figure 8- English press article on the "crooks' paradise" on regent Street In fact, In addition to the company that appears to be registered in Cardiff, Wales, on 16 February 2021, there is another one in the USA that was registered on 6 February 2023 (he likes February) under the name Embassy of Love International Ministries ,   with its registered office in Washington state . The U.S. address corresponds to the Fidelity Building in Spokane (below in a photo - fig. 10 - taken from Google's Street View  where part of it appears blurred at the request of some of the businesses located there). It is not known what the two sister companies are involved in. Even the UK company register  entry does not reveal the purpose of the company, although it does mention duties and remuneration. Figure 9 - Chamber of Commerce certificate of the Embassy of Love Internationall Figure 10 - Street view of the address of the Embassy of Love International Ministries in Spokane, Wa, USA Figure 11 - Obaseki & Co Ltd. The team If we look at the other nodes directly linked to the lawyer, we see Roma Nation Embassy , a company based at, you guessed it..., yes, 207 Regent Street! Activity? Unknown. We also see that he is connected with Obaseki & Co Ltd , the law firm run by Nigerian lawyers where he runs his practise. In the team photo, you can catch a glimpse of Amicarelli peeking out from behind the heads in the front row (Figure 11). You can recognise him because he is the only "Caucasian." Surprisingly, this studio is actually at the address given in the records, Bentley Road, a far less cool neighbourhood than Regent Street, where he prefers to have his correspondence sent (Figure 12). Poking around the other nodes in the network reported by North Data, we see a direct connection to the All Faiths Network for the United Kingdom . This is one of the multiple organizations under the umbrella of Scientology . Figure 12 - The location of the law firm where the FOB chairman works. This religious holding, whose credo is a mixture of Gnosticism, magic and science fiction (you can read a summary of its doctrine in the third chapter of this report), is an organism with many faces and many manifestations. One of these is the All Faiths Network , whose director is William Martin Weightman , not coincidentally another direct node of Amicarelli, as North Data reports. It's easy to find out who Weightman is. He is a proud member of the Church of Scientology and, as he states on his Linkedin page , former director of the church's human rights office (Figure 13). Figure 13 - Linkedin page of Martin Weightman This is no surprise. In fact, Amicarelli, Weightman and a certain Rabbi Jeff Berger of the church of Scientology in London, have co-signed a book   on Covid 19  published by the All Faiths Network. There is a picture of me on page 25. The photo of the philanthropist speaking at a meeting of the All faiths Network under the effigy of Scientology founder Ron L. Hubbard  was also not lost on me (Figure 14).   Figure 14 - Amicarelli gives a speech at the All Faiths Network and below a picture of Ron L. Hubbard The All Faiths Network  is one of the members of the European federation for Freedom of Belief (FOB ), of which Amicarelli is President. Other constituent associations of the federation  include Soteria International , an expression of the Atman Yoga organisation of Gregorian Bivolaru , the guru who has been wanted by Interpol for years and finally arrested in France  in 2023 on charges of criminal conspiracy, human trafficking and sexual abuse; then there is the European Interreligious Forum For Religious Freedom , whose president is the "Rev." Eric Roux , President of the United Churches of Scientology in France and vice-president of the European Office of Public Affairs and Human Rights of Church of Scientology (and probably head of the OSA, the Church's intelligence) and the European Coordination for Freedom of Conscience (CAP LC) , whose president is Thierry Valle , also a rapresentative of Scientology . Figure 15 - Eric Roux e Thierry Valle One of the founding members , and still a member of the  Federation's scientific committee , is Fabrizio d'Agostini , who in the Scientology magazine "Etica e Verità" expressed his satisfaction at having achieved OT 6 certification, one of the highest levels in the Scientology hierarchy (Figure 16). It almost suggests that FOB has something to do with Scientology. Figure 16- Scientology magazine's "Ethics and Truth" page dedicated to Fabrizio d'Agostini Incidentally, Amicarelli is also the surname of the historical spokesman for Scientology in Italy, Fabio Amicarelli . Of course, it does not mean anything, it could be a name match, but there is a third Amicarelli, the hypnotist Michele Amicarelli , who also sits on FOB's scientific committee. Three people with the same last name all connected to the same world. It may be, although Amicarelli is not a very common surname in Italy. Below (Figures 16 and 17) you can see a comparison between the prevalence of that surname and mine, which is also not very common except locally. Figures 17-18 - Comparison of the prevalence of the Amicarelli surname and the Corvaglia surname in Italy: 88 households vs. 803 What is FOB about? As you can read on their website, it promotes and protects religious freedom. FOB is in the register of lobbyists  at the European Parliament and the European Commission. In January 2016, I reported all this to the ‘Linkiesta’ newspaper, which published an article   by Carmine Gazzanni that included an interview with me. The FOB's immediate reaction was a response in the same magazine, threatening to sue the author of the article and me for defamation. I responded on the same page:   I don't think anyone, inside or outside FOB, would have the temerity to say that Scientology, for one, is not at least a "controversial" organisation. Yet the FOB board writes that this statement is "damaging." Why? If being part of even controversial organizations is the right that FOB defends to the hilt, why should the statement  that its members are also part of such organizations be injurious! Perhaps an association that defends gay rights would be offended if it were accused of some of its members being homosexuals? A curious logical wrapping up that can only be explained by the FOB board's fear that this might cast doubt on the Federation's true aims. Of course, no lawsuit followed. Most of the articles published on the organisation's website are taken from   the magazine Bitter Winter . This is the magazine of the Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religioni (CESNUR)  of the well-known Massimo Introvigne , whose wife is herself on the scientific committee of FOB ). This prolific author is also the president of a strange company called E-religion SNC , which claims to have only one employee. The company was founded in 2001 (the employee was hired 20 years later). Figure 19 - Chamber of Commerce certificate of the company E-Religion by Massimo Introvigne and Pierluigi Zoccatelli Between embassies of love and electronic religion, the various societies that can be linked to the cadre of defenders of "religious freedom" appear increasingly intriguing and mysterious. What will all these entities with registration numbers, mailboxes and emails ever be used for? We will not be told. What is certain is that inferences, rumors and, the more time passes, interesting clues are circulating on the subject.... The latest grotesquerie is the use of a photo taken on 29 September 2017 in Salekhard, Siberia. I am reposting it here (Figure 20):   Figure 20 - Speakers at a conference on destructive cults held in Siberia in 2017 The one on the far right is me. The picture was used as definitive, "smoking gun" evidence of a connection between FECRIS, or at least me, and the Russian regime. Indeed, the second from the left is Alexander Dvorkin, a Russian anti-cult activist close to the Orthodox Church (and the one in the centre is, of course, an Orthodox bishop). The now iconic image has served its purpose on the main websites of anti-cult movement opponents and has enjoyed an honourable career spanning many years. It even enjoyed the honour of being presented as part of a scholarly dissertation at the international congress of the famous Centre for the Study of New Religions (CESNUR).  An example of high conceptual elaboration and rare scholarly rigour was the speaker's comment: "I was told that this person - she was referring to me  - is strongly atheistic - who told her that?  - but you can see he has no problem hanging around with clergy." Indeed, the bishop at the centre was not exactly incognito. You can see the irrefutable argument in Video 1 (further down in the text). Video 1 - Rosita Soryté Caught the author of this report in awkward company The refined scholar who presented this sophisticated argument at the CESNUR international congress is Rosita Soryté , the wife of CESNUR director Introvigne and a member of the scientific committee of the FOB federation mentioned above.   The image was even quoted by Massimo Introvigne  himself   in an article in Russian , in which the scholar claims to have seen a picture in which I, a so worldly person, appeared "almost overwhelmed by priests" (the gentleman with the beard next to me is Thomas Gandow, a Lutheran pastor). The director of CESNUR of this blessed image has made it a highlight of his repertoire for years. In the photo below, for example, he illustrates the image at the 2018 American Academy of Religion conference in Denver (Figure 21). Figure 21 - Introvigne comments on the usual photograph at the American Academy of Religion convention in Denver in 2018 The photo has since also appeared in such unlikely circles as a book on the Covid 19 pandemic published by the All Faith Network  (but now we know what it is. It is the photo on p. 25 that I alluded to above). The photo later appeared several times in the magazine Bitter Winter , published by CESNUR, once even with a funny but sibylline caption  that read "Luigi Corvaglia on the far right (which is not his political position)." However, the most incredible of the reuse of this photo, took place in The European Times , an obscure online newspaper which claimed that the anti-cult movement was responsible for the anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Russia and, therefore, morally co-responsible for the ongoing war (!). The author of this and other articles in that magazine is a certain Jan Leonid Bornestein, of whom there is no trace on the Web. His only available photo, entered into the prompt on the Facecheck.id  website, an identity verification tool using facial recognition, returned zero results. It cannot be ruled out that this person does not exist and that the photo is an artificial intelligence achievement. "The European Times" is a strange publication registered in Spain but whose editor is a Bulgarian, a certain Petar Gramatikov . He claims to be a hierodacon of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, although his ordination took place  in violation of the canons (he has been married and divorced several times, which makes him ineligible for ordination). In any case, he was ordained by the Metropolitan of Tyrnovo, even though he lives in Plovdiv. So, in all likehood, his diaconate and monasticism are simply decorative. The only things that are certain are that he publishes the newspaper of a wellness center, the Orpheus Club Wellnes , in Plovdiv, and that he has a very good relationship with Scientology, as evidenced by his presence at the 46th anniversary celebration of the founding of the organization's Belgian headquarters . The photo below shows him in the centre during said celebration. Figure 22 - Attendees at the 46th anniversary celebration of Scientology's Belgian headquarters. The one on the far right (whether this corresponds to his political faith is not known) is Ivan Arjona Pelado , one of the leading representatives of Scientology and a component of church’s secret service. Tout se tien. In October 2024, the French investigative newspaper 'Blast' published a dossier revealing that The European Times is part of an international Media Center called Brussels Media , whose executive director, Lahcen Hammouch , is very close to Scientology. Incidentally, the contact address of The European Times is that of a satellite association of Scientology in Spain, the Fundazion para la Mejora de la Vida, la Cultura y la Sociedad , whose director is that Ivan A. Pelado who can be seen on the far right of the previous photo (fig. 22).  The Blast article also publishes a photo taken in the European Parliament on November 30, 2023  showing an interesting clique that includes Pelado, curiously always last on the right of the picture, the aforementioned Eric Roux, Scientology's highest rapresentative and FOB federation member, in the centre, and Brussels Media director Lahcen Hammouch, second from the left (fig. 23). Figure 23 - from left to right: Willy Fautré, Lahcen Hammouch, Maxette Pirbakas, Eric Roux, Christine Mirre, an unidentified person, and Ivan Arjona Pelado Then, there is no doubt about the link between The European Times, Scientology and associations defending "religious freedom," such as FOB and others, like Human Rights Without Frontiers , whose director is Willy Fautré , first from the left in photo 23, or the Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience (CAP LC ), whose vice-president Christine Mirre is third from the left in photo number 23, next to Roux.  At the end of the same month that saw the publication of the 'Blast' article on the network linking Brussels Media, Scientology and NGOs in defence of "religious freedom," my Siberian photo also returned to the limelight after a brief period of eclipse. The reason for this was that the Ukrainian parareligious cult AllatRa had not liked my statement to a collective of investigative journalists  that their movement was a conspiracy theory with obscure origins and that it exhibited pro-Putin rhetoric. An incredible smear campaign  followed in which various AllatRa "trolls" accused me,  not them,  of being a "Russian agent" or an "agent of the Russian Orthodox Church." That photo helped (see Figure 24). The arguments used against the anti-cult movement, taken evenly from Bitter Winter's publications, also served them well. Figure 24 - Adept of AllatRa intent on smearing me as Russian agent using Bitter Winter and FOB campaign Apart from that, there seems to be no doubt about AllatRa's pro-Russian political goals, as several journalistic investigations  have also shown.  In early November 2024, Ukrainian security services even raided around 20 cult’s headquarters , confiscating material that confirmed the findings of investigations into the cult' s " subversive activities on behalf of the Russian Federation ." Strangely enough, the only expert from outside the organisation who was willing to be interviewed for the TV of that movement about the alleged persecution of AllatRa and other cults was a FOB member, and not just any FOB member, but top Scientologist Fabrizio D'Agostini . I thought I understood that I was the friend of the Russians and that FOB stood for democracy and freedom instead. Evidently there is something wrong with this representation.   Figure 25- Fabrizio D'Agostini (Scientology and FOB) on the pro-Russian cult Allatra TV. This introduction has thus enabled the reader to familiarise themselves with the actors (CESNUR, Scientology, FOB, USCIRF, etc.), to get an idea of their relationships with each other and their modus operandi, and to learn how the author uses open resources to investigate the network of "cult apologists"." The reader can now immerse themselves in the neat treatment of the history, ideological framework and geopolitical context in which the hybrid warfare operations we have just discussed are embedded. II - Mind Games   1- The paradigm of the cross-eyed gunslinger   There are two ways to hit the mark. One is to have a good aim and hit the innermost circle of the target. The other is to hit randomly and draw the target around the hole we have made. This second system is more effective, but only if no one is watching us shoot. A group of sociologists who have monopolised the study of "new religious movements" is a good example of the second kind. These authors, gathered around the Centro Studi Nuove Religioni (CESNUR) in Turin, Italy, put forward a single and simple thesis in hundreds of mutually recognised articles in a kind of cross-peer review, namely that is, that mind manipulation is a myth. It follows that the "cults" that abuse their followers are nothing more than a "moral panic" created by a phantom anti-cult movement that is "bereft of scientific credibility". In short, people join destructive cults of their own free will and after a rational assessment and stay there. This portrayal is made with complete indifference to the enormous amount of experimental psychology, neuropsychology and social psychology studies on persuasion and social influence. In fact, it has been clear for decades that individual and collective decisions defy rationality and that the human mind is susceptible to suggestion and systematic errors that can be exploited by those who wish to direct them (Tversky & Kahneman, 1979; Cacioppo & Petty, 1984; Damasio, 1984; Zimbardo, 2002; Budzynska & Weger, 2011). There is someone who received a Nobel Prize for these studies on the manipulability of the mind: Daniel Kahneman . The social influence and power of the perception of oneself as part of a group (self-categorisation) in determining actions is a consolidated legacy of scientific knowledge (Turner, 1987, 1991, Turner & Reynolds, 2012). The existence of persuasion techniques is the basis of marketing and political propaganda strategies (Cialdini, 2017; Sharot, 2018). Despite this undeniable mass of data on persuasion compiled by the disciplines truly relevant to such studies, the aforementioned sociologists repeat in chorus that "science" has rejected the theory of "brainwashing". What science? Theirs, i.e. studies based on data such as proselytism and retention rates in new religious movements. All psychological and neurobiological studies do not count. This approach is akin to a group of boys refusing to play football and therefore deciding to fence in a new, smaller pitch, thereby defining the rules of a new game, by deciding who can and cannot play, and finally declaring that those who play traditional football are not really playing football. It's like  drawing the target around the hole.   2-The argumentative fallacies   At this point it is fair to ask what game those we use to call “cult apologists” are playing in their new playing field. It is quickly said: essentially in the use of argumentative fallacies. There are three main ones:   1 straw man argument 2 poisoning the well 3 petitio principii   The Straw Man argument   The 'straw man argument' is a trick used by those who want to win an argument without addressing its content. It works by attributing to the other side an argument that they have never put forward. Of course, the thesis must not only be false, but also obviously absurd, grotesque or ridiculous and therefore easy to refute. In the case of the apologists, the straw man is 'brainwashing'. Just as all psalms end in glory, all historical reconstructions of the concept of brainwashing made by cult apologists end with a citation of the old film The Manchurian Candidate  starring Frank Sinatra. The film tells of a Korean War veteran who, in response to a certain stimulus, was reprogrammed into an alien-controlled automaton to kill the candidate for President of the United States. This cinematic and grotesque version of manipulation serves to highlight the absurdity of the idea and thus protect gurus, demagogues and cult leaders from accusations of practising it. There is only one problem with this reasoning: nobody believes in the manchurian candidate, no one has ever supported the brainwashing thesis. What scholars mean when they speak of mind manipulation has nothing remotely to do with the Manchurian Candidate hypothesis.   To better understand the difference between undue persuasion and Hollywood, however, it is useful to read a book by the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. In his book Underground  (1997), he recounts the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo underground in 1995, in which thirteen people were killed and 6,000 others poisoned. Murakami writes that the followers of the religious cult known as Aum Shinrikyo  (The Supreme Truth) who carried out the attack "were not passive victims, but actively sought to be controlled". He describes how most Aum members "deposited all their valuable personal wealth of self-esteem" in the "spiritual bank" of cult leader Shoko Asahara. Their goal was to submit to a higher authority, to someone else's representation of reality. Perhaps what constitutes an abusive and totalitarian group is the premeditated construction of a system that selects and supports this escape from freedom, reinforcing it with slow and gradual steps, playing on guilt and shame. This may not be ‘brainwashing’, but it is certainly manipulation, certainly undue persuasion, because it is aimed at exploitation. We are talking here about mechanisms known to neuroscience, social psychology, the “behavioural economics” of Kahneman - who won a Nobel Prize for revealing the systematic errors (biases) and irrational heuristics of our brains used by marketing and propaganda - and the cognitive linguistics of Lakoff (2004), which emphasises the persuasive nature of language. He clarified how the use of specific terms activates cenceptual frames that guide the listener's perception.   To deny this, you have to be very ignorant or very much in bad faith.   A significant mistake in the discussion of the subject has been to define persuasion as a construct made up of a single dimension. If there is only one form of persuasion, it will always be lawful for someone ("we all persuade and are persuaded") while for others it may sometimes be malignant. But they do not know where to draw the line to separate it from lawful persuasion. So it is necessary to introduce an often-ignored dimension: the purpose of the persuader, that is, the dimension of interest . This is a dimension we can outline in an axis that has egoism (interest in ourselves) and altruism (interest in others) at the two poles. The introduction of this new dimension amplifies the range of connotations and expressive typologies of persuasion. These can be reproduced spatially by intersecting two axes according to the tradition of circumplex models used in psychology (fig. 26). figure 26 - Circumplex Model of Undue Persuasion (Corvaglia, 2019) Two things can be deduced from this: The first is that the focus must not be on brainwashing through specific methods, but on persuasion for the purpose of exploitation. That is manipulation. The attention must be directed on “why”, non “how”. The second thing that can be easily deduced from the diagram I presented is that the idea that anti-cultists want to censor persuasion tout-court  is false, as only one of the quadrants represents the mind control area. It is basically another straw man argument.   b) Poisoning the well The expression “poisoning the well” is used to describe an argument in which what the opponent says is delegitimised in advance by questioning his or her credibility or good faith. In this way, anything they say can be ignored, deemed false or irrelevant by the public. “since you’re bad, what you say is not worthy of consideration”.  The constant defamation of activists, academics and associations that show concern for totalitarian groups is certainly not aimed at discussing their arguments, but at casting doubt on their credibility. Indeed, activists who oppose the work of cults are nevertheless labelled as unscientific (because of the brainwashing myth), illiberal (because they are hostile to 'freedom of worship') or even complicit in despotism. Whatever the 'anti-cult movement' says is therefore unfounded. figure 27 - Introvigne shows a slide titled "Anti-Cultism and the War in Ukraine" where you can see a nice picture of me C) Petitio principii (or “begging the question fallacy”) The most sophisticated technique, which can even be regarded as a genuine mind game, is the “begging the question fallacy” ( petitio principii ). This is an error in which the premises already contain the statement that the conclusion is true. In other words, the conclusion is already taken for granted in the premise.   Massimo Introvigne (1993) gives us a wonderful example of this. He has found the most ingenious way to propose the concept that anti-cultists believe in a non scientific phenomenon with his division into a secular anti-cult movement  and a religious counter-cult movement . He combines the division 'secular-religious' with a division into 'rationalist' and 'post-rationalist' movements. Rationalists, according to the author, are those who believe that 'cults' attract their followers through fraud, deception. Deception is not supernatural, ergo it is rational. Therefore, there will be both rationalist anti-cult movements and rationalist counter-cult movements. Introvigne writes: Anti-cultists will emphasize the secular features of the fraud (e.g. 'bogus'miracles) and the counter-cultists its religious elements (e.g. 'manipulating'the scriptures), but the fraud remains prominent.   Instead, movements that imagine superhuman or supernatural intervention to explain cultsuccess are called post-rationalist. Post-rationalist counter-cult movements theorise the intervention of Satan. The devil is the supernatural explanation favoured by the religious. Referring to the secular critics he calls anti-cult movements, the author writes: For their secular counterparts of the anti-cult movements, cultists, have themore-than-human power of 'brainwashing their victims; but, as it has beennoted, 'brainwashing' in some anti-cult theories appears as something magical, the modem version of the evil eye.   figure 28 -Schematic representation of Introvigne's double division An extraordinary coup de théâtre ! First, we are presented with a dichotomy that is simplified but loaded with meaning. This is then articulated in a further subdivision that produces four boxes: two for the rationalists and two for the post-rationalists, as if there were two floors of a building. One floor is rationalist and the other post-rationalist. On each floor, one flat is occupied by religious people and one by secularists. Introvigned describes the tenants on the first floor, the rationalists, as very similar because they use explanations of the same kind. They are in the same framework (rationality), but he claims to perform the same operation with the tenants of the second floor, the supposed post-rationalists, who are not similar in any way. Only a very low level of critical vigilance can let this analogy pass. A very low vigilance and an effective frame, that of absurdity (“evil eye”, “post-rationalism” and so on). Let us take a look outside the box. Satan's intervention is indeed a supernatural idea, mind manipulation a scientific theory. While it is true that neither hypothesis is universally accepted, the first is not because it is not falsifiable by Popper's definition, while the second is up for debate precisely because it is falsifiable; hence it is a scientific hypothesis. However, a well-designed frame – as George Lakoff teach us -  can create an illusion of similarity. Most importantly, the normal logical processes are reversed in the description presented here. Instead of arriving at the conclusion that the manipulation theory is irrational through a series of successive logical steps, the discourse only spins the argument further by setting this irrationality as a premise! T hus, a tautology is realised that cannot prove anything. “Since brainwashing is not rational, cult apologists promote unscientific concept”…. Nice try, Massimo! It is precisely a “begging the question fallacy”, because  the same idea is repeated in the premise and the conclusion. Arguments that beg the question can be persuasive and obscure the fact that a debatable claim is being presented as truth. 3 - From argumentative fallacies to smoke and mirrors The first to take advantage of the systematic errors of the mind and carry out a manipulation are precisely these authors. a) Cult apologists as cultural parasites Cult apologists and leaders  invoke religious freedom, i.e. the principles of open society that apply outside the cults, the same principles that they deny within the cults. In other words, they claim to defend closed societies on the basis of the principles of open society. I call it “ Salvemini’s paradox ” (after an Italian liberal thinker). Besides being a paradox, this is a form of cultural parasitism, because they take nourishment from the open society to feed closed societies. b) Cult apologists as identitarians The activism of the organisations defending ‘religious freedom’ associated with these authors is presented as a defence of rights, of freedom, of respect for free choice, in short, of democracy. It is anything but. Where democracy means the universalisation of rights and respect for minorities, the cult apologists' proposal is not really motivated by respect for minorities, but it is very reminiscent of the differentialism  of the identitarian and sovereigntist  ideology, a far-right ideology , which, on the contrary, values differences precisely in order to oppose the universalisation of rights. Identitarians and cult apologists appeal to the “ right to be different ”. Although this may seem like an affirmation of universalism and ecumenism, the identitarian is an enemy of the open society. dentitarians defend other closed groups against the claims of open society so that it does not interfere with theirs own group. If the Western citizen is horrified by the practise of infibulation or other female genital mutilations and calls for their abolition, it is because he or she believes that the universalization of rights is a value that precedes respect for a culture that degrades and inflicts violence on women. The identitarian, on the other hand, believes that the customs and traditions of cultures where individual rights are not respected must be protected because the defence of identity precedes the defence of individual rights. Indenties are superior to human rights. Cult apologists  work in the same way. The identity of the cult is  superior to  civil rights that exist outside it. So the call for the defence of rights by cult apologists is a red herring, a smoke screen. c) The final smoke screen Finally, it takes a minimal cognitive effort to escape the traps of argumentative fallacies and understand that the New Religious Movements, the term we might ironically consider the “woke” term for cults, obviously have no reason to be defended in the name of vaunted liberal principles, because in the liberal-democratic framework, religious freedom is intangible. Those who need to be defended are abusive and totalitarian cults, i.e. groups where abuse and harassment take place. This defence is necessary for abusive cults precisely because they operate in a liberal democratic system that condemns abuse and harassment. Anything else is drawing the target around the hole. figure 29 - Recursive structures: a photo of me showing a photo of Introvige showing a photo of me... (Stuttgart, Germany, 2024) III - The Cult Apologists Network Scientology "The good news is that thanks to the intervention of the CIA, the department of the Greek secret service that deals with new religious movements has been closed and the staff dismissed!!!". So says one of the numerous documents found by Greek police in the mid-1990s when they stormed Scientology's headquarters in Athens and seized a variety of internal material   from the cult some of which was made public. Some of the documents contain references to CIA support for Scientology's foreign branches.   Figure 30 - One of the documents found by the police at the Scientology headquarters in Athens in which the Director of Special Affairs (OSA) of Scientology Greece mentions a CIA intervention Investigators also found thousands of pieces of information about the private lives of citizens and evidence of actual espionage activities. Scientology does indeed have its own highly efficient intelligence structure: the Office for Special Affairs (OSA) . The former head of the local FBI office in Los Angeles said that Scientology has 'one of the most effective intelligence services, rivaling even the FBI'. To better understand what we are talking about, an interlude is necessary to introduce the reader to the Scientology doctrine and its 'ethics'. a) Scientology doctrine in a nutshell   Scientology was founded by Ron L. Hubbard a year and a half after the success of his 1950 book " Dianetics : The Modern Science of Mental Health ", which formed its basis. According to Hubbard, the mind is divided into three parts: the analytical mind, the reactive mind and the somatic mind and most physical and mental problems are nothing more than problems caused by traumatic  events stored in the reactive mind and called engram s . It is possible to   eliminate engrams, and thus eliminate the reactive mind, in order to reach the state of “ clear”, a state in which the individual is able to realise their full potential. This is possible through a therapy described as auditing   in which the pre-clear confronts the engrams of their reactive mind with the help of an auditor. The process is a one-to-one technique in which the auditor asks questions and the pre-clear searches their mind and provides answers. These levels of auditing, called "degrees”, are fee-based,  like all Scientology courses and services. Figure 31 - John Travolta with a E-meter The E-meter  is an indispensable tool for auditing. This is an artefact that resembles a skin conductivity meter and records what Hubbard calls the "electronic structure of the reactive mind”. Fluctuations in the needle of the E-meter indicate the presence of a 'mental mass' that acts as a resistance to the flow of the E-meter's electrical energy, indicating the presence of engrams and the untruthfulness of the adept's confessions, which are obviously blocked by spiritual problems. Once the state of "clearness" is reached, one witnesses the disappearance of a multitude of diseases, an increase in intelligence and a decrease in accidents, 'for engrams predispose to accidents' (p. 122). All this was already described in Dianetics in 1950. Hubbard further developed his doctrine on this basis and founded the Hubbard Association of Scientologists in 1952, from which Scientology emerged in 1954. Apart from the many 'technologies' for achieving incredible advantages, the doctrine is based on the Gnostic idea of an immortal soul that can free itself from the prison of matter through knowledge. Hubbard calls it thetan . In Scientology, thetans are believed to be reborn in new bodies from time to time through a process called 'assumption', a concept equivalent to reincarnation. The expression   Body thetan  refers to a disembodied thetan that is stuck in, on or next to a human body. All human bodies are said to be infested with these disembodied thetans, or groups of them, known as 'clusters', which are formed in a hierarchy with a leader, a deputy leader and other members of the group. This has its origins in the story of Xenu . This mythical story deserves a description. According to "Scientology's Advanced Technology", Xenu was the extraterrestrial ruler of a "Galactic Confederacy" who 75 million years ago brought billions of inhabitants of his overcrowded empire to Earth (then known as "Teegeeack") to kill them after rounding them up with the help of psychiatrists under the pretext of a tax audit (that's funny). Psychiatrists play the same role in the Scientology narrative as Jews do in anti-Semitic doctrines. Then he had them loaded into spaceships that resemble the Douglas Company's DC-8 aircraft in every way (that's funny too), had them brought to Earth and stacked around volcanoes, then killed with hydrogen bombs. The official Scientology writings claim that the thetans of these aliens were captured by Xenu's forces using an "electronic tape" and sucked into "vacuum zones" around the world. The hundreds of billions of captured thetans were taken to some kind of cinema (weird, huh?) where they were forced to watch a "super colossal 3D movie" for thirty-six days. This implanted what Hubbard called "various misleading data" (collectively referred to as the R6 implant ) into the unfortunate thetans' memories, memories that "have to do with God, the devil, space enterprises, etc." These included all world religions; Hubbard attributed Roman Catholicism and the image of the crucifixion in particular to Xenu's influence. The two 'implantation stations' mentioned by Hubbard, i.e. 'cinemas', were allegedly located in Hawaii and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. These disembodied thetans then infested the bodies of people on Earth, causing mental damage that can only be repaired by Scientology auditing. For a fee. These events are known in Scientology as " Incident II" , and the traumatic associated memories as " The Wall of Fire "or, as mentioned, " R6 Implant ". The Church of Scientology normally only reveals the story of Xenu to members who have completed a long series of courses (which cost a lot of money). After reaching the 'state of Clear', the individual is supposed to be able to ascend through 8 further spiritual levels, called OT levels ( Operating Thetan ) , from OT I to OT VIII. Hubbard described Xenu's history in 1967 in Operating Thetan Level III (OT III) and warned that the "R6 implant" was designed to kill anyone who revealed it or "attempted to dislodge it". Despite this, much material about Xenu leaked to the public through court documents and copies of Hubbard's notes circulated over the internet, and it appears that no one died as a result. A peculiarity of Scientology is therefore the concept of the 'misunderstood word ' . Progress on the 'bridge to total freedom' (as Scientology defines itself) can come up against an obstacle if one encounters terms in the study that one does not understand. This, according to Hubbard, would lead to a dangerous process of introversion, abandonment of study and the commission of ' overts ', i.e. those 'contrary' acts that prevent the release of true spiritual potential. Scientology has a so-called "Study Technology" to which it devotes a veritable religious/professional course and has invented no less than nine different methods of "clarifying words". These are essentially the ideas that Scientology followers believe in. What they do has mainly to do with so-called Ethics . To uphold right action, the movement has an 'Ethics Section' to which the follower turns or is sent when sub-optimal situations arise in his personal life or in the group. The Section, headed by an 'Ethics Officer', develops special programmes (often for a fee) to bring their 'ethics' back 'in' . Situations that may involve the Ethics Section are: Homosexuality; family members who are critical of the follower's membership, but especially criticism of the organisation, its founder, the doctrine by suppressive persons  that is, i.e. persons whom Scientology perceives as its enemies, whose "pernicious' actions are intended to suppress the progress of individual Scientologists or the Scientology movement. The 'attack the attacker' policy was codified by Hubbard in the late mid-1960s in response to government investigations into Scientology. In 1966, Hubbard wrote down the correct procedure for attacking the enemies of Scientology:   (1)  Spot who is attacking us.   (2)  Start Investigating them promptly for FELONIES or worse using our own professionals, not outside agencies.   (3)  Double curve our reply by saying we welcome an investigation of them.   (4)  Start feeding lurid, blood, sex, crime actual evidence on the attackers to the press.   Don't ever tamely submit to an investigation of us.  Make it rough, rough on attackers all the way.(…)  Never wait.  Never talk about us - only them.  Use their blood, sex, crime to get headlines.  Don't use us .   I speak from 15 years of experience in this.  There has never yet been an attacker who was not reeking with crime. All we had to do was look for it and murder would come out.  (from Attacks on Scientology , "Hubbard Communications Office Policy Letter," 25 February 1966 ) . The most important management tool for suppressive people is the Office for Special Affairs (OSA ), Scientology's secret service. Opponents of Scientology can ‘be "sued, tricked, lied to or destroyed". This is clearly stated in the law of Fair Game . The founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, introduced this policy in the 1950s. Even the possibility of murdering critics is not ruled out. He wrote the following: The homes, property, places and abodes of persons who have been active in attempting to: suppress Scientology or Scientologists are all beyond any protection of Scientology Ethics , unless absolved by later Ethics or an amnesty [...] [T]his Policy Letter extends to suppressive non-Scientology wives and husbands and parents, or other family members or hostile groups or even close friends. from L. Ron Hubbard, HCOPL 23 Dec 65, Suppressive Acts – Suppression of Scientology and Scientologists – The Fair Game Law Hubbard made it clear elsewhere in his writings that this policy is also applied to outside organisations, including governments, guilty of interfering with Scientology activities. Scientology and the US government Examples of state intervention in support of Scientology are certainly not limited to the above-mentioned protection provided by the CIA to the Church in Greece. Among the documents published on Wikileaks is a report that after the arrival of US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Germany, German Scientologists were invited to a briefing at the US embassy. With the US Secretary of State! Wikileaks has published cables  showing that the American consulate in Hamburg received information about the German task force against Scientology and in particular the well-known church opponent Ursula Caberta  from Christoph Ahlhaus , who later became mayor of the city. When Gerry Armstrong , who is regarded as Scientology's greatest enemy, arrived in Russia, the authorities were informed of his arrival by the American embassy in Moscow  so that they could take detention measures against him. In short, not only does Scientology seem to have more than cordial relations with the US government, but it even seems that the US authorities are doing everything they can to help the church get rid of its enemies.   Greg Mitchell , the founder of The Mitchell Company, is the Commissioner of the Church of Scientology in Washington D.C.  and a member of the Church of Scientology himself. According to insiders, his job is to help the Church gain credibility with influential decision-makers. He has been at home in various US governments since the 1990s. According to disclosure reports from the US House of Representatives and Senate, the controversial religious group has paid more than 1 million dollars to Greg Mitchell since 2003 to carry out his lobbying work. Figure 32 - President George W. Bush with Scientology lobbyist Greg Mitchell at the White House According to White House visitor logs, Gregory Mitchell participated in a 'Criminal Justice Working Group" with political advisor David Pope in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building of the White House on 28 September 2009. The Church of Scientology is an informal member of the NGO International Religious Freedom Roundtable , which Mitchell chairs. According to the IRFR's official website, "the IRFR "works to engage the United States government and urge its leaders to make religious freedom a higher priority in foreign policy and national security'. This goal appears to have been absolutely achieved with the passage of the   International Religious Freedom Act  in 1998.   In 1989, the memoirs of Miles Copeland , an ex- CIA officer representing the 'libertarian' far-right (i.e. strong supporters of the free market), current associated with the magazine National Review , were published in London . A curiosity: he is the father of 'Police' drummer Stewert Copeland. In his book ' The Game Player ' , Copeland tells of a plan hatched by his colleague Bob Mandelstam in the first half of the 1950s. The operation was called 'Occultism in High Places'. The idea was simple: since some heads of state and government were in the habit of consulting astrologers and occultists, American intelligence officers were to 'co-operate' with these occultists in order to turn them into channels of influence for the agency.   The plan worked, for example, when a "clairvoyant" sent by the agents convinced the president of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah to make a visit to China, during which a CIA-inspired coup d'état overthrew the absent leader. According to Copeland, US intelligence also influenced Indonesian President Sukarno 'quite significantly' through 'psychics" and 'fortune tellers". But the agency also allegedly utilised spiritual movements. This applies to the political-religious movement Moral Rearmament , founded by Lutheran pastor Frank Buchanan, which, according to Copeland, offered agents the opportunity to influence not only African and Asian politicians but also European leaders via secret channels. At one point Copeland mentions Scientology. Unsurprisingly, the church founded by Ron L. Hubbard  was seen as an excellent means of influencing people who were themselves influential. In fact, Scientology's persuasion techniques are well known and are strikingly similar to those of the CIA. Copeland then reports an interesting fact:   We sent into the Scientology cult our agent, who under the direction of Ron Hubbard himself became “clear,” but then he demanded and started to receive ever more “monetary compensation for operational expenditures,” which together with his savings he gave over to  Dianetics .   Dianetics  is, as I said, the registered trademark that describes the 'technology' developed by L. Ron Hubbard and the fundamental principles of mind and spirit on which Scientology is based. In other words, it is not clear whether the CIA was trying to infiltrate and influence Scientology or whether the opposite was the case. It probably went both ways. What is certain is that the process known in Scientology as auditing  is very similar to the polygraph-based interrogation in the Kubark Counter-Interrogation Manual . Kubark is a code name used by the CIA to define itself. It was used at the 'School of the Americas' , a US military training facility in Panama, among other places. The students included some of the most bloodthirsty personalities in Central and South America, including Manuel Noriega  and Omar Torrijos   (Panama), Leopoldo Galtieri  and Roberto Eduardo Viola  (Argentina), Hugo Banzer Suárez  (Bolivia).   Scientology literature is full of code names and acronyms that correspond to the use of intelligence documents, and some of the Church's training routines appear to have been taken directly from the Kubark manual. Scientology's training routine, TR-1, is called "Dear Alice". In this routine, the trainee is asked to read random sentences from Lewis Carroll's book "Alice in Wonderland" without showing any reaction to the book's whimsicality. The Kubark manual describes an interrogation technique called 'Alice in Wonderland'. Hubbard quotes the Kubark manual almost verbatim when he says that   Detention in a controlled environment and perhaps for a lengthy period is frequently essential to a successful counterintelligence interro- gation of a recalcitrant source. Of course, none of this is proof of an overlap between Scientology and the CIA, but it is certainly evident that L. Ron Hubbard was aware of these techniques and intended to use them for the same purpose that the CIA used them: to gain control and power over others. In truth, Copeland claims that a pact was also made between the CIA and Scientology, but without providing evidence or revealing the contents. However, we are certain that there was another agreement, in 1993. This is a story that needs to be reconstructed.   Operation Snow White Relations between Scientology and the American government were not always cordial. In the 1970s, Scientology carried out an infiltration and espionage of American institutions, known as Operation Snow White , which ended with an FBI raid on the organisation's headquarters. In this operation, Scientology's intelligence service (then the Guardian's Office, now the Office for Special Affairs - OSA ) illegally gained access to 136 government agencies, foreign embassies and consulates, and private organisations critical of Scientology in order to obtain information and delete compromising documents. This was the largest infiltration in US history. At the same time, a bitter 25-year war began between the Church and the Internal Revenue Service, the famous IRS. We are talking about the government agency that managed to put Al Capone in jail for tax evasion, while it failed to do so for murder and drug trafficking. for 25 years, Scientology claimed tax exemption as a religious corporation. More than 50 lawsuits were filed by the organisation against the IRS. In 1993, the IRS unexpectedly capitulated and granted the exemption. Four years later, the New York Times revealed some interesting background to the affair . A private investigator told reporters that he and several other colleagues had been hired by Scientology to gather information on IRS officials, particularly about misconduct at work, alcohol and drug use, and extramarital affairs. Irregolarly, the tax exemption came about at the express request of the IRS director, so the normal approval process was skipped.   It was after this agreement, that the US State Department began to lobby internationally to defend Scientology's interests in all countries of the world. For example, when the German government became involved against Scientology (a 1998 report emphasised the destructive aspects of this 'commercial enterprise disguised as a religion' and a 2007 report by the Ministry of the Interior described the organisation as ' incompatible with the Constitution ' ), a series of firm statements by the US government in defence of the cult followed. For the US, Scientology is a religion and must be protected in the name of 'religious freedom'. Other measures include a document by the Beareau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour (BDHRL) , an agency of the US State Department, in which Germany is listed alongside countries such as China as one of the countries that violate religious freedom. The Clinton administration has been very friendly towards Scientology. In November 1996, the President himself wrote an 'exclusive' article on 'what we can do about drugs' for the Scientology magazine 'Freedom', which was later translated into several languages.   His wife Hillary Clinton received members of the Scientology front office ‘ Hands of   Hope ’ in the White House and received a quilt with a quote from L. Ron Hubbard as a gift [ here ] .  This event was later aptly labeled in the media as Clearwatergate  (a cross between Watergate, which engulfed Nixon, and Clearwater, the headquarters of the Church of Scientology). Figure 33 - Scientology lobbyist Greg Mitchell with the Clintons In 1997, Clinton's National Security Advisor Sandy Berger met with actor John Travolta , a believer in the Church, and other Scientologists to discuss the German government's stance on Scientology (TIME 22September 1997). According to "George" magazine in March 1998, President Clinton met personally with John Travolta. Clinton praised the 'educational' materials of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. According to the 'George' report, he said: 'Your programme sounds great' and added: “I would like to help you with your problem in Germany with Scientology”.   On March 21 1997, the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service reported that President Clinton had complied with the requests of Scientologist Tom Cruise  by instructing his newly confirmed Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to arrange talks with German Foreign Minister Kinkel about Scientology's claims of religious persecution in Germany (Berliner Morgenpost, 23 November 1998).   In a letter of 'warm greetings' dated December 22 1999, Clinton thanked Scientologists for 'all your efforts to promote and build just communities united in understanding, compassion and mutual respect".   The official reason given for the Clintons' interest in Scientology was that the President had a Scientology sympathiser as a roommate when he was a student. The US government's interference in Scientology outside US territory has been even more serious. At the end of 1998, for example, the US State Department sponsored a concert by jazz pianist and Scientology loyalist Chick Corea  in Berlin because he was allegedly not allowed to perform in Germany due to 'religious discrimination'. Just how far the US government's administrative support of cults can go is shown by the advice of the US State Department spokesman, who recommended that Germans watch the film 'Mission Impossible' starring Tom Cruise. The Hollywood star is Scientology's ambassador in Europe. In a letter to the State Department, he spoke seriously and openly about his lobbying work for Scientology: ... I appreciate the valuable assistance the State Department has given to members of my Church in protecting their rights, especially in Europe. It is even known an intervention by the US Consulate General in Hamburg  about the building permit issued by the city's technical authority for the establishment of the new Scientology Centre  in the city, which concerned, among other things, the number of toilets and showers.   Many influential politicians in the United States have been recruited by Scientology. Some of them can be shown to be dependent on Scientology campaign contributions. An outdated list  can be found on the Internet.   The agreement between the government and Scientology was accompanied by a secret protocol that has not yet been made public. What could be the content? Surely we can guess the potential of a planetary organisation like Scientology, whose main objectives include collecting and storing a large amount of information so that it can blackmail and compromise anyone, from the ordinary member who has gone astray to the powerful of Earth. To name one example: Arseny Yatsenyuk, the Prime Minister of Ukraine, who probably attended several courses in Scientology many years ago as director of the Aval Bank of Kiev, is an example of a man whose personal information would be extremely interesting not only to Scientology but also to the American intelligence services. Certainly, the weight of the Church founded by L. Ron Hubbard seems to have grown disproportionately in the political sphere since the mid-1990s, when a powerful lobbying effort was initiated that has been meticulously described by Stephen A. Kent  of the University of Alberta. The church funded politics  and its celebrities (Tom Cruise, John Travolta and others) personally financed election campaigns. According to Bruno Foucherau, Scientology paid $725,000 to a political lobbying firm in 1997 and $420,000 the following year. Greg Jensen, one of the church's most respected leaders, allegedly sponsored the campaign of Senator Benjamin A. Gillman, who would later become chairman of the OSCE's Commission on Religious Freedom , an organisation that nearly led to a diplomatic incident over its attacks on France's anti-cult policies at the OSCE meeting (in the section moderated by Introvigne, director of CESNUR ).   Emblematic of Scientology's closeness to the US government is the affair surrounding the dismissal of Arnaud Palisson , who headed the "Sects and Cults" department of the French secret service for ten years when Sarkozy was in government, who received Tom Cruise at the Elysée Palace and was very accommodating towards the Church. Asked about the affair, Palisson, who now lives in Canada, replied: " Sarkozy is the American. He does not want to do anything that displeases him' . Operation Snow White is now just a memory.   Scientology and the network of 'cult apologists' The Hadden Memorandum When you encounter organizations with Religious Freedom or Religious Liberty in their names, you know that you have run into another Scientology  front. Benjamin Beit-Hallami , professor emeritus at the University of Haifa, says this in his recently published book Academic Advocacy for New Religious Movements: Of Apocalypse and Justice   (2025). The story that unfolds since the 1980s onwards, both in the field of studies on the so-called New Religious Movements (NRM) and in that of associations that protect religious freedom, is the demonstration of what Beit-Hallahmi claims. His book highlights the   Hadden Memorandum . This is a confidential email from   Jeffrey Hadden , a professor at the University of Virginia,  which became public against the author's wishes. The subject was: Developments following the informal meeting in Salt Lake City on 27 October 1989.  The text states that Hadden and two other well-known NRM scholars, Eileen Barker  and David Bromley,  met in New York from 10 to 12 December 1989 to discuss in greater depth  what had previously been discussed. In these meetings they discussed with Perry London (dean of the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University); Mark Galanter (professor of psychiatry and director of the Division of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse at NYU School of Medicine); Eric Lieberman (attorney involved in several cases involving NRMs); Dean Kelley (National Council of Churches) and John Biermans, David Hagar and Hugh Spurgen [the last three represented the controversial Reverend Moon's Unification Church ]. Lieberman is described as a “lawyer who has been involved in several NRM cases,” and later in the memo he is referred to as “our legal counsel.” In reality, Lieberman has never been involved in an NRM case. His notoriety — or infamy - stems from the fact that he worked for Scientology. If he was “their” legal counsel, did he work for free or was he paid by Scientology? The memo then reveals a network of meetings and strategies between known New Religious Movement (NRM) scholars, lawyers, and NRM representatives aimed at “neutralizing” – this is the term used –cult critics (anti-cults), such as Margaret Singer  and the American Family Foundation (AFF) . The memo’s three main proposals were: Creation of a secret funding stream from the NRM  to an “independent” group made up of the organisers of the meetings to support research in favour of the cults, with the origin and purpose of the funds not being made transparent. It was discussed, for example, during the meetings with the Unification Church, but it seems that the latter limited itself at the time to funding the American Conference on Religious Freedom , a conference organised by Americans for the Preservation of Religious Liberty (APRL) , a front organisation of Scientology. Creation of an American version of INFORM (UK) . The Information Network Focus on Religious Movements (INFORM)  is a seemingly reputable organisation founded by   Eileen Barker   in London in 1988. In the letter, Hadden writes that Barker "has taken a very significant step towards neutralising the anti-cult movements in the UK". Hadden reveals here that this organisation, which also enjoys some academic prestige, was in fact part of a worldwide campaign against anti-cultists , at least at the time of the letter, and the author is promoting the establishment of a version in the US with the same aims. Developing a   strategy to counter the   American Family Foundation's (AFF)   "Project Recovery" program, which helps   former cult members and their families, through a public campaign and the production of a new academic research agenda aimed at delegitimizing the concept of brainwashing. Hadden's text thus reveals an active, covert ,  and ideologically orientated collaboration between certain scholars and the religious movements under scrutiny. Hadden and others (including Melton, Barker, Bromley, Lewis and Richardson) not only studied the NRM, but also defended it to critics and the media. On October 15, 1998, nearly a decade after the memo was written, Hadden wrote on the NUREL-L mailing list, "This was a private communication to about 12–15 people who had met privately at a professional conference to consider what, if anything, social scientists could or should do to 'neutralize' the activities of various anti-cultists." The term “ neutralize ,”  used in 1989 and repeated in 1998, speaks for itself. Hadden admits that the intention was not to investigate, but to actively intervene in the object of study . One would expect scholars to analyse anti-cultists and not attempt to sabotage their activities . This points to an ethical development in which the protection of cults takes precedence over scientific impartiality and the confrontation with scholars involved in “cultic studies” is not limited to a scientific dispute but to the delegitimisation of the opponent. In 1992, the Association for World Academics for Religious Education (AWARE)   came on the scene under the leadership of James R. Lewis  , which describes itself (see Lewis's Wikipedia page ) as "... an information center established to disseminate objective information about non-traditional religions [...] AWARE also educates the academic community and the general public about the severe persecution suffered by religious and cultural minorities [...] and supports the United States government in its efforts to reduce prejudice in our country and around the world" (Lewis, 1994, p. 214). This public program goes far beyond academic research. Although INFORM USA was never launched, the actions and projects developed in this memorandum have been reflected in a dense network that brings together organisations dedicated to lobbying for religious freedom and study centres such as  CESNUR , on whose international scientific committee Eileen Barker herself serves. In his book, Beit-Hallahmi then writes about a seemingly trivial fact: I have before me an undated fax message from James R. Lewis, in which he wrote:  I once witnessed Jeff Hadden asking an ISKCON representative to give $ to the SSSR [Society for the Scientific Study of Religion]. He further suggested that the money be ‘laundered’ by being passed first through a third organization. This was many years ago when Jeff was president of the SSSR.” Hadden was SSSR president in 1984. This is not an unimportant point. The creation of "Chinese boxes" consisting of fictitious companies and organisations still seems to be in vogue today to hide the trail of dirty money by some cult apologists. Like Beit-Hallahmi, I too jealously guard some papers. These are evidence and signed testimonies of money transfers from controversial groups to a company in the American West, run by a disbarred lawyer in three states, from which the money then goes to religious freedom organisations and more or less reputable academics. My secrecy in this matter acts as a life insurance policy: this evidence would be made public if something were to happen to me (but also if the intimidation I am constantly subjected to - fair game? - were too much to bear). The network at work The Cult Awareness Network (CAN)  was the most important organisation to emerge from the anti-cult movement in America. In 1991, Time magazine quoted the then director of CAN, Cynthia Kisser, in the article 'The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power ' . Kisser stated that: "  Scientology is quite likely the most ruthless, the most classically terroristic, the most litigious and the most lucrative cult the country has ever seen. No cult extracts more money from its members” . These comments and other forms of criticism from CAN caught the attention of the Church of Scientology and ‘Landmark Education’, which separately took legal action against the organisation. in 1996, Scientology sued "deprogrammer" Rick Ross  and CAN for violating the civil rights of Jason Scott , a member of a Pentecostal church who was abducted by Ross and two other associates to undergo "deprogramming" at the behest of his parents. CAN was involved because a contact person in the organisation had referred Scott's mother to Rick Ross. In the trial, Jason Scott was represented by Kendrick Moxon, a prominent Scientologist lawyer. Ross and CAN lost the case, which drove CAN into bankruptcy. The puzzling thing is that the association's phone numbers, name, logo and real estate were acquired by Mr Hayes - a member of the Church of Scientology - who gave them away for free to a Californian group whose board includes several Scientology members ( see here ).  In other words: Scientology has formed an anti-cult organisation on its own! Basically, it's like the Mafia founding an anti-Mafia organisation. The new CAN is, as one might suspect, much softer on alternative groups. The new CAN's list of experts includes Gordon Melton  and Massimo Introvigne . The latter is the director and founder of the Centro Studi Nuove Religioni (CESNUR) , the former is the director of the American section of the same CESNUR . CESNUR’s benevolence towards Scientology has led some to speculate  that the two organisations have a mercenary relationship. The director of CESNUR, who sent me a cease and desist notice on the matter, says this is not true. To be honest, I don't believe it either. It would be wrong to reduce CESNUR's activities to a mean form of intellectual prostitution. The study centre and Scientology seem to have the same goals and pursue them through cultural influence. It is not about buying a service. Right in the middle of the 1990s, when anti-cult campaigns were being activated in Europe and religious freedom control institutes were proliferating in the US, Scientology seemed to become the rallying point for many other minority cults, forming more or less formal and more or less open alliances supported by America's Christian fundamentalist organisations and, by osmosis, by their political credentials. Organisations like the Institute on Religion and Public Policy  are an interesting hodgepodge of diverse people, from ultra-conservative senators to Moonies (the followers of Reverend Moon's Unification Church ) and the followers of Guru Sri Chimmoy. However, this does not prevent the Institute from describing itself as ' fundamentalist Catholic' . The founder and president was Joseph K. Griebosky . In 2004, a former employee of Griebosky's, Daniel Chapman, contacted the well-known activist Gerry Armostrong  to inform him that Griebosky received $8,000 per month from Scientology when he founded the IRPP  in 1999. It is possible that Scientology itself paid for the founding of the IRPP. In December 2011, Mark ("Marty") Rathbun, a former high-ranking Scientologist, published on his blog  a Scientology document  titled "Grieboski Programme" dated 29 January 2007, which described "goals" or actions that church leaders believed Grieboski had to take to solve Scientology's problems in Europe and facilitate its entry into Muslim countries.   The Institute on Religion and Public Policy opens up the phenomenon of incongruent aggregations and paradoxical ecumenism. This will become particularly evident in the coming years with the explosion of associations and federations whose declared aim is to lobby national and supranational political bodies to oppose the actions of organisations protecting the victims of cults. The action is best known in Europe, a continent where the anti-cult policies of some countries, notably France, but also Germany, which has imposed significant restrictions on Scientology, pose a threat to those who consider it useful to defend 'religious freedom". The most important organisations of the so-called 'cult apologists' are the Belgian Human Rights WIthout Frontiers (HRWF) , the French Coordination des associations et des particuliers pour la liberté de conscience (CAP LC)  and the Italian European Federation for Freedom of Belief (FOB) . Then, of course, there is the Centro Studi Nuove Religioni (CESNUR) , a scientific think tank that supports the demands of the above-mentioned associations with the supposed authority of academic knowledge. Let us briefly examine them. The president of the HRWF is Willy Fautrè , a regular visitor to the US embassy in Brussels and a long-time correspondent for News Network International , an evangelical US publishing group that is fiercely anti-communist (communism meaning anything that deviates from right wing views) and extremely conservative (against abortion, against recognising same-sex couples, etc.). He was also a member of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHF) , an organisation that apparently had links with Scientology . Indeed, the Greek correspondent of the Federation contributed to publications of the church founded by Ron Hubbard and the Moscow delegation published a book in collaboration with Scientology. It is interesting to note, with regard to Human Rights Without Frontiers (HRWF) , that its claim of independence from religious, political, or philosophical movements is seriously undermined by its financial records. In 2019, in fact, about half of the organization’s total income came from a single source: the Alfred Vogel Foundation , as clearly stated in the 2019 financial report (archive ) . The Alfred-Vogel-Stiftung , registered in Switzerland under number CHE-102.058.838 , was established to continue and disseminate the naturopathic philosophy of its founder and to allocate surpluses to institutions reflecting his “Christian philosophy. ” In reality, this wording points to Alfred Vogel’s well-known affiliation with the Jehovah’s Witnesses : the first edition of his manual Der kleine Doktor  contained warnings against blood transfusions, consistent with the movement’s doctrine, and the company A. Vogel AG  was co-founded with M. Bolle , himself a Jehovah’s Witness, together with other executives linked to the same community. Seen in this context, it is hardly surprising that HRWF has repeatedly published articles and reports openly favorable to the Jehovah’s Witnesses—for instance, here , here , here , and here . The French CAP LC  has Thierry Valle  as its president, who is pictured in the photos below (Fig. 34) together with Françoise Morel, a leading Scientology figure, in front of the headquarters of the Citizens' Commission for Human Rights (CCHR) , a front office of the Church of Scientology. The photos were taken by a group of French 'ethical hackers' who were active against Scientology in 2015. Figure 34 - Thierry Valle in front of the CCHR (Scientology) in 2015 Thierry Valle also appears in the list of employees of the Guaranty Building (HGB) in Los Angeles , one of Scientology's most important administrative locations, for the year 1994, which the former Scientologist Paul Adams compiled a few years later. The Italian European Federation for Freedom of Belief (FOB) describes itself on its website as 'an interest-led non-governmental organisation registered in the official register of lobbies at the EU Parliament and the Commission in Brussels and Strasbourg, representing six nations' . The current president is Alessandro Amicarelli, who accused me of collaborating with the Chinese Communist Party on organ harvesting (see the prologue to this dossier). Incidentally, one of the founding members was Fabrizio d'Agostini , who is still a member of the scientific committee. His form of presentation  is missing a basic piece of information that is, however, easy to find in Scientology publications: he is a high-ranking Scientologist . He would even be OT VIII. Figure 35 - Interpol file on the wanted man Gregorian Bivolaru One of the founding organisations is Soteria International , an emanation of Atman Yoga  (formerly MYSA Yoga) by Gregorian Bivolaru , the ' sex guru '  who is currently in prison in France  after being on the run for many years. He is facing charges of sexual abuse, human trafficking and more. Rosita Šorytė , the wife of CESNUR director Massimo Introvigne , sits on the FOB's scientific committee.   These organisations work through coordinated lobbying of supranational bodies (UN, OSCE, Council of Europe, ECHR), just as envisaged in the manifesto  written by Introvigne in response to the French law against cults.  We will come back to this.   In 2019, the Scientology front group Fundación para la Mejora de la Vida, la Cultura y la Sociedad  was granted Special Consultative Status by the United Nations . The foundation is headed by Ivan Arjona Pelado  , a high-ranking member of the Church's secret service, the Office for Special Affairs (OSA) . This status will enhance Scientology's ability to speak to the United Nations and will also enable it to organise conferences under the UN umbrella and thus gain new political allies from around the world. The previous year, Ivan Pelado, Greg Mitchell and Eric Roux, a top Scientology figure in Europe and head of the OSA, took part in a summit on religious freedom   in Brussels  organised by ACRE, the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe. This is a Eurosceptic political group in the European Parliament. The most renowned participants were Ahmed Shaheed , Special Rapporteur on Human Rights at the UN Human Rights Council, and Sam Brownback , former Governor of Kansas and, until Biden's election, US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. Brownback's office published the State Department's annual report on international religious freedom . Brownback's selection as Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom  in 2018 was made by USCIRF . USCIRF is the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom , the commission that advised the US President in 2020 to obstruct the work of the anti-cult federation FECRIS at the OSCE (see the prologue to this report). Figure 36 - Scientology's official lobbyist Greg Mitchell  with Alessandro Amicarelli, FOB President Other speakers included the aforementioned Willy Fautrè , President of Human Rights Without Frontiers (HRWF) , and Patricia Duval , a French lawyer who is rarely absent from Scientology panels. She is a member of the scientific committee  of the Italian European Federation for Freedom of Belief (FOB) and is one of the authors of the CESNUR magazine on religious freedom Bitter Winter  and the Journal of CESNUR . Also present was Bashy Quraishy  from EMISCO, an association that fights against anti-Islamic prejudice but, strangely enough, fights against the anti-cult movement. This is just one example of the diverse lobbying activities of the network of “cult apologists” at the level of transnational politics.   The actions of Scientology organisations and the cult apologists at European level are facilitated by the benevolence of various French-speaking personalities. For example, the French far-right MEP Maxette Pirbakas  (2019-2024) and the Moroccan businessman Lahcen Hammouch , CEO of Brussels Media , the holding company that publishes the European Times . The former is the organiser of the conference on religious freedom, whose speakers are pictured in Figure 23 (see below), with the MEP third from the left. Lahcen Hammouch  (second from left in the picture) is an entrepreneur who is committed to the cause of the Moroccan Sahara. He is running for mayor of Brussels for the ‘Les Engages’ party, which, according to the newspaper 'Blast', emerged from an ufological cult . Figure 23 bis -Fautré, Hammouch, Pirbakas, Roux, Mirre, unknown, Arjona Pelado Two photos taken at the OSCE Human Rights Meeting in Warsaw in different years give an idea of how coordinated this action is. The first (fig. 37) shows in the front row, from the left, the Scientology delegate Ivan Arjona Pelado , next to him Massimo Introvigne , the director of CESNUR  and Bitter Winter , then Willy Fautrè from Human Rights Without Frontiers  and finally Alessandro Amicarelli  from the European Federation for Freedom of Belief (FOB) . In the second row, behind the Scientology representative, Christine Mirre , Vice-President of the Coordination des Associations et des Particuliers pour la Liberté de Conscience (CAP LC) . The first thing the viewer notices is that, apart from the Scientology representative who had not noticed, everyone is smiling at the same camera, even the CAP LC representative in the second row. Like a school group on a field trip, they are one group.     This photo is proudly displayed on the banner of the website of the European Federation for Religious Freedom (FOB). It shows, among other things, the arrival of Bashy Quraishy , the man with the black beret on his head and a colourful scarf, who is just taking his place. Practically all the members of the Brussels Committee for Religious Freedom mentioned a few lines above. Figure 37 - Ivan Arjona Pelado (Scientology), Massimo Introvigne (CESNUR), Willy Fautrè (HRWF), Alessandsro Amicarelli (FOB) and, in the second row, Christine Mirre (Cap LC) at the OSCE meeting in Warsaw The second photo (Fig. 38) is even more telling and shows a briefing with high-ranking representatives of Scientology meeting with representatives of organisations defending "religious freedom". So we are not talking here about a simple 'conflict of interest', but about blatant complicity. It is evident that this is a coordinated and planned action by some Scientology executives (including those of the OSA) and the leaders of the NGOs in defence of religious freedom. The photo was taken at the OSCE meeting in Warsaw shortly before the start of the session in which I would have attended. Figure 38 - Thierry Valle (CAP LC), Christine Mirre (CAP LC), Ivan Arjona Pelado (Scientology), Willy Fautré (HRWF) and Eric Roux (Scientology) give a briefing together before the session on religious freedom at the OSCE meeting Go to Part II

Despicable me In October 2024, within days, countless people began posting articles and videos on social media labeling me as an agent of a global conspiracy consacrated to genocide and the establishment of a new Nazi Reich on the planet . I had not felt so important since the USCIRF report advised President Trump to obstruct my work at the OSCE (see the prologue to this report ). But this time it went too far. Dozens of strangers flooded the computer network every day with videos calling me, in various languages, a direct agent of the Russian Orthodox Church, a threat to democracy and human rights, even one of the three contemporary ideologues of the anti-cultist plan for world domination (see figure 80). Without irony but with contempt for the ridiculous. Figure 80 - One of hundreds of posts by trolls calling the author of this report a conspirator for world domination Not only would I be a leading exponent of " anti-cult terrorism " sponsored by a Russian association that has real power in Russia and aims to seize absolute power on the world by controlling the media and persecuting dissidents, but I would even be only three degrees of separation from Adolf Hitler, as can be seen from the screenshot shown in the image below (figure 81). Figure 81 - A screenshot from a defamatory Allatra video showing the close relationship between the author of this report and Adolf Hitler If this sounds crazy to you, you should know that this is not the crazy part. I quote the attack of an article  on the main page that spreads this interesting myth: Without anticultism, billions of people would have been spared from suffering, persecution, and pain, and millions would have remained alive.[...] It was anticultism that fueled the brutal rise of Nazism as we know it in history. Moreover, were it not for anticultism, even Jesus Christ would not have faced execution. In short, the "anti-cultists" have been causing damage for more than two millennia.   All these people harassing me are exponents of a mysterious organization that bears the name AllatRa and is described in a now conspicuous literature as an apocalyptic cult linked to Russian interests and bearing a pan-Slavic mysticism. To get an idea of what AllatRa professes one should look at an insane eight-and-a-half-hour “documentary” (so, insane also in terms of duration), in which a truly grotesque conspiracy theory is outlined. In short, the world is ruled by an anti-cult hydra that, at the behest of the Russian Orthodox Church , which holds the real power in the motherland of former Sovietic Union through its anti-cult association, wants to unleash a world war and is preparing the genocide of all those who do not comply with its wishes, just as the Nazis did with the Jews. In the thousands of articles and posts written with great use of artificial intelligence, the action of scientists and activists working to protect the victims of destructive cults is labelled as “terrorism”. This hydra would be behind the attacks on Shinzo Abe, Donald Trump, and Robert Fico ( see here ). One of the aims of the anti-cult campaign would be to induce the Kremlin to use nuclear weapons (the connection is not entirely clear, but you can see it here ). The phantom “anti-cult movement” would also be the director of the mass shootings in public places that are so common in the US. The system by which this kind of international “Spectre”, of which I would be one of the leaders, drive the population into slavery, make them shoot innocent masses and head for nuclear war, would be a subliminal manipulation operated by the media in the service of the organization and that AllatRa called ' Puzzle Piece Coding '. All very interesting and curious ideas, but which, if uttered by just one individual and not by a community of “believers”, would be branded as delusions and require psychiatric intervention of some significance. One of the delusional claims repeated thick and fast by the Allatra trolls is that I, like this whole fantastical anti-cult movement, are Russian agents. It is hilarious an excerpt in which also my friend Janja Lalicih , professor emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, is labeled as a Russian agent (see here ). The fact is that the smear campaign against me started precisely because I said in an interview with a collective of investigative journalists of the project ' Firehose of Falsehood' t hat AllatRa is seen as a pro-Russian organisation (I did not even claim that it actually is) and that pro-Putin rhetoric is evident in their narrative. Saying this about Allatra does not sound like something that is advisable if you are a person with a large audience. Someone has had it worse than me. On 25 September, the regional prosecutor’s office in Žilina, northern Slovakia, opened an investigation against Kristina Ciroková , a reporter for the Czech newspaper Seznam Zprav, for allegedly “ supporting and promoting anti-cult movements ”. The accusation is original. Since when is it a crime to disseminate critical information about cults? The accusations are vague but worrying. It appears that the journalist “promoted the ideology of anti-cult movements and organisations, thereby committing the crime of founding, supporting and promoting a movement aimed at suppressing fundamental rights and freedoms ”. Basically, these are the charges that Allatra supported against the anti-cult movement! In December of the previous year, Ciroková made a scoop. He had tracked down Igor Danilov , the fugitive leader of this Ukrainian organisation, that is a group that promotes conspiracy and pseudo-science theories, in  northern Slovakia. Ukrainian counterintelligence and police cracked down on the AllatRa movement because they suspect that the organisation's members are working for Russian special services. Danilov is suspected of several crimes. Above all, treason, leading a criminal organisation and justifying and denying aggression against Ukraine. According to the police, the leaders of the movement face 15 years or up to life in prison. Danilov was there with some “ heavenly birds ”, his harem that includes as its most prominent exponent the supposed alien of the Anunnaki lineage who calls herself Zhanna . Zhanna comes from Vamfi, an artificial planet created by the Anunnaki. Figure 82 - Igor danilov's heavenly birds Due to this and other articles and television appearances on Allatra, a criminal investigation has been opened against the journalist for involvement in the dissemination of ideas of an anti-human rights movement and for participating in subliminal manipulation to bring about massacres . Also Investigative Center of Ján Kuciak (ICJK) reporter Karolína Kiripolská was interrogated as a witness by the prosecution due to her reporting on AllatRa and Creative Society . The Creative Society is an outgrowth of Allatra and represents its presentable face in public. No pan-Slavic rhetoric, no Nazi anti-cult conspiracy, no massacres controlled by subliminal manipulation, but “only” the premonition of a coming apocalypse based on volcanic explosions. It is presented as “an association concerned with the geophysical analysis of the effects of climate change on the Earth”, but is in fact engaged in the active promotion and dissemination of climate disinformation on a global scale. Naturally, journalists' organisations in the Czech Republic and abroad have fought back against this massive attack on press freedom . It was later discovered that the prosecutor of the Žilina Regional Prosecutor's Office, Lucia Pavlaninová, was associated with the cult . The case was dismissed. However, Pavlaninová was not the only one to bow to the movement's ideas. Slovak television reporters have uncovered that another Žilina prosecutor, Jana Vajzerová, is also in favour of the movement. It is expected that the Creative Society also has supporters among the employees of the Ministry of the Interior. A look into the rabbit hole The roots of the AllatRa movement go back to 2011, when the international organisation ‘Lagoda’ was founded in Russian-speaking Ukraine and Halyna Alexandrivna Yablochkina launched the AllatRa publishing house. These two organisations then jointly founded the ‘international public movement AllatRa’ in 2014, the year of the Maidan uprising. The organisation is headed by chiropractor Igor Mikhailovich Danilov. Its main goal seems to be the promotion of Anastasia Novykh 's book series, which promises readers “unique scientific evidence of the existence of the soul” and “exclusive information about self-knowledge and secrets hidden by society”. It therefore appears to be another New Age sect. Due to the recognisability of the concepts and style, some experts conclude that Anastasia Novykh is in fact Marina Tsvihun, the former leader of the infamous " Great White Brotherhood of Yusmalos " cult. It is interesting that the White Brotherhood seems to have been a project of the KGB to influence large parts of the Ukrainian population. Anyway, in 2016, Kiev Theological Academy associate professor Konstantyn Moskalyuk published a research paper stating that the author or co-author of Anastasia Novykh's books is actually AllatRa guru Igor Danilov. The central work of AllatRa's teachings is the book 'Crossroads'. Its main character is Nomo . In the story told in this book, two of the main character's brothers die. However, he will rise to success by gaining public recognition at the Bergedorf Forum in St Petersburg and reaching the peak of his career in 2000. These events clearly coincide with the life story of Russian President Vladimir Putin . AllatRa claims that in the future all Slavic peoples will be united, mainly thanks to a magical saviour (is it Nomo-Putin?). As taught by the cult leader and his alien girlfriend, the world is ruled by " archons " who impose animal life on humanity. Rather, the Anunnaki aliens, who are spiritual, are our friends and will come to our aid when the world collapses. As the spiritual leaders of the cult teach, it was the archons who created history, established the existing world order, divided and rule nations, introduced religions and spread disease. And now the archons are preparing the third world war. The UN and the League of Nations serve the interests of the archons, and NATO is their whip; the centre of these archons is the USA. The members of "Allatra" believe that the unification of the Slavs will certainly take place and then the unification of the world. A crackpot theory would suggest a bunch of post-hippie wackos, while the anti-scientific ideas propagated by the Creative Society about a climate catastrophe that is not man-made but the result of natural cycles and cosmic rays would remain just one phenomenon among many in the rampant climate misinformation. We would be wrong to think so. The effect of this pervasive disinformation within the conspiratorial ‘echo chambers’ is well known, but the intrusion outside these chambers via the Trojan Horse of the Creative Society, which even appeals to bona fide volunteers concerned about ecological catastrophe, has an even more dangerous impact on people's psychological and socio-cultural structures. The cultural and political infiltration by Allatra is now obvious. Allatra's cultural and political infiltration is now evident. In January 2024, AllatRa was able to boast that it discussed the climate crisis with the Pope (figure 83). Figure 83 - Pope Francis and AllatRa president at a private audience at the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City In September of the same year, the president of AllatRa, Maryna Ovtsynova, said she had attended a “ high-level meeting with representatives of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom ” - yes, the very USCRIF that, in its report on religious freedom in the world, called on the US president to obstruct FECRIS (see the Prologue of this dossier ). We do not know if this is true, because in the photo that Allatra's website publishes as proof of this (Figure 84), there is no indication that she was at USCIRF headquarters, and the stranger seen next to her is not a USCIRF commissioner, however, a certain Egon Cholakian , who claims to be a former US secret agent and a Figure 84 - Maryna Ovtsynova, President of ALLATRA during her official visit to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom Figure 85- Egon Cholakian and The list of his declared positions scientist at CERN (where nobody knows him), has become AlltRa's official lobbyist in the US Congress. In his presentation, he introduces himself as a person who has carried out an investigation into the conspiracy against Allatra carried out by Russian and Ukrainian secret services, the Moscow Patriarchate and the European Federation of Centres for Research and Information on Sectarianism (FECRIS). (figure 86). They pay him $150K per year to spread climate lies and cospiracy propaganda in the US, and globally (figure 87). Figure 86 - Excerpt from the document regarding Egon Cholakian filed with the US Congress Figure 87 - AlltRa's lobbyist's economic pay to the U.S. Congress. There is even a comic about this character in which he fights the anti-cult Hydra in the guise of Captain America and wins (Figures 88 and 89). Figure 88 and 89 - Egon Cholakian as Captain America in the comic "Captain America Vs Hydra" In the second story of the saga , Elon Musk calls old Egon Cholakian back into service to fight the Hydra that wants to bring America a civil war. Egon and Elon will save the planet (Figure 90). Figure 90 - Elon and Egon in the second installment of "Captain America Vs Hydra" Strangely enough, in the same saga, we see a panel on which Hydra tells his followers to ignore "that democratic pawn’ and not to let him "believe that he is the king". It is referring to the silhouette of a man who is clearly Putin. This is to convey the idea that Putin is not really in control of the country. The democratic pawn is under the thumb of the anti-cult hydra (figure 91). Another panel is even more explicit, as it presents poor, disconsolate Putin and Patriarch Kirill declaring that democracy (probably represented by Putin himself) must be got rid of (Figure 92). Figure 91 - Hydra tells that Putin is not the real head of Russia While the use of  religion  as  a tool  of influence has a  long  history (think US funding of neo-Pentecostal evangelical churches in Latin America to counter liberation theology and generate voting masses favourable to US interests), the use of religious-based conspiracy theories seems to have exploded in recent years thanks to the ‘ hive mind ’ of the telematic network. Trump, for example, winked at the QAnon conspiracy during his first presidency. The structure of these networked disinformation cells, which are non-hierarchical and voluntary, can evade traditional state control. This structure of AllatRa makes it possible to use it as an instrument for possible strategies of “public opinion formation”. It is interesting to note that such organisations are mainly active in crisis regions or strategically important regions such as Central and Eastern Europe. Indeed, the idea of uniting the Slavic peoples under the leadership of Russia is particularly suitable for promoting the concept of a Russian world, i.e. as a strategy aimed at restoring Russian influence and power in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states. Figure 92 - Putin deprived of his powers by Patriarch Kirill watches helplessly as the planet is ruined Comics are not the only channel of influence AllatRa uses in pop cultural production. They also have a rap artist, one RoyStar SoundSick, who espouses the cult's conspiracy theory in his songs ( here an example ). He also dedicated a mocking song to me about a fashion brand that I could open with my name so ‘cool’ instead of continuing my anti-cult activity. The Ukrainian secret service (SBU) claims that AllatRa hides this propaganda under a religious or cultural cloak and combines it with “psychological operations” (psy-ops). This configures a hybrid warfare strategy. Such operations are a low-intensity but effective strategy to manipulate public opinion. Exploiting people's fears in times of global uncertainty and using fear to channel emotional reactions for or against certain goals is a psychological operation in the context of "soft power". The infiltration of institutions in Slovakia, the registration of a lobbyist in the US Congress and the other things we have described show that Allatra ideas also penetrate institutions. In November 2024, representatives of the ALLATRA International Public Movement took part in a major global event — the UN Climate Change Conference COP29 in Baku. This event brought together representatives from over 190 countries to address the key issue of overcoming the climate crisis and protecting our planet. Egon Cholokian was there. Figure 93 - Allatra at the COP29 in Baku, Arzebaijan AllaTra as a litmus test of pro-cult influence All this confirms that both in the East and in the West, the creation of alternative cults that are not bound by territorial borders and are protected by the principle of “religious freedom” is an excellent instrument of influence that is functional for geopolitical objectives. The only obstacle seems to be the “anti-cult movement". The solution is to propagate its danger to civil rights and emphasise its power to the point of grotesqueness. Cult apologists in the West do the same. However, while the conspiracy theory there is that the anti-cults are secularists driven by the pseudo-scientific theory of “brainwashing", the conspiracy theory in the East is that the anti-cult movement is part of an evil “pro-religious” organisation (i.e. controlled by people in the Russian Orthodox Church) that practices a kind of global “brainwashing.”! The appearance on the scene of a bursting actor like Allatra, that has the same enemy as the Western cult apologists, but with divergent motives and conflicting wills of influence, upsets the cards and produces logical paradoxes. Indeed, CESNUR , which never flinches when it comes to defending the worst cults that have fallen into disrepute, has not said a word in defence of AllatRa. CESNUR and its magazine Bitter Winter have always taken an Atlanticist and anti-Russian position. The situation is embarrassing. However, this does not seem to embarrass some classic friends of the Italian study center. For example, a Scientology bigwig, Fabrizio d'Agostini ( see the prologue of this dossier ) , has rushed to the cult's defense with a kind of masterful lecture on religious freedom and the vulnus that the anti-cult movement would cause to it on Alltra TV . D'Agostini is one of the founders of the European Federation for Freedom of Belief ( FOB ), which has published many articles by Bitter Winter and by CESNUR director Massimo Introvigne and that has his wife on its scientific committee . Figure 94 - Allatra's post on the intervention of the wife of the president of the Unification Church in the Czech Republic in defence of the cult In October 2024, Allatra took part in a forum in Vienna  organised by the Women's Federation for World Peace (WFWP) , an organisation of another historical companion of the Western cult apologists, the Unification Church . Barbara Grabner, a "respected historian and journalist" who is the wife of the president the Universal Peace Federation (read Unification Church ) in Slovakia, gave an interview to AllatRA in which she reproduced almost verbatim what we could read in the indictment of AllatRA's close accuser Pavlanina. Among the speakers at Moon's church events in that country and in Slovakia, we can easily find Ján Figeľ , a conservative politician close to AllatRa (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 6. The libertarian network ). Figure 66 (from the 6th part of this report) - Ján Figeľ was the moderator of a public event on how to achieve peace between Russia and Ukraine organised by AllatRa. Below left is the logo and name of the Universal Peace federation (Unification Church) It is therefore not surprising that the only newspaper to publish an article that is a hagiography of Igor Danilov ("innovator in medicine, advocate of the Earth") is ‘ The Washington Times ’ (figure 95), i.e. the newspaper of the church founded by Moon (see the prologue of this report ). The mutual relationships of the AllatRa-Scientology-Moonies triad are well established. There are various proofs of this. For example, the Slovak Universal Peace Federation has held several events with AllatRa, as you can see, for example, here . The same can be said for Scientology ( here ). Here you can see AllatRa with Scientology and Moon's followers together. According to the Allatra case in Slovakia, Allatra asked the the prosecutor's office to get testimonies about anticult terrorism from these groups: Falun Gong, Scientology, Waldorf school, Slovak Yoga Association, Mormons and Jehova Witnesses (figure 96). The prosecutor in his indictment makes extensive use of the literature produced by CESNUR to denigrate the anti-cult movement (Figure 97). Figure 95 - Apologetic article about Igor Danilov in the Monnies newspaper The Washington Times Ultimately, the AllatRa case is a real litmus test. First of all, it demonstrates the effectiveness of the use of spirituality as a geopolitical means. It can often hide behind disputes that are ostensibly about scientific controversies or human rights advocacy (as outlined in Fascists, spies and gurus. 7. CIA cults ). This case also shows the creation of a logical short-circuit and reveals a double standard, but also makes evident where consolidated alliances diverge and allows us to understand why; in other words, the observation of the presences and absences next to Allatra shows which associations regard the action of cultural influence as primary (the absentees) and which regard it as secondary and instrumental to the advantage of their own organisation (the present ones). If we were to apply to the organisations that do not publicly flank AllatRa the same logic that AllatRa applies to me, namely that of degrees of separation, we could say that CESNUR or HRWF are only one degree of separation away from a pro-Russian organisation. Figure 96 - In his indictment against Czech journalist Ciroková, Slovakian prosecutor demands to hear Falun Gong, Scientology and other cults on the subject of anti-cult terrorism Finally, Allatra is a litmus paper also because the accusations against the anti-cult movement, taken to extremes, appear as grotesque as a caricature, and as a caricature they better show the most characteristic aspects of the original "face". The accusations were already ridiculous. In fact, AlltRa uses the same arguments already used by western cult apologists in the context of an even more absurd conspiracy. For example, take a look at the video that you will find in the main body of this text (Video 4). It is an excerpt from a kind of talk show dedicated to me, in which an expert on my person uses exactly the same arguments that have been used for years by the network of cult apologists (CESNUR, Scientology & C.) to denigrate me. Figure 97 - The prosecutor in his indictment makes extensive use of the literature produced by CESNUR to denigrate the anti-cult movement Video 4 - an expert in "Corvagliology" speaks As mentioned above, the AllatRa trolls claim that it's not them who are pro-Russian, but me and all the other anti-cult activists. As evidence, they cite the news published in the newspaper “ The European Times ” that 15 non-governmental organisations have asked UN Secretary Blinken to expel the FECRIS Federation. Apparently they did not think it worth mentioning that 1. “The European Times” newspaper is one of the emanations of Scientology ( as shown in the prologue of this report ); 2. the signatories to that letter were mostly expressions of cult apologist organisations, such as CESNUR and HRWF, or organisations linked to Scientology, such as the International Religious Freedom Roundtable and its chairman, the White House Scientology lobbyist Greg Mitchell ( see the chapter on the apologetic network ) and other shady characters; neither Blinken nor anyone else at the United Nations thought to attach the slightest importance to such a letter. Further evidence are the “interesting pictures” of various FECRIS members eating together in a restaurant in Riga. Of course, they would be interesting if any of us had ever denied eating together and, more importantly, if eating together was evidence of a conspiracy. It is then mentioned that the congress in Latvia was organised by a person who would later turn out to be pro-Russian. Not only did that person turn out to be pro-Russian years after the opening of the congress as a political representative, but the event was also organised by a Latvian anti-cult association whose members are against Putin's policies and Russian aggression against Ukraine. The video ends with this question, which should be rhetorical. ‘And who is Luigi Corvaglia, on whose side is he? Is he on side of democracy or is he just another pawn, another agent of the Russian RACIRS (a Russian association)?’ The guy who asks seems to know the answer. I address the same question to him. Fascists, spies and gurus. 1. Prologue (funny stuff) Fascists, spies and gurus. 2. Mind Games Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network Fascists, spies and gurus. 5. Attack on secularism Fascists, spies and gurus. 6. The libertarian network Fascists, spies and gurus. 7. CIA cults Fascists, spies and gurus. 8. Cults, far right and Neo-Templarism Fascists, spies and gurus. 9. Double Truth Next chapter coming soon

The strange case of the 'Group of Thebes" Paris, June 3 1990: In a hall of the Grand Orient de France (GOF), the most important Masonic observance beyond the Alps, the official founding of an occult esoteric group took place. It was called the Group of Thebes , but will only become known three years later thanks to a press release revealing its name and composition. The latter is very interesting because it involved a peculiar acolyte. The lynchpin of the group was Rémi Boyer , a representative of the magical Order of the Rosicrucians (AMORC) . Boyer had already founded 'Arc-en-ciel', an association of occult and New Age groups (including Sri Chinmoy, the Grande Loge indépendante des rites unis, the Institut pour une synthèse planètaire, the Ordre Chevaleresque de la Rose-Croix, the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University). The Group of Thebes was thus Boyer's second creation, dedicated to a smaller and presumably higher group of 'initiates'. It is therefore noteworthy that among the latter was the very Catholic Massimo Introvigne , a prominent figure of Alleanza Cattolica and founder and director of the Centro Studi Nuove Religioni (CESNUR) for two years. The lawyer, who was caught in this embarrassing situation by a French magazine, will claim to have been admitted as a scholar. A claim that might convince those who are not familiar with the workings of an esoteric society. Indeed, initiatory orders proceeds for hierarchical levels of knowledge sanctioned by special rites of passage. It is therefore unlikely that an initiatory group would accept an uninitiated scholar among its high-ranking esotericists. Among other things, the group was even secret from the Freemasons of the Grand Lodge, and also from the "Alexandria Group", which acted as a nursery to attract new members to the more occult circle. Introvigne, who had only been involved with spiritual movements for two years, would have entered this circle directly, and the high initiates, who did not break secrecy even with "brothers" of the high degrees, would have welcomed him to be studied by a profane. In response to the criticism levelled at him by the traditionalist magazine ' Sodalitium ', our man finally let it be known that he was one of the founders of the Group of Thebes . However, it is not untrue that the Thebes Group was a study group. The various esoteric realities there should have been compared in order to define which groups really fulfil the criteria of the Tradition . Figure 98 - The list of founders of the Thebes Group. Strangely Introvigne's surname is partially concealed This of course requires advanced knowledge, in the initiatory sense, from all members. Introvigne was not the only Italian; there were others. One of them was a no less anomalous presence. It was Paolo Fogagnolo , a former member of the ' Brigate Rosse ' (Red Brigades), a communist terroristic organisation, to whom the "Madonna", or rather the Sefira, the equivalent of the Virgin in the esoteric tradition, had appeared. He had therefore turned to esotericism and founded the group 'Prometheus', which was dedicated to the Egyptian mysteries. The group was recognised by various magical orders, including the Ordo Templi Orientis ). This is the hermetic order made famous by Aleister Crowley , who called himself " the Beast 666 " and is regarded as the founder of modern occultism and a source of inspiration for Satanism . Crowley had sympathies for the Nazis. In addition to the traditionalist Catholic and the former terrorist who saw the Mother of God, there were some interesting personalities. One of the pillars of the group of Thebes was Jean-Pierre Giudicelli . He is a Corsican independentist, right-wing extremist and former member of the neo-fascist groups Ordre Nouveau (inspired by the Italian group Ordine Nuovo , responsible for the massacres in Italy) and Troisieme Voie (disbanded by the Council of Ministers). The latter, former head of the French section of the Order of Myriam, an organisation dedicated to sexual magic, later became bishop of the Church of the New Alliance . Other members were Jean-Marie Vergerio of the Order of the Templars of Circe , Robert Amadou , parapsychologist and occultist, Rosicrucian, Triantaphyllos Kotzamanis , Freemason, Bishop of the Gnostic Apostolic Church and Rosicrucian, Gérard Kloppel , Freemason and Martinist, Jean-Pascal Ruggiu , Grand Hierophant of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (a magical order also linked to Aleister Crowley), Georges Magne de Cressac and Jean-Marie D'Asembourg , well-known right-wing extremists. So far, the most presentable members have been listed. According to some French outlets, one of the members was the historian Robert Faurisson , the most famous Holocaust denier. However, Massimo Introvigne scornfully and firmly denies this claim, stating that he never saw him at the group's meetings (and adds that if Faurisson had been there, he would have left). Introvigne is keen to express his opposition to holocaust denialism. The Italian does not show the same contempt for a member whose presence is instead certain: Christian Bouchet . The latter is a Nazi-Maoist (or, as they say in France, a Mao-Maurrassien ). He was active in several neo-fascist groups and joined the Groupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE) in the early 1980s. GRECE is an anti-Christian and neo-pagan group in favour of identity and sovereignty. An expert on the English magician Aleister Crowley , Bouchet was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) . He is also a member of the white supremacist cult World Church of the Creator, also known as the Creativity Movement . He is also the editor of several magazines. These include 'Lutte du Peuple', which can be categorised as 'neo-Nazi'. Remy Boyer replied to a journalist who asked him how he could include a character like Bouchet in the group when adventurers, the great travellers, set off to tackle the Himalayas, they know that above 4000 metres, everyone they meet is inevitably their friend. No matter what they were in the valley. Bouchet was a speaker at the international CESNUR conference in Santa Barbara in 1991 and four times in France in 1992. CESNUR and Bouchet were clearly above 4000 metres. Figure 99 - Jean-Pierre Giudicelli, Christian Bouchet and Robert Faurisson Surprisingly, 'Secrets et sociétés', a small confidential newsletter specialising in the life of cults, reported in great detail on a disagreement between Bouchet and Ruggiu (the two had clashed because Bouchet had published part of the Golden Dawn ritual in his magazine 'Thelema'). Rémi Boyer picked up the phone and called the editor-in-chief of Secrets et sociétés, Arnaud d'Apremont . It is not known what the two talked about or how the newsletter learnt of the internal disagreements within the group, but the two became friends. Behind d'Apremont, however, was Arnaud Dupont , a militant right-wing extremist, as well as the director of the newsletter, Philippe-André Duquesne . The aim of the two men was to build bridges between right-wing extremist networks and the small world of esoteric groups and secret societies. The project stemmed from Duquesne and Apremont's shared experience in the ranks of GRECE , the same neo-pagan group as Bouchet. The extreme right has indeed appropriated the pagan tradition to make it the basis of a new fascist thought. The idea is to destroy the concept of equality associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. The plan of the two editors of the newsletter to infiltrate the group to make it a node of the fascist network was certainly successful since D'apremont revealed to the journalist Serge Faubert that he and Massimo Introvigne were planning to create an esoteric magazine together. Agostino Sanfratello , one of the founders of Alleanza Cattolica (see the Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network ), explains perfectly how it is possible for seemingly opposing souls such as Catholic traditionalism and neo-paganism to coexist. We remember that he is close to the neo-fascist Franco Freda . The latter, a self-proclaimed 'Nazi-Maoist', was convicted for the explosives attacks of 25 April 1969 and those on trains the following summer, which were carried out as part of the so-called strategy of tension . He was later convicted of subversive association for founding the Gruppo di Ar . Freda is also the editor of 'Edizioni Ar'. In the manifesto of the Ar Group he writes: We are for an Aristocracy  that is a radical rejection of the egalitarian model [...] We are for a traditional concept of existence in which the exaggerated and abnormal suggestions of society and the economy give way to the heroic values of the spirit understood as Honour, Hierarchy and Loyalty'. In 1983, to mark the 20th anniversary of the publishing house, Freda published ' Risguardo IV ', a special edition of his journal containing numerous contributions, including one by Sanfratello. In this text, the ultra-Catholic, founder of Alleanza Cattolica and one of the main protagonists of the Confraternity of St Pius X , turned against the comrades rebelling against the neo-pagan current of the New Right by invoking the "plurality of traditions' and the 'convergence in the common struggle'.   Marco Pasi commented on Introvigne's speech at a conference on the "roots and development of contemporary paganism" in Lyon in the right-wing magazine "Orion" with these words:   Thus, in his first speech, Introvigne explicitly said that accepting an invitation to a conference on neo-paganism, where a confrontation with 'neo-pagans' was planned, was 'not only a pleasure but also a duty', at a time when the report of the commission of enquiry [of the French parliament] described neo-paganism as socially dangerous because it was widespread in racist and anti-Semitic far-right circles."  (in 'Esoterismo e nuova religiosità', in Orion , Milan, March-April 1996, p. 51 ff.) Figures 100 and 101 - Agostino Sanfratello and Franco Freda Tradition, perennialism and Far Right We have said that in the group of Thebes different esoteric realities should have been compared in order to define which groups really fulfil the criteria of Tradition. It is therefore necessary to briefly explain the relationship between traditionalism, esotericism and right-wing political thought, i.e. the constituent elements of the group just analysed. Traditionalism assumes the existence of a perennial wisdom or philosophy, of original and universal truths that are the source of and shared by all major world religions. According to the representatives of traditionalism, all major world religions are based on common original and universal metaphysical truths. The perspective of their authors is often referred to as " philosophia perennis" (perennial philosophy). There would then exist a perennial wisdom (sophia perennis) and a perennial religion (religio perennis). According to the  traditionalists , this truth has been lost in the modern world  due to  the rise of novel secular philosophies  dating back  to the Italian Renaissance and led to the to  the Enlightenment, and  modernity  itself is  seen as  an abnormality. The breakdown of natural hierarchies, egalitarianism and disregard for the sacred are part of this abnormality. This constitutes reactionary thinking and gives rise to a first link between the political right and traditionalism. In addition to right-wing culture, the traditionalists' perennialism is closely linked to esotericism . Indeed, esotericism refers to the supposed ability to access the intimate and unified core of a truth that transcends external appearances. Every religion would have an esoteric component from which it emerges. By transitive relation, right-wing culture is linked to esotericism. The access to truth permitted by esoteric research involves an initiation and a step-by-step discovery. Exoteric (external) and esoteric (internal) characters can coexist in the same doctrine: instead of excluding each other, they can complement each other . The same doctrine may have an esoteric and an exoteric component; or the same teaching may be given an exoteric interpretation, open to all, and a deeper esoteric one, the preserve of the initiated only. The most famous example of an esoteric order in the West is Freemasonry . The best known exponent of traditionalism was the French René Guénon, but for the purposes of our discourse the Italian Julius Evola is more important . He was influenced by Guénon but from whom he departed on many points. In fact, he was the one who exerted the greatest influence on the far right-wing movements in France and Italy, especially in the " years of lead ". The terrorists of Ordine Nuovo were devoted to pagan-type rituals with animal sacrifices. Some fringe slipped into magic and occultism (You can read Stefania Limiti, Potere Occulto. Dal fascismo alle stragi di mafia la lunga storia criminale italiana, Milan, 2022 ). After Evola, Traditionalism provided the ideological cement for the alliance of anti-democratic forces, also in post-Soviet Russia. So, Steve Bannon , former Donald Trump adviser and Aleksandr Dugin , informal adviser to Vladimir Putin , can both be included in the same club, that of Evola's admirers, and have therefore interacted with each other on the basis of their common interests. CESNUR in action The Group of Thebes is undoubtedly very heterogeneous. Despite its obvious exoteric diversity (there is the Catholic, the neo-pagan, the sovereignist, the terrorist, the red-brown, etc.), the members of the Group of Thebes are nevertheless united, because they are representatives of reaction and traditionalism. In practise, it is a group of extreme right-wing esotericists. Indeed, the composition of the Group appears to be similar to that of the French branch of CESNUR, now extinct. The board of the Introvigne study centre included Antoine Faivre , right-wing Freemason, occultist, martinist and editor-in-chief of the esoteric magazine "Cahiers Villard de Honnecourt", Olivier-Louis Séguy , Freemason and right-wing extremist with links to the Front National , Roland Edighoffer , Freemason and Rosicrucian, and Jean-Francois Mayer , a militant right-wing extremist in Lyon, former sales manager of the denialist newspaper 'Défense de l'Occident', member of the neo-fascist movement Nouvel Ordre Social , a contributor to the esoteric magazine 'Politica Hermetica' and ' Panorama des idees actuelles ', a magazine of the neo-pagan group GRECE , as well as an agent of the Swiss military secret service. Régis Ladous , a historian with occult interests, was also a member of CESNUR's board of directors. The latter was at the centre of a scandal involving the University of Lyon when student Jean Plantin received an excellent grade from Ladous in 1990 for a thesis denying the Holocaust . In 1992, the conference 'Magical Challenges' took place in Lyon, organised jointly by the University of Lyon II and CESNUR. Regis Ladous did not speak as a representative of CESNUR, but as a professor at the University of Lyon III. Other speakers included the indefatigable Massimo Introvigne, Bruno Geras, Rector of the University of Lyon III, and other emblematic figures of CESNUR. Among them was Christian Bouchet , the neo-Nazi who is also a member of the Thebes group.   In 2001, Serge Garde wrote in 'L'Humanité' :   Massimo Introvigne's CESNUR acts as a bridge between the sects and the far right , starting from their university bases. In Lyon, but also in Paris. The president of CESNUR-France, Antoine Faivre, is a professor at the École pratique des hautes études en sciences religieux at the Sorbonne. This small world knows each other, works together, publishes and helps each other. This is how the activist Christian Bouchet became a doctor of ethnology in 1994, after defending his dissertation with Robert Amadou, professor at Paris 7, chronicler of '"Original", an esoteric series in which Massimo Introvigne and Christian Bouchet are rampaging. Régis Ladous is published by Jean-François Mayer, among others. (Bold mine) 'L'originel' is the magazine of Charles Antoni, who claims to specialise in 'traditional sciences' but is in fact an occultist. It was around this magazine that the group was reformed in practise. In short, CESNUR , some esoteric groups and the Group of Thebes overlap. The structures have different functions, but the characters are often the same.  To better understand the role of CESNUR, let us begin with the testimony of criminologist Jean-Marie Abgrall before the Belgian parliamentary committee of enquiry into cults (1997):   A few years ago, the cults joined together in FIREPHIM , the International Federation of Minority Religions and Philosophies, a kind of mutual assistance treaty between the cults in the event that one of them is incriminated or threatened. Just as FIREPHIM (NDR: association created in 1992 on the initiative of Scientology , the Unification Church and the Raelian Movement to 'defend new religious movements') was quickly exposed, the cults have created a parallel structure, the CESNUR , the Centre for the Study of New Religions, whose director, Massimo Introvigne, is a professor at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, which belongs to the Vatican. This Athenaeum was founded by the Legionaries of Christ , a movement that is close to the European far right, or more precisely to a fundamentalist Catholic extreme right. At this moment, all European cults are trying to obtain a kind of moral, public and political guarantee. Introvigne himself is also responsible for a structure called Alleanza Cattolica , the Roman equivalent of TFP Tradition-Family-Property , a far-right cult. (Bold mine)   Abgrall's statement is imprecise in its temporal definition, since CESNUR was founded in 1988 and FIREPHIM in 1992, so that the Italian organisation cannot be considered as the answer at the end of the French one, but the description of their functions is valid.   The 1999 report of the French commission of enquiry on sects  states: The presence of dominant characteristics in different organisations raises the problem of the existence of a " cross-sectoral" structure that would be responsible for ensuring the defence and coordinating the different movements. Several examples of co-operation between cults have been brought to the Commission's attention. Several organisations play an open role in the coordination of the cults. The Centre for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR) - under the direction of Mr Massimo Introvigne - has been a platform for the defence of sectarianism for several years... In particular, CESNUR has launched a campaign to denigrate the work of the former [parliamentary] commission of enquiry. Traditionalist Catholics defending cults...no stranger than Catholics  who ally themselves  with neo-pagans... According to  Stephen Kent  of the University of Alberta, CESNUR is " the highest-profile lobbying group for controversial religions " and its director is said to be "[a] fierce critic of any rational attempt to identify or restrict so-called 'cults , ' who has spoken out against what he sees as intolerance towards 'minority religions,'  particularly  in Belgium, France and Germany.   Double truth and noble lie It is well known that Alleanza Cattolica has followed the doctrine of the Tradition, Family and Property from the very beginning (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network ). According to the historian Orlando Fedeli , who has been a member for thirty years, Tradition, Family and Property would be a millenarian and gnostic cult. There would be an external doctrine and a secret teaching reserved for the highest levels of knowledge. De Oliveira's 'esoteric' teachings, which can also be read in the magazine 'Dr Plinio', directed by Monsignor João Scognamiglio Clá Dias, focused on the ' metaphysical superiority' of the nobility , especially the South American landed gentry. One can see how this faithfully traces both the Platonic hierarchy of human beings and the Gnostic idea that salvation is reserved solely for the 'spiritual' (and condemnation partly for the 'psychic' and entirely for the 'ilical'). The TFP's anti-egalitarianism engenders in its activists a contempt for class, a taste for luxury and idleness.   In the Joyeux report on the TFP school in Saint Benoit , France, we read that hardness of heart and undisguised hatred of ordinary people characterise the daily behaviour of the majority of TFP activists . Everything that has to do with luxury, glamour and idleness is seen as counter-revolutionary and triggers a sense of pride that stems from the feeling of belonging to a destined elite. Since the revolutionary mentality is characterised by a virulent glorification of pauperism, the TFP acts by systematically claiming the opposite. A TFP activist once said to a young Frenchman visiting Brazil: 'It's good to get up late in the morning because it goes against the revolutionary spirit that drives activism'. Since most TFP activists do not have to keep a schedule and do not have a job, they can lead a sweet life (p. 46 of the report). To understand De Oliveira's elitism, it is enough to know that he never supported 'integrism', the Brazilian version of fascism, because he considered it too 'interclassist' and 'socialist' and not open to the demands of the metaphysical superiority of the landed aristocracy. The result of this thinking is authoritarian-conservative in politics, pro-free market in economics and gnostic-millenaristic in the spiritual realm. Its Italian expression Alleanza Cattolica was originally propagated by the Veronese magazine 'Carattere'. The Catholicism of 'Carattere' had its points of reference in Papini, Attilio Mordini, Domenico Giuliotti and Silvano Panunzio; it was a Catholicism that pursued the 'chivalrous path of an aristocratic and Ghibelline Christianity '. In short, it was well prepared to embrace the vision of Dr Plinio. Not only that, it pursued a 'traditionalism' that we might call ' Christian esotericism " (see here ), i.e. not even in opposition to those who seek "tradition" in the myth of the heights of the spirit that preceded the Fall, i.e. the decadent era, the " Kali Yuga " described by Julius Evola , who is indeed among those who are appreciated by Alleanza Cattolica. The fact that Evola was pagan and anti-Christian did not seem to bother the founder of Alleanza Cattolica, Giovanni Cantoni, as he praised him as one of "the "prophets of the crisis of the modern world"; immediately afterwards he added, among other things: " In our opinion, only one person has said what needed to be said and could be said: René Guénon ". Evola and Guenon were both esotericists and expressions of a traditionalism that is a "revolt against the modern world" and an anti-egalitarian differentialism. The convergence in the above-mentioned common struggle. It has been seen that Tradition, Family and Property embraced American neoconservatism in the 1980s (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network) . At the suggestion of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, Paul Weyrich founded the International Policy Forum (IPF) , an alliance of conservative associations that laid the foundations for the emergence of a transnational New Right . Paul Weyrich also founded the Heritage Foundation , the Free Congress Foundation , which he chaired, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) . We know that these organisations, along with dozens of other 'libertarian' organisations that see religious freedom and economic freedom as inseparable - paradigmatically, the Acton Institute calls itself "for the Study of Religion and Liberty" - form an important operational arm of the US soft power. The tactic is that of 'entryism', i.e. the colonisation of the media, the academy, and the parties, in order to steer the masses in a counter-revolutionary direction . Alleanza Cattolica (and CESNUR) is participating in this strategy.   Emanuele Del Medico writes: The goals set by this 'counter-revolutionary apostolate' relate above all to the struggle against secularism , the rewriting of historical memory and the control of the ideological production of the Italian right through the creation of a narrow intellectual elite from which the future ruling class would emerge. The 'establishment of the kingship of Christ also over human societies' would be expressed in the restoration of traditional hierarchies within the framework of a society of order in which religion would once again assume a predominant role in social control and the legitimisation of political and economic power . The access of representatives of AC to the upper echelons of Berlusconi's coalition does not appear to be a novelty: the politicians Riccardo Pedrizzi, Alfredo Mantovano and Michele Vietti are part of it. The underlying project is not so much to uphold the banner of Catholic traditionalism, but to establish a hyper-conservative neoliberal right wing on the model of that in the United States (Bold mine)       As a critic "from the right" of the TFP's epigones, Luigi Copertino, writes, "The thought and above all the financial resources of American neoconservatism, which reach as far as Europe, have succeeded where flowery theological and philosophical treatises have failed: namely, the feat of converting to Americanism, with extreme and suspicious rapidity, large sections of Catholic traditionalism that until yesterday resisted anything that seemed modern and liberal and therefore American," underestimating that the Catholic neoconservative who espouses the reasons for Euro-American cultural unity " accepts to move ideally in a Protestant rather than a Catholic context ." In truth, this acceptance of moving in a Protestant context had already manifested itself in the TFP in the 1970s, when one of the organisation's top figures, José Lùcio de Araùjo Correa, suggested to a fierce anti-Catholic, the Reverend Carl McIntire , that they work together to "fight progressive Christianity, secular modernisation and communism" ( Cowan , 2001, p. 154). This deep aversion to progressive drift enabled McIntire to overcome his deep aversion to Catholicism, and TFP to overcome McIntire's anti-Catholicism. Overcoming theological and ideological differences in pursuit of a common goal is thus the hallmark of the counter-revolutionary network and will indeed be the hallmark of the work of Introvigne and CESNUR, an organisation born from a rib of an ultra-Catholic group and ready to protect non-Catholic cults from the criticism of those who carry the values of modernity. The same conversion from anti-Americanism to Atlanticism that we have seen in the TFP had taken place in European neo-fascism through the OAS and the Aginter press e (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The black network) . It is therefore interesting to look at the roots of the idea that Alleanza Cattolica and the board of CESNUR have embraced so passionately, namely the neoconservative movement of America. Leo Strauss is considered, rightly or wrongly, to be their inspiration. Strauss believed that all great writers wrote in a form distorted for the common people, an 'exoteric' form, and that the clues to the 'esoteric' truth had to be found between the lines. This truth was reserved for those who could bear it, such as the disciples chosen by the Master, whom he called "hoplites". This truth consisted of the nihilistic realisation that the only truth is nothingness and that all moral principles are empty and meaningless. The 'exoteric', external message, on the other hand, consisted precisely in these 'natural moral values'. The authentic philosopher must despise the beliefs of the people, but in public he must pretend to believe in the myths and illusions concocted for the use of the masses, he must conceal this contempt and in reality be the spokesman of moral values suitable for the masses: religion, democracy, justice. Once again, lessons reserved for the elect, elitism, counter-revolution. Strauss, who, like de Oliveira, adopts an anti-egalitarian and aristocratic perspective, enters into polemics with modernity and democratic concepts by explicitly resorting to the " noble lie " and affirming the need to use religion as a rhetorical device to manipulate and control the masses . It is the doctrine of " double truth ", the first legitimisation of which comes from a thinker very dear to certain elitists, Plato . In his 'ideal city', the aristocracy of spirit and thought is legitimised to use deception for moral, educational and political purposes: [...] God, when he created you, mixed gold into the generation of those among you who can exercise power, so that they are the most valuable; into that of the guards silver; iron and bronze into that of the farmers and craftsmen.[...] the city will perish when it is protected by a defender of iron or bronze. As it turns out, the members of TFP feel like they are made of gold, probably their epigones too. The TFP, its Italian sister organisation and the study centre derived from them, in the wake of the overlapping elitist thinking of Correa de Oliveira and Strauss, seem to have embraced the duplicity that every Platonic builder of 'caretaker governments' recommends. So when we highlight the duplicity of CESNUR, since it is the front office of a traditionalist Catholic organisation and at the same time a centre that produces studies for the benefit of the cults furthest removed from Catholicism, we are not talking about logical paradoxes or personality splits, not even the banal lie of mercenaries hired by the cults, but about double truth and noble lies. It is not surprising that it is considered morally acceptable to resort to lying 'ad usum populi', to profess the values of a democratic and liberal society that one inwardly despises. The fact that these values are despised by the CESNUR leadership is clear from the much-cited genealogy of the study centre. That it is a 'legitimate' imposture to pose as defenders of religious freedom becomes clear when one considers the Platonism inherent in this genealogy.   When a law against mental manipulation was passed in France in 2001, Introvigne wrote a " manifesto " with advice on how to defend oneself against it. Point 1 was entitled "Trying to understand the law in the French context" and made it clear that the defence of religious freedom that CESNUR proposes is still perfectly embedded in the counter-revolutionary project. Indeed, the author wrote that a good starting point for understanding the French law is to realise that "the French are truly convinced that the eradication of religious belief is desirable and possible". It is this theoretical conspiracy that CESNUR is responding to. The enemy is still Robespierre. Point 2 is entitled ' Supporting internal and European litigation '. In other words: Intervention in the media, in the courts and even in supranational bodies such as the OSCE and the UN to protect the rights of 'new religious movements' from persecution by a phantom 'anti-cult movement'. In practise, this is an action of institutional lobbying and cultural influence. This is precisely the mission of the international network of associations for the defence of 'religious freedom", made up of non-governmental organisations linked to Scientology and other cults, but also American neo-conservative foundations, very reminiscent of the Birch Society , which acted as a link for the Aginter presse, including that of the aforementioned Atlas Network or the Rutherford Institute , with which CESNUR has a historical acquaintance. The 'cult apologists' form a network of interest groups that are active in international bodies such as the OSCE and the Council of Europe. These organisations include Human Rights Without Frontiers - HRWF , the European Federation for Freedom of Belief - FOB (which we met in the prologue to this dossier) and Coordination des associations et des particuliers pour la liberté de conscience - CAP LC . The mutual contacts between these organisations, CESNUR, Scientology, the American 'libertarian' foundations and sectors of neocon politics are so close that the distance between one node of the network and another is hardly greater than two intermediate nodes. In fact, there is often complete overlap. CESNUR seems to play the same role in this network that the Aginter Presse  played in the subversive work, namely that of a control room. In point 4 of the manifesto ('Don't feed the wolves') Introvigne writes:   [...] even the less pleasant movements, accused of pseudo-crimes such as 'brainwashing' or 'cult', should be vigorously defended. No matter how much we dislike them , [...]   The benevolence even towards abusive cults therefore seems somewhat hypocritical and the call for tolerance and ecumenism seem to be actions that only acquire a morally positive connotation when they follow the justifying logic of the 'double effect' that was of Ousset and the OAS militants. In short, if it serves to combat subversion and secularism (and enforce the global hegemony of conservative America), anything goes. St Thomas takes care of that. With the help of Uncle Sam. Figure 102 - Paul Weyrich, Plinio Correa de Oliveira, Leo Strauss Fascists, spies and gurus. 1. Prologue (funny stuff) Fascists, spies and gurus. 2. Mind Games Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network Fascists, spies and gurus. 5. Attack on secularism Fascists, spies and gurus. 6. The libertarian network Fascists, spies and gurus. 7. CIA cults Fascists, spies and gurus.8. Cults and far right Next chapter : Fascists, spies and gurus. 10. East Wind

CESNUR at the scene of the crime In October 1994, 48 followers of the Order of the Solar Temple were found dead in the villages of Cheiry and Salvan in Switzerland. When the bodies were discovered, a self-appointed ‘religious affairs adviser from the Central Defence Office’ appeared at the scene of the crime and collaborated with the investigators by questioning the witnesses alone, ignoring all procedural rules. He was Jean-François Mayer , a former far-right activist in Lyon. Mayer was responsible for the distribution of the Holocaust denial newspaper Défense de l'Occident , a member of the Nouvel Ordre Social (a national-revolutionary movement based in Geneva), a contributor to the magazine Panorama des idees actuelles, a publication of the GRECE , the Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne, a right-wing, neo-pagan think tank. By 1976, however, he had converted to orthodox Christianity. The most interesting thing, however, is that this person was a leading member of CESNUR , the Centre for the Study of ‘New Religious Movements', which grew out of an Alleanza Cattolica offshoot. I n a BBC documentary on the Solar Temple suicides case, Mayer is portrayed as a representative of Swiss military intelligence. Figure 103 - Jean-Francois Mayer in the BBC documentary "The Order of The Solar Temple" After the discovery of the bodies of 16 other followers of the Solar Temple in December 1995 in Vercors, France, Jean-François Mayer was one of the 300 privileged people who received a cult file containing the posthumous writings of the sacrificed. In her book ‘Ordre du Temple Solaire, en quête de vérité’, Rosemarie Jaton reports on the content of an interview with J.F. Mayer, in which he admits to having been in contact with Luc Jouret , one of the two leaders of the Order of the Solar Temple. Luc Jouret was a former Belgian far-right military officer who was associated with Gladio , a branch of the secret anti-communist NATO organisation known as Stay Behind . The supposed ‘mass suicides’ of the Solar Temple still remain shrouded in mystery. Certainly, the facts recounted suggest a connection between intelligence, the far right and cults. Spirituality and covert operations Neither the connection between Western intelligence and the far right nor that between secret services and minority spiritual cults is strange. The alliance between Western security services and neo-fascism was the subject of the a previous chapter of this report ( Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network ). The matter of the Order of the Solar Temple now gives us the opportunity to assess the influence of the secret services on spiritual and esoteric groups. It should be said at the outset that the preference for "cults" in no way excludes mainstream religions. In fact, Allen Dulles, who headed the CIA in its early years, had already used the Catholic Church as a cover for intelligence operations when he was in charge of the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner organisation of the CIA. In his book ‘ Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors ’, Michael Graziano writes about the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War: ‘American analysts often assumed that Catholic interests - and those of the Vatican more specifically- were perfectly aligned with US objectives’. The agency also worked with the Catholic international press through the Belgian priest Felix Morlion in what it called ‘ Operation Pilgrim's Progress ’. When the agency encountered other world religions during the Cold War - Shintoism in Japan, Buddhism in Southeast Asia, and especially Islam in Iran - it took it for granted that " the United States and world religions [were] natural allies " in the fight against atheistic communism. After the end of the war, former OSS agents joined the newly founded Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), bringing with them the experience and networks needed to use religion as a tool for clandestine activities. In the early years of the Cold War, James Angleton organised an elaborate spy network that enabled the CIA to receive intelligence reports sent to the Vatican from papal nuncios stationed behind the Iron Curtain and other "closed" areas. At the time, this was one of the few means available to the CIA to penetrate the Eastern Bloc. CIA officials such as Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt, Miles Copeland, William Eddy and James Jesus Angleton did not hesitate to use religion as a transactional tool . American clergymen, missionaries and the evangelical Billy Graham worked secretly with the CIA. In 1975, a US Senate report revealed the use of various American priests and missionaries for counterintelligence in various countries. a) mobilize blocs of voters and influence public influence Figure 104 - Jerry L. Falwell The Moral Majority  was an American political organisation and conservative evangelical lobby founded by Jerry L. Falwell in 1979. The movement sought to enshrine what it believed to be the fundamentals of Christianity in the nation's politics and campaigned against abortion, homosexuality, pornography and the easing of relations with the USSR. It found its advocate in Ronald Reagan. So, it played a key role in mobilising conservative Christians as a political force and, in particular, in the Republican victories in the presidential elections of the 1980s. If well organized, churches can become decisive voting blocs during the usually light turnout of primary elections in the USA. We already saw this in the 80s, when many fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches were organized as blocs. Falwell's Moral Majority  helped organize the fundamentalists, while other groups, like Christian Voice , helped organize the Pentecostals and charismatics. In 1984 Christian Voice, a political action group made up largely of Pentecostal Christians, trained local ministers in registering, educating their flocks about the "right" political choices, and getting their congregations out to the polls on election day. Many churches voted in blocs for candidates identified by Christian Voice as "moral." Christian Voice supplied churches with congressional "Report Cards" and a "Presidential Biblical Scoreboard" that rated the candidates. Their rating system was heavily slanted in favor of the "pro-family" Republicans who favored increased defense spending and an aggressive anti-communist foreign policy. The Democratic candidates in 1984 were portrayed in the "Presidential Biblical Scoreboard" as pro-abortion ''baby-killers" who favored "kiddie-porn," and were mired in the moral relativism of "New Age Globalism." A headline in the Christian Voice "Presidential Scoreboard" stated that "Mans "serial killers are homosexuals." The "Scoreboard" blasted the Democrats for favoring bills to protect gays' civil rights. Shortly after Ronald Reagan became President of the United States, the nation’s capital got a second morning newspaper. Eventually, Dr Ronald Goodwin, the Rev Jerry Falwell ’s former lieutenant in the Moral Majority , became its editor. The strange thing is that the owner was the Rev. Sun Myung Moon , who claimed to be the Second Coming of Christ, the true Messiah who would unite Eastern and Western civilisation under his South Korea-based Unification Church . Fundamentalist Christians who associate themselves with a church that claims that the only family is the community of Moonies and that its leader is the new Messiah. Although it seems anomalous, when the ends converge, religious fanatics prove to be very unfussy. Moon was keen to found a conservative newspaper to promote his cause and raise his profile. The American neoconservatives needed a medium to promote their rigid ideological orthodoxy. The neocons already controlled several magazines and right-leaning foundations, but they needed a daily newspaper that would help them set the agenda on Capitol Hill. The newspaper was called the Washington Times  and was primarily a platform for a movement that included the Christian right, conservative Jews and the radical right wing of the Republican Party. The paper was staffed by ambitious and talented young writers, many of whom knowingly ignored the basic conventions of American journalism and instead followed the party line established at Wednesday night meetings of neocons under 30 at the Heritage Foundation . So we have an odd aggregate: Christian right, conservative Jews, Moonies, right-wing Republicans and US pro-free market foundations. b) New religious movements and minority religions If majority churches are in some cases useful for espionage purposes and clandestine operations, minority cults - especially if they have their own intelligence structures, such as Scientology - are even more useful, especially in countries where majority religions are difficult to infiltrate or are closely linked to governments. This is the case in Russia or China. For example, when in 1985 the Reagan administration's Congress cancelled funding for support of the Nicaraguan ‘ Contras ' terrorists against the Sandinista regime, effectively funding for an anti-communist proxy war in Latin America , the Reverend Moon's Unification Church participated in providing food and money for the guerrillas. The facts are well presented by John Gorenfeld in his book ‘ Bad Moon Rising ’. " In the Central American hinterlands, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the CIA’s operatives from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s disciples. They appear to be working in harness against the communist-tainted Sandinista regime in Nicaragua" - wrote Jack Anderson on the Indiana Gazette of August, 16 1984 . CAUSA  is the most important political arm of the Unification Church. It was founded in 1980 following an exploratory tour of Latin American countries, during which Bo Hi Pak met with important right-wing and military leaders. CAUSA's main activities in 1980-1982 consisted of organising ideological indoctrination seminars for political, military and other leadership groups throughout the continent. In 1983, CAUSA North America was founded and began organising similar seminars in the USA. Originally known as the Confederation of the Associations for the Unification of the Societies of the Americas, at this point the "Unification" was renamed "Unity," apparently in an effort to distance CAUSA from the church. Whatever the name, the Unification Church has controlled the organisation throughout. The directors of CAUSA International are all serious members of the church. Once limited to the western hemisphere, CAUSA has developed into a global project with significant activities on all continents since 1983. The general orientation of CAUSA is anti-communist education from a historical perspective. CAUSA's antidote to communism is the " Godism", i.e. the philosophy of the Unification Church without Moonist mythology. In 1978, the Fraser Commission , a subcommittee of the US Congress, investigated the political influence of the South Korean government on US policy, the so-called Koreagate . The commission published a report that also listed Moon's involvement in these activities. This 80-page report covered the efforts of Moon's movement to influence US institutions and US foreign policy, partly in its own interests, partly in the service of the South Korean government and partly, of course, on its direct orders. Lobbying activities to obtain the renewal of an arms production licence for one of Moon's companies and many other things were also investigated." Koreagate " was an American political scandal in 1976 involving South Korean politicians who wanted to be influenced by 10 Democratic members of Congress. The scandal involved the uncovering of evidence that the Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) was allegedly distributing bribes and favours through South Korean businessman Tongsun Park in order to secure favour and influence in American politics. The Unification church was involved. In the period immediately after his coup, the Korean president Kim Jong Pil founded the KCIA, the Korean Intelligence Agency, and oversaw the establishment of a political base for the new regime. An unanalysed CIA report from February 1963 stated that Kim Jong Pil "organised" the Unification Church while he was director of the KCIA and used the Unification Church "as a political tool" Although the report  stated that "organized" is not to be confused with "founded"," as the Unification Church was founded in 1954, ".. there was ample evidence in this and later intelligence reports to suggest that Kim Jong Pil and the Moon organization had a mutually supportive relationship and to suggest that Kim was using the Unification Church for political purposes " . The Fraser Report revealed that the KCIA was using the UC as a front for its clandestine operations in the US (Fraser Report 1978, 311–39; Bale 2017, 66). The KCIA was eager to cultivate Nixon by proxy because they wanted him to overturn a troop drawdown in Vietnam he had announced as a goodwill gesture towards China at a time when the White House was eager to promote normalization of ties with Beijing (Fraser Report 1978). The KCIA shared the anticommunist ideology of the UC and developed strong personal connections during the Park Chung Hee era (1961–79). CAUSA financed Le Pen's ‘National Front’ in France, whose member of the European parliament Pierre Ceyrac was also head of the French section of CAUSA. In Germany, CAUSA board member Ursula Saniewski was personal assistant to Franz Schönhuber of the far-right ‘Republicans’. The relationship between the Church of Moon and the family of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe , who was killed in July 2022, is of particular importance. The relationship goes back to Shinzo's grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi . Nobusuke Kishi's post-war political agenda led him to work closely with Ryoichi Sasakawa , a businessman and nationalist politician who was suspected of war crimes during the Second World War. Sasakawa helped found the UC in Japan in 1963 and took on the role of both patron and president of the church's political wing, the International Federation for Victory Over Communism (IFVOC, 国際勝共連合), which forged close ties with Japan's conservative politicians (Andrew Marshall and Michiko Toyama, In The Name of The Godfather, Tokyo Journal, October, 1994, pages 29-35). Moon's organisations, including the Unification Church and the overtly political IFVOC, were financially supported by Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama , an ultranationalist and exponent of organised crime. In the early 1970s, members of the Unification Church were used by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)  as campaign workers without compensation. LDP politicians were also required to visit the Unification Church headquarters in South Korea and attend Moon's theological lectures, regardless of their religious views or membership. In return, the Japanese authorities protected the Unification Church from legal sanctions for its often deceptive and aggressive practises. As a result, the Unification Church gained strong influence in Japan. Such a relationship was passed on to Kishi's son-in-law, former Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe, Shinzo Abe's father. The latter continued this relationship. On 8 July 2022, Shinzo Abe was shot down by Tetsuya Yamagami , a 41-year-old who was  immediately arrested. Yamagami stated that he killed Abe because this latter was connected with the Unification Church. Yamagami said he resented the fact that his mother was brain-washed by the religious group, and had gone bankrupt as a result. The killer believed the former prime minister had spread the religion to Japan . Massimo Introvigne  wrote in an article in the 'Journal of CESNUR ' that the real victim was the Unification Church, while the real killer would be the anti-cult movement that excited the weak mind of the assassin with their anti-Unification Church campaigns (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 5. Attack on secularism ) . It has been revealed that Donald Trump received around $2.5 million from the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), the new denomination of the Unification Church, to make video appearances on three occasions between 2021 and 2022, while former Vice President Mike Pence received $550,000 to speak at a UPF event. This was confirmed by the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper by obtaining official US documents and comparing them with court documents in Japan. The event took place in 2022, and the director of CESNUR Massimo Introvigne, who gave a talk at the meeting, was also funded by the UPF (figure 50 bis). Figure 54 bis - The giant picture of the CESNUR director on stage at the UPF (Unification Church) in 2022 in Seoul The relationship between Moon's church and the LDP requires a look at another spiritual phenomenon that is also linked to Japanese politics, has even founded a party and is just as powerful internationally , but enjoys a much better public image. It is the Soka Gakkai . It is a Japanese Buddhist religious movement based on the teachings of the 13th century Japanese priest Nichiren, whose third chairman Daisaku Ikeda  is the subject of a veritable personality cult. The organisation bases its teachings on an interpretation of Nichiren's Lotus Sutra that is not shared by other Buddhist movements and places the mantra of Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō  at the centre of devotional practise. The beliefs of Soka Gakkai are based on the realisation that all life has a dignity with an infinite inherent potential. This immanent Buddhahood exists in every human being and can be awakened through Buddhist practise. According to other Buddhist schools, the Soka Gakkai is not really a form of Buddhism, because instead of aiming to eliminate desires, which according to the Buddha are the cause of attachment and suffering, they are actually encouraged, with the promise that reciting a certain mantra will realise one's goals in every area, including financial, professional and sexual. As the Soka Gakkai was able to send 76 representatives to the local administrations in the 1959 elections in Japan, the CIA conducted a study  on the movement and its political views in 1963. They wrote "The amorphous character of the Gakkai's political stand, suggests that it could go either to right or left". It is a good description of populism. In fact, just one year after the CIA report, Ikeda founded a party that was also populist in name: Komeito  (Clean Government Party). Soka Gakkai is not the only religious organization that has built close relationships with political parties and lawmakers. However, there is no religious group comparable to Soka Gakkai in terms of influence and vote-gathering power. The group says they have a following of 8.27 million households in Japan. Komeito and Soka Gakkai came under concerted attack in the Diet, accused of violating the separation of religion and the state required by article 20 of the Constitution. In 1970, there was a controversy over freedom of expression because the publication of Hirotatsu Fujiwara's polemical book 'I Denounce Soka Gakkai', which severely criticised Ikeda, Soka Gakkai and the Komeito, was to be prevented. In his speech of 3 May 1970, in which he addressed Soka Gakkai members, guests and the media, among others, Ikeda responded to the controversy by apologising to the nation "for the inconvenience caused by the incident"," reaffirming the Soka Gakkai's commitment to freedom of speech and religion, and announcing a new policy of formal separation between the Soka Gakkai religious movement and the Komeito. The Komeito severed its organizational ties to Soka Gakkai, but has nonetheless remained the political arm of Sokka Gakkai  in Japan. The Komeito was then re-established in 1998 as the New Komeito (NKM) and has been allied with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) , the party close to the Unification Church, since 1999. So, the LDP is linked to both Soka Gakkai and Unification Church. 2.6 terabytes of data, 210,000 offshore companies, 11.5 million documents. These are the figures  from  the  " Panama Papers ",  data stolen by the  Panamanian  law firm Mossack Fonseca from an anonymous source ,  who  passed  them  on  to the  editors  of the  Süddeutsche  Zeitung.  In view of  the huge amount of data,  the German newspaper  was forced to ask the ICIJ (The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists), an international network of journalists from all over the world, for help. The Panama Papers are confidential documents that show how the  firm  Mossack Fonseca set up offshore companies in tax havens for people of all stripes, from politicians to common criminals, as well as international branches of credit institutions. Panama's history as a tax haven began in 1919 when it started registering foreign ships to help the American oil giant Standard Oil evade US taxes and regulations. Standard Oil led the way, and other US ship owners followed suit because they wanted to avoid higher wages and better working conditions imposed by US law. Within a few years, Panama recognised the opportunity to extend the principles it had applied to shipping, namely minimal taxes, regulations and disclosure requirements, to offshore finance. These laws attracted a long line of 'scumbags" and dictators who used Panama to hide their stolen loot, including Ferdinand Marcos, 'Baby Doc' Duvalier and Augusto Pinochet. When Manuel Noriega, the commander of the Panamanian armed forces, took power in 1983, he essentially nationalised the money laundering business by entering into a partnership with the Medellin drug cartel and giving it a free hand to operate in the country. The book edited by Trine Brox and Elisabeth Williams-Oerberg Buddhism and Business  reports on page 87 that Soka Gakkai was on Panama Papers list (see the figure above). Figure 105 - Soka Gakkai is in the Panama Papers' list If the relationship between the Soka and Panama had stopped at this, it would only have been gross dishonesty. This is not the case. In 1994, the well-known economist Yoshi Tsurumi  wrote a book, never translated from Japanese, entitled Americagoroshi no chohasso . On pages 206 one can read: When President George Bush Sr. was director of the CIA, Noriega supported him as his agent and was involved in an operation to overthrow Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro; he was also supposed to corner anti-government groups in Central America, e.g. in Nicaragua. In return, Noriega was allowed to import cocaine from Colombia to the USA, even using CIA aeroplanes (...) However, Bush senior was so astute that in 1989, as soon as he became President of the United States of America, he launched a surprise attack on Noriega. Noriega was captured and taken as a prisoner to Florida, where he was tried in secret, convicted and imprisoned in a special prison. In Noriega's confession, there was a story about Japan. It was the story that Daisaku Ikeda invested the money donated to him by his supporters in the cocaine trade in collaboration with Noriega. Ikeda continuously donated large sums of the profits to Ozawa of the Japanese LDP. (bold mine) Figure 106 - Ikeda with Noriega in the 70s In July 2018, Toni Occhiello, a former adherent of the Soka Gakkai, reached Prof. Yoshi Tsurumi by phone to have confirm what was in the text and received the reply that Tsurumi ‘stood by his statements’. A month later, Occhiello also reached the then US ambassador to Tokyo, Michael H. Armacost , a former CIA official. Asked about the circumstances reported Tsurumi in his book, the former ambassador replied: "Yes, I remember hearing about this matter at the time; and that I certainly, in my position, dealt with it".  It would therefore seem to be an established story. Bush senior then silenced Noriega and was able to use this as a stick to control Ozawa and other LDP politicians. Figure 107 - Ikeda and Noriega in the 80s This does not appear to be the only smuggling the Soka Gakkai is involved in. Former Soka Gakkai High Leader Steve Gore told how he left the organisation after stumbling through an airport checkpoint with a suitcase full of gems, which his bosses had told him they were uncut gems. Gore was arrested for smuggling, while the high-ranking Sokians calmly walked through airport security with ‘clean’ suitcases . However, the trafficking with Noriega is particularly relevant because it is set in the context of geopolitical tactics. Of particular interest, therefore, is the fact that one of the highest international officials of the Soka Gakkai is Nydia Bertran , wife of Roger Stone , a Republican political consultant. Basically the man who politically invented Donald Trump. Figure 108 - Miles Copeland As mentioned in a previous chapter ( Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists ) , in 1989  the memoirs of  Miles Copeland ,  a former  CIA officer were published. In his book ' The Game Player ' , Copeland revealed that the Agency used many religious groups as means of influence and espionage. Among the was Scientology . Unsurprisingly, the church founded by Ron L. Hubbard was seen as an excellent means of influencing people who were themselves influential. Copeland claims that a pact was also made between the CIA and Scientology, but without providing evidence or revealing the content. The use of the Mormons  also seems to have been remarkable, as Alain Gillette points out in his book ‘Les mormons. De la théocratie a Internet’. In the early 1980s, the Nicaraguan government accused the Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses of being involved in a CIA plot to overthrow the Sandinista government . Figure 109 - Press article on CIA recruitment of Mormons It has been proven that many Mormons in Finland have been connected to the CIA since the 1950s . In 1978, two journalists, Jorraa Lindfors and Jukka Rislakki, wrote in a book about the CIA's alleged links to the Mormon Church . According to the authors, "many of the young missionaries in Finland had been trained as military officers and the head of the Mormons’ international missionary work, Apostle Neal A. Maxwell , was a former CIA agent'. c) cults as external contractors Jeffrey M. Bale , renowned scholar on violent political and religious extremists and covert political operations at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies,   in the May 1991 issue of "Lobster" , clearly outlined the problem that when it comes to ‘sects’, the public's attention is focused on their power of manipulation and the abuses committed on their followers. Even when it comes to their political activities, such as support for certain parties or attempts to infiltrate administrations, the public views this with the perplexity owed to fanatical madmen and fails to realise that cults often have a genuine political agenda. This, says Baele, is exactly the case with the Unification Church. Bale then produced a dense analysis of the moonies phenomenon, concluding that In the wake of Contragate, a theme which has been constantly reiterated in the press is that of the so-called ‘privatisation’ of U.S. foreign policy. (...) At the very least, the process is better described as the ‘contracting out’ of specific tasks by government agencies to sympathetic non-governmental organizations, which should therefore be viewed as subcontractors rather than independents. Nor should one overlook the possibility that certain ostensibly private organizations are nothing more than front groups for intelligence agencies. This leads us to reflections on the role of cult apologists on the same chessboard. The same author suggested elsewhere  that CESNUR pursued a sub rosa agenda disguised as a defence of civil rights, but instead aimed to push them back in line with their own political and religious views (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network ) d) Intermezzo: a few words about Freemasonry and Gnosticism For a long time, people have sought elevation or enlightenment through knowledge. Access is gradual, from an outer to an inner circle, through a series of ritual initiations. This approach, as mentioned in the previous chapter, is characterised by esotericism. It refers to a series of spiritual teachings of a secret nature whose occult meanings are only accessible to followers who proceed according to different degrees of initiation. The best known and most influential esoteric society is Freemasonry . Modern Freemasonry, also known as speculative Freemasonry, originated in Great Britain in the 17th century and in France and other European countries in the 18th century. It sees itself as the heir to the ‘operative’ Freemasonry of the Middle Ages, i.e. the guilds of journeymen that built cathedrals. Its aim is to build the ‘Temple of humanity’. This perfection of humanity goes beyond individual perfection (in Masonic symbolism, this process is compared to the smoothing of the ‘rough stone’ until the ‘cubic stone’ useful for the construction of the temple is achieved). This process involves an initiation and a journey in stages that follow precise rites. The first three degrees (blue Freemasonry) are those of ‘Entered Apprentice', ‘Journeyman' and ‘Master Mason' and are under the control of various ‘grand lodges'. In Italy, for example, these are the ‘ Grand Orient of Italy (GOI) ’ or the ‘ Grand Lodge of Italy of the ALAMs ’. Then there are the ‘perfection rites’, which are not regulated by the various obediences, but by special international organisations. The Scottish Rite , for example, provides for 33 degrees. Soon many grand lodges in the Latin countries diverged from the main British organisation, mainly because of the obligatory Christian reference (which was rejected by the more secular, if not anti-clerical, Latin obediences). But this so-called liberal Latin Freemasonry carries far less weight than Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry. The Anglo-Saxon denominations are dominant. Of the approximately seven million Freemasons in the world, four are American. Gnosticism is the main variant of this search for enlightenment and meaning and was carried on by Christian movements in the first three centuries, which were branded as heresies. It was a very sophisticated and complex system of thought that has often been simplified and vulgarised in recent times. One of the central themes of this modern Gnosticism is that salvation is achieved through a higher form of knowledge (Gnosis) and that the material world is not the work of God, but of a demiurge, a sub-god. Man could escape the imperfection of the material world by rediscovering the divine spark within himself through the enlightenment of esoteric knowledge. These scattered movements gave rise to a very complex family tree, including the Knights Templar, certain orders of chivalry and even Freemasonry. Hence the constant references to the Temple, the Orders and the Knights, and to the Sun of Enlightenment in modern Western esotericism. As they use the same vocabulary, the boundaries between Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and the numerous Templar and solar orders are not always entirely clear. In the 18th century, some streams of Freemasonry invented a connection to the Knights Templar. The Rosicrucians inspired the highest degrees of the Grand Lodge of France (GLF). The most widely practised Masonic rite in the world is called Rosicrucian in England. The organisation known as Scientology , which was founded by a representative of the Ancient and Mystical Rosicrucian Order (AMORC) , the science fiction author Ron L. Hubbard , is no stranger to this lineage. According to journalists Ottenheimer and Lecadre, the Grand Orient de France (GOF) and the Grande Loge Nationale Francaise (GLNF) are " notoriously infiltrated by Scientology ". e) Neo-templarism Numerous journalistic and judicial investigations in both Italy and France have highlighted the frequent links between certain Masonic ‘lodges, parts of the NATO secret services and far-right movements, which have often influenced each other at different times in the political life of the two countries. The best example is the strategy of tension in Italy . For their part, the French journalists Ottenheimer and Lecadre, in their book ‘ Les Fréres Invisible ’, have well described the situation in France, where all the obediences, especially the GLNF, seem to be infiltrated by both the extreme right and members of the secret services involved in Stay Behind , the anti-communist paramilitary organisation created by the US secret services. The French authors are very helpful when it comes to understanding the colourful panorama painted by the nebula of neo-templarian and paramilitary movements, which are predominantly French-speaking and have proved very useful to the intelligence services. The case of the Order of the Solar Temple shows how useful chivalric and neo-templar groups are. These are associations that, generally without having any title or authority - invoke a form of direct derivation from religious orders of chivalry that existed during the Crusades, particularly from the Knights Templar . Today, there are thousands of official and unofficial chivalric organisations. Of the official ones, the Knights of Malta are the best known. Martin A. Lee writes that the American branch of the Order is one of the most important channels of communication between the CIA and the Vatican . In fact, the Order of Malta is able to transfer money to and from countries to which neither the CIA nor the Vatican have access. Among other things, the Order is authorised to issue diplomatic passports and, although it has no territorial connection, has diplomatic representations or its own embassies in 112 countries. The Order is full of military and intelligence agents. The head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA's predecessor, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, was a member of the Order of Malta, as was James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's head of counterintelligence. Among others, William Casey, Director of the CIA during the Reagan administration, who is considered the main organiser of the Gladio network in Italy, i.e. the network to which the members of the Order of the Solar Temple belonged and which maintained close relations with the Italian P2 Masonic Lodge, was also a Knight of Malta. If this is the nature of an official organisation such as the Knights of Malta, the contours of the countless unofficial or sideline orders of Masonic obediences, which are often ‘spurious’, seem even more obscure. The link between neo-Masonic orders and Freemasonry is due to the fact that the legend has spread in Freemasonry, especially in France and Germany, that the Knights Templar, who were officially suppressed in 1307, continued their activities until the 18th century. The persecuted knights allegedly ‘hid’ in the English and Scottish guilds of Freemasons, from whose ‘guilds‘ 'speculative’ Freemasonry would later emerge. In other words, Freemasonry would be the Order of the Temple continuing in disguise. This is also the origin of the so-called ‘Templar degrees’ of the York Rite , a classic American rite of "perfection" as well as various neo-templar associations open only to Freemasons. In 1805, Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat, a freemason of the Parisian lodge ‘Knights of the Cross’, decided to rebuild the Order of the Knights Templar and had himself proclaimed its Grand Master. In practise, the idea was born that the Knights Templar should be independent of Freemasonry. Neo-Templarism's estrangement from Freemasonry was finalised in 1811, when the Order officially distanced itself from the Grand Orient de France and at the same time abolished religious freedom by refusing membership to Protestants. in 1814, Fabré-Palaprat finally decided to merge the order with a new church with esoteric characteristics, the Johannite Church . The Gnostic creed of this new church was based on the idea - which Palaprat would have discovered in some texts that had come into his possession - that Jesus Christ would choose St John the Evangelist as his earthly successor and not St Peter; therefore the Catholic Church would be illegitimate. This led to various schisms, such as the Grand Priory of Italy, which decided not to follow Palprat‘s 'new positions’ and declared its independence and continuity with the Catholic tradition. After Palprat's death in 1838, such splits became more frequent and countless new orders emerged, claiming direct descent from the original mediaeval order. Towards the end of the century, the various orders were attracted by the revival of occultism that characterised this period. Templar-like concepts, symbolism and rituals were incorporated into various organisations of magic and occultism , the most important of which was the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), founded by the Austrian industrialist Carl Kellner, but whose fame was mainly due to the English magician Aleister Crowley , an agent of the British services who also founded an Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica . in 1932, the Order of the Temple, which had been "sleeping" according to Masonic terminology, was revived in Belgium under the name Sovereign and Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (OSMTJ) . In 1970, General Antoine Zdrojewski, former leader of the Polish resistance and now a French citizen, was elected Grand Prior of the OSMTJ. He was responsible for the mass admission of representatives of the Service d'Action Civique (SAC) to the Order. The SAC began as the security guard of the Rassemblement du Peuple Francais (RPF), the right-wing party founded by General de Gaulle in the immediate post-war years. This type of private police force was made up of former members of the Resistance and soldiers who had been active in the Algerian War, police officers and secret service agents, all loyal to the General, and its main task was to protect Gaullist candidates and provide security at RPF meetings and rallies. Over time, the SAC began to lead an autonomous life, forging links with organised crime and engaging in obscure trafficking. in 1970, the SAC created an even more clandestine organisation to be used for tasks that required greater secrecy and to make it easy to deny their involvement if something went wrong. This new organisation was named Études Techniques et Commecials (ETEC) . The head of the ETEC was Charly Lascorz, a right-wing extremist. The ETEC worked closely with various police departments, the Ministry of the Interior and the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST). The reasons for the infiltration of the self-proclaimed Templars were manifold. As the order generally appealed to the highest levels of society, it could be used to infiltrate the police, the army, the media and so on. According to Francois Audiger, author of a study on the SAC, the OSMTJ already had links to various secret services. Moreover, the new Templars were wealthy contributors to ETEC's activities, as they paid substantial membership fees and donations. The main objective of this operation, which does not exclude personal financial gains for its main actors, was to use the order to create an international neo-fascist network through neo-Templar connections around the world. In 1971, Lascorz founded the Union pour la Défence des Libertés e de Doits , which Audiger described as "a kind of explosive mixture of an extreme right-wing party and Templar Freemasonry" and which used the existing OSMTJ network to forge links with other right-wing groups throughout Europe, particularly in Germany. The OSMTJ issued diplomatic passports to SAC figures without any legitimisation. In 1972, the police raided the ETEC because it was involved in drug and arms trafficking with the organised underworld. in 1973, Zdrojewski had the French priory OSMTJ ‘put to sleep’. With the election of Giscard d'Esteing in 1974, the power of the SAC diminished considerably. On the night of 17-18 June 1981, a former SAC member and police inspector, Jacque Massié (probably also an OSMTJ Templar), was murdered in an internal feud with his wife, his eight-year-old son and three other people at his home in Auriol in Provence. This led to a commission of enquiry, which led to the closure of the SAC the following year on the orders of Mitterrand. The subsequent trial revealed that Zdrojewski had continued his activities even after the official dissolution in 1973, issuing passports in the name of the OSMTJ and - according to journalistic sources - maintaining relations between the neo-Templars associated with the SAC and the P2 . It must be said that the opaque intertwining of neo-templarism, far right and the intelligence did not begin with the takeover of the OSMTJ by the SAC in 1970. In fact, Gèrard de Sède notes in his book ‘ L'Occultisme dans la politique ’ (1994) that in the 1950s, a very important figure in French intelligence, Constantin Menlik , was part of the original Sovereign Order of the Solar Temple (SOTS) , the forerunner of the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS) . In 1960, the news leaked out and ‘France Observatoire’ wrote on 17 March (quoted in Enquête sur les extrémistes de l'occulte : de la loge P2 à l'ordre du temple solaire by Renaud Marhic, pages 201-202) that the group's activity consisted of coordinating Franco's fundamentalist Catholics in an anti-communist capacity, together with the psychological warfare department of George Sauyers' army. Melnik was the mastermind of La Main Rouge (‘the Red Hand’), a state-sponsored terrorist group that operated in particular during the Algerian War in the 1950s. Several terrorist attacks were attributed to this organisation, which operated under ‘ false flags ’, i.e. attacks that appeared to be directed against France but were actually carried out by the French state itself. Constantin Melnik had received his training at the Rand Corporation , a company whose main customer is the Pentagon. By his own admission, François de Grossouvre , a right-wing politician and SDECE agent (Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage), was decisive in his return to France in 1983. De Grossouvre was responsible for Gladio in the Lyon region. De Grossouvre later committed suicide in his office at the Elysée Palace, the residence of the French president, although many believe that he was ‘suicided’. For the purposes of our discourse, the Renewed Order of the Temple (ORT) deserves a mention among other neo-Templar groups. It was founded by Julien Origas , a representative of the AMORC , the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis , a magical movement founded in the United States but predominant in French-speaking countries, along with Raymond Bernard . Origas had neo-Nazi ideas and connections and was also in contact with the SAC. in 1981, Origas came into contact with Luc Jouret , a naturopath and neo-Hindu guru, a former paratrooper, right-wing extremist and former infiltrator of left-wing movements on behalf of the Belgian secret service. He joined the ORT in 1981. After the death of Julien Origas, Luc Jouret tried unsuccessfully to have himself recognised as the leader of the ORT. This led to a split in 1984, which resulted in the birth of the Order of the Solar Temple (OTS) , which was founded together with Joseph Di Mambro , an occultist and close associate of the French secret service. The story of the Order of the Solar Temple, which led to three massacres in Switzerland, France and Canada in 1994, 1995 and 1997 with a total of 74 deaths, remains opaque. The web, which includes the infiltration of the Canadian company Hydro-Québec , the arrest of two members for arms trafficking and even the connection to an alleged terrorist group called Q-37 , which wanted to assassinate Québec Interior Minister Claude Ryan because he was too sympathetic to the Indians' demands, is too inextricable and it would go beyond the scope of this dossier to unravel it. What is interesting instead is that there is a broad consensus among those who have looked into the case that the OTS was controlled by Western intelligence services. Among others, Jean-Marie Abgrall , an expert involved in the investigation of the massacres, declared in statements to ‘Le Point’ and ‘Nice-Matin’ in February 2003 that the sect of the Renewed Order of the Temple (ORT), the forerunner of the OTS, had links to the Gladio network. Abgrall added that there were other links between AMORC and French networks in Africa, the so-called ‘Foccart network’. According to journalist Maurice Fusier, Abgrall concluded that " the Order of the Solar Temple as well as AMORC and ORT, was created and controlled by French and foreign intelligence services ". This position is also defended by François-Xavier Verschave , who claims that the ‘collective suicides’ are linked to Gladio. Bruno Fouchereau, author of ‘ La mafia des sectes ’, wrote that Luc Jouret collaborated with the Belgian far-right activist Jean-François Thiriart . In the 1970s, the two founded an organisation whose aim was to organise a split from the Belgian Communist Party and found the Parti Communautaire Européen, which later became the Parti Communautaire National-Européen . Foucherau claimed that this Belgian "Nazi-Maoist group" was in fact controlled by the SDRA8 , the Belgian branch of Gladio. Based on its own investigations, Radio Canada claimed that Joseph Di Mambro used the Solar Temple for arms trading and money laundering activities via an Australian bank. Also linked to the Order of the Solar Temple was a ‘mythical’ figure, Yves Guérin-Sérac , the grey eminence of black terrorism in Europe, one of the masterminds of the strategy of tension in Italy and founder of Aginter Presse , the fake Portuguese press agency that functioned as the organisational centre of the subversion of democracy on a planetary scale (see Fascists, spes and gurus. 4. The black network ). This mainly francophone excursus confirms that spiritual groups are a useful instrument of intelligence. Even before the social polarisation processes we have seen (in Fascists, spies and gurus. 6. CIA cults ) and the use of these for strategies of shaping public opinion through disinformation (as we will see in Fascists, spies and gurus. 10. East Wind ), these groups can serve the secret services as a transactional tool, i.e. for the mediation, a delegation of clandestine operations, espionage, money transfer and money laundering. Another element that this Francophone overview provides us with is the confirmation of a black lace that binds together minority cults, especially those of an esoteric nature, and the intelligence services, that of the political right. If we had focused on Italy, we would have found a stronger involvement of deviant Freemasonry in this right-wing network thanks to the CIA-P2 axis (via Frank Gigliotti , as in Fascists, Spies and Gurus. 7. CIA cults ). In France, this network was mainly based on the orders of chivalry. From the end of the Second World War until the 1990s, in the Atlantic Pact, these efforts seem to have been focused on fighting communism. Now that communism has collapsed, this covert work is being directed towards other goals, and these seem to include the defence of ‘religious freedom’, not as an ultimate goal, but as a goal that serves to achieve other geopolitical objectives. Indeed, "religious freedom" enables new tools of psychological warfare. Fascists, spies and gurus. 1. Prologue (funny stuff) Fascists, spies and gurus. 2. The cult apologists Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The black network Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. Attack on secularism Fascists, spies and gurus. 5. The libertarian network Fascists, spies and gurus. 6. CIA cults Fascists , spies   and   gurus . 7 . East   wind Fascists, spies and gurus. 8. The double truth Next   chapter : Fascists, spies and gurus. 9. The double truth

Luigi Corvaglia Religious polarisation On 8 January 2023, thousands of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro raided the Congress building and also stormed the Federal Court in Brasilia to protest against the election of his rival Lula. In part a repeat of the storming of Capital Hill two years earlier by Donald Trump supporters. While in Washington many of the rioters were fundamentalist Christians and many also adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory who flaunted their affiliation on T-shirts and signs, in Brasilia most of the participants in the storming were evangelical Pentecostals who gathered and prayed amid the devastation. Some turned their rosaries towards the police riot squad. This shows how important religion is when it comes to determining the moves of the masses on the geopolitical chessboard. Figure 73 - The post by Brian Kaylor, a Baptist pastor, pointing out the role of religion in the attempted coup in Brazil in 2023 Religious soft power The term soft power was coined in the 1990s by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Nye sees it as a form of exercising power that represents an alternative to the use of military force and aims to influence public opinion, primarily through mass culture and the media. Such operations are a low-intensity but effective strategy for influencing public opinion. This is a strategy of hybrid warfare. The use of religion as a tool of influence has a long history. The CIA 's first religious tool was Catholicism, which “became the model through which intelligence agencies could understand and manipulate other world religions ” ( Michael Graziano coined the phrase). Under the guise of the Church's profound power of persuasion, the OSS, the CIA predecessor, mobilised the European population against its Nazi (and later Soviet) occupiers. However, the primacy of Catholicism, so great that the CIA was nicknamed the “ Catholic Intelligence Agency ", has waned over time. In Latin America, the Catholic continent par excellence, the Roman Church is increasingly losing ground to the various evangelical denominations. One reason for this is the fact that the position of the more conservative Evangelicals was directly supported during the Cold War by the United States , which saw the religious group as a useful bulwark against communism in Latin America, an area where liberation theology had given Catholicism a dangerous flavour. The Rockefeller Report of 1969 and the Santa Fe Declaration of 1980 illustrate the use of religion by North American intelligence in defence of American interests in South America. The Rockefeller Report states that the US must strive to win the battle for the hegemony of consciousness by exposing Latin America to the influence of the American way of life “ through the control of the traditional socializing apparatuses of civil society: family, school and church ”. The Santa Fe document , prepared for the Council on Inter-American Security and presented to the Republican Platform Committee in 1980 by a team of ultra-conservative advisors, states that “US foreign policy must begin to counter (and not react to) liberation theology as used in Latin America by liberation theology clergy.” The paper refers to the work already done in this direction: The experience gained in Vietnam through programmed population control was exported by many A.I.D. agents and other U.S. services to Latin America, particularly Guatemala. Some cults were founded by psychological warfare specialists who had been entrusted with the control of political space and hegemony over consciences. (emphasis mine) The Santa Fe document is clear and does not mince  its  words.  Through the  National SecurityAgency (NSA) ,  the United States is creating  “cults”  “ that are able to "control the  political space and the hegemony of consciences ”. In charge are “specialists in psychological warfare.” Jesus Garzia Ruiz writes in a text entitled “La notion relative aux sectes en Amérique latine ”   that in Latin America " all cults are work of the United States and are financed from abroad ." A note from  the  Mexican  Ministry of the Interior  states that Sects carry out the most subtle part of the process of domination and North Americanisation of underdeveloped societies by using religious preaching, which is part of the ideological struggle, within civil society. To support this policy, the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) , an interfaith organisation, was established in 1981 and funded by right-wing institutions, including the Smith Richardson and the Mellon Scaife Family Foundation. Both served as financial conduits for the CIA . The IRD unleashed a propaganda campaign against church activists who were at the forefront of opposing US aid to the government of El Salvador and other repressive regimes in Latin America. The project was successful. Today, the influence of evangelicals on society in these countries is enormous in terms of electoral potential. The expansion of evangelical churches in Latin America, especially the neo-Pentecostal churches, which have considerable fundings that make them more “competitive” with the Catholic Church, has contributed to the rise of “right-wing” personalities and political forces close to the interests of the economic-financial powers, especially the American ones. Behind these phenomena there seems to be a very specific strategy, which consists of replacing “left-wing Catholic” Christians (because they are interested in social issues) with “right-wing evangelical” Christians (who are very interested in moral issues, but little in social issues). There is ample evidence of US funding of all kinds of churches, Christian and non-Christian. For example, the CIA funded churches in Kerala , India, and this interference in Indian politics came to light in 1978 when the former ambassador to that country, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, published the information in his book “A Dangerous Place” In addition to the interference in Kerala, the American churches also supported the terrorists in Nagaland on a large scale. These terrorists received blatant help from the American establishment in the form of so-called human rights reports and public statements of support from high-ranking politicians like Jimmy Carter. The CIA worked with agents of DINA, the Chilean secret police, to build a very sophisticated intelligence system in Chile that utilised the Pentecostal “Message” cult and the Colonia Dignidad facility, founded as a Nazi refugee colony and run by Pastor Paul Shafer , for covert operations. Paul Shafer, a former Nazi and security agent for Pastor William Branham in Germany, worked with the DINA (Chilean secret police) to interrogate, torture and murder opponents of the Pinochet regime . Religion plays a very powerful role in culturally influencing and orienting the masses. Religions are an extraordinary instrumentum regni because they can dilute the religious identity of some population groups by creating new forms of mutual recognition (in-group) that become manoeuvrable constituencies when they are not useful for processes of social polarisation that can lead to uprisings or real revolutions. For example, Carl Gershman, director of the National Endowment for Democracy (Ned) , told the US Congress in 2018 that Ned had spent $3,381,824 on programmes prior to the 2014 popular uprising in Ukraine , which took place under the name “Euromaiden”, including support for those non-governmental organisations that fuelled the uprising. The role of the various churches and cults in the Euromaiden affair was significant. Among them were the Greek Catholics. This does not mean that Euromaiden was carried out by “sects” or “Satanists",” as has been claimed, but only that the religious element played a role in social polarisation. Two Chinese cults In 2019, the television channel NBC revealed that Donald Trump's most important advertising supporter - after his election committee - was the newspaper The Epoch Times . This is a multilingual, far-right newspaper run by the Chinese religious movement Falun Gong . Much of the newspaper's efforts are dedicated to promoting the right in America, but also in Europe , a work that has included the dissemination of false data about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 US elections . The Epoch Times is also one of the main disseminators of conspiracy theories. The most important is that of QAnon , the bizarre theory that sees Trump as the possible saviour of the world from the satanic-pedophile dome that secretly rules it. In 2020, the New York Times called the paper a “ disinformation machine of global scale .” According to Media Matters for America , the main goal of the Epoch Times - which is now published in 36 countries under the supervision of a network of non-profit organisations - is not to make a profit, but to organise a long and extensive “ influence operation ” The aim of this influence operation, in turn, is to “foment anti-Chinese Communist Party sentiment". The cult is actually being persecuted in its own country. It has been said that The Epoch Times was the main financier of Donald Trump's election campaign. However, it is not clear where Falun Gong's funding came from. Steve Bannon , the guru of Trump's New Right, has collaborated with Falun Gong in the production of a documentary for New Tang Dinasty TV (NTD) , a channel owned by the cult's holding company, and said that in conversations with these interlocutors he was under the impression that they had unlimited resources. The conclusions frequently drawn over the years, not only during Trump's presidency, about a connection between the Chinese cult and the CIA in an anti-Chinese capacity are based on sporadically filtered and reported press reports. As early as 2010, the Washington Post reported $1.5 million in funding from the US State Department for the Global Internet Freedom consortium, which is based in the US but linked to the Falun Gong spiritual movement. More recently, in 2021, the US media reported on a State Department grant to a software development team owned by Falun Gong . Oddly enough, Steve Bannon himself is involved. In June 2024, the finance director of Epoch Times, Weidong Guan, was arrested for alleged involvement in a multi-year money laundering scheme involving at least 67 million dollars in illegally acquired funds. According to the indictment, Guan allegedly used a cryptocurrency platform to purchase prepaid cards with illicit funds, including unemployment benefits, at a discount. Interestingly, following the arrest of the finance director, Falun Gong spiritual leader Li Hongzhi wrote two articles that appear to be aimed directly at the media company's leadership and were published prominently on the Epoch Times homepage: You were thinking that it’s hard to fight the CCP’s persecution without funds, and wanted to make money for this cause; and that the U.S. government would be understanding if something wasn’t handled quite right - Li wrote in an article published on 5 June  - But that was your own thinking. The  Falun Gong leader,  who  apparently  distances  himself from the  newspaper's leadership ,   which  allegedly  orchestrated  the scam without his knowledge, describes the publication 's  mission (to  fight  the CCP's persecution of Falun Gong) and refers to the complacency that this leadership would have expected from the U.S. government in case the illicit operation became known.  On what premise should a  money  laundering activity  conducted  by a Chinese cult would have met with  such  complacency?  So the  New York  District 's investigation  was embarrassing. Figure 74 - The tab dedicated to the founder of Safeguard Defenders on the Epoch Times website. However, in order to understand how a work of influence takes place, I am reporting here on a fact that is small (but perhaps not even that small) but extremely significant from the point of view of international political relevance: In 2022, the main international, but mainly Italian and Canadian newspapers published an alarming news story about the proliferation of secret Chinese police stations scattered around the world, tasked with monitoring compatriots abroad. This alarm was based on a report by the Madrid-based non-governmental organisation Safeguard Defenders , whose leading figure is Peter Dahlin, who co-founded it with Michael Caster. A quick Google search was all it took to find out that Dahlin writes for the Epoch Times (Figure 74). Does this mean that the issue of the Chinese police stations is a fake? We cannot say. It may very well be true as far as a person outside of this intelligence dynamic could know. However, it should be noted that national and supranational agencies and bodies are also acting on the basis of information coming from organisations linked to a cult that has been described as a disinformation machine on a global scale . However, another Chinese cult has come to the fore undermining Falun Gong. This is the Church of Almighty God , also known as the Lightning of the East , which is considered the most persecuted religious movement in the world . The financing of this cult, too, is also unknown. It must be much larger than that of Falun Gong, because this movement, which worships the reincarnation of Jesus Christ in a Chinese woman, is known for an intense artistic production that includes films, songs, ballets, musicals and various shows of dizzying quantity and outstanding quality. It is unclear where the Church of Almighty God, a minority and persecuted cult, gets the huge sums of money needed to produce such a large amount of artistic material, produced with great professionalism (among other things, translated into almost every language in the world, in which it is dubbed with equal professionalism). This is an immense commitment from people such as directors, actors, scriptwriters, set designers, authors, dancers, choreographers, costume designers, singers, translators, dubbing actors, cameramen, editors, etc. The money required is enormous and the organisation complex: logistical difficulties, studios, rehearsal times that are incompatible with the daily work of a non-professional, etc. Video 2 - One of the thousands of ballets and musicals produced by the Church of Almighty God One of the stars of these films is Li Yanli, who staged a suicide attempt at Madrid airport on 3 November 2023 to avoid being deported to China. Although she was a follower of a cult that was far from Catholicism, she was supported by a broad front of Catholic extremism that managed to collect over 60,000 signatures to present a petition to the judges to grant the actress political asylum. Part of this broad front was the association “ Abogados Cristianos ”, an ultra-Catholic lobby closely linked to the far-right party Vox , but also to such fundamentalist lobbies as CitizenGo , HazteOir or El Yunque , of which HazteOir appears to be only a screen-organization . In 2021, Wikileaks published “ The Intolerance Network ", ” consisting of 17,000 documents revealing the relationships between CitizenGO, HazteOir, the far-right party Vox and the occult organisation El Yunque . The latter is a Mexican secret society organised as a paramilitary corps with the aim of restoring the Kingdom of Christ. Basically the same agenda as Tradition, Family and Property. It is therefore interesting to read what is written about the situation in Spain in the report “ Modern-Day Crusaders in Europe ", prepared for the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights: [...] in 2003 a new organisation called Hazte Oir appeared which seems to fit many of the characteristics often associated with TFP  (see section 5), including: grass-roots mobilisation combined with fundraising, multiplicity of branding, youth outreach, the same US contacts, intense contact with other TFP organisations and, finally, exercising traditionalist pressure on the Catholic Church. It diverges from  TFP  characteristics primarily in its branding, and, while Catholic-inspired, Hazte  Oir is by no means a religious movement, and there are no references to Corrêa de  Oliveira. Hazte  Oir (literally, ’make yourself heard’) plays a watchdog role on Spanish political life and launched a social mobilisation platform “ CitizenGo ” which would appear to be a 21st century digital version of the direct mailing techniques TFP pioneered in the 1970s (see section 8). Hazte Oir may be the reincarnation of TFP-Covadonga (name of the Spanish branch of TFP, ed.) under a new set of circumstances where there are limits as to how openly it may display its affiliations in Spain26 (see section 6). Whether Hazte Oir is formally part of the TFP family or not, it shares many of the characteristics of  TFP  organisations and occupies the same niche. (Bold mine) After all, representatives of another organisation that is closely linked to the TFP via Alleanza Cattolica (see the fourth part of this report ), namely the Centre for the Study of New Religions (CESNUR), expressly apologise to CitizenGo and also describe it as a “ meritorious organisation ". We know about the persecution to which the Church of Almighty God is subjected by the Chinese Communist Party mainly thanks to an Italian publication issued by the think tank CESNUR, which emerged from Alleanza Cattolica. It is called Bitter Winter . Not that the backers of Bitter Winter, a daily magazine in eight languages with news from China, a country from which it is not easy to export news, and which is published by a non-profit organisation based in Turin, CESNUR, are clear either. But the news about religious persecution in China used by the US State Department is that of the Turin-based magazine. The Department, whose documents represent the official US position and are supposed to guide US policy, openly admits in its report on religious freedom that much of the information comes from Bitter Winter. Its editor, Massimo Introvigne, rightly boasts of this and writes Readers of Bitter Winter will forgive us if we mention that, in the section on China, Bitter Winter remains, as it was in the report of last year , the single most quoted source. We were quoted 74 times in 2020. The quotes became 85 in 2021. It is evident that the sources accessed by the Catholic Lawyer's magazine are more reliable than those accessed by the US intelligence services. In an exchange on Facebook between a member of the Italian “anti-cult” community and Introvigne, faced with the paradox that Bitter Winter could have more information than the American services, Introvigne commented with a short text containing the following statements: “I have known the people who produce these reports for decades" and “there are people in China, but not only there, who prefer to pass on information to scholars who do not work for American government agencies or those of other countries”. With this, the editor of CESNUR and Bitter Winter confirms both the direct and long-standing knowledge of the report writers and that his magazine actually knows more than the CIA because Chinese citizens are willing to talk to its editors rather than the agencies the magazine will later report to anyway. The post lasted the minutes it took the author to realise that it was inappropriate to leave it online and delete it. However, the screenshot was photographed before it was deleted (Fig. 75). A few days later, returning to the same topic on the same social network, the director of CESNUR had a new fit of unbridled self-congratulation, going so far as to boast that “a small magazine published in Turin has become the main source of official documents on religion in China from the most important country in the world” (Fig. 76). Figure 75- Introvigne writes that the Chinese talk to his magazine and not to government agencies Figure 76 - Introvigne confirms that Bitter Winter is the most important source on religion in China for the USA. It is therefore ironic that a magazine and an organisation capable of such intelligence capabilities should fall for a hoax such as the one perpetrated on it by a Ukrainian pseudo-scientist: Oleg Maltslev . This is the leader of an Odessa-based organization with whom CESNUR developed an instant affectionate relationship and for whom it gave in to an exculpatory impulse after this organization came under heavy criticism in 2014 from Russian and Ukrainian anti-cult associations. According to a well-known script, the exchange of cordiality and appreciation then began between CESNUR and the leader of the group vilified by the evil anti-cultists, Maltslev. A monographic issue of CESNUR's magazine was dedicated to him in 2018. The monographic issue was preceded by an exchange of courtesy visits in 2016. Malstlev had first been invited to the CESNUR headquarters in Turin, and then the CESNUR director had returned the favour with a visit to Odessa , where he gave a lecture to Maltslev's supporters on the blatantly discriminatory actions of the anti-cult movement . The CESNUR director reportedly called Meltslev “a scientist whose scientific research deserves much attention”; the Ukrainian instead referred to the Italian as a star of great magnitude that “shining in the sky of Odessa”. In 2024, things took a turn for the worse: Ukrainian law enforcement and security services gathered evidence of psychological abuse, blackmail, threats and harassment against supporters and journalists after a lengthy investigation. Those who questioned Maltslev's authority, his titles (which were apparently all fake) and his merits were harshly persecuted on social networks, for example by spreading accusations of paedophilia accompanied by edited audio and video files. In addition, many people who were persecuted by Maltslev's organisations were bombarded with calls with threatening content from unknown numbers. One person died of a heart attack as a result. But that's nothing. On 1 September, almost six months late, the Ukrainian press reported that on 5 March law enforcement officers had arrested the closest associate of the “guru'”, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper “Unsolved Crimes” (one of the organisation's productions) Konstantin Slobodyanyuk, and taken him to a pre-trial detention centre. The latter was accused of an impressive series of crimes. These include the payment of bribes to an official, criminal conspiracy and illegal burglary of computer equipment, but above all high treason under martial law (Part 2 of Article 111 of the Ukrainian Criminal Code). For the latter offence, he and Malstlev himself, who was on the run, face a life sentence. The intelligence investigation revealed that Oleg Maltsev had set up a spy organisation that worked for the Russian enemy . It was a full-fledged sabotage unit consisting of 23 people, including an assault group, a sniper, a reconnaissance group, an operational support group and even a communications officer. This story is ironic for two reasons. The first reason is that the “anti-cult movement” have been accusing them of being close to Russia by cult apologists for years. So being caught by the Ukrainian security services in the vicinity of a traitor working for the Russian enemy is just as embarrassing as a conservative being caught red-handed with a tranny. This guy will of course be able to say: “I did not know that",” and if he is not particularly bright, there is also a risk that it is true. The second element that makes me smile is that the director of CESNUR, who likes to describe me as “sometimes funny but not brilliant” - as is common among academics - said that CESNUR's magazine, Bitter Winter, would be able to gather much more information about the misdeeds of the Chinese Communist Party than the CIA. However, it had failed to realise that the group they were exchanging mutual appreciation, besides being (it seems) a criminal syndicate, was also working for Russia. They also were betrayed. Funny, but not brilliant. Figure 77 - Oleg Maltslev and Massimo Introvigne at CESNUR in Turin, 2016 If you want a little amusement, you can read Willy Fautré's (HRWF) heartfelt defence of Maltslev, who is allegedly the victim of a conspiracy. Among the hilarious things expressed in his article, Fautré cites as the most likely of the hypotheses about the architects of the plot against poor Maltslev the martial arts schools, which would have been very concerned about the new form of fighting invented by the Ukrainian “scientist”. No kidding. It is written here: Ukraine, Suspicion of Fabrication of a Criminal Case . The less authoritative newspaper publishing this piece of journalism is an old acquaintance, The European Times , the publication linked to Scientology (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 1. Prologue ). Back to China. One of the most horrific accusations levelled at the Chinese Communist Party is that it harvests organs from living people (or kills them to harvest their vital organs), especially from “prisoners of conscience” such as followers of Falun Gong and the Church of Almighty God. According to a 2017 Washington Post report , investigations and reports have refuted the claim that China is currently secretly performing 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants per year. Data compiled by US-based Quintiles IMS showed that China's demand for immunosuppressant drugs, which are needed to prevent patients' bodies from rejecting transplanted organs, was roughly equal to the number of transplants China said it was performing. On 14 November 2018, Mark Field of the UK Foreign Office responded to a specific question in a debate on the issue in the House of Commons in London: “We disagree with claims of systematic organ harvesting from political prisoners of conscience, assessing that the evidence they present does not substantiate that claim.” A similar position was taken by Australia. However, a London-based independent tribunal called the China Tribunal - Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China has confirmed the veracity of organ harvesting. This body was founded by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC) . However, if you look at ETAC's website, you will find that many members of its “ management ” have close ties to the Epoch Times, the Falun Gong newspaper! If you go through the list of ETAC management, these Falun Gong connections appear in almost all of them. ETAC is clearly a Falun Gong front organisation . Of course, this does not mean that the findings and conclusions of this tribunal are necessarily false, but its vaunted independence does. The problem is that it is the judgement of this tribunal that Bitter Winter refers to in his articles on this subject. Let us remember that Bitter Winter is the main source of information on China for the US State Department. Meanwhile, the influence of Bitter Winter also seems to be having an effect in Italy. This is evidenced by the fact that, as Introvigne himself writes on the website of HRWF , the Belgian organisation chaired by Willy Fautrè, more and more followers of the Church of Almighty God (CAG) are finding asylum in Italy precisely because of the magazine. Interestingly, Italy is the main refugee country for the Chinese cult. Introvigne writes: On June 14, in an exemplary decision judging a CAG asylum seeker, represented by specialized lawyers Amalia Astory and Laura Bondi, as deserving “the higher level of protection” in Italy, the Tribunal of Rome answered the question by mentioning as “reliable sources” “Bitter Winter,” reports by the U.S. and other governments that quote “Bitter Winter,” and a statement by the late sociologist  PierLuigi Zoccatelli , who was deputy director of  CESNUR , “Bitter Winter”’s parent organization. Reference is made to the case of a woman who was refused asylum at first instance in 2018. The author speculates that the court was influenced by Chinese propaganda. That may be, but the real objection was that it was not credible that in a closed, non-democratic, high-tech surveillance country, an influx of believers from a church persecuted by the government into Italy, all of whom with their proper passports, was possible. It was Bitter Winter's men who made it clear to the court that corruption of officials is extremely widespread in China and therefore it is not very difficult even for members of the Church of Almighty God to obtain a passport to leave the country. On what basis did they prove this? Introvigne says: Quoting Italian government sources, which in turn refer to “Bitter Winter,” “a study by sociologist Pier Luigi Zoccatelli,” and the U.S. State Department reports on  religious liberty (which also quoted “Bitter Winter”) […] Oh, okay then... Bitter Winter not only informs the West about China's persecution of spiritual minorities, but also campaigns vigorously against the “ anti-cult narrative ” promoted by organisations it assumes are linked to the governments of France, Russia and China. Another conspiracy the editors are keen to address is the artificial origin of the coronavirus , which allegedly escaped from a Chinese laboratory. It may be a coincidence, but a recent study conducted by the University of Urbino has shown that most of the nodes of the disinformation network about the Covid 19 pandemic in Italy lead directly to the website of the Church of Almighty God. Certainly, some doubts about the reliability of Bitter Winter, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not have it, have instead been expressed by sources that have no connection with the Chinese government, which could have an advantage in discrediting the magazine. For example, from a Korean Protestant publication (see screenshot below) and from the website BZBriefs , which is affiliated with China Source, a non-profit Christian “ministry” based in the U.S. that seeks to reduce the CCP's pressure on Christian churches. These critics speculate about a connection between Bitter Winter and the Church of Almighty God. It must be said that China Source later rectified its claim by publishing that it understood that Bitter Winter is not connected to the Church of Almighty God in private discussions with Bitter Winter . However, no one dares to speculate with whom this church is in turn connected. Figure 78 - An articles on the korean site "Church Eresy" debunking Bitter Winter. We only know that the persecutions of the CCP, real and alleged, are absolutely useful in demonstrating the godlessness of the Chiana government. There is one small problem, however: what  is going  on in China is hard to know. But that's  not a problem for Bitter Winter. The magazine is a useful megaphone of persecution. Ifit  did  not  exist ,  the  American services would have had to invent it. Video 3 - Massimo Introvigne on TV 2000 (Italy) in October 2023. The journalist hints at his relationship with the secret services Appendix: Italy and the fabulous Frank Gigliotti In an article that appeared in the ‘San Diego Union' on 23 January 1947, it was reported that the evangelical pastor Frank Gigliotti , who lived in La Mesa near San Diego, had received a letter from the Italian government informing him that the commission charged with drafting the constitution of the new republican state had adopted the 'religious freedom' amendment he had proposed on 19 December 1946. The thing did not stop there. In March of the same year, Gigliotti travelled to Italy to work personally on the articles of the Italian constitution concerning religious freedom. The ‘San Diego Union reported on 17 July that the respected citizen had returned home after drafting the articles of the Italian constitution. It is very strange that an American citizen, who holds no institutional position, would lay his hand on the constitution of a foreign country. And yet it was again the San Diego Union that reported on 6 October 1970 that the Italian state had awarded Gigliotti the Republic's Medal of Merit for his help in founding the Republic itself. In the article, Gigliotti stated: "I helped to draft Articles 17, 18 and 19 of the Italian Constitution, which deal with freedom of assembly, religion and association". But who was the man who was called ‘ the fabulous Frank Gigliotti ’? Antonio Nicaso , an essayist and expert on organised crime, explains this in an interview with journalist Ferruccio Pinotti for the book ‘Fratelli d'Italia’ (BUR, 2007): Figure 79 - Article in the San Diego Union about the receipt of the news of the authorisation of his emendation by Frank B. Gigliotti Frank Bruno Gigliotti was a Protestant pastor of Calabrian origin, but grew up in the United States. He first came into contact with the OSS, the Office of Strategic Service, and then with the CIA. in 1942, Gigliotti and the OSS founded the American Committee for Italian Democracy, which was supported by the Sons of Italy, an organisation of Mafiosi and secret agents who were preparing the landing in Sicily. Lucky Luciano also hired the very young Michele Sindona to connect the OSS with Sicilian mafia bosses. Gigliotti had so much influence that he forced Italian Freemasonry - which had just been resurrected after the hostilities of Fascism - to accept the secret lodge of Prince Alliata di Montereale from Palermo into its ranks in exchange for the return of Palazzo Giustiniani [the palace, the historic seat of Freemasonry, had been acquired by the state after Freemasonry had been banned under Fascism. Author's note]. Prince Alliata di Montereale was investigated for the Portella delle Ginestre massacre - and acquitted in a preliminary trial. In 1947, Gigliotti was the architect of the first recognition of the Grand Orient of Italy of Palazzo Giustiniani, which was to become the mother house of Lodge P2 , by the prestigious Northern Circumscription of American Freemasonry. In other words, Frank B. Gigliotti was a CIA agent and Freemason who was active in Italy in the immediate post-war period. He became famous among historians for his reconstruction of Italian Freemasonry as an organisation subordinate to the American one. It is widely agreed that this work was part of the US plan to combat communism. In fact, the American secret services had found in Freemasonry, the Catholic Church, the Mafia and the ex-fascists the ideal allies to fight communism in the Western country with the largest communist party (and bordering the Soviet bloc). As Nicaso says, "some American lodges had been active in Italy since 1941, in association with the OSS, whose leaders were all Scottish Rite Freemasons and members of knightly orders". In 1960, Gigliotti promoted the union of the masonic obedience Grand Orient of Italy (GOI) with the Supreme Council of the Most Serene Grand Lodge of the ALAM of the Sicilian Prince Giovanni Alliata di Montereale (whose name would be associated with the events of the Borghese coup , the Rosa dei venti and the Mafia organisations, in addition to the Portella delle Ginestre massacre ), which later ended in the P2 lodge . The commission on P2 led by Tina Anselmi wrote: It seems that the union of the Grand Orient with the strongly conservative Freemasonry of Alliata was the condition that Gigliotti, fuelled by a visceral anti-communism, set in exchange for American intervention in the negotiations with the Italian government over Palazzo Giustiniani [... from these events it is clear not only that the project of unifying Italian Freemasonry does not seem to correspond only to domestic interests, but also that Gelli appeared on the scene after Gigliotti's disappearance, in a chronological order and with an identity of functions that are not without significance. This is not enough. Sergio Flamigni  writes in ‘ Trame Atlantiche ’ that Among the conditions that Frank Gigliotti dictated to Italian Freemasonry in order to gain the recognition of US Freemasonry and thus obtain American support for the recapture of Palazzo Giustiniani was permission to establish extraterritorial American lodges in Italy [...] Daniele Ganser writes in his book ‘ Nato's Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe ’, that Licio Gelli , the later Venerable Master of the P2 lodge , was personally recruited by Gigliotti to fight the communist front with the support of the CIA. The relationship between P2 and the strategy of tension in Italy and the involvement in the operations of Gladio , NATO's secret anti-communist structure, is history. All this is acquired knowledge. Instead, Gigliotti's in some ways even more disturbing work as ghostwriter of the articles of the Italian Constitution concerning religious freedom remains rather obscure. Here too, it is difficult to imagine that the interests at stake were exclusively ‘domestic', that Gigliotti's work was aimed solely at defending the rights of Italian citizens. The commitment seems inappropriate, out of scale for a simple pastor and characterised by an exaggerated and ostentatious zeal. Thus we read in ‘L'Unità’ of 15 January 1950 that the Reverend Frank Gigliotti, Presbyterian pastor of Lemon Greve (California), declared that 'American Protestants will declare war on the Italian government if the persecution of Italian Protestants is not curbed". The issue of ‘religious freedom’ is used in politics as a weapon of blackmail and intimidation. This allows to retrodate the decision to regard religious freedom as a fundamental objective of American foreign policy, as enshrined in the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. The CIA's contiguity with the Vatican, which went so far as to nickname the agency ‘Catholic Intelligence Agency’, was not convenient for it to remain exclusive, just as it was not favourable for it to remain exclusive with the political parties of the far right. It was no coincidence that Gigliotti was responsible for the split of Giuseppe Saragat 's Socialist Party of Italian Workers (PSLI) , later the Italian Social Democratic Party (PSDI) , from the Italian Socialist Party in 1947. The PSI, led by Nenni, represented maximalism with a revolutionary matrix close to the PCI, while the wing represented by Saragat was reformist. The fact that Frank Gigliotti was behind this split is confirmed by many. Penny Lernoux writes in ‘ In Banks We Trust :Bankers and Their Close Associates: The CIA, the Mafia, Drug Traders, Dictators, Politicians and the Vatican ’ that ‘according to a former prominent Italian Freemason, the split in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), from which the Italian Social Democratic Party (PSDI) emerged, "was “entirely provoked by the Freemasons in the United States and Italy”' (p. 201). Giuseppe Casarrubea , a scholar of relations between the Mafia and the secret services, whose father was killed by the gang of the bandit Salvatore Giuliano , the author of the Portella delle Ginestre massacre, says that Frank Gigliotti was the architect of the socialist split in Palazzo Barberini under the leadership of Saragat’ ( Storia segreta della Sicilia. Dallo sbarco alleato a Portella delle Ginestre , Bompiani, 2007, p. 146). The support of the parties of the moderate left enabled those behind Gigliotti to have a variety of anti-communist forces and possible alternatives at their disposal when the facts had rendered the forces of the right useless. A good example of this was the situation that arose when President Truman supported the De Gasperi government on condition that the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was excluded. However, an eventual Christian Democrat-led government would have created a Catholic supremacy that would have been poorly tolerated by various Protestant circles overseas and would have led to a polarisation between secular and clerical forces. As Roberto Faenza and Marco Fini rightly note in ‘ Gli Americani in Italia ’, many figures such as Truman, Marshall and Welles, who were known as representatives of Freemasonry and therefore tended to defend the secularism, would have reacted to excessive clerical influence. Therefore, Gigliotti's influence - once again - helped bring Saragat into government by stemming the clerical tide to appease the US government of the day. Saragat did indeed enter the 4th De Gasperi government. The function of religious diversification is probably similar. Relying solely on the Vatican and the network of parishes is not advisable, and sometimes it may be necessary a work of influence that clash with Catholic interests. The Assemblies of God In Italy (ADI) , a Pentecostal congregation founded in 1947, to which Gigliotti and his associate Charles Fama , also a Freemason, were very close and which had links with the American Assemblies of God , benefited most directly from this. And not only that. Go to the next chapter: Fascists, spies and gurus. 8. cults and far right Fascists, spies and gurus. 1. Prologue (funny stuff) Fascists, spies and gurus. 2. Mind Games Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network Fascists, spies and gurus. 5. Attack on secularism Fascists, spies and gurus. 6. The libertarian network

Follow the money From 2008 to 2020, the major Christian conservative associations in the United States spent more than $280 million abroad. At least 90 million of that went to Europe, while the rest went to Africa and Asia. This is according to an analysis by the US investigative website OpenDemocracy , in which authors Claire Provost and Nandini Archer analysed thousands of financial records from 28 mostly Christian extremist and ultra-pro-free market US groups with strong links to the conservative, sometimes far right. In recent years, thanks in part to these investments, these groups have become increasingly influential in American and international politics. Indeed, the funds have the explicit purpose of supporting both initiatives and other satellite organisations around the world, which in turn work to influence public opinion, laws and national policies to prevent the enforcement of sexual and reproductive rights. But that's not all. Among the aims of all these organisations, the protection of “ religious freedom ” is of great importance The list of 28 groups under consideration includes the Acton Institute , the Alliance Defending Freedom , the Family Research Council , the Federalist Society , the American Center for Law and Justice , the Heritage Foundation , the Cato Institute and the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property . The latter is nothing other than the American branch of the Brazilian organisation for the defence of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), which was founded by Plinio Correa de Oliveira and to which the Italian traditionalist Catholic associations Alleanza Cattolica and Fondazione Lepanto refer, as we have seen ( see Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network ). From the first part of this report, we know that the main objective of this organisation since the mid-1980s has been to defend religious freedom and thus promote an anti-secular vision of society. It is therefore likely that the funds of this society - 3,123,131 dollars between 2008 and 2020 - will flow to European organisations pursuing the same goal. In Italy, the most important organisation of this kind is the Centro Studi Nuove Religioni (CESNUR) , which has emerged from a rib of Alleanza Cattolica, with which it has long shared a top figure. On the other hand, De Mattei, the head of the Lepanto Foundation, is a member of the expert panel of the Heritage Foundation and the Acton Institute , both of which are included in the list analysed by Open Democracy. Figure 66 - Press reports on Robert Sirico's arrest for holding a men's auction for a gay sadomasochist club The Acton Institute calls itself an “Institute for Religion and Liberty” and was founded in 1990 by Robert Sirico and Betsy DeVos . Sirico is an original personality. He is a Catholic priest, former member of David Berg's “ Children of God ” (notorious for sexual promiscuity and paedophilia scandals), former evangelical Pentecostal pastor, and an advocate of conservative anarcho-capitalism . he is now well established in the Vatican and in 2004, he was even one of the editors of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, the very doctrine that Sirico, a rampant anarcho-cpitalist, has fought against all his life. He was arrested in 1976 for auctioning young naked male slaves. The charge of reduction to involuntary servitude   fell  a few days later, when it was discovered that the slaves were all consenting adults who were members of a sadomasochistic organization called Leather Fraternity . Betsy DeVos is part of the family that owns Amway . Amway is a multinational multi-level marketing (MLM) company that distributes various soaps and detergents and whose executives are militant evangelicals closely aligned with the American economic, political and military right who claim to speak directly with God. The Acton Institute is headquartered in the same city as Amway, Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Institute is a member of the Atlas Network , a large network of Christian pro-free market organisations. The organisation has been described as a “self-replicating think tank that creates think tanks” Major US think tanks that belong to the network include the Cato Institute , the Heartland Institute (which is dedicated to refuting climate change), the Heritage Foundation (which is particularly opposed to abortion and LGBT rights) and the American Legislative Exchange Council . Figure 67- Relationships of the DeVos family to foundations and organisations of the American Christian and right-wing pro-free market wing This flow of money to Europe is driven primarily by two groups that focus their battles on the courts. One is the organisation American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) , led by Trump's personal lawyer Jay Sekulow, and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) . The latter boasts Betsy DeVos 's family among its founders. “Although both the ACLJ and the ADF” ”present themselves as simple human rights organisations," says IRPI Media , " their aim is actually much more political: they protect conservative positions similar to the ultra-Catholic world. The ability to intervene in European and international courts is in reality a tool for lobbying and influencing national regulations.” Both groups are part of Agenda Europe , an informal network of associations that came together in January 2013 with the aim of building a Christian-inspired European think tank and supporting the “pro-life” movement in Europe. This was reported by the EPF in a report summarising documents from this network, which were kept secret until 2017 and published following a leak from a still anonymous source. It is interesting to note that while the foundations listed are an expression of the neo-conservative world of the USA, Agenda Europe's donors include Alexey Komov , a representative of the Russian Orthodox Church, who is supported by the far-right Russian multimillionaire and oligarch Konstantin Malofeev , who was also officially responsible for the foundation's international projects. Malofeev is the chairman of the board of directors of Tsargrad (Imperial City), a platform used by such people as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and far-right political analyst Aleksandr Dugin . Since 2014, Malofeev and his companies are designated to the lists of individuals sanctioned during the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine maintained by the European Union, United States, and Canada. In September 2019, the Bulgarian government banned him from entering the country for ten years over an alleged spying conspiracy aimed at turning the country away from its pro-Western orientation and further toward Moscow. On the visible level, there is currently probably a rift between CESNUR and other groups, that nonetheless come from the same root of TFP, about Russia. CESNUR director Introvigne told the Catholic magazine ' La bussola quotidiana ' the following: The fact that Russia behaves well towards the LGBT lobby and fundamentalist Islam does not justify its aggressive and expansionist policies in the West, and at the same time condemning these expansionist policies does not diminish the appreciation for the fight against the gay lobby and fundamentalist Islam that Russia is waging. The closeness to the US government repeatedly professed by Introvigne places CESNUR in an undeniable Atlanticism. It is surely to be found in this that the well-known study centre, which always presents itself as the defender of whatever cult is the subject of public disrepute, has not said a word about the pro-Russian cult AlltRa : At the level of deep dynamics, however, the situation is far less clear. The close links between this world and Russia are obvious. It seems that some American freedom foundations serve as a clearing house for interests that converge despite the diversity of ideologies. It has been said that TFP has taken a strong Atlanticist position, followed by its Italian sisters, such as AC and its offshoot CESNUR. From this position, its representatives allow themselves to accuse the FECRIS of collaborating with Russia simply because a Russian, Alexander Dvorkin, was its vice president for a long time (and there is photographic evidence of my acquaintance with him! ). Yet, it seems quite certain that the Polish branch of TFP, the Ordo Iuris Association, has regular dealings with and is funded by the Kremlin . The World Congress of Families (WCF) , in which the Polish section of TFP has participated so often, is a cyclical event that brings together an international group of ultra-conservative organisations opposed to women's rights and LGBT rights. It was initiated in 1995 by a Russian and an American, Anatoly Anatov and Allan Carlson. The World Congress of Families acts as a platform for far-right religious and social groups. On its website, Ordo Iuris presents a list of “partner organisations” including, for example, the ' Catholic Institute for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam) '. C-Fam is headed by Austin Ruse. Thanks to a hacker group called Shaltai Boltai, which hacked the inbox of Alexey Komov and his boss, the oligarch Malofeev, we know that Ruse was on the guest list for the Kremlin congress known as the "Black International”. The following scan comes from the list of 357 guests invited by Russians to the Kremlin congress: figure 68 - The scan from the list of guests at the Kremlin's "Black International" According to the BuzzFeed News portal , the list shows that “Russian nationalists and social conservatives appear to be working together to use connections with ‘pro-family’ organizations in the United States and around the world to promote Russia's geopolitical agenda. The Guardian writes that Austin Ruse has praised Malofeev for “ working to bring Russian Orthodox and US Christianity closer together ”. Despite the stance of some organizations close to parts of the US government, the positions in the culture war become more nuanced when the goals coincide. Religious right and the defense of cults This whole world of Christian fundamentalists and enemies of sexual freedoms and self-determination is strangely interested in the defence of cults that are furthest removed from Christian orthodoxy. To give an example, the Conservative Summit 2024 held in Bratislava, Slovakia, featured OndřejDostàl among the speakers. He is a a Czech politician but also a representative of the Creative Society , a project of the AllatRa cult. Ján Figeľ is a Slovakian politician with links to CitizenGo , a Spanish fundamentalist association, which is particularly committed to the defence of religious freedom and is close to both Scientology and the Unification Church . He is a key figure of Agenda Europe . Figure 69 - Ján Figeľ was the moderator of a public event on how to achieve peace between Russia and Ukraine organised by AllatRa. Below left is the logo and name of the Universal Peace Federation (Unification Church) In 2022, he participated in the symposium " Religious Freedom: A Human Right Under Attack ," co-organized by Figeľ's Tunega, Púčik and Tesár Foundation with the Universasl Peace federation (Unification Church). Aaron Rhodes  ( Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe) was among the speakers. Aaron Rhodes  served as Executive Director of the   International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights   (IHF)  that is said to be infiltrated by Scientology . Rhodes is also a member of the Common Sense Society , an organisation full of pro-Russians. I n 2023, Ján Figeľ together with Willy Fautré (HRWF), Massimo Introvigne (CESNUR) and Aaron Rhodes ( Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe) , signed a letter to Japanese Prime Minister Kishida in defence of the Unification Church . A month earlier, together with Massimo Introvigne, he had already spoken out in favour of this issue at the International Summit for Religious Freedom ( as stated on the church's own website ) . Figure 70 - Some of the participants at the Conservative Meeting 2024 in Bratislava, Slovakia The Citizens Commission for Human Rights (CCHR) , a well-known Scientology front organisation, funded Paul Weyrich's American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) , according to a letter from CCHR board member Carol Steinke. A branch of Paul Weyrich's American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) also honoured the wife of Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the Unification Church , Hak Ja Han Moon. The award was presented by Robin Brunelli, president of the National Foundation for Women Legislators  and wife of Sam Brunelli, ALEC director and long-time CNP member. In an AFN radio interview by Kelleigh Nelson with Chey Simonton, the far-reaching connections between the Council for National Policy (CNP) and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church  were discussed at length. As we have seen in part four of this report , Moon's Unification Church helped the Reagan administration fund the Nicaraguan Contras as part of the secret plan for which former USCIRF  Chairman Abrams was convicted. Figure 71 - The signatories of the letters in defense of the Unification Church ( Willy Fautré, Ján Figeľ, Massimo Introvigne, Aaron Rhodes ) as they appear in the CESNUR magazine Bitter Winter In 2020, Figel' founded the Clementy Group LTD . It is based in London and its sole purpose is to fund the Clementy Foundation. Their mission? "Youth mindset enhancement", "Forstering a sustainable peace in Europe" and "Nature preservation". Here are the members of the board besides Figel': Pierre Louvrier . Belgian. Investigations by journalists revealed that he was involved in business with the Russian oligarch Malofeev. Sigmar Gabriel . German. Former Vice-Chancellor of Germany, former SPD Minister for Economic Affairs and Foreign Affairs. He is considered a Gazprom lobby. Mick Mulvaney. US Citizen. Former director of the Office of Management and Budget under Trump administration, then Trump's Chief of Staff . He was involved in the Trump-Ukranian scanda l , cospirationist reguarding COVID. Domenico Giani . Italian. Ex Vatican's longtime security chief and Pope Francis' with a past for the Italian secret services. He  resigned in 2019 over leaks related to an investigation into alleged financial wrongdoing in the Vatican. Nothing is known about the LTD's economic activities, nor how they intend to implement the "youth mindset"and "nature preservation". At the 2014 summit of Agenda Europe, Gudrun Kugler and Paul Coleman of Alliance Defending Freedom International emphasised the need for network organisations to accredit themselves with all relevant institutions and to keep each other informed about what is happening at the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OECD) and the European Court of Human Rights. All of this sounds very familiar to those involved in the fight against totalitarian cults. Those who, like the author, are involved in combating organisations that defend totalitarian cults on the international stage, observe the coordinated lobbying of associations “in defence of religious freedom” at the OSCE and the Council of Europe. This coordination “strangely” includes “study centres", which should be theoretically avalutative and scientifically aseptic, and even the Church of Scientology . The photo below (Fig. 72) was taken in October 2023 at a meeting of the OSCE Human Rights Office in Warsaw and shows a briefing attended by high-ranking representatives of Scientology and the directors of two of the best-known European associations for the defence of religious freedom, namely the Belgian organisation Human Rights Without Frontiesr (HRWF) and the French Coordination of Associations and Individuals for Freedom of Conscience (CAP LC) . This is roughly the same line-up that took part in a meeting on religious freedom at the European Parliament in Brussels about a month later (see Fig. 22). Figure 72 - The briefing of top Scientology officials with presidents of religious freedom advocacy organizations at the OSCE Warsaw 2023 meeting Lee Fang writes that the “libertarian” network that funds European organisations is itself subsidised by the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy . The latter is an essential arm of American soft power. It is therefore “a silent extension of US foreign policy” The prototype of all these associations is the John Birch Society , which was already mentioned in the fourth part of this dossier . It was the channel that made it possible to avoid the direct financing of “dirty” operations by the secret service to the Aginter press. It is likely that the organisations linked to Atlas and the DeVos family perform the same functions in relation to spiritual groups, study centres and non-governmental organisations involved in the defence of “religious freedom", aimed at reorienting public opinion by creating a benevolent view of minority cults and lobbying powerfully in supranational contexts to prevent the law of modern secular states from interfering with the actions of these cults. The Vicar Regent of Alleanza Cattolica himself, Introvigne, wrote in his book “Una battaglia nella notte” (2008) about the TFP that the American TFP maintains close relations with the world of conservative foundations in the USA (page 210). To understand that there is more than just mutual appreciation between conservative foundations and think tanks and organizations of cults and their apologists, one only has to think of the network at the centre of which was the late Paul Weyrich . The latter, an Austrian-born traditionalist Catholic, founded both the Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation , of which he was president, the International Policy Forum (IPF) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) , described as “the largest bipartisan organization of legislators dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism”. Above all, however, Weyrich was one of the founders and one of the most important members of the Council for National Policy (CNP) . This is a secret organisation described by the New York Times as “a little-known club of a few hundred of the country's most influential conservatives” who meet three times a year behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference. Weyrich and other CNP members actively collaborated with Plinio de Oliveira 's Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) . It was at the suggestion of Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira and inspired by the example of the TFP, that Paul Weyrich founded the International Policy Forum (IPF). This alliance of conservative associations was conceived by Paul Weyrich and chaired by Morton Blackwell. “The construction of a transnational New Right,” writes Bemjamin A. Cowan , "took place through organizations specifically created for this purpose. [...] The International Policy Forum (IPF) was one such organization, perhaps the paradigmatic example. [...)]. Representatives of TFP were pioneers in networking with similar organisations in Northern America, a collaboration that laid the foundations for the establishment of a transnational New Right . To summarise, there is an intricate international network, including US government commissions, controversial cults and conservative think tanks, which appears to work in synergy and whose members appear to support each other, albeit discreetly and behind the useful fig leaf of “religious freedom. Geopolitics consists of three forms of action: a) a hard and visible action, which consists of political or economic antagonism up to and including war; b) a hard but less visible action, because it is carried out in secret or clandestinely, and finally c) a ‘soft’ and invisible action, which consists of disinformation and the orientation of public opinion. The first is carried out by politicians, the second by the intelligence services and the third by ‘agents of influence’, i.e. people who produce cultural products to disseminate ideas that are in line with a particular geopolitical project. This is a form of unconventional warfare known as soft power , which also includes the issue of religion. Organisations defending "religious freedom" play an important role in this. The true and profound reasons for the defence of cults by libertarian foundations The Theory of Religious Economy Rodney Stark is an American know-it-all scientist who vehemently advocates Darwinism in all fields except the one that is its own, biology (in his opinion, evolution is an invention to discredit religion). This is how blogger Miguel Martinez sums up this character. An effective and keen synthesis that's enriched in the following lines: Rodney Stark's main concern is to justify neoliberalism theologically, as is evident from the triumphant title of one of his books, The Victory of Reason. How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. A concept we might translate as, "If they foreclose on your house, it's because Jesus wanted it that way" [2]. The author is witty and shows very well the conditions under which the "American know-it-all" works. However, to say that Stark merely "justifies neoliberalism theologically" falls short; in fact, his main concern is to justify theology on "neoliberal" grounds. We should proceed in order. We can say it better. Rodney Stark can be considered the founder of the theory of religious economy. This is the notion that the religious is a "market' equal in all respects to the commodity market. As in all markets, different consumers buy goods, which in this case are the "religious goods" (the various creeds) of competing religious enterprises (the more or less organized religions) [3]. Consistent with this paradigm, the theory states that.   as in any other market for material or symbolic goods, and contrary to what some theorists of secularization think - also in (institutional) religion competition is good for the market and within certain limits supply feeds demand [4] As evidence of this, authors working in the wake of this mercantilist conception point out that. The countries with the greatest religious pluralism - that's, with the greatest competition among religious enterprises - such as the United States (...), are also the countries where the total number of religious practitioners remains stable or increases [5]. Whereas, Where, on the other hand, the state obstructs religious pluralism and, in particular, opposes the entry into the market of new entities branded as "cults" or enemies of national identity, there-as in France and Russia-the number of religious practitioners generally declines spectacularly [6]. In other words, the conclusion is "more market and less state," according to the classic Lassiz-Faire paradigm. This position is based on two premises and an implicit assumption. The first presupposition is that the increase in the number of people practicing religions is a positive and desirable fact; the second presupposition is that the "consumer," the actor who makes his choice in the market of religions, is "rational" and knows what he's buying, in short, that this person is the homo oeconomicus imagined by neoclassical economics, who tends to maximize his own utility; the implicit assumption of the theory is that the various religious "firms" compete with each other and try to satisfy the buyers they compete for better than the others. The consequences are manifold. If the basic assumptions are accepted, it follows that there's a need for strong "deregulation" of the religious market. Stark and Iannaccone write: To the extent that a religious economy is competitive and pluralistic, overall levels of religious participation will tend to be high. On the contrary, to the extent that the religious economy is monopolized by one or two state-supported enterprises, participation tends to be low [7]. In short, it appears that the enemy of the religious market, as with any other market, is the state; for it's natural for state institutions to favor monopolies to the detriment of free competition and to brand new potential competitors as "sects" or destructive cults. The attraction that the Theory of Religious Economy has for some cult apologists is obviously due to this ideological notion, which relabels criticism of abusive cults as an attempt to suppress the free market in favor of monopolistic religions protected by a planning state that seeks to protect them from competition. The implication, then, is that anti-cult activism is interested work carried out by people who're somehow connected to the state and/or the religious apparatus. In other words, the conspiratorial idea that's already part of relativist and postmodern apologetics reappears in a discrete form. Of course, only the large organized religions can claim a monopoly, certainly not the secular states of the West, whose founding value is precisely secularism. Nevertheless, the anti-cult movement has no relation to institutional religions, to the point of being accused of "secularism"... The profane reader of the religious economics, however, is still unsatisfied with the curiosity of how the various religions can compete with each other to satisfy customers better than their competitors.The answer is simple: the religions that satisfy customers the most are the most demanding and restrictive. One of the proponents of this mercantile view is  Massimo Introvigne , president of CESNUR , the best example of what I call the differentialist apologists . He places great emphasis on this aspect of competitors improving the quality of the offer. He writes, for example: ... there is a kind of Darwinian struggle even in the religious field. The most demanding religious proposals tend to prevail: among Jews, the Orthodox, in Islam the fundamentalists, and among Catholics, the most rigid movements and congregations [8]. Competition would select the faiths that are more rigid and strict in demanding adherence, in short, the more integralist and fundamentalist versions. Competition, then, selects the fundamentalisms. The more neutral term used by these authors is "strict." This selection of extremist versions can be explained by the phenomenon of free riders who literally "travel cheap." Those who want to enjoy the benefits of a collective enterprise, but don't want to bear the costs, travel without a ticket. In the religious realm, the collective enterprise is a church or faith community. An organization can tolerate a few free riders, i.e., uncommitted members, but not too many. Introvigne writes: In the realm of religions, the less strict and rigorous organizations, which charge low admission fees and unobtrusively check that members have paid their admission ticket, i.e., that they're sufficiently committed, take on board such a high number of free riders that they offer their faithful a diluted and unsatisfying religious experience, (...) The more rigorous organizations charge a more expensive admission ticket and check that everyone pays for it: In this way, they allow fewer free riders, and the symbolic goods of a group where there are no free riders are usually perceived as more satisfying by consumers [9]. One concludes that the outcome of this beneficial competition between religions is an increase in religious zeal and commitment, i.e., an increase in what's most hostile to competition (in this case, other commitments and zeal). This competition feeds the monopolistic claims of fundamentalisms, which are by definition incompatible. A free market that generates hostility to the free market! This is an incompatibility that cannot be reconciled and cannot harmonize in an ecumenism precisely because of the rigidity chosen by the market. In conclusion, any representative of a conservative spiritual vision who wanted to strengthen it would have to work to ensure the continued existence of all other faiths on the market and to defend even the most controversial spiritual groups (e.g. Scientology) with all their might. This would have the double effect of strengthening his own incontrovertible "truth" and at the same time - paradoxically - becoming a defender of religious freedom. Defending the indefensible: the crypto-paleolibertarianism of apologists This free market, with its less than liberal results, is very reminiscent of the "paleolibertarian" strain of a doctrine known as anarcho-capitalism. Anarcho-capitalism  or libertarianism is one of the directions of contemporary political and legal philosophy that proposes the abolition of the state and replaces it with market relations. The main intellectual reference for anarcho-capitalism is the economist Murray Rothbard  [10], who in the 1960s proposed a political theory that focused on the inviolable sovereignty of the individual. Based on the axiom of non-aggression [11], an ethical principle of natural law that states that it's not legitimate to attack the person and property of an individual, all forms of taxation that constitute a theft of individual property and all coercive measures by the state, which is seen as inherently authoritarian, should be abolished. In this society, every service would be provided by private individuals on a voluntary basis. A less extreme version is called mini-archism, and its proponents want to maintain a "minimal state" whose only function is to legitimize the protection of individuals from aggression, theft, breach of contract, and fraud. Both versions agree on the central idea that the state wouldn't be authorized to use its monopoly to interfere with free transactions between individuals. Every transaction between individuals is a "market" transaction, even those that cannot be monetized in a concrete sense, such as the choice of friends or partners, because they're based on incentives and disincentives, on costs and benefits. Freedom and economic prosperity can therefore only be guaranteed by universal laissez-faire, in the economy as in any other sphere. The state, even minimalist mini-archism, therefore has no right to interfere in individual choices such as sexual orientation, drug use, lifestyle, and religious affiliation. When using European political categories, American libertarianism is usually considered "right-wing" in economic terms and "left-wing" in rights terms because of its radical advocacy of individual liberties. However, many of those who held this view were culturally conservative and considered total freedom in the area of personal choices to be libertine excess. Therefore, in 1990, an article by Lew Rockwell [12] gave rise to a conservative current called " paleolibertarianism"  which traces its origins to the old American paleoconservative right of Ludwig von Mises  and Albert J. Nock . What distinguishes it from classical anarcho-capitalism, especially in its "left" version, is the strong defense of traditional values and customs, especially those associated with Christian morality. This creates a correspondence with the European criteria of the "right", since paleolibertarianism combines economic conservatism and cultural conservatism. This current is historically associated with the Von Mises Institute , an academic organization that sponsors hundreds of conferences and meetings to combat etatism and promote conservative moral values. Von Mises, the Austrian economist to whom the institute is dedicated, based his praxeology (the science of human action) on the assumption that "human action is always rational." [13] The results of this logic may seem confusing to advocates of market libertarianism. In a classic of anarcho-capitalist thought entitled Defending the Indefensible  [14], Walter Block goes so far as to exonerate and justify behavior deemed reprehensible on the basis of the individual's free and consensual choice. "The 'blackmailer,' the 'filthy male chauvinist,' the 'employer of minors,' the 'garbage distributor,' the 'loan shark,' the 'homeless man,' the 'corrupt policeman,' even the 'person who yells 'fire' in a crowded club,' and other unsympathetic figures are defended on the basis of the principle of nonaggression. To give an example of the otherwise brilliant argumentative style that characterizes this provocative book, this excerpt from the speech in favor of the blackmailer is worthwhile: What exactly is blackmail? Blackmail is the offer of trade. It is the offer to trade something, usually silence, for some other good, usually money. If the offer of the trade is accepted, the blackmailer then maintains his silence and the blackmailed pays the agreed-upon price. If the blackmail offer is rejected, the blackmailer may exercise his rights of free speech and publicize the secret. There is nothing amiss here. All that is happening is that an offer to maintain silence is being made. If the offer is rejected, the blackmailer does no more than exercise his right of free speech.The sole difference between a gossip and a blackmailer is that the blackmailer will refrain from speaking — for a price. [15]. Among the 28 figures that benefit from Block's defense, the one of "guru" or "leader of a coercive group" is missing, but it can be argued with reasonable certainty that the arguments used would be based on the principle of non-aggression and on free intercourse between individuals. Moreover, it's the same defense that Block voices with respect to the "capitalist pig exploiter of labor." These arguments overlap with those of cult apologists of all kinds, who're generally also extremely pro-free market. The connections and sometimes the overlaps between the characters and institutions of the various environments considered here, i.e., the conservative Christian environment, that of promoting aggressive economic laissez-faire, and that of the cults, are consistent, even if little known. Suffice it to look at the Acton Institute   At this point it's particularly interesting to return to and reflect on a biographical episode in Robert Sirico 's life, namely the slave auction. For voluntary slavery is a topic that serves as a good metaphor for the situation of the followers of coercive cults and is also one of the most discussed topics in the libertarian world. Paleolibertarian Walter Block, for example, defends so-called "slave contracts" as the result of private ownership of one's own body rather than imposed voluntary choices [23]. For Rothbard, on the other hand, the will, that's, control over one's own body and mind, is a structural and immutable fact of human nature and therefore inalienable [24]. In this framework, the theory of Religious Economy fits perfectly, because it corresponds to a forma mentis that's mercantilist and Christianist (a neologism that denotes the use of Christianity for political purposes). At the very least, the convergence of religious economics and paleolibertarian theorists on common goals that represent areas of ideological overlap for the two groups that we could only euphemistically call extensive is natural. It's no accident that the Acton Institute calls itself the "Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty." The two aspects are brought together in one. For this reason, we see that the same people keep meeting in the two contexts. The embrace that becomes an inextricable tangle between the market without controls and the defense of "religious freedom" allows some reflections. Among the latter is the clear recognition that the constant denial of thought manipulation by a certain group of scholars of the "New Religious Movements" isn't a real denial of its existence, but rather a form of "anti-prohibitionism" based on libertarian thought. This would be consistent with the tenets of leftist anarcho-capitalism, but the paleolibertarian vulgate that seems to unite most of the cult apologists is characterized by a conservatism and such disregard for alternative lifestyles that defending the sole right to join a religious group seems truly inconsistent. Next chapter : Fascists spies and gurus . 7 . CIA cults Fascists, spies and gurus. 1. Prologue (funny stuff) Fascists, spies and gurus. 2. Mind Games Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists   Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network Fascists, spies and gurus. 5. Attack on secularism

Luigi Corvaglia Pre-trial acquittals On 8 July 2022, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe,  a long-time right-wing politician, was assassinated during a rally in the city of Nara. The assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami, claimed to have killed him because he blamed him for the spread of the Unification Church  in Japan, an organisation to which his mother had allegedly donated so much that it ruined the family. As the Financial Times reports , the link between the Unification Church and members of Abe's political party is an old one. Nobusuke Kishi, Abe's grandfather, who was prime minister of Japan in the second half of the 20th century, supported the church as an instrument in the anti-communist struggle . Over time, the Unification Church served as a safe reservoir of votes for the Liberal Democratic Party, Abe's nationalist party. According to the founder "Reverend" Sun Myung Moon , humanity fell from grace when Eve fornicated with the fallen angel Lucifer, who later became Satan. As a result of this perversion of God’s love, all of Adam’s descendants inherited a contaminated bloodline and were alienated from God. Eventually, God sent Jesus as the Messiah to redeem humankind, but God’s plan to purify mankind’s sinful bloodline by having Jesus marry and start a family did not work out. As Plan B, God sent the Messiah Sun Myung Moon, who embodied the Second Coming. Mass weddings are part of the plan. The idea is that two believers, chosen and brought together by the Messiah, will be united as husband and wife with the blessing of the Messiah and their children will be born free from sin. The church is a business empire that includes a car factory and a huge manufacturing company, several hospitals and major property investments around the world. Among other things, it owns one of the largest seafood export companies in the world and has helped to popularise sushi in the USA   and from there to the rest of the West. He also owns the conservative newspaper Washington Times . Naturally, he plays a major political role. In 2003, Moon caused a stir with a sermon in which he claimed that the Holocaust was the just punishment inflicted on the Jews for the murder of Jesus. Figure 52 - Shinzo AbeSun Myung Moon and Hyung Jin 'Sean' Moon   The founder's son, Hyung Jin 'Sean' Moon , is no less right-wing. He founded The Rod of Iron Ministries  in the USA. The 'rod of iron' is the AR-15 submachine gun; in fact, the church worships firearms, which it describes as 'religious equipment'. The leader wears a crown of bullets and the faithful participate in ceremonies armed with this equipment. The church has strong ties to American Identititarian and far-right movements.   Back in Japan, the links between the Liberal Democratic Party and the church became clear after the death of the former prime minister. Since then, dozens of party members, including those in top positions, have admitted their links to the church or other related organisations. The government subsequently launched an investigation into Moon's church and on 12 October 2023 declared its intention to request the dissolution of the church . Figure 53 - Faithful of The Rod of Iron Ministries However, the church has many friends. When the US Congress cut off funding to the Reagan administration in 1985 to support the Nicaraguan ' Contras ' terrorists against the Sandinista regime, Reverend Moon's Unification Church became involved in providing food and money for the guerrillas (see further ahead). Ford Greene reports that CAUSA , a company of the Moonies, provided thousands of dollars and tonnes of food, medicine and clothing to the guerrilla forces. In 1985, the Moonies' newspaper, the Washington Times , set up a private fund for the Contras and announced that Bo Hi Pak, the paper's official publisher, had contributed $100,000 to raise $14 million. When asked how the paper could afford this, the publisher explained that the paper's owners (the Moon organisation) were willing to provide extraordinary help on important moral issues (i.e. the fight against communism).   The extensive ties between Paul Weyrich's Council for National Policy (CNP) ,   closely connected with the Brazilian  Family and Property Tradition,   and the Unification Church  were discussed at length in an AFN radio interview by Kelleigh Nelson with Chey Simonton. In 1978, the Fraser Commission, a subcommittee of the US Congress, investigated the South Korean government's political interference in US policy, known as Koreagate . The commission published a report in which Moon's involvement in activities with the US government was also listed.   It was recently revealed that former US President Donald Trump received around 2.5 million dollars from the Universal Peace Federation (UPF) , the new denomination of the Unification Church , to make video appearances on three occasions between 2021 and 2022, while former Vice President Mike Pence received 550,000 dollars to speak at a UPF event. This was confirmed by the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper  by obtaining official US documents and comparing them with court documents in Japan. The event took place in 2022, and the director of CESNUR Massimo Introvigne, who gave a talk at the meeting, was also funded by the UPF  (Fig. 54). Figure 54 - The giant picture of the CESNUR director on stage at the URF in 2022 in Seoul Obviously, CESNUR  immediately came to the aid of the Unification Church after the murder of Abe. The prompt intervention of a group of Westerners in defence of a controversial religious movement reminded someone in Japan of what happened in 1995 after the Tokyo underground attack  by the Aum Shinrikyo   (The Supreme Truth) cult. The religious group's followers had punched plastic bags of sarin gas, a nerve agent, into underground cars in Tokyo, killing 13 people and poisoning over 6,200. Gordon Melton  of CESNUR USA was paid  by the group responsible for the terrorist attack even before he arrived in Japan with another pair of experts to defend the cult . A preemptive payment for the defence of prejudice. Melton has in fact written several books that were directly commissioned and paid for by various groups , including the Ramtha School of Enlightenment ; the same groups then ensured the distribution of his books. This was also done years ago by the Unification Church  of Moon in Italy with a book by Introvigne. In any case, this funding appears to be just the crumbs of a much larger loaf. Figure 55 - People intoxicated by sarin gas in the Tokyo underground in 1995 Returning to the Abe case, Introvigne writes in an article in the 'Journal of CESNUR ' that “ While the weak mind of the assassin had clearly been excited by anti-Unification-Church campaigns by militant lawyers and anti-cultists , the latter succeeded in persuading most media, both in Japan and internationally, that rather than being a victim the Unification Church was somewhat responsible for the homicide, in a spectacular reversal of both logic and fairness ” (bold mine). In other words, Shinzo Abe was killed by the 'anti-cult movement'. Regardless of the reader's assessment of where the 'spectacular reversal of logic' lies, this blanket defence exemplifies a tendency towards prejudiced absolution of the cults under criticism, which is hardly consistent with the claims of a rigorous study centre. Some examples of this same prejudiced absolution sometimes border on the ridiculous.   In March 2020, at the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, a Korean religious movement called Shincheonji Church of Jesus  was accused of contributing to the spread of the virus in the Asian country by preventing its believers from adhering to government regulations and organising crowded prayer meetings without social distancing or masks. More than 60% of those infected in the country were church members. The propaganda machine for new religious movements immediately rushed to the sect's aid and published a 'white paper' titled Shincheonji and the Coronavirus in South Korea: Separating Facts from Fantasies . A few days later, the head of the church, along with 12 other members of the sect, apologised on his knees in front of television cameras for causing the outbreak. Figure 56 - Lee Man Hee, leader of the Shincheonji Churchpublicly apologises for helping to spread the Covid-19 virus in South Korea Timing does not seem to be CESNUR's strong point. The year before, CESNUR  had already shown how difficult it is to deal with the absolving impulse - with disastrous results. In May 2019, the study centre presented the FIRMA awards ( International Festival of Religions, Music and Arts ) at the Turin book fair. This prize was created by the Introvigne think tank to honour those who have distinguished themselves in promoting peace through interreligious dialogue. In this edition, Apostle Naasón Joaquín García , leader of the Luz del Mundo  church, was among those honoured . A few weeks after being honoured as an advocate of human rights and author of charitable works, Naasón Joaquín García was arrested in Los Angeles on 26 charges, including human trafficking, production of child pornography and rape of minors . The trial ended with a plea by the apostle and his sentencing to 17 years in prison.   I admit that I have occasionally mocked the director of CESNUR for this unfortunate faux pas. I was answered verbatim: 'I would - and I do not rule this out - give Luz del Mundo in the person of its legal representative pro tempore an award for charitable activities, because I know them and they are admirable', and then concluded: 'The intention was to reward charitable activities, not the apostle's private life'. I invite the reader to watch the documentary film about Garcia and the Luz del Mundo on the Netflix platform ( The Darkness within la Luz del Mundo ) and then read Introvigne's sentence again.   However, it should be mentioned that Introvigne's wife claims that there is a conspiracy between the anti-cult movement and Netflix. This is not a joke ( see here ).    Figure 57 and 58 - left: The CESNUR leader Introvigne with that of the Luz del Mundo Garcia - right: Garcia during the trial Although a character as colourful as the Mexican apostle can steal the show with such theatrical plot twists that are not devoid of irony, it is another award winner, Greg Mitchell , who deserves our attention. We have already met him. He is the chief lobbyist for Scientology  and founder of the International Religious Freedom Roundtable . (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists ). The activities of this loyalist of the American religious holding company are not only regularly reported on institutional websites, but Mitchell himself explained in an interview with 'Business Insider' that the church's lobbying work with the US government is currently not focussed on promoting Scientology, but on 'religious freedom". This work 'often involves working with other religious organisations to encourage the United States to put pressure on foreign countries that persecute religious groups' . In other words, Scientology, along with 'other religious groups," encourages the U.S. government to 'exert pressure' on foreign countries. Thus, exerting pressure on other countries for their actual or perceived interference or restraint in religious affairs is not a conclusion based on circumstantial evidence, but a stated intention pursued by a variety of actors who, even if they have different motivations, consider such action congruent. A convergence of interests, even if they pursue theoretically opposing goals. Here it is useful for Christian fundamentalists to defend movements that are far removed from Christianity. This lobbying is already provided for by the International Religious Freedom Act  of 1998, regardless of the spur of Scientology and other cults. Or not?   Attack on secularism   In 1995, a French government parliamentary committee of enquiry into cults produced a report, the so-called Guyard report , which expressed great concern about the phenomenon. Similar initiatives followed in Belgium (1996), Germany (1997) and Italy (1998). in 1996, France adopted a series of laws to protect the victims of 'cults' and, above all, an inter-ministerial mission to combat cults  (MILS, later MIVILUDES ), whose first president was the socialist MP Alain Vivien. This made the country of laicité the spearhead of the resistance against the infiltration of totalitarian groups in Europe and triggered a process that led to the creation of the Fédération Européenne des Centres de Recherche et d'Information sur le Sectarisme (FECRIS) , the 'umbrella organisation" bringing together dozens of anti-cult associations from various European countries, and the adoption of the About Picard law , which criminalised the 'abuse of weakness' in 2001. On 6 June 1997, the interior ministers of the federal and state governments in Germany agreed to place the Scientology organisation under surveillance. This was just one of the measures taken by the German government to crack down on Scientology (a 1998 report emphasised the destructive aspects of this "commercial institution disguised as a religion" and a 2007 report by the Ministry of the Interior described the organisation as " incompatible with the constitution "). This was followed by the Scientology campaign against Germany (which is conceivable), but also a series of strong statements in defence of the cult by the US government (which is less conceivable). Other actions included a document by the Beareau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labour (BDHRL) , an agency of the US State Department, in which Germany is listed alongside countries such as China among the countries that violate religious freedom.   In 1998, the International Religious Freedom Act  was promulgated, making the defence of religious freedom in the world US foreign policy. This act established a new department of the US government, which emerged from the Department of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour. Thus was born the Office of International Religious Freedom (OIRF) . In practise, this was a specialised body designed to combat 'discriminatory' policies towards alternative spiritual groups. It was decided that the office would be headed by an authorised ambassador, flanked by no fewer than five officials from the State Secretariat. The Commission even had its own representative in all American embassies. Its first chairman was Robert A. Seiple . The curious thing is that this former marine was for more than 11 years the head of World Vision Inc ., the world's most important evangelical association promoting ultra-conservative views (and rumoured to be controlled by the CIA). One would have expected a department concerned with religious freedom to bear the traits of secularism, or at least not to have dogmatic traits that clash with a mission that could be labelled 'ecumenical', i.e. giving equal dignity to all religions and allowing them to coexist.   The fact is that the Commission's first report in September 1998 accused France, Germany, Austria and Belgium of violating religious freedom. The OIRF was soon joined by a new organisation, the Commission on Religious Freedom . This commission was made up of American parliamentarians who made representations to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) . During a meeting of the OSCE in 1999, these parliamentarians were the protagonists of a fierce attack on France, which was accused of the nefariousness of the 'Vichy regime', of witch-hunting and persecution. A diplomatic incident almost occurred. The delegation from the Religious Freedom Commission was led by Benjamin A. Gillman, whose election campaign was financed by Scientology (see Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists ). The session was moderated by Massimo Introvigne.   In September 1999, the OIRF published an even harsher report against the European countries, forcing French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine to write to his American counterpart Madeleine Albright to denounce the intolerable aggression that was calling into question the fruitfulness of the dialogue. This led to the termination of diplomatic dialogue on the issue.   To complete the picture of the forces on the ground, a third body of the US government was added, this time directly linked to the White House. It is the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) . Yes, the commission that wrote the report advising Trump to obstruct the work of the FECRIS spokesman at the OSCE (c'est moi!). It's worth taking a closer look. An American commission   The   United States Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)  is an advisory body to the US government that produces an annual report on religious freedom in the world. It consists of only 9 members, 5 from the President's party and 4 from the largest opposition party. It was established with the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act  of 1998, which promotes religious freedom as part of US foreign policy . The report produced by this commission in 2020 was very tough on the so-called "anti-cult movement', in particular the Federation of European Anti-Cult Associations, the Fédération européenne des centres de recherche et d'information sur le sectarisme (FECRIS) . According to the responsible USCIRF in 2020, scientists, activists and associations that campaign for the rights of cult victims would carry out 'hate campaigns' and restrict civil rights. The 2020 report also contains a recommendation to the US President to   [...] combat the propaganda against the new religious movements disseminated by the European Federation of Research and Information Centres on Sectarianism (FECRIS) at the OSCE's annual Human Dimensions conference by sharing information regarding the continued involvement of individuals and entities, operating as part of the anti-sectarian movement, in the suppression of religious freedom  (sic).   In practise, it is proposed that individuals (!!)  and organisations active in the fight against abusive cults should be monitored... The most worrying thing for me is that I am one of these people! In fact, I was - and still am - the one who carries out the 'propaganda against new religious movements' at the OSCE. Figure 59 - The author of this dossier as a speaker at the OSCE in Warsaw in 2023. Next to him, for reasons of schedule, is Ivan Aroja Pelado of Scientology At the time the 2020 report was written, the President was Donald Trump. If you know how the commission that drafted this document was composed, there are some surprises and curiosities.   The vice president was Tony Perkins . He is also chairman of the Family Research Council, a fundamentalist Protestant organisation. The Family Research Council  is against pornography, embryonic stem cell research, abortion, divorce and LGBT rights. The FRC believes that "homosexual behaviour is harmful to the people who practise it and to society in general and can never be affirmed. It is therefore a vice and a sin. Paedophilia would be a problem related to homosexuality. Questionable but legitimate positions, of course, but not the ones one would expect from those who have to pass judgement on discrimination and 'hate speech'. In fact, the Southern Poverty Law Center  classified the FRC as an anti-gay hate group  in 2010 because the group "makes false claims about the LGBT community based on discredited research and junk science" to block LGBT civil rights. Now, the Family Research Council is among the organisations cited in a study by OpenDemocracy  for sending money to Europe to fund the activities of associations that aim to prevent the affirmation of individual rights. As if that was not enough, Opendecracy itself had previously found the Family Research Council among the religious right associations in the US that have funded campaigns against sex education, contraception, abortion and LGBT rights in Africa .   Figure 60 - Manhatthan Declaration: 'Under no circumstances will we give to Caesar what is God's'. Another component of the USCIRF was Gary L. Bauer , the former president of the FRC. In November 2009, Bauer signed an ecumenical statement called the " Manhattan Declaration " in which he called on Evangelical, Catholic and Orthodox Christians to disregard government regulations and laws  that they felt would force them to support or simply allow abortion, same-sex marriage and other issues that go against their religious conscience. It seems odd, to say the least, that someone who calls for defiance of the law and is adamantly opposed to recognising the rights enshrined in the Constitution is a member of a commission that oversees respect for civil rights and liberty .   Another component was Johnnie Moore . The latter is Trump's 'evangelical advisor' and advocate of American hegemony. He is president of the Congress of Christian Leaders , a group monitored by Right-Wing Watch , an independent body that monitors all right-wing subversive groups.   Nadine Maenza , another member of the committee, is executive director of Rick Santorum's Patriot Voices PAC  for the Defence of Conservative Values. He apparently opposes abortion and same-sex marriage and has adopted the image of the 'culture warrior' in the war on civil liberties during his tenure in the Senate. Santorum is a supporter of the group Regnum Christi , which is affiliated with the Legionaries of Christ , a highly controversial group at the centre of a major scandal . During his tenure as senator, Santorum authored the Santorum Amendment, which promoted the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in schools and opposed the teaching of evolutionary theory.   Another component is Nury Turkel ,  Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute , a conservative-oriented US think tank.   Figure 61 - Tony Perkins, Gary L. Bauer, Johnnie Moore, Nadine Maenza If we expand the search for the components that have alternated over the years in the USCRIF, we find that the relationships between them and the associations of the Atlas Network  are very frequent. We said (in the previous chapter) that these Christian-pro-free market organizations are “a ‘silent extension of US foreign policy.’” In USCIRF we find representatives of the Federalist Society  (such as Leonard Leo , Chairman of USCIRF in 2009), the American Enterprise Institute  (such as John R. Bolton, former appointee) or organisations linked to them such as the Hudson Institute  (such as Nury Turkel , appointee). In 2018, USCIRF endorsed international Senator Sam Brownback  as a religious freedom ambassador , who was among the speakers at a Brussels conference along with Scientology and Eurosceptic politicians. His election campaign in Kansas was financed by Koch Industries , one of the founders of the anarcho-capitalist organisation Americans for Prosperity , which is linked to Amway . Figure 62 - Elliott Abrams However, the first president is enough to raise doubts about the USCIRF. He is Elliott Abrams , a leading representative of the neoconservatives, who was sentenced to a year in prison for his involvement in the Iran-Contras scandal . This involved the notorious financing of the war in Nicaragua against the democratically elected Sandinista government through the illegal sale of weapons to Iran. Among the crimes committed in connection with this sordid operation was the importation of cocaine by the CIA from the Contras, the anti-Sandinista guerrillas, and the subsequent obstruction of justice in the US Department of Justice. Abrams was one of the men involved in this affair and is also accused of being involved in the massacres in Guatemala and El Salvador when he was in charge of Latin America under Reagan. He has often accused the Israeli Likud of excessive tenderness towards the Palestinians. This champion of rights and ecumenism was chairman of the Commission on Religious Freedom International until 2000 and was still a member in 2022 ! In 2023, the Parlament of the World's Religions was held in Chicago with representatives from USCRIF , Scientology  and the director of the Centre for the Study of New Religions (CESNUR) Massimo Introvigne (fig. 63). This is not about the ideas of the USCIRF majority commissioners who wrote the 2020 report, but about the paradox that those who advocate these ideas want to pose as defenders of civil liberties. So it seems clear that this commission, which was unsurprisingly created as an additional arm (there were already three US government bodies for religious freedom) at the promulgation of the International Religious Freedom Act, has the function of reacting to the contrary policy put into practice by France and which hinders the geopolitical vision underlying that policy document.   Figure 63 - Eric Roux (Scientology) posts on Facebook the news of the meeting held together with the USCIRF with Massimo Introvigne also present Appendix: Taiwan as Tortuga pro-cult For years, numerous conferences and seminars on respect for religious freedom have been held in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. CESNUR, but also representatives of various cults, such as the Church of Providence, the Luz del Mundo, the yoga school from Buenos Aires and the Unification Church, always take part. The American Institute in Taiwan (AIT)   plays a central role. Taiwan, an island off the coast of China that is disputed by China, is not legally recognised by most countries in the international community and is not represented in the UN in accordance with Resolution 2758 of 1971, which was also signed by the USA and European countries. This makes it a useful free harbour for conducting political and media campaigns that would be embarrassing in the US. This avoids potential diplomatic misunderstandings with Tokyo, which now holds diametrically opposed positions on the issue of new religious movements but is an important ally of the US. In practise, Taiwan has become what the island of Tortuga was to the pirates of the 17th century: a filibuster port that is not subject to the same rules as most other countries. Figure 64 - 'Academia' reports that 15 March 2019 many articles by the author of this report were read from Taipei, Taiwan - Figure 61 - Who was in Taiwan on the days when the author's articles were read from Taipei?   Figure 65 - Introvigne in Taiwan in 2023 shows a photo of the author of this report  Next chapter: Fascists, spies and gurus. 6. The libertarian network Fascists, spies and gurus. 1. Prologue (funny stuff) Fascists, spies and gurus. 2. Mind Games Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists   Fascists, spies and gurus. 4. The black network

Luigi Corvaglia A strange religious expert   Figure 38 - Yves Guérin-Sérac The 'Foro Espiritual' in Estella, Spain, is, as it says on the city's website , 'a workshop of fraternity where different religious communities coexist in an atmosphere of harmony, peace and joy, seeking meeting points with the aim of the world finding peace'. In short, an ecumenical festival with clear New Age connotations. At the first edition in 2006, the speakers included a certain Ives Guillou, who was presented as an 'expert on religions'. Anyone who knows enough about the ' strategy of tension " and the italian 'anni di piombo' ( years of lead ) will wince when they read this name. It is the real name of the man who went down in history as Yves Guérin-Sérac . He was the founder of the Aginter Presse   agency, a covert terrorist structure that was financed by Salazar's secret police and had links to Western intelligence services. Aginter Presse functioned as a control room for right-wing subversion from 1966 to 1974. Through the neo-fascist organisation Ordine Nuovo , Aginter Presse was involved in terrorist attacks in Italy, starting with the massacre in Piazza Fontana , and in Operation Condor , a CIA plan to eliminate opponents of South American dictatorships in the 1970s. It is somewhat unusual for the grey eminence of international black terrorism to speak about universal love and the 'human family' at a religious festival, especially given the fact that he had been in hiding for decades when he was listed at the festival under his real name. Interestingly, however, this was not the first time Guérin-Serac had participated in events related to the world of alternative spirituality. The journalist Andrea Sceresini inform us  that in 2002 Guérin-Sérac took part in a meeting of the Women's Federation for World Peace, an emanation of the Unification Church . What makes it all even more incomprehensible is that Guérin-Serac was anything but ecumenical, not only politically but also religiously. One man who knew him very well was the lifelong Vincenzo Vinciguerra , who was a member of the neo-fascist groups ‘Ordine Nuovo’ and ‘Avanguardia Nazionale’. He claimed that what struck him most about the figure who called himself Ralf at the time was his religiosity: 'Ralf was very Catholic. Fundamentalist Catholic!' In other words, he was not the type to attend new age festivals.         Vinciguerra, however, added a further notation :   Christian civilisation was built on millions of dead and he had no qualms about doing the same to preserve it! The traditionalist matrix   (a) the doctrine of double effect The twisted logical and moral entanglements that characterise a particular environment in which the political right combines with religious radicalism are difficult to see through. For example, there are two glaring contradictions in the lines above. The first relates to the coexistence of the fundamentalist Catholic and the mass murderer in one and the same person - specifically in Guérin-Serac. The second contradiction is that of one who professes a form of Catholicism that is hostile to ecumenism, because he is fundamentalist, and actively participates in events organised by other cults. To solve these apparent puzzles, we need to unravel the skein and start where the thread of the story begins. Following it will take us to unimaginable places. Figure 39 - OAS poster  The proximity of Catholic traditionalism to murders and terrorist attacks was already evident during the Algerian war. The OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète)  was a French clandestine paramilitary organisation with the slogan 'French Algeria or death'. It was founded in Madrid in 1961 under the protection of Francisco Franco's fascist government and had as its main political reference the Catholic counter-revolutionary organisation La Cité Catolique , which supplied the OAS with numerous fighters. In fifteen months, the OAS caused around 1,500 deaths through terrorist attacks of unprecedented cruelty. After the Evian Agreement between the French government and the Algerian Liberation Front, which laid the foundations for Algerian independence from France, became known, the OAS decided to carry out an assassination attempt on de Gaulle, who was considered a traitor. This failed and the organisation disbanded. As anomalous as it may seem, it should be noted that in Catholic circles linked to the military hierarchies, the practise of torture and murder was considered worthy of absolution. This was based on the ideas of Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine of Hippo. Louis Delarue, chaplain of a unit deployed in Algeria, said that one had to choose between two evils, and letting a bandit temporarily suffer the death penalty was the lesser.   Probably the best justification for the nefarious deeds of Catholic activists was provided by St Thomas Aquinas' doctrine of the double effect : 'The evil caused by an action directed towards the good does not invalidate the morality of the action itself'.   Among the OAS volunteers was Yves Guérin-Sérac , who apparently based his mission on the logic of St Thomas, as he was later prepared to kill millions of people in order to achieve the goal of protecting traditional Christian society. b) Subversion and revolution   After the defeat in Algeria, Guérin-Sérac and other OAS veterans fled first to Franco’s Spain and then to Salazar's Portugal in order to avoid being sentenced for desertion and treason. It was here that the idea of founding an international anti-communist organisation took shape. This structure was to consist of specialists in the fight against ' subversion '. This concept is of central importance. An important reference for the OAS fighters is said to have been La Cité Catolique . It is therefore appropriate to say a few words about this organisation. It was a Catholic counter-revolutionary organisation led by Jean Ousset . He saw the root of all evil in 'subversion'. By this he meant the distortion of the Christian order, natural law and the Creator's plan, a distortion that had been given its greatest impetus by the French Revolution. It was no coincidence that the organisation's journal, 'Verbe', described itself as a civic training organ for the counter-revolution. Ultimately, what the military called 'counterinsurgency' had its roots in Catholic radicalism. Figure 40 - Jean Ousset So although Ousset had fully followed Marshal Pétain's Vichy regime during the German occupation of France and later said that he had nothing to apologise for in this regard, the Cité Catolique cannot be described as a fascist organisation, but rather as reactionary. Similarly, the structure developed by Guérin-Sérac, who was primarily a Catholic traditionalist, was geared towards the defence of 'Western values' threatened by communism and related subversive forces, rather than fascist ideology.   From the 1960s onwards, this fight against subversion also took the form of the defence of the 'white presence' in the few African territories that remained in European hands.   Ousset was not alone in this battle. The same struggle against modernity and the disruption of the natural order was waged in Brazil by Plinio Correa de Oliveira  and his association Tradition, Family and Property . What Ousset called 'subversion', Correa de Oliveira called 'revolution'. De Oliveira argued that Christianity had suffered a dramatic spiritual decline since the 15th century due to the spread of social egalitarianism and moral liberalism, which had put an end to the righteousness that had characterised mediaeval society.   He therefore considered it necessary to fully restore Christian civilisation through the reintroduction of social hierarchies and aristocratic titles, as well as the dissolution of socialist parties . De Oliveira was the advocate of a programme for the 'restoration of order', which was described as a return to a   Christian civilisation, austere and hierarchical, fundamentally sacred, anti-egalitarian and anti-liberal. Figure 41 - Plinio Correa de Oliveira TFP has remained true to this goal by actively participating in the efforts of reactionary forces to depose democratically elected presidents in Latin America, beginning with the coups in Brazil in 1964 and that of Pinochet in Chile in 1973. Margareth Power writes  that the TFP maintained a "mutually supportive relationship" with Pinochet's dictatorship for seventeen years, justifying the violation of human rights with the overriding need to fight communism. This is the same logic used by the Catholic OAS military in Algeria.   Penny Lernoux points out  that the actions of the TFP were in line with the goals of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) , which not only supported the coup but even seems to have financed the TFP for its work against democracy in Chile  (page 297). There are even reports of martial arts training camps in Rio de Janeiro for members of the TFP, the army and the police. In those years, the TFP forged links with the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) , which, according to Benjamin A. Cowan , was "a secretive and often questionable organisation whose activities in the second half of the 20th century ranged from spreading panic to overt or covert support for right-wing terrorism“ (page 156). The fifth WACL congress, held in Manila in 1971, was hosted by dictator Ferdinand Marcos and was attended by the Brazilian and Argentinian delegations of the TFP (Power, op.cit., p. 98). In the 1980s, the TFP extended its reach further by joining forces with and co-founding the International Policy Forum  of the US New Right theorist Paul Weyrich .   Plinio Correa de Oliveira and Jean Ousset did not like each other because the Brazilian found the Frenchman too socialist and because of his allusions to the French counter-revolutionary culture of the 19th century, which always harboured a certain hostility towards the ruling bourgeoisie, as he considered it to be secular and Masonic. However, the two lessons are composed in an Italian counter-revolutionary association that has both Ousset and de Oliveira as cultural references: Alleanza Cattolica .   c) Aginter Presse   Figure 42 - Advertising poster of the fake agency Aginter Presse In May 1974, after the 'Carnation Revolution' had brought democracy back to Portugal, a group of soldiers stormed the premises of a press agency at Rua des Pracas 13 in Lisbon on the orders of an official from the PIDE, Salazar's secret police. The agency was Aginter Presse , founded by Guérin-Sérac. Analysis of the documents found revealed that the fake press agency was an international centre of subversion, the control and coordination room of an unconventional war, capable of carrying out espionage operations, organising attacks, training mercenaries and infiltrating revolutionary movements. The agency consisted of   - an espionage centre linked to the Portuguese secret services and other Western intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and the West German Gehlen network ; - a recruitment and training centre for mercenaries and terrorists specialising in attacks and sabotage, especially in Third World countries;    - a political organisation called 'Orde et Tradition ', flanked by a military arm called 'Organisation d'Action Contre le     Communisme International' (OACI) .   In the Rua des Pracas archives, evidence was found of active cooperation between Aginter Presse and the security services of major Western countries, which commissioned the agency to carry out 'dirty' operations that were not officially allowed to be carried out by government agencies of democratic countries. The American services supported the agency, for example, in the anti-communist plan Stay Behind , in which the Italian paramilitary secret organisation Gladio  was also involved. Relations with the American intelligence were conducted via intermediary organisations that avoided directly financing the Aginter Presse. Figure 43 - John Birch Society: "This is a republic, not a democracy" One of these organisations was the John Birch Society . This organisation of the economic and religious right is the prototype of a galaxy of conservative foundations and think tanks that form the backbone of American soft power . We will see later what role they play in supporting 'religious freedom" in the world. This paradoxical struggle against subversion through subversion experienced its greatest stage in Italy with the so-called strategy of tension , which began with the Piazza Fontana bombing  in 1969. The documents of Judge Salvini, who was in charge of investigating the massacre, clearly show that the agency and Guérin-Sérac himself were involved in the attack. In June 2005, the Court of Cassation ruled that the massacre was the work of a "subversive group founded in Padua within the Ordine Nuovo' , a neo-fascist group founded by Pino Rauti, whose links with Guérin-Sérac have been proven, as Judge Salvini also stated in the parliamentary commission of enquiry into the massacres . The relations between Ordine Nuovo and parts of the Italian secret service were so close that one cannot speak of a simple infiltration of the organisation into the security services  , but of two parallel and coordinated structures. Ordine Nuovo was also referred to as the ' prosthesis of the deviated services' . Figure 44 - Ordine Nuovo The Ordine Nuovo also consisted of young people who were fascinated by mystical and esoteric cultures. Rauti himself had them practise magical rituals. The culture of the Ordine Nuovo was permeated by an anti-modern, hierarchical and spiritualist attitude (see Stefania Limiti, Potere Occulto, ChiareLettere, 2022, p. 278). Through the OAS and Aginter Presse, European neo-fascism underwent a strategic and fundamental change: from an anti-American and anti-Soviet stance to a defence of the West, even becoming a force defending Atlanticism.   d) Alleanza Cattolica Figure 45 - Logo of Alleanza Cattolca During the trial for the massacre in Piazza Fontana, Giancarlo Rognoni, the leader of the terrorist group Ordine Nuovo  in Milan in the 1960s, who was accused of helping Delfo Zorzì to smuggle the suitcase containing the explosives into the bank where the massacre took place, was defended by Benedetto Tusaan, a representative of the traditionalist association Alleanza Cattolica . Another representative of Alleanza Cattolica, Mauro Ronco, defended Carlo Maria Maggi, one of the most important representatives of the Ordine Nuovo in northern Italy, who is considered a 'theorist of massacres'. As the insider Roberto De Mattei , who was one of the first activists, writes, 'Alleanza Cattolica was the backbone of Catholic reaction in Italy in the decade 1970-1980 '. The organisation was founded in 1968 by Giovanni Cantoni  together with Agostino Sanfratello . Italian traditionalism, which saw its fulcrum in AC, was also always very critical of the “ Risorgimento ” , the political  and  social movement   that led to the unity of Italy in 19th century,   which was seen as the Italian version of the French Revolution. Alleanza Cattolica was therefore dedicated to spreading revisionist interpretations of the history of the Risorgimento and the apologetics of the various 'insurrections', i.e. the Catholic popular uprisings against the liberal and democratic revolutions (Vendée in France, Sanfedistas in Italy, Cristeros in Mexico, etc.). Sanfratello is close to the neo-fascist terrorist Franco Freda  and was the mentor of Roberto Fiore , the founder of the extreme right-wing movement Terza Posizione . Freda was convicted for the 1969 bombings in Italy, then for incitement to racial hatred and subversive association. Fiore, on the other hand, was sentenced by the Italian judiciary in 1985 for the offences of subversive association and armed gang. During his years as a fugitive, Fiore was protected by MI6 as an 'agent of British intelligence'.  In 1991, the European Commission of Inquiry into Racism and Xenophobia confirmed his association with MI6  since the early 1980s. Fiore and Sanfratello are also the founders of the political movement " Forza Nuova ", on whose lists Sanfratello himself stood as a candidate in 2003. President of Forza Nuova was another representative of Italian catholicism, the jurist Piero Vassallo,  author of an essay in defence of the Nazis in court in Nuremberg. There are many lawyers in the AC. Among them is Alfredo Mantovano , who at the time of writing is Undersecretary of State in the Presidency of the Council of Ministers and responsible for the secret services.   However, the most influential lawyer in AC is Massimo Introvigne . He joined Alleanza Cattolica in 1972, Introvigne soon became the most active member of the association and one of the main signatories of the magazine "Cristianità", the official organ of AC. in 2008, he even succeeded founder Cantoni, who had suffered a stroke, in the official role of 'Reggente Vicario', but effectively at the head of the organisation (Cantoni only retained the position of Regent in an honorary capacity). Introvigne continued the tradition of insurrectionary apologetics by founding the Centre for Counter-Revolutionary Studies (CESCOR)   in Turin. But what is Alleanza cattolica? The organisation says it is committed to defending the 'social doctrine of the Church', where 'social doctrine' has nothing to do with a commitment to solving social problems, but rather with the instructions that believers should follow in the public sphere according to the principles of 'natural morality'. De Mattei writes :   Giovanni Cantoni's encounter with Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, whose major work Revolution and Counter-Revolution became the basic text for the training of young fighters, was decisive for him.   However, Introvigne writes in an article  in 'Cristianità' on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Jean Ousset's magnum opus "Pour qu'Il règne" that the founder of Alleanza Cattolica chose Correa de Oliveira's text as a "reference manual" because it was a simpler compendium of counter-revolutionary doctrine than Ousset's texts, whose lavish complexity did not make them easily accessible. Nevertheless, Ousset remains an important reference for the members. As Introvigne himself told me in a private communication, "Alleanza Cattolica has always 'navigated' between Correa de Oliveira and Ousset, recognising that there was also a pluralism within the counter-revolutionary world, participating in Ousset's famous Lausanne congresses and maintaining no less friendly relations with this world than with the TFP."   Ultimately, the Alleanza Cattolica moves between the organisation that was dear to the OAS fighters (and whose veterans flowed into the Aginter Presse) and the Brazilian association that collaborated with the South American caudillos protected by the CIA.   Figure 46 - Logo of Fondazione Lepanto Alleaanza Cattolica has produced two new entities, one by secession and one by budding. The Lepanto Foundation  was born through secession. This split was allegedly the result of a disagreement that arose during the referendum campaign on the repeal of the law on voluntary abortion in 1981 between those who held a 'maximalist' position, who wanted to prevent abortion even for therapeutic reasons, and those who, on the other hand, for reasons of expediency, had bowed to a position that agreed with a minimalist goal, i.e. maintaining the possibility of abortion in the event of the mother's death. The maximalists, including Sanfratello and De Mattei, therefore decided to leave the association and found the  Lepanto Centre .   The two realities, which later diverged more and more on various issues, especially with regard to Bergoglio's magisterium, instead pursued in a singular synchrony in following the development of 'Tradition, Family and Property' towards a US-style neoconservatism. It is necessary to dwell on this development for a moment.   (e) neocon slip   From the mid-1980s, Tradition, Family and Property came under considerable fire from the institutions. A scandal had already shaken the image of the TFP in France at the end of the 1970s. The Saint Benoit school, founded by the TFP in Chateauroux in 1977, hit the headlines when former members of the association and concerned family members denounced the indoctrination of children that took place there through manipulative pressure and led to negative effects on their relationships with their families. This indoctrination allegedly led the children to fully identify with the organisation and its goals, which had a negative impact on their family relationships. In particular, many students were made to see their parents, especially fathers with prestigious professional positions, as an expression of the 'revolutionary' values that the organisation was supposed to combat. A report on the school's aberrations entitled ' Tradition, Family, Property. Catholic association or millenarian sect? " was compiled by anonymous writers. Among the other accusations made in the dossier was the excessive veneration of the founder's mother, Mrs Lucilia, whose locks of hair were elevated to the status of relics. Following this report, the school was closed. At a court hearing in 1982, it was established that the students had been subjected to psychological measures to make them members of the organisation. Figure 47 - TFP's book that inaugurated the strand of criticism of brainwashing In 1984, following a parliamentary investigation, Venezuela banned the TFP, accusing it of practising forms of psychological conditioning of its followers. The following year, the Brazilian Bishops' Conference declared that the TFP was incompatible with the Church 'because of its esoteric character, its religious fanaticism, the cult reserved for the personality of its founder and his mother and the improper use of the name of the Virgin Mary' (XXIII National Assembly of the Brazilian Bishops' Conference, Itaici, 18 April 1985). Two things then happened. Firstly, the TFP published a haphazard pamphlet destined, however, to inaugurate a fortunate thread and entitled Brainwashing. A Myth Exploited by the New 'Therapeutic Inquisition . Its central theme was that mental manipulation was a myth used to combat religion by a fictitious and conspiratorial 'anti-cult movement' made up of psychiatrists and communists . in 1991, TFP reiterated this by publishing in French "The New Atheist and Psychiatric Inquisition Calls Those They Wants to Destroy 'Cults'", by Gustavo Antonio and Luís Sérgio Solimeo, ed. Société Française pour la Defence de la Tradition, Famille et Propriété, Paris 1991, translation of a Spanish text from 1985), which already makes the concept clear in the title.   The second event was that Correa de Oliveira and his followers suddenly developed a vision in which they saw Christian America as the only counter-revolutionary force capable of responding to European secularism, the fruit of the French Revolution, and the 'Marxisation" of the Latin Church, which had gone so far as to criticise Tradition (and even TFP).   Tradition, Family and Property has collaborated with representatives and associations of American conservatism such as Paul Weyrich  and the Council for National Policy (CNP) . This is a secret organisation described by the New York Times as 'a little-known club of a few hundred of the country's most influential conservatives' that meets three times a year behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference.   Their European sister organisations of TFP, such as Alleanza Cattolica and the Lepanto Foundation, have taken the same stance, allying themselves with American neoconservatism in the fight against secularism and defending 'religious freedom". De Mattei (Lepanto Foundation) is a member of the board of experts of the Heritage Foundation  and the American Enterprise Institute  as well as the Acton Institute    - some of the most active think tanks in the American neoconservative galaxy. Introvgne himself writes in his book on Plinio Correa de Oliveira ( Una battaglia nella notte , 2008) that TFP has succeeded in linking with the American right " a set of interests involving the major foundations around which conservative culture revolves " (p. 210).   All of these associations are part of a vast network of Christian pro-free market organisations called the Atlas Network , which is known to operate [...] as a silent extension of US foreign policy, [...] think tanks associated with Atlas receive silent funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, an essential arm of American soft power. American soft power.   Lee Fang writes this in Sphere of influence: How American libertarians are remaking Latin American politics , The Intercept, 9 August 2017 In view of this change in political perspective, the foundation of a new institution from the AC in 1988 seems to follow the same logical sequence. This was the Centro Studi Nuove Religioni ( Centre for the Study of New Religions ), CESNUR. Its founder and director is Massimo Introvigne .   f) CESNUR, the counter- revolution with the mask Figure 48 - CESNUR's logo CESNUR is a well-known research centre for 'new religious movements' that claims to be 'independent of any religious or denominational organisation'. Although Introvigne has often responded to criticism of the dubious neutrality of a centre for the study of religions whose main representatives are members of Alleanza Cattolica (e.g. Pierluigi Zoccatelli, Marco Respinti and Andrea Menegotto) by pointing out that CESNUR has nothing to do with Alleanza cattolica and works in an avalutative and scientific manner, it was Introvigne himself who declared in 1993 :   Thus, the activists of Alleanza Cattolica, together with others, have founded and run CESNUR, the Centre for the Study of New Religions, [... ...]  within the context of an apologetic response that does not fail to return to the broader framework of the dramatic struggle between evangelisation and anti-evangelisation, and thus, in the language of the Catholic counter-revolutionary school from which Alleanza Cattolica draws its inspiration, between revolution and counter-revolution, a framework whose thematic presentation constitutes one of the main objectives of the association.   In ‘La questione della nuova religiosità’ by Massimo Introvigne, published by Cristianità, 1993 (ISBN 88-85236-14-6).   "The Catholic counter-revolutionary school from which Alleanza Cattolica draws its inspiration' and which forms the backbone of CESNUR's activities is that of Ousset and Correa de Oliveira. Over the years, CESNUR has emerged as the main actor in favour of 'religious freedom", presenting itself as a scientific authority entitled to defend the cults criticised by the so-called 'anti-cult movement', which is hostile to free belief. This includes spreading the idea in publications and at congresses that spiritual manipulation does not exist. We are once again faced with the paradox from which we started, namely that Catholic traditionalism thunderstruck by ecumenism on the road to Damascus. Perhaps it was not Damascus. Figure 49 - Introvigne, highlighted in the red circle, at a panel organised by Scientology and the Universal Peace Federation (new name for the Unification Church) in Buenos Aires on 22 March 2023 The dark side of politics   Figure 50 - The book by J.M. Bale where CESNUR is described as an organisation whose sub rosa agenda is to fight against secularism Jeffrey M. Bale  of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies , arguably the foremost international expert on political and religious extremism, terrorism, unconventional warfare and covert political operations, does not hesitate to write in the second volume of The Darkest Side of Politics  that unconventional warfare play a role organisations, promote " political and religious agendas that, in the name of religious and democratic freedoms, actually aim to defend extremist, totalitarian and anti-democratic groups from investigation, criticism and possible state repression, and more generally to resist or even drive back secular humanism, liberalism and modernism in the West ". The expert adds that 'perhaps the most important case of these organisations is CESNUR '.. The 'sub rosa' agenda of defending religious freedom with paradoxical 'liberal' arguments (since its director is a 'right-wing Catholic activist'), the "sub rosa" agenda of this centre is to fight against secularism. Seen this way, CESNUR appears as the “cognitive” version of the Aginter Presse. That was the control and coordination room of a physical and psychological war against communism; CESNUR is the control room of a cultural and cognitive influence war against secularism. Indeed, Massimo Introvigne still describes French secularism today as a consequence of the Jacobin terror (revolution, subversion), whose heirs would be the government agency Mission interministérielle de vigilance et de lutte contre les dérives sectaires (MIVILUDES) and the Fédération Européenne des Centres de Recherche et d'Information sur le Sectarisme (FECRIS) , a French organisation that brings together European associations for the defence of and information on the sectarian phenomenon. He writes in an article dated 9 May 2023: France, even more than Germany, has always been the European country that has made intolerance of religion almost a national sport. Article 2 of the French constitution consists of the famous motto liberté, egalité, fraternité. [...] Not everyone knows that the full text originally contained the closing words 'ou la mort'. [...] After 240 years, the anti-religious mentality of a certain France has still not completely disappeared. [...]   In short, the enemy is still Robespierre.   Figure 51 - Introvigne, who has taken off the shoes of the traditionalist Catholic for the time it takes him to put on the shoes of the scholar, visits the temple of Satan  Go to Fascists, spies and gurus. 5. Attack on secularism   F ascists, spies and gurus. 1. Prologue (funny stuff) Fascists, spies and gurus. 2. Mind Games Fascists, spies and gurus. 3. The cult apologists