Hubbard advertised and made others advertise that he was “mankind’s greatest friend.” He published and made others publish what they all said was an authentic, heroic, supermanic biography. He promised and made others promise fabulous results for his technology and religion. Should we have believed and trusted him, or any of his agents or spokespersons, at any time? Emphatically no! We should have challenged him and his people, and we should have observed and challenged how they reacted to challenge and handled or treated their challengers. And we should challenge them now, and continue to challenge them.
Even before he announced Scientology to the world, Hubbard lied about his benevolence, his intentions, his history, his research, his abilities, his products, his statistics. You, Mike, were Hubbard and Scientology’s spokesperson for many years, and you knew from incontrovertible evidence no later than 1984 that Hubbard and his spokespersons were lying about these things. That is when these facts were litigated in your first lawsuit against me, and Hubbard was judicially declared a pathological liar. It is reported that you became a director of CSI in 1982, so you actually had access to this evidence, and were legally responsible for actions against me and other SP targets, from that date. Since then, you have been willfully lying in service of this man you knew to be a pathological liar, and you have never owned up to it. You happily victimized the people Hubbard or his pathologically lying successor David Miscavige wanted victimized.
Hubbard’s credibility, his claims about himself, his truthfulness, his history, his qualifications, and his claims for his technology are fundamental to why people were suckered into his cult, why they got fleeced, and why they remained there, abused and enslaved. You are significantly responsible for keeping the lying, fleecing, abuse and slavery working. You have treated or handled well-founded challenges and bona fide challengers just as Hubbard did, and Miscavige does, and Rathbun does – as the cowardly do. “Double curve,” “attack the attacker,” “black PR,” “fair game,” “silence or destroy,” and even “ignore tech” are all cowardly reactions to warranted challenge.
The ignore tech you, Rathbun, Miscavige, et al. practice in response to legitimate challenges does not show, as you would have people believe, that you are “above it all,” that you are morally superior to your challengers, and we are inconsequential “naysayers,” who aren’t worth you ignorers’ time, and only deserve ignoring. The Scientologists and their collaborators’ ignore tech is contemptuous and cowardly. It is proof of cowardice. You should be challenged, again and again. So should Leah Remini and A&E executives, who must have known you still serve the Scientologists’ malign purposes toward your victims, yet reward you richly, provide you cover for your criminality, and promote you as courageous when you know you’re being cowardly.
Years ago I recognized cowardice as the Scientologists’ Why for their continuing aggressive, antisocial actions toward their victims. For example:
[Jeffrey Augustine:] Why can’t Gerry make peace with the Indies?
[me] Because their terms are destructive. The Scientologists have to make peace with their victims.
The question is, why don’t the Scientologists make peace with their victims? LF
Cowardice. LFBD F/N This is really Scientology’s VFP.1
As I noted, cowardice is one of the Scientologists’ essential valuable final products, if not their most essential VFP, that they produce and enforce in their members and collaborators’ characters. Wikipedia says:
Moral character or character is an evaluation of an individual’s stable moral qualities. The concept of character can imply a variety of attributes including the existence or lack of virtues such as empathy, courage, fortitude, honesty, and loyalty, or of good behaviors or habits. Moral character primarily refers to the assemblage of qualities that distinguish one individual from another—although on a cultural level, the set of moral behaviors to which a social group adheres can be said to unite and define it culturally as distinct from others.2
For phonetic and syntactic parallelism, when listing the Scientologists’ eight character VFPs I’ve identified, I use “pusillanimity,” which is just a fancy synonym for common cowardice. This is from a 2015 response of mine to a letter to the Los Angeles Times from attorney and one of your coconspirators Monique Yingling:
In Scientology, crass merchandising, hard sell, deceit, fraud, hate, incarcerations, slavery, the destruction of human rights and persons, financial ruination, using the law to harass, black propaganda, and many other antisocial or criminal activities are religious exercise, or sacraments. The Scientologists lure good wogs into their cult with the wonderful promises of White Luciferianism, and then handle and hold them with Hubbard’s Black Luciferian “tech,” and do their damnedest to turn them into tough, dedicated, glaring Black Luciferians. While telling people their objective is to get everyone to “think for yourself,” the Scientologists compel cult personalities that must think as the cult head commands. Thinking for oneself or “other-intentionedness” is restrained and punished. While insisting that they are engendering virtuous or moral characters and behaviors in their members, the Scientologists actually instill the “valuable final products,” as they call them, of vanity, dishonesty, hypocrisy, perfidy, envy, pugnacity, malignity and pusillanimity.3
In his 2015 book Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt, which I highly recommend, writer, Presbyterian minister and activist Chris Hedges distinguishes between physical courage and moral courage.
To rebel requires that elusive virtue that Snowden exemplifies and that Melville’s Starbuck lacks — moral courage. I have been to war. I have seen physical courage. But this kind of courage is not moral courage. Very few of even the bravest warriors have moral courage. The person with moral courage defies the crowd, stands up as a solitary individual, shuns the intoxicating embrace of comradeship, and is disobedient to authority, even at the risk of his or her life, for a higher principle. And with moral courage comes persecution.
The US Army pilot Hugh Thompson had moral courage. He landed his helicopter between a platoon of US soldiers and ten terrified Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre in 1968. He ordered his gunner to fire his M60 machine gun on the advancing US soldiers if they began to shoot the villagers. And for this act of moral courage, Thompson was hounded and reviled. Moral courage always looks like this. It is always defined by the state as treason— the Army attempted to cover up the massacre and threatened to court-martial Thompson. Moral courage is the courage to act and to speak the truth. Thompson had it. Daniel Ellsberg had it. Martin Luther King Jr. had it. What those in authority once said about them, they say today about Snowden. 4
The Scientology conspirators permit and even demand physical courage from Scientologists in many situations – hard labor, sleep deprivation, life-risking assignments, beatings, imprisonment, impoverishment, disaster site appearances, punishable criminality, etc. The conspirators, however, prohibit and suppress moral courage in Scientology in virtually every situation, and punish it as a high crime. Because I once defied Hubbard and his crowd, stood up as an individual, disobeyed his authority, and told the truth, he had his coconspiring juniors — you, Rathbun, Miscavige, et al. — persecute me, and you have been persecuting me ever since.
Notes
- http://gerryarmstrong.ca/j-swift-on-tony-ortegas-blog-lying-for-indies-whoever-they-are/ ↩
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_character ↩
- http://gerryarmstrong.ca/on-monique-yingling-alex-gibney-scientology-and-the-irs-deal/ ↩
- Chris Hedges, Wages of Rebellion (Toronto, ON: Vintage Canada, 2016), 59. ↩