We got wind of it a while ago: the scienos rented a conference room in the American hotel, fairly posh, very central, for a one-week exhibition. The same one that has been travelling around the UK. So we organised the appropriate reception. Got demo permits for the entire week, produced fliers in the very last minute, got our act together and were fully armed and ready for the grand opening Friday afternoon. Anticlimax. No grand opening. We got it all wrong, the exhibition was starting Monday. However, we were already there and suppressives had come from all over the country (OK, OK, from the Hague), so there was no reason to call it off. In four hours or so, six of us handed out about 700 fliers to the afternoon shoppers, tourists, saunterers and early evening out-goers. Small fliers, short and to the point slogans. The anticlimax turned into a party and a very successful demo. We also got our facts straight: the scienos will be at the hotel from Monday 21 to Thursday 24 and inside the central station from Friday 25 to Sunday 27. Alright, got some more preparation work to do Monday. And we cancelled the demos for the weekend 19-20. Monday morning was dedicated to bureaucracy, but at one in the afternoon we met outside the hotel to celebrate the real opening of the exhibition. The scienos knew we had been there on Friday, yet appeared to be taken by surprise when we arrived today. They made some attempts at handling us (surrounding, questioning, insulting, distracting), but personally I was not at all in the mood for that. I called the police, who arrived half an hour later and told them off. In the meanwhile, a couple of tone-40 "FUCK THE HELL OUT OF MY FACE!" at about 120 db proved to be most efficient, since they can't very well have scenes like this in front of their posh exhibition, with press invited and all. Even the hotel manager came out and told them off. Pretty soon we moved away from the hotel entrance, which is on a side- street, to the main street where all the pedestrian traffic is. Leafletting went swell - some 500 within two hours; we run out and I had to go make another 800. In the meanwhile the scienos got their counter-picketters ready and came out to apply their usual tactics again: surrounding us, barring us from view, standing in front of us. A couple of them were really hysterical; among them a member of the Jive Aces, a real asshole. The scienos played a couple of good hands too. They came out with balloons and carnations (or was it roses?) and started distributing them to passers-by. That won them momentary sympathy, which often only lasted until they proceeded to offer an invitation card for their exhibition. Handing out our fliers to the people that got the invitations with the words "the other side of the story" was no problem at all. Sometime around four it started raining heavily and we took refuge at a nearby café. More than an hour later we went back to enturbulate a bit more. At about the same time the Jive Aces took to playing at the nearby square, which is completely crowded with tourists. The people formed a wide ring around them - an audience of say 100 - and were given flowers, balloons and invitations. Somehow this made it extremely easy for us to walk inside that circle and serve each and every member of that audience with one of our own fliers, while the scienos could hardly disturb their show by trying to handle us inside the circle in full view of everybody. The Jive Disasters broke up and left. Everybody back in front of the hotel, until they tried again and the same story was repeated. The last time, after the music stopped, just when the applauses subdued and everybody was still in place and attentive, I got that one moment of general silence in which I could shout "All they want is your money!" Judging by faces it was Very Efficient[TM]. At seven we went again for a beer. By the time we had drunk them (no, no grammatical error; plural is an inherent characteristic of any one beer on a nice evening :) we decided we could just as well call it a day. And so we did.
The demos will continue through the week. If you live in the area and feel like participating, you are most welcome; mail me for times and places. If not, more reports will be posted at irregular intervalls. Most of our fliers can be found at http://www.xs4all.nl/~oracle/fliers/ . Yes, they are all in English; the tourist/native ratio in central Amsterdam on a warm summer day is similar to that in Venice. You get two or four fliers out of every A4 sheet. Please help keep the environment clean (from the CoS) by recycling them outside your local org :) Z
-- oracle@everywhere: The ephemeral source of the eternal truth...
From: mgormez@chello.nl (Michael 'Mike' Gormez -- www.b-org.demon.nl/scn/deaths)
Subject: Re: Scieno exhibition in Amsterdam
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 20:16:40 GMT
Organization: Scientology is a Dying Industry: don't let them kill your child.
Message-ID: <39a42860.4167517@news.a2000.nl>
Yesterday 23 Aug we continued our picket of the 'What is Scientology' exhibit in the American hotel. About 5 picketers attended off and on and again hundreds of leaflets left our hands. The scieno's had stopped to be aggressively in our face and were "interested to hear your story" this time. Personally I've a very short fuse for dissemination drill games so I passed them on to another picketer who very patiently explained them about body thetans and what not. Besides the first day I'd spent lots of time talking with a 22-years-in scieno and even when his fellow culties were insulting me in his companion, he could not object. Waist of time. Btw, this one I hadn't heard earlier. Two critics were discussing the excesses of the GO and a former christian turned scieno said that Christ ultimately had given up and was crucified. Ie. that would not happen with Scn. Oh, and only two times I was told to "get a life, man." So far no one of the Hubbard-clan has been so braindead to start asking what our crimes are. Sure, what kinda work we do seems to be of major importance to them, but that's about it. Actually I am disappointed in that, I need a good laugh now and then.
Today went extremely well too. A nice cult woman traded with me, a rose with exhibit invitation for a copy of OT3 :8) Perhaps someone will post more about today and # of flyers/picketers. I lost count and hardly can keep my eyes open and need a cold shower. Mike (getting a nice sun tan too) -- John Jansen van Galen in Het Parool van 17 januarie 1997: "Dat scientologen nare luitjes zijn, weet ik al heel lang." www.b-org.demon.nl - www.xenu.net - www.scientology-lies.com From: Zenon Panoussis <oracle@xs4all.nl>
Subject: Amsterdamned exhibition
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 18:01:32 +0200
Message-ID: <39A6985C.70C839A3@xs4all.nl>

Picket report for Wednesday 23 and Thursday 24 August: If there is one lesson we all learned by this picket, it is that you can have a tremendous inpact with very small means, as long as your logistics are well-oiled and you plan and prepare ahead of time. On Wednesday the scienos were completely changed: they did not surround us, they did not harass us, they hardly tried to handle us. The contrast to the previous days was so tremendous that it got me thinking "hey, we are indeed slowly educating this cult to behave decently". I return we interfered much less and far more politely with their body routing; instead of shouting "all they want is your money" to the victims, we would just hand them a flyer, or most often only approach them after the scienos had left them. During the day our patrolling entheta agents reported that the Jive Assholes were playing at de Dam, the main square in front of the palace, a stonecast away from the org and a kilometre away from the exhibition. Evidently they found playing close to our demo counter-productive. We decided to stick to the exhibition and not split our forces to cover de Dam. Several part-time picketeers joined us for shorter or longer periods, giving the demo more "body" than the usual 4-5-man show. We had to make two flyer reprints during the day and had a terribly successful demo all in all. By Thursday some of those unoiled logistics of ours were finally sorted out. We arrived at the hotel at 14.00 to meet a technician from the electricity company who gave us power from a connection box in the street; as it turned out, it was impossible to hire a generator anywhere due to the ongoing Sail 2000 show ( http://www.sail2000.nl/english/index.htm ). I made a couple of runs with the car and got our OCA table in place, computer and all. That is, a computerized OCA you could do outside the cult, as a demonstration of how they sucker you. We also placed one huge A0 poster (85x120 cm) with the text "Scientology is a fraud. See here how they trick you" on each corner in front of the hotel, so that it was impossible to get to the exhibition without seeing them (see http://www.xs4all.nl/~oracle/demo/corner.html ). The "see here" in the text was intentionally ambiguous: it could refer equally well to our OCA table as to the scienos' own exhibition. The scienos were notably furious. The posters definitely resolved all the confusions on who is who, and it became even easier for us to hand out our flyers without being mistaken for scienos. The hotel was completely surrounded by entheta and the exhibition was under seige. As a result, the scienos moved all their body routing away from the hotel, to the nearby square and elsewhere. On the other hand, the OCA table was mainly a failure. It did work very well as an eye-catcher, but hardly anybody bothered to take the test. Considering that the posters costed us USD 30 for the both while the electricity + table permit costed a total of USD 250, I'd say that small means are the most efficient. Soon we had a couple of accidents. One of the posters was tied to a pole, the other was just leaned against one. Silly on my part: within 15 minutes the scienos had stolen it, leaving one flank partly uncovered. OK, in return we can now call them thieves to their face. A while later a drunken bum leaned on the OCA table, upset it, and sent the monitor rolling on the pavement. Our fault too: we should have been guarding that table more closely. Luckily the monitor was still working afterwards, despite the rattling of lose parts inside and a couple of barely noticeable darker spots on the screen. Next time better table. Nothing of this disrupted anything anyway. And then the police arrived. As it turned out, they had had a constant stream of complaints from "annoyed citizens" all week about our "agressive leafletting" and our "harassing of passers-by". They had also received complaints from the CoS officials about our "offending flyers" and our "disruption of their peaceful exhibition". It took the police very short time to figure the real situation and the real source of the complaints. They dismissed the "agressive leafletting" as bullshit, the "offending flyers" as freedom of speech and the "disruption of a peaceful exhibition" as a propely carried out demonstration with proper permits and all. This done, we begun to wonder about the leafletting of the scienos: did *they* have a permit for it? Highly unlikely, we thought, since the city never gives permits for the same place and the same time to two opposing groups. "Right", said the police to the OSA, "can we see your permits now?" And this is how history repeated itself yet once again, operation foot-bullet succeeded and the scienos were ordered to stop leafletting at once, leave the area in front of their own exhibition and not get close to us any more. Knowing that the scienos were bound to disrespect these orders, I made a deal with the police: we would tolerate the scienos' illegal leafletting and not burden the police with it as long as the scienos did not interfere with our demo in any way; in case of harassment or other interference, we would call the police, the police would respond at once and they would use the illegal leafletting as an undisputably valid ground to chase the scienos away. Subsequently I informed the scienos about this deal and told them were the limit was: no surrounding, no handling, no distracting, no standing in front of our posters, no snatching of our flyers, no agressive tactics of any kind. End result: the scienos were allowed to leaflet and body route due to our tolerance and undue respect for their freedom of speech. I have reasons to believe that this is considered humiliating in scieno circles. We carried on until 21.30 and then went for a drink on the terrace of that same hotel. This last day of the exhibition at the American hotel was definitely our most successful one, with more than 2.000 flyers handed out and a really great response from the public. All in all during the five days at the American hotel we handed out more than 3.000 copies of OT3 and a lost count of other flyers, probably a total of about 8.000-10.000. And it became terribly apparent that scientology is fighting a lost battle, at least here in Holland. As Karin remarked, only the Aum Shinrikyo seem to have a reputation that is worse than scientology's. The evening ended with yet another reminder that my "hey, we are indeed slowly educating this cult to behave decently" is terribly premature. Perhaps in twenty years it will be true, but for the time being they are still their old ugly selves. This supreme human, this enlightened and free spirit of an OT came up to Karin to tell her "just wait; there's an arrest warrant out in Sweden for your lover and as for you, your sado-masochistic practices will soon be out all over the world". Eyes full of uncontained hatred, mind full of the lowest vindictiveness: that's an OT for you in his full Hubbardian glory. Needless to say, there is no arrest warrant for me and as for Karin, be it that she has her kinky sides, she is not into S&M and she couldn't care less about "being exposed" anyway. "Oh?", she told him, "I really hope the pictures are flattering". Z From: Dave Bird <dave@xemu.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Amsterdamned exhibition --- Picket planning
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 22:38:50 +0100
Message-ID: <f5rFbPCqdup5EwV5@xemu.demon.co.uk>
In article<39A6985C.70C839A3@xs4all.nl>, Zenon Panoussis >foot-bullet succeeded and the scienos were ordered to stop leafletting
>at once, leave the area in front of their own exhibition and not get
>close to us any more.
A word about the situation in England. For a picket of four or more people you have to give the police a few days notice in writing, who and how many and what for and so forth, and you can do pretty much what you like [short of blocking the way or causing a violent disturbance]. There is no such thing as "permission to leaflet" or shit like that, it is only because our protesting in front of another organisation's building is a POTENTIAL source of disturbance that they want to know about it. A Sergeant on the planning section writes down sets of notes which go to the patrols, and to the radio room. In among stuff like "several crews of pickpockets in the High St" is "note that there are six to eight people picketing the Scientology shop on X street from 12:00 to 16:00 today."
Now, first time through, the clams make a false complaint and we just smile and let it happen. We talk to the patrol which come down to site and say, no, our leaflets aren't obscene, here is a sample of each. The clams have what they want. They have photographs which show "the picketers were questioned by police"; and they forget to add "because we lied to the police to get them on site".. But we have what we want, too. You see, one of us always phones up that police Sergeant to make sure the letter arrives. We talk things over, and we explain how the clams make false complaints -- which he has seen for himself now -- and it all goes down on the notes, "expect complaints from the scientologists which turn out to be unfounded, interview any complainant on site then go to see Mr X or Mr Y (descriptions)". All sitting there in the control room.
You see... as always with clams they think, "be outrageous with someone who doesn't know you and you'll get away with it." We think "never shit on anybody who doesn't deserve it, because there's always a next time you meet them again."

From: mgormez@chello.nl (Michael 'Mike' Gormez -- www.b-org.demon.nl/scn/deaths)
Subject: Re: Amsterdamned exhibition
Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2000 22:27:35 GMT
Organization: Scientology is a Dying Industry: don't let them kill your child.
Message-ID: <39abf13b.15845951@news.a2000.nl>
In article <jdbdqskr5h8qo5fjrqm4siqfoknjff549n@news.xs4all.nl>, Anton Hein <ahein.news@xs4all.nl> wrote: >>(see http://www.xs4all.nl/~oracle/demo/corner.html ). The "see here"
> Not there...
Now it is. Btw, during our last picket day I had a chat with a mid-60s OT5 lady. We had met a day earlier too. Nice but not too bright. Proud to be OT5 and all. First she was talking aloud to a 50ties-OSA-dude with the clear intent that I should hear what a poor guy I was and how she felt sorry for me. (As an aside, that kind of game was never played by the critics. It's just that, silly games.) Asked by me if I should make myself available for adoption so as to get it better, the OT ignored that but she came over to me and was full of all the good Scn did and agreed with me that they like to pride themselves how ethical they think they are. This of course gave me a fine opportunity to let the woman gently know that albeit the two parties were happily busy with handing out leaflets, only we had a permit and they hadn't. In fact the scienos were breaking the law on that same moment before our eyes. Lol! She flatly refused to believe me. "No no, scientology would have taken care of it!" Well obviously not, and finally after some pressing she told me she'd ask later. Another thing that got the scienos higly enturbulated is when discussing their redefined ethics. I had a great time telling them what the purpose of "ethics" is in Scn as can be read in the sickening Hubbard book "Introduction to Scientology Ethics" Namely: THE PURPOSE OF ETHICS All that Ethics is for - the totality of the reason for its existence and operation - is simply that additional tool necessary to make it possible to apply the technology of Scientology. ===== They vehemently disagreed with me. "You haven't read it correctly. That is not what it says" and other assorted nonsense. Back to my lady-OT5 again. Got two more anecdotes which are too good to let go without mentioning. We went on talking on about the goals of Scn. "A world without crime.." etc. We both agreed that noting is wrong with that. But again I had to cram the lady on the redefinition of words in the cult, which have become completely incompatible as used by the outside world. "You know that publicly criticizing Scn is a high-crime, don't you?" She nodded. I continued: "So in a Scn world no more criticism allowed." This time I looked hopefully at her, at least that must give a mid-60s person who was here during WW2, something to think about. So I hoped. Sadly it did not. Woman looked at me and answered in totally honesty that there is nothing the criticize scientology for. I told the woman her point was moot because whether there was something to criticize or not, it was a crime in a Scn dominated world. Forbidden. Not allowed. Period. The OT5 said in an last attempt that nothing about Scn was negative. Shook my head in disbelieve and walked away to get busy again. A few minutes later still puzzled by her answers I wanted to know her opinion on another "ethical" Scn point. Hubbard's racism. We had flyers with <http://www.xs4all.nl/~oracle/fliers/> some LRH quotes (well received by the colored passers-by btw) and I wanted to show her one of a Professional Auditors Bulletin (PAB #119) which has this: "The South African native is probably the one impossible person to train in the entire world -- he is probably impossible by any human standard." The OT5 refused to look at my leaflet. So I asked her why. Thinking what the reason could be, the PAB is not a confidential piece as far as I know. She anwered, being an OT5 and allowed to read it. "Why don't you?" was my question. "I don't want to read negative things" was her answer. Mike -- John Jansen van Galen in Het Parool van 17 januarie 1997: "Dat scientologen nare luitjes zijn, weet ik al heel lang." www.b-org.demon.nl - www.xenu.net - www.scientology-lies.com

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