Subject: This is a response to Gridsit who accused Asian Tribune for fermenting religious intolerance by publishing an expose titled, Scientology: Cult of Greed in Divine Garb

http://www.asiantribune.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=50

By Sesha Samarajiwa

You obviously represent the latest in a long line of powerful pests from the West who have come and keep coming like locusts to colonize our souls. I am thinking not only about you Scientologists; I have in mind all your American competitors, be they the Mormons who hunt in pairs, Jehovah's Witnesses, Baptists, AnaBaptists, Church of This and the Church of That, well-heeled evangelists of a mind-boggling array of corny creeds and cults, all of whom, in typical American style, are engaged in aggressive marketing and PR campaigns to boost their ranks and their coffers with suckers from the East. Of course, you command the money, the power and the technologies to back your campaigns, your fishing missions.

This, however, is merely a continuation of the 500-year-old sorry saga of Asia, Africa and South America, which began with the arrival of Portuguese and Spaniards, then the world powers. Some have never recovered from the machinations of their priests and the savagery of their conquistadores. The baton of imperialism has passed from the Europeans – the Dutch, the French, the Belgians and the English – to you Americans, the new Romans on the rampage.

The old tricks, which you have mastered, still work. Priests from the West come to the East. They tell the natives that good things will happen now and in the afterlife if only they accept their blond, blue-eyed god as their savior. Otherwise, the prospects would be dreadful. "Now, close your eyes, and let us pray," says the priest. "Let us pray that the god of your conquerors will save your miserable, heathen souls. Let him carry your burdens, give you comfort and, when you die, you can enjoy eternity sitting on his lap. Every Sunday, let the blood of the lamb wash your sins away, so that you can live to sin another day. If you don't, you'll be roasting in hell forever." The carrot and the stick never fail. So we shut our eyes tight, clutch our bibles or tracts containing words of wisdom from Prophet L Ron Hubbard, Prophet Smith (founder of the Latter Day Saints also known as the Mormons) or whoever, and we pray. When we open our eyes, we have the bibles or other glad tidings, while the canny comforters and their kind have our land and our pennies, which can multiply into a tidy sum for the 'spiritual' cartel. For five centuries, your kind not only colonized our lands and bled us dry but, to add insult to injury, they also colonized some of our souls. Yet some of us, our heroes and our martyrs, resisted.

Many weaker cultures succumbed to the multi-pronged onslaught from the West. Those who resisted were either slaughtered wholesale or the seeds of abjection and eventual self-destruction were sown among them. We know well how your own ancestors won the West. They won it through mass genocide of the native population. Your Buffalo Bills, your Wild Bills, your Custers and the long line of your despicable killers and priests made sure that the sorry remainder of once-proud nations would remain so, while you rule the roost in a land soaked with native blood. Even today, you see the pathetic dregs of once-noble nations staggering around native reservations and barrios in North and South America, in Australia, in New Zealand. They have lost their spirit. They have lost their will to live. They are ashamed to be alive. They are self-destructing. At best, they are performing monkeys titillating whites with a thirst for the exotic. They are abject peoples, vanishing tribes.

Not satisfied with ruling your large chunk of raided real estate, you and your kind are hell-bent on extending your hegemony to the whole world. Even a little island nation in the Indian Ocean does not escape your radar, a radar scanning new territories for economic, cultural and spiritual colonization.

You accuse the Asian Tribune of publishing unsubstantiated assertions. But it is very easy to substantiate the nefarious activities of you and your ilk. All one has to do is to enter phrases such as 'Scientology Critique of' or 'Scientology investigation' or Scientology malpractice' or 'Christian missionaries, adverse effects on native cultures' into a good search engine. But in the interests of space and given the format of this message, I do not intend to cite the massive number of academic studies which prove beyond doubt the devastation that has been wreaked on various peoples and cultures by the agents of Western imperialism – an arrogant and ruthless enterprise fuelled by religion, money and armed might, the unholy trinity if neoimperialism.

Human misery is happy hunting grounds for you and your kind. It has always been so. You strike when your targets are at their weakest (or you take action, like bombing them to submission to make sure they are at their weakest) when they are susceptible to inducements (deals) and brainwashing. You have many tried and tested weapons in your arsenal. You are canny. To 'convert' people, you must first make them despise and reject what has sustained them and their ancestors for millennia. So you vilify their faith or convince them it is a spent force. You make them spit on their heritage. Then you dazzle them with your power and glory: rare is the native who can resist such marvelous baubles. Make sure your bait is juicy. Pile on the questionable comforts of the new religion you are peddling, and reel them in, easy as you please. Add another zombie to your roster. Check!

Know this you self-righteous Scientologist and your whole mob. Asian civilizations (including the Sinhala civilization, which is your latest target, although at a low point now) were established on and sustained by the finest and wisest spiritual and moral foundation this planet has ever known. Although you and your kind from the West have tried for five centuries to colonize our souls, make us ape you and adopt your delusions, many of us have resisted, while some of us, of course, succumbed under pressure, be it in the form of inducements or in the form of effective brainwashing.

When the three founding pillars of a nation – a common faith, a common tongue and a common culture, all inextricably linked – are undermined, neither a nation nor a civilization can survive long. Those who engage in such willful, relentless destabilization are engaged in emotional violence, psychological warfare. They traumatize and balkanize nations, set son against father, husband against wife, neighbor against neighbor, fermenting crisis and conflict, which eventually leads to disintegration. They are then soft targets for takeover.

All manner of Western religious organizations are, in every sense, Trojan horses. We welcome them to our lands and accept their gifts at grave risk. For once they are in, once they gain a foothold, they will annihilate our unity and integrity, which is tantamount to annihilating our culture. Then we are one step closer to extinction.

We believe that it is worth preserving the unique, beautiful and, yes, great civilization that flourished on this island called Lanka. We believe it is worth fighting for, as did our ancestors who fought for it against tremendous odds. For that, we must be vigilant. For that, we must be courageous. For that, we shall not allow your kind to colonize our souls. For that, we must resist bribes and brainwashing.

We know we are struggling against an enemy immensely more powerful than we are. But we must resist at all costs. In this do-or-die struggle to preserve our way of life and our spirit, we can take courage from the lessons of history. Where is the mighty Roman empire whose sphere of control extended from remote Britain to the Middle East? Where is the British Empire where the sun once never set? Gone, all gone, as the American empire is bound to go.

You may use Korean agents in Sri Lanka, Mr Scientologist. But we know who their controllers are: you, megalomaniac Americans.

Be gone, ye wolves in sheep's clothing!

_________________

Sesha Samarajiwa

ProAsian

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