Longue, très longue critique de deux livres sur la scientologie par le New York Review of Books
David Miscavige, le patron de la scientologie.
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
by Lawrence Wright
Knopf, 430 pp., $28.95
Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape
by Jenna Miscavige Hill, with Lisa Pulitzer
William Morrow, 404 pp., $27.99
” One of Wright’s most shocking accounts reveals how the IRS was intimidated into allowing Scientology the status of a religion: Wright found that when in 1993 the IRS sent a bill to Scientology for $1 billion in back taxes, Scientologists infiltrated it, IRS agents were threatened, their lives became a sea of legal and domestic torments. “Some government workers,” according to Wright, “were getting anonymous calls in the middle of the night, or finding that their pets had disappeared. Whether or not these events were part of the Scientology onslaught, they added to the paranoia many in the agency were feeling.” The agency had to defend against more than two thousand legal actions. It eventually capitulated to the church’s campaign of lawsuits and harassment, reduced the amount owed to $12.5 million, and most usefully for the Scientologists, acceded to its wish to be categorized as a religion, which saves it untold sums of future taxes. (Scientology has not been given official recognition as a religion in France, Germany, Greece, and Belgium, among other nations.)”
(….)
“What explains the reluctance of the press, or anyone, to bring up religion? Do we feel it needn’t be mentioned because it is of no practical significance? Or can we assume that believers in any religion are formed according to its tenets, which might affect the rest of us, like, say, Paul Ryan’s radical Catholic sacrifice-the-life-of-the-mother views or Ayn Rand influence, which he was frank in acknowledging but were rarely mentioned?”