In light of Bob's recent experience, I thought it might be useful to repost this:

In the early '60's the civil rights activists in the US started the Freedom Rides on buses. They would ride into southern towns and challenge the segregation laws and rules, such as seperate restrooms for whites and blacks. A black Freedom Rider would use the white restroom, and a white Freedom Rider would use the black restroom, etc.

This became violent. In some spots, white mobs would be waiting to attack the Freedom Riders. In one case, some whites stopped a bus outside of town. The Freedom Riders locked themselves in the bus, but then somebody threw a fire bomb into the bus. As the Freedom Riders got off, they were beaten.

CORE, the organization that began the Freedom Rides, decided to halt the Freedom Rides at least temporarily, but SNCC wanted them to continue. Diane Nash of SNCC called Jim Farmer of CORE and delicately asked if they could take up where CORE had stopped, that is, continuing the rides farther into the deep south. Now here's a quote from the book "The Children" by David Halberstam, page 283 - "'It's the most dangerous thing I've ever seen,' he told her; 'the other side, the Klan, they're well organized, and they're working in partnership with the local cops and state troopers.' But she persisted and he understood why they were coming in. 'Well, you guys have good instincts and you're well trained, so go ahead,' he had said."

Now, imagine this; these mostly college students were going to ride a bus into communities where the Ku Klux Klan had great power, and were in cahoots with the local police and authorities. There had already been previous beatings and even attempted murders of previous riders.

Their intelligence told them that there would be more such incidents.

They were pledged to nonviolence, so they had no protection with them.

The federal government was no help and in fact had tried to prevent the Freedom Rides. And STILL THEY WENT!!!!!

Now, imagine this; a group of people want to go to Clearwater to picket Scientology. There have been lawsuits, dead agenting, harassment of the picketers in the past. The Clearwater police in the past had made sure that there was a peaceful event. The picketers had worked hard to make sure everything was well organized and would be peaceful. There had been no acts of violence from either side in the past 3 pickets. And STILL SOME STAYED HOME!!

Well, I guess it just depends on how worthy a person thinks the cause is. I'll be afraid to go picket in Clearwater when the police are on the side of Scientology and leave when it's time for church members to beat up on picketers. I'll be afraid when the mayor of Clearwater announces that the picketers are just outside agitators and the city cannot guarantee their protection. I'll be afraid when someone heading to Clearwater was attacked and beaten. I'll be afraid when the media refuses to cover the event.

I'm not saying that Scientology's Harassment Tech is not painful. I'm just saying, there is very little reason to be afraid of coming to Clearwater December 5 to protest Scientology's policies and actions that hurt people. And there is no reason to abandon nonviolence as our philosophy.

Imagine, for example, if the Freedom Riders had gone with guns and vowed to protect themselves at the slightest provocation. What do you think the result of such a ride would have been? As it was, the Freedom Riders succeeded, using nonviolence. They ABSORBED violence, they did not USE violence. And like many other cases in history, nonviolence worked for long-term results.

I've just finished reading "The Children" by David Halberstam. There are striking parallels between our struggle with the Church of Scientology and the civil rights activists' struggles, especially in how Scientology has reacted to our efforts. [note: page numbers are from the above mentioned book] For hundreds of years in the U.S. south the social order was unwavering and deeply engraved on the minds of all. Blacks were second class citizens. They were kept seperate from whites in most situations, they could not vote, and the political and judicial systems were basically stacked against them. The civil rights movement began, not to take over the South, but simply to gain equality for blacks. The method was simple - they would use nonviolent direct action to challenge the status quo.

The first such action was to go into whites only lunch counters, sit down, and order a meal. If no one would take their order, they stayed there, quietly waiting for a chance to order. The restaurant workers and owners were beside themselves over what to do, so they would often close the establishment. [p.104-5] Well, surprise! In Clearwater in December 1997 and in Los Angeles in March 1998 the Church of Scientology closed down its properties that were targeted for picketing! We just went there to peacefully voice our opinions, and they got so confused over what to do that they simply ran away.

Segregationists tried the usual methods of intimidation on the civil rights activists. They attacked their families, [p.165] as Scientology has done to Grady Ward, Bob Minton, myself, and many others.

The segregationists used what Scientology calls "dead agenting" to silence critics. [p.188] This is simply the attempt to smear the reputation of the critic. The Church not only uses this, they've coined a phrase for it.

The segregationists would shadow and photograph the activists, as the Scientologists do to us today. [p.22, 574] The segregationists would accuse activists of being outside agitators who didn't understand that everything locally was actually fine and dandy. [p.114, 121] At all three pickets in Clearwater so far, the Church has accused us of being outside agitators there simply to upset the status quo. This is bunk. Several times when I have picketed here in Phoenix, the local Scientology representative would tell the media that it was silly for us to picket in Phoenix because our complaint was actually with Church leadership, not the locals.

So, then we take that advice and go to Church headquarters to protest, and when we get there the Scientology representative tells the media we are outside agitators. The lesson? According to Scientology, there is NO PLACE that is the right place for us to protest.

Segregationists decided that if they could silence the leader of the activists, the movement would collapse [p.197] But little did they know that the civil rights movement was run by concensus, not by hierarchy. They went after Jim Lawson, the man who prepared and nurtured the activists before they did any action. But "Though Jim Lawson was their teacher and he was to be the keynote speaker at the meeting, they in no way deferred to him." [p.216] The activists talked ideas out and came to mutual agreements as to what to do. And that is how we operate. Scientology has thought that if they could just take out Larry Wollersheim or Dennis Erlich or Bob Minton or whomever they think at the moment is head of the ARSCC, we would all shrink back to our pitiful wog lives.

Just as the segregationists thought the old tried and true ways to handle the "niggers" would work on the civil rights activists, so Scientologists thought the Hubbard Tech of "attack the attacker" would work to silence us critics.

The civil rights activists wanted to march through Selma Alabama on March 17, 1965. They peacefully walked over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and could see on the other side Major John Cloud's Alabama state troopers and Sheriff Jim Clark's deputies, some of them on horseback.

Everybody did what was expected of them - the troopers pummeled the marchers, and the marchers absorbed the blows. The Good Ol' Boys no doubt went home all proud of themselves for protecting the Way of the South. But of course, in actuality, their actions greatly sped up the time when segregation collapsed. The activists had used the predictability of the segregationists' mentality against them. The television tapes of these vicious attacks are still hard to watch without getting ill. But all of America did see them. The Good Ol' Boys were stars in a play not of their making.

Scientologists dutifully come out to harass and intimidate us critics using the tried and true Hubbard Tech. But I think they are beginning to see now that things are not as they once were. We EXPECT to be harassed and in fact we WANT it at times, to show the world the true face of Scientology. This is the essence of Operation Footbullet - they use Hubbard's rabid attack methods on us, and we expose this to the world. The result is that Scientology is known for their rabid attacks more than anything else.

The segregationists seriously mis-read the activists they came up against. They just saw them as "uppity niggers" that could be handled by simply ratcheting up the old methods. But things were changing.

Here's one of my favorite paragraphs from the book:

In 1995, on the thirteenth anniversary of the Battle of Selma [the confrontation at the bridge], the Reverend James Luther Bevel returned to that city along with Jamese, his sixteen-year-old daughter, to be a part of the ceremonies commemorating both the past and the future.

There he had received a surprisingly warm welcome from one of his old adversaries, Joseph Smitherman, who was still the mayor, and who told Jamese, "All of us were more afraid of your father than we were of any of the others. Your father's a small man physically, but when he would ride that bike by himself in the morning, with that hard look on his face, it scared us, not only because we had no idea what he was up to on those rides, but because we knew he didn't fear us. I mean, he was not supposed to be riding around by himself - Selma was dangerous for black people in those days, but he didn't seem to know it. We were more scared of him than of Dr. King." [p.684] So, the segregationists, in charge of the police, the courts, the political machine, and the social order for hundreds of years, were afraid of one black guy on a bicycle. Why? Because he didn't fear them.

Here's another bitter pill the segregationists had to swallow because the blacks began to lose their fear;

On a subsequent occasion, Lewis brought his people to the courthouse, only to find their way blocked by Clark [Sheriff Jim Clark of the bridge fame]. The sheriff ordered them to go back, but Lewis stood up to him. The courthouse, Lewis said, was a public place and they had a right to go inside. "We will not be turned around," he said.

"Did you hear what I said?" Clark asked. "Turn around and go back." He seemed closer to an explosion than ever, some people thought, after Lewis' defiance.

"Did you hear what I said?" Lewis answered. We are NOT going back."

And he stood his ground. Finally Clark, in some irritation, backed down and told them to go on in. Watching the scene, James Chestnut was amazed: the mighty Jim Clark BACKING DOWN in front of this young boy?

He had been sure that Clark was going to beat John Lewis on that day, and yet he had backed down. Chestnut had thought to himself, he later wrote, that it was a moment when his eyes had opened. "To hell with [Judge] Hare... I have spied your nakedness. All my life I believed that white people could and would draw the lines whenever and wherever it wanted." Now for the first time he was not so sure. A revolution was taking place in the minds of the local people. [p. 497] Ex-Scientologists and Scientology critics today have lost their fear.

Scientology is seen as the King in the fairy tale, strutting around in his finery, until a little boy shouted "the King is naked!"

Scientology is naked.

************** Now I've shown Scientology many of the inside secrets of the ARSCC.

They can see now how Operation Footbullet works, how we are "organized", how to deal with us at protests. But I have no fear of exposing our secrets. Why not? Because they are stuck in a dilemma. On the one hand, they MUST follow Hubbard's teachings to harass, intimidate, and attack critics. But on the other hand, they know that when they DO follow Hubbard, it creates all sorts of bad publicity and detrimental consequences. So, if they don't follow Hubbard, it will be better for them, but then they won't be Scientologists, will they? So, they will predictably follow Hubbard Tech, and we will just as predictably oblige by showing the world just what the Church of Scientology is all about.

I leave you with one more quote from the book:

The members of the central committee met every day and remained on red alert. Their confidence had grown steadily. They had a mounting sense that they were on the winning track and they could laugh about some of the confrontations now, about the befuddled white woman who had panicked when they had staged the sit-in at Harveys on Big Saturday and had rushed from the restaurant to the ladies' room, opened the door, and found two black Fisk co-eds there, and had started screaming, more in dismay than anger, "Oh my God, they're everywhere!

They're everywhere!" [p. 211] Jeff Jacobsen August 27, 1998 for the ARSCC * * * * http://www.primenet.com/~cultxpt/cos.htm

The March 8 1997 picket of the church of Scientology in Clearwater Florida was in the planning stages four months before the event. As one of the organizers, my goal was to have a peaceful picket of the church at their most sacred site and let them respond. At most pickets I've done the person or organization being picketed basically ignored us. We had our voice of complaint and went home, and that was that.

But from reading Hubbard Tech, it was pretty certain that this is not how the church would react. So we did all we could to make sure we had a peaceful event, planning for any possible reaction and keeping the local police and media informed of our plans. This was, in a way, to be a contest between Gandhi Tech and Hubbard Tech [please note that this is my opinion of the event and not necessarily that of the other picketers].

Sure enough, on the night before the picket, a Clearwater policemen came to our sign making session and told us what the church had suggested for the day. They would be washing their hotel building on one side of the sidewalk where we might be picketing, and they would be having a kid's event on the empty lot along the sidewalk on the other side of the street where we had been all along planning to picket. They had not informed the police of these events until one day previous. On top of that, if we did picket where we planned and did not instead go to their suggested picketing site for us that would have taken us around non-Scientology businesses, they would come out with 500 counter protesters. Obviously, the goal was to shut us down before we even started. Hubbard Tech was swinging into action. By the end of the evening, we had agreed not to change our plans.

When we arrived to picket, we were indeed faced with hoses and cleaners in front of the hotel and an "Anti-Drug Awareness Day" event on the other side of the street. I arrived a few minutes after the picket started and had a hard time finding any of us 30 picketers! We had thinned out along the sidewalks on both sides of the street and most of us were surrounded by Scientology counter protesters. The method the church members used against us was to surround us, badger and harass us with inane statements [like one guy said to me "do you take videos of naked kids?"], get in our way, and try to hide our signs from view with their signs. From 11am to 3pm we absorbed this abuse. Their signs accused some of us of being porno kings, deadbeat dads, or child molesters. By listening to the church radio frequencies we could hear that this was a highly organized event on the church's side. They were ordering people around to picketers whose signs could still be seen so that counter picketers could hide our signs.

At the candlelight vigil for Lisa McPherson that night, we came with only candles, we didn't even bring any signs. This time the church's tactic was to fill the sidewalk with probably 300 people so that we would have to wade through this sea of antagonists for the whole time that our candles burned down. As we slowly tried to wind our way through this tight tangle of people, we were again cajoled, made fun of, bumped, blocked, and often had our candles blown out. We, on the other hand, were mostly silent and continued walking back and forth through the crowd until our candles had dwindled to little stubs. We then left and a great cheer came up from the crowd of Scientologists.

Now we can ask, which worked better on March 8, Hubbard Tech or Gandhi Tech? First, what did Hubbard Tech accomplish? It did not stop us from doing anything that we planned on doing. It did prevent passersby from seeing our signs. It also showed to the world how cruel and unethical Scientologists can be. They seemed to view us as some lower form of life instead of as fellow human beings. Their iron-fisted approach did not work this day, in my opinion, except to hide our signs.

What did Gandhi Tech accomplish? Exactly what Gandhi taught it would.

It exposed to the world (with the help of the media) just how evil Scientology can be, how intolerant they are of free speech, how willing they are to attack, and how uncivilized their moral code is.

Their facade of being a persecuted nice religion was shattered. We succeeded this day.

Gandhi Tech worked in India, Czechoslovakia, the Philippines, and in the US with the civil rights movement. I believe it can be successfully used to stop the Church of Scientology's evil policies and actions that hurt people. Again, I don't follow Gandhi's theories completely, but this protest demonstrated to me that his basic ideas do indeed work.

* * * * http://www.primenet.com/~cultxpt/cos.htm

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