Scientology, the Last Laugh

French

In May this year, Belgian Le Soir Magazine published an astounding cover article, or spread of articles, by Julie Barreau, headlined “la Scientologie vise Bruxelles.” The cover featured a photo of Scientology’s mega celebrity “Operating Thetan” and ambassador Tom Cruise. The article treated a range of issues relating to Scientology, identifying it as a political organization seeking to seize power and establish a dictatorship, announcing its purchase of a large and strategically located office building in Brussels for its new European headquarters, and impugning some of its claims as fraudulent, its cost as exorbitant, its psycho-social system as robotizing, and its head David Miscavige as a bully boasting of shooting down critics or “Suppressive Persons” like ducks in a pond. The article also provided an update on the pending criminal case against Scientology’s Belgian branch on charges of fraud, illegally practicing medicine, violating the privacy law, and being a criminal organization.

By recent American media standards, the article is astounding in its defiance or challenge to Scientology, attesting the writer’s and Le Soir Mag’s confidence in their facts and in their ability to withstand Scientology’s counter attack, whatever it may be. Since Time Magazine’s 1991 cover story “Scientology the Cult of Greed,” serious American media, if they touched it at all, have produced much softer and safer pieces on the organization. Of course Scientology’s response to Time and its writer Richard Behar included years of threatening and resource-consuming dirty tricks, and litigation that cost the magazine a reported seven million dollars. The lawsuit against Time and the appeals that followed and only ended in 2001 also cost Scientology dearly, adding significantly to rendering the organization now virtually libel-proof. Scientology’s reputation is sufficiently bad that almost anything said about it cannot further damage that bad reputation. Serious American media did not take advantage of Time’s legal success and Scientology’s libel-proof condition, however, but were clearly chilled by the amount of money the magazine and its parent company paid in legal fees to defend against the organization’s formidable litigation machine.

Funnily enough, it has been elements within the unserious American media that have made the most use of Scientology’s terrible reputation, to the point of openly daring the organization and its litigious leaders to sue for that usage. For the past two years, since OT Cruise started publicly and somewhat wackily stumping the world for Scientology, cartoons and comics have declared the organization and the actor comedic fair game. In 1977, U.S. cartoonist Jim Berry drew a single newspaper cartoon panel that nonconfrontationally merely mentioned Scientology, and then organization boss L. Ron Hubbard ordered Berry’s career destroyed. The national network of Scientology intelligence and public relations personnel mobilized for that purpose, and only the FBI’s raid of organization intelligence bureaus in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. the same year exposed and derailed the operation. In 2005, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone devoted a whole half hour very popular television show to blatantly and confrontationally ridiculing Scientology, its reputation, its hierarchy and Cruise. The episode ends mocking Scientology’s and Cruise’s litigiousness and defying them to sue. So far Scientology has bitten its group lip, remained silent publicly, and mounted no perceptible counter attack.

Ms. Barreau reviewed the hilarious Scientology episode “Trapped in the Closet” in Le Soir Mag and noted that Scientologist Isaac Hayes, who provided the voice for one of South Park’s regular characters, had reacted by suddenly leaving the show, and that Cruise may have used his star power or box office clout to prevent a repeat broadcast of the episode. Parker and Stone responded with an even more lurid episode in which Hayes’ character is disposed of obscenely, although with some sorrow. Since the Le Soir Mag article, moreover, the repeat broadcast of “Trapped in the Closet” has occurred, and the episode was nominated for an Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program. The Internet spread these episodes around the world and has made them instantly available to anyone at any time. The Internet never ceases to watch and to comment on anything Scientology does in response, and the Net goes back in time to fill in what might have been missed about the organization earlier. In part because of its reputation for litigiousness, Scientology has lost some teeth from its litigation bite. In part because of its use of the law to squelch Internet exposure and opposition, Scientology is more exposed and opposed than ever in that medium. The organization cannot shudder South Park or the rest of the media’s jokers into silence, it cannot close cyberspace, it won’t sue Le Soir Mag, and it will never rehabilitate its former ability with threats of legal action to prevent the public from getting the facts that add up to its libel-proof reputation. Since Scientology is a peculiarly American cult, since Miscavige in California dictates every step the Scientologists take in Brussels and all Europe, and since the U.S. Federal Government still supports and promotes the organization internationally, the American media cannot but get serious about it. Scientology will face that eventuality without the hope of stopping it, and will only make its reputation and condition worse if it tries.

The Le Soir Mag article was also astonishing for its report on Scientology’s April 8, 2006 gathering at the Best Western Hotel in Brussels, which Barreau, apparently quoting the organization’s own advertising, called a “summit meeting.” In reality, it was a programmed staff recruitment event, to which dedicated Western European Scientologists, who were not already on staff at their local “churches” but were good recruit prospects, had been invited and herded. It is not clear if Barreau or some other writer got herself invited inside the meeting room to record the event, but it is clear that she was not part of the herd. Scientology lets journalists occasionally see inside some parts of its buildings that Miscavige says they can see, and lets them hear what Miscavige says they should hear. Occasionally too, some under cover journalist has gotten inside long enough to take an introductory Scientology course. Scientology does not, however, permit journalists or any other undedicated outsiders, or “wogs” as Scientologists call us, to attend its recruitment events. The organization does not let wogs witness its recruiters haranguing Scientologists with warnings of imminent danger and doom to get them to join staff. Miscavige would have wanted journalists to see or hear very little of what was seen and heard in that Brussels hotel meeting room. The announcement of the purchase of Scientology’s new European HQ building was a great gimmick to corral a sizeable crowd of perhaps two hundred potential staff recruits. The gimmick also worked to get the interest of some wogs who were anything but potential staff recruits, and to motivate them to get one or more wog reporters into the event.

Miscavige would not want journalists and other wogs to hear Scientology’s view that Europe, and specifically its democratic institutions, the European Commission and the European Parliament, comprise the “Fourth Reich.” Miscavige would not want the wog world to know that he and his Scientologist troops have declared war on that Fourth Reich. For years Scientology has conducted most of its skirmishes covertly, hidden its warlike intentions, spent millions creating a human rights cover, and denied even being at war. Nevertheless, as Ms. Barreau reports, that is precisely what the lead recruiter at the Brussels events in April told his audience to get them to join staff – the European Union and its Government are the Fourth Reich and Scientology is at war with them. Amazingly, the man making these statements was none other than Fabio Amicarelli, who since 2003 has held the position of Executive Director of the Church of Scientology International’s European Office for Public Affairs and Human Rights. While schmoozing European government officials in Brussels, and promoting Scientology to them as a human rights organization, Amicarelli does not say that he and his fellow Scientologists are at war with them and view them as Fourth Reich Nazis. At the recruitment event, however, he was on specific program orders, probably approved by Miscavige personally, to recruit staff for Scientology’s envisioned European expansion from among the supposedly dedicated Scientologists assembled to hear him. Amicarelli and the other recruiters could not deviate from their program orders and spoke what they had been instructed and drilled to speak, and consequently the journalists and any other wogs present heard some remarkable things.

Another extraordinary acknowledgement or admission Amicarelli made, which is particularly useful to Scientology’s opponents in its war, is that its “social reform” or front groups -- Narconon, Applied Scholastics, Criminon, etc. -- are all feeder lines for the Scientology organization. “Feeder” is a common English word, meaning in this usage a device that feeds materials into a machine for further processing. “Feeders” is also a specific Scientology term defined as “all the junior entities on the bridge that are supposed to feed people up the bridge to the higher org.” The “bridge” is what Scientologists call their gradated system that processes people from Homo sapiens, “wog” or “raw meat,” through the higher Scientology state of “Clear” or Homo novis, to the highest state of “OT,” where Scientologists claim they are “at cause over matter, energy, space, time and life.” Every Scientologist is somewhere on the bridge, and every person that Narconon, Criminon, Applied Scholastics or other such groups get into their programs is on the same Scientology bridge. For decades, organization spokespeople have denied that these groups are feeders, and denied that they have any agenda to recruit people into Scientology. Amicarelli’s admission to the Scientologists he was trying to recruit for organization staff that these groups are all Scientology feeders is also an admission that Scientology spokespeople all of these years were all lying.

Since Amicarelli, a top organization representative in Europe, has now admitted that Narconon, Criminon, etc. are feeder lines for Scientology, public agencies, officials and courts that recommend or fund these groups, send people to them, or permit them to operate, cannot now avoid confronting and understanding the system into which such people are being fed. As long as any Scientology feeder groups operate in their countries, national governments have a right and a duty to demand that the organization, and David Miscavige personally, reveal and explain what those countries’ wog citizens fed into Scientology will be processed to become, to believe and to do. As long as the U.S. Government supports Scientology and its feeder groups around the world, other national governments have a right and a duty to demand that the U.S. identify all the dangers of the system or “religion” the feeders feed people into for processing. It is foolish for the governments of Europe to permit its very vulnerable people -- those addicted to drugs, those in prison, those suffering from mental disorders -- to be food for an organization that will process them into cult members who will view Europe’s peaceful democratic institutions as the Fourth Reich and who will join a war against these institutions. It is equally foolish for the governments of Europe to not view the U.S. support for Scientology and its feeders -- Narconon, Criminon, Citizens Commission on Human Rights, etc. -- as support for the organization’s war and a threat to European democracy.

A key point that everyone fed into Scientology’s system reaches, which the European and U.S. Governments, the media, the public and the Scientologists can productively be brought to understand and address is the “Suppressive Person” doctrine. In Scientology “scripture,” the doctrine justifies Scientologists viewing Europe’s government as Fourth Reich Nazis and waging war on them. The SP doctrine generates hatred and underlies antisocial or criminal policies and practices such as “Disconnection,” which has broken up countless families, and “Fair Game,” which legitimizes the destruction of critics or opponents by any means. Because of the doctrine, which people are taught even within the feeder groups, Scientologists accept and even revel in Miscavige’s violent claim of shooting down SPs, who are but peaceful and good wogs, like ducks in a pond.

The best example of the organization’s worldwide application of the Suppressive Person doctrine is the almost 25-year Scientology v. Armstrong saga. The case demonstrates with overwhelming documentation that virtually every person fed into Scientology’s system becomes contracted to suppress and destroy basic human rights in violation of international human rights charters. My case shows, beyond rational argument, that the organization’s claims of defending and promoting human rights are hypocrisy, and that its “religious creed” is fraud. The case is applicable not just in California or just in the U.S., but has international relevance and applicability. Amicarelli, all his fellow recruiters, all their recruits, every Scientology corporation or “church” everywhere in the world, every related entity such as the feeder groups, and all of their directors such as Miscavige, officers, employees, volunteers such as Cruise, agents and lawyers are contracted to destroy human rights. The Scientology v. Armstrong case and evidence demonstrates that Scientology is what it is accused in the Belgian courts of being, a criminal organization.

The media and the European governmental components Scientology attacks as the Fourth Reich have never really understood and addressed the Suppressive Person doctrine or the Armstrong case. Consequently Scientology and its representatives, and the U.S. officials who support the organization against Europe, have never been brought to confront or even explain the doctrine and the case. Scientology’s big push into Brussels, Amicarelli’s rants of war and the Fourth Reich, his identification of front groups such as Narconon and Criminon as feeder lines, and the organization’s blind eye and deaf ear for its libel-proof reputation have made this confrontation very timely. Who knows, perhaps Le Soir Mag will contribute another astounding article or two.