Introduction

In the worst cases – such as the violent terrorist cults – this annihilation of life is directed not only at followers but at outsiders, with acts of terrorism and war taking thousands of lives. Other groups focus the terror only internally (so it is not visible to the outside world), seeking to maintain their grip on followers in this way. Behaviors and ways of feeling and thinking evolved over millennia, can, in particular environments, be turned against our own survival. The very behavior that protects us within the environment to which the peoples are adapted becomes a dangerous vulnerability outside of this environment. In China, the mass incarceration and brainwashing of the Muslim Uyghur minority group has only recently been recognized. The mind-shaping activity can be usefully termed brainwashing, coercive control or coercive persuasion. The social structures of totalism and the belief systems they exhibit enter deep into the lives of those targeted.