Book Review: Lonesome Squirrel (1991) by Steven Fishman

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Wow!  This is one outrageously hilarious parody of the Church of Scientology.  It is in a class by itself as a completely thorough mockery of L. Ron Hubbard’s “religion.”  Very well done and great fun, but it is definitely not for everyone.  (Among other reasons for this, it is a very long document, and it seems to be only available online.) 

Although the book represents itself on the surface as a true autobiographical narrative, it is actually a work of fiction, while still uncannily reflecting the actual documented culture and policies of Scientology, albeit in a most exaggerated manner.  Yet it is not as far from the truth as one might think -- e.g., the very well-documented (from numerous other sources) culture of vicious infighting within Church ranks, etc.  Steve Fishman was actually never as much of a Scientologist as he claims, but he had studied tons of genuine Church books and history closely enough to gain an impressive expertise of its workings.  But he actually figures into the true history of Scientology by infamously causing some of the cult’s most secretly guarded “scriptures” to be publicly released, e.g., the story of galactic overlord Xenu, etc.  More on this below. 

Caveat:  Again, this is definitely not a book for everyone.  It is grossly blasphemous, vulgar, extremely offensive, misogynous, and way sick – which is part of its warped appeal – but it is funnier than Hell on Fire.  (E.g., as Fishman sings praises of the Church: “Even my bowel movements were clean and crisp, and it was all due to Scientology.”)  There is something in this book to offend almost everyone.  If you don’t have much informational background on Scientology and on its insane culture and criminal history, then you will not understand much of Lonesome Squirrel, but if you have been following the Hubbard cult closely then this book will blow your mind by its spot-on satire. 

Another Caveat:  Steve Fishman is a convicted criminal and a well-documented liar who is now in prison for the second time.  His first conviction (1990) was for mail fraud and obstruction of justice – which according to his fictional account in this book was in the service of the Church of Scientology – and he was sentenced to five years.  After serving some of that time and getting out on probation, Fishman got into another fraud scheme, and this time he is serving a 20-year sentence.  He can be a piece of shit, but he’s got a great sense of humor. 

Briefly, the story of how Steve Fishman publicly released top-secret Scientology scriptures.  On 6 May 1991, TIME magazine published a phenomenal cover story, “Scientology:  The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power”, and the Church of Scientology immediately sued the magazine for libel.  (The magazine won the case, but only after spending over $7,000,000 in the legal fight; this expensive “victory” quelled other journalists’ temptation to anger the Church for years to come.)  Apparently, the magazine’s cover story writer had believed Fishman’s wild account of his fictional career in Scientology and recounted some of Fishman’s most outrageous lies; and these were some of the things the Church held to be libelous. 

So the Church also sued Fishman, who represented himself in court.  In his massive personal library of Scientology lore he had somehow acquired authentic copies of the secret upper OT levels.  These “Operating Thetan” levels, OT 1-8, are as high as you can go in the Church, and you must pay hundreds of thousands of dollars before the uppermost secrets are revealed to you.  Fishman entered these OT level secrets as exhibits in open court files, and from there they were posted by others onto the Internet (famously known ever since as the Fishman Affidavit, aka, the Fishman Papers).  The Church then retreated from suing Fishman and tried, unsuccessfully, to stop online dissemination of the OT levels.  The most famous of these levels is OT-3, the “Wall of Fire” level where the story of Xenu was revealed.  (See South Park’s famous parody of Scientology in their episode “Trapped in the Closet”.)  That these Fishman Papers are actually authentic is proved by the fact that the Church tried to shut down Internet dissemination of the OT levels by arguing that their "copyrights" were being violated, thus admitting that these were their actual documents. 

At the very end of Chapter 18 of Lonesome Squirrel, Fishman claims that he personally “introduced Russell Means to the Libertarian Party” in 1984.  This being a Fishman claim, I am skeptical enough to call it total bullshit. 

Only a die-hard Scientology Watcher will appreciate this book and get its in-jokes, so I recommend it only to those twisted few. 

-Zenwind.

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Book Review: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013) by Lawrence Wright

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For the Church of Scientology, the shit has hit the fan. If you can only read one book about L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, this is the one. I have had a perverse hobby of researching this cult for many years, and I’ve read most of the important exposes of the cult. They are all informative and most often riveting, but this book is the gem of Scientology critiques because of its journalistic rigor and completeness. It is very well written.

(There has been a recent HBO documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015), directed by Oscar-winning documentary maker, Alex Gibney, which is based on Wright’s book and which includes interviews with Wright. I saw the documentary, and I love it.)

Although I have read many books about Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (L. Ron Hubbard, or “LRH,” 1911-1986), this book by Lawrence Wright provided a lot of additional information about him and his religion. Wright dug deep and interviewed many “apostates” who left Scientology but who were witnesses during its important years, and he mastered the vast literature of the multitude of ex-Scientologists.

He also acknowledged some of the reasons that make Scientologists so loyal to their group. He sees LRH as not only a liar and a fraud but as a charismatic fabulist that fascinated many people and made them believe him on faith. He notes that LRH, while still successful at grabbing money for power, spent much of his time alone with his E-meter developing his “spiritual technology.” LRH worked obsessively on working out a route to higher levels in his church doctrine. Wright asks: “If it was all a con, why would he bother?” He apparently believed his own bullshit. LRH was astoundingly complex, and Wright appreciates this while not sparing him radical criticism.

Lawrence Wright is an eminent American journalist on the staff of The New Yorker, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, in which he accurately nailed the relevant terrorist ideology, origins, and activities.

He wrote this book on Scientology in a measured style, honest and reality-oriented – brutally honest – yet also showing sincere compassion for true believers who were positively affected by Scientology. E.g., Scientology has netted some celebrities as high-profile icons/recruiters; and actress Ann Archer (Patriot Games, Fatal Attraction) and her husband agreed to be interviewed by Wright – and I really respect them for such openness and forthrightness – and Wright is respectful of their deep devotion to Scientology.

Scientology is very much a Hollywood style religion of the late 20th century, but it has its perverse dark sides and the well-documented extreme horror stories of totalistic confinement, mind control, families ripped apart through forced “disconnection,” and ruthless revenge against anyone who is considered to be a critical “enemy” of the church. The Hollywood celebrities are shielded from such controversies.

Academy Award winner Hollywood screenwriter and director Paul Haggis is a big part of this story because Wright wrote a long 2011 article on Haggis’s journey in and out of Scientology in The New Yorker called “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology.” Chapter 1 of Going Clear is “The Convert,” an account of Haggis as a young man pursuing the allure of Scientology in the early 1970s. The book will tell, near its end, of Haggis investigating and re-thinking Scientology after 35 years in it, and Haggis is very honest and courageous in his criticisms.

Chapter 2, “The Source,” focuses on LRH (Hubbard), the “source” of all cult doctrine. He was such a bullshitter! His lies about his wartime service and intellectual accomplishments are covered in other of my posts here in the Post Index Category, "Scientology".

Chapter 3, “Going Overboard,” covers LRH’s exile when running from governments in the 1960s and 70s. One very interesting item is about when he wrote the “theological” level Operating Thetan Three (OT-III), the secret knowledge of Galactic overlord Xenu 75 million years ago and how Xenu caused the mindfuck that continues on planet Teegeeack (aka, Earth). In the late 60s LRH was in Tangiers “researching” OT-III, the “Wall of Fire” level, and he wrote to his wife in England that he was “drinking lots of rum” and downing drugs, “pinks and grays,” while researching. He sounds inspired. The reaction of Paul Haggis when he finally earned the right to read this secret story about Xenu – which is now all over the internet – is one of my favorite parts of the book.

Hubbard moves his base of operations to Clearwater, Florida in the early 1970s, while personally hiding out elsewhere. This is the time of his aggressive campaign to “destroy” Paulette Cooper, a journalist who wrote The Scandal of Scientology (1971), and he almost did destroy her. (Her story is the subject of another great recent book by Tony Ortega, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, which I hope to review here someday.) The Church of Scientology is infamous for its litigious practices, suing opponents into the ground. Hubbard’s doctrine was to viciously attack and to completely destroy perceived enemies. The church’s dirty tricks were often criminal.

At this time Hubbard also declared war on the US government, and other world governments, in his “Snow White Program,” which I have described before. It is called the biggest domestic infiltration of the US government in history. The FBI raided the church in 1977, and 11 high-level church officials, including Hubbard’s wife, ended up going to prison.

Chapter 4 is “The Faith Factory.” Borrowing from Jon Atack’s research, Wright applies the work of Robert Jay Lifton on “ideological totalism.” Lifton studied Maoist “thought reform” (which the CIA called “brainwashing”), especially the techniques of public confession and then re-education. Numerous Scientology defectors describe these exact techniques as a principal tool of control in the Sea Org (SO), the core “clergy” unit of the church. The horror stories are consistent from many different informants.

Meanwhile, the cult cultivates celebrities, especially Hollywood ones. John Travolta was one of the first big names. Tom Cruise is now the biggest name. LRH always emphasized going after famous people as icons and recruiters, and Hollywood was his main target. Celebrities are insulated from the harsh realities of rank and file church members.

LRH died in 1986 – or rather his mythology says that he “dropped his meat body” in order to do research amongst the galaxies and he will reincarnate someday here on Earth. He had still been an exile living in secret locations, hiding from his enemies.

New to me were some of the further historical details about Scientology’s present supreme leader, David Miscavige (DM). DM took over the church after the death of LRH, and he continues the ruthless policies of the Founder. With a vengeance.

DM micromanages every detail of the church’s activities, including the extremely cruel traditional LRH revenge and dirty tricks actions. Miscavige’s violent physical and mental assaults on his staff are very well documented elsewhere, but Wright’s documentation of DM’s history of violence shows us that he was abnormally violent while a young teenager. I can only conclude that Miscavige is a psychopath, by most accounts a dangerously angry bully who delights in crushing anyone he dislikes. And he has over a billion dollars in a slush fund which he uses to litigate or hire private detectives to harass his enemies.

Most of the recent Scientologists who have “blown,” i.e., who have managed to escape this religion that ruthlessly tracks you down and harasses and intimidates you to stay within the cult, have already told their stories elsewhere and the stories are very, very consistent.

Most of Hubbard’s own children have blown. Quentin Hubbard, LRH’s heir apparent, blew in 1976. Quentin was gay in a religion that considered this extremely perverse. He was found in Las Vegas, comatose in a car with the engine running and a hose from the exhaust to the window, and he died later. When Hubbard got the note about Quentin’s suicide, his reaction was: “That little shit has done it to me again!” (!!!)

Hubbard’s daughter Suzette blew in 1988. As did his youngest son Arthur that same year. The only remaining child of his third marriage, Diana, lives as a recluse on the California desert base.

In 1993 the Church of Scientology won a long-fought victory against the IRS, gaining tax-exemptions as a recognized religion. They won by wearing the IRS down through over 2,000 lawsuits against its district offices and individual employees. The IRS lawyers were completely overwhelmed, and the director made it all go away by simply surrendering to the cult’s demands. Now Miscavige has accumulated billions in cash and real estate.

“Google: ‘Lisa McPherson’.” In 1995 Lisa was given the church recognition of having achieved the state of “Clear,” meaning being perfectly healthy and on her way to higher Scientology levels. Yet she was psychotic. Who was the church auditing case supervisor who declared her to be “Clear”? It was David Miscavige. DM himself (although the church now denies it). When Lisa was soon hospitalized in a psych ward for running naked in the streets, the church moved her to their own hotel and “treated” her with LRH’s wacky theories. In 17 days she was dead. Miscavige micro-managed her entire treatment. The church only resolved the embarrassing situation in their favor after declaring a long war on the medical examiner and forcing her to reverse her judgment and retire in shattered health. Bastards.

You won’t believe some of the nutty accounts in Chapter 8, about David Miscavige in the Church headquarters out in the California desert near Hemet. But the witnesses are too many and too consistent. Give a madman like him money and unlimited power, and the incredible cruelty follows when no one will speak up at the time. Meanwhile TC (Tom Cruise) and DM are best buddies, and the abuses just cruise over Tom’s head.

The Sea Org (SO) members work endlessly for measly pay and are “thought reformed” into submission. All their (rare) phone calls are monitored, their mail opened, their bank records watched – like under the Stasi. Meanwhile, DM lives a lavish lifestyle with the best of everything.

Defections from the cult are multiplying, and they include high officials. Mark “Marty” Rathbun was second only to DM in the cult, as the Inspector General. With decades in the church, Marty was trusted to “audit” (i.e., counsel, mentor) Tom Cruise on the E-meter when Tom returned to an active role in the church. Rathbun blew in 2004, stayed silent for five years and then started a blog critical of DM’s dictatorship. He has been harassed unmercifully under DM’s micro-managed revenge machine. His inside knowledge of the church is priceless.

Marc Headley blew in 2005, and this also reflected badly on Tom Cruise. When Tom was in earlier church training he had to in turn audit someone else. Marc Headley was a SO employee who never had time to do his own advancement in Scientology levels, so DM had Tom audit Marc. The point is that if Marc blew, his auditor (Tom) is supposed to share a lot of the blame. Not that it will happen. Marc’s wife, Claire Headley, blew after Marc did, and she was the overall case supervisor of Tom Cruise’s auditing process. Embarrassing, no? Marc’s fine book, Blown for Good was reviewed earlier here.

In 2010 John Brousseau blew, and this shook things up because he had intimate knowledge of DM’s behavior and of the work SO laborers did for Tom Cruise for slave wages.

In 2007 Mike Rinder blew. Mike was a top official, the church’s spokesman for many years and executive director of the Office of Special Affairs (OSA), the cult’s spy org that replaced the old Guardians Office. With uncommon inside knowledge of the cult, he knows “where the bodies are stashed.”

As far as Hollywood celebrities blowing, Jason Beghe, an actor who takes no BS from nobody, left the cult loudly and unafraid. Paul Haggis was concerned about the hypocrisy he saw in church leadership, and he did (forbidden) research on the internet to have his eyes opened to church abuses. Haggis wrote a long detailed letter of resignation from the Church of Scientology and he shared it with a few people. The letter found its way to Marty Rathbun, who asked Haggis for permission to reprint it on his blog. Haggis said sure. What surprised Haggis was that Rathbun’s blog post with his letter had 55,000 hits that very afternoon! Scientology is being watched by multitudes of folk who don’t like what they see.

There is much, much more interesting material in this masterful work. Lawrence Wright had a legion of fact-checkers and an army of lawyers doing their homework before publication, because the cult is notorious at suing critics into the ground. Their work was so well done that the cult can only squawk.

In his Epilogue, Wright puts the Church of Scientology into historical perspective. He compares them with the early Mormons. Joseph Smith was a pathological liar, a habitual fraud and con man, and a sexual exploiter, but he was charismatic enough to have a following of thousands in his short life, and today the Mormons are a flourishing almost-mainstream sect. They even had a Mormon run for president. (Although Mitt said his favorite novel was Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard! Give me a break!) Wright points out that the Christian Scientists oppose mainstream medicine even more than Scientologists, yet they have been accepted in American life for the most part (even though they are diminishing in numbers these days). And as far as Scientology’s policy of “disconnection”, the Amish do the same thing, calling it “shunning,” and the Amish have settled into their niche as an accepted, marginal, sect. Scientology won’t die soon, despite the shit hitting the big fan right now. What will it evolve into?

Wright is harsh when he has to be and compassionate when that is called for. But he is adamant that the Church of Scientology has to be confronted for its egregious abuses. He calls on the celebrity members, naming Tom Cruise and John Travolta, he maintains that they cannot be blind to these abuses, and he challenges them to take responsibility and renounce or try to change the cult’s present practices under David Miscavige.

In sum, this is a great book. I enjoyed reading it, even though many (not all) of the facts were already known to me – mainly through reading the daily blogs on Scientology by the indefatigable journalist Tony Ortega for many years now; Ortega has been covering Scientology for 20 years and is a clearing house of info, and he is also interviewed in Gibney's documentary Going Clear.

Wright is able to combine impeccable documentation with wonderful storytelling. This is a book I will be reading again someday, as a timeless account of the cult.

-Zenwind.

Book Review: Blown for Good: Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (2009) by Marc Headley

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Blown for Good is an autobiographical narrative but it reads like a thriller. In Scientology’s esoteric babble, to be “blown” is to have escaped from the Sea Org (SO), the cult’s dedicated hard core of workers and executives, each of whom have signed up for a “billion year contract.” And one must really achieve an all-out desperate escape, because they send out a massive manhunt of security people and SO staffers to drag you back in; they scour bus stations, airports, and any other place you might try to get away. Scientology has elsewhere been very accurately called the “prison of belief.” I knew that Marc Headley “blew” several years ago, and I knew the eventual outcome, but his story had me enthralled with its suspense to the very last page. I couldn’t put it down. His depiction of the cult as an “Iron Curtain” is perfect. Think of the people risking all to escape East Germany from 1945 to 1989.

Marc Headley grew up in Scientology with his mother and sister, and at age 16 he signed the “billion year contract” to join the Sea Org. Long hours, hard work, little sleep, poor food, pathetic “pay,” insane policies, and brutal harassment were the norm in the paranoid and crazy International Base in the California desert. This is Scientology’s headquarters, run by the Chairman of the Board (COB) of the Religious Technology Center (RTC), David Miscavige, who is the indisputable dictator of the entire worldwide cult and a certifiable asshole. Headley gives proof and describes Miscavige as being “evil” and delighting in the suffering of others – a fact confirmed by countless others who have experienced his cruelty and have escaped from the cult.

One of the things preventing anyone from “blowing” from Scientology is that if you do you will be “declared” as a “Suppressive Person” (SP), a kind of apostate heretic, and your family members still locked into the cult must “disconnect” from you and never communicate with you ever again. It is an absolute church law for all (unless you are a special rich celebrity like Tom Cruise). Marc and his wife Claire have been disconnected by almost all of their families, who refuse to communicate with them per church commands. The church denies having this policy, but it has been church doctrine starting with the founder L. Ron Hubbard, and it still goes on.

After 15 years of loyal, productive, and hard work at Scientology’s headquarters, taking an increasing amount of abuse in an increasingly crazy organizational atmosphere, Marc decides to blow. His story is fascinating.

Scientology has a special language of acronyms and slang that is hard to get through. But Headley has provided a Glossary for acronyms to help you maneuver through it.

I have read many books on Scientology, but this is one of the best because it describes individual life on the inside the cult so well.

-Zenwind.

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Book Reviews: A Piece of Blue Sky (1990/2013) by Jon Atack; and Bare-Faced Messiah (1987) by Russell Miller

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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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