Guardia Civil: Criminal Sectarianism

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This is an exceprt of a report on cults prepared by a senior police official in Spain in 1981. The original in Spanish can be found at Guardia Civil: Sectarismo Criminal.

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Guardia Civil, March 1981.

CRIMINAL SECTARIANISM (II)

By the Commissioner ANTONIO VIQUEIRA HINOJOSA

Head of the Institute of Police Studies

The Children of God and The Family of Love

One of the sects that at the moment is very dangerous by virtue of the doctrines it propagates. It forms a universal community that tries to live in an imaginary Biblical world, with a radical separation from the influence men, whose lifestyle and values they despise.

The expectation of the end of the World and free Pentecostal teaching sustains this community, constituted by extremely strong authority incarnated in their founder and director David Berg who, under the name of Moses (Mo), appears like the Prophet of the end of the World.

The aforementioned David Berg – who is also called, "King David" - was an evangelical pastor who resided in California in 1968 and who gave the name of "Eve" to his wife, simultaneously who named his four married children "bishops" of his new "church", which continuing his work-they engage themselves in travels round the world involving themselves with high status personalities of diverse nations, who by naivete, stupidity or lack of information welcomes them and supports them in their tactics, although this one already has been unmasked by more intelligent and foresighted governors.

"The Children of God", or "Family of Love", also constitute a revolutionary group in frank rupture with the present society and Church, giving itself totally to religious sexism, that declares the war of the spirit against a system of schools without God, etc.

One of the resources that it specially uses for capturing of followers –especially amongst young people, consists of stimulating prostitution and the corruption of women and free sexuality. The cult has strong economic reserves and makes intense public propaganda in streets, gardens, footpaths, etc., amongst the occupants of cars when stopping at traffic lights, allowing them to use the girls. One of their instructions is that the "missionaries" always smile to the people to who they give pamphlets to obtain funds in the style of the devotees of the Eastern sects already alluded to.

In Belgium – a nation that seems predestined to this type of activity -, the Police, in 1976, carried out an investigation into possible ritual crimes in the persons of two members of "the Children of God", who had showed publicly their desire to leave this sect. In Namur, the 22 of February of that year, the corpse of 21 year old Michel Piersotte (described as an "artistic painter and evangelist") was found. And in December of 1975 the remains of Jean Paul Meurice (20 yrs) were discovered. The internal organs of these had undergone a strange and heavy compression against their spine, causing their death.

There is a strong similarity between "the Children of God" and the Moonie sect when first considering that the latter reveals "a Nazi" or racist character.

The Regional Minister of Education of Baja Sajonia, in April of 1978 indicated the dangerous nature of the followers and doctrines of David Berg accepting prostitution as a method of evangelism. The referred sect has in West Germany 120 "communitarian" colonies, being numerous the young people who deserted their families and studies because of their fidelity to the same.

It is impossible, given the number, to describe how many sects or pseudo religious groups are spread around Spain. We have only mentioned - or cite only those whose doctrines, rites and strategy are known and, therefore, lack a criminal valuation, appearing between some - legally recognised- that considers giving honour to the national flag as an "an idolatrous" manifestation, and an infamy to serve to the Mother country in the Army. This particular sect practically causes the suicide of its followers who need a blood transfusion, to save their life, being a homicide by refusing help from the relatives of such when they prevent the remedy that would save them from death, because of some capricious Biblical interpretation... We will summarily mention the criminal activity of other groups and foreign sectarian organizations, like the Ku-Klux-Klan, with its fiery crosses, racist persecutions and tortures; "the Children of Satan", responsible for the murders of Sharon Tate and the La Bianca’s, directed by the terrible Charles Manson (a) "Satan"; the mass suicide of 900 members of the "People’s Temple" sect , on the 18th of November 1978, in Guyana, victims of the poison that, in a parody of communion, administered by its head and founder Jim Jones, before killing whoever refused to die voluntarily. And, finally, the extermination of a couple made up of Al Mílís and his wife Jonnie, perpetrated by unknown persons in March of 1980 in Berkeley (the USA), fugitives of the referred Jones, who had founded in their turn in that city the “Centre of Human Freedom” with a new religious creed. There is a tendency that exists in these "manufacturers of these exotic and mystical sects" to look for, as a base or fundamental pillar, members of its families, like a sacrificial offering offered to its false Gods. Thus it occurred with the immolation of women as in the case of "the Children of God", and with the elevation to the "Episcopy" by the Pastor David Berg of his descendants in "the Children of God". But here is another aspect offered by that particularity here: the one of Yugoslavian Miroslav Kolac, of forty six years, resident in Melbourne, who arrived in that Australian city from Germany

The house where he lived with his wife and eight children, of ages between 2 and 21 years, was surrounded by a fence of four and a half meters in height, painted in a silver-plated colour. It was equipped with flloodlights and reflectors to avoid their escaping at night; they had even remained locked up for ten years having nailed the windows shut. They were released in a true police assault in September of 1980. The Kolas belonged, together with other forty followers of the same city, to a sect called “I am", that forbad all contact with the outer world. It had as its symbol a star of ten points with eyes in each one of them, appearing together with other strange signs in the fences and doors of "fort" Kolac. The disturbing action of some sects in certain minds, disposed to admit to the unreal or the impossible, leads sometimes to the most unsuspected situations that change the normal unfolding of the facts, like what happened once in the summer of 1978 in the English locality of Ayiesbeare. A girl, Genette Tate, when distributing newspapers on her bike, was kidnapped by a man who drove a Triumph car, without hearing from her again. The officious intervention of a Guru, of the Transcendental Meditation cult, conned the parents of the missing child, saying to them that she had been taken by "extraterrestrial beings", and assured them that she would be returned after one night. After several hours of distress the girl did not return.