(Reminds me of Keith Henson)1
This email exchange between Alanzo and me is self-explanatory. I believe it adds to the understanding of certain immediate and public issues that have arisen within the Scientology problem. I am also posting this exchange for a number of reasons including for optimum transparency.
On Fri, Jul 19, 2019 at 9:28 PM Gerry Armstrong wrote:
Hi Allen:
You quoted Karen Pressley from Scientology Whistleblowers, Observers and Troublemakers:
“Then, I woke up this morning and found a post about the harm Mike Rinder caused to Gerry Armstrong while Mike and Gerry and many of us were in the cult. I deleted it because that post, even though there is no doubt that Gerry Armstrong was dealt a deep injustice, the post had the intent to suck readers back into the black hole of destructive Sea Org operations which hundreds to thousands of us have left years ago.”2
Then you wrote:
If you want to see the posts that Karen censored from her group, and talk to the great critics and whistleblowers she trashed and banned, go to Scientology Deprogramming. You will be welcome there and allowed to contribute – no matter what rank you had in the Sea Org.
Yes, I would like to see the subject post from SWOT she found and deleted, which went into Rinder’s black hole of destructive Sea Org ops he ran against me.
I was an ensign. Do you have any other ex-ensigns at Scientology Deprogramming?
Thanks,
Gerry
From: Alanzos Blog
Sent: July 20, 2019 12:11 PM
To: Gerry Armstrong
Subject: Re: SWOT docHey Ger-
The post that Karen Pressley saw and which she took down was your letter to Aaron Smith Levin:
From: Gerry Armstrong
Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2019 4:13:44 PM
To: ‘Alanzos Blog’
Subject: RE: SWOT doc
Thanks. Dark comedy.
It is ridiculous of Pressley to say that Rinder caused harm to me while we “and many of us were in the cult.” All of my fair gaming that Rinder is responsible for was after I left the cult, but he and Pressley were inside.
From: Alanzos Blog
Sent: July 20, 2019 3:03 PM
To: Gerry Armstrong
Subject: Re: SWOT docI really don’t think she knows. Most everybody who is a critic now knows almost nothing about what happened prior to their own escape. And most of them left in 2012 or after. Mike is busy revising history for them and he has been incredibly successful.
Alanzo
From: Gerry Armstrong
Sent: July 21, 2019 4:42 PM
To: ‘Alanzos Blog’
Subject: RE: SWOT doc
I have the Kindle version of Pressley’s book Escaping Scientology: An Insider’s True Story: My Journey With the Cult of Celebrity Spirituality, Greed and Power, which I’m newly looking at. She writes that she knew of me soon after she got into Scientology, which is about when I left. She mentions me twice in the book, both in odd contexts.
Her silencing of my relevant words in a present-time matter that in the Scientology awareness milieu had to be on a lot of people’s minds is understandable, not by what she says about defending readers from being sucked back into the black hole of destructive Sea Org operations, which, she also says, hundreds to thousands of people like her left years ago, but by her ongoing relationship with Rinder. She writes:
Thank you to Mike Rinder and Steve Hassan for writing a foreword to my book.
And following Rinder’s foreword, she writes about him:
Mike Rinder, former Executive Director of the Church of Scientology’s Office of Special Affairs (OSA) and international spokesperson, has become the foremost critic of the Church of Scientology International since he left Scientology in 2007. A second generation Australian Scientologist, Mike worked with L. Ron Hubbard in the Sea Organization aboard the Flagship Apollo since 1973. He remained in the Sea Org until 2007, when he concluded that there was no way he could change the culture of violence and abuse that had become endemic under its head, David Miscavige. Since Mike left Scientology, he has worked to bring about change that ends abuses within the church. Mike has appeared in the Emmy-award winning HBO documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief by Alex Gibney (2015) and works as a consultant to Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath (A&E Channel, 2016-2017).
Yes, Rinder has been, by the world’s standards, in various ways, incredibly successful. But it is a key issue of our time: do all the history rewriters working determinedly throughout history at their rewriting jobs and with the best rewriting technology and equipment actually rewrite any history whatsoever? Ultimately history rewriters would have to kill everyone who might tell the truth, and even that is possibly impossible. In fact-based reality, the lies and the efforts to rewrite history are facts and part of history and reality, but like Scientology they don’t work as sold.
Rinder’s solution for people pillorying him for all his history-rewriting, and for all his refusal to tell the relevant and freeing truth, is very simple. Just give up. Stop ignoring his victims, which is not difficult because ignoring us is utterly unjustified. Tell the easy, pleasant, repentant truth about what he did to whom in service of Hubbard, Scientology or Miscavige. He would end up telling the easy, pleasant truth to all the people who supported his stubborn post-Sea Org refusal to do the right thing, all the people like Pressley he got to promote him as the foremost Scientology critic, and to censor and negate his foremost victim.
Well I have good reasons now for contacting Karen Pressley. So I am grateful to the person who posted my note to Smith-Levin on SWOT. I have a few times chuckled about a closed group whose members “are focused on the bigger picture of exposing Scientology’s abuses and crimes.”
Cheers.
Gerry