“Thought Control” McCarthy was chairman of the “Senate Committee on Government Operations”, which performed a parallel function in the Senate to the Committee on Un-American Activities in the House of Representatives. He told U.S. News and World Report that he intended to root out “Communist thinkers” in education: “From coast to coast you hear the screaming of interference with academic freedom. And you and I know full well that there is no freedom of thought, no freedom of expression on the part of a Communist teacher. His thinking is set forth for him and if he deviates one iota he is out of the party. So that’s a completely false claim that you’re interfering with freedom of thought, freedom of expression when you get rid of Communists. The person who is trying to get rid of them and get good honest Americans in your schools and colleges is the man who is trying to promote freedom of thought and expression in college... complete thought control is on the part of the communists.” “Thought control” is an adaptable animal, however, depending on the times. Fifty years on, Alain Vivien, former MILS president, and his like-minded associates have armed themselves with a rhetoric that denounces “thought control” and “totalitarianism.” Yet they advise one of the most totalitarian regimes in the world, the Chinese, on its treatment of “sects” such as the Falun Gong and Christian movements. “I met with the Chinese leader of religious affairs”, National Assembly member Catherine Picard told Christian Broadcasting Network, and in November 2000 Vivien and his wife were honored guests at a Chinese government symposium in Beijing against such “evil cults.” Vivien’s wife, Patricia Casano, used to head the French anti-sect group, Center Against Mental Manipulation, formerly chaired by Vivien himself. Shortly after their Chinese visit, CCMM’s newsletter reported that in China “France is often mentioned as an example because of its large and coherent moves against the danger of the cults” and reproduced two pages of Chinese government propaganda against the Falun Gong. No criticism was made that the French representatives are providing support to a regime that routinely jails and even tortures believers of all faiths not acceptable to the government. And, as reported by Amnesty International, some die in jail under suspicious circumstances. McCarthy received most of his information from the FBI, then headed by J. Edgar Hoover. Neither he nor his staff cared to verify it; he was a demagogue not a researcher. Today Vivien and their associates receive much of their information from the French equivalent of the FBI, the RG, which in turns works in close collaboration with ADFI, a government-funded “anti-sect” movement in France. Indeed, an application for government funding for ADFI stressed that its collaboration with the RG was essential to its functioning—and ADFI’s main source of funding by far is the government. Just as Hoover’s FBI placed individuals suspected of “thinking wrongly” under surveillance, so is the RG conducting surveillance of those “believing wrongly.” The Christian Broadcasting Network has described how RG officers “mingle among the crowd” while attending evangelical services, taking notes. Another parallel between McCarthyism and the campaign against minority faiths in France is that both continually revise the scope of the alleged problem. Like McCarthy who kept coming up with different numbers of suspected communists in the U.S. Congress and State Department, Vivien, ADFI and their cohorts keep revising their estimates of alleged “sects”, without even providing a definition of the term.