Testimony of Juliano the Apostate. Mexico

THE GREAT DECEPTION, 12 YEARS LATER

by Juliano the Apostate

To the friend who told me I was wrong.

In the final six months of 2010 I wrote, in the solitude of my study, a book focused on the history, doctrine and the damage caused by the militant sect New Acropolis.

The sounds of typing crossed the autumn bringing back images of the past. Landscapes, scenes and experiences. The Great Deception was an encounter with my memories and with what was known in the time of freedom. That was an avalanche of reflections and investigations. I wanted to share my experiences, my discoveries.

As I added pages I remembered that when I left Acropolis I reflected at length on why I became part of it and how I was betrayed. But even more: hearing, as time passed, the accounts of the harm to members who stayed and to those who arrived later, even to some who were born in the sect, confirmed for me the social usefulness of what I was doing.

I wove chapters having verified the emotional traces, the destroyed marriages, the frustrated life expectations, the ruined motherhoods, the loss of affections, the moral damage, the pain and, above all, the ghost that haunted them: that of being held responsible for what happened, not the organization and its leaders. What I learned about others affected me more than what happened to me. So I sought to open a beacon of warning about the manipulations carried out by New Acropolis and to offer hope that it is possible to leave and heal through the fundamental act of knowing. The book was to give voice to those who live those experiences globally and to find them some justice; it was not just for me.

Verifying files, I thought about the complaints, reports, and accounts of appearances in Europe. Without diminishing their merit, it seemed to me that I could add another thread to the depth, so I set out to articulate a description at different levels, to alert about the true intentions and practices of the group founded by Livraga Rizzi.

Much happened, but no one expected The Great Deception to be prophetic. What was described in its pages was corroborated by the experiences of members of the sect. As the book anticipated, New Acropolis Mexico suffered a rout that almost destroyed it. It was also confirmed that the cult of power within the sect is serious, even for themselves, because it enabled their leaders Lidia Pérez López and Esmeralda Osuna Lafarga to seize control of the sect in the country and change its name to create a faction called Inspira. Did I say prophecy? No. It was a prognosis, based on the logic of the world described and its behaviour.

I am not here to destroy a sect. Sects destroy themselves.

Today, on the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état in Chile, I recalled Livraga’s admiration for the dictator Pinochet. In the context of libertarian dramas I considered that I could provide this testimony of facts related to the book, but even more, to speak of the present and the future, with you free from the sect.

In the window

During the first distribution of The Great Deception, New Acropolis had a reaction of violence that ultimately implied the implicit threat of killing. I will not recount the details as they are delicate and involve the security of those affected, but I am authorized to provide data that will allow you to know what few or no one knew at the time.

For my part, it was not those events that made me stop making myself seen. My first idea was to circulate the book freely and nothing more. Then I wondered if there would be former members who would read it and wish to expand the complaints. However, social networks with their reach and interaction were less developed than now, therefore I received no messages, neither from Mexico nor from anywhere, and, as I will tell you, I found no utility in making approaches. So I finished, because I had fulfilled my objective.

... And we were in the cave

I left New Acropolis because ultimately I had a moral crisis. I had been convinced for years that my actions were, as we were told, for the benefit of humanity, through what Acropolis calls service and what other sects call seva. However, when I witnessed the abuses that occurred both toward other members and toward me, consciousness began to awaken gradually. I went from justifying reality, to denying it, and finally to accepting its truth.

It began as a physical feeling of discomfort at the idea of presenting myself at headquarters and then it became an insistent inner voice that began to question the nature of New Acropolis. The information absorbed here and there accumulates in your unconscious and emerges as what Acropolis calls “the crisis.” They are aware of its existence and define it as an episode of weakness generated by selfishness and the loss of the member’s grasp regarding the effort implied by service to humanity, and they try to quell it by injecting feelings of guilt, shame and by giving moral punishments to the member, since they know that the crisis is in reality an awakening of consciousness.

It is important to note that the crisis in a sect is not a single event. In the plural, I consider crises as the result of accumulations in the experience of abuse. In the singular, a crisis can be defining. We have all been able to observe that a crisis leads either to leaving Acropolis or to sinking further into it. Crises are in reality the product of what science calls cognitive dissonance. A crisis is a dissonance that pressures your consciousness.

Generally, the crisis is due to a triggering event. They tell you something, you see something, you live something, that releases the effect of accumulated negative experiences.

In my case, the triggering event was a complaint a young security guard made to me, partly painful and partly calm. He showed me the suffering caused by my decisions as his commander, the doubts he experienced from the pressure to which I subjected him, which was, by the way, less than that to which I subjected myself and in which I was.

The boy was in crisis. Therefore, I could have silenced him, imposed punishment shifts, exposed him publicly, as is done, but as I listened to him his words made a deep impression on me. Something inside me forced me to pay attention. With his words events appeared to me, whose interpretation shifted from the familiar—commitments of discipleship, overcoming the ego, sacrifice necessary for duty—to perceiving them as false and violent in nature. Violence in all spheres, which for years I had ignored but to which I had adapted, feeling it normal in our community, and it made emerge in my memory moments and emotions that I had been assembling. I heard him, but I also heard myself. And a very large part of that was me telling myself that I was morally abusing others, beginning with that young man. My voice repeated to me, with an incessant, inflexible chime, that what that guard was telling me was, causing me a feeling of serene horror, the cruel and lacerating truth.

I never knew what led him to say that to me. He could have gone to informants, to the Head of Living Forces or to the National Command itself. Although I was his hierarchical channel, precisely because I was the source of his discomfort he could have avoided me. Apart from the fact that they might have shouted at him, punished him and blamed me for not containing him, apart from his naivety in thinking that protesting would serve any purpose, I want to think that he told me, besides out of rebellion, because he believed I could hear him and for that reason, although I knew nothing of his personal life, and since I stopped seeing him I have known nothing, I consider him a friend and I dedicate this testimony to him.

At that moment I answered evasively, sent him back to his duties and withdrew to an empty room, seized by a series of emotions that crossed me without my being able to contain them and by disordered thoughts. I felt touched in what I considered my deepest identity. I felt confronted by the terrible truth, unable to escape that sensation, pierced by a cry of complaint, an accusation that came from my mind, that, instead of being a guide, I had become an instrument of suffering and deception for those who trusted me.

I was a passionate defender of militancy, of devotion to a Master and of collaboration in a noble cause that sought to live and sustain itself not with words but with my acts. However, in an instant I realized that, in my desire to help, I had become, without realizing it, part of a system that abused people’s trust and manipulated their lives in a way that contradicted my own moral principles. Moreover, I was becoming aware of the historical horrors of Nazifascism which, together with the heroic sense, formed part of the marrow of what we considered our mystique. It was a silent storm that pressed my temples with the inflexible finger of shame.

And what happened to me, full of that shame that hurt like a stab, hammering me, was that in that empty room where I had given classes in moral philosophy, in symbolism and had reached the flights to comment that we would not see the New World, but that that world of beauty was deserved by the souls of tomorrow, I sat where the members sat, covered my face, and hard and silently I began to cry with burning tears. They had thrown in my face that I had lost sight of what it really means to be a compassionate and just person. And even now when I remember it, I feel that shame again, and I feel grateful for it.

His words were the triggering moment of a crisis that led me to leave Acropolis, also as is common, not immediately. It is hard to give up affections. It is difficult to renounce what you have taken as a sacred pattern in your existence. The last time I was in Acropolis I stood before the fire of the so-called Security temple. In front of the flame that continuously burned, I remembered when I joined Acropolis. I was looking for a cause. I felt I had found it in New Acropolis, as it offered. I remembered when I became an element of Living Forces. The feeling of action when, before the oath ceremony, I was instructed to place the black tie in the space of the third button of the shirt of the same color, with the red band on the arm. “Attack position,” they explained to me, and I knew I was prepared for anything.

And what underpinned it, the idea that acts and sacrifices were transcendent for the benefit of humanity, was nothing more than a gigantic and pathetic deceit, because the form it took was the opposite of that and was immoral. What hurt me most was Acropolis’s betrayal of belief, but I was processing it. I remember that standing before the candle my expression was serene, and I felt my gaze concentrated and within it another flame, this one of a first glimpse, a still vague certainty, that history was not going to end this way.

I stopped the memories, appreciated my goodwill and, listening to the sounds of endless, useless labor for the world of those outside, I thought that there may be celestial dreams and earthly awakenings. Then I left and did not say goodbye to anyone, nor did I ask after anyone’s future. Of those I knew, I have special recollection of only one, a man of ideals who deserved a better cause, one of those who have silences full of emotions and landscapes where heroes create worlds. Those who can exist exactly where New Acropolis is not. Years later I learned that he had left and I was very happy for him, although I never told him.

A window

I know that some of those who read me may be interested in knowing whether my testimony affects them, because they are responsible for economic and sexual abuses. However, my focus is not on them. And I cannot be accused of any of that, because I never committed such acts. My responsibility was different. It is that of a type of member who seeks an existential commitment. My responsibility was to speak of falsehoods as if they were truths. That I believed them true and that it was the tone of some people never made me feel any better.

There was a nuance. From the beginning I recognized, besides the philosophy, the esoteric content of Blavatsky and of nazifascism, which I reiterate, as I said in the book, also attracted me. A characteristic thought of certain young people who rebel against traditional systems and who consider that democracy can be a form of dictatorship: at twenty I believed that Nazism was a valid way to contribute to a better world and that it failed because it was betrayed. I identified it from the first classes and I saw it with my own eyes when I joined Living Forces. Its atmosphere of pagan religiosity satisfied in me a need for mystique, although I had done such things before. The aesthetics, but above all the tone and concepts of totalitarianisms, was something I grasped immediately. That is why I understand that Westland New Post, a philonazi group that took classes in Acropolis, picked up on it and I will tell you more about it later.

I carried some thoughts that did not clash with what I perceived of Acropolis, but on the contrary reinforced them. I believed that a noble cause could not advance only with kind people, but that an army was needed to drive it. I told myself that a problem was that the good pray, while the bad stab them. Good people with knives were needed. This perspective was not only mine; expressed in other words it was the spirit of Living Forces, perhaps not of the Women’s Brigades in that style of fanaticism, where, except for some, the others lived what they considered commitment, forms you learned from publications and inferred from the very existence of inner circles, although the majority did not see their background and many could have just as well been tending a bar. When I had the crisis, which was defining, I had long understood that that way of acting was immoral and the danger of encouraging it when an esoteric or pseudo-philosophical component is added.

When the time came to write The Great Deception, I knew I had to make those confessions so they would help to understand the context. Now I delved deeper for the same reason. To reach the light, you must show some shadows.

The after

From what I have lived, in addition to what I witnessed, in this testimony I add elements that may be useful to you.

At some point along the way, even if you are moved by the impulse to help make the problem known, the sect must disappear from your life and you must dedicate yourself to your projects. By building your life you slide out of it the forms of thought and action that the sect imposed on you. You are more yourself than ever once you are free.

Bear in mind that the sect will always want to demean you by saying that you are “angry, resentful.” Of course you are angry. The people swindled you. But they try to reverse the focus of responsibility to hide, assigning it to you. Or they blame you for the problem they caused. That a group makes an error and accuses others of having made it is a resource taken from Goebbels’ playbook.

When you are coming out of the influence of the sect, I invite you to avoid certain mistakes in managing the situation.

• Do not analyze the experience and pretend that you can carry on as before. One of the most significant errors is not reflecting on what led you to be captured by a sect. This can lead to maintaining the thinking patterns that put you at risk. That could result in you “jumping from sect to sect.” It is vital to analyze your experience critically and assume your responsibilities. I suggest avoiding the “they taught me what not to do and I thank them.”
• Behaving with the same power relationships as when you were inside. Upon leaving the sect, it is natural to seek support among those who have left the organization, because a first feeling is that you are totally alone. However, if you try to maintain the same dynamics of influence you had in the sect, you are perpetuating control and submission, especially if you come from a paramilitary sect like New Acropolis. Seek relationships of equality and mutual respect.
• Not creating your own dynamics and projects. Once outside the sect, it is important not to extend the mentality or rhythm of life you had. You must strive to build your own life, create your own projects and values.

Behind the scenes of The Great Deception

The origin of the book is a blog where I denounced the academic fraud of the then National Command, Lidia Pérez López, who, without having the studies, claims to be Dr. in psychology summa cum laude, to the media and society, because that is her personality, but also because New Acropolis teaches practical falsification to achieve its purposes.

As Pérez López was the highest authority of the sect, and her behaviour was common among Acropolis commanders, I considered that the denunciation painted a picture of its hierarchies, but also of how the adherents do not find out the truth or, if they do, justify it. So that it is not thought that only people with problems are duped by sects, it is clear that anyone can be deceived.

I carried out the investigation on official academic sites, including Harvard and the Sorbonne, where Pérez López claimed to have given lectures, and I provided evidence of her usurpation of profession. Later a good fellow from Acropolis—I found his photo—sent me the address of a site, it posted his message, against “my defamations” toward his National Command. I visited the website out of curiosity, but obviously there was nothing. If it was a trick to hack me, they got a virus. I also received an invitation from Esmeralda Osuna, then a leader of Acropolis, to talk, she said, but for me it was a waste of time because talking with a dogmatic person is like talking to the air.

In the time prior to the blog, two Women’s Brigades denounced, on their own initiative and in good faith, with Delia Steinberg, the abuses of the National Command of Mexico, Lidia Pérez. In return, one of them received threats from lawyers, even more so when they were later linked to the book. The invitation made to another of them, also by Osuna Lafarga, took place in a context where, without having proof, she was accused of participating with Juliano and the conversation was, I quote the phrase the leader used, “to help her get out of her error.” These Living Forces reaffirmed their decision and left Acropolis.

I contacted judicial and police authorities to obtain information on support for those who report activities related to sects. The experience was characterized by being a process in which I was referred from one instance to another. One of the agents practically submitted me to an interrogation, looking for contradictions, which made me feel like the suspect. Another, with a cynical smile, asked me about my possible motivations for economic benefit. Another authority expressed fear of sects, while another advised me not to get involved, arguing that his experience indicated there could be a risk of violence, with no possibility of support for me. I verified the lack of instruments to act in these situations. I decided not to seek those supports.

Later I discovered that NGOs do in fact provide backing: Red de Apoyo Inc., RedUNE, RIES. But at that time, the only person who could tell what I knew was myself—not who I had been, but who I now was.

The distribution

Once I had the work, I located the sect’s websites in Mexico, recovered emails from former members I had not spoken to in a long time and one afternoon I made mass mailings. I have the pleasant suspicion that there were resends. It was necessary to inform.

The Great Deception draws a direct connection between Acropolis and the primordial principles of its founder, delving into the controversial issue of philonazism in the sect. The book argues that philonazism, although not always evident, cannot be ignored and in some cases manifests explicitly.

For someone familiar, hearing “brown shirts” would alert them immediately. Therefore, it was important for the book to place the emblems whose conceptual associations I realized at the time, as well as to invite reflection that so many coincidences are significant, not accidental, and trace its real identity. To understand that the present decline in manifestations does not, by itself, mean that Livraga’s era was only an absurd mixture of radicalism and incense. The creator and his creation cannot be separated.

When we handed out propaganda flyers, sometimes without noticing we gave them to foreigners. More than once, we offered them to Spaniards who looked displeased and said “ah, no, we know about this in Spain.” They knew something we were living, but which practically no one in the group could identify. There was a lag in information. And this also occurs among former members. The gaps in experiences and perceptions will widen and that is what New Acropolis bets on.

Reaction of New Acropolis

What I knew and had prepared for happened: the threats, because anyone who launched something like this at that time understood that intimidation would come, without having much support against it. The sect already used lawyers, although it was less hypocritical and issued warnings through its leaders, as well as threats through intermediaries.

I will not relate certain details because it serves the security of the matter. It can be said that New Acropolis, in cases of dissent that begins to move, in addition to unleashing an internal hunt to see if they have infiltrators, also summons the commanders and draws up a list of suspects based on their behaviour when they were members and the terms in which they left. The immediate reaction is the shotgun approach. They fire at everything to see who moves. Moreover, they keep your location data. When your former companions look for you to greet you after you leave Acropolis, what they do with that is verify that they have your updated information. The coffee to which they invite you is to find out what you do and think. They speak very nicely to you and then give a report. They believe it is worth betraying your friendship for the sake of the Ideal.

I learned by e-mail of pressures and threats, veiled or otherwise, to some former members. One of the messages came from a former Brigade member, who shared with me that she had received a telephone call, to which she responded by stating she would not be intimidated. Over the receiver, a voice without accent, not identifiable as from New Acropolis Mexico, told her that “Juliano should withdraw the book or there would be reprisals” against him and against the person who received the call and that “Juliano should offer apologies to New Acropolis and to the Master Lidia Pérez López.”

A week and a half after the distribution of the book, there was also a face-to-face visit by a member of the Security Corps, accompanied by his father, to one of the women who wrote to World Command, Delia Steinberg. The intimidation was manifested through the warning that Acropolis would resort to international lawyers to sue the woman for Juliano’s book. The man told her that the pool of lawyers would go after her.

The most serious thing is that the intimidator was that woman’s husband.

Acropolis and its commanders sent others to the front line, putting them in danger, without caring about the possible consequences. However, there were other responses. I discovered, two weeks later on YouTube, that one of those affected held a press conference to denounce the threats and to expose Acropolis’s sectarian face. I also learned of attempts to hack Facebook profiles and of the theft of an email account.

In the end, faced with that level of confrontation, I took measures so that, if they retaliated against anyone, many Acropolis members would face criminal consequences. These measures remain in force.

The threats ceased within three weeks, I understand because the book was taken down, but also because Acropolis received warnings of legal and police action.

And something happened that I had not anticipated. With its attack, the sect promoted the work. Two days after it was taken down, readers unknown to me re-uploaded The Great Deception to several websites and from there its dissemination multiplied.

The deepest redoubt

I did not retract and I do not do so now. I did not because, although it is unpleasant to be threatened, I had calculated that it would happen and I felt morally prepared. I would never offer apologies to those who have harmed other human beings in countless ways, for the irrefutable fact is that New Acropolis is a sect, an element of social perversion that tears apart family and community ties, that extracts, uses and harms in the name of philosophy, spirituality and volunteerism.

After the book

I decided to contribute. I translated and disseminated materials about New Acropolis, shared information about investigations and about WikiLeaks, and continued to broaden the international picture of the problem.

It stood out that the Belgian police investigated Acropolis for allowing a philonazi group called Westland New Post to use its facilities to meet. A member of that group declared that to be admitted they had to take a six-month course in New Acropolis, probably Probationism, and described the organization as a “school of far-right philosophy.”

The necessary union

Seeing the evolution, I realize that there is something like an “old school” of the sect. The information, according to the changing scenarios to which Acropolis adapts, must be maintained, exchanged and analysed, or in the end what is unknown is perpetuated.

As I said, I found the blog where you read this testimony and I invite you to read all the others. It is work that deserves greater projection, because it is not about “destroying” a sect, the sect is not important, but the people who can be harmed.

The "I didn't see that"

I have sometimes heard the response to something serious that was experienced formulated as “I didn’t see that,” and I consider it extremely important to comment on it.

Each time you say, for whatever reason, when another relates something, “I didn’t see that,” you are saying you did not live it or that it surprises you, but if you react like this to discredit the truthfulness of a testimony, you are likely to continue seeing the world from the perspective of the sect. When you doubt or rule it untrue with “I didn’t see that,” you invalidate the testimony of those who are telling you what they saw and lived, contributing to the loss of collective memory. And with that oblivion, their responsibility is also erased.

The time has come to be happy

The celebrations in New Acropolis Mexico over the withdrawal of the book gave them a taste of victory that lasted just over a year.

The premises of the book predicted that due to relations of power and ambition, sooner or later people would leave en masse. Above all, they pointed out that Lidia Pérez would end up having a problem with the sect.

At the high levels of international Acropolis they did not look favorably on Lidia Pérez, but they kept her because she occupied a high place in the hierarchical pyramid. That belief allowed an usurper to steal their structure.

Barely two years after the appearance of The Great Deception, Lidia Pérez, accompanied by Esmeralda Osuna, contacted Delia Steinberg to tell her that Mexico was separating from New Acropolis.

Lidia Pérez then told the members that Acropolis had lost its way and that “they were no longer happy in New Acropolis,” inviting them to follow her. Then, branch by branch, she took each member before a jury where they were made to declare whether they would stay in New Acropolis or go to the new group. Because she had placed commanders loyal to her and not to the sect, 90% of the members abandoned New Acropolis. She then ordered the removal of the signs from the premises and the placement of new ones, already prepared, bearing the name Inspira.

Indeed, the new group is not a separate entity. Inspira is a faction of New Acropolis.

In Mexico, the reality is that New Acropolis barely survived, because overnight its place was occupied by Inspira, which kept the premises, the library and probably the banners of Living Forces.

Not so fast

This point further reveals New Acropolis as a whole. Lidia Pérez López justified her separation from Acropolis arguing that it no longer served its purpose and that its members no longer found happiness in it. This claim is shocking, given that for years she had defended New Acropolis by presenting it as a humanist and philosophical institution that provided integral formation and a transcendent vision of life.

Those who upheld Acropolis to extreme fatigue and later denigrated it did so only because she told them to. The oft-repeated teaching to keep commitment to the Ideal and not to the person was conveniently set aside. The lack of coherence was a sign that they were cracked inside.

Those who chose to remain in New Acropolis also did not show self-criticism regarding what led them to that situation. They were incapable of questioning their leader, of evaluating her actions and of rectifying their attitudes.

Reflection

In New Acropolis there is no honour, no respect, no philosophy, no humanity, no love, as much as they talk about it. In the end they remove their masks and reveal that it is only about their anxiety for money and power.

New Acropolis incapacitates people from reacting. There is the phenomenon, on the one hand, of cynicism in the one who usurps, and on the other, of indoctrination in those who leave or stay. The indoctrination or process of controlling thoughts, emotions and behaviours, worked on over time, causes, by the logic of New Acropolis, its followers to obey whoever holds the staff.

You are not an acropolitan eagle, nor a New Man. To New Acropolis you mean nothing. New Acropolis must mean nothing to you. If they invite you, do not go in.

Conclusion

Twelve years after sharing The Great Deception, I note that the warning about sects must continue to be sounded. Sects persist, but so do those who, generation after generation, give their testimony.

The history of New Acropolis serves as a striking example of how sects can manipulate and harm, even themselves, because they lack values. It also exemplifies how the absence of reflection can hinder the ability to recognize problems. Therefore, it is essential to be alert to the signs of a sect. Do not renounce critical thinking and solidarity.

Live your life, pursue your projects, you owe them nothing. There is a path for you for which you do not need Masters to dictate what you should think.

Is there a Great Deception? Yes, but there is something better. It is the hour of the Great Truth.

Juliano, September 2023