Victim-Soldiers in American Religious Cults and Terrorist Groups
Terrorist leaders use cult mind control techniques to recruit, condition and deploy their ranks. Economic, social or emotional desperation often combine with a failure, inability or unwillingness to critically analyze recruitment and conditioning tactics.
Skilled psychomanipulators transform the desperate to create victim-soldiers who unquestioningly obey every command of their leaders. Both modern religious cults and the Islamist terrorists sweet talk prospective recruits, then steal their personal freedom. In the mainstream religious cults, a battlefield of the godly versus the worldly helps polarize the decisions of new member, where each choice must be made within the context of a godly war. The victim-soldiers are commissioned to aggressively distribute religious literature, collect donations, and recruit more members. In the case of the terrorist cults, bright young men and women strap on explosive vests, or commandeer jets to kill civilians they consider enemies. Terrorists are no less victims, but devastatingly more literally soldiers.
Terrorist groups and religious cults are very similar in use of classical mind control techniques in their methods of recruitment, indoctrination and behavior control.
Both types of groups concentrate their leadership in the hands of a charismatic individual or small group who uses a claim to speak for god to control or direct the daily activities of the members through a hierarchical system.
Both types of groups have well designed programs to advertise to their target market, and well trained “salesman/missionaries” who skillfully convince prospective members to make the decision to join.
This abusive practice is hardly new. Bible writers claiming to speak for god have inspired devastating vengeance upon enemies for thousands of years, including the most disgusting of genocides, “Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities,” the ancient Jews are commanded in Isaiah 14:21.
This blog, and soon, an extensive paper, will examine aspects of the social psychology of religious mind control. We will look at some neurological processes in the brain during the emotional distress often preceding the moment of commitment join a religious cult, and find out if this may weaken one’s ability to resist the warped logic of cult recruiters. We will review innovators’ successes in defining the psychology of recovery of victims from mind control cults, as well as an example of one Islamic terrorist who left the group spontaneously. Finally, I shall propose an extension to the foregoing which can be used to prevent terrorism at its roots, in the weakness and vulnerable confusion of a desperate human mind.
