Bio of L. L.
L. L. was born in the Outback of Western Australia in 1932. At that time, there were no radio signals strong enough to reach that remote area, and it was long before TV. Communication was by telegraph, and even that was pretty remote.
Her life has not followed the usual route. She knows what it is like to kill in order to eat. As a child, a lot of her time was spend minding flocks of sheep. At age eight, L. L. spent some time being educated by four Irish nuns.
Minding "mobs of sheep" was a priority; however, she did learn to read at the convent, and from then on, read everything available: dictionaries, encyclopedias, and even some of Freud’s writings on psychology.
Birds were a great interest of hers, and because of them, she learned a lot of latin names! When L. L. was a baby, she was sharing her mother’s interest in two baby eagles that L. L.’s mother had rescued from a timber clearing project. L. L.’s father was involved in the project in order to "improve" his land holdings. The eaglets became L. L.’s "siblings."
She was sent out to work at age eleven (different work from "minding mobs of sheep"): she was tall, and looked older than she was. Working was a further education and an experience in different people. At age fourteen, she started work as a maid in a country hotel. This was further experience in observing people and developing the skill of avoiding the problems that people cause by being "loose at the lip."
In the 1950’s, L. L. spent some time catching poisonous snakes for the CSIRO (Commonwealth research labs), when it was working at developing antivenins for poisonous Australian snakes, as there were no antidotes for snakebite at that time. Coincidentally, just prior to taking part in poisonous-snake catching, she had completed an Advanced Outback First Aid course!
The only defence against a snakebite was a razorblade and a piece of innertube (to be used as a tourniquet). She was taught a unique method of bleeding and stripping blood out of the bitten limb, but fortunately, by being extremely cautious, she never had to use this.1
L. L. then moved to the city and became "semi-civilized." In the late 1950’s, she spent some time as a door-to-door salesperson in the city, which she found to be a wonderful education in how people lived, and how some were happy with little, and some were not happy with much – and vice versa.
In the early 1960’s, she opened a photographic studio in a partnership: this was the time of black & white photography and hand-coloured portraits, using oil colour on sepiatones. L. L. learned this art and enjoyed it, eventually doing all the developing and printing, as well.
L. L. became involved in raja yoga at the same time and reached an interesting state of "awareness and timelessness", but was unable to retain it stably. In her search to maintain this state, she discovered an organization that said they could do this in one lifetime, not thousands: it was a cult.2 Nothing was known about dangerous cults at at that time, so, while maintaining the studio, L. L. also attended cult indoctrination on the weekends and some evenings. The studio was doing well, and she was employing two girls and several "stringers" (freelance photographers) to do the outside functions.
The "cult" became very important, and she became a "loyal dedicated idiot" for The Cause. The Cause was to make the whole world come under the domination of "the truth" of the cult.
L. L. put a manager (a cult member) in charge of the studio, and went to England for further advanced training. Air travel was not easily within reach, so she went by ship. This voyage was a wonderful experience of different places to see and lots of food. This ship was the last passenger ship through the Suez Canal before the Arab-Israeli war: it was interesting, seeing the military posts with lots of weapons on the sides of the canal.
Cult Headquarters in England was an "awakening." Lots of study, thousands of hours of listening to tapes by the founder, over and over. L. L. remembers the first time she heard the set of tapes "on study", thinking to herself, "This bloke is saying the same thing over and over, only in slightly different ways," but by the time she had listened to these tapes for the twentieth time (each new study subject required it), she thought the Leader was the most intelligent and wonderful person in the world.
He was really clever in brainwashing and indoctrination, and often boasted on his tapes that he could brainwash anyone if he wanted to – a sneaky way of hiding the truth, by telling someone what you are actually doing, and even then, have them not see it! By the time L. L. completed the year of study and graduated, she knew the only thing to do was to open her own branch of the organization, so she came to Canada, where there was "a need" for a new branch. The idea was to get it operating and return to Australia: instead, in 1968, she became the world leading recruiter for the organization, and was awarded with further upper level indoctrination by the Cult!
In late 1969 and the early 1970’s, L. L. noticed that the people she sent to the organization for upper training were not becoming the superior beings with high ethics that the organization promised this trainng would produce. She thought she must be at fault, herself, in some way for this, so she redid her training, and made sure she knew the material thoroughly. By this time, she had decided that she wasn’t doing enough to bring the organization’s power to the world, so she took the Cult’s secret police training.
When L. L. returned to Canada, someone gave her the book 19843 and here was what she had just been trained to do: steal files from libraries’ newspaper morgues and replace them with documents carefully prepared by the organization’s Public Relations Department – reading the novel was a shock!
Stupidly, L. L. imagined that some corrupt people were taking over the organization, so she tried to reform it, and correct the corruption. Then, L. L. discovered she was "targeted for elimination"! The sudden realization that the organization was actually an international criminal conspiracy was like discovering God was a Con Artist!
After speaking with a lawyer (whom she had secretly investigated for the organization three years before) and with the RCMP, L. L. was advised to go public 4, so she did, and became an outspoken voice about Cults, Pimps, and Other Creeps, and how people of good faith can be manipulated as fronts for criminal groups. It was for this work that L. L. was nominated by a women’s group for a lifetime achievement award.
©2002, L. L.; Notes, ©2002, Jesse Ancona. All rights reserved. For information on citation of Internet sources using the Harvard System, see Library - BRIDGES: Harvard System - Electronic Material.
Notes (by Jesse Ancona)
1 Maybe her early training with poisonous snakes gave her the ability to survive the deadly human "snakes" she encountered later in life!
2 As L. L. mentions in her article, "Cults, Pimps, and Other Creeps," cults often tell you they can give you whatever it is you are seeking – once they find out what that is. This was the "bait" that hooked L. L.
3 Orwell’s 1984 has an uncanny ability to help cult members deprogram themselves. Heather and Gary Botting were able to emerge from their brainwashing as Jehovah’s Witnesses after reading this book, as they reported in their study of the organization’s methods in The Orwellian World of Jehovah’s Witnesses, which helped me (Jesse) to understand how the Worldwide Church of God operated. George Orwell was very insightful, being able to recognize, in 1948, how certain elements of British society were leaning towards the kind of totalitarian thought Orwell features in 1984. Interestingly, Karl Marx came to his theories of communism while studying in England.
4 While, intuitively, a person wants to hide when being hunted, in these cases, going public is the only protection. It makes it impossible for your enemies to quietly eliminate you without questions being asked. The head of Iranian security, when he left his country for America, experienced the same thing when the CIA turned against him, and his only protection was to publish a book about his experiences, which stopped their pursuit.
