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Interesting Italian book about cults

Sekh

Patron with Honors
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In Italy, a new book about cults and their influence in politics is written by Gianni del Vecchio and Stefano Pitrelli, two well-respected research-reporters in the Roman-language part of Europe. The Name of the book is: Occulto Italia. It was published by ''BUR futuropasso" on 12 march 2011.


This means "Occult Italy", but also something like "The Hidden Italy" and seems to be an interesting attempt of exposing the ways cults use to gain influence in politics and Big Business.

Unfortunately the book is, at least for now, only available in Italian.
It would be nice to have an English translation, if possible one that addresses the international situation.

The book is not specially about Scientology, though it takes a prominent place. Still, it gives food for thought for everyone who worries about the influence of religious cults on our institutions.

An Anon, nicked mnql1, was so friendly to translate the Synopsis in English.
Here it comes:

Political Sects

Occulto Italia reveals how esoteric movements practice lobbying and secure complicity

by Giovanni Cocconi
March 15, 2011

The devil, as they say, is in the details.

When Italy noticed on December 14, 2010 [note 1] that Domenico Scilipoti could play a central political role, it was too late. We learned everything about him too late: his bank loans, his work as an acupuncturist, his partiality for holistic medicine. Even the leader of his former party, Antonio Di Pietro, should have opened his eyes much earlier, since that he decided last September to entrust Scilipoti with creating the National Forum against Mental Manipulation and an observatory to monitor sects, an alarming phenomenon with which "Mimmo" was a bit too complicit.

He was the wrong man in the right place. The underestimation of Scilipoti mirrors a larger underestimation that is explained in Occulto Italia (Bur, 2011, 12.50 euros) by Gianni Del Vecchio, journalist for Europa, and Stefano Pitrelli, a longtime collaborator of the newspaper.

The book refutes one of our most deeply rooted beliefs, that sects involve marginal happenings and marginal persons. Neither is true.

On the contrary, the book shines a spotlight on what might be called a "third level" [note 2] of more or less naïve or conscious complicity in politics.

The fascination with esoteric sects and movements cuts across almost all groups and embraces almost the entire political spectrum, with one understandable exception, the Union of Christian and Center Democrats. To be clear, we're not talking about a double affiliation - to a party and to a sect - by administrators and parliamentarians, but a double motivation that leads a movement to seek institutional support and some politicians to not avoid giving it, and in some cases, to pursue it for electoral purposes. The effect is a strange paradox in which Italy is one of the few Western countries where the crime of mental manipulation has been abolished and Italy may slip into the opposite extreme, granting legal recognition to sects that, through persistent lobbying, have been aiming to benefit from tax-deductible charitable donations with the consent of the Italian government. [note 3]

For example, few remember that Scientology hit the jackpot when, in 2005, Letizia Moratti, then Minister of Education, accredited Applied Scholastics, a company linked to the movement founded by Ron Hubbard, among the training institutions for public school teachers. Fortunately, this accreditation was cancelled in 2008, thanks to the intervention of Education Minister Giuseppe Fioroni, but for three years it allowed affiliates of Hubbard's religion to indoctrinate a lot of teachers.

The legitimization of parareligious sects is often almost invisible. In 2006, the Minister for Youth, Giovanna Melandri, established the Youth Council on Religious and Cultural Pluralism and, to represent Italian Buddhists, she invited members of Soka Gakkai, an "apocryphal" sect that was on the rise thanks to pop testimonials such as those of Sabina Guzzanti and Roberto Baggio.

The book describes the voting affinities between certain movements and certain alignments and vice versa. For example, Damanhur, a strange spiritual community whose heart is in Valchiusella, at the foot of the Alps, 50 km from Turin, is very popular in the ranks of the center-left.

Rooted in this locality, the sect can boast of having given its name to a bipartisan parliamentary amendment in 1996 that, in effect, condoned the illegal construction of the movement's temple underground.

The paradox is that Damanhur offers an environmentally friendly way of life which, not surprisingly, has found much support in the Green Party, on whose National Council Damanhurians managed to place three members.

The book dwells on the embarrassment of former leader Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio who, in 2006 in the town of Vidracco, home of the movement, succeeded in garnering more votes than the center-left candidate Romano Prodi. Interviewed on television about his closeness to Damanhur, he babbled an unconvincing explanation. Parliamentarian Luciano Violante of Turin - a figure considered "highly sought" but "difficult to approach" - visited the sect's temple. Some time later, however, he eyes were opened about the movement during a hearing by his "own" Institutional Affairs Committee at which the National Observatory on Psychological Abuse testified. On the subject of psychological abuse, the investigation by Del Vecchio and Pitrelli reports many personal stories, anonymously of course, that fully convey the drama of the mistreatment that was experienced and the difficulty of leaving the sectarian world. This makes the book unsurpassable concerning a phenomenon that television sometimes covers too superficially.

Lobbying activities are often a matter of necessity; when a single movement tries to go it alone, the results are almost comical in electoral terms. Possibly the most disturbing example of complicity between politics and sects is the case of ontopsychology and its leader, Antonio Meneghetti, a true "evil genius" who, through video jockey Andrea Pezzi, managed to secure financial backing from the creator of Publitalia-Forza Italia, Marcello Dell'Utri, and his foundation Il Circolo del Buon Governo. The project was called Ovopedia and it envisaged the creation of a multimedia encyclopedia that would have rewritten history according to Meneghetti's creed. It is no consolation that Pezzi is now also courting political support on the left.

It is also no consolation that Meneghetti's followers can quietly teach at La Sapienza University in Rome.

Fortunately, one of the politicians who has always been most sensitive to the problem of psychological manipulation of the most vulnerable, Giorgio Napolitano, is now President of Italy. For once, the right man is in the right place.

Notes:
[1]Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi survived a no-confidence vote on December 14, 2010 with unexpected support from Domenico Scilipoti, amid accusations that Scilipoti is a political Judas whose vote was bought off. (link)

[2]The "third level" (terzo livello) of the Mafia concerns relations between the Mafia and politics.

[3] Italian taxpayers can donate 0.8% of their income tax to an institution whose name appears in a list. This is called the 8 per mille ("8 per thousand") rule.

A link to the author's website: http://www.pitrelli-delvecchio.com/

mnql1 ordered a copy and promised to post more translated material on clambake if he/she can find the time, knowing very well there's much more to do right now for this person,
Still, I personally hope that it will be anytime soon, this is fascinating stuff, and not just for Italians.

Interested readers could send a mail to the authors, asking when the English translation hits the market....:whistling:

Love, Sekh.
 

Jachs

Gold Meritorious Patron
We should be creating a chrono-'illogical' timeline of CofS blackeye/footbullet reports.
 
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