PRIVATE EYE MAGAZINE
No. 677 Friday 27 Nov 87 - Price 50p

CULT CORNER

In desperation at their failure to drag enough marks in for "personality testing", brain washing and demonetarisaration, Scientologists have reactivated their front organisations to get money and recruits from the general public.

The most amusing report comes from a hospital which was sent a folder from the "Concerned Businessman's Association", advert ising the "way to happiness campaign". The pack includes a record with words and music of unsurpassed banality by L. Ron Hubbard and a book of trite aphorisms by the same fraud. One of the ways to beat Crime, it appears, is to brush your teeth or chew gum after every meal. The joker in this pack is a letter suggesting that the record should be played on the hospital radio, and that "you could also use the booklet by reading out sections as a cheerful way to start the day for your patients". Verse two goes: "But what are the things called morals? / We're told we must not sin / And warned we must not trespass / But seldom once wherein."

At first sight this seems to be a plot by Edwina Currie to drive NHS patients out of hospitals. But the person who has signed it is a certain Duncan Maclean, "Director of Public Affairs" of the Scientology front. The secretary is solicitor Lensworth D. Small and the chairman Sir James Hort, whose wife is a trustee of the Scientologists' private school, Greenfields, near East Grinstead.

Sir James, proving that hereditary posses- sion of a two-century old title does not necessarily confer wisdom, was also one of the co-signatories of a full-page, paid-for obituary for El Ron in the Daily Telegraph when he went to join Xenu in the great Con Job in the sky.

Businessmen are invited to buy bulk copies of the booklet for distribution. Many will doubtless be unaware that the little, 'copyright [.. Ron Hubbard" tag means that El Ron's heirs will be tapping the funds for royalties, and that anyone who writes to them is likely to get an offer of a Dianetics course shortly afterwards.

However, businessmen have every reason to be concerned. Another Scientologist front organisation, "Narconon", is also after their money. Many firms have had letters soliciting donations to this "charity", whose listed secretary, Sheila Gaiman, is the head of the Scientologists' "Social Co-ordination Bureau".

The fund-raising Secretary, Rulene Henderson, of 19 Stanwell Drive, Middleton Cheney, Oxon, is asking for donations towards the £18,400 budget to stop drug addiction [NarConon] . This utterly ineffectual programme consists of a "megavitamin" and purification course through saunas. It is of course entirely co-incidental that Gaiman and her husband own G&G hoods, suppliers of just such vitamins, and that he has recently set up a company "Clean Living Body Care" which lists saunas as one of its activities.

The charity will have to pay copyright on Hubbard's works, and will be used to recruit gullible young people in schools, for example, into Scientology, playing upon its "respectable" front. Kids should be warned. It costs as much to get hooked on Hubbard as on heroin.

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