Channel 4 News - Anonymous news from around the world

After an embarrassing string of high-profile defection and leaked videos, Scientology is under attack from a faceless cabal of online activists. Has America’s most controversial religion finally met its match?
Clearwater is prepared for its enemies. It’s a warm, if overcast, Saturday in February, but all the storefronts lining the sidewalks of this sleepy town on […]

I was skimming through High Winds when I came across an article winningly headlined ‘Handling Suppression on the Fourth Dynamic’ (by then I had learnt that the ‘fourth dynamic’ meant the whole of mankind). In a tone of unforgiving militancy, it talked of ‘eradicating SPs’, and crowed about how they had ’shut down’ one particular defector who had criticised the movement. ‘Unemployed and abandoned by his family, this squirrel had schemed to make money by hawking his lies in a book. But the Office of Special Affairs had a court declare his book libellous. He has now been forced into bankruptcy…’

They repeated the Scientologist dogma that mental ailments - conditions that doctors now know to have a biological basis as surely as cancer and influenza - are a sort of imaginary miasma summoned into existence by negative thoughts and the evil residue from your past lives - i.e., if you’re bipolar, it’s your fault. We were particularly scandalized that one of the emissaries was a professional educator in her day-to-day life, yet seemed entirely beholden to Scientological conspiracy theories about psychiatric medication. Amazingly, these folks seemed genuinely amazed that the media was more interested in Tom Cruise’s loony comments about Brooke Shields’ postpartum depression than the fact that the Church had recently dispatched aid workers to Indonesia.

The same people who had tried to obtain my exdirectory phone number, handed out pamphlets attacking me, and dispatched an American private detective - an ex-Los Angeles police officer - to Britain to frighten and smear the source who had helped me expose their activities.

Almost daily threatening letters arrived by fax and post at the newspaper where I used to work. Messages were left on the answer machine at the home of the managing director.

Strangers turned up in his village asking questions about him.

And the culprits behind this campaign of intimidation? Step forward the Church of Scientology.

Scientology is mounting an offensive on Europe’s capitals and major cities. “National offices” already exist in Madrid, London and Brussels, and the opening of new branches was discussed at an “expansion summit” last year. “If we are to implement our planetary campaigns for salvation, then we have to reach the top levels of the German government in Berlin,” a Scientology document states, adding that the Berlin headquarters is responsible for “building the necessary in-roads to the German parliament, in order to ensure that our solutions are genuinely introduced to the whole of German society.”