Going Clear: the film Scientologists don't want you to see

[Pedro-NF]

Going Clear: the film Scientologists don’t want you to see

The most mesmerising moment in Going Clear, Alex Gibney's wrecking-ball job on Scientology, watched so far by 5.5 million Americans, is a clip of leading church executives singing along to a clunking 1980s rock anthem, We Stand Tall. Disciples wave candles and sway in bad knitwear but, by this point in the HBO documentary, we know that the church allegedly blackmails adherents over their sex lives; that it is thuggish to those who question its conduct; that founder L Ron Hubbard was a conman who switched from writing bad science fiction to bad space religion; that his successor "Pope" David Miscavige is portrayed as a psychopath who has repeatedly hit and tortured his staff.

So, the clip of Scientologists singing along with Miscavige is sinister, an eerie negative of thousands of North Koreans weeping at the death of mass murderer Kim Jong Il. It feels like brainwashing in action. The North Koreans have an excuse for going along with thought control lest they end up in the gulag; Scientology's extraordinary achievement, perhaps, is to pull off brainwashing in Florida, in California. But the church's aggressive lawyers deny all that, and are working hard to prevent the film ever being broadcast in the UK.

[blaskattacks]

Didn't the people making this send out a couple of camera men to film the scientologist prison camp, and they got chased by some guys for like weeks, they would just be following them and watching them everywhere they went. Then I think they tried suing them even though they hadn't done anything.


I read this on the wikipedia for the movie and it made me think of that.

The church also denounced the film's interviewees as "the usual collection of obsessive, disgruntled former Church members kicked out as long as 30 years ago for malfeasance, who have a documented history of making up lies about the Church for money".Two of those interviewed in the film, journalist Tony Ortega and former Scientologist Marc Headley, reported that investigators from the church had surveiled them at Salt Lake City airport as they made their way to the festival"

from slate discussing laurence Wright, who wrote books that film is based on

That status guaranteed the millions in revenue that finance Miscavige’s “never defend, always attack” approach. Defectors are constantly harassed, and Vulture's Bilge Ebiri observes that “many of those still in the religion fare worse, with elaborate punishments that would be considered assault and torture if you or I did it, but in Scientology’s case are protected under the First Amendment protection of religions.”

[Pedro-NF]

I created the same topic on the bitcointalk.org forums:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1041479