David Miscavige and the Stockholm Syndrome | Print |
Monday, 15 February 2010 09:44
hostageAs we read the horror stories about the SP Hall and other forms of punishment and abuse that David Miscavige has meted out to good Sea Org members, you have to ask yourself, why do people put up with this?  Why are Guillaume Lesevre (former Executive Director Int), Marc Yager (former Commanding Officer CMO Int and WDC Chairman) and Ray Mithoff (former Senior C/S Int) allowing themselves to be perpetually beat up, humiliated and degraded by a man who in actual fact doesn't have an ounce of power over them? Three men, who, if they chose to, could turn around and put this abusive dictator against a wall and turn the tide of Scientology overnight.

I can tell you this, the phenomena is widespread. It is NOT limited to just those at Int (the base near Hemet) who felt the direct hand of David Miscavige. While Guillaume, Ray and Marc and countless others, Debbie Cook on down the ranks - have endured Miscavige's gulag, the same phenomena was and is happening down the levels of the Sea Org. We felt it and experienced it at lower levels. It's called the Stockholm Syndrome.  Here is a definition:

The Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims. The syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at Norrmalmstorg in Stockholm, in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from August 23 to August 28, 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their captors, and even defended them after they were freed from their six-day ordeal. The term "Stockholm Syndrome" was coined by the criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police during the robbery, and referred to the syndrome in a news broadcast. The following are viewed as the conditions necessary for the Stockholm syndrome to occur.
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Hostages who develop Stockholm syndrome often view the perpetrator as giving life by simply not taking it. In this sense, the captor becomes the person in control of the captive’s basic needs for survival and the victim’s life itself.
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The hostage endures isolation from other people and has only the captor’s perspective available. Perpetrators routinely keep information about the outside world’s response to their actions from captives to keep them totally dependent.
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The hostage taker threatens to kill the victim and gives the perception of having the capability to do so. The captive judges it safer to align with the perpetrator, endure the hardship of captivity, and comply with the captor than to resist and face murder.
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The captive sees the perpetrator as showing some degree of kindness. Kindness serves as the cornerstone of Stockholm syndrome; the condition will not develop unless the captor exhibits it in some form toward the hostage. However, captives often misinterpret a lack of abuse as kindness and may develop feelings of appreciation for this perceived benevolence. If the captor is purely evil and abusive, the hostage will respond with hatred. But, if perpetrators show some kindness, victims will submerge the anger they feel in response to the terror and concentrate on the captors’ “good side” to protect themselves.
In cases where Stockholm syndrome has occurred, the captive is in a situation where the captor has stripped nearly all forms of independence and gained control of the victim’s life, as well as basic needs for survival. Some experts say that the hostage regresses to, perhaps, a state of infancy; the captive must cry for food, remain silent, and exist in an extreme state of dependence. In contrast, the perpetrator serves as a mother figure protecting her child from a threatening outside world, including law enforcement’s deadly weapons. The victim then begins a struggle for survival, both relying on and identifying with the captor. Possibly, hostages’ motivation to live outweighs their impulse to hate the person who created their dilemma.
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Typically, and many former Sea Org members will tell you the same, it takes a year or two AFTER leaving the Sea Org to recognize the fact that one's mind had actually been shifted into an illogical reverance for David Miscagive and that in spite of all the things that were wrong about that conclusion, one still believed that he was the good guy.  I can say from personal experience that in spite of abuse, degradation and incarceration, and clear-cut evidence showing that David Miscavige was and IS the source of the perversion we see in Scientology today, that I still denied it to myself for almost a year after leaving. It wasn't until I was out long enough to perceive the real world again, and when I got on the internet one day and read the sites posted by people that revealed the truth to me; that I actually realized that I was defending the criminal himself.

When you read this and other sites about the abuses and dehumanizing, de-personalizing incidents going on, they are not exaggerated. Emotional content aside, since it is a bit difficult for a former Sea Org member to explain what he or she experienced without some emotional output and a sense of loss of having had their dreams compromised, none of it is hyperbole. I will tell you this, most of those people, myself included, are trying to relate their experiences in terms of tangible facts. Being social personalities, we want people to know the truth, and if anything, we will and have toned down the actual pain and abusive nature of life under the DM regime in order to minimize the entheta. Social personalities don't like to spread bad news - even when it should be told about. It's terribly difficult for people outside the SO domain to get a concept of life inside the camp when all they hear about is "ideal orgs", "expansion", and other campaigns.

The reason that good people have tolerated it, in spite of their better senses, is called the Stockholm Syndrome, where the victim, the abused, allies themself to the abuser and defends them. Technically speaking we could explain it on rather simple terms from a Scientology perspective, but it helps to understand why a person like Guillaume Lesevre would stand there and let himself be degraded, and then go on the stage in front of the Scientology world and tell everyone how wonderful everything is, return to the Int base and resume his degraded existence. Like us, if they were given a chance to get away from DM and to repair their own souls, gain back their viewpoint, they would eventually come to the same conclusions.

We can give it any spin we want, but the truth is that through force, humiliation, fear and constant invalidation, David Miscavige has reduced anyone and everyone around him and below him to blithering idiots so that they could not challenge him. The only ones who are "still there" are simply henchmen and minions who do his deeds.

I watched, sadly, as long term veteran Sea Org members that I had grown up with since the 1970s in the Sea Org, were reduced to mindless insipid puppies, licking the heels of this man. In 2006 I watched David Miscavige strut by my office, with Guillaume Lesevre on his heels, running after him, because David Miscavige was "calling him".  It sickened me because Guillaume used to be one of the best executives in Scientology. It was under his command that Europe exploded with expansion in the late 1970s.

So remember this, an SP only has power to restimulate, that is ALL. David Miscavige uses that power to the hilt, and the Stockholm Syndrome is an unfortunate byproduct of his actions.

If we understand it then we can expose it.  Our most powerful weapon is TRUTH, ARC and using what we know to handle it which = KRC.

OTB