Protecting
FREEDOM OF THOUGHT

The Berlin Wall (above) dividing East and West Berlin was a hated symbol of the cold war and of a government that suppressed its people’s right to think and act freely. Top: To counter intolerance based on stereotypes, in the late 1990s the Church of Scientology launched a campaign to encourage people to “think for yourself.”

The freedom to think is the building block of a free society and is integral to the preservation of human rights. It is specifically articulated in Articles 18 and 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which confer “the right to freedom of thought” and “the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference....” Most people recognise author George Orwell’s image of “Big Brother” in the totalitarian state that dictates the life of every citizen. But Big Brother may take subtler forms: the autocratic official who violates his nation’s constitution, the press that publishes a story known to be false, or the powerful institution that purveys distorted information to the public.

Every one of us pays for the consequences of such abuses in heightened tensions, xenophobia, and intolerance. The common denominator of the individuals who engage in these acts is their desire to suppress the citizen’s basic right to think for himself.

With intolerance towards racial, ethnic and religious minorities mounting across Europe in the late 1990s, the Church launched a campaign throughout Europe to promote freedom of thought by encouraging people to take a fresh look at society. A series of advertisements, billboards, fliers, and radio spots were punctuated by the single message “Think for Yourself.” Images of famous independent artists, scientists and adventurers — Van Gogh, Einstein, William Tell and others — showed how each had made a difference by looking at the facts for himself. The encouragement to “Think for Yourself” motivated many people to do exactly that — and to reject the mass media stereotypes of minority groups that fuel intolerance.

Exposing Mind Control

From its earliest days, the Church of Scientology has been concerned with the advocacy of the right to freedom of thought. The opposite of freedom of thought is the effort to control and manipulate populations through propaganda, indoctrination and thought reform — namely, mind control.

In the mid-20th century, in the depths of the cold war era, covert government programmes were developed to manipulate men’s minds through special drugs and coercive psychiatric treatment. These now infamous “mind control” programmes included implanting destructive ideas or impulses in an individual without his consent. Among the first to discover and publicly expose and decry this practice was L. Ron Hubbard, in his 1951 book, Science of Survival.

In 1951, the very existence of “mind control” programmes was still a closely guarded secret. The day had not yet come when the revelations about CIA misconduct would reshape public perception of that agency. It was not until a quarter of a century later that the newspapers and the U.S. Congress would make the facts public. In his book, Mr. Hubbard described the combined use of pain, drugs and hypnosis as a behavioural modification of the worst kind. These techniques, he warned, “[have] been a carefully guarded secret of certain military and intelligence organisations... the extensiveness of the use of this form of hypnotism is so wide today that it is long past the time when people should have become alarmed about it.” Quoting this statement in his 1978 book, Operation Mind Control, author Walter Bowart credited Mr. Hubbard with exposing what Bowart called “a vast iceberg of mind control research using drugs as an aid to hypnotic induction.”

After Mr. Hubbard’s exposure of these mind control programmes and the human rights violations they represented, those responsible for the abuses retaliated with a massive smear campaign against Mr. Hubbard and Scientology that would last for several decades.

Undeterred, the Church of Scientology forced the “iceberg” into full view. In 1969, the Church founded the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) in London to expose and eradicate human rights abuses perpetrated by psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners against their often unwitting victims. Expanding from England across the world in only a few years, CCHR soon established a reputation as a determined and effective organisation uncompromising in protecting the rights of citizens.

“Citizens Commission on Human Rights has been responsible for many great reforms. – Erica-Irene Daes, UN Special Rapporteur

CCHR was commended for its effectiveness in a 1986 report to the United Nations Human Rights Commission by Erica-Irene Daes, a UN Special Rapporteur and Human Rights laureate (1993), who concluded, “CCHR has been responsible for many great reforms. At least 30 bills [now more than 100] throughout the world, which would otherwise have inhibited even more the rights of patients, or would have given psychiatry the power to commit minority groups and individuals against their will, have been defeated by CCHR actions.”

Throughout the 1970s, CCHR continued to uncover and expose secret psychiatric mind control experiments, including a notorious “research” project conducted at St. Thomas Hospital in London by British psychiatrist William Sargant. These experiments kept patients in a “sleep room” for up to 40 days under heavy sedation. The project was called “deep sleep,” a drug-induced comatose state lasting up to several weeks during which the unconscious victim was battered daily with up to 200 electric shocks — often without knowledge or consent. And, as confirmed a few years later by independent researchers and reported in the international media, the experiments were funded by the CIA as part of a program known as MK-ULTRA, designed to create a “programmed assassin.”