======== Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology Subject: AUM SHIN RIKYO AND SCIENTOLOGY From: mgarde@superlink.net (Maureen Garde) Date: Sat, 07 Sep 1996 17:33:14 GMT AUM SHIN RIKYO AND SCIENTOLOGY: Is there a comparison? I think there is. I've just finished reading a remarkable book: "The Cult At The End Of The Universe," by David E. Kaplan & Andrew Marshall (Crown Publishers, Inc., N.Y., N.Y.). This book details the history of Japan's Aum Shin Rikyo religious cult and its leader Shoko Asahara (real name: Chizuo Matsumoto). This book is mandatory reading for anyone concerned about religious cults and the danger that many of them present to society. The Aum Shin Rikyo cult's highest leadership was responsible for the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway system on March 20, 1995. Twelve people were killed, and over 6,000 were injured. It could have been a lot worse. And it was not the first time the cult had unleashed a gas attack. It was just the first time that they were caught at it. Those familiar with the activities of the church of scientology, both those proven and those alleged, will find many chilling and remarkable parallels between Aum Shin Rikyo (or Aum Supreme Truth) and scientology. The parallels begin with the cult leaders. Who does Shoko Asahara remind you of? He was from a poor family, sent to a boarding school for the blind at a young age. He could seen well enough, however, to dominate his classmates and bully them. He tried to enter Tokyo University, but failed the entrance exam. He then turned to various scams, including an acupuncture and yoga clinic where he sold quack health remedies. He became interested in Hindu and Buddhist practices, visited the Himalayas and came home claiming to have mystical powers. He began advertising in a Japanese magazine devoted to the supernatural, and selling expensive yoga courses. Soon, however, he announced that his teachings were a religion, and he renamed himself Shoko Asahara and his organization "Aum Supreme Truth." He installed himself as the cult leader, whose word was law. He required blind obedience to his teachings. Asahara, through Aum Supreme Truth, offered courses to followers that claimed to raise adherents to a higher spiritual level. The organization was set up with various levels, with courses and examinations required to go from level to level. And the courses cost large sums of money. Adherents were pressed to contribute still more to Aum, with their rewards consisting of photo sessions with Asahara and the grand prize of gallons of the cult leader's dirty bathwater, said to have miraculous powers. Aum claimed to invest its followers with powers of telepathy and levitation and superior mental skills. They also taught that people had lived past lives. Cult members were told to disconnect from their families, and family contact resulted in punishment. Members were isolated in cult compounds, given little sleep and food, and forced to participate in cult rituals. Turnover of all of their assets were demanded, leaving people without resources even if they wanted to leave the cult. Cult members wore caps which electrically stimulated their brains, and were said to coordinate their mental patterns with that of the cult leaders. Not surprisingly, the caps cost a lot of money. Aum's blend of religion and philosophy had many sources, including science fiction literature, most significantly, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. One of Aum's top cult leaders, Hidel Murai, claimed that the cult's long term plans were based on the series. Murai, the cult's chief scientist, presided over Aum's weapons development program, which included attempts to manufacture assault weapons and ammunition and to obtain nuclear weapons components. They were frighteningly successful in making contacts with governments and criminal elements all over the world in their attempts to amass an arsenal of weapons and build weapons of mass destruction. By the end of 1987, Aum had a few thousand members, branches in many Japanese cities, and a New York office. Aum followers were trained to recruit new members. New members were urged to contribute all their assets to the cult. The money coming in was taxed, so in 1989 Asahara sought to incorporate as under Japan's religious corporation law. Japanese officials at first resisted, as one of the requirements under the law was that followers be able to freely join and leave the organization. Japanese authorities already had many complaints from parents who claimed the cult had taken their underage children from them, and refused to permit them contact with their families. Asahara's devotees marched on Tokyo city hall, and cult lawyers filed suit against the officials, who eventually gave in and registered Aum Supreme Truth as a religion. A Tokyo newspaper began to run critical articles, focusing on Asahara's past criminal history and the cult's bizarre practices, including its practice of stripping cult members of their personal financial assets and luring underage children away from their families. The cult responded by posting the editor's neighborhood with flyers, claiming the stories were lies, and secretly posting the flyers inside the newspaper offices. In subsequent years, the Aum cult would use the tactic of litigation against media critics, suing for libel when negative stories were published. One of Aum's earliest public opponents was an attorney, Tsutsumi Sakamoto. He represented many parents who were trying to have their underage children released from cult control. At a negotiation meeting, cult lawyers accused Sakamoto of trying to violate cult members' religious freedom. The meeting broke up in acrimony. Shortly thereafter a group of cult leaders broke into Sakamoto's home in the middle of the night. The group included Murai, the cult's chief scientist, and Tomomasa Nakagawa, a physician who had only recently been initiated into Aum. They killed Sakamoto, his wife, and their year old son, and stuffed the bodies into metal drums. The drums were disposed of in rural Japan, and were not uncovered until after the sarin gas attack in 1995. When the assassination team reported back to Asahara on the success of their mission, he commented that they should feel no guilt because they were doing holy work, that the Sakamotos deserved to die because they were repeating evil deeds from a past life, and that their toddler son would be born again in a higher world. The Sakamoto family simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Police treated the case as a missing persons case, refusing to assume that the family had been abducted and killed, as many people believed. It was widely assumed that Aum was responsible, yet police dismissed the connection with the Aum cult, despite finding a cult badge at the scene of the crime. Only a few of the badges had ever been produced, but when Aum officials heard that the police had this evidence, they immediately ordered the badges to be mass-produced and distributed widely. When police inquired, the cult said that they badges were widely available, that anyone could have gotten one and deliberately left it at the scene of the crime to incriminate them. The police backed off. One of the most remarkable phenomenon that emerges from reading the book is the manner in which apparently ordinary people who joined the cult could easily be manipulated into committing acts that ranged from the simply criminal to cruel and unspeakable torture and murder. One of the five cult members who released the subway sarin attack was a cardiac physician who ran the cult's hospital, where quack medical remedies were practiced on patients who were pressured to hand over their assets to the cult. Many died from their treatment, which frequently included immersion in hot water (resulting in burns and scalding). Also remarkable was the fact that the Aum cult was able to build, equip and run sophisticated weapons factories without intervention by Japanese authorities. At their secret facilities they manufactured and tested many different biological weapons such as botulinism toxin and anthrax spores, chemical agents such as sarin and other nerve gases. They operated firearms factories, and were able to purchase and import a Soviet built military helicopter. They did so with the protection of their status as a religion, claiming that police inquiries were a form of religious persecution. Amazingly, Japanese law enforcement authorities were intimidated for years, and failed even to investigate reported murders, kidnappings, financial scams and other outrageous conduct. And, their sarin attack in the Tokyo subway was only the culmination of their attempts to unleash Armageddon. A few years earlier they had unleashed a gas attack against three judges who were sitting on an important case involving one of their properties, succeeding in sickening the judges sufficiently to delay an adverse decision in the case. Seven people died and 200 were injured. They were less successful in attemps at mass murder through the spread of botulism toxin and anthrax spores. For years police in the vicinity of one of Aum's chemical factories received complaints of chemical damage to surrounding property. When police attempted to investigate, Aum refused entrance to the compound on religious grounds. They also claimed that the chemical damage (which was in fact caused by the leakage of chemical compounds from their nerve gas factory) was caused by government gas attacks on them. Aum persistently claimed that they and their followers were being gassed and poisoned, when leakage from their factories and their own chemical and biological experiments on their followers were causing sickness and even death. For a few years prior to the gas attack, the cult recruited members from Japan's military and police forces, and were able to get advance notice of planned law enforcement activities against them. Shortly before the sarin gas attack, Aum learned that the police were about to raid their facilities. They firebombed one of their own facilities, then claimed that they were being attacked by their enemies. They did so in order to gain public sympathy and head off the police investigation. The cult also claimed to receive frequent bomb threats, and they wiretapped and surveilled public officials and others they defined as their enemies. Despite mouting reports of cult crimes, authorities did nothing, claiming time and time again that they did not have enough evidence against the cult. Only in 1995 did Japanese authorities begin seriously to investigate the cult. They finally did so in response to the cult's daylight kidnapping of a known critic, a notary, in downtown Tokyo. The man was shortly dead as a result of his interrogation at Aum hands, the result of his reaction to the truth serum that was used on him. There is much, much more detailed in the book. I urge everyone concerned about the phenomenon of religious cults to read it. There are patterns that anyone can see: cult members indoctrinated into the belief that their religion is above secular law, that any act or crime is justified by their higher purpose; the encouragement of a paranoid world view; the use of litigation and intimidation against critics, the media and government; the misuse of religious status. There is enormous danger to society from religious organizations that raise their beliefs and practices above the law, and use the legitimate alue of religious freedom to obscure their activities and hide their purposes. Get the book. Read it. Make up your own mind.