What's the Matter wit' you, Mask?

Let's be frank. There is something distinctly unsettling about seeing several hundred people wearing the same mask. More unsettling still when they have all come together to protest against something that is seen as a sacred cow - that private, personal frontier of religious belief. It is far too easy to see, in the often bizarre placard waving masses of Anonymous, the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan. This becomes an easier parallel still when the origin of Anonymous is examined, the often tasteless, often (seemingly) bigoted outpourings of /b/ chan. It is too easy; it is also a mistake, a wholly unjust leap of logic to make.
Although the masks in a sense predate the demonstrations (the "group", after all, predate the removal from YouTube of that video) their need exists primarily because of the Church's Fair Game policy. CoS has a long history of harrassing critics, both legally and illegally in line with a supposedly withdrawn policy from L Ron Hubbard; that enemies of the church be cheated, lied to and destroyed. Contemporary critics of Anonymous might like to make the simple assumption that the mask is akin to the KKK wimple - that it is there to protect the identity of the wearer as a means to avoid prosecution, but no. The masks are worn to protect against the actions, legal or otherwise, of the Church.
I have been blogging about CoS since the summer of 2007. I forget exactly why I began; in part for personal reasons, in part because of the Panorama documentary, in part because of the inspiration that the old guard critics, Bunker, Christman, Heldal Lund. Aware of the defamation that has been repeatedly attempted against these and other critics I posted anonymously, and continue to post anonymously. But this was never exclusively to protect myself from Fair Game. The other, and in the greater scheme of things more important, reason is that Scientology sets up, in the mind of the believer, the notion that no critic of Scientology is free of crime. Hubbard promoted the ad hominem attack. Never defend, he said, always go after the critic; discover his crimes, fabricate them if necessary.
Again, this sounds like I mask my online self for defense, but, like so much of Scientology, the "what are your crimes" tactic has a manifold purpose. What does it mean to "never defend"? If someone is never invited to defend her belief, then she will never be forced to think critically about her beliefs. Hubbard, by commanding his followers to attack critics rather than enter into dialogues with them, was letting those followers off the hook of critical thought, even of accountability. Although by writing critically about the Church I will automatically be taken for an SP (such is their irrationality) I hope that, devoid of any attachment to a flesh-and-blood person of doubtless criminal past (like LRH himself, who died a fugitive) Scientologist readers will find it marginally more difficult to dismiss my writing without thinking about it first.
CoS should not and are not surprised by the monthly worldwide gathering of masked protestors. Tory Christman said, commenting chiefly on the way in which Anonymous rallied around the Old Guard following the Church's pulling of the Cruise video, that the Church makes its critics. Where it harrasses someone, it recruits as critics anyone who witnesses that harrassment. But CoS not only makes its critics, it shapes them too. It is Church policy that has led not only to the number of people turning up on a monthly basis to demonstrate against them, but led to those people wearing masks. Whereas it may at one point have found credibility in the claim that these masked fellows were wronguns, as soon as the Church began attacking people who participated in the demonstrations (or even were just in the area at the time) it did more to legitimise the use of the masks than anything the anonymous crowds could have come up with. Well done.