Scientology has been in the news nonstop since the Tom Cruise promotional video was scandalously "leaked" two weeks ago. The Cruise news was followed by fellow Scientologist Kirstie Alley’s moment in the spotlight: her legal team threatened to have a photographer fired for making an inane crack about the religion. This past weekend saw international protests against Scientology, and seemingly every day brings a new Tom Cruise spoof video confirming the conventional wisdom: these Scientology culties are batshit nuts.

While some of their members might be crazy, though, the leadership of the church of Scientology is arguably anything but. The “leaked” Cruise video grabbed the attention of an information-addled audience afflicted with a notoriously short attention span. Osama Bin Laden famously mused that, while Westerners talked tough about Islam after 9/11, they also started buying a hell of a lot more Qurans. Likewise, while many people who watched the Cruise video may have found it bizarre or ridiculous, hordes of us also Googled Scientology for the first time. In 2008, this is surely the very definition of successful religious propaganda.

Was this dumb luck on the part of Scientology? Unlikely. What’s far more plausible is that David Miscavige, the leader of the religion, judiciously weighed the costs and benefits before signing off on this fortuitous "leak."

Tom Cruise is not crazy, either. In the video we see see a fiercely intense adult with an unbreakable sense of self and total confidence in the legitimacy of his own views. If we think Tom is a jackass and his religion laughable, he clearly doesn't give a shit. "I think it's a privilege to call yourself a scientologist," he declares at the beginning of the video, leaning forward and looking up at the camera. "You want to start shit?" he might have well asked. "Bring it." He appears less the fame-addled dipshit and more the persecuted heretic calling out the local clerisy.

Two Toms: which is the grandest inquisitor? No, Cruise isn’t crazy; but he may very well be dangerous. The Cruise we saw in the “leaked” videos is an extreme iteration of a particular type of religious fundamentalist: The "Grand Inquisitor,” scourge of all those whose faith is impure. The Grand Inquisitor is the fevered guardian of doctrinal purity who "looks into the eyes" of other men and knows that they are a danger to the cause. We've seen this type in many places and times: Tomás de Torquemada—the prototype of the class, who spent the latter 15th century torturing Spanish Christians to elicit confessions of disbelief; Che Guevara, the left-wing hero who spent romantic months in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains, eagerly shooting peasants in the head for suspected disloyalty; the henchmen of Al Qaeda, so-called “takfiri” Islamists who denounce other Muslims as non-believers, and kill them for it.

Every religion needs its Inquisitors, to be sure. In fact, any person—if they care at all about any religion, movement, or cause—must sometimes play the Inquisitor. For example: imagine that next Shabbat you attend New York's famously progressive B’nai Jeshurun synagogue, where you explain to the rabbi that you've chosen his synagogue because he understands that Judaism is a diverse and malleable tradition, and has always been adapted to the needs of its practitioners and the circumstances of time and place. So far, so good. But what if you further explain that your understanding of Judaism is that the Flying Spaghetti Monster governs the cosmos with great Grace and Majesty, and that on Friday evening we light two candles to symbolize our awareness of each of those two traits. The rabbi of B’nai Jeshurun, the very one who sings the praises of theological diversity and tolerance, must surely draw the line and tell you, well, "that's not Judaism."

So between the rabbi of B’nai Jeshurun and the most zealous evangelical minister there can be no disagreement on this one point: If our religion is to mean anything at all, we must exclude certain practices and ways of thinking. We must all play the Inquisitor—we disagree only on where the lines ought to be drawn, but on the necessity of lines there can be no disagreement.

Tom Cruise, as he convicts himself again and again through squinted eyes and gritted teeth to "Keep Scientology Working," and rails that "if you don't know [true Scientology doctrine], don't say you know," is, in one sense, no different from the current Pope, who once headed up the Congregation of the Faithful—formerly known as the Office of the Holy Inquisition. Both of them, like the rabbi at B’nai Jeshurun, seek to prevent people from polluting their faith with unwanted theologies and doctrines. Indeed, Keeping Scientology Working (a piece of scientology scripture) is one protracted plea by L. Ron Hubbard for Scientologists to stamp out incorrect interpretations of the religion. Scientologists, Hubbard says, should prefer to see someone dead rather than promoting incorrect beliefs about Scientology. Tough words, but no different from other such injunctions found in other scriptures. The anger Cruise demonstrates in this video and others, the pristine certainty and clarity with which he swears he will uphold the commandment to Keep Scientology Working, and most alarmingly, his certainty that he can detect lack of faith simply by looking into one's eyes: This is the mark not of a cult member, but of a personality type that haunts all religions and movements—an unnaturally ardent iteration of the Grand Inquisitor.

So the "leaked" Tom Cruise video may well have been a success for Scientology, but if it is true, as a recent biographer claims, that Tom Cruise is now ranked number two in the hierarchy of this growing religion, then this should give us pause. Most especially, it should give Scientologists pause. Tom Cruise will never again be the kid who danced in his underwear in Risky Business. But given real power to chart the course of a well-funded, well-organized, and rapidly growing religious movement, he may turn out to be something rather more formidable and more destructive, and the people least likely to enjoy the new Tom will be rank-and-file Scientologists themselves.

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For some time now, I have been a member-in-good-standing of the Facebook group: "Che Guevara is a PENDEJO." Here is the group's description:

For anyone out there
who's sick of seeing Che Guevara shirts being worn by idealistic
college students and/or simply hates Che Guevara or any other
communists for that matter.

We also invite anyone who's sick of hearing "naw man, you got it all wrong, Castro was an asshole but Che had the right idea."

If
you're slightly amused by the irony of a Marxist t-shirt being sold and
worn in a capitalist system, feel free to join as well.

I was immediately reminded of my association in this august body upon reading Robert Scheer's latest in The Nation (which has a thing for Cuban commies), offering a critical appraisal of Guevara's ideology (apparently it was more sophisticated than "Murdering the bourgeosie," as I had always assumed it to be) and explaining how his CIA-orchestrated assassination has actually proven fortuitous for the left because it turned him into a martyr for the new generation of Latin American leftist leaders to extol. This sentence is emblematic:

Che was restless in post-revolutionary Cuba because his anarchist temperament caused him to bristle at the emerging bureaucracy.

You gotta hand it to Scheer: "Restless" is a pretty good euphemism for "killing people with whom you disagree." Even better is Scheer's whitewashing Guevara's capricious violence as some sort of response to the ineffectiveness of the new Cuban revolutionary government's "emerging bureaucracy." Che's actually a do-it-yourself anti-statist conservative!

One can excuse certain elements of the Left's embrace of totalitarian murderers like Che Guevara because these sorts of folks have always had a hard time coming to grips with thugs preaching a "progressive" ethos. Bashing the Left for loving Che is nothing new. But more troubling among the apologists for Guevara (and the Cuban revolution, more generally) is the lack of acknowledgment of what the Cuban Communists did to homosexuals--that other, oppressed minority which supposedly owes its salvation to the Left, along with the "working classes."

In 1960, just a year after coming to power, Guevara's glorious revolution established forced labor camps (actual gulags, not the fake one of Amnesty International's imagination) for any and all assortment of undesirables. This is how Alvaro Vargas Losa tells it (his article is entitled, by the way, "The Killing Machine," which confirms Scheer's impression that Guevara was indeed just "restless" with the ineffectiveness of the Cuban government's ability to violently suppress dissent):

This camp was the precursor to the eventual systematic confinement,
starting in 1965 in the province of Camagüey, of dissidents,
homosexuals, AIDS victims, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Afro-Cuban
priests, and other such scum, under the banner of Unidades Militares de
Ayuda a la Producción, or Military Units to Help Production. Herded
into buses and trucks, the “unfit” would be transported at gunpoint
into concentration camps organized on the Guanahacabibes mold. Some
would never return; others would be raped, beaten, or mutilated; and
most would be traumatized for life, as Néstor Almendros’s wrenching
documentary Improper Conduct showed the world a couple of decades ago.

The Communist Cuban regime's treatment of homosexuals was most famously recounted in Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls, the film version of which cast Johnny Depp as a transvestite who smuggled Arenas's prison diaries off the island via his amazingly stretchable...well, you get the picture.

Scheer offers a few drips and drabs of qualified criticism about Che's legacy.
"Fortunately," he writes, Latin America's new crop of leftist thugs "differ from Che in preferring the ballot to the gun," (just wait until Hugo Chavez loses an election). But you know the left is lost when it is still able to glorify and explain away the crimes of a murderer of homosexuals.

When I saw the headline of this Times piece -- "A Revolutionary Icon, and Now, a Bikini" -- I thought it was another example of late-breaking news coverage from the paper that first informed us about a week ago of the "ironic" hipsters who've carved out a niche for themselves in Williamsburg. Then I read this:

Ms. Guevara and her family, too, have tried to stop the marketing of Che’s image in ways that they find abhorrent. She says they have reached out to lawyers in New York, whom she would not identify, to pursue companies the family thinks are misusing the image, not to sue them for damages, but to ask them to stop.

Communists who sue for copyright infringement. What's next?

Ms. Guevara travels the world speaking at conferences dealing with Che. At one in Italy, she learned after signing T-shirts for some young people that they were Fascists. “They knew nothing about him,” she said with a sigh.

Gotcha.