Legal Measures to Combat Cult Violence: Continuous monitoring of the individuals active in cults Since the cults spread their threat among the societies throughout the world and nations experienced a great cult scare, the need to establish agencies and regulating laws to monitor the activities of suspicious groups and cults seemed to be an inevitable preventive measure. From the Manson family to the Moonies, the Waco sect to the Jonestown massacre, the activities of cults prompt great public concern and many NGOs and government-run agencies have devoted their resources to monitoring the activities of deviant groups. In the US alone the media continually warn of the dangers of cultic brainwashing strategies and the FBI continues to monitor closely religious groups they perceive to be potential dangers. Despite the great public and governmental attention afforded to detect destructive cults and sects, however, still a great number escape unnoticed.
The role of government to establish effective procedures besides constant monitoring of the individuals that are known to be active in certain cults is of great importance. Moreover, to ascertain the social security and build a protective wall against the threat of the cults, the government might maintain a militant protection which thereby obligates it to monitor and, if necessary, take action against destructive cults operating in a country. Indeed, it is not in any way against the practice of democracy to determine which cult or organizations or associated members have to come under the scope of a cult-monitoring activity since the society may suffer irreparable damages after unwarned, psychopathic attack or operation of a cult. In fact, it is people’s right to know and be informed of possible threats of cults and as Singer states:
Without the citizenry being aware of the power and control certain cults are wielding, democracy and freedom can be curbed one step at a time. 1
It has to be noted that because of unsettling presence of cults more people are susceptible to the threats of cults and in the same way it requires strenuous task to monitor the activists and activities. Moreover, in some occasions cults take advantage of existing flaws in the law to evade prosecution. For instance, Japan’s Aum Supreme Truth cult, responsible for a Tokyo subway gas attack which killed 12 people and injured thousands, escaped outlaw under Japan’s anti-subversion laws in January 1997 because a legal panel ruled there was no reason to believe it could still be a threat to society. Although Japan’s Public Security Investigation Agency later in 1999 conducted further investigations and began close monitoring of the cult activities with a view to re-apply for anti-subversion laws, there was no guarantee that the cult would not engage in further destructive and menacing operations.
In Iran, because of hypocritical nature of Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO/MEK), the organization managed to escape security scrutiny of the newly established government. The result was irremediable for the government and the nation. It cost Iran at least two tragic explosions in the prime minister’s office and the main office of the Islamic Republic Party killing the late president Rajaee and his prime minister and more than seventy key Iranian figures. Expelled from Iran, MKO continued its clandestine activities in other countries. In Germany, for example, it was after a two-year close monitoring of the government that the group’s illegal fundraising activities were discovered:
In Germany, the government uncovered the Mojahedin’s financial activities. After a two year investigation, the German High Court on 21st December 2001 closed the Mojahedin ‘shop’ – twenty-five houses and bases – after evidence was found of misuse of Social Security and fraud. 2
Then, it becomes evident that fundraising activities of the cults, although seemingly harmless at the first look, helps equipping the cult, if it is a terrorist cult like MKO, with sophisticated, destructive arms for military operations. The devoted members of cults are motivated to engage in fundraising activities with remarkable results. As Anne Singleton, a Briton ex-member of MKO, explains:
When Maryam came to Europe in 1993, she brought with her a totally dedicated force who undertook any task required. They set about taking over from the supporters’ role of fundraising. With their bullying tactics, their productivity far exceeded anything seen before. Some were able to return up to 1500 pounds sterling, per day. But even before this, in one year alone, Iran Aid charity in the UK had a declared income of 5 million pounds. Its undeclared income has been estimated at over twice this, making a total of over 15 million pounds in one year. If this amount is multiplied for just ten countries: UK, USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, then an annual amount of 150 million pounds can be estimated to have made its way to the Mojahedin organisation. If this is multiplied over ten years, then the figure of 1.5 billion pounds gives a rough estimate of the resources which Massoud Rajavi has amassed through the efforts of his devoted followers only in the streets of the West. 3
In France too, it cost the government a high price before discovering the threatening, cult nature of MKO residing there in Paris. Suspecting that MKO’s headquarters acted as the cells of plotting terrorist and cult-like activities, the French police raided its headquarters in the vicinity of Paris and arrested its leader, Maryam Rajavi, and a number of her accomplices. Reported by the Figaro after the police’s raid:
The PMOI has carried out a number of activities on French soil that are clandestine, sectarian, delinquent, and even seriously criminal. In France, tile organisation has two or three hundred militants and sympathisers. Its ‘hard nucleus’ is made up of a few dozen militants. 4
The following shocking activities by the members of MKO proved that the police had acted on the basis of confidential reports; more than twenty members set themselves on fire in the streets of Paris and other European cities with two consequent deaths. The danger of cultism isn’t always restricted to be suspicious of a cult but activities and its members whose monitoring can sound the alarm before it is too late.
References:
1. Thaler Singer, Margaret; Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace, introduction, XXVIII.
2. Anne Singleton; Saddam’s Private Army, Iran-Interlink, 2003.
3. ibid.
4. Antoine Gessler; Autopsy of an Ideological Drift, Translated by Thomas R. Forstenzer, 2004, p. 95.
Taking refuge in France, the Iranian Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization has shown its cult potentiality and to mobilize people for multiple protest demonstrations. In the course of Iran-US football match in Lyon in 1998, for example, and the visits of Iranian key officials to France, notably that of President Khatami in 1999 and Iranian members of parliament in February, 2001, the organization demonstrated the degree of its mass mobilizing threats that alarmed France. Reported by Associated Press, 21 June 1998, quoting some French authorities talking about some taken security measures before Iran-US football match, we read: 
person or group of people that has near-complete control. Charismatic cult leaders often make extreme claims of divine or “otherworldly” power to exercise influence over their members. Many legitimate religions have had powerful figures who have inspired enormous dedication in people. Being a powerful leader is not inherently wrong , though it carries a high potential for abuse. A group becomes destructive when its leader actively uses such power to deceive members and to rob them of their individuality and free will. For example, I was told to surrender my free will (viewed as Satanic) to God’s representative, Moon, and his subleaders. Marshall Applewhite told followers that an alien entity was speaking through him, and used his message to justify his absolute control over their lives. 
As part of the intense influence and change process in many cults, people take on a new social identity, which may or may not be obvious to an outsider. When groups refer to this new identity, they speak of members who are transformed, reborn, enlightened, empowered, rebirthed, or cleared. The group’ approved behavior is reinforced and reinterpreted as demonstrating the emergence of "the new person." Members are expected to display this new identity. 1 The new personality totally split from the outside world is manipulated for a variety of group tasks based on the objectives of the group and cult that consider the outsiders as the enemies who have to be confronted: The conflicts a mass movement seek and incites serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip its followers of their distinct individuality and render them more soluble in the collective medium. 2 As Hoffer asserts, a cultist personality is formed to be submissive to the inner-cultic relations that have priority to outwardly demonstrated ambitions and goals. The members undergoing overall identity change easily consent to any means of changing behaviour and conduct. Thus, cults can successfully accomplish their goal of binding new members to the group. Considering the stages people will go through as their attitudes are changed by the group environment and the thought reform processes, Singer points to psychologist Edgar Schein’s second stages of three: During this second stage, you sense that the solutions offered by the group provide a path to follow. You feel that anxiety, uncertainty, and self-doubt can be reduced by adopting the concepts put forth by the group or leader. Additionally, you observe the behavior of the longer, term members, and you begin to emulate their ways. As social psychology experiments and observations have found for decades, once a person makes an open commitment before others to an idea, his or her subsequent behavior generally supports and reinforces the stated commitment. That is, if you say in front of others that you are making a commitment to be "pure," then you will feel pressured to follow what others define as the path of purity. 3 There are also the eight psychological themes that psychiatrist Robert Lifton has identified as central to totalistic environments and cults invoke these themes for the purpose of promoting behavioral and attitudinal changes in the members. The third theme, demand for purity, depicts two opposite world of black and white; the cult being an absolutely white and clean world versus the black and evil world of outside. Of course, the members with a new personality have no other choice but to think and act according to cult’s ideology and drawn strategy: An us-versus-them orientation is promoted by the all-or-nothing belief system of the group: we are right; they (outsiders, nonmembers) are wrong, evil, unenlightened, and so forth. Each idea or act is good or bad, pure or evil. Recruits gradually take in, or internalize, the critical, shaming essence of the cult environment, which builds up lots of guilt and shame. Most groups put forth that there is only one way to think, respond, or act in any given situation. There is no in between, and members are expected to judge themselves and others by this all-or-nothing standard. 4 The process of producing identity within MKO follows the same mechanism in the cults and its orientation began with the start of the internal ideological revolution. All the members undergoing the revolution process admitted their identity change, that there does exist a long distance between their organizational and personal identities. It was instilled into them that their identity would be prompted based on the extent of adherence to the ideological system of the group and denial of any personal identity. In a text written by a member of MKO in self-denial we read: Personality, egocentrism, self-reliance and individualism are all souvenirs of the bourgeoisie’s worthless humanism that distanced me from the organization as far as its degree of its impact on me. It was like a chaff that barred me to drink the pure, life-giving instructions of the organization and was leaving me alone in a desolate waste-land with no way out. I was enslaved by dominant ambiguities within me. When I failed to overcome the ongoing struggle inside me, I was even more vulnerable to the outside misfortunes and could not even face them. 5 The member’s confession well depicts his identity destabilization and what psychologists call an identity crisis. He looks back at his own world and values to find out that he has been wrong in the past. This process makes him uncertain about what is right, what to do, and which choices to make and of course, as he admits, only the cult-like instructions of the organization can lead him to what is inspired to be the right path. Consequently, he takes on a new organizational identity which he considers a change for the better. In the process, he, as the member of a cult, detaches from his most dear ideas and attachments which he discovers to have been nothing beyond a barren waste-land for the identity reborn, a utopia in the horizon he fails to dismiss easily. Masoud Banisadr, another separated member of MKO, in his memoir relates of the time when sat tearing whatever attached him to the past under the commands of the organization: This time I attacked my old photographs from my own childhood till marriage and up to then, my parents photographs as I wanted to deny all of them, my father who was perhaps responsible for my bourgeois tendencies and my mother who was responsible of my own ‘mild’ and ‘gentle’ behaviour known as liberal ones. Anna seeing me taking all those photographs and albums, with anger, was quietly crying, then when I attacked our marriage Album she start crying louder, and asked me to stop it. She said those are not just yours . . . but I was not listening to her and took everything and put them in a rubbish bag. 6 Quoting Lifton’s forth theme, through a cult’s instructions, members are told whatever connects them to their former lives is wrong and has to be avoided, a fact well affirmed by MKO’s ex-members: Through the confession process and by instruction in the group’s teachings, members learn that everything about their former lives, including friends, family, and nonmembers, is wrong and to be avoided. Outsiders will put you at risk of not attaining the purported goal: they will lessen your psychological awareness, hinder the group’s political advancement, obstruct your path toward ultimate knowledge, or allow you to become stuck in your past life and incorrect thinking. 7 That is why MKO refer to members’ solubility in the organizational identity as a “reborn” or “identity salvation”. The organization, being transformed into a cult, pursues the same cult mechanism of altering the members’ personal identity to produce a new identity. References: 1. Margaret Thaler Singer; Cults in Our Midst, JOSSEY-BASS, 2003, p. 78. 2. Eric Hoffer; The true believer, Harper &. Row, Publishers, New York, 1966, p. 112. 3. Margaret Thaler Singer; Cults in Our Midst, JOSSEY-BASS, 2003, p. 76. 4. Ibid, 71. 5. Mojahed, no. 252; Abdol-ali Maasoumi’s letter to the ideological revolution. 6. Masoud Banisadr; Memoirs of an Iranian Rebel. 7. Margaret Thaler Singer; Cults in Our Midst, JOSSEY-BASS, 2003, p. 72.
Ahmadinejad of Iran. They claim that they have revealed the Iranian military nuclear programs in 2002. After the American security agencies reported that Iran has interrupted its program for bomb fabrication, MEK refused the report and claimed that Tehran is still seeking nuclear weapon secretly. And this is exactly what Bush claimed after the reports issued. There is a question here: 
more and more obedient and passive. Considering the significance of the matter, finding out the nature and extent of members’ obedience in cults is one of the major issues in internal cultist relations. The reasons why a person submits to be subjected to mental, physical , psychological, and financial misuse to the extent that he/she gives up job, family, and the individual freedom are very important issues for those interested in investigating cultist mechanisms and levers. In simple words, those outside cults, out of curiosity, strive for public awareness and preventing people’s deviation as well as discovering how in an age of scientific development and communication there people who easily fall in the cults’ trap and are are hoodwinked by their tricks. In order to understand such an issue we must look at the social and psychological techniques used by cults and cultic groups. This process of planned, convert coordinated influence-popularly called brainwashing or mind control or, more technically, thought reform-is the means by which the cult leader subjugates the followers.
of the major issues in internal cultist relations. The reasons why a person submits to be subjected to mental, physical , psychological, and financial misuse to the extent that he/she gives up job, family, and the individual freedom are very important issues for those interested in investigating cultist mechanisms and levers. In simple words, those outside cults, out of curiosity, strive for public awareness and preventing people’s deviation as well as discovering how in an age of scientific development and communication there people who easily fall in the cults’ trap and are are hoodwinked by their tricks. In order to understand such an issue we must look at the social and psychological techniques used by cults and cultic groups. This process of planned, convert coordinated influence-popularly called brainwashing or mind control or, more technically, thought reform-is the means by which the cult leader subjugates the followers.