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The Disaster Relief Angle

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Magazine article: Providing Indiscriminate Help Anywhere (2011)

It is the one campaign that is all but synonymous with our brand of help. The Volunteer Minister program extends the gift of LRH technology across all continents and every imaginable terrain.

It begins with local Volunteer Ministers reaching out in their neighborhoods and communities to provide solutions for life’s inevitable disasters, both little and large. It reaches out further with Org and Continental Cavalcades pitching now-iconic tents to bring help to major metropolitan zones. It further extends its help in the outlying rural communities and the whole developing, world with VM Goodwill Tours and takes it off the map entirely to the most remote parts of the globe with the Extreme Pioneer Tours.

To expand VM help to every conceivable corner of this world, there is also an online Virtual Cavalcade providing all the technology of the Scientology Handbook in 17 languages.

But there is still one truly iconic image of VM action— Volunteer Ministers Disaster Response. Never is the statement “Something Can Be Done About it” more evident than in times of greatest need, be it a natural or unnatural disaster. In this issue, we cover the highlights of the heroic actions of VMs worldwide during the past year.

[…]

Russia Wildfires

Moscow,
Russian Federation

Several hundred wildfires were burning around Moscow in July and August 2010 during record high temperatures.

Smoke from the fires blanketed large urban regions. Combined with the heat wave, these conditions made for a major disaster where an estimated 56,000 people died from the effects of smoke and heat. In Nizhny Novgorod, 270 miles from Moscow, the mission held an IAS event during which they were briefed on the Haiti earthquake and the VM response. At the end of the event, ten of the attending Scientologists decided to do something about the fires smoldering outside their cities.

The next day they left Nizhny Novgorod Mission and headed southwest toward the fires to help). Upon arrival, they met with the firefighters and the emergency units on the ground. Though they had no fire fighting experience, the VMs quickly learned on the job and got to work dousing the flames and doing damage control. When the fires were put out and the immediate danger was handled, the deputy mayor of Vyksa personally congratulated and acknowledged the VMs for their help.1, 2

Notes

  1. Impact 127 (pp.88-89) (2011). PDF format. ↩
  2. Re: “Indiscriminate Help:” The SP doctrine requires that Scientologists, including Volunteer Ministers, discriminate. A fundamental aspect of Scientology’s outreach program is propagandizing on this doctrine. See Ups and Downs in Life Course;  The Enemy Angle ↩

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Magazine article: Scientology Volunteer Minister Campaign (2010)

The Volunteer Minister fulfills the very definition of religion by extending the gift of Scientology itself and bringing indiscriminate help. As one of the largest independent relief forces on Earth, the reach of VMs has no boundaries. No matter where, when or what… that bright flash of yellow means hope.

THE IAS-SPONSORED VOLUNTEER Minister Crusade works to extend the gift of Scientology itself. Volunteer Ministers are providing succor to what amounts to the face of humanity, both geographically and demographically:

First, with our now-famed VM Emergency Response arm, launching on a moment’s notice to bring our brand of spiritual succor.

Second, radiating out like spokes of a wheel, our Org and Cont Cavalcades provide the everyday tools for living from the Scientology Handbook. Meanwhile, and still farther afield, Goodwill Tours extend the LRH technical lifeline to areas well beyond our orgs on five continents.

To reach those areas “off the grid” altogether, our Extreme Pioneer Tours bring tech to the heart of the world in Amazonia, across the belly of Africa and into the Australian Outback.

While to meet needs everywhere else we present our VM Hotline and online training through our Virtual Cavalcade.

In that way, across every conceivable landscape, we bring our message to the world that “Something Can Be Done About It” through our Global Goodwill Alliance.

It has been said that you can follow the trail of our now-renowned VM Emergency Response arm by tracking storm patterns and Richter scales, and this year certainly bears it out.

[…]

Beyond every far-flung town and village, the VM Hotline is where those in urgent need go to request on-site seminars, which are sponsored by the IAS. One of the first this year was in Kiberia, outside of Nairobi, Kenya, where parents, teachers and 80 children took the VM Communication Course, and learned to deliver assists. Also in Kenya, a Boy Scout troop leader  came across volunteer-ministers.org and requested everything—seminars, materials, even T-shirts. A team of veteran VMs trained them on-site, whereupon, Kenya’s Boy Scouts turned into “VM Scouts,” igniting a movement that has thus far embraced more than 10,000. Other IAS-sponsored traveling VM teams went to eastern Uganda to provide assists on behalf of tribal leaders, to Tanzania on the southern shores of Lake Victoria for Study Tech in a grammar school, and to Sierra Leone to conduct Basics of Organizing courses on behalf of Christian missionaries. Other teams went to Bangladesh to deliver Study Tech to more than 400 children and to Cambodia for a Bible Study Group that wanted PTS/SP Tech.1

[…]

All of which makes for a Volunteer Minister life support system, including partnerships with police departments from across the world of law enforcement; the same again for search and rescue, civil defense and emergency response units across the whole disaster management community; and still more again to military units of every branch of service that support disaster response. In sum, it is 200-plus agencies with whom we’ve built a network of goodwill.2, 3

Notes

  1. Volunteer Ministers deliver entry-level PTS/SP tech on the “Overcoming Ups and Downs in Life” Course. http://www.scientologyhandbook.org/suppression/sh11.htm.  See also: The Enemy Angle ↩
  2. Impact 125 (pp. 58-67) (2010) PDF format ↩
  3. Also see OCMB thread: Photo Op in Pakistan ↩

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Lecture: Creating a Third Dynamic (1957)

 The main thing–the main thing I’m saying is, that an organization which has a multiple, not-apparent purpose would probably be very successful. You get a business manager, he’s a pretty good promoter. He hires a few salesmen around town to go around evenings, and they simply sell memberships and back up the hearse–or whatever else they do to sell memberships–and they get names on the Survival Club pledges and the USA clubs are sold to them and–the membership–and they’ll get out from under in case of atomic war or something like this. You’re not trying to sell them religion or getting better or you’re not trying to sell them anything but self-preservation which is usually easy to sell. And it doesn’t cost any fabulous amount and your finances on the thing tend to work themselves out one way or the other. Furthermore, the organization here will have this in its literature pretty well codified and organized. You’re not exactly sailing out into the blue.

Now you may or may not know this, and it probably isn’t important anyway: I was a member of Naval Civil Affairs at the end of the last war and they sent me to the Princeton School of Government. Well they had to get a four-year education done in a few months and they were actually doing a pretty good job because all they were trying to do was smarten some guys up so they wouldn’t lay too big an egg when they got out amongst disaster populaces. Therefore, my interest in the subject of disaster relief has been greater perhaps than it would have been otherwise having been educated in this subject. I was once, by the way, a field executive with the American Red Cross in the Puerto Rico hurricane disaster. And these things have some reality to me, you know. I mean it isn’t very unreal and the thing that I have the greatest reality on is it’s awfully easy–it’s awfully easy to form groups to take care of disasters. And why civil defense is unable to recruit people to do this, I wouldn’t have a clue unless their program is so lousy that the people that they’re trying to recruit see through it at once, as a fraud or something. It must be a terribly bad program. Nobody’s signing up for civil defense these days. They’ve deserted this sphere.

Well disaster relief, or organizations to lead toward the survival of peoples are not very complicated organizations for this reason. The people themselves each one have some desire or some knowingness on the subject. You get the idea? You’re using native talent. Now you’ll understand better when I say an auditor has to be, really, to get good results, has to be trained as an auditor. You got that? Well, a couple of mechanics and a filling station operator don’t need very much education to be your transportation officials. You got that? So all you have to do is throw them the idea, how’re we going to get–how’re we going to get three thousand survivors transported from the city out to this evacuation area. Why sit around and jam your wheels with it, see? You find some guys that know something about wheels, and you say, “Heh, it’s your baby. It’s your baby. Now you’re in charge and you make sure it’s done and we’ll hold you liable for it and you give us a report every meeting on what you’ve done in order to organize this thing.” You see that. In other words, you’re dealing with something where you have tremendous quantities of native ability. Where you don’t have to do a great deal of education. You can pick and choose.

Now the mistake would be to just do everything for the people and set up a service that does everything for the people and that’s that. No, you’re going to be a slicker-because remember basically, even if this is known only to you, this is a therapeutic operation. You shove the responsibility at them. You shove them the problems. Soundly enough organized, basically, in the organization so there’s some way they can do something about the problems if they think of an answer. You put them into communication with one another with regard to these problems and you get them tremendously interested in it.

All right, we have a Survival Club team, and it has–it has twenty basic offices, and that doesn’t care whether we’re getting in recreation or whether we’re working about inflation or whether we’re working about atomic disaster or what we’re working on, there are twenty offices. We’re going to have a picnic, let me assure you that you’ve got to have all of these officers at a picnic, even the medical. See, they’ve all got to be present at the picnic just as they would be at the disaster. Just make sure that they have countless assistants so that they get so busy trying to keep their assistants busy that they never have any time to be critical of what you’re doing.

Now, it’s quite interesting–it’s quite interesting but you’re adding goals and purposes to people. And you’re taking a society which is relatively purposeless and you’re putting purposes into their heads. We don’t care what the purpose is. The purpose is every few weeks we’ll have a picnic. Every Saturday night we will have a dance. We’ll own a piece of property that has a big barn. The thing by the way has to be even about thirty-five to filly miles away from town in order to be in a safe area outside an atomic fallout.

Even then it might be a little dangerous, but you have provisions against that.If-you’ve got programs you know. And if the programs aren’t going right and the members aren’t turning up, blame the members and ask them for suggestions and get them all together to remedy this horrible thing.

They’ll come up with ways and means of doing it. If they’re inefficient, if the club isn’t running efficiently, all you have to do is tell them to run it better.

When I say you tell them, you wouldn’t even have to be an officer. It’s just propaganda that you put around.

The art and skill of being an executive is being an expert agent provocateur. That’s being an executive. Some people think it’s being an organizational expert. No. It’s just provoking people until they’ll organize. The capitalist failed because he got them to organize against him. That wasn’t smart.

Now here then is a Survival Club idea: United Survival Action Clubs. The reason they’re called that is just so you can say USA Club. But the loose term is Survival Club. You want a group, you want people you can talk with, you’ll find these people take quite a while-with another purpose, together–before you could talk to them about anything like Scientology or better IQs or anything else. But if they are performing their job well, they will be getting better and you will be making a country and a government possible.

You want a group, don’t try to form them on the basis of Scientology just per se and as such. All you want is to get some bodies together and I’m giving you an idea of how you get some bodies together. Put the bodies together, even though it’s apparently quite distant from what you’re doing. Because there will be a group of bodies which will become a group which will become itself a body that you can communicate with to the society at large. And you can’t talk worth a nickel without a body. I know, I’ve processed some of you. Get you up in the middle of the room, whatcha do you do, squeak.

Well now, you’re doing that with society at large right now. You have not accumulated a body to talk with. You understand that? Well don’t think Scientology couldn’t talk loud and long if you all, those of you who are interested in this, did your job well in organizing Survival Clubs or many Survival Clubs in your area and these were all united together under a central club that fed literature and coordinated ideas and activities and published club news and interchanged it all. Don’t think Scientology wouldn’t have a voice. You would be able to talk.

Now I dare say that this idea will not get there and prevent an atomic war. I dare say that it’s not probable. Well when these people back up the hearse to you about atomic war, remember one thing: That there’ll be tremendous numbers of people left alive. Just be one of them, that’s the trick. Actually, in even a heavily bombed area, about fifty percent of the populace directly under the bombs still lived. Now what are you going to do about these people?1

Notes

  1. Hubbard, L. R. (1957, 30 December). Creating a Third Dynamic. Ability Congress,   (5712C30B). Lecture conducted from Washington, DC. ↩

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Lecture: Auditing Techniques: Solids (1957)

All right. Now, radiation is a 1957-type problem, and it is here with magnitude. I don’t say that we have a magnitude of radiative particles around, so much as the problem itself has great magnitude, in that to realize that men could be so suicidal or so foolish they could go on playing with a weapon which is not a weapon and which is not useful in war. And they still go on playing with it. To realize that men can get into that condition is to realize that they go further south and still walk than we realize.

Do you know that no police force in the world would arm itself, by the way — no police force would arm itself — with fifty-caliber machine guns. You realize that? No civic police force. You could make them a present of fifty-caliber machine guns, and they would do nothing with them. A fifty-caliber machine gun fires a slug, you see, as big as my thumbnail. It is a huge slug with an enormous charge of powder. And the guns are big and they’re unwieldy, and they are not good antipersonnel weapons. See? They’re not good weapons; they just aren’t functional.

And if you can imagine that the weapon a cop would have as he walked down the street would be a fifty-caliber machine gun (which is easily picked up by two men!) strapped on to his side, you’ll get the reason why. But the main reason is not its portability, but the fact that the thing is not a good antipersonnel weapon and is not useful on citizens. It’s too big a weapon to use on citizens. It would not keep citizens in line. It would actually inhibit law enforcement to such a degree that no law enforcement could take place. Nobody ever dared use a fifty-caliber machine gun in a city street. You see? It’s just not something that you could set up and fire after a speeder. You know, the way they pull out their popguns and shoot at a speeder. You know? They do that — and kill innocent bystanders. But they still do that.

But they know that a weapon can be so large as to be useless. This is a principle which is well known. It has been with man since way before catapults. Even in the days of the broadsword and so forth, why, a gentleman wanted to be armed. And he was going to carry one of these two-handed, armor-piercing broadswords, you know, that was half as tall as his horse, you know? A great big, doggone thing — try to wield one in a drawing room. It just doesn’t work, see? You get it tangled in the draperies and so forth. And so we had to have a short weapon in company with it. And after a while, shorter and smaller and more agile weapons entirely took its place. It isn’t even around anymore. It was an awful lot of weapon. On a battlefield, against an armored knight, in the hands of a strong man, a broadsword had some use. It would cut through a casque and a helm and a skull and a breastplate as far as that’s concerned — clank! But as I say, it just didn’t work as, for instance, a weapon for the Praetorian Guard or a weapon for the Queen’s Own, or something of the sort. Just what would they be doing with that? I suppose they could lock broadswords point-to-hilt, or something like that, and press back the populace — if their arms didn’t drop off trying to hold it up that long. But it’d be an extreme and stupid use.

And here they’ve developed a weapon which is too much weapon, which is not useful either in keeping the peace or in waging war. And why they want to test it, I wouldn’t know. I am not an unqualified authority on this subject, I assure you. I’ve studied war, and it’s something that you just wouldn’t use. What would you use it for? You mean you’re going to set up the whole area so your troops can’t penetrate it? You mean you’re going to pollute the atmosphere to such a degree that your own people are going to be knocked off if you ever dared wage war? Well, why is anybody testing it?

Now, that’s merely a comment on sanity for only this reason (I’m not giving you a propaganda series because everything I’m saying to you, you undoubtedly have more or less added up yourselves, watching this program): People become obsessed with these particles. Got it? They become obsessed with the particles, and they lose the idea of terminals.1

Notes

  1. Hubbard, L. R. (1957, 31 January). Auditing Techniques: Solids. Sixteenth American Advanced Clinical Course,   (5701C31). Lecture conducted from Washington, D.C. ↩

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Lecture: Civil Defense: New Channels for Putting Dianetics Into Society (1) (1951)

I’ve been working on the first in a series of new books. The book I’m working on currently would seem at first glance to be well off the beaten track of Dianetics. I am writing a basic manual of civil defense.I happened to take a look at the federal government (there is a government, I want to assure you of that), and I saw the lack of an effective civil-defense program.

This new manual on civil defense is based on training which I had as a civil-affairs officer. There are probably about ten thousand civil-affairs officers in the United States who were trained to handle civilian populaces in war-torn areas. The military found out that it was uneconomical to neglect, overrun and butcher civilian populaces; they found out that it impeded military operations.

The thing to do, then, was to get a civilian populace into some kind of semblance of order so it would stay out of the road of the military. Furthermore, the government found out that every time they tried to do anything for a civilian populace via the military, such as sending a company of soldiers into a town to govern it, everything blew up, and then the military really had trouble.

So they trained up officers that they called civil-affairs officers. Anybody who had experience with Asia was welcome as the flowers of spring up at Princeton where they were being trained, so they pulled me out of the Pacific and I went to Princeton in the last few months of the war. 1 What they were teaching was a tremendous amount of disaster relief.

Now, the federal government has done a halfway job of putting together (let’s be charitable) a civil-defense program; it is a magnificent job of long paragraphs which mean absolutely nothing. There is a total lack of realism compared to what is actually known about disaster relief.

For instance, I was with the American Red Cross in 1934 after a Puerto Rican hurricane. If any one of the civil-defense organizations which the federal government now has planned went   up against anything as mild as that Puerto Rican hurricane, they would flop. And here they are planning for the sudden onslaught of the majority of our cities lying waste in rubble with half our populace dead, or something like that, and they are planning for it something like a fireman’s outing.

I looked this over and I said, “Why haven’t they asked some of the old civil-defense boys about this–people who were accustomed to the idea of a populace being smashed flat and who go in and do what they can for it?” They need to get it off this basis of a bombed area in a little, tiny, precise point in the city, where the rest of the city is all well organized with people equipped with brassards and helmets who will go in and put the ruins back together again and make sure that the injured are helped. That is not what is going to happen to America.

For every person killed in the immediate impact of a disaster, 2.8 people die after the disaster from starvation, lack of water, disease and injury not caused by the impact of disaster. No provision has been made in civil defense for the United States for the 2.8; all the provision is being made really for those injured in the first impact. So I glanced around and talked to a few friends of mine in civil affairs, and I went around and talked to civil defense people, and all of a sudden I saw how we in Dianetics fit in rather well with all this.

The manual actually has to be nothing more than a boil-down of the Princeton University curriculum of how to handle disaster.2   That is about all it is, and it is aligned with and adapted to the statements which have been put out by the Civil Defense Planning Bureau in Washington. It is just a resynthesis of known techniques; it really does not have a thing to do with Dianetics. But the back page carries an absolute must in terms of a bibliography–the library which a civil-defense officer should have: a good home formulary, of course, and a good First-aid manual for handling the aches and pains of people, and naturally Dianetics in order to handle their mass hysteria3 and so forth.

That is the first book of the series. The next one is concerned with something everybody is worried about–bacteriological warfare. Bacteriological warfare isn’t very tough; that was in civil affairs too. So we just take the old civil-affairs textbooks and shuffle them like a deck of cards, put them back together again and issue a second little book that has to do with bacteriological warfare. Mind you, none of these books are being issued by the federal government; it is time somebody did something about it, so the Foundation had better do it.

Now, on bacteriological warfare, we come to the conclusion that the necessary step to take in order to combat a bacteriological war is to clean up all the bacteria and disease out of the country first–get the country all set and ready to go and in perfect physical condition. Then you have a good chance of fighting bacteriological warfare.

Actually, bacteriological warfare following in the wake of a battle consists of typhus, tetanus, smallpox, measles–all of these various things, really, are what are going to take the toll. It does not matter what kind of bug gets sent into America. If the sewer systems and the medical lines and transport lines get disrupted, that alone is going to be a very bad thing just from the standpoint of diseases with which we are very familiar. So, you just spark up the idea that the best thing to do is to clean up the country.

The third book is on the subject of security. What about the security of the country? All of a sudden you don’t have as many prisons as you had before and you don’t have the facilities with which to care for the insane and so on. A would-be dictator has to have criminals. He has to have them; they form up the rank and file of every intelligence organization. Criminals– people well below 2.0 chronically and nearly spun-in–are the tools of every subversive group.

Somebody had better do something about that before the atom bombs hit. You don’t want these people running all around loose through a disrupted society, so you have got to do something about them.

Now, it just so happens there is a technique of doing something about them. So we start curving very definitely in to the fourth book, called “An Introduction to Dianetics,” a very simple little book on the level of bluebirds and happiness4 that says “This is how you do it.” I am trying to develop a technique now which I want to test with some five- and ten-year-old kids to see whether they can use it. I am going to develop it gradually until I get a technique by which a person can be made to feel better without the person who is running it having to know much about Dianetics. Of course he wouldn’t be able to produce very much either, but he would get an effect.

If that technique can be put out as an introduction to Dianetics–a very mild little thing but still startling–we might get a very broad public response. The fifth book of the series is the hard cover book on Group Dianetics. The first four are all leading up to that. All of this is very much on the same subject. The whole thing is trying to alert mankind to an idea that he had better start attacking the things suppressing him. It doesn’t matter much what they are.You broaden the concept of civil defense from the idea of people getting busy as soon as Russia atom-bombs certain American cities to the idea that civil defense is an actual integral part of government and that its job is promoting the survival of the people. I think a ball can be started rolling in that direction.5

Notes

  1. See Hubbard’s memo: Subject: School Of Military Government – Request For Appointment To (September 9, 1944); Reply ↩
  2. See OCMB: Hubbard and Heinlein. ↩
  3. See also: All About Radiation re hysteria. ↩
  4. Cf. Hubbard’s The Way to Happiness booklet; The Happiness Angle. ↩
  5.   Hubbard, L. R. (1951-06-27). Civil Defense. First Annual Conference of Dianetic Auditors, (5106C27A). Wichita, Kansas. ↩

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Lecture: Civil Defense: New Channels for Putting Dianetics Into Society (2) (1951)

For every person killed in the immediate impact of a disaster, 2.8 people die after the disaster from starvation, lack of water, disease and injury not caused by the impact of disaster. No provision has been made in civil defense for the United States for the 2.8; all the provision is being made really for those injured in the first impact.

So I glanced around and talked to a few friends of mine in civil affairs, and I went around and talked to civil defense people, and all of a sudden I saw how we in Dianetics fit in rather well with all this.

The manual actually has to be nothing more than a boil-down of the Princeton University curriculum of how to handle disaster. That is about all it is, and it is aligned with and adapted to the statements which have been put out by the Civil Defense Planning Bureau in Washington. It is just a resynthesis of known techniques; it really does not have a thing to do with Dianetics.

But the back page carries an absolute must in terms of a bibliography—the library which a civil-defense officer should have: a good home formulary, of course, and a good First-aid manual for handling the aches and pains of people, and naturally Dianetics in order to handle their mass hysteria and so forth.

That is the first book of the series. The next one is concerned with something everybody is worried about—bacteriological warfare. Bacteriological warfare isn’t very tough; that was in civil affairs too. So we just take the old civil-affairs textbooks and shuffle them like a deck of cards, put them back together again and issue a second little book that has to do with bacteriological warfare. Mind you, none of these books are being issued by the federal government; it is time somebody did something about it, so the Foundation had better do it.
Now, on bacteriological warfare, we come to the conclusion that the necessary step to take in order to combat a bacteriological war is to clean up all the bacteria and disease out of the
country first—get the country all set and ready to go and in perfect physical condition. Then you have a good chance of fighting bacteriological warfare.

Actually, bacteriological warfare following in the wake of a battle consists of typhus, tetanus, smallpox, measles—all of these various things, really, are what are going to take the toll. It does not matter what kind of bug gets sent into America. If the sewer systems and the medical lines and transport lines get disrupted, that alone is going to be a very bad thing just from the standpoint of diseases with which we are very familiar. So, you just spark up the idea that the best thing to do is to clean up the country. 1

Notes

  1. Hubbard, L. Ron (1951, June 27) Civil Defense: New Channels for Putting Dianetics Into Society. First Annual Conference of Dianetic Auditors; Wichita, Kansas ↩