Word: cult
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...their defense, they seem like very nice people. They are. The Ikea people I met in Sweden are the nicest people you can imagine, but they were also like a cult. Their allegiance to Ikea was just beyond belief, to the point where they weren't really thinking about what their day-to-day activities meant. They design to price: they set the price first and then do what they need to do to keep the price where it is. So whether it's a 50-cent coffee mug or a $100 table, they do what they need...
...near analogous. Iranians in the streets were looking for greater freedom, not the overthrow of the regime. The neocon effort to turn the Iranians into East European rebels against the Soviet Union was as crudely misleading as Benjamin Netanyahu's fantasy that the Iranian government is a "messianic apocalyptic cult" led by mad mullahs likely to nuke Israel. The truth is, Iran's government is a conservative, defensive, rational military dictatorship that manages to subdue its working-class majority softly, by distributing oil revenues downward. (On June 23, Ahmadinejad announced that doctors' salaries would be doubled, for example...
...Matters Late last summer, his father, 68, suffered a stroke, and that brush with mortality apparently concentrated his mind. North Korea was founded by Kim Jong Il's father, the so-called Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, who has become, in the decades since, the focus of a dynastic cult of personality like no other. (Dead for 15 years, Kim Il Sung is still North Korea's "President for life.") Kim Jong Il has three sons from two wives. The eldest embarrassed his father in 2001 by trying to sneak into Japan on a fake passport. His father thinks...
...notes that while she and many fellow Muslims opposed the headscarf ban as meddling in private matters of choice, she is relieved at action taken on the burqa. "Imposition of this garment on women is one manner Salafists get individuals to renounce their individuality and submit to the extremist cult thinking that masquerades as Islam - but which is an abomination of it," Bouzar says. "That Salafist influence and activity is spreading, and if it takes political action to prevent their cult from leading Muslims astray of Islam...
Others apply methods familiar to psychologists and those who deprogram cult members. James Fitzsimmons, a retired FBI interviewer who dealt extensively with al-Qaeda members, says terrorism suspects often use their membership in a group as a psychological barrier. The interrogator's job, he says, "is to bring them out from the collective identity to the personal identity." To draw them out, Fitzsimmons invites his subjects to talk about their personal histories, all the way back to childhood. This makes them think of themselves as individuals rather than as part of a group...