What to Get L. Ron Hubbard for His Birthday

[7/4]

What to Get L. Ron Hubbard for His Birthday

How “Anonymous” has changed the game of

exposing Scientology's ruthless global scam

by Tony Ortega, VVoice

March 11th, 2008 12:11 AM

L. Ron Hubbard, the pulp fiction writer who gave the world Battlefield Earth,

as well as a nuisance known as Scientology, would have turned 97 years old this Thursday, March 13.

Ron’s been worm food for more than a score of years now, so it

probably won’t matter to him that the best birthday party being held in

his name will take place a couple of days late. On Saturday, March 15,

the surprisingly upstart, leaderless movement known as “Anonymous” will

be holding its second worldwide anti-Scientology protests at Hubbard

sites in more than a dozen countries.

The grassroots, Internet-based group seemed to materialize out

of thin air just a few weeks ago, and it’s difficult to tell whether

the surprising success of its February 10 rallies—which were held from

Oslo to Sydney—will spark even more rallies beyond this weekend. The

February protests featured a lot of twentysomethings, for the most

part, carrying anti-Scientology signs, and wearing masks to protect

their anonymity (Guy Fawkes masks were popular) in places like New

York, Boston, London, and Toronto. This time, they say, they’re

bringing cake and candles.

Anonymous has actually been around for a while, wreaking havoc

like a bunch of drunken teenagers on numerous Internet locations since

2006. And at first, it approached Scientology the same way, like

reckless hackers and pinheads. But thanks in part to the calm words of

someone I used to write about when I covered Scientology in Los

Angeles, Mark Bunker (now known as ‘Wise Beard Man’ to the protesters),

Anonymous quickly grew up and started taking a more Gandhi-inspired

approach to opposing Hubbard’s weird cult.

This recent targeting of Scientology sprung up after several

years of the worst press Hubbard’s followers had ever endured. From the

time Tom Cruise appeared to lose his mind leaping all over Oprah

Winfrey’s couch in 2005, to his knockout nine-minute video not meant

for public consumption that appeared in January, Cruise and Scientology

have been reeling from one PR disaster to the next.

And now it seems as if everybody and his brother is writing

about Scientology, ridiculing Hubbard, making fun of "Xenu" and

"e-meters" and "going clear," and laughing at John Travolta and Kirstie

Alley and Leah Rimini and Cruise.

A decade ago, I hardly would have believed it. Not that I’m

complaining. I much prefer it this way. Back then, I was one of a small

number of journalists who tried to communicate to the larger public

what was alarming and nonsensical and simply inane about Scientology

and its status as a “church.” Other, braver, journalists had been doing

the same for decades. There was Paulette Cooper, for example, who

occasionally sent me encouraging e-mails when my stories came out, and

who had suffered like no other (you can look it up). I’m not claiming

that my colleagues and I did the kind of pioneering research that

Paulette and others did in the 1970s and 1980s. But still, just ten

years ago, it was a very different environment.

Even then, you didn’t look into the secrets of the church

without having at least some second thoughts about what it might mean

to take on Hubbard’s dim minions. But it felt worthwhile. When you got

past the typical American reluctance to criticize or even discuss the

particulars of another’s religion, listeners at cocktail parties would

be mesmerized to hear that only 10 percent of Scientology’s adherents,

for example, have been let in on the church’s origin story. As I put it

in a story back in the day:

Imagine the Roman Catholic church

withholding the contents of the Book of Genesis from 90 percent of its

900 million worldwide adherents. That's 810 million Catholics kept in

the dark about "Let there be light," Adam and Eve, and the rest of the

Christian origin saga. And imagine that the Catholic church called

Genesis a "trade secret" that could only be revealed to Catholics who

had spent years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, obtaining the

correct level of experience to be allowed to read their own religion's

version of how the universe started and where people came from.

That’s what, for me, separated Scientology from the rest, what put

the lie to claims (sometimes from mushy-headed religion professors)

that Hubbard’s was a legitimate “church.” What other “religion” wanted

$100,000 and several years of dedication before a member learned its

most basic beliefs? And Scientology can’t afford to be more

forthcoming: Who would join if they knew they were going to spend that

kind of money (and shun other family members and completely build their

lives around Scientology) in order to rid their bodies of invisible

space-alien parasites? No wonder such details aren’t mentioned during

the most basic Scientology come-on, the free “personality test” you get

in the subway.

So yes, I’m looking forward to this Saturday’s shindig for the

commodore. Hubbard was an attention whore, so he might not really

disapprove. And while I’m counting heads at the local rally, I’ll

probably feel some nostalgia for an earlier time, when there were much

fewer of us trying to get at the truth.

Back in 1999 I was working for a newspaper in Los Angeles that no

longer exists. Scientology was a wonderful subject for an eager

reporter: It was nefarious as hell, operating more like the mafia than

a religion, and at the same time breathtakingly stupid: Besides its

core beliefs about a galactic overlord and disembodied aliens

inhabiting the human body, adherents are convinced that Ron’s talking

cure will lead them to become clairvoyants able to leave their bodies

at will, which, as Cruise pointed out, makes them excellent first

responders to auto accidents. And believe me, there’s far weirder stuff

that was committed to paper by a burnt-out, pill-popping pulp fiction

writer with a messiah complex named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, who had

demanded that his followers sign billion-year contracts so that they’d

continue to serve him lifetime after lifetime (Hubbard’s own lifetime

ended in 1986).

Wading into this stuff was too much fun. And at that time, my New Times Los Angeles

colleague Ron Russell and I had little competition. Scientology was

centered in Los Angeles (its other headquarters is in Florida), but

after the Los Angeles Times had done a major, multi-part exposé

in 1989, the paper had given up covering the cult almost completely.

Other publications were aware that after Time magazine took its

own shot in 1990, calling Scientology a “ruthless global scam,” the

church had filed a libel lawsuit asking for hundreds of millions of

dollars, and nine years later the case was still unresolved (it was

ultimately dismissed). With the Time suit still pending,

most publications were wary of Scientology’s litigious reputation.

Other than Richard Leiby, a Washington Post

reporter who was doing excellent work, Russell and I practically had

the Scientology investigative field to ourselves for a few years.

Russell, for example, wrote a mind-blowing piece about how

Scientology officials took advantage of a brain-damaged man, convincing

the poor sucker to invest some of the millions he’d received for his

injury in a non-existent ostrich-egg business. (I shit you not.)

My favorite experience was writing about a woman named Tory

Christman (Tory Bezazian then), a 30-year Scientologist who had rather

spectacularly defected from the church in the middle of a Usenet

slugfest after secretly reaching out to one of the cult’s biggest

detractors, the operator of Xenu.net. That story, “Sympathy for the

Devil,” lives on in cyberspace, even though the newspaper I wrote it for no longer does.

In another story, we put the lie to the church’s claim that it

no longer practices “fair game"—L. Ron’s famous edict that his troops

should engage in dirty tricks to bury its perceived enemies. In “Double

Crossed,” we detailed one of the most hellacious cases of fair game in

recent years, the smearing of attorney Graham Berry with the use of a

coerced, false affidavit claiming that Berry was a pederast who went

after boys as young as 12. When the man who made that false affidavit,

Robert Cipriano, was sued by Berry in a defamation suit, the church, in

order to keep him from recanting his false claims, offered to represent

him in the lawsuit for free, donated thousands to Cipriano’s nonprofit

projects, and even got him a house, a car, and a job at Earthlink

(which had been founded by Scientologists). You can see the story here.

Berry’s experience, as well as that of others (Google “Keith

Henson,” kids), made it plain that if you opposed Scientology, you had

to be very careful not to give the church a way to claim victim status.

Which is exactly what Anonymous didn’t do.

After the Cruise video, meant only for other delusional

Scientologists and not the rest of the world, showed up in January on

the Internet, the church went into attack mode, trying to shut down

every copy. (Gawker’s Nick Denton has done the world a service by

keeping the video up and flipping Scientology the bird. See it here.)

That in turn inspired Anonymous, which has a thing about

Internet censorship. But the nameless group of geeks initially took a

hacker’s approach, hitting Scientology sites with various tactics to

shut them down. For longtime critics like Mark Bunker, it was a

nightmare.

with a video of himself, explaining in a sort of open letter that

Anonymous was ruining the work that he and others have been doing for

decades. By pranking and vandalizing Scientology sites, Anonymous was

only giving the church the ability to claim that it was being

victimized. The moral high ground, in other words, had been lost.

Bunker’s simple video—a bearded older guy sitting in front of

his computer and talking into a web cam—seemed to have a major effect,

resulting in the peaceful protests of February 10.

Will the Anonymous phenomenon continue to grow? And how, given

its past, will Anonymous be able to police its own, so that some of its

“members” don’t revert to reckless antics? Scientology, no doubt, will

continue to claim that it’s a victim of religious bigots. It always

has.

But at the least, it’s good to see so many people a little more

aware of what Hubbardism is all about, even if it means I’ll have to

come up with something else as cocktail party patter. Hell, everyone

seems to know about Xenu by now.

Link.

Other relevant threads here and here.

[Free For All]

I'd have to say that Battlefield Earth was perhaps the worst movie I've ever seen. Even worse than Ishtar.

[Chuck Nessa]

I got Ron a Snickers for his birthday. If he doesn't eat it in the next half hour, it's MINE!

[DTMX]

Hey, as far as I'm concerned, the guy has done a lot in his field. His work has made many people happy, influenced a whole generation of followers and I think that he has written some of the best material in his genre. I hear a lot of people knocking him these days, but some people peak early in their careers and in the fifties and sixties and seventies, few people could hold their own with him. I'll always respect his abilities and the contributions he has made.

Wait, we were talking about Freddie Hubbard, right?

[Aggie87]

Tom is googling your addresses as we speak.

[Dan Gould]

It never ceases to amaze me the basic tenets of this "faith":

Meeting her today, it's hard to believe that such a gregarious and effusive person could ever have been a part of what she herself describes as a cult. But Bezazian, 54, is clearly a former Scientologist -- her chatty conversation is filled with the corporate-sounding jargon that marks a longtime adherent of the Hubbard way of thinking.

Bezazian joined the church in 1969 after almost killing herself with heroin in San Francisco. She had ditched her parents' home in an exclusive and stifling suburb of Chicago to become a hippie, then had to be brought home on a gurney when a hypodermic needle turned out to be dirty. Recovering in Illinois, Bezazian was approached by a couple of Scientologists she knew. Their stories about an "applied philosophy" lured the 22-year-old to L.A. Once here, however, she worried that she'd made a big mistake: Scientology's quasi-military structure and obsession with large, Chairman Mao-like images of Hubbard felt Big Brotherish to a hippie deep into freedom of expression. But Bezazian learned to love Scientology, and stayed with it for more than three decades.

She'd become unhappy in recent years, however, partly because she could never rid herself of the space aliens in her body.

Like other advanced members of the church, Bezazian had learned about the aliens inside her only after spending years in the religion and parting with tens of thousands of dollars. In a financial arrangement which is probably unique in theology, adherents of Hubbard's faith must pay increasingly large sums of money to learn the basic tenets of their religion. Former church members and court records indicate that parishioners pay about $100,000 to learn the story of Scientology's origins, which is contained in something called OT III -- its Book of Genesis, as it were. According to a church spokeswoman, only about 10 percent of Scientology's adherents have reached this level. The rest are kept in the dark about Hubbard's strange tale of how his religion began. For them, Scientology is an increasingly expensive progression of classes that give them, they believe, a complicated "technology" for ridding their minds of scars left by previous traumas, some of them from past lives.

Upon reaching OT III, Bezazian learned Hubbard's revelation that Xenu, an evil galactic overlord, had banished millions of space aliens to the planet Teegeack -- now Earth -- in an attempt to solve a cosmic overpopulation problem. Xenu had packed the surplus aliens into volcanoes and pulverized them with hydrogen bombs, but some 75 million years later their disembodied souls, called thetans by Scientologists, had managed to survive. Invisible and incredibly resilient, some of the aliens, which Hubbard called body thetans, had taken up residence inside unwitting human beings. Clustered inside each of us, these interstellar parasites are the source of all human misery.

That ulcer eating away at your stomach lining? It's an ancient body thetan gnawing away at you. That arthritis in your elbow? E.T. feels right at home in your creaky joint. That anxiety you feel speaking in front of a group? Space aliens lurking in your head, tripping you up.

After absorbing this tale, Bezazian, like other Scientologists, continued on through higher levels in a process of counseling and classes -- collectively called "the Bridge" -- which was supposed to help eradicate body thetans. Only when Bezazian had chased off the last of the critters would she attain her true potential -- the unleashing of her own true inner thetan, the alien soul that piggybacking space creatures had held back and tormented. This would in turn produce in her a superhuman state that Hubbard referred to as "clear." Clears could wield amazing powers, Hubbard claimed, including total memory recall and clairvoyance.

The trouble was, no matter how hard Bezazian tried to move across the Bridge (and no matter how much money she spent), her church counselors, called auditors, always claimed to find more body thetans clinging to her.

For years she found herself stuck at OT VII, the second-highest level in the religion. Year after year, she diligently went through drills and tests trying to locate all of the body thetans infesting her system. The process mostly involved talking with auditors while hooked up to an "E-meter," an electronic gauge that measures tiny fluctuations in skin conductivity. Scientologists believe the erratic movement of the meter's needle while a subject talks indicates the presence of body thetans.

One of the things holding Bezazian back was the real mother of a body thetan that had taken up residence in her nervous system. She had epilepsy, which to the rest of the world is a serious, chronic illness. But to Scientologists, Bezazian's epileptic convulsions were a sure sign of a body thetan's presence.

When Bezazian stuck to a drug regimen recommended by doctors, she suffered few effects of the disease. But Scientologists viewed resorting to medication as a sign of weakness, an indication that an adherent didn't trust Hubbard's "tech" to drive away the body thetan causing her malady.

Several times, she tried to adhere to her faith by going off her medication. She suffered greatly each time. Although she was warned she would never "go clear" until she "handled" her epilepsy through the tech, Bezazian eventually went back on medication permanently.

Others chose to battle severe medical problems without help from doctors. A good friend, she says, died painfully after relying on auditing to cope with breast cancer.

Stuck at OT VII and increasingly unhappy with how her auditing was going, Bezazian became even more disillusioned with changes made under new church leader David Miscavige, who had taken over after Hubbard's 1986 death. At a mass gathering in 1997, Miscavige announced the "discovery" that higher-level Scientologists had been trained incorrectly and would need to redo some levels. Bezazian says she was told her retraining would cost $25,000.

Already $60,000 in debt and in no mood to undergo still more auditing to reach a level where she'd been stalled for years, Bezazian complained to Miscavige. She wrote him letters asking why she should have to pay so much when it was the church's product that had proved to be defective. She got no response. And that's when she decided to get off the Bridge.

"It's a big decision for a Scientologist," she says. "But I didn't care if they came up with OT fucking billion, I was done." Feeling cheated and abandoned, she found little support from other members. "It's not like I didn't give it my best shot. But they always tell you it's your fault if the tech doesn't work. No one has ever apologized to me for anything."

Bezazian gave up trying to rid herself of body thetans. But her faith in Hubbard and Scientology was unshaken. She didn't like some of the changes occurring in her church, but it was still her church, after all. After so many years in the religion and after paying more than $100,000, Bezazian says, Scientology was nearly her entire world. The thought of leaving it never entered her mind.

[Alexander]

Man, imagine how AWESOME it would have been if Philip K. Dick had started his own cult!

That's one cult I would join!

[7/4]

Man, imagine how AWESOME it would have been if Philip K. Dick had started his own cult!

That's one cult I would join!

Woah! Wouldn't that be somethin'.

[Big Al]

Would his followers be called D.... no, I just can't do it. Too easy!

I'm still waiting for Dave Barry to start his own cult.

[Jim Alfredson]

We got a pretty good cult going here.

[Guest Bill Barton]

A niiiiice birthday gift might be a copy of Chick Corea's The Leprechaun. Even though L. Ron's dead he might yawn a bit after repeated listenings...

[BERIGAN]

I'd have to say that Battlefield Earth was perhaps the worst movie I've ever seen. Even worse than Ishtar.

Hey, Ishtar is nowhere near as bad as Battlefield Earth!