Gerry Armstrong made some excellent points in response to my post about the RPF's RPF. It is information that should go to John Travolta and Chick Corea and others who want to promote this cult or defend it.

I want to comment on a few of Gerry's points, deleting (unfortunately) some other text to shorten this down. (Also I am unable to attach it as a real reply and part of this thread. My apologies.)

Re: Hubbard's Gulags: RPF's RPF (RVY)

On Thu, 25 Sep 1997, Gerry Armstrong wrote:

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I have seen people picked up bodily by four big men and taken to the RPF kicking, struggling and screaming in protest. That is not "voluntary" as Scientology's spokespeople claim. I have seen many people held and guarded. All mail out of the RPF was read by the MAA, and any mail in could be. Telephone calls to family were by permission and were monitored.

There was one instance that would have been funny, had it not been so evil and brutal. I had given Stacy a small stuffed lion that she sometimes carried around in her purse. We named him Lionel and sometimes remarked on him, as if he was a person, as to his life and comings and goings. It was one of our few, very tiny fantasy worlds that we enjoyed. And so Lionel showed up in our mail, such as her remarking how Lionel was back from New York and he saw a Broadway show etc. One day, Stacy wrote how poor Lionel was very upset as he had forgotten the number of his Swiss bank account. I had countered with something like how this had happened to him before with his Liechtenstein account. Well, the next thing we know is that Stacy and I (separately - she was in LA and I was at the Gilman base and we didn't piece this together for a long time) were interrogated for days about Lionel and his bank accounts. Each of us tried to say he was only a small stuffed animal but the capos didn't buy it. Their paranoia told them we were lying and so we were grilled for days to confess. Stacy, I learned later, was shattered by the experience only because it was so harmless, such a tiny little private fantasy world that we could create and - exactly like Winston and Julia in "1984" - the organization came down on it with jackboots to shatter it, destroy it, and grind it into the dirt. Later, the was no apology or even an admission that they were wrong. The questions merely stopped one day and move on to a new subject. But it has always stuck with me as an example of how they operate, straight out of the evil cruelty of "1984."

John Travolta and Chick Corea should hear a few stories like these before they take to defending this cult.

The RPF is something Germany and every government should look at because the citizens of every country are being assigned to these US-based gulags in violation of basic human rights. People assigned are not free to leave but are held, guarded, and must sign lists of their "crimes" culled from their pc folders before they are routed

How can this happen? Well, first, you come to believe that you had all these past lives, that you committed crimes in your past lives - which is why you are in the bad shape you are in now - and it gets REALLY EASY to do what Scientology calls "dub in" or merely imagine it and then - pure doublethink - call it "real." You can scoot on down the "time track" into that past life and find those times when you murdered people and blew up planets and overthrew governments. (Past life crimes are not included in DA packs.) So it gets really easy to "confess" and go along with the idea that you've been so very very bad but now that you are telling all, and telling them what you want them to know, that you will be "better."

This takes a hyperjump when doing OT3 for it is possible to get into the "crimes" of the BTs that you imagine are covering your body! (You often have to find an "incident" that the BT is "stuck in" and it could be whatever killed him/her or it could be a crime. Whatever. You get to make your own little movie.) The point is that after years of such mental doublethink fantasy, it becomes part of one's mental makeup. One's psychology begins to think with that structure in the same way one thinks with the grammatical/syntactical structure or the political/social structure in which one is raised.

The other element is the "control" of the person in charge of one. From day one, when you walk in, you are controlled, all under the guise that you are learning to be FREE of control. (More doublethink.) But in the auditing situation, what you respond to is controlled by the auditor's questions. (In OT2 and 3 you get to start to do it to yourself, which is where you really get into doublethink and build the ruts and "circuits" that will take over. This is what allows a person to be told that Joe saw them do so-and-so and the person can buy it. They have been trained to take commands. They have been drilled to take orders. They have spent possibly thousands of hours having their thinking process reshaped as certainly as if they had been physically manipulated for years by a yoga master to assume certain poses. It gets really easy to put that leg behind your head and it gets really easy to imagine you've got crimes and all you have to do is "confess" and your needle will float and you will be better and come to love Big Brother.

out. Until, among other reforms Scientology must make, the organization abolishes its RPFs, freedom of religion in the US is a lie. The US has created a freedom for unholy corporations to persecute individuals for "religious" reasons. The US has allowed its Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to be perverted by money-motivated corporate lawyers.

If a person wants to believe that they are covered with Raisinettes (a chocolate covered raisin candy here in the US), hey, go for it. But you cannot coerce a person into believing it or defraud them to believe it or punish them for saying otherwise. You cannot lock up people, beat them, starve them or degrade them and keep them hidden from their families and friends and the authorities while their thinking processes are manipulated to the point that they will come out smiling and - as Gerry puts it so well later - thanking their abusers, just as Winston comes to do at the end of "1984." He has been driven over the edge and he comes to love Big Brother, as a tear steaks his cheek.

Another irony is that Hubbard writes about the phenomenon of someone thanking their abuser and how degrading it is. But that is one of the clever tricks that Hubbard always did, he told you about things that you then come to believe he is not doing. After all, he told you about it, didn't he? How could you possible be abused to the point that you would thank your abuser if LRH told you that this was a bad practice! Ha! Welcome to doublethink.

That is not religion. That is mind-bending coercion. And that is what the RPF and the RPF's RPF finally comes to represent in its purest form, despite the arguments or the pleas of the apologists that there is no such control or manipulation and that it really isn't possible to do that to a person's mind. As I said before, let THEM spend a few weeks on the RPF's RPF, under heavy labor, fully degrading, no sleep, no friends, interrupted by interrogations and let THEM come back and tell me and those who went through it that it really doesn't exist.

And don't give me a comparison of a monastery or a boot camp. Give me a comparison of a gulag and we can talk. (I saw a lot of illegal, physical brutality in the USMC and I saw men break and I saw men die but it is not in the same category as the RPF/RPF's RPF and I know that Andre Tabayoyan - another Jungle Bunny (Marine), but one who spent one-third of his 21 Scientology years on the RPF - that he will agree.

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When Corea and Travolta, Cruise and any other spokesman for Scientology promotes this organization they are sending someone to an RPF gulag.

But this is typical of the RTC/OSA, to divert attention away from what they are doing and claim that others are doing it TO them. No. People are being brutalized INSIDE Scientology and the horrifying part is that they are being convinced it is right, just as those hundreds of people were convinced to follow Jim Jones in Guyana.

And the koolaid they drank was tax exempt too.

And also pass it on to those who say there is no form of "cult mind control" that goes on in Scientology. Better yet, let THEM do the RPF's RPF and keep them there until they change THEIR minds "of their own self-determinism" and let's see what they say.

The RPF, the RPF's RPF and all of their bizarre punishments were intended to break the spirit of anyone Hubbard or his cultish capos felt needed breaking. People could be assigned for nothing more than a needle movement on the organization's "religious artifact."

Those who went to the RPF as a "List One RSers" had no idea what the "crime" was, only that he/she was one and they had to go spend months or years digging around their thetans/BTs to find or manufacture enough crimes to confess to so that they could be deemed "rehabilitated" and "graduate" from the RPF. (That is how it is done. If one confesses to enough self-degrading, self-damaging crimes, and you sign them, they are finally convinced and let you go.) Even then, they were forever marked as a "former List One RSer" and suspected.

This purge was all done in the name of "religion" as it is done today.

People could be assigned for a "low OCA," the "personality test" with which the cult recruits raw meat. People could not get out of the RPF until they had become so compliant that they thanked their punishers for the punishment, and wrote a success story (to be used against them in the future if they ever realized they had been abused and sought redress for that abuse).

See that? The top reason is a movement of the needle on the meter. The second is a test score. Forget 3 and 4. Those are always rigged too. If they say you have "crashed the stats," then you have crashed the stats. Etc. For this you get to lose your freedoms and family until you come around to their way of thinking.

It is a tribute to the human spirit that such a diabolical enterprise is so ineffective. Many people are speaking out against these abuses, and they will be stopped.

Robert Vaughn Young
writer@eskimo.com