Part 26 (1/2)
* In a 1983 interview with Penthouse magazine, Hubbard's eldest son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., maintained that he was the result of a failed abortion, according to his father. ”Nibs”-who would later change her son's name to ”Ronald DeWolf” in an attempt to distance him from his father-also recalled that when he was six years old, he'd watched his father try to perform an abortion on his mother, using a coat hanger. ”There was blood all over the place ... A little while later a doctor came and took her off to the hospital. She didn't talk about it for quite a number of years. Neither did my father.” Nibs later retracted these and many other denigrating statements he'd made about Hubbard Senior.
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* Sara Hubbard had, in fact, written to the head of the Elizabeth Foundation, stating that she felt her husband was a paranoid schizophrenic and urging him to help get Hubbard psychiatric care.
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* In 1971, Alexis, now a twenty-one-year-old college student, went looking for her father. In response, Hubbard sent two church officials to visit her, with a letter a.s.serting that he was not her real father. According to Hubbard, Sara had been his secretary in Savannah, Georgia, in 1948, and in 1949, ”dest.i.tute and pregnant,” had come to find him when he was living in Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing a movie. As Sara later testified in Armstrong v. The Church of Scientol-ogy in 1984, Hubbard also told her daughter that Sara had been a n.a.z.i spy and that the couple had never been legally married. As Jon Atack would later point out, the wording of the letter was crucial: ”Hubbard did not deny his marriage to Sara, simply its legality. He was technically correct; the marriage, being bigamous, was illegal, but that was hardly the fault of either Alexis or Sara.”
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* Contrary to Hubbard's claims, the E-meter was not a new invention. It was technically a variation of a Wheatstone Bridge, which is an electronic meter that measures resistance to various electrical flows. Constructed to measure the tiny electrical fluctuations under the surface of the skin, ”psychogalvanometers,” as they were called, were used as far back as the nineteenth century, and Carl Jung, for one, enthusiastically embraced the devices as a therapy tool.
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* In 1956, the Founding Church of Scientology, in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., was granted tax-exempt status by the IRS; soon many other Scientology churches would be granted similar exemptions. In 1959, the Was.h.i.+ngton church's tax exemption was revoked (though several other Scientology organizations would remain tax-exempt). Upon review, the U.S. Court of Claims found that Hubbard was profiting from Scientology beyond what would have been considered standard remuneration.
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* Even more controversial was Hubbard's a.s.sertion that low-toned individuals should be exiled from society. ”The sudden and abrupt deletion of all individuals occupying the lower bands of the tone scale from the social order would result in an almost instant rise in the cultural tone and would interrupt the dwindling spiral into which any society may have entered,” Hubbard wrote. ”It is not necessary to produce a world of clears in order to have a reasonable and worthwhile social order; it is only necessary to delete those individuals who range from 2.0 down, either by processing them enough to get their tone level above the 2.0 line”-a task that might take as few as fifty hours or more than two hundred, according to Hubbard-”or simply quarantining them from the society.”
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* h.o.m.os.e.xuality was decreed one such ”perversion.”
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* Hubbard had by then begun to downplay his degree from Sequoia University on his resume.
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* Burroughs would later denounce Scientology's organizational policies and Hubbard's ”overtly fascist utterances” as suppressive of freedom of thought, though he maintained that some of Scientology's techniques were valid.
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In the late 1980s, Scientology produced a ca.s.sette tape t.i.tled ”Can We Ever Be Friends?” to help members repair relations.h.i.+ps with their families and ”help you gain wide acceptance of Scientology in your area,” as one promotion read. The forty-five-minute ca.s.sette presented Scientology as a tolerant, mainstream religion, not in any way a cult, as some families believed it was.
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* The term, an acronym for Worthy Oriental Gentleman, is a holdover from British imperialism, once used to describe people of African or Asian descent.
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* The twelve conditions, ranging from highest to lowest, are Power, Power Change, Affluence, Normal, Emergency, Danger, Non-Existence, Liability, Doubt, Enemy, Treason, and Confusion.
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* According to a number of followers, Hubbard had become convinced during an auditing session that he was the reincarnation of Cecil Rhodes, the flamboyant adventurer and founder of the African country of Rhodesia. Acting on this belief, Hubbard had journeyed to southern Africa, hoping to ”safe point,” or establish, a safe haven in what is now Zimbabwe, to build a Scientology community. Some believed he planned to turn the realm of Cecil Rhodes into a country of Scientologists. ”The entire objective,” recalled one former follower, Hana Eltringham Whitfield, who would become a close aide to Hubbard, ”was to find a place that Hubbard could eventually turn into his own kingdom, with his own government, his own pa.s.sports, his own monetary system, in other words his own princ.i.p.ality, of which he would be the benign dictator.”
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* Rolph also noted that in response, Scientologists filed an injunction against the NAMH, insisting they be reinstated, and Gaiman personally sent letters to members of the organization, and its chairman, urging them to adopt a policy of psychiatric reform. After many months of legal wrangling, the decision to eject the Scientologists from members.h.i.+p in the organization was upheld by a British high court. Gaiman went on to serve as public relations director for the Church of Scientology in Great Britain.
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* A pseudonym.
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* On land, some organizations continued the policy in a distinct way: forcing a staff member to stand against a wall while other Scientologists threw buckets of water at him or her.
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The Diana and the Athena were now anch.o.r.ed off the coasts of southern California and Denmark, respectively, in close proximity to the Scientology Advanced Organizations in Los Angeles and Copenhagen. In addition, there were four other s.h.i.+ps, including a small yacht called the Neptune, which one Sea Org recruitment brochure described as being part of the ”Pacific flotilla.”
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