Several times I would be hauled into an interrogation by the RPF MAA as to the something being said in a letter to me or from me.
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Gerry Armstrong made some excellent points in response to my post about
the RPF's RPF. It is information that should go to John Travolta and Chick
Corea and others who want to promote this cult or defend it.
I want to comment on a few of Gerry's points, deleting (unfortunately)
some other text to shorten this down. (Also I am unable to attach it as a
real reply and part of this thread. My apologies.)
Re: Hubbard's Gulags: RPF's RPF (RVY)
On Thu, 25 Sep 1997, Gerry Armstrong wrote:
snipped
> I have seen people picked up bodily by four big men and taken to the
> RPF kicking, struggling and screaming in protest. That is not
> "voluntary" as Scientology's spokespeople claim. I have seen many
> people held and guarded. All mail out of the RPF was read by the MAA,
> and any mail in could be. Telephone calls to family were by permission
> and were monitored.
I had forgotten about the mail monitoring. Mail in to me arrived opened.
All mail out from me had to be sent in an UNSEALED envelope. Several times
I would be hauled into an interrogation by the RPF MAA as to the something
being said in a letter to me or from me. They were on the lookout for any
complaint or problem. And more than once, I was told to rewrite the letter
to delete the offensive language and the instance would end up showing up
in one of my security checks. E.g., if I had made a harmless remark like,
"It would be nice to spend a day at the beach with you," I would be asked,
"On your remark that you wanted to spend a day at the beach, are you
planning to leave?" That sort of paranoia runs deep in the organization.
Staff face this daily.
There was one instance that would have been funny, had it not been so evil
and brutal. I had given Stacy a small stuffed lion that she sometimes
carried around in her purse. We named him Lionel and sometimes remarked on
him, as if he was a person, as to his life and comings and goings. It was
one of our few, very tiny fantasy worlds that we enjoyed. And so Lionel
showed up in our mail, such as her remarking how Lionel was back from New
York and he saw a Broadway show etc. One day, Stacy wrote how poor Lionel
was very upset as he had forgotten the number of his Swiss bank account. I
had countered with something like how this had happened to him before with
his Liechtenstein account. Well, the next thing we know is that Stacy and
I (separately - she was in LA and I was at the Gilman base and we didn't
piece this together for a long time) were interrogated for days about
Lionel and his bank accounts. Each of us tried to say he was only a small
stuffed animal but the capos didn't buy it. Their paranoia told them we
were lying and so we were grilled for days to confess. Stacy, I learned
later, was shattered by the experience only because it was so harmless,
such a tiny little private fantasy world that we could create and -
exactly like Winston and Julia in "1984" - the organization came down on
it with jackboots to shatter it, destroy it, and grind it into the dirt.
Later, the was no apology or even an admission that they were wrong. The
questions merely stopped one day and move on to a new subject. But it has
always stuck with me as an example of how they operate, straight out of
the evil cruelty of "1984."
John Travolta and Chick Corea should hear a few stories like these before
they take to defending this cult.
> The RPF is something Germany and every government should look at
> because the citizens of every country are being assigned to these
> US-based gulags in violation of basic human rights. People assigned
> are not free to leave but are held, guarded, and must sign lists of
> their "crimes" culled from their pc folders before they are routed
This is an important point! In the tradition of the former Soviet Union or
in Communist China or other dictatorships, these "crimes" are often
manufactured or fed to the person to confess to. The person then often
writes them down in their own handwriting so it can be used later - in
"dead agent" packs - as "proof" as to what the person is "really like." It
is not unusual for a staff member to take the "easy route" and say, yes,
okay, I did that and then - and this is the astounding part - make it
their own (TR1, anyone? those of you who know what I am talking about can
give that to the apologists) and embellish on the fabricated crime!
Impossible you say? Hardly. Police investigators are familiar with this
phenomenon, where people suddenly confess to a crime that they didn't do
and even come to believe that they did it. Well, it happens all the time
in Scientology.
How can this happen? Well, first, you come to believe that you had all
these past lives, that you committed crimes in your past lives - which is
why you are in the bad shape you are in now - and it gets REALLY EASY to
do what Scientology calls "dub in" or merely imagine it and then - pure
doublethink - call it "real." You can scoot on down the "time track" into
that past life and find those times when you murdered people and blew up
planets and overthrew governments. (Past life crimes are not included in
DA packs.) So it gets really easy to "confess" and go along with the idea
that you've been so very very bad but now that you are telling all, and
telling them what you want them to know, that you will be "better."
This takes a hyperjump when doing OT3 for it is possible to get into the
"crimes" of the BTs that you imagine are covering your body! (You often
have to find an "incident" that the BT is "stuck in" and it could be
whatever killed him/her or it could be a crime. Whatever. You get to make
your own little movie.) The point is that after years of such mental
doublethink fantasy, it becomes part of one's mental makeup. One's
psychology begins to think with that structure in the same way one thinks
with the grammatical/syntactical structure or the political/social
structure in which one is raised.
The other element is the "control" of the person in charge of one. From
day one, when you walk in, you are controlled, all under the guise that
you are learning to be FREE of control. (More doublethink.) But in the
auditing situation, what you respond to is controlled by the auditor's
questions. (In OT2 and 3 you get to start to do it to yourself, which is
where you really get into doublethink and build the ruts and "circuits"
that will take over. This is what allows a person to be told that Joe saw
them do so-and-so and the person can buy it. They have been trained to
take commands. They have been drilled to take orders. They have spent
possibly thousands of hours having their thinking process reshaped as
certainly as if they had been physically manipulated for years by a yoga
master to assume certain poses. It gets really easy to put that leg behind
your head and it gets really easy to imagine you've got crimes and all you
have to do is "confess" and your needle will float and you will be better
and come to love Big Brother.
> out. Until, among other reforms Scientology must make, the
> organization abolishes its RPFs, freedom of religion in the US is a
> lie. The US has created a freedom for unholy corporations to persecute
> individuals for "religious" reasons. The US has allowed its
> Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to be perverted by
> money-motivated corporate lawyers.
I have been asked - by media, individuals and in deposition - if I
consider Scientology to be a religion. I do not. If others want to believe
in it as a religion, that is their right. I am a firm supporter in what
the Supreme Court laid down: you can believe what you want. You just
cannot DO what you want.
If a person wants to believe that they are covered with Raisinettes (a
chocolate covered raisin candy here in the US), hey, go for it. But you
cannot coerce a person into believing it or defraud them to believe it or
punish them for saying otherwise. You cannot lock up people, beat them,
starve them or degrade them and keep them hidden from their families and
friends and the authorities while their thinking processes are manipulated
to the point that they will come out smiling and - as Gerry puts it so
well later - thanking their abusers, just as Winston comes to do at the
end of "1984." He has been driven over the edge and he comes to love Big
Brother, as a tear steaks his cheek.
Another irony is that Hubbard writes about the phenomenon of someone
thanking their abuser and how degrading it is. But that is one of the
clever tricks that Hubbard always did, he told you about things that you
then come to believe he is not doing. After all, he told you about it,
didn't he? How could you possible be abused to the point that you would
thank your abuser if LRH told you that this was a bad practice! Ha!
Welcome to doublethink.
That is not religion. That is mind-bending coercion. And that is what the
RPF and the RPF's RPF finally comes to represent in its purest form,
despite the arguments or the pleas of the apologists that there is no such
control or manipulation and that it really isn't possible to do that to a
person's mind. As I said before, let THEM spend a few weeks on the RPF's
RPF, under heavy labor, fully degrading, no sleep, no friends, interrupted
by interrogations and let THEM come back and tell me and those who went
through it that it really doesn't exist.
And don't give me a comparison of a monastery or a boot camp. Give me a
comparison of a gulag and we can talk. (I saw a lot of illegal, physical
brutality in the USMC and I saw men break and I saw men die but it is not
in the same category as the RPF/RPF's RPF and I know that Andre Tabayoyan
- another Jungle Bunny (Marine), but one who spent one-third of his 21
Scientology years on the RPF - that he will agree.
snipped
> >
> When Corea and Travolta, Cruise and any other spokesman for
> Scientology promotes this organization they are sending someone to an
> RPF gulag.
>
Bravo, Gerry. This should be the #1 item to be pushed to these Scientology
Celebs. They are protesting the treatment of Scientologists in Germany and
yet they don't have the foggiest idea that Scientologists and former
Scientologists are being brutalized right here in their own US of A.
But this is typical of the RTC/OSA, to divert attention away from what
they are doing and claim that others are doing it TO them. No. People are
being brutalized INSIDE Scientology and the horrifying part is that they
are being convinced it is right, just as those hundreds of people were
convinced to follow Jim Jones in Guyana.
And the koolaid they drank was tax exempt too.
>
> >And also pass it on to those who say there is no form of "cult mind
> >control" that goes on in Scientology. Better yet, let THEM do the RPF's
> >RPF and keep them there until they change THEIR minds "of their own
> >self-determinism" and let's see what they say.
> >
> The RPF, the RPF's RPF and all of their bizarre punishments were
> intended to break the spirit of anyone Hubbard or his cultish capos
> felt needed breaking. People could be assigned for nothing more than a
> needle movement on the organization's "religious artifact."
Gerry is remembering that infamous "List One" era when people were being
shipped to the RPF every day because the were "List One RSers." A "List
One" was a list of items that were read off to the person while the person
was holding the e-meter. If the needle acted in a certain manner (called a
"rock slam") it meant the person had crimes against Hubbard and they were
shipped off to the RPF. It took nothing more. The mere jerk of that sacred
needle was enough for that person to lose their family and their dignity.
I don't know how many people went but it was a purge that Hubbard had
ordered in one of his more demonic states of paranoia. It was like when
Stalin was shooting all of his generals, convinced they were working for
the Nazis.
Those who went to the RPF as a "List One RSers" had no idea what the
"crime" was, only that he/she was one and they had to go spend months or
years digging around their thetans/BTs to find or manufacture enough
crimes to confess to so that they could be deemed "rehabilitated" and
"graduate" from the RPF. (That is how it is done. If one confesses to
enough self-degrading, self-damaging crimes, and you sign them, they are
finally convinced and let you go.) Even then, they were forever marked as
a "former List One RSer" and suspected.
This purge was all done in the name of "religion" as it is done today.
> People
> could be assigned for a "low OCA," the "personality test" with which
> the cult recruits raw meat. People could not get out of the RPF until
> they had become so compliant that they thanked their punishers for the
> punishment, and wrote a success story (to be used against them in the
> future if they ever realized they had been abused and sought redress
> for that abuse).
>
Exactly! In fact, under the definition of "Rehabilitation Project Force"
in their Admin Dictionary (my copy reprinted 1986), the reasons for
assignment to the RPF are: (1) R/Sers (2) low OCA non-producers, (3)
repeated stat crashers, (4) overt product makers.
See that? The top reason is a movement of the needle on the meter. The
second is a test score. Forget 3 and 4. Those are always rigged too. If
they say you have "crashed the stats," then you have crashed the stats.
Etc. For this you get to lose your freedoms and family until you come
around to their way of thinking.
> It is a tribute to the human spirit that such a diabolical enterprise
> is so ineffective. Many people are speaking out against these abuses,
> and they will be stopped.
>
I agree. Until then, those celebrities and apologists who are defending
the practices of this cult and diverting attention to other issues will be
known as accomplices. At least Kathy Lee Gifford had the good sense to
speak out when the abuses in her industry came to the surface. We await
the day when a Scientology celebrity wakes up. The problem they will
generate is that the RTC/OSA won't be so quick to publish their supposed
"crimes" on the Internet. Then again, maybe they will. After all, Hubbard
said to do it.
Robert Vaughn Young
writer@eskimo.com
--
Robert Vaughn Young
writer@eskimo.com