If you haven’t seen it yet, you soon will.
It’s making the rounds around the Web faster than Tom Cruise’s hyena-esque clip and it’s far more disturbing.
A group calling themselves Anonymous is out to expose and “systematically dismantle” Scientology and is throwing down the gauntlet on YouTube after enlisting hackers the world over to shut down the Church’s website several days ago.
“Over the years, we have been watching you,” says a computer-generated voice over time-lapsed images of a building I can only assume is a Scientology-owned property. “Your campaigns of misinformation; your suppression of dissent; your litigious nature, all of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed.”
If the word “destroyed” doesn’t cause the little hairs on your arms to stand on end, then the next line out of synthesizer Sam’s mouth–explaining the group’s motives–should. “For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind, for our own enjoyment.”
Now, I’m no fan of the Church of Scientology, but to destroy it for the sake of one’s own enjoyment sounds truly pathological and just downright creepy. At first I thought maybe the video was some Scientologist trying to garner the controversial belief system some ACLU-like sympathy, but the sentiments expressed in the video are so vibrantly malignant that it’s hard to believe this is an experiment in reverse-psychology.
A loose confederation of “Internet vigilantes,” Anonymous has taken on others, notes Gawker.com. But it was the release of the aforementioned Cruise video on YouTube, followed by threatened legal action by the Church of Scientology, that spurred them into action. Apparently, it’s dangerous to meddle with the tech geeks’ turf.
Anonymous admits that they are employing some of the very methods it denounces in the Church of Scientolgy itself to battle Scientology, fighting fire with fire so to speak. But does one totalitarian turn really deserve another?
Anonymous promises that the infiltration and destruction will be gradual and protracted, so we can only wait and see what the next move will be. For now, perhaps gossipmeister Perez Hilton summed it up best when he said in a recent post, “This is some scary Matrix s**t!”