"Anonymous" Takes Scientology Protest to the Streets

This past Sunday members of the group "Anonymous" that has been running an attack on the church of Scientology took their battle from the tubes of the internet to the pavement of real life, staging a protest outside the central Phoenix Church of Scientology. "The protesters said they gathered Sunday in lieu of the birthday of Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist once cared for by church staffers. Her 1995 death sparked media attention and a civil wrongful death suit against a branch of the Church of Scientology. A wrongful death suit by her family was a public-relations nightmare for the church for years until it was settled in 2004. The Church of Scientology declined to comment on the Phoenix protests. It did provide a news release calling members of Anonymous cyber-terrorists."

Comments

I never really thought of myself as a victim.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your linked-to video voiceless surprised me. I didn't expect to cry.

Years and years ago, I was heavily involved with the Co$. I bought it hook, line, and sinker. I thought I had the ultimate answer to everything and I was willing to fight for that with my life.

I endured grueling 12+ hour workdays and virtually no pay for a chance to save the world. I practiced how to lie effectively (they call them TRs) and due to my "get it done" attitude, shortly had an office in the International Administration Headquarters in Hollywood, the Flag Command Bureau, as a member of the Sea Org. I had a nice office with a window seat overlooking downtown Hollywood, and I wore a uniform that looked sharp and military, with epaulets on my shoulder!

It's hard to explain just how intoxicating it is to think you have the 100% right answer to all the world's problems. And, as a die-hard Scientologist, that's exactly what you think you have. You can create a beautiful world free of drug abuse, crime, insanity, and war. You just have to apply the tech.

You are on the side of freedom, of knowledge, of truth, of unlimited personal power. And anybody who gets in your way needs to be shut up and rendered powerless by any means necessary. It's that simple!

But, something just wasn't quite right. No matter how hard I tried, I could never quite do enough, or do it right enough. I had trouble getting the books and tapes to fully make sense to me. When I disagreed with what I read, I was sent to endless word clearing where we looked up every single word in the dictionary, one by one to try to find the "MU" or "Mis-Understood [word]". I had trouble getting up on time in the morning. I got sick from time to time, which is proof that I was "PTS" and needed ethics handling. I went through endless "ethics conditions" despite my very, very best intentions. They were very careful to keep me convinced that the problem was me.

It's hard to explain how frustrating it was, to be surrounded by people who are apparently "getting it" and not being able to be one of them, despite having a tested genius IQ, and being able to read just about anything *ELSE* just one time and get it immediately. I thought there was something wrong with ME. I often cried before going to sleep at night.

They had the tech, but who could explain me? When I got to work, I got lots and lots done. I was routinely commended for job well done, for quality work, for "stellar levels of production". It seemed that, when I worked, everything I touched turned to gold. Yet I couldn't make the most amazing technology in the world just make sense to me. I could read a book on mathematics, or aeronautics, or software, and turn right around and do it without any problem. (which is their test for comprehension: can you read it, and APPLY the result immediately?) But I couldn't do the same with Scientology. Something was wrong with me.

So began my fall from greatness. Slowly, surely, over months and years, I lost all my former glory. My job title drifted from the international scale on down through the organization until I finally ended up at the very, very, very bottom.

The RPF.

AKA the Rehabilitation Project Force. It's like prison for Scientologists. You are a bad, bad, dude, or something is very, very wrong with you.

You have exactly 7 hours to sleep in a crowded, slummy, cockroach infested triple-bunk in the basement. You wear black jump suits with colored arm bands. You eat only left overs. You get 1/4 the pay of normal staff. You perform grueling, hard, disgusting work from the time you get up until "personal enhancement time", where you have 2.5 hours of time to read Scientology books and tapes until bed time. You are not permitted to talk to staff "in good standing", though they are free to bark orders at you. You are not permitted to walk. (No kidding!) You must run everywhere you go, and if you are ever caught walking you are made to do push-ups or worse. You must be c

Re:I never really thought of myself as a victim.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting how this happens outside CoS too. People "get it" and can't believe that others don't. Or People don't get it and can't understand why they do not. In either case, there is tremendous pressure to "get it" (or "shun it") just to fit in. Politics for instance. It's almost like self-imposed peer-pressure.

I don't believe it's possible to convey what I was trying to say here to you. But Scientology gives you a serious mindfuck: According to them, the "tech" is perfect. This is something that you *know* can be used to make *everybody* better. It's taught as 100% workable "tech". And the only time it doesn't work is when there's something wrong with you - you are evil and don't want to admit it. You have some hidden, scary, evil desire to do terrible things.

But what happens when you dig, and dig, and dig for the evil, when you do everything in your power to purge out the wicked sins (called 'overts and withholds") and it *still* doesn't work? What if it's something you have agreed to donate, not just your life, but your LIVES for the next billion years? What if you are ready to die in defense of this without hesitation?

The degree of utter defeat and personal humiliation is all but impossible to imagine. Blowing an easy college class compares like a Christmas tree light against the sun. It's a serious mindfuck that you would really appreciate only after it was way, way, way too late.

At the first, Scientology appears to be amazingly insightful, self-evident, and workable. Simple things like practicing communication make you a more effective communicator. All carefully arranged so that you get past that "does it work" stage with little doubt, so that you can slowly accept the gradual march toward insanity. It's easy to dismiss from the comfort of your armchair, and say "that'll never happen to me". But many people have paid very high prices in the meantime to fight for your right to do this.

Legions of others have ached to share their stories, to grapple with their pain. Fear of retaliation is universal among these stories. Ex staff remember the lengths they would have gone to as staff to defend their cult. They realize just how evil, how insane, how unforgiving staff members are. Want to see some of this for yourself?

The Internet is an amazing thing. Its power to unite people around the world is simply stunning. People around the world are gathering behind the flag of anonymous. Hope is breathing where only fear and despair ruled.

Living proof: I whisper once again, one of the silent, alone, and voiceless for over 10 years...

Re:A guarantee

[slyn]

How do you guarentee it's accurate.

It's a religion; therefore, I guarantee it isn't accurate.

Until you can answer the question of what was there before the big bang, and what was there before that, and what was there before that, ad infinitum, that is a debatable statement.

Regardless, Anon is not against the religion of scientiology, but rather the church of scientology (see here). To quote that website:

The CoS is harmful to society, and to its own members. Its institutional purpose is, as stated by its founder, its own prevalence and expansion, mainly in an economic way. It considers the religion, the belief, the faith to be not an end, as it should, but a means, a mere tool. Indeed, it is degrading towards its own religious base and all those who believe in it.

This humiliating manipulation alone is enough to consider it insulting at best, malign at worst. But its crimes do not stop there.It has attacked freedom of expression routinely; it has attacked freedom of religion by going against those who follow the faith but not the institution; it has attacked freedom of movement, of association, of thought.

Furthermore, it has attacked the right to life, the right to the pursuit of happiness, and all other fundamental human rights.

As an outsider looking in (as of now, I may attend the Ides of March protest), I think its an extremely interesting phenomenon. Watching news reports about anon or reading online news articles about the protests from the press gives me the sense that no one who is reporting on this (outside of practially Anon itself (ie wikinews)) has any idea of what is really going on. The fact that a bunch of (essentially) computer nerds from global internet websites such as 4chan, digg, ebaums, something awful, and probably many other sources have essentially banded together for a common cause through a decentralized network of group leadership and manages to make the news through their protest amazes me. The fact that they are able to do so while wearing V for Vendetta masks, Hello Kitty shirts, Gas masks, and looking generally nerdy all while still pulling fairly ridiculous numbers makes me swell up inside with nerd pride (hey that rhymed).

Re:what

[Deanalator]

I got a surprisingly large amount of that on Sunday. Many people came up to me and said that they agreed with what we were doing, but it was too bad we were all dressed up like terrorists. One woman even likened us to the Taliban.

From what I understood, the whole point of rule 17 (the mask rule) was that we were not representing ourselves, we were representing a cause. Of course, after what happened to people like Paulette Cooper, and Dave Touretzky (a computer science professor at CMU), many people were afraid of retaliation from the church, but I think for most people (using my friends as a random sampling) it was a show of solidarity.

I think the most tragic thing about this is that it sounds like terrorists have now ruined the once noble image of the ninja mask. Maybe next time we can all get big smiley emoticon style masks.

I also find it interesting that the official CoS statement called us "terrorists". Where I was at, it was very civil. Towards the beginning, some jackass tried to grab a video camera from an Anonymous (too many thetans), but after that CoS members were very nice. Many of them taking our fliers and engaging in friendly conversation.

We were there to deliver information that has been suppressed by the church, to the church members, and to the general population. Attempting to "terrorize" anyone is counterproductive to freedom of information. Fear causes people to react without logic. If the church of scientology actually came to terms with their sketchy past, and confronted these problems instead of waging information warfare to deny their history, I would not have needed to go down there yesterday.