A French McCarthyism How Lives are Destroyed

The dominating politician stood before the microphone, looking out on the audience who had come to hear about a threat to national security greater than any they had imagined. “I have here in my hand ... a list of names,” he said, of Communists “working and shaping the policy of the [United States] State Department.”

The speech catalyzed an era that many French citizens remember—one that opened with suspicion, proceeded with hysteria, and closed with shame.

The speaker was Senator Joseph McCarthy; the time and place: February 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia, in the United States. The “Red scare” and purge to root communists out of American public and private life would earn a name after its foremost demagogue: McCarthyism. The word today stands for intolerance and inquisition; a smear campaign of groundless accusations in which professions of innocence become admissions of guilt, and in which civil rights are trampled by suspicion and rumor.

Today’s anti-sect hysteria in France has the hallmarks of a new McCarthyism, and like the original, it is diseasing a nation: destroying lives, ruining careers, and giving extremist politicians a platform to undermine the democratic structures upon which a just society depends.

McCarthy deflected opposition by accusing all critics of being communists, subversive, or infiltrated; he pointed the finger at prominent national figures, including Secretary of State Dean Acheson, statesman and U.S. Army General George Marshall—who would receive the Nobel peace prize in 1953—and senators. In August 1951, when William Benton asked the Senate to form a committee to examine whether to expel McCarthy, not one fellow-senator spoke up in Benton’s support. McCarthy promptly called Senator Benton “the hero of every Communist and crook in and out of government.”

Do we learn from history? It seems the answer is “no”. Any criticism of “anti-sect” measures is squelched today by the very tactics McCarthy perfected. The headline of Actualites des Religions in May 2001 is evocative: “MPs were afraid to be considered pro-cult.” The article described the silence of the few MPs present in the National Assembly on May 30, 2001 when time came to vote on a repressive “Law to Reinforce Prevention and Repression of Sectarian Groups”—the About-Picard “anti-sect” law, named after originators Catherine Picard from the National Assembly and Nicolas About from the Senate.

When the About-Picard bill was being voted on the Senate floor, one senator briefly mentioned “a kind of pressure” to ensure that it passed. “Let me tell you, this is absolutely scandalous!”, he declared. But discussion of the topic was shut down at the urging of Senator Nicolas About, co-author of the bill.

The “sect scare” in France is doing what the “red scare” did in the United States. The hysteria is generated and kept alive by, among others, Alain Vivien, who in 1998 was appointed president of the “Interministerial Mission to Fight Against Sects (MILS).” For years, Vivien has maintained a stream of propaganda to incite discrimination and persecution of individuals based solely on their religious beliefs.