CCP fellow traveler Roland Delcourt translates a Chinese text with ridiculous results.
A press release by Bitter Winter
Bitter Winter has uncovered recently a series of strange maneuvers by the CCP and its Belgian fellow traveler Roland Delcourt, which resulted in the publication of false documents against our magazine and Chinese refugees from The Church of Almighty God escaping persecution and torture in China and seeking asylum in democratic countries. The campaign included statements falsely attributed to CIAOSN (Centre for information and advice on harmful cultic organizations), a Belgian federal center keeping watch on “dangerous cults.”
For whatever reason, having been exposed as the source of false documents and statements, Chinese agencies and Roland Delcourt have decided to keep alive this controversy. On August 4, the EU Reporter published another “advertisement” by Delcourt, with the cautious and wise statement that “This article is the personal opinion of the author only, and is not endorsed by EU Reporter.”
The article was obviously produced in Chinese and machine-translated, and Delcourt did not even make the effort of re-reading it before sending it as an advertisement to the EU Reporter. Clear clues of machine translation include calling repeatedly the editor-in-chief of Bitter Winter, Massimo Introvigne, “Massimo Antovigne,” the Korean movement Shincheonji Church of Jesus “Shincheonji Jesuits,” and the Order of the Solar Temple “Sun Temple.” Even more revealing is that Delcourt, who allegedly sent the article to the EU Reporter, does not know how to spell his own last name, which is spelled four times “Delacore.” Somebody forgot that machines make mistakes in translating last names, and “Delacore” and “Antovigne” is how “Delcourt” and “Introvigne” would sound in Chinese. We publish some nice screenshots in case the article will be corrected after this press release.
Whoever fabricated the article also believes in the old propaganda theory that repeating a lie several times converts it into a truth. Not for the first time, the article repeats that, “According to reports from the German Katolische magazine and the Italian L’Espresso weekly magazine, Bitter Winter is very close to the position of the US government on the China issue. One of its primary purposes is to disrupt the agreement between the Holy See and China.” The authors of the article forgot the advice college professors give to undergraduates all over the world: never trust Wikipedia. They took the “information” from Wikipedia, but unfortunately for them the articles by Katolisches and L’Espresso are still available online. It is easy to check that they did not say anything remotely similar. On the contrary, they highly praised Bitter Winter. L’Espresso called its editor-in-chief Massimo Introvigne “one of the leading world experts on the Protestant Churches and new Christian religious movements,” and Katolisches referred to him as “the renowned sociologist of religion.”
Taking other false information from Wikipedia, a notorious battlefield plagued both by Chinese and anti-cult propaganda, the article accuses Bitter Winter of having defended the “Sun Temple” (presumably the Solar Temple) in an article published in 2012. There is only one small problem about it, Bitter Winter started being published in 2018.
The article also explains that Massimo Introvigne “calls himself a ‘sociologist’ and is one of the ‘world’s top experts on new religious movements’ but in fact, he is a patent attorney.” That Introvigne also has another hat as an attorney, and one of his specialized fields is intellectual property, is well-known to the community of scholars of new religious movements. It does not seem to be a crime, and certainly does not prevent Introvigne from being at the same time a “renowned sociologist,” as Katolisches said.
For some reliable information about CESNUR, Massimo Introvigne, and the opinion of scholars about him, the authors of the article might have referred to the standard Italian manual on sociology of religion, whose author is veteran sociologist Roberto Cipriani. It refers to Introvigne as “one of the Italian sociologists of religion most well-known abroad, and among the world’s leading scholars of new religious movements” (Roberto Cipriani, Nuovo manuale di sociologia della religione, 2nd ed., Rome: Borla, 2009, p. 470). They might have found this quote even in Wikipedia!
Since the authors try to revive the dead horse of the CCP accusations against The Church of Almighty God concerning a murder perpetrated by a different religious movement in a McDonald’s diner in Zhaoyuan, Shandong, in 2014, here is what one of the most eminent Sinologists specialized in Chinese religion, University of Montreal’s David Ownby, has to say about the corresponding pages in the book by Massimo Introvigne Inside The Church of Almighty God, published in 2020 by what is perhaps the most respected academic publisher in the world, Oxford University Press. “Introvigne convincingly demonstrates, writes Ownby, that the murder, which did indeed occur, was carried out by people connected to a very small group—basically one family—two members of which were convinced that they were divinely empowered to rid the world of evil spirits. They entered the McDonald’s and asked random customers for their phone numbers so that they could contact them in the future, and when one woman refused, they beat her to death, believing she was possessed by evil spirits. There is some evidence that some members of the family may have been in possession of church [of Almighty God] literature (a pamphlet) but no other evidence proves or even suggests that they were church members. Religious seekers consistently collect large amounts of information from the milieu they inhabit, which tells us more about the milieu than about the individual seeker.”
Ownby’s article was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Its publisher, the American Academy of Religion, is the largest and most authoritative academic organization in the field of the study of religions in the world. The same American Academy of Religion publishes a book review magazine, Reading Religion, which in turn called Introvigne in 2017 “an Italian sociologist of religion [who is] one of the major names in the study of new religions in general.”
In English, the “bible” about the history of the academic study of new religious movements (NRMs) is A Historical Introduction to the Study of New Religious Movements, by Truman State University Professor of Religion W. Michael Ashcraft, published by the academic press Routledge.
A quote from this manual (p. 236) may probably settle the issues raised in the article about CESNUR and Massimo Introvigne: “The largest outlet currently supporting research on NRMs is the Center for Studies on New Religions. Its acronym is CESNUR, taken from the title of this organization in Italian: Centro Studi sulle Nuove Religioni. CESNUR’s founder is Massimo Introvigne, an Italian attorney and prolific author. He has emerged as one of the most influential scholars in NRM studies today, having published numerous articles and books in Italian, English, and other languages. Through CESNUR, he supervises annual conferences that include scholars from all over the world, and those conferences are held all over the world. In addition, CESNUR sponsors or supports numerous other conferences focused more narrowly on a single NRM or NRM-related theme. The CESNUR website is a cornucopia of information on hundreds of NRMs as well as on topics like the anticult. Introvigne’s curiosity about religions in general and NRMs in particular is endless, as is his capacity to produce quality scholarship. He recently published a major book on Satanism. While he was researching and writing this book, he found time to explore other areas, such as Theosophy in the arts, which led to publications and conferences, including a special issue of Nova Religio, which he guest-edited. He is also a public advocate for NRM studies. He regularly contributes to online debates about many subjects pertaining to NRMs. And he has been a leading voice in opposing repressive government measures against minority and marginal religions …”
We suspect that the opposition to “repressive government measures” against religion is what bothers the authors of the article. Why it was published by the respectable EU Reporter is a different question.
