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This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer) political cult
Although the majority of groups to which the term "cult" (currently often used as a pejorative term according to some comparative religion scholars[1] [2]) is sometimes applied are religious in nature, a number are non-religious and focus either on secular self-improvement[3] [4] [5] [6] or on political action and ideology.[7] Groups that some writers have termed as "political cults," mostly advocating far-left or far-right agendas, have received some attention from journalists and scholars. In their 2000 book On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left, Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth discuss about a dozen organizations in the United States and Great Britain that they characterize as cults.[8] However, the term has also been used to describe the "cult of personality" in North Korea (in a context that clearly describes practices more extreme than those in most communist countries to which the term has been applied).[9] [10] [11] [12] The recent usage of the term "political cult" has been largely by writers who themselves are former members of Marxist-Leninist organizations. Both Tourish and Wohlforth are former members of Trotskyist sects who now attack their former organizations and the Trotskyist movement in general.[13] Wohlforth is currently a crime fiction author[23] and Tourish is now a management professor who has also written about "corporate cultism" at Enron and elsewhere.[24] Sociologist Janja Lalich was for over a decade a leading member of the Marxist Democratic Workers Party.[14] Dennis King, a long-time critic of the Lyndon Larouche organization, was a member of the revolutionary Marxist Progressive Labor Party in the late 1960s.[15] Alexandra Stein, who likewise spent a decade in a secretive Minneapolis Marxist group, entitled her memoir "Inside Out: A Memoir of Entering and Breaking Out of a Minneapolis Political Cult."[16] Prior to the recent coining of the term "political cult," former members of Marxist-Leninist organizations had often been the most vociferous opponents of their former organizations.[17][18][19] A notable example was the 1950 publication of The God that Failed, featuring recollections of 6 prominent ex-Communists[20] Critics such as the socialist writer Isaac Deutscher contended that the former communists retain the rigidity of thought they denounce in their former organizations: He remains a sectarian. He is an inverted Stalinist. He continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colors are differently distributed. Chip Berlet, a researcher at Political Research Associates (PRA)—which describes itself as a a progressive think tank devoted to supporting movements that are building a more just and inclusive democratic society[25]—is another writer who has attempted to promote the concept of a “cult-like totalitarian movement.” Berlet bases this characterization and usage on the writings of Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism[21] The historian Walter Laqueur has described the followers of Arendt as themselves comprising a cult who have latched on to her as a politically correct icon.[22] Former Unification Church member Steven Hassan, author of Combatting Cult Mind Control, has described inhabitants of the former Soviet Union as having been in "the political cult of communism." Hassan claims that concept of "destructive cult" he and others in the "anti-cult" movement use "fits the Communist model precisely."[23] The term "cult" has also been used loosely and sometimes sarcastically to refer to tightly controlled or excessively fanatical political formations or movements without necessarily meaning that they fit the definition of a destructive cult in the sociological sense of the term.[citation needed] For instance, And a Republican Party activist in Texas complained to writer Joe Conason that the local party had become "more religious cult than political organization."[24] Non-mainstream Religions and PoliticsSome religious groups that have been described variously as cults or new religious movements participate vigorously in politics, including the Unification Church of Rev. Moon[25] and Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation movement (which sponsors the Natural Law Party),[26] but such groups often clearly identify themselves as being religious organizations that are motivated primarily by spiritual concerns.[27][28] Falun Gong, a religious movement in China, was branded a cult by the Chinese government in the 1990s and has been subjected to harsh repression ever since. As a result, Falun Gong has become one of the most politically active religious movements in the world, fighting tenaciously against the Chinese communist regime's anti-religious and other undemocratic policies.[citation needed] Falun Gong's Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party is a book-length attack on the entire history of Maoism. The book claims that Chinese communism used brainwashing, criticism and self-criticism, physical repression, isolation, paranoia, personality cultism and a full range of other cult-like manipulative methods to control the Chinese people, and that this distortion of Chinese culture has reached deep into Chinese society and needs to be dislodged by a real cultural revolution to bring the nation into the modern world politically and culturally as well as economically.[29] American Family Foundation GuidelinesGuidelines have been developed by the American Family Foundation (AFF) [26] that claim to provide a basis for making a provisional judgment as to whether a particular group might be a "political cult" rather than simply an ideological sect that uses flamboyantly extreme rhetoric and/or elicits a high level of voluntary commitment from its core members.
AFF and the Falun Gong ControversyIn the People's Republic of China, the China-Anti Cult Association (CACA) has borrowed many of the concepts of the western Anti-Cult Movement in its repression of the outlawed Falun Gong movement, according to one scholarly article.[27] Another report claims that the "brainwashing ideology" of the Western anti-cult movement has been a contibuting factor in the violent repression of the Falun Going by the chinese government.[28] In an interview published by the Chinese embassy, AFF Board member Margaret T. Singer labeled the Falun gong as a cult, and said she did not feel that the government crackdown on the group was “a religious freedom issue at all.”[29] Singer told the Embassy reporter that the American public’s perception of the Falun Gong as a suppressed relgious organization was a result of misunderstandings by the American public and a bias against the Chinese government: I think the Chinese government has to get a lot better of public relations over here, real good stuff into our press and TV, so that it makes Falun Gong visible as these years, [as] one more of….thousands of cults. The American Family Foundation's then president, Herbert Rosedale, presented a paper at a CACA meeting in China in 2001[30] and the following year hosted a meeting of the China Anti-Cult Association and "cult experts" associated with the AFF.[31] Rosedale was criticized at the time for lending support to the Chinese government's suppression of the Falun Gong.[32] In 2004, the ICSA issued a statement unequivocally condemning the repression of Falun Gong by the Chinese government. Noting that lists of groups maintained bt the ICSA 'are not lists of "cults,'" the statement said that "reports in the Chinese press and elsewhere that ICSA has branded Falun Gong a cult are false...ICSA as an organization has not taken a position on the issue."[30] A Falun Gong-associated online newsletter expressed concern about the AFF's decision to cut ties to the Chinese government and only relate to "civil organizations and individuals who study Falun Gong": AFF doesn't understand that civil organizations and individuals who study Falun Gong in China all serve the Party's purpose of persecuting Falun Gong.[33] Examples of groups that have been described as "political cults"The LaRouche Movement[34] [35] and Gino Parente's National Labor Federation (NATLFED) [36] are examples of political groups described as "cults" that are based in the United States (the latter by former NATLFED member[37] Jeff Whitnack); another is Marlene Dixon's now-defunct Democratic Workers Party (a critical history of the DWP is given in Bounded Choice by Janja A. Lalich, a sociologist and former DWP member).[38] The "O", a small Marxist group in Minneapolis, is the subject of a memoir by ex-member Alexandra Stein.[39] Organizations headed by Fred Newman, such as the International Workers Party and the New Alliance Party, have been described as cults by the Anti-Defamation League, as well as by political critics such as Tourish and Wohlforth and Chip Berlet.[40] [41] [42] Newman is involved in both politics and psychotherapy, and has described the cult claims as false and as politically motivated, destructive attacks by political opponents.[43][44] The followers of Ayn Rand have been characterized as a "cult" by economist Murray N. Rothbard and historian of science Michael Shermer.[45] [46]. Among the groups that represent themselves as followers of Rand are the Ayn Rand Institute, and the Ayn Rand Collective. Although Rand followers advocate a decidedly libertarianism philosophy, Rothbard claimed they were but organized in the manner of a "Leninist" organization.[47] In Britain, the Workers Revolutionary Party, a Trotskyist group led by the late Gerry Healy and strongly supported by actress Vanessa Redgrave, has been described by others who have been involved in the Trotskyist movement as having been a cult, or as displaying cult-like characteristics, in the 1970s and 1980s.[48] [49] Another British Trotskyist group, known variously as the Committee for a Workers International (CWI), the Revolutionary Socialist League and the Militant Tendency, has been the subject of a case study by former CWI member Dennis Tourish[50] in the Cultic Studies Journal.[51] The Shining Path guerrilla movement active in Peru in the 1980s and 1990s has been described variously as a "cult"[52] and an intense "cult of personality."[53] The People's Mujaheddin, a leftist Iranian guerrilla movement based in Iraq, has been described as a political cult by Middle Eastern history professor Ervand Abrahamian and Council of Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Max Boot,[54] [55] [56] in a Human Rights Watch report,[31][verification needed] and on "Iran Interlink", a website which claims to be devoted to helping members of the group leave its military encampment in Iraq and reunite with their families,[32] but which has elsewhere been described as run by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).[57] References
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