Peter Damian wrote:Catfitz wrote:The entry on the Belarus Free Theater has crazy stuff about Scientology put into it by anonymous persecutors. How can this stand?
I am researching the Scientology thing at the moment. The stuff seems to have been added by this guy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Co ... s.vavokhin . Two questions: (1) is it true? (2) Even if it is, is it relevant enough to be included in an article about a theatre?
There's a very determined insider group of anti-scientologists on Wikipedia who try to get information about scientology into any conceivable subject, even when it is entirely irrelevant. Probably deserves a thread split.
I don't know what the pattern is on Wikipedia re: Scientology. What struck me about this entry is that the insertion of the Scientology stuff was a way of trying to discredit these people (along with a claim they edited their own entry). I think the Lukashenka regime is interested in trying to discredit in the eyes of Westerners this successful dissident theater group that was forced into exile.
I've known the people who run the Belarus Free Theater for something like 15 years. I've spent countless hours with them. In all this time, I never heard them once mention Scientology. I can't believe that they could somehow be Scientologists past or present without mentioning it. What I do think is possible is that in the 1990s, when all kinds of opportunists descended on these former Soviet states with a lot of vulnerable people looking for education and jobs, it's possible that some "management training" caper was made available that the one director got involved in, possibly unwittingly. But I don't see any evidence of anything further and it's bewildering. They also deny that they are the ones making additions to their own entry -- this seems to be a common technique by Wikipedia vandals (or the default of editors of bad will?), where you are accused of being the one who has added favourable things to your own entry, and, as they say in Russian, you have "no way to prove you are not a camel".
I first saw the anti-Scientology movement in the virtual world of Second Life in the groups that went on to become Anonymous. I believe they used it to prototype what were later their real-life demonstrations. The same people who were griefers in SL and involved in somethingawful.com and 4chan.org were the ones who got involved in this cause, and then some of them went on to much bigger offenses (like Barret Brown). I have no use for Scientology whatsoever, but I've always understood this war Anonymous has waged on Scientology not so much about freedom for oppressive religion, so much as a turf war between two cults vying for Internet control. Scientology was among the first users of the Internet extensively.
I realize the Scientology people themselves create fake websites and such.