Blacks not ready for the vote: L. Ron Hubbard’s 1960 talk supporting apartheid

[Hubbard in South Africa, 1960]

This story was originally published on February 20, 2020 at our dot org legacy site. It’s about an important lecture by L. Ron Hubbard that Scientology tried to keep under wraps. We decided to find room for it here at our Substack so it will have an ad-free archival home. — T.O.

We have a very disturbing audio recording for you today, a 1960 lecture by L. Ron Hubbard that the Church of Scientology would rather that people forget.

At the end of that year, in Washington DC, Hubbard held another of his “congresses” — a series of lectures, usually more than one a day, over several days. In this case, on the final day of 1960 Hubbard began the “Anatomy of the Human Mind Congress” with three talks, which you can see listed from Scientology’s official “Technical Bulletins” (red volume) record of the gathering…

You can see clearly that the third talk he gave that day, on December 31, was titled “A Talk on South Africa.”

In all, Hubbard gave six lectures over two days for this brief “congress.” And yet, if you pull up the Church of Scientology’s current package of this congress, it clearly states that there are only five lectures. And they’ve been renumbered:

AHMC-1 The Genus of Dianetics and Scientology
AHMC-2 The Things of Scientology
AHMC-3 Dianetics 1961 and the Whole Answer to the Problems of the Mind
AHMC-4 The Field of Scientology
AHMC-5 Scientology Organizations

Hey, what happened to that talk on South Africa?

The Church of Scientology would prefer that you didn’t notice it had been dropped from its package. Audio of the lecture has been available on the Internet for years, but for some reason it hasn’t received a lot of attention. And now, for the first time, we have not only the full audio for you to hear, but also captioning so you can follow along with Ron as he takes you on a little travelogue after his months in the southern hemisphere.

And what a travelogue it is. It’s more of a harangue really, damning the “northern press” for producing fake news about the South African apartheid government, and explaining how the “Bantus” aren’t ready for the vote.

Some sample quotes from the lecture:

“I’m not against the black man. As a matter of fact, I’m probably more friendly towards the black man than any person in this audience.”

“Right now you tell me, well, the government of South Africa does not permit the black man a vote. He doesn’t even know what a vote is!”

“Blacks kill off the Blacks. And all you’ve got to do is pull a stable government off the top of them and they promptly start killing each other off.”

“The present administration does not permit an Indian or a white tradesman in a Bantu area. Does that sound like oppression?”

“You can’t understand anything about the Bantu by understanding anything about the American black man. The American black man in the first place has been mixed with Indian and white blood over a period of a couple of centuries or less, but has actually been in close proximity to the white man and white land civilization for a century or two, you see.”

“As far from being a police state — they’re not even half as tough as the American cops.”

(Hubbard was giving this lecture the same year of the Sharpeville massacre, when South African police had opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators, killing and wounding 250.)

“The great Margaret Bourke-White…had a ball shooting pictures down there, but she couldn’t get enough bad pictures, so she sort of gave it up. They won’t photograph anything that is happening in South Africa, and they won’t really talk about anything that’s happening.”

[An iconic Margaret Bourke-White photo, from her 1950 Life essay, “South Africa and its Problem.”]

“I’d say they’ve got about 50 years to go before they get the South African Bantu up to the same status and level of civilization of the American Black.”

“The Bantu doesn’t register the same on an E-meter as a White, and I have had to start a whole program of research in addition to everything else I’ve been doing, trying to find out how to read a Bantu on an E-meter. Because he doesn’t operate like an American Negro or like a European.”

“I’m not actually trying to sell you the South African government. I could easily do so because I consider these men very able from what I have seen. They’re nice guys. I know them personally.”

“The press has ceased to be factual, has ceased to be a reporting medium and has become a propaganda media throughout the world.”

Historian Chris Owen has written for us how odd it was that Hubbard, who had so much animosity for the governments of the US and UK and other countries, embraced so enthusiastically the government of South Africa and its individual ministers. He’s practically fawning over them here, particularly defense minister Jim Fouché, who would go on to become the South African republic’s second president.

Owen found formerly confidential letters that Hubbard sent in 1966 to Prime Minister Henrik Verwoerd, trying to impress on him how much he (and Scientology) was down with the apartheid program. “I have over and over proven our loyalty to the Rightist cause,” he wrote.

Could there be any doubt of that after listening to this harangue?

So here’s the lecture. We’re really looking forward to your thoughts on it.

Saturday Bonus Stories: As we count down to the 30th anniversary of our first Scientology story in November, we’ve been posting some of our favorite articles from the past that are becoming hard to find on other platforms. Some of them are about Scientology and some of them are not. We hope you find them interesting.

Phoenix New Times (1995-1999): The cosmic life of Robert Burnham Jr.

New Times Los Angeles (1999-2002): Battling Babe-Hounds: When two dating gurus took their mutual hate to a courtroom

The Village Voice (2007-2012): Secrets of the Super Power Building; Scientology and oiliness; The strange death of Flo Barnett

The Underground Bunker (2012-2022): Scientology’s Master Spies

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Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

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