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March 11 - March 20, 2024
The decade of the 1950s, when Scientology was born, was a time of extreme concern—even hysteria—about mind control. Robert Jay Lifton, a young American psychiatrist, began studying victims of what Chinese Communists called “thought reform,” which they were carrying out in prisons and revolutionary universities during the Maoist era; it was one of the greatest efforts to manipulate human behavior ever attempted. In 1949, a number of Americans and Europeans who had been imprisoned during the Maoist revolution emerged from their cells apparently converted to Communism.
The totalist paradigm begins with shutting off the individual’s access to the outside world, so that his perceptions of reality can be manipulated without interference.
The dogma of the group is promoted as scientifically incontestable—in fact, truer than anything any human being has ever experienced. Resistance is not just immoral; it is illogical and unscientific. In order to support this notion, language is constricted by what Lifton calls the “thought-terminating cliché.” “The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed,” he writes. “These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” For instance, the Chinese Communists
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When a preclear voices a criticism of Scientology or expresses a desire to leave the church, the auditor’s response is to discover the “crimes” that the client has committed against the group. In Scientology jargon, those crimes are called “overts and withholds.” An overt is an action taken against the moral code of the group, and a withhold is an overt action that the person is refusing to acknowledge. Hubbard explained that the only reason a person would want to leave Scientology is because he has committed a crime against the group. Paradoxically, this is because humanity is basically good;
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There are further questions asking if the respondent has ever sold drugs, committed adultery, practiced homosexuality, had sex with a family member or a person of another race. It winds up by inquiring: Have you ever had unkind thoughts about LRH? Are you upset about this Confessional List?
Are you upset by being grilled about highly personal topics that are none of the Church's business?
despite the Communists’ absolute control of the environment, of the forty victims that Lifton studied, only three were “apparent converts” to the ideology. That figure has been used to discredit the notion of brainwashing, although Lifton himself later said that he was impressed by the extent to which minds could be altered and “truth blurred to the point of near extinction.”
(After 9/11, documents emerging from the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base showed that the methods used by US interrogators to question al-Qaeda suspects were based on Chinese Communist techniques.)
Although it is unlikely that Hubbard would have known about MKUltra when it was going on, he had become fascinated by the mind-control scare. In 1955, he distributed a pamphlet, which he probably wrote, called “Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics.” For some former Scientologists, “Brain-Washing” provides a codex for Hubbard’s grand scheme. There is an eerie mirroring of the techniques described in the pamphlet and some Scientology practices, especially those put into effect in the RPF.
Perhaps, like the three victims of Chinese Communist thought reform that Lifton termed “apparent converts,” Prince was predisposed to be a part of a totalitarian movement because of his own psychological need to conform, or to be a part of a polarized system that separates all humanity into the saved and the damned. Such persons, the theory goes, are reared in either chaotic or extremely authoritarian homes. They have conflicted images of themselves as being at once extremely good and extremely bad.
This is Jesse Prince, not Prince as in the artist
Brainwashing theory, on the other hand, proposes that strenuous influence techniques can overwhelm and actually convert an individual to a wholly different perspective, regardless of his background or pre-existing character traits, almost like an addiction to a powerful drug can create an overpowering dependency that can transform an otherwise stable personality. Stripping away a person’s prior convictions leaves him hungry for new ones. Through endless rounds of confession and the constant, disarmingly unpredictable fluctuations between leniency and assault, love and castigation, the
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After roll call, Kent instructed everyone to point in the direction of ABC Studios and telepathically communicate the instruction: “We want John Travolta for the part.” At the next meeting, Travolta revealed he had gotten the role of Vinnie Barbarino—the part that would soon make him famous. “My career immediately took off,” Travolta boasted in a church publication. “I would say Scientology put me in the big time.”
This was definitely a huge confidence boost, having the whole room praying for him
Within the church, the explanation for the raid was that some Scientologists were being charged with stealing the Xerox paper they used when they had copied the reports on the church in government files—in other words, it was just another example of jackbooted government goons twisting the Constitution in order to crack down on religious freedom. But when the indictments came out the following year, the scale of Operation Snow White was plainly exposed.
Hubbard agreed to let her travel to Clearwater, to do an “end of cycle on her hats”—meaning that she would brief her successor at the Celebrity Centre before she died.
For her impertinence in complaining about Gillham’s treatment, Taylor was sentenced to RPF. Her new baby daughter, Vanessa, was taken away and placed in the Child Care Org, the Scientology nursery. There were thirty infants crammed into a small apartment with wall-to-wall cribs, with one nanny for every twelve children. It was dark and dank and the children were rarely, if ever, taken outside.
even if she did escape, she realized, she actually knew very little about what was going on in the world. Since she had joined Scientology at the age of fourteen, she had never read a book that hadn’t been written by L. Ron Hubbard.
Like most celebrities, Travolta had been shielded from the church’s inner workings. The scandals that periodically erupted in the press about Hubbard’s biography, or his disappearance, or the church’s use of private investigators and the courts to harass critics—these things rarely touched the awareness of Scientology luminaries. Many simply didn’t want to hear about the problems inside their organization. It was easy enough to chalk such revelations up to religious persecution or yellow journalism.
Hubbard was becoming increasingly cranky and confused. He slept with guards outside his door, hiding in the tamarind trees that flanked his cottage. One morning he accused the Messenger outside his door of abandoning his post. “Someone came in and exchanged my left boot for a boot half a size smaller,” he said. “They even scuffed it up to make it look the same. Someone is trying to make me think I’m crazy.”
Frustrated with the ineffective treatment his son was getting for his asthma, Ron took David to a Dianetics counselor. “I experienced a miracle,” David later declared, “and as a result I decided to devote my life to the religion.” But in fact asthma continued to afflict him, and his disease was at the center of the Miscavige family drama.
At the age of twelve, David became one of the youngest auditors in the history of the church—“the Wonder Kid,” he was called.
“They said, ‘We have to warn you about Dave,’ ” Scott recalled. “ ‘David has episodes, very unusual episodes.’ ” The parents explained that Dave became extremely angry when he was suffering an asthma seizure. “Then they said, starting with the husband, ‘When these episodes occur, do not touch him!’ The mother reiterated, ‘Yes, please don’t touch him!’ I said, ‘What happens?’ They said, ‘David gets very, very violent, and he beats the hell out of you if you touch him.’ And the sister says, ‘Oh my God, he does beat you, really hard!’ ” Again and again, the family members emphasized that David
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That sounds less like asthma and more like a meltdown or fugue state.
He started to touch him, but drew back and performed a Scientology “assist.” He said, “That’s it, David, come up to present time,” repeating the command twice. David blinked and then jolted awake. He was still disoriented, so Scott performed another Scientology exercise, called a locational: “Look at that wall. Look at that bed.” Slowly, David began to focus.
He also asked for David’s preclear folder, which should have a record of his previous auditing. He was told that David didn’t have a PC folder. Scott had never heard of a Scientologist without one.
According to Scott, David admitted that he had never audited anyone and that, in fact, he had never even been audited himself. “Auditing is for weaklings,” he said. In any case, he said, he was Clear from a past life. Scott wrote up another Knowledge Report.
Scott remembers that on Monday, David audited a preclear. When he came back to the room, he seemed agitated, and Scott asked him what was going on. “Those fucking women!” Scott remembers David exclaiming. “There should be no women in the Sea Org.” Scott learned that there were three women who were overseeing David’s internship at Saint Hill. David’s attitude toward women was deeply troubling, as Scott noted in yet another Knowledge Report. So far, no one in the Ethics Office had responded. That changed a few days later. Scott was called into the Ethics Office and told that David had complained
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Karen de la Carriere was also a young intern at Saint Hill, and she was directed to join the others in the internship room. “They told us that David Miscavige had struck his PC,” she recalled. “He had been removed from his internship, and we were not to rumor-monger or gossip about it. We were supposed to just bury it.”
Just... Allowing this 15 year old to be violent, without any attempt to help him or protect other people.
After the skit that made such a poor impression on Hubbard, David redeemed himself in the founder’s eyes by renovating one of his houses and ridding it of fiberglass, which Hubbard said he was allergic to.
Do Scientologists believe in allergies?
HUBBARD FINISHED WRITING his thousand-page opus, Battlefield Earth, in 1980. (Mitt Romney would name it as his favorite novel.)
Why am I unsurprised it's a thousand pages?
Suddenly Franks got a call from Miscavige saying, “Get me John Travolta. I want to meet that guy!” Miscavige began wining and dining the star. “He just moved in and took over Travolta,” Franks recalled. But he says that privately Miscavige was telling him, “The guy is a faggot. We’re going to out him.”
Miscavige ordered that $1 million a week be transferred to the founder, but now it had to be done in a nominally legal manner.
David Mayo was sent to the RPF. He was made to run around a pole in the searing desert heat for twelve hours a day, until his teeth fell out.
She demanded to deal with Hubbard himself, but Miscavige refused. He controlled access to the church’s founder so thoroughly that even his wife couldn’t talk to him.
Jesse Prince says that when Hubbard was angry at someone he would command Miscavige to hit or spit on them, then report back when he had done so. Larry Brennan, who was a member of the church’s Watchdog Committee in charge of dealing with legal affairs, had seen how a minor infraction could be inflated into a major offense that justified the most severe penalty. There were no mistakes; there were only crimes. Every action was intended. This logic brooked no defense.
In December 1982, David Miscavige married Michele “Shelly” Barnett, a slight blonde, twenty-one years old. She had been one of the early Commodore’s Messengers on the Apollo.
Brousseau recalls looking over at Miscavige five minutes later. He was visibly shaking, his veins were bulging. “You got to be kidding me!” he said. “This is it? You just sit here and fucking wait?” Brousseau said that was the general idea. “I can’t stand it!” Brousseau remembers Miscavige saying. “I feel like jumping in and grabbing a fish with my fucking hands! Or cramming the hook down their fucking throats!”
Finally, Jesse Prince got the assignment. “It was a do or die mission,” he recalled. If he didn’t succeed in gaining clear custody of Roanne for Horwich, he would be sent back to the RPF. For whatever reason, Diana signed the release he put in front of her. Hubbard was thrilled. He rewarded Prince with a leather coat, a gold chain, some cash, and an M14 assault rifle.
The church also harassed the judge in the case, Ronald Swearinger. “I was followed,” the judge later said. “My car tires were slashed. My collie drowned in my pool.”
:(
On a Friday afternoon, the judge announced that the OT III documents would be made public at nine a.m. the following Monday, on a first-come, first-serve basis. This was the disaster the church had been dreading. When the courthouse opened that Monday, there were fifteen hundred Scientologists lined up. They filled three hallways of the courthouse and overwhelmed the clerk’s office with requests to photocopy the documents in order to keep anyone else from getting their hands on the confidential materials. They kept it up until the judge issued a restraining order at noon, pending a hearing
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As many as 12,000 Scientologists came from all over the world in May and June 1985 to protest the judgment in what they called the Battle of Portland. Day after day they marched around the Multnomah County courthouse, shouting “Religious freedom now!” and carrying banners reading WE SHALL OVERCOME!
The thetan has to report to a “between-lives” area, Hubbard later explained, which for most of them is the planet Mars. There the thetan is given a “forgetter implant.” “The implant is very interesting,” Hubbard later wrote. “The preclear is seated before a wheel which contains numbers of pictures. As the wheel turns, these pictures go away from him.… The whole effect is to give him the impression that he has no past life.” The thetan is then sent back to Earth to pick up a baby’s body as soon as it is born.
He presented himself as an expert on the subject, claiming he had been pronounced dead but had come back to life on two or three occasions.
Of course LRH did
On Friday evening, January 24, 1986, Hubbard died in the Blue Bird bus that had served as his living quarters for the past three years. Ray Mithoff, Pat Broeker, and Hubbard’s personal physician, Eugene Denk, were at his side, along with a handful of acolytes and employees. His body had suffered the usual insults of old age, along with the consequences of obesity and a lifetime of heavy smoking. Dr. Denk had given him injections of Vistaril, a tranquilizer, usually prescribed for anxiety.
Earle Cooley, a church attorney, took charge of the body. At seven thirty that morning, about twelve hours after Hubbard’s death, the mortuary in San Luis Obispo was notified. Cooley demanded an immediate cremation, but when the owner of the mortuary saw the name on the death certificate, she called the coroner. After learning that Hubbard had signed a new will the day before his death, the coroner ordered an autopsy, but Cooley was able to produce a document signed by Hubbard stating that an autopsy would violate his religious beliefs.
“Thus, at two thousand hours, Friday, the twenty-fourth of January, A.D. 36 [that is, thirty-six years after the publication of Dianetics], L. Ron Hubbard discarded the body he had used in this lifetime for seventy-four years, ten months, and eleven days.” Miscavige turned to a large photograph of Admiral Hubbard with the waves behind him and began to applaud. “Hip, hip, hooray!” he cried, as the audience echoed him. “Hip, hip, hooray!”
Every new religion faces an existential crisis following the death of its charismatic founder. Through his missionary work, Paul the Apostle kept Christianity alive after the crucifixion of Jesus. Brigham Young rescued the Church of Latter-day Saints following the murder of Joseph Smith by leading the Mormon exodus across the Great Plains into Utah. Religious geniuses arise all the time, but the historical test falls upon the successor, whose fate is to be forever overshadowed by the founder.
His artistic mother was the daughter of Haddon Sundblom, the illustrator who created some of the most enduring images in American commercial history—Aunt Jemima, the Quaker Oats man, and the famous Santa Claus drinking a Coca-Cola beside the Christmas tree.
Although it is easy to see in hindsight that the nineteen-year-old Mark Rathbun was primed, because of his troubled background and questing philosophy, to become a part of the Church of Scientology, it wasn’t clear to him at the time. His current spiritual mentor, Krishnamurti, preached against the idea of messiahs, but he also stated that every individual has the responsibility for discovering the causes of his own limitations in order to attain universal spiritual and psychological freedom. That resonated with Hubbard’s aim of “clearing the planet.”
They crashed through the picket fence and wrestled on the lawn. More shots were fired. At one point, according to Rathbun, the barrel of the revolver was pressed against the nape of his neck and Colletto pulled the trigger. The gun didn’t fire, but Rathbun went exterior, viewing the scene from twelve feet above his body.
He had the unfortunate combination of being garrulous without being articulate.
Rathbun eventually came to the conclusion that there were no further OT levels—no OT IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV—it was all a bluff on Broeker’s part, a lie that the church would have to live with, since the levels had been so publicly announced.
The same day that Miscavige canceled Hubbard’s order, Annie showed up in a remote re-education camp, in the Soboba Indian Reservation in Southern California, that Scientologists called Happy Valley. It had once belonged to an order of nuns, who left a sign on the gate that said VALLEY OF THE SINGING HEART. An armed guard stood watch. Dogs were trained to track down anyone who tried to leave.
