The Process often said it was a mirror in which people saw themselves. That, it claimed, was a function of the open-eyed acceptance with which it met all and sundry: people simply projected onto it whatever they were concealing from themselves. The same thing, be it noted, was said about Aleister Crowley, which could explain why some found him to be a powerful focus of sacred power and others insisted they encountered a cesspool of human depravity. When there is, effectively, a complete absence of reactivity in another, that individual or that group simply take on the qualities concealed inside the observer.

My own dealings with Holger Haffke have been solely by email. I contributed some pieces to his website - www.gnosticliberationfront.com - a few years ago, then broke off after some acrimonious exchanges about his obsession with Holocaust denial. The site disappeared for a time, but recently came back up.

Before our correspondence stopped, he admitted to me that he couldn't understand the Processean concept of the mind. This is understandable, because it's not that easy to absorb from scratch. What was more difficult for me to accept was his level of suspicion, which made him almost unreachable. He seemed narcissistic and self-pitying (read the autobiographical “A Gnostic Childhood” on the site to grasp my point) and paranoid. As I experienced him, he was locked into a perspective of the Germans having been unjustly stigmatized after WW2, and this fed back into his rejection of the fact of the Holocaust. His sense of the importance of his own experiences was something I couldn't relate to what he actually said about his life, and any effort to question this met with snarling scorn. I can already see the comment he might post to this blog in response, damning me for my meanness, ignorance, and sense of my own superiority.

Holger discovered a couple of Process magazines a few months before the original Church folded in 1974. He waited a little before checking the thing out in person, only to find it no longer existed, except as its own bastard child, The Foundation Faith. His grief and loss at this (“In my heart, soul and spirit, there has been and still is, such a deep longing for The PROCESS” he says on the site) underline what I'm saying about his odd self-pity.

The charisma of The Process is now surely stale-dated, yet it continues to influence many, Holger clearly included. It's as if that open stance, that straight, wide-eyed look, is still somehow active. Thwarted in the 1970s, Holger had a wild hope three years ago that he had rediscovered The Process' hidden core, only to learn (whether he would acknowledge it or not) that he had run across a couple of hyped-up and very junior Processeans without much clue or credibility. The efforts of some people to point this out made him conclude he was facing “a well organized and well orchestrated operation” to discourage and mislead him. I'm apparently one of the people he means by this; his learning that I'm in contact with a few ex-members only deepened his sense of an exclusive conspiracy. A mean part of me finds this funny; a more thoughtful part finds it sad; and my most objective part finds it irrelevant. I don't overrate this blog's minuscule significance in the world, but I get the feeling Holger overrates that of himself and his website.

It was suggested that I tell him to take my contributions off the site, and I considered it. But I think they give it some balance, especially when he is saying, for example, that he has read Maury Terry's dreadful book Ultimate Evil and finds Terry's “claims and research are solid and impeccable.” In this, I see him projecting that paranoid, self-pitying streak again, and finding kinship with a nut-job who floats around in the murky, shallow waters of tabloid journalism.

The Holocaust doesn't die. There are still people alive haunted by its horrors, as there are some Germans, like Holger, who can't acknowledge it and move on.

My job often puts me in contact with German-trained engineers, so I sometimes deal with people who still carry inside them the anguish of the War and the desperate decade that followed it. Most have accepted history, and bear its scars as best they can. A few cannot: though both groups have a hard time talking much about it. It's far easier to disown the whole thing and project it onto a group such as The Process that, however bizarre and dishonest it could be about itself, did really nothing anyone would call criminal.

“I can no longer deny,” Holger adds on the site, “that in my heart and soul, I believe that The Process Church was the seed to a variety of murderous Satanist cults, who are more then ever busy in their work of fomenting chaos and murderous evil, including child-abductions and pornography upon this earth. I believe that these people are as smooth as satin and as ruthless as Satan himself. These are people in high and low places who in appearance and demeanor are no different than our next-door neighbors but who, driven by a perversion of the soul and spirit, delight in evil.” Whether he notices the disjuncture between this remark and his earlier statement that: “In my heart, soul and spirit, there has been and still is, such a deep longing for The PROCESS,” I can't say. Sadly, I doubt it.

 

http://skepticaltheurgist.blogharbor.com/blog/TheProcess/_archives/2006/4/17/1892467.html