LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Cults: North America
built 184 days ago
Cults Across America is not a serious simulation. Rather, it allows players of all stripes to have a good time for a few hours, whether they aim to crush their competitors using deep-thinking strategy, enact improbable religious campaigns, or simply froth, foam, yell, and destroy.
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In Cults Across America, you'll do all that and more. You'll take charge of an insanity-inducing faction of frothing fanatics. You'll command cultists, high priests, tanks, nuclear reactors, the national guard, the Pope, the President, and maybe even Cthulhu himself.
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The 1978 Jonestown Massacre, where 913 of the Reverend Jim Jones' followers were forced to commit suicide, marked the high point in America's condemnation of cults. Spread across newspaper front pages and national magazines from coast to coast, the slaughter gave focus to an alarm that had grown throughout the decade. Were cults spreading like wildfire? Were Rasputin-like religious leaders luring the nation's youth into oblivion like modern-day Pied Pipers? The Jonestown coverage reinforced the common perception that, in cults, America harbored some alien menace. The perception could not be further from the truth.
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This explores the question of when and why violence by and against new religious cults erupts and whether and how such dramatic conflicts can be foreseen, managed and averted. The authors, leading international experts on religious movements and violent behavior, focus on the four major episodes of cult violence during the last decade: the tragic conflagration that engulfed the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; the deadly sarin gas attack by the Aum Shinrikyo in Tokyo; the murder-suicides by the Solar Temple in Switzerland and Canada; and the collective suicide by the members of Heaven’s Gate. They explore the dynamics leading to these dramatic episodes in North America, Europe, and Asia, and offer insights into the general relationship between violence and religious cults in contemporary society. The authors conclude that these events usually involve some combination of internal and external dynamics through which a new religious movement and society become polarized.
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To determine whether the techniques employed by the cults would be best described as super-salesmanship or whether cults really engage in coercive conversion and brainwashing would require a cult-by-cult and case-by-case analysis. It is clear... that many of the techniques closely parallel those described by Edgar Schein, Robert Lifton, and others, who have studied brainwashing techniques used on American soldiers captured during the Korean War. These techniques included efforts to undermine physical resistance, removal of all social and emotional supports, mortification exercises, and intensive indoctrination procedures. Moreover, the results are sometimes similar to brainwashing in that converts experience altered personalities, altered world views, and partial or complete loss of the ability to think clearly and abstractly.
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[The Anthropologists] study American families the way they would Polynesian cargo cults or Mongolian nomads--by inserting themselves into the daily lives of their subjects" [stress added]." Matt Crenson, 2000, Anthropologists Among Us. The Modesto Bee, July 17, 2000, pages D1 and D2.
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