A sunny but cold December day. Seven intrepid suppressives turned up to picket the newly re-opened 'org' (sorry - 'Life Improvement Centre') on Tottenham Court Road to mark Lisa McPherson's death. Two different broadcasting organisations were interviewing us and recording the protest, as after the massive foot-bullet of the opening of the Queen Victoria Street 'org' no British journalist seems to think their career is complete without going into an 'org' and writing an article containing the Xenu story.
That very day there was an article from a 'Guardian' writer, Oliver Burkemann, who normally applauds anything "unconventional" ('The more I explore self-help, the more tolerant I become of those who believe in angels and spirit guides'), which included 'It's not that I have anything against people who believe humanity's troubles began when an intergalactic ruler landed on earth 75 million years ago, imprisoning dead souls in a volcano, causing woes that can only be relieved with the expensive assistance of the Church.' .... "'Scientology's "auditing" process apparently detaches the memories from the distress, whereupon the traumatised person becomes "clear". One person in the video provides the scientific explanation for the process: "Woo-hoo! it really works!"'... 'So I squeezed the cans hard. The needle shot across the dial. "There!" the man said. "What were you thinking of? You see. It works!"'
We positioned the boom-box across the street from the 'org', positioned leafletters on both sides of the road and proceeded to enlighten the area. For the first five minutes I thought my throat was not going to make it, but after an un-amplified cough or two, I was fine. The Scientologists took turns demonstrating the E-meter to one another on tables outside the 'org'. The normal OSA scowler scuttled around trying to write down the words on a placard, tried a "Tone 40" command to get the holder to stand still and ended up being ordered about by our "Tone 40" commands. Perhaps she was flustered by being watched by a more senior OSA character. We were handing out a selection of leaflets, they just had tiny invitations to watch their dreadful video.
After a couple of hours we retreated to a warm hostelry.
-- John Ritson *** "This case was what you'd call a Fifth Invader, just as a classification of cases. They all respond to this classification, that's the only reason we say that case was a Fifth Invader case. There are Fourth Invader people and Fifth Invader people. This is just E-Meter stuff we're using; we don't care anything about the history of the Fifth Invader Force and its first incursion into the MEST universe, Galaxy 12. That's just history and we're not interested in history; we're interested in conditions and the remedying of conditions - what a big difference." L. Ron Hubbard - "Exteriorization and the Phenomena of Space" ***
It was a quiet picket, we were surprised at their having no leaflets and little confront despite knowing we were coming. I did actually have a staff member talk to me, which is a real rarity.
Present were John, Jens, David, Arcady, myself and two newer picketers.
Passerby awareness of scientology gets better all the time.
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