One of the things that fascinates me the most about Scientology management is the cult of personality they've built up around my new Psychic Friend, Ronnie.

I've recently been re-reading, as I said before, both Miller and Atack's books, comparing Scientology's Cult of Ron with other cults of personality I know on more or less an intimate basis.

The cult around Josip Broz (aka "Tito") was intentional. During World War 2, most people in Yugoslavia had no idea who he was.

So when they got a break from fighting in the civil war, his subordinates would emphasize his role. The poet Novak wrote poems about his daring. He was always mentioned, as he was in Novak, together with his mentor, Stalin.

Tito's cult was very conscious. During the war he rode on a white horse. Fables were spun around his pet dog who, during a ferocious battle, threw itself in the way of shrapnel to protect his owner. They were reported in the Communist press as fact of his almost divine, superhuman grace. He was selected by the Gods. This was not quite in line with atheist ideology but the hacks in agit-prop consoled themselves that they were trying to win over god-fearing peasant masses.

Like Hubbard, Tito's birthday became a "day for others", in his case a Day of Youth.

Stalin on the other hand had very little role in formenting his own personality cult. Lenin's cult had lain the groundwork, and Koba stepped into that role. During the Purges, lackeys in the provinces like Beria were never ordered to make Stalin more prominent. Beria, who was more responsible than anyone for the Stalin Cult, did the heavy lifting on his own initiative.

Beria commissioned the work which lied about Stalin's revolutionary background. Koba had nothing to fear about history; he was a prominent Bolshevik in good standing. Beria turned him into *THE* Bolshevik. Witnesses who could contradict the New History were shot before they could raise their voices in protest.

In return for this service, Beria was allowed to build up his own, albeit smaller, personality cult in his home region of Georgia.

Hubbard too managed to expel those who assisted in the early days of Scientology. With his associates declared to be "Covertly Hostile" or worse, he could then claim that he was Source, the One and True Authority who had almost never accepted outside input, and when he did it was almost always destructive. Who could contradict him? Who *would* contradict him?

The language used to denounce Ron's ex-associates such as David Mayo, and the situations themselves have undeniable echoes in the persecution of Trotsky, Zinoviev and of a thousand others who made their "evil intentions" known only after they had infiltrated the Communist Party for many years.

Hubbard never had the power to wipe out entire nationalities or deport away those who were "below 1.1" on the tone scale.

The very idea that some people are inherently "defective" like this, even friends, is inherently Stalinistic. That thousands of otherwise able-minded individuals can either ignore or even agree with this sort of garbage amazes me. But it shouldn't:

of the millions who passed through Stalin's gulag, a good many remained loyal Communists. The Kremlin was hit with appeals from them for their beloved leader, begging him to clear up the mistakes which had resulted in their entire families being arrested, tortured, and used as slave labor to bolster Stalin's epic blunders and keep the Soviet Union anywhere near America's production levels (the Gulag was for punishment and detention, but de facto it wound up as an enormous slave labor camp).

At the center of it is the cult of personality, the belief in infallibility of Source, be it Stalin or Hubbard. The facts are out there but Scientology continues to pretend that neither Miller nor Atack have cast a single shade of doubt on this epic fraud, compulsive liar and charlatan. It's perhaps a little naive to think that one day, when the Truth was revealed, that Scientologists would have the scales removed from their eyes and wake up.

But there's no question that the Church management fears this, probably out of purportion to historical precedents. After Stalin's death, of course, his crimes were revealed. But not only by Khrushchev. The first to break the silence on Stalin's crimes was his chief executioner, Beria himself. He denounced the so-called "Doctor's Plot", which Stalin in his last demented days believed was an actual conspiracy to poison him by several Jewish doctors. The man who had done so much to further the Cult of Stalin declared that less than 10% of the estimated 1.5 million slaves in the Gulag were actually politically serious risks, and declared an immediate amnesty.

This was part of a power struggle inside the Kremlin, which Beria lost to Khrushchev, who later explained Stalin's crimes in significantly more detail at the 20th sitting of the Central Committee. But Beria broke the silence first, and the Soviet Union did not even falter.

So it was with Wallace D. Muhammed, son of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammed, who renounced his father's racist beliefs and his fanciful story of being "the last prophet", closed his organization down and lead a new one. The NOI was involved in drug running, assassination, and a host of other crimes. They were also miniscule, probably not even as "large" as the Church of Scientology. Today, Muhammed's mainstream organization which teaches nothing of his father's contorted beliefs and engages in none of their dirty business to silence dissidents has a membership 100x what the NOI had at their peak.

May I say that the NOI comparison to Scientology is probably the most appropriate. Stalin, for his obvious heinous crimes, *was* actually a tough guy. Tito too had been through some experiences. There was a kernel of truth to build on there.

By emphasizing "Ron the Writer" when 95% of people with a taste for literature will decide for themselves that the guy was a forgettable hack, the Church has a lot more work cut out for themselves. The mythical achievements of "Ron the Explorer", "Ron the War Hero" and "Ron the Humanitarian" require constant buttressing through the courts, constant struggles to get the word to the uninitiated before they pick up a book or check out a website about what Ron was really doing during World War 2 or in the Far East.

Emir

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