The ultimate influence on society’s outlook is its news media. Celebrity gossip, the trivial and bizarre, self-serving agendas, the depraved obsession with violence and salaciousness eclipse events and issues that really matter.
There are outposts in the media where truth is still valued, where solving society’s fundamental dilemmas is the work at hand. That’s what Freedom magazine aspires to do.
In this issue, we explain our ante in the game of human survival. Three magnificent new Scientology Churches—in Harlem, USA; Budapest, Hungary; and Sydney, Australia—are celebrated. Beautiful buildings, true. But that’s not their purpose. These are command posts for combatting the scourge of drugs, for raising the banner of human rights, for bringing the hope of literacy and spiritual uplifting.
Yet to build a healthy society, it’s necessary to expose existing corruption. There are criminals and predators in society—not just the cartels and gangsters, but people in tailored suits and white lab coats. Freedom takes on horrors committed by psychiatry in the name of help—using electricity to destroy minds, a practice that many consider was consigned to history. We expose an effort to permit this dangerous and damaging practice without any scientific support or regulatory control. We also lay bare the continuing mistreatment of thousands of our most vulnerable citizens, children in the foster care system, who are routinely drugged as a means of control.
To build a healthy society, it’s necessary to expose existing corruption. There are criminals and predators in society—not just the cartels and gangsters, but people in tailored suits and white lab coats.
If there is a worthy poster child for psychiatry and its avaricious allies, it’s one of America’s most famous—although fictional—psychiatrists, Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter. He declared in one film, “I’ve come to collect a head.” Unlike Lecter, most psychiatrists don’t actually eat their patients’ heads. But the doctors often leave their victims worse off than Lecter’s—their brains and minds sliced, fried and marinated with toxins.
While the press does occasionally report on the most outrageous crimes of psychiatrists—say, a Georgia doctor who killed 36 patients, or the Israeli psych who had a five-year career as a sexual predator, or the Romanian “physicians” who were using patients as human guinea pigs in experiments reminiscent of the Nazi death camp doctors—pundits and public officials seldom raise the obvious questions: Do these psychiatrists ever heal anyone? (Answer: No.) Since they are engaged in so much criminality and anti-social behavior, should they, as an industry, be shut down? (Answer: Yes.)
There are reasons psychiatrists haven’t been stripped of their Rorschach cards and bottles of mind-crippling, addicting “medicines.” More than anything, society is afraid of the shrinks. It’s little surprise that totalitarian states had a special fondness for using psychiatrists to destroy the minds and bodies of perceived undesirables. Some nations still use the fiction of “mental health” laws to oppress and torture dissidents.
There’s a long, media-ignored history of psychiatry seeking to impose its pseudo-science on the governance of democratic states. During WWII and the 1950s, much of organized psychiatry and psychology embarked on a quest for social control not dissimilar to George Orwell’s 1984. England’s foremost psychiatrist, John Rees, happily chirped that psychiatry’s objective was to “imitate the Totalitarians.” Psychiatrists in America proposed—and almost put into federal law—a scheme for a large reservation in Alaska where anyone could be exiled to psychiatric imprisonment, all without a shred of legal due process. Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard was one of the champions who defeated that assault on freedom.
Political dissenters—even Martha Mitchell, wife of then Attorney General John Mitchell, who claimed Richard Nixon was engaged in illegal activities (true)—were silenced by accusations of “mental disorders.”
That psychiatric assault on freedom isn’t just ancient history. A law in California that allows for involuntary psychiatric holds has been used for personal and even political reprisals. In Florida, the Baker Act for decades has done the same. It all adds up to the violation of human rights and degradation of society.
On the other hand, if there’s one place in America that symbolizes rebirth, renaissance, culture and spirit, it’s Harlem, where Scientology’s ecclesiastical leader, David Miscavige, opened a new Church and Community Center. The Harlem Church has been rocking the Big Apple ever since, championing human rights, anti-drug campaigns—and a lot of music, from Chick Corea’s ultimate coolness to massive amounts of reggae.
But Mr. Miscavige does not stay put long as Scientology continues expanding. He also opened another Church, a beacon of freedom in Budapest, Hungary.
And then he flew around the world to Sydney, Australia, where Down Under now boasts a new Advanced Church for Scientologists to progress to the upper levels of the religion. The Advanced Organization ANZO will energize the growth of Scientology in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan and the rest of the East Asia and Pacific nations.
Freedom gives an inside view of these new Churches, all of which share a grand mission to uplift this civilization.
In addition to servicing Church members, each is part of a global infrastructure supporting and emanating Church-sponsored humanitarian programs in alliance with hundreds of thousands of agencies, organizations and individuals throughout the world.
Freedom covers these programs in action from the outlands of Papua New Guinea to the lowlands of flood-drenched Louisiana.
Finally, an essay by Mr. Hubbard brings us full circle to exposing those in society undermining the best efforts of the majority working to build a better world.
—The Editors
