Scientology’s global conquest: Founder L. Ron Hubbard stressed ‘put in ethics’ to foil enemies

We were going through a pile of early Scientology materials and ran across a 1966 account of his African travels from L. Ron Hubbard that we found particularly entertaining. It has been posted to the Internet before, but we don’t think we’ve discussed it here at the Bunker. We do remember a few years ago reacting to an account of Hubbard’s time in Rhodesia as told by his official biographer, Dan Sherman, and that was a riot. But this is Hubbard’s own version of his time there, and it is filled with howlers. But aside from his tall tales, we find it a striking assertion by Hubbard, that the way to foil enemies was to “put in ethics” — in other words, establish Scientology control through intimidation. We’d like to get your thoughts on Hubbard’s assertions in this piece.

I’m going to tell you about the adventures of somebody who went out barefooted to take a country.

In February of 1966, the organization was running just fine, technology was wrapped up, so I decided, “I’ll go on down to South Africa and get into some mischief.” I didn’t have a very well conceived plan about it, but what I wanted to do was found and locate an alternate base or OT base.

So I went down, and I stopped off in Rhodesia. But en route to Rhodesia it suddenly occurred to me that there was a type and principle of constitution that would get them off the hook as a country and solve some of their problems. I wrote it up in some notes, and when I got there I got it typed up and handed it over to the government, who seemed to be very happy about it.

And I got to looking around the place, suddenly remembered I had some assets in Southern Africa, so I decided I would go into a bit of investment.

I can always locate money for some peculiar reason. This baffles Income Tax, by the way, but it’s explained very easily. You don’t make money, you just have it. You want to learn that someday. You just have money, you don’t bother to make it.

I found out I could buy a house very cheaply, so I bought it. Some guy came tearing up the drive one day and told me that I could buy a hotel that was entirely surrounded by elephants on Lake Kariba which was going very cheap indeed. It was about an average hotel, and we could buy it for about £5,500. So I wrote him a check. And later on, I noticed a nice farm. So I got the farm, and so on.

It’s a wonderful area, a lot of sociality. Typical 19th-century English; you don’t have dinner without putting at least a dark suit on. It’s a totally sophisticated civilization sitting as a small jewel in the midst of a howling wilderness.

You go any direction very far and you start running into elephants, buffalo, lion and the lot. But those sports cars, chromium-plated girls and so on, abound inside the tiny perimeters of the areas that are civilized.

Here is a brand-new country that hasn’t been run downhill yet and could afford a great deal of development. I went to work on this, kept in touch with the government. I met all the ministers and talked to them, met the Prime Minister and had tea with his wife.

I was a very acceptable bloke. Every time anybody would ask me about Scientology, I would just brush it off and not say anything about it. I’d define the word for them and go on talking about cows or gold mines.

Television found me, and I went on television. Radio found me, and I started going on the radio. You know me—I see some situation to be solved, I’ll go ahead and solve it.

I got in transport into Lake Kariba. It’s the first time anybody had ever gone down to the southern shore of Lake Kariba with any kind of transport. And I got four wheel drive Land Rovers, two-tonners, and started throwing them in there to supply the hotel. We called it the “Boomy Express.” And it ran along through the lines and through the buffalo and the elephants.

Boomy Motel has an airstrip. They actually have to buzz the hotel now and then to get the elephants off the runway. It sits right there on Lake Kariba, a huge lake, beautiful setting. You can sit on the porch drinking a Tom Collins and watch the elephants and buffalo walking very close by, and baboons thumbing their noses at you, tearing the thatch off the roofs and raising the devil.

But I got the Boomy Express going. A black fellow by the name of Samson drove it, an old Kariba truck driver. He didn’t quite fit into the scene as a domestic chauffeur, but as soon as I turned him loose with the Boomy Express, he was in his element. First time they’d ever had any transport in there. The economy started to spark.

The statistic of Rhodesia started to rise. They’d look at me on TV and say, “Well, he thinks the country’s all right, so there must be something right about it,” and then get busy instead of sitting and moping. That was all it took.

Now, an outfit in Britain considered all this sufficiently important to send one of their reporters down to tell their Minister of Information what a terribly bad fellow I was. He instantly, without checking his facts at all, turned around and gave the Prime Minister a story about what a terribly bad fellow I was, who turned around and gave the cabinet the same story, and they refused to extend my visa.

Based on these experiences, I now know what an OT Base has got to do. The first thing it’s got to do is put in ethics on a planetary level. Because if we put in ethics, we can then get in technology.

There are SPs walking all over the place. And just one SP, all by his little lonesome, is blocking the entire Rhodesian situation — the Minister of Information. A real, garden-variety nut.

The major threat to Scientology is that an atomic war or political takeover may occur before we get sufficiently well advanced that the organizations themselves are able to continue clearing human beings. I wanted to see if Southern Africa couldn’t serve as a security point and another avenue.

But now I’ve found out what OT Base would have to do. OT Base would have to put in ethics on the planet. If you don’t put in ethics you’re not going to get in tech.

Every time you’ve tried to disseminate Scientology you have run into ethics. And when you didn’t solve ethics, you fell back for a loss.

Right now there is an ethics problem here in England, which we are solving by investigation. There are two or three blokes who have suddenly decided to spend a fortune trying to cave in Scientology.

We’re going to have to do something about those fellows. They do things like get your headquarters robbed of private research papers, buy them off the thief, publish them out of context and thus confuse the theory and research papers of Scientology with the actual practice of Scientology. They’re challenging a fellow’s right to make notes of what he’s seen.

Unless we can get ethics in at this level, we ought to quit trying. Nearly every human being on this planet that is in trouble, is in trouble because ethics are out. Their lives are lives of misery. When you see three, five, ten million troops being killed in a war just because there was an SP in some government nobody took out — I think that’s too many men to kill off.

These situations resolve rather readily. We could actually sort out who are the key SPs in any situation on an international basis.

If you’re going to appeal to the wog world you certainly better know the wog world. I learned for instance how to sell Scientology against any out-ethics situation. You say to some person — who is friendly to you but who is a little bit upset because of the bad things he has heard about Scientology — “Well, you’ve heard objections to Scientology.“ You hand him The Problems of Work and say, “Here, read that, and find out what there is in it to be objected to.”

One lady I did this with forgot to feed her family. At eight or nine o’clock — she should have served supper at six — she was still reading!

Man needn’t be in trouble at all. I don’t care how many conflicts he has in his religions or political systems or anything else.

Any difficulty you’re having as an individual is only because you haven’t got ethics in your immediate environment. Where we have erred is getting ethics in too heavily on Scientologists and too lightly on the surrounding environment.

You should upgrade your idea of what an SP is. Man, meet one sometime. A real monster. And of course, you just hang the label around his neck.

A real SP is not just a difficult person. He’s the guy who has been putting people in sanitariums and busting up lives and making nervous breakdowns and that sort of thing.

Find the real SP in a person’s life. Don’t throw it around carelessly, because this is a very exaggerated condition, SP. They can look very nice, but usually you can tell one a long way away. You hear the sounds of conflict and you see the strewn wreckage long before you see the SP.

In the perimeter outside Scientology, don’t stand around and worry about whether or not you’re going to make a mistake on what person or which. Just get ethics in. If you’ve gotten it in wrongly, correct it.

Getting ethics in on the planet will probably be a gradient, but it better be a fairly steep gradient and better be done fast while we’ve still got a planet. I don’t like billiard balls!

— L. Ron Hubbard, 1966

For more information about L. Ron Hubbard’s southern African adventures without the tall tales, please see this piece Chris Owen wrote for us, and this gem as well.

 
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Source Code

“If you did it, you can undid it. How do you like that? You can! You can undo it. Anything you’ve done, you can undo one way or the other — somewhere on the track, given enough time. Even without processing, you could undo it. A lot of you are going forward in life right now, just hoping you will get an opportunity to undo, oh, Lord knows what, killing blondes or something. Hoping you get enough opportunity to unkill battleships or something. Of course, some of you are out of luck entirely because maybe your overt acts are against heavy hussars — heavy cavalry, heavy horse cavalry — and you’re trying to undo overt acts against heavy horse cavalry in an age that doesn’t have any. So you have to become an historical writer.” — L. Ron Hubbard, January 3, 1960

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Avast, Ye Mateys

“CRUISE: We rapped out the mileage and as I write this we apparently will have our day’s stats at the end. One day and two nights at sea compared to two days and two nights. It was a fairly comfortable run. I like this port we’ll be in as you read this. The officials have always been pleasant and obliging, the people great, and they don’t push people around. Some aboard don’t like it. Smells of fish they say. Well, I prefer the smell of fish and saw dust to the smell of tourists. I’ll never forget the relief and cheer we once felt when driven by the sea and the height of the Smersh campaign this port welcomed us. It always has been friendly and decent. Not being shoved out to anchor ‘to make room for the great Tourist Liner BUNKO and the Tanker SS Stinko.’ We’re off the beaten track here. The Phoenicians, Carthoginians and Portuguese have left their traces. And these people still go on. I’am changing our scheduling after the next port after this. Be nice to these people, they’re your friends. Be nice to this port. I consider it an Affinity haven.” — The Commodore, January 3, 1971

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Overheard in the FreeZone

“Earth is being taken over, and unless we get rid of this bad DNA from our gene pool or unless we correct our DNA through doing OT8 we will always have trouble here on Earth. This is exactly what David Icke is describing when he says the elite are possessed by reptilians. Hubbard never mentions the word reptilian but it’s the same thing. Maybe David has taken the research further by discovering they are reptiles? Maybe Hubbard knew this but thought people couldn’t handle that data as it might sound too silly or something so didn’t mention what they look like? And it isn’t that relevant anyway. These evil people are not really people, they are possessed. So we can keep fighting the evil changes to our world they are trying to make which is things like setting up the European Union and turning us all into trannies, or we can do OT8 on mass to fix everyone’s DNA so that these evil beings can’t mind control/posses people here anymore.”

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Past is Prologue

2001: “Ethercat” reported a protest in Atlanta this week. “Arrived around 2, left around 3. There were two adults who left in one car, and an adult with a child in the second car. Wynot made sure they got a glimpse of the ‘Who is Xenu? Find the answer on xenu.net.’ sign, keeping the ‘Scientology Lies’ sign aimed at the street. My sign said ‘What is Scientology? A bait and switch SCAM!’ One thing I’ve noticed about the honks and waves – they’re becoming bolder. We’re getting people laying on the horn, for a long honk as they pass. Some of the people waving or giving us thumbs ups take great care to make sure we see, and we always give them a wave or a smile.”

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Random Howdy

“There seems to be a reluctance even among some exes to understand that all the E-meter is physically capable of doing is measuring galvanic skin response. It is incapable of reading one’s emotional state.”

 
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Full Court Press: What we’re watching at the Underground Bunker

Criminal prosecutions:
— Danny Masterson charged for raping three women: Next hearing set for February 8. Trial scheduled for August 29, 2022.
— ‘Lafayette Ronald Hubbard’ (a/k/a Justin Craig), false imprisonment, aggravated assault, plus drug charges: Next hearing scheduled for January 18.
— Jay and Jeff Spina, Medicare fraud: Jay sentenced to 9 years in prison. Jeff’s sentencing to be scheduled.
— Hanan and Rizza Islam and other family members, Medi-Cal fraud: Pretrial conference January 22 in Los Angeles
— David Gentile, GPB Capital, fraud: Next pretrial conference set for February 11.
— Joseph ‘Ben’ Barton, Medicare fraud: Pleaded guilty, awaiting sentencing.

Civil litigation:
— Luis and Rocio Garcia v. Scientology: Eleventh Circuit affirmed ruling granting Scientology’s motion for arbitration. Garcias considering next move.
— Valerie Haney v. Scientology: Forced to ‘religious arbitration.’ US Supreme Court denied Valerie’s petition Oct 4.
— Chrissie Bixler et al. v. Scientology and Danny Masterson: California Supreme Court granted review on May 26 and asked the Second Appellate Division to direct Judge Steven Kleifield to show cause why he granted Scientology’s motion for arbitration. Oral arguments held November 2, awaiting a ruling.
— Brian Statler Sr v. City of Inglewood: Third amended complaint filed, trial set for June 28, 2022.
— Author Steve Cannane defamation trial: Trial concluded, Cannane victorious, awarded court costs. Case appealed on Dec 23. Appeal hearing held Aug 23-27. Awaiting a ruling.
— Chiropractors Steve Peyroux and Brent Detelich, stem cell fraud: Lawsuit filed by the FTC and state of Georgia in August, now in discovery phase.

 
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THE PROSECUTION OF DANNY MASTERSON

We first broke the news of the LAPD’s investigation of Scientology celebrity Danny Masterson on rape allegations in 2017, and we’ve been covering the story every step of the way since then. At this page we’ve collected our most important links, including our four days in Los Angeles covering the preliminary hearing and its ruling, which has Danny facing trial and the potential sentence of 45 years to life in prison.

SCIENTOLOGY: FAIR GAME

After the success of their double-Emmy-winning, three-season A&E series ‘Scientology and the Aftermath,’ Leah Remini and Mike Rinder continue the conversation on their podcast, ‘Scientology: Fair Game.’ We’ve created a landing page where you can hear all of the episodes so far.

LEAH REMINI: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE AFTERMATH

An episode-by-episode guide to Leah Remini’s three-season, double-Emmy winning series that changed everything for Scientology watching. Originally aired from 2016 to 2019 on the A&E network, and now on Netflix.

SCIENTOLOGY’S CELEBRITIES, from A to Z

Find your favorite Hubbardite celeb at this index page — or suggest someone to add to the list!

 
Other links: SCIENTOLOGY BLACK OPS: Tom Cruise and dirty tricks. Scientology’s Ideal Orgs, from one end of the planet to the other. Scientology’s sneaky front groups, spreading the good news about L. Ron Hubbard while pretending to benefit society. Scientology Lit: Books reviewed or excerpted in a weekly series. How many have you read?

 
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THE WHOLE TRACK

[ONE year ago] Scientology social media: Stop being afraid to turn over all your hard earned cash!
[TWO years ago] In the Sea Org, it’s difficult to see Scientology’s incompetence — until you escape
[THREE years ago] We asked Marc Headley about NXIVM’s Allison Mack using his Scientology lawsuit as a defense
[FOUR years ago] Conan O’Brien to Danny Masterson in ’04, after rape claim was settled: ‘I’ve heard about you’
[FIVE years ago] Tonight on ‘Leah Remini’: Aaron Smith-Levin on how families get so screwed up in Scientology
[SIX years ago] Scientology’s state of the union, 2016: Former spokesman Mike Rinder predicts ‘more pain’
[SEVEN years ago] Jon Atack: What it’s like for the Scientologist who gives up the dream of being superhuman
[EIGHT years ago] Another Scientology video you aren’t supposed to see: ‘The Command of Theta’
[TEN years ago] Is Scientology Imploding? Watching the Panic After a Former Executive Dares to Question Church Management

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on January 3, 2022 at 07:00

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Our new book with Paulette Cooper, Battlefield Scientology: Exposing L. Ron Hubbard’s dangerous ‘religion’ is now on sale at Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats. Our book about Paulette, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology tried to destroy Paulette Cooper, is on sale at Amazon in paperback, Kindle, and audiobook versions. We’ve posted photographs of Paulette and scenes from her life at a separate location. Reader Sookie put together a complete index. More information can also be found at the book’s dedicated page.

The Best of the Underground Bunker, 1995-2020 Just starting out here? We’ve picked out the most important stories we’ve covered here at the Underground Bunker (2012-2020), The Village Voice (2008-2012), New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002) and the Phoenix New Times (1995-1999)

Other links: BLOGGING DIANETICS: Reading Scientology’s founding text cover to cover | UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists | GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice | SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts | Shelly Miscavige, 15 years gone | The Lisa McPherson story told in real time | The Cathriona White stories | The Leah Remini ‘Knowledge Reports’ | Hear audio of a Scientology excommunication | Scientology’s little day care of horrors | Whatever happened to Steve Fishman? | Felony charges for Scientology’s drug rehab scam | Why Scientology digs bomb-proof vaults in the desert | PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill | The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ

Watch our short videos that explain Scientology’s controversies in three minutes or less…

Check your whale level at our dedicated page for status updates, or join us at the Underground Bunker’s Facebook discussion group for more frivolity.

Our non-Scientology stories: Robert Burnham Jr., the man who inscribed the universe | Notorious alt-right inspiration Kevin MacDonald and his theories about Jewish DNA | The selling of the “Phoenix Lights” | Astronomer Harlow Shapley‘s FBI file | Sex, spies, and local TV news | Battling Babe-Hounds: Ross Jeffries v. R. Don Steele

 

Tony Ortega at The Daily Beast