Dragged, Screaming and Kicking

The threat that Dvorkin’s intolerance poses to our nation is easy to see once light is shed upon his influences. CAN was founded by thrice-convicted criminal Ted Patrick. Patrick’s record includes a ban against re-entry to Canada after he traveled there to assault a 21-year-old woman who had converted from the Protestant Church of her upbringing to the Roman Catholic Church.

Patrick considered the Catholic Church a “cult” and, after dragging this Canadian woman into an auto, drove her to a secluded house where he subjected her to days of physical and emotional abuse in an effort to “persuade” her to leave her Church.

The unconscionable use of threats and violence is common among those who adopt Patrick’s ways. In his own book, Patrick describes the kidnapping of a Christian who resisted by bracing himself against Patrick’s escape auto; Patrick forced the man into the auto by squeezing his genitals until he collapsed in pain.

“Then I hit,” Patrick wrote, “shoving him head first into the back seat of the car and piling in on top of him.”

Patrick was one of the first to use the term “deprogramming” to describe such coercive attempts to destroy religious belief. The word is an attempt to camouflage obviously criminal actions and make them appear legitimate. It implies that anyone who holds religious beliefs has been “programmed,” and thereby suggests that “de-programming” is necessary to reverse this “process.”

This theory has been utterly disproved by academics, numerous courts, and even the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association. The reasons are obvious: it violates a basic human right and every accepted standard of civilized conduct.

In Patrick’s own book he states that deprogramming:

“may be said to involve kidnapping at the very least, quite often assault and battery, almost invariably conspiracy to commit a crime and illegal restraint.”

In the development of deprogramming, Patrick acknowledged a debt of gratitude to British psychiatrist William Sargant. Sargant’s now condemned experiments in brainwashing produced techniques which, in his own words, would enable:

“the therapist [to] deliberately distort the facts of the patient’s life-experience to achieve heightened emotional response and abreaction. In the drunken state of narcoanalysis, patients are prone to accept the therapist’s false constructions.”

In other words, the victim can be brainwashed by deprogramming so that he not only denounces his religious beliefs, but now actually believes lies about his former religion implanted by the deprogrammer.

This is one of the reasons why Dvorkin’s work is likely to continue to reflect badly on the Russian Orthodox Church. Due to his position, people may feel the methods he advocates reflect the ideology of the Church, when in fact they are purely of psychiatric origin.

And what is the true purpose of deprogramming, other than the irrational hatred caused by bigotry? It is money. In America, “deprogrammers” first spread alarming stories about any new or minority religion. Then, when they have family members or friends concerned about someone who is a member, they charge $10,000 or more to attempt to kidnap and “deprogram” the relative. As can be seen by the examples above, no religion is exempt. As long as they are paid, deprogrammers will attempt to take any parishioner away from any group or belief.