WIS? observations
keshet
Thumbing through the 1998 edition of _What Is Scientology?_, I
was noticing how nicely Co$ had photographed various Orgs around
the world. All the biggies are there: Clearwater, Los Angeles (I
love that Celebrity Centre photo), Washington, Boston, Toronto,
Sussex.
There are few included, though, that puzzle me because they are
rarely, if ever, mentioned on the newsgroup.
What's the size of the Org in Tokyo, for instance? Are there any
Japanese critics? Is anything happening at the Miami Org? Did they
get into this photo collage simply because they have photogenic
buildings?
My personal favorite is the photo of the Org in Durban, South
Africa. It's nice, but rather nondescript and unimpressive
compared to the others. It makes me curious about the condition
of the churches in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and
Pretoria that excluded them from WIS?.
The interesting thing is that the Scientologists in the picture,
chatting out front on a lovely sunny day, are conspicuously white
(and blonde!). I assume that Durban has a good-sized white
population but given that blacks greatly outnumber whites in the
KwaZulu-Natal region and Durban is home to the largest Indian
population outside India, I wonder why there are no people of
color in the photo? Especially troubling because Scientology
claims "that all men [but not women??] of whatever race, color
or creed were created with equal rights." A nice concept, surely,
but there's little evidence of its application in the cult.
Keshet
--
Kes...@cyberpass.net * http://thingy.apana.org.au/~fun/scn/racism/
Where prejudice exists it always discolors our thoughts. -M.Twain
Cornelius Krasel
[Scientology in South africa]
> The interesting thing is that the Scientologists in the picture,
> chatting out front on a lovely sunny day, are conspicuously white
> (and blonde!). I assume that Durban has a good-sized white
> population but given that blacks greatly outnumber whites in the
> KwaZulu-Natal region and Durban is home to the largest Indian
> population outside India, I wonder why there are no people of
> color in the photo? Especially troubling because Scientology
> claims "that all men [but not women??] of whatever race, color
> or creed were created with equal rights." A nice concept, surely,
> but there's little evidence of its application in the cult.
"In North Africa they had the Arab with the gun and whip, but he
could force people to do things a gun and a whip [sic] and he
accomplished a tremendous amount of extermination, but he certainly
didn't advance that civilization very much. In South Africa they
had a bit of the whip but everybody just gave up. The South African
native is probably the one impossible person to train in the entire
world - he is probably impossible by any human standard."
[LRH, Professional Auditor's Bulletin No. 119, 1st September 1957]
More information on LRHs view on apartheid can be found in an essay
written by Chris Owen:
http://wpxx02.toxi.uni-wuerzburg.de/~cowen/essays/apartheid.html
--Cornelius.
--
/* Cornelius Krasel, U Wuerzburg, Dept. of Pharmacology, Versbacher Str. 9 */
/* D-97078 Wuerzburg, Germany email: pha...@rzbox.uni-wuerzburg.de SP4 */
/* "Science is the game we play with God to find out what His rules are." */