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I have always had a morbid fascination reading about weird
cults, religions, philosophies, and infamous celebrities. I’ve been reading extensively about Scientology
for several years now, and I recently read two fine (unauthorized) biographies
of L. Ron Hubbard.
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I just finished Jon Atack’s A Piece of Blue
Sky, and it is one of the best historical accounts I’ve seen yet on
L. Ron Hubbard (LRH) and his creation, the Dianetics movement and the Church of
Scientology. A new edition of Atack’s
book has recently been published, and I got it on Kindle. His title came from a remark Hubbard was said
to have made around 1950 about creating a religion and making a lot of money
from it: “Let’s sell these people a piece of blue sky.” Atack shows us how Hubbard got rich while
leaving a lot of damaged people in his wake.
The ruthless nature of Scientology as a mind-controlling, money-grubbing
cult is well documented, in both the Hubbard and post-Hubbard eras.
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Russell Miller’s 1987 Bare-Faced Messiah: The true story of L. Ron Hubbard is
also excellent reading. Miller traces
Hubbard’s life history with special attention to the fables surrounding his
early personal life. Hubbard (LRH) was a
pathological liar. He lied about
everything, about his childhood, his adventures, his explorations, and his
military career. (Did he also lie about
the alien overlord, Xenu, and the Galactic Confederacy of 75 million years
ago? Or did he believe it?) Such habitual liars never expect to be called
out on their stories.
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For instance, Hubbard’s military claims were checked by
researching his US Navy records. He
claimed to have fought in “all five theaters” of WW2; to have been the “first
US returned casualty from the Far East” (machine-gunned on Java); to have commanded
a “corvette squadron” in action in the Atlantic; and to have finished the war
in hospital crippled and blind (injuries which he claimed to have self-cured by
his Dianetics-Scientology mystic insight).
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In actuality, he never saw combat action. At the beginning of the war, he was to be
posted to the Philippines, but he was sent back stateside after only arriving
in Australia, the reason being that he was “not satisfactory for independent
duty assignment,” and he “will require close supervision.” Stateside, he was relieved of the only two
naval boat commands he ever had – one on the US east coast, before even sailing
(“not temperamentally fitted for independent command”), and one on the west
coast where he exhibited gross incompetence and poor judgment during his two
short instances of commanding a small naval ship at sail along the North American
coast.
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His Navy fitness report after this rated him as “below
average,” and continued: “Consider this
officer lacking in the essential qualities of judgment, leadership and
cooperation. He acts without forethought
as to probable results. … Not considered qualified for command or promotion at
this time. Recommend duty on a large
vessel where he can be properly supervised.”
LRH finished the war hospitalized stateside for an ulcer, not “crippled
and blind.” LRH was, as we used to say
in the Marines, a “lying sack of shit.”
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LRH claimed that he was a “nuclear physicist.” He never finished college, and he failed the
only class he ever took in nuclear physics.
The scale of his life-long trail of lies and fabrications is
stunning. However, early in his
pre-Dianetics career he was a prolific writer of pulp science fiction, churning
out volume after volume.
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Both Jon Atack and Russell Miller – who collaborated a bit – owed a lot to the historical work of Gerry Armstrong,
a dedicated Scientologist who found a treasure trove of early Hubbard letters
and documents in an attic. Armstrong
started archiving and researching – with the blessing of LRH – for biographical
purposes. But Armstrong quickly found
that the documentation was proving LRH to be lying about almost everything, and
he eventually soured on the cult and left it.
The cult harassed him almost to death, but he got the documentation out
to the world.
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Legal harassment and incredibly nasty dirty tricks campaigns
(called the “Fair Game” policy) were a common recommendation of LRH, in his
written policy letters, against perceived “enemies” of the Church. Scientology’s leadership still uses these
methods to this very day, as Atack and Miller can tell you. Both have had horrendous personal experiences
of endless Church attacks, and they document numerous cases of attacks on many
other people. They both document that
this culture of nastiness originated with LRH himself and is his lasting institutional
legacy.
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Miller’s 1987 book was published in the UK and Europe, but
US publishers gave up after two years of legal battles with the Church, and it
was never available in America. The
Church has such immense wealth that it can easily overwhelm its enemies in
endless legal suits, as LRH taught them to do.
But, finally, this year Bare-Faced Messiah has been
published in the USA, and it is now on Kindle also.
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One fact that might be unknown to many who have only passing
knowledge of Scientology is that in the mid-1970s Scientologists, under the
ever-paranoid direction of LRH and the cult puppets he created, infiltrated the
US government to a degree unprecedented in history, copying reams of documents, thousands upon thousands of pages. LRH called
it the “Snow White Program,” and the reality of the extent of its spying is
documented in Church of Scientology documents later taken by the FBI in its
1977 raid on the Church.
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The cult’s Guardian Office (GO), now re-named the Office of
Special Affairs, infiltrated not only Interpol, but the US IRS, the DEA, the US
Coast Guard, and the Department of Justice.
The GO agents burgled numerous offices of US government officials,
including the US Courthouse in Washington and the office of the Deputy Attorney
General, as well as the Federal Trade Commission, the Treasury, and US Customs. They also burgled offices of attorneys for
the American Medical Association and of a critical newspaper. One must admit that, while all of this was
stupid and had to eventually fail, it was ballsy.
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The 1977 FBI raid on the GO found all the paper
documentation proving that Scientology had conspired and infiltrated the US
government. Eleven top Scientologists
were sent to prison, including the number two in the hierarchy, Mary Sue
Hubbard, LRH’s wife. LRH was insulated
from the GO directives, but he was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” and
went into hiding for the rest of his life.
He threw his wife under the bus and ran.
It was his life-long style.
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The bottom line lesson from these two fine biographies (and
from many, many concurring witnesses) is that L. Ron Hubbard, while sometimes
appearing charismatic, was a vicious fraud, a liar, and a con man – albeit on a
grand scale. Rather than being a
“Commodore” in command of himself and others, he was often panicky, childish,
and one who threw horrendous tantrums when he couldn’t get his way. But he was one hell of a storyteller.
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-Zenwind.
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