SCIENTOLOGY WAS UNDER ATTACK elsewhere in the world as well. Germany, acutely sensitive to the danger of extremist movements, viewed Scientology with particular alarm. In Hamburg, in 1992, the state parliament created a commission to investigate “destructive groups,” a category that included the Church of Satan, Transcendental Meditation, and the Unification Church, but was mainly aimed at Scientology. Scientologists were barred from holding government jobs and forbidden to join Germany’s main political party, the Christian Democratic Union, because they weren’t considered Christians. The youth wing of the party organized boycotts of Cruise’s first Mission: Impossible and Travolta’s movie Phenomenon. The city of Stuttgart canceled a concert by Chick Corea when it was discovered that he was a Scientologist. Seventy percent of Germans favored the idea of banning the organization altogether.
The 1990s saw the rise of apocalyptic movements in many different countries. As the millennium drew near, the theme of science fiction and UFOs became especially pronounced and deadly. In October 1994, police in Switzerland, investigating a fire in a farmhouse, discovered a hidden room with eighteen corpses wearing ceremonial garments, arranged like spokes in a wheel. Other bodies were found elsewhere on the farm. Their heads were covered with plastic bags; some had been shot or beaten. The next day, three chalets burned in another Swiss village. Investigators found more than two dozen bodies in the ruins. They had been poisoned. Some of the dead had been lured to the scene and murdered, but most were followers of Joseph Di Mambro, a French jeweler, who had created a new religion, the Order of the Solar Temple. Di Mambro’s chief lieutenant, a charismatic Belgian obstetrician named Luc Journet, preached that after death the members would be picked up by a spaceship and reunited on the star Sirius. Like Hubbard, Journet had been influenced by Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis. A year after these macabre incidents, the burned corpses of sixteen other members of the group were found in Grenoble, France; then, in 1997, five more members of the order burned themselves to death in Quebec, making a total of seventy-four deaths. In contrast to the Branch Davidians or the followers of Jim Jones, who were predominantly lower class, the members of the Solar Temple were affluent, well-educated members of the communities they lived in, with families and regular jobs, and yet they had given themselves over to a mystical science-fiction fantasy that turned them into killers, suicides, or helpless victims.
In March 1995, adherents of a Japanese movement called Aum Shinrikyo (“Supreme Truth”) attacked five subway trains in Tokyo with sarin gas. Twelve commuters died; thousands more might have if the gas had been more highly refined. It was later discovered that this was just one of at least fourteen attacks the group staged in order to set off a chain of events intended to result in an apocalyptic world war. The leader of the group, Shoko Asahara, a blind yoga instructor, combined the tenets of Buddhism with notions drawn from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, which depicts a secretive group of scientists who are preparing to take over the world. Many of Asahara’s followers were indeed scientists and engineers from top Japanese universities who were enchanted by this scheme. They purchased military hardware in the former Soviet Union and sought to acquire nuclear warheads. When that failed, they bought a sheep farm in Western Australia that happened to be atop a rich vein of uranium. They cultivated chemical and biological weapons, such as anthrax, Ebola virus, cyanide, and VX gas. They had used such agents in previous attacks, but failed to create the kind of mass slaughter they hoped would bring on civil war and nuclear Armageddon. Still, Aum exposed the narrow boundary between religious cultism and terror, which would soon become more obvious with the rise of al-Qaeda. A spokesperson for the Church of Scientology in New Zealand explained that the source of Aum Shinrikyo’s crimes was the practice of psychiatry in Japan.