Foreword

This book makes no pretence of being an authoritative work on the doctrine and practices of Scientology. How could it be, in all honesty, when I am not and never have been, a Scientologist?

I have never been processed nor dianetically audited, with or without the use of an E-meter. I cannot lay valid claim to the insights and independence of thought which are said to result (and I believe they do) from the proper application of Scientology's Standard Tech.

I must make this perfectly clear at the outset to forestall the inevitable allegation by people hostile to Scientology that Mr. Hubbard or his followers have "brainwashed" me or otherwise deprived me of my free will and common sense.

All this is not to say, of course, that I know little or nothing about the philosophy, aims and techniques of Scientology. I know a great deal about all of these, having made a careful and exhaustive study of the literature published by Scientology organizations themselves, as well as a great deal of material opposed to or attacking Scientology. In addition, I have enjoyed face-to-face discussions hours on end with well-informed Scientologists in America and abroad.

12 / The Hidden Story of Scientology

However, my underlying purpose in thus familiarizing myself with the history and practice of Scientology was orientation. It was preliminary to my real task, which has been to investigate charges made by Scientologists that there exists a world-wide, secret alliance, with interlocking national organizations, whose common goal is the establishment of a strictly controlled, one-world society.

The Scientologists further assert that they are being subjected to relentless attack by this "global conspiracy" because Scientology has challenged their aims and exposed their methods.

I paused a long time before that word conspiracy. Over and over again, we have had urged upon us the notion that people who believe they are the target of a conspiracy are victims of some kind of mental illness.

A mass-circulation magazine some time past published a long article on the subject, accompanied by a garish illustration depicting the many kinds of "conspiracies" some Americans, for example, believe to exist. The writer of the article hastened to note that it was only a minority of "the more alert among us" who view with suspicion much that is happening in our society today.

His meaning was clear: such persons are paranoiacs, suffering from what might be called a conspiracy syndrome.

He did not seem to think that the growing, bare-fisted threats to what most people consider civilized values might justify at least a modest amount of suspicion.

Still, there was a modicum of truth in his premise. In today's world of shifting verbal sands, when semantic slight-of-hand is widely used for everything from promoting cold-water detergents to the selling of a President, you can't be too careful about words. For, ultimately, words convey ideas; and ideas are as explosive as nitroglycerine.

According to the French thinker, Fouillée, every idea consists not only in an intellectual act, but also in what he terms "a certain direction of the sensibility and of the Will". He believed that, as a consequence, "in society, as in the

Foreword / 13

individual, every idea is a force, tending more and more to realise its individual end".

Writing of the vital role played by ideas in the French Revolution, Wyndham Lewis observed:

"It was seen how, properly used, they could burst open kingdoms and disintegrate societies, so that sons would massacre their fathers and virtuous women carouse with street-walkers and mix blood with their wine..." 1 (p. 65).

In our own day, a good illustration of this same phenomenon (if I may be allowed a brief digression) is the now-familiar idea of a "generation gap".

This expression, embodying the notion that an unbridgeable gulf of understanding and mores separates people on opposite sides of the arbitrary age of 29 years, 29 days, 59 minutes and 59 seconds, was fabricated by the hoax manufacturers of the revolutionary corporation in America.

Packaged, labelled and put on the intellectual market, it was vigorously promoted by the trained seals of journalism, the en rapport educators, the progressive clergy, the goahead psychologists and the avant-garde arbiters of cultural life.

The public, long accustomed to an uncritical acceptance of any authoritative broadside, soon made the idea a household commodity. Every dinner conversation, every Parent Teacher Association meeting, every TV Talk Show was studded with references to the "generation gap". It was the latest thing. Similarly, the academic and literary air was suddenly full of the same phantasy.

Once the idea was in general circulation, it began to shape itself into reality. Parents discovered that, sure enough, they couldn't talk to their children any more and be understood or taken seriously. And youngsters above the age of twelve all parroted the same averment they had heard so often: there's no use trying to talk to your parents. They won't listen, and they don't know what it's all about, anyway.

Created and encouraged thus by the mythmakers, and

14 / The Hidden Story of Scientology

aided in its growth by the widest possible exposure in the mass media, the counter-culture of youth so confidently proclaimed, began indeed to emerge.

In cities and campuses across America, then across the world, appeared hordes of pathetic young tramps who had mistaken filth for freedom and drug-induced euphoria for "liberating experience".

Their mystique of deformity included various tribes and orders: the Yippies, the New Left radicals, the studentpower organizers, the black militants dressed in the garb of African chiefs, and all the rest. Their slogans varied, but their goals were identical -destruction of civilized values, Their stampede was towards the abyss.

Allen Ginsberg, poet-spokesman for the new breed, wrote: 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked."

The power of words to unbalance and polarize society was never more clearly demonstrated. No wonder the process has been called by those who employ it "restructuring the social order through a revolutionary use of language".

But let us return to the word conspiracy. I owe it to my readers to clarify, so far as I am able, what is meant in this book by that term. Otherwise, what I have to say might get lost in disagreement as to what the term implies.

Scientologists well understand this point. Opposite the title page of most Scientology texts there appears an "An Important Note", which cautions the reader: "Always get any word or phrase you do not understand defined. Trying to read past a misunderstood word will result in mental 'fogginess' and difficulty in comprehending the following pages,"

That is good advice for the reader of almost any nonfiction book today. For the purposes of the present inquiry, then, I have adopted the standard dictionary definition of conspiracy.

Foreword / 15

Webster's International gives, as one connotation, "a combination of men for an evil purpose; a plot".

The Oxford Dictionary of English agrees in this instance with the American usage, defining conspiracy as "a combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose; an agreement between two or more to do something criminal, illegal or reprehensible; a plot".

If, as the Scientologists claim, it can be shown that hidden enemies have knowingly combined their efforts in a plot to destroy Scientology, then on the basis of the definition just cited, a conspiracy does indeed exist.

From the outset, it appeared that the Scientologists have a prima facie case in the simple fact that they have been attacked without any just cause by the governments of every country in which they have had an organized following. These attacks have not taken the form of legal prosecution for violation of any existing laws. Rather, they have been launched as extra-legal acts of oppression, of the kind familiar to anyone who has followed the rigged hearings and judicial proceedings set in motion by Soviet authorities when dealing with "enemies of the State".

I have read through thousands of pages of transcript covering such hearings, official enquiries and parliamentary debates in the U.S., Australia, South Africa, Rhodesia, New Zealand, Canada and Britain. Yet in not a single instance that I have been able to discover have any of these lengthy proceedings produced a shred of evidence that Scientologists or Scientology's founder have been guilty of anything actionable under the criminal or civil laws of the countries conducting them.

Instead, the most serious indictment to emerge from the vast heaps of verbiage is a vague generalization such as "Scientology is an evil cloud", or "Scientology is a falsehood and a fantasy".

Even Britain, the most permissive country in Western Europe, banned foreign Scientologists from entering the

16 / The Hidden Story of Scientology

United Kingdom because they were - (are you ready for it?) - "socially harmful".

Here was the tight little island , in whose major cities crimes of all categories were steadily increasing exponentially each year, with no effective action taken to curb them.

More than a hundred Soviet Communist spies, whose presence and activities had been known to Whitehall for four years, were finally expelled only when a defector from the Russian KGB (secret police) let the cat out of the bag. If British traitors had been aiding them, they were never apprehended.

Pornographers were flourishing, sometimes with official assistance. For example, the Department of Trade and Industry - a governmental agency - agreed to pay a subsidy to the publisher of The Little Red Schoolbook, earlier found by the courts to be obscene, so he could exhibit the volume at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Independent investigation had uncovered shocking evidence that patients in certain British mental institutions were being grossly abused. But a government white paper blithely dismissed the report as being based on "misrepresentations, wilful disregard of medical opinion, and serious distortion of facts".

Subsequent to this demurrer, not one but several mental hospitals were involved in serious scandals, as we shall detail in a later chapter.

Against this background of official tolerance almost to the point of idiocy, Scientology - a religious philosophy aimed at the spiritual regeneration of mankind - was viewed as "socially harmful".

In other countries, events followed a similar course. Although Scientology was only a minor sect, the massive powers of national governments were arrayed against it.

In the United States, the interventionist character of the government made it possible to attack Scientology in a brutal and direct way. The instrumentality for these assaults was the federal agencies such as the Food and Drug

Foreword / 17

Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Post Office Department, and the Federal Trade Commission.

Using the totalitarian (but unconstitutional) police powers they now wield in America, these bureaucratic hierarchies have tried to suppress Scientology by administrative law and by extra-legal harrassment.

Viewed objectively, the marshalling of such awesome forces against a small religious community appears decidedly fishy.

Another suspicious feature of the attacks on Scientology is that they all conform to a set pattern, regardless of the country in which they are carried out.

In each instance, the groundwork for official action is laid by a smear campaign in the media. Newspapers carry lengthy accounts purporting to show that a considerable number of people are being duped and their mental health undermined by a new "cult" called Scientology.

These initial stories carry headlines such as: "Scientology in South Africa Worries Doctors"; or, "Scientology Is Dangerous, Intellectuals Seriously Warn". Upon careful reading, the articles which follow turn out to be not news reports, but accounts of what are known to professional journalists as "pseudo-events", that is, interviews with biased "experts", aimed at swaying public opinion.

Next come sex and scandal stories ("'Women Quizzed Me On Sex,' Says Schoolboy"); loaded opinion surveys; letters to the editor; cartoons derisive of Scientology; and exposés by spies who posed as students.

The succeeding stage involves carefully controlled and slanted debates on television and discussion forums, usually sponsored by organizations hostile to Scientology.

Once Scientology has been established in the public mind as something evil and a serious threat to the community, demands are made that the government "do something".

In Britain and Commonwealth countries, politicians "respond to growing concern", (i.e., they yield to pressure by certain individuals and groups), and put down a question

18 /The Hidden Story of Scientology

in Parliament, then press for an enquiry into the practice and effects of the "dangerous cult".

Readers who are accustomed (or is it conditioned?) to a low-key, "balanced" discussion of all controversial issues, will no doubt regard this book as being strongly biased in favour of the Scientologists.

Let me say at once that the unequivocal conclusions stated herein were arrived at after more than a year of careful investigation and rest solely upon the documented evidence presented to support them.

I take no particular pleasure in being provocative; but I resolved that the disquieting import of this work would not be lost amid polite debate and tippy-toe assertions.

The possibility that any international alliance could extend its coercive power anywhere in the world; could use press, parliaments, ministries and diplomatic services to do its bidding, is too sobering a thought to dismiss lightly.

Who, then, are the individuals and groups that allegedly make up such a behind-the-scenes confederacy, if it does in fact exist? What are their over-all aims and why are they so violently opposed to Scientology?

In the following pages, I will attempt to supply at least partial answers to these questions and to others related to them. But to provide the reader with the perspective necessary to understand fully all that has happened and is still happening, it is necessary first to examine briefly the history and teachings of Scientology and of the science from which it evolved - Dianetics.

REFERENCE NOTES

1. Wyndham Lewis, The Writer and the Absolute. London: 1938.