Word: cult
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When the ghastly scene was discovered, the day before Christmas Eve, much of appalled Western Europe was compelled to ask--again--Why? The winter solstice ritual enacted about an hour's drive from the site of the glittering 1992 Winter Olympics reprised similar cult sacrifices that took place 14 months earlier. And among the victims were some of the most privileged, responsible members of society. Besides the police officers, the woman psychotherapist and an architect, the dead included Patrick Vuarnet, the 27-year-old son of 1960 Winter Olympics gold medalist Jean Vuarnet, best known today for his line...
Founded by a Belgian homeopath named Luc Jouret, the cult at first seemed to be a harmless New Age mishmash of astrology and health regimens professing to trace some of its ideas back to the Knights Templar, an order of Crusaders. By late 1994, the directions his sect was taking became horribly clear when Jouret and 52 fellow Templars were found dead as part of mass immolations in Switzerland and Quebec...
...likely to wither away. Vuarnet's family knew better. Recalling his brother's guilt at not having been "called" in 1994, Alain Vuarnet says Patrick "looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Alain, you are the one deluding yourself. You just don't understand.' " In view of the cult's still extensive assets and international following, authorities are trying harder than ever now to understand...
...were explicitly avoided; the focus was on strategy, not philosophy. Gingrich taught his acolytes "our rhythm and style," how to use his serrated language to cut their opponents; Democrats were to be described as traitors and with such adjectives as sick, corrupt and bizarre. Gingrich eventually became such a cult figure among young Republicans that supporters considered publishing a comic book with him as the hero fighting bureaucratic bloat...
...AMERICAN TABLOID by James Ellroy (Knopf). This big, brazenly entertaining novel begins in 1958 and ends seconds before the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. In between, James Ellroy--a crime-noir cult writer making his mainstream debut--propels two rogue FBI agents and a former Los Angeles County deputy sheriff through a fictionalized, nightmarish tour of five tumultuous years in U.S. history. Life is seldom horrifying and hilarious at the same moment. On nearly all its 576 pages, American Tabloid manages to be both...