Haven't read Corydon's book. It was Barefaced Messiah and A Piece of Blue Sky that finally got me the nerve to read OTIII. That was what convinced me that after 20yrs out I would never go back. That was when I KNEW it was a fraud all along. I DID get sick from reading it, but not pneumonia. I had violent projectile nausea from the magnitude of the fraud. No WONDER all the OTs weren't OT. There's no such thing as OT and every "OT" fucking well knows it deep down.
Then you probably haven't seen this.
From a 1985 interview of Martin Samuels, former Mission Holder, and founder of the Delphian School, from the 'Reflections' chapter of the book, 'L. Ron Hubbard, Messiah or Madman?'
http://www.amazon.com/reader/0942637577?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=sib_dp_pt :
"Hubbard operated according to a couple of key patterns.
The first pattern involved basically decent well intentioned people... no one was able to rise in the organization to a point of any real proximity to him, without being attacked and vilified...
And of course the next person thinks he or she is immune...
The next pattern: It's reap and rape. Hubbard would let the reins loose. He'd let people believe they really could get on with it... He'd let people believe they really could prosper to the full extent of their own ability, and enjoy the fruits of their labor.
And, with that kind of freedom, prosperity does occur, Inevitably, though, he'd come along and rape and pillage and rip off and take what had been produced. The most dramatic example of this was '82, '83, when he 'raped' his most decent people in management along with the mission holders, and looted the entire mission network.
And look at this pattern... He surrounded himself with absolute hooligans as 'managers'; guys who beat the shit out of people. This man, who 'is this OT, the author of Science of Survival, completely able to predict human behavior', surrounded himself with ruthless people - like Miscavige - who got there because they emulated Hubbard's savagery. They emulated his total willingness to completely break, use, and discard another person.
And then after their hands were so bloody - and the only reason their hands were bloody was that they were doing what Hubbard wanted - when it finally started to get to the point where it couldn't be tolerated by people anymore, Hubbard wiped them out. Then he said. 'My God! I didn't know!' Scapegoat. He even did that to his own wife, who went to jail in his place...
But the thing that's amazing, and to me terrifying, is the characteristic of the mind, my mind, your mind, and apparently many other people's minds, where I could buy this horseshit, where I could participate in it."
________
From the hard bound third edition of '
Messiah or Madman?'. An excerpt from its book flap material:
"I have high hopes of smashing my name
into history so violently that it will take a
legendary form even if all the books are
destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as
I am concerned. Things which stand too
consistently in my way make me nervous.
It's a pretty big job. In a hundred years
Roosevelt will have been forgotten - which
gives some idea of the magnitude of my
attempt. And all this boils and froths inside
my head...
"Psychiatrists, reaching the high of the
dusty desk, tell us that Alexander, Genghis
Khan and Napoleon were madmen. I know
they're maligning some very intelligent
gentlemen."
L. Ron Hubbard wrote these words in a letter to
his first wife in 1938.
In 1950 he wrote the bestseller 'Dianetics, the
Modern Science of Mental Health. This inspired a
layman oriented mental health movement which,
ultimately, developed into Scientology, the most
profitable of the money-making new religions.
Hubbard's early Dianetic and Scientology writings
borrow freely from Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and
the founder of General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski.
And P.T. Barnum appears to have been an inspiration.
Hubbard also took much from the writings of Aleister
Crowley - self-proclaimed "Beast 666." This is a source
of embarrassment for the Scientology Church, which
is determined to achieve broad public acceptance.
In the 1960s Hubbard incorporated Brainwashing
methodologies into the subject. He established the
"Fair Game Policy" which states that an "enemy" of
Scientology "may be deprived of property or injured
by any means by any Scientologist, without
discipline of that Scientologist. May be tricked,
sued, lied to or destroyed."
He also became the Commodore of his own private
navy, and began to refer to himself as "Source."
L. Ron Hubbard, Messiah or Madman? exposes
as never before the dark side of Scientology, yet
contains an in-depth examination of the potential
positives of the subject and their actual origins.