Privilege and Perjury in South Africa

 

A second major recommendation contained in the 192-page Report was the proposal that legislation be passed, aimed at controlling the practice of psychotherapy for fee or reward. Under terms of the Act, a professional council would be set up to pass on the practitioner's qualifications.

Was Sir John being naive or merely clever when he advanced the absurd notion that such a professional council - probably controlled by psychiatrists and medical men - would, as he put it, welcome the Scientologists with open arms if they could make good their claim that Scientology was indeed the first thoroughly validated psychotherapy?Did he honestly believe, after reviewing the documented evidence placed in his hands during the Inquiry, that the secret international alliance which had initiated the persecution of Scientologists all over the world would accept them as qualified colleagues?Even allowing for the fact that the legal mind is capable of the most extraordinary contortions, one is driven to conclude that the eminent expert on law saw in such legislation the means of eliminating all unorthodox mental therapies.Further supporting this view is the fact that be wanted the law to apply not only to Scientologists, but to doctors, dentists, ministers of religion, social workers and marriage guidance counsellors as well. "If any of these wish to charge their patients or clients for practicing psychotherapy on them, there is no reason why they should not first satisfy the Council that they have undergone the necessary training and obtained the necessary qualifications."

The residual import of Sir John's proposed legislation is that a protective trade union for psychotherapists, similar to that which exists for the practice of medicine, should be established by statute. There is abundant evidence to show that people whose minds and/or bodies have been seriously damaged by psychotherapy have been patients who were treated by the professional people Sir John would like to have determine the qualifications of others.

At the outset, Sir John states that since he held his enquiry in private and heard neither witnesses nor advocates, he has considered himself disqualified from passing any judgment, adverse or favourable, on Scientology, its practitioners or practices. He nevertheless does pass judgment in the very thrust of his Report and in the selection of the material he presents. For example, he quotes a number of derogatory passages from the biased Anderson Report, referring to his Victorian colleague, as "Mr. Kevin Anderson, QC, a distinguished leader of the Melbourne Bar", presumably implying that the words of such an anointed member of his profession merit the kind of acceptance accorded a message from the Burning Bush.He passes judgment on Scientology when he says, "I have been unable to discover any evidence which would support Scientology's claim to be a science..."

He passed judgment on the leadership and practitioners of Scientology when he declared (in Paragraph 168, p. 120): "I am quite satisfied that the great majority of the followers [emphasis his] of Scientology are wholly sincere in their beliefs, show single-minded dedication to the subject, spend a great deal of money on it and are deeply convinced that it has proved of great benefit to them. But it is only fair also to make the obvious point that none of this furnishes evidence of the sincerity of the Scientology leadership, whose financial interests are the opposite of those of their followers."Taken as a whole, the Foster Report clearly aims at denigrating Scientology, not in illuminating it.Publicly, at least, the Scientologists themselves expressed great satisfaction with the Foster Report. David Gaiman, deputy guardian and Scientology's chief spokesman at the Saint Hill headquarters, told newsmen: "This has lifted a shadow that has been hanging over us for three years. Naturally, we are delighted that the report has recommended what we most wanted - that the ban on foreign Scientologists should be removed."

From his flagship Apollo, L. Ron Hubbard issued a telex statement, saying: "I consider the lifting of the UK ban on Scientology's foreign students as a Christmas present.

"All the ban did was cost England many millions in foreign exchange and make unnecessary upsets for people. The ban never hurt Scientology. Its numbers are double those of 1968."

Hubbard said he felt no resentment towards the British Government, who had acted on reports now proven false. "I only hope this helps get German psychiatry off the backs of the British people."The Scientologists' elation - if, indeed, it was genuine was somewhat premature. A representative of the Home Office made it clear that the British Government had no intention of allowing foreign Scientologists back into Britain "in the foreseeable future".Sir Keith Joseph, Secretary for Social Services, told the Commons that the main recommendation of the report was that the restrictions instituted in July 1968 should be relaxed, but that the practice of psychotherapy for reward should be restricted to suitably qualified persons. The Government took the view that the recommendations should be considered as a whole, that is, the ban could not be lifted until "after consultations with relevant professional organizations". "Until they are completed, the Goverment does not feel able to reach any conclusions on the report."In a word, the ban which Sir John had found to be unjustified in the first place, might be lifted, but the Whitehall overlords had not decided in what century it might happen.

While the Scientologists regarded the Foster Report as a Christmas present to them, their indefatigable adversaries thought St. Nicholas had put their names on the package. In a letter dated December 29, 1971 to Mary Applebey, general secretary of the National Association for Mental Health, Dr. D. H. Clark (medical superintendent of Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridge) wrote:"I spent much of Christmas morning reading the Foster Report and as I read it in detail I was filled with un-Christmas glee. I may be wrong, but I believe that Sir John Foster has dealt Scientology a subtle but grievous wound from which they will suffer for many years.

"If one only reads the conclusions the report seems favourable to them. This is what David Gaiman (did you see him on TV?) and the Press and other superficial people immediately seized on and which caused the Scientologists to whoop with glee. Yet the conclusions could hardly have been otherwise. Callaghan's original decision to penalise the Scientologists - out of all the queer, religious and unpleasant political sects that come to Britain -could not, in the long term be defended. Apart from that, there was little for Sir John to make recommendations on, though his suggestion that the Tax Authorities screw down on all the shadow companies of the Scientologists will, I think, hurt them quite a bit in the long run.

"When one reads the whole report however, quite a different picture emerges; Sir John refuses to draw any specific conclusions; he expresses many doubts about the kind of enquiry that he has been holding, openly calling it 'Inquisitorial'; he says again and again that he will not publish any controversial evidence and he announces that he is going to destroy everything that was said to him yet to any dispassionate reader the endictment is wholly damning and this indictment is cunningly constructed of hardly anything but quotations from the Scientologists themselves. Sir John has cunningly extracted, from all the hundreds of documents that he must have had, examples of their vicious directives, evidence of their great wealth and cupidity and the very few really damaging incidents that are recorded against them (from the Anderson Report he lifts the one really terrifying story of how they processed a woman in front of Mr. Anderson to such an extent that she had to be admitted [to] a mental hospital a week later).

"I believe the total effect on any open-minded individual would be to damn the Scientologists utterly and I hope that as many people as possible - all Members of Parliament for instance - will read the report; I believe it is to them that Sir John was addressing himself. I believe that he concluded that the Scientology leadership were evil men, grasping, paranoid and litigious and that he decided to write a report for his own kind, Members of Parliament, Judges, Lawyers, members of the establishment which would slowly lead the reader to damn the Scientologists by quoting from their own texts. I may be imputing too much sublety to him but I cannot help wondering whether he did not deliberately refrain from condemning them in the hope that they would swallow the bait and endorse the report as they have done. I believe that he reached exactly the same conclusion as Mr. Anderson but decided that instead of launching a violent polemic against them which tends to be selfdefeating (as the Anderson Report is in its very intemperance) he has written a seemingly temperate report which will do them much more harm in the long run.

"Certainly, they have swallowed the bait and have endorsed the report; we can now say to anyone who enquires 'Here is a Government Report on Scientology, the Scientologists have accepted it as fair, I suggest you read and come to your own conclusions!'"

Dr. Clark added: "If I am right in this I am sure that we ought to buy large numbers of copies of the Foster Report so that we will always have them available to lend to people when necessary. I think we should consider giving it the widest publicity possible. Could we perhaps consider devoting one copy of 'Mental Health' exclusively to quotations from the Foster Report - perhaps by using Sir John's techniques and adding nothing of our own but merely quoting from him?" In her reply, Miss Appleby agreed that the Foster Report was a subtle hatchet job, but she expressed some doubt that it had dealt as grievous a blow to the Scientologists as her comrade-in-arms seemed to think.

"I was delighted to have your Christmas lucubrations on the Foster Report, and I am delighted that you consider the Foster Report as subtle as I do. What I wonder is whether the wound you see is in fact very grievous. I entirely agree that there is nothing in the Report to cause the Scientologists glee. On the other hand, unless the public can be made to read the Report and to appreciate the subtlety of its conclusions, have we really got very far? Of course no objective enquirer could recommend that the immigration ban should be continued, but any suggestion that Dr. Weissmann and his merry men will deter the Scientologists from their 'therapy' is, I am afraid, moonshine (see Donald Gould in this week's New Statesman). However, it would be good to talk to you about this, as I am talking to a number of people."

In South Africa, it was like watching a well-known play. The cast was different, but the lines were as familiar as those in the passage from Macbeth: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..." Anyone who had attended the performances in Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and London could have joined in under his breath.There on stage was the protagonist, the cosmic pretzelbender from the National Association for Mental Health (played by T. J. Stander) with his overblown rhetoric describing the horrors of Scientology.

There were the Pals in Parliament (Drs. Ventner and Vosloo, and the Hon. Mr. Wood) who duly raise the motions; the Honest Health Minister (Dr. Hertzog) who refuses to act on rumour and second-hand evidence of what allegedly happened in another country half a world away, and is forthwith supplanted by the Second Health Minister, (Dr. de Wet) an obedient servant.

Then, in their turn, come the Chief Headshrinker (Dr. Pascoe) who appears briefly to dispense learned nonsense and dire warnings; the White Knights of journalism following, ludicrously mounted on jackasses and bearing banners with such inscriptions as "Punish These People", "Ban Scientology" and "Witchcraft Too"; and bringing up the rear, the long-faced clergy (the Reverends de Vos, Botha and van Niekerk) reciting the Word of God, spiced with such pulpit metaphors as "Synagogue of Satan".Providing an absurdist background of camouflage and confusion to the whole performance is the Anvil Chorus (Rational Thinkers, National Welfare Board members, Professors of psychology, and Medical Association lobbyists) all in fright wigs, intoning passages from the Anderson Report, like a group of Maoists brandishing the little red book.The entire production is centred, of course, upon the Inquiry, which comes along in due course, and apparently is intended to supply an element of suspense. The False Witness (Capt. Jan Hendrick du Plessis) gives perjured evidence which two and a half years later he will recant, as did Phil Wearne in Australia, saying he was motivated by a desire for revenge. Testimony will be taken from outraged parents and marriage partners, failed Scientologists, an ex-Communist, alcoholics and psychiatric patients.Although there were a few random laughs imparted by befuddled stand-up comics in baggy trousers; and fragile hysterics when Possessive Mother with voice vibrating like violin strings, told how Scientology lured her forty-fiveyear-old son away from home, on the whole the South African performance was a mechanical replay, put on by an amateur dramatic society.