Hubbard said children were trillion year old thetans in small bodies. As such, they were entitled to have their own towel in exchange for signing a billion year contract.
I have spent decades reading L. Ron Hubbard’s directives, and I have learned to read them watching for what made the directive necessary.
Flag Order 1248, “Basic Hygiene for the Nursery,” dated 22 August 1968, is one of the most quietly damning documents in the entire Sea Organization record.
Read the order’s own opening line: “These orders are to be followed within 24 hours.” A twenty-four-hour compliance window is the language of emergency remediation, not routine housekeeping.
And the order is signed by Scientology “Medical Officer” W/O Joan Bristow, for the 4th Mate, and approved by the Case Supervisor. When a Medical Officer must issue an emergency order establishing that each child shall have his own towel, the only honest inference is that, the day before, the children did not have their own towels and widespread illness or skin disease resulted.
So I read the ten points as evidence of the state they were correcting.
Point 1: each child is to have his own towel — meaning towels had been shared. However, no order is ever given that the children’s towels must be laundered daily or laundered at all. Were the towels dirty and perpetually unlaundered?
Point 9: each child is to use his own toilet articles “and no one elses” — underlined in the original — meaning combs and toothbrushes had been passing between children.
And then Point 10, the sentence I cannot get past: “The water used for bathing is to be changed in between each child being washed.”
Sit with that. The order to change the bathwater means that, until 22 August 1968, the children of the Sea Org were being bathed one after another in the same standing, unchanged water.
Now follow the money, because this is where the document stops being merely squalid and becomes characteristic. What did the organization itself provide? A board. Some cuphooks. Labels in different colors. That is the entire material contribution of the Sea Organization to the disposable children in the nursery — and these children were chattel doomed to a life of slavery, deprivation, and horrific abuses in the Sea Org where sexual molestation, malnutrition, illiteracy, suicides, and everything else was covered up.
Everything else — soap, washcloth, comb, toothbrush, paste, and the drawstring bag to hold them — the order assigns to the parents, twice, in points 4 and 5, in case the point was missed: “These are to be provided by the parents.”
Here, then, is the arithmetic of Hubbard’s nursery: The Sea Org took the parents’ entire waking lives on a billion-year note, paid them a pittance, and in return issued their children a numbered hook on a board. The institution externalized one hundred percent of the material cost of its members’ children back onto the members.
There is a final detail that tells you what kind of organization this was. Even the act of washing was administered as Scientology drilling. Point 8 calls for “8c with A.R.C.” — 8-C being a Hubbard control drill, ARC his formula of affinity, reality, and communication. Point 9 instructs that “the children Do the drill” until each child can fetch his towel and bag “without falter or comm lag.”
Comm lag — communication lag — is an auditing measurement, the hesitation between a question and its answer, read as a symptom of “case.” Hubbard’s organization could not simply let small children learn where their towels hung. It drilled them, like preclears, until the hesitation was gone. Care was replaced by repetition, and the toddler was processed.
Oliver Twist life
This article is fascinating. I was a baby at the old “ASHO Day” house at 811 Beacon Street on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles. I came years later on the day I was born. There were 30 to 40 babies to one or two caretakers. There was a 7 year old girl that looked out for me there. She reached out a couple of years ago when I started doing interviews, before I decided to write Child X.
The woman now in her 50s asked me “do you know how they used to bathe you?”. I told her no, I was a baby. She told me once a week they would draw a bath and dip us in them hand us to the another “nanny” or what I would call an abuser and they would dry us and put on a fresh diaper. The 7 year old girl, and now a woman, told me, “they did not change the water in between.”
When I finished the book I got a call from a friend doubting the treatment of babies and children as animals within the “cadet org” or what I would call a future suicide/drug addict production machine. This was written years before I was born. It’s haunting to know that this occurred before me and that washing babies in feces was not a new phenomenon. Obviously, the issue show above did not stop the practice.
Many that read Child X doubt my account on the treatment of children because they can’t fathom why anyone one good through the trouble, go out of there way, to make children suffer. The truth is we were not and are still not children to the thousands of Hubbard religious ex paramilitary members who saw us we were then what we are to them now: trillion years old fallen gods in baby bodies at best and livestock for future Sea Org labor at worst.
I’ve never met an ex “sea org” member that saw us or looked past us. Even the one’s that speak out against slimetology for decades are like Sargent Schultz when it comes to babies and children, “I saw nothing, I see nothing”. Well, I saw you and we weren’t wearing invisibility cloaks. You saw it and now you’ve unseen it. Only Robert Dam in Denmark ever saw anything which he details in his book, Hotels of Darkness, recently translated into English.
An abomination is has occurred here and it is actively being erased by ex and anti former Hubbardites, staff and customers. This occurred on 4 continents over 30 years to thousands of Hubbard’s religious paramilitary children. The condition of animalization and the systematic destruction of the developing child mind are always the same. We had no meta intelligence. We we animals. This generation of seemingly blind ex members have some soul searching to do. If you think we were both equal victims than you are a monster in your current form. It’s time the truth was told before us children, now adults, age out and die with our systematic destruction completely erased.
The abuse was not the abuse it was the animalization, the medical neglect, educational evisceration, the unallowed emotion, no parent except for a couple hours a week, the being told that our infant hell was our fault because we pulled it in, the judgement of ptsness and lower conditions, being told we were low toned, down tone, down stat and idiots for not being full competent now in our baby bodies from millions of past lives. We are not and will never be the same as a 20 year old recruit. The only class the would conflate these two are ex members who still continue to downplay the systemic psychic and physical torture of children. This happened. It will see the light. Not just the molestations the machined icepick to the child mind. I’ve lost too many to suicide and drug addiction to continue to pretend.
May you be blessed with strength. It is a subject that must be addressed