THE ORANGE PAPERS
A series of pages about Substance Misuse Recovery Programs, Real Recovery.
and Analysis of Alcoholics Anonymous.
An Online Book by "Orange"
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information,
which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man
in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to
investigation."
HERBERT SPENCER
The above famous misquote1
was put in the Big Book by William G. Wilson,
in Appendix II, "Spiritual Experience",
in the back of the second and third editions.
Bill Wilson was trying to imply that we should not dismiss his
"spiritual cure for alcoholism" without first trying it.
That is curious, because in 1864 Herbert Spencer was actually arguing against
fundamentalist religious beliefs and dogmatic blind faith,
and in favor of Charles Darwin's new theory of evolution.
Nevertheless, that quote sounds like good advice.
So let's really, honestly, investigate Alcoholics Anonymous,
without rejecting criticism of A.A. before investigation of
all of the facts...
What is the REAL A.A. success rate?
Out of each 1000 newcomers to A.A., how many will pick up a one-year sobriety
medallion a year later? Or ever?
And how many will get their 2-year, and 5-year, and 10-year coins?
How about 11 years and 21 years?
This mirror of the Orange Papers has no affiliation with the original author, nor with various discussion groups , chatrooms , or other forms of "social media" that are named after the Orange Papers. If/when the original Orange Papers website is restored to a working state, this site will be redirected there.
Consider a diagnosis of ADD or ADHD.
Also see
this letter about
how a diagnosis of "alcoholism" immediately prevents any other underlying
diagnosis like depression or ADD. The "authorities" claim that alcohol caused the mental problems,
not that the mental problems caused the drinking.
GSC51 (pdf) == AA GS Conference report from 1950, where Bill Wilson helped himself to even more money.
See a discussion of this document
here.
Bill Wilson's Last Will and Testament, leaving ten percent of his estate
to his favorite mistress, Helen Wynn, and the other ninety percent
to his wife Lois.
2011_Marcus_Chatfield.pdf,
Marcus Chatfield's interview with William White about Straight,
the child-abusing "rehab" program
Grant of Authority: A.A. General Manager Greg Muth authorizing
the German A.A. organization to sue A.A. members who were publishing their
own translation of the old out-of-copyright first edition of the Big Book
A lawyer's opinion to Greg Muth, declaring that the 400 multilith
(mimeograph) copies of the Big Book that Bill Wilson made and sold were
not a problem to the copyright. Of course the lawyer maintained the fiction that the copies were all stamped
"Loaner Copy", which they were not.
Historymetaphor.pdf, by Peter Ferentzy and Nigel Turner,
a history of the debate about whether problem gambling is literally a disease, or only metaphorically so.
Much is also applicable to alcohol abuse and A.A.
Get this entire web site in a set of compressed packages so that you can
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Current as of 2017-11-22 (yyyy-mm-dd).
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2013.11.06: I did not get a URL for the "list of Major Areas of Post-cult Adjustments",
but a Google search yielded this, which is probably
what he was talking about:
http://www.csj.org/studyindex/studyrecovery/study_repairsoul.htm
That is a page by none other than Janja Lalich, Ph.D, who also co-wrote a bunch of books about
cults with Prof. Margaret Thaler Singer of University of California at Berkeley, who was a reknowned
expert on cults and brainwashing. (Look
here and
here.)
Dr. Margaret Singer was one of the doctors who studied the brainwashed veterans who returned from Korea.
Made a list of all of the letters where A.A. followers claimed that A.A. has
saved millions of alcoholics. There are a lot of them.
A.A. "MILLIONS Saved" Stories
Reworked
the propaganda trick
"Laugh It Off", and came up with a long list of A.A. members
(ostensibly) laughing at information that disturbs them, like the cultish nature
of A.A.
The quintessential sponsor's letter: a crazy woman insists that she has
the sole right to talk to a kid who is a "retard" who
"has a serious spiritual disorder and also one inside his head",
here.
Also see comments on this letter
here.
Professor G. sent in
some interesting history.
Did you know that the "Big Book" got that name because Bill Wilson
wanted to make a medium-sized book look bigger
so that he could sell it for the equivalent of $55, so he had it printed on the cheapest, thickest
paper that the printer had, with extra-large margins, which made it a very bulky book.
Someone sent in a document that is the first official A.A. headquarters
admission that I've seen that says that sponsors raping under-age girls
in 12-Step groups is a big problem.
Look here.
The International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction
totally discredited the faked Humphries-Moos study that supposedly showed
that A.A. works better than Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. They criticized
the "test"
for many failings like bad mathematics in calculating the A.A. success rate,
no control group, mixed teachings (teaching 12-Step superstitions in
CBT courses), cherry picking, self-reporting, unrealistic environments,
and no actual valid follow-up. See:
orange-letters247.html#Clark_M.
It's quite an article.
Erik sent in a spreadsheet
that shows the recruiting and retention and failure rates of the large
Foxhall Group in Omaha, Nebraska. It's very informative.
The story of Carmen, an orphaned gosling
(which has nothing to do with alcoholism, except that this is the kind of fun that
you can have when you aren't killing yourself with alcohol and tobacco.)
Fixed a zillion misspellings and typos and broken links, thanks to Alan who
compiled a long list of such errors. If you haven't updated your local archive
of the Orange Papers in a while, now might be a good time, because much is fixed.
It turns out that MGM made a movie that satirized Dr. Frank Buchman's Oxford Group / Moral Re-Armament
cult back in 1940, called "Susan and God".
Check it out.
Another post on the Midtown Group
MySpace thread says that the "Pacific Group" on the West Coast is
similar to the Midtown Group.
And NBC4 produced yet another story of the Midtown Group. This time a policeman's wife says that she was
encouraged to cheat on her husband and to divorce him.
See the story here.
And also see the following story about life as a teenage girl in Midtown:
Michelle told News4 that sexually transmitted diseases are not all that uncommon in Midtown.
"It was almost your rite of passage. I would say that it would be
uncommon to not have something once you've been there a couple months," said Michelle.
And there are also
many more links
to Midtown Group information.
And still more on The Midtown Group.
NBC 4, the local TV station in Washington DC, has another story about a girl who ended up in the hospital
after she was told to have sex with the male cult members and stop taking her doctor-prescribed
psychiatric medications.
See story here.
And more news:
Midtown Group banned from another church in Washington DC.
See the story here.
Still more from the Midtown Group: A good historical narrative from one
of the earlier old-timers, who saw how Mike Q. took over the Midtown
Group. Includes stories like how girls are counseled to have sex with
the older male members of the group. Described and linked
here.
Still more from the Midtown Group: Newsweek magazine published an article:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID;=137850505&blogID;=258918827
== A 15-year-old girl is told to cut off all communications with people outside of A.A.,
and stop taking medications for a bipolar disorder, and is encouraged
to have sex with MUCH older A.A. men.
And that's just the start of the article.
A therapist says:
"We're all saying, 'Go to AA, go to AA,' and we may be sending people
into this terrible situation and not realizing it."
Worse of all, the police say that they can't find anything wrong with it.
Also see:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368218/site/newsweek/
== where MSNBC has reprinted the article
Now we get a report from the Phoenix, Arizona, Young People's A.A. that says that the group exists solely
for "cars, pussy, and money".
Check it out.
Over at the Rick Ross web site, there has been an on-going debate about whether A.A. is a cult.
I saw such obviously wrong
statements being made that I just had to jump in. After a few posts, Rick Ross started deleting my
messages, especially when I questioned his credentials and knowledge of A.A.,
and pointed out that he had the same number of degrees and certifications as I have == none. (But at
least I've gone to a lot of A.A. meetings.)
You can read the censored posts
here.
This is too much: a violent video game from the Religious Right
where the players wander the streets of Manhattan and
shoot those people who will not convert to fundamentalist "Christianity".
See descriptions
here
and
here.
(Can you say "Fascism" and Hitlerjugend? I knew you could say that.)
Just when you think that maybe the
Children's Gulags
problem is behind us, the sadistic monsters who wear drill sergeants'
hats brutally murder another child: http://www.nospank.net/anderson.htm
== the story of Martin Lee Anderson.
Laugh of the week:
http://www.eap-association.org/index.html
— this is allegedly The International Employee Assistance Program Association.
(That terminology, "Employee Assistance",
is code-speak for "shove all drinking and drugging employees into
a 12-Step quack medicine program.")
Their web site is so messed up that it looks like they are all stoned out of their gourds
on something or other.
Check out their web site, and then ask yourself whether you would trust those
people with your mind and your life. — Or with the lives of your loved ones.
Fun and games! South Park did a show that is an outrageous spoof of
Alcoholics Anonymous — the most biting and true satire of A.A. that I've ever
seen. You can download the show to your computer and watch it again and again.
See the story and the procedure here.
Have a Merry and Hilarious Christmas!
More on the Straights, the child-torturing "drug and alcohol treatment programs" that
were run by, among others, former Ambassador Melvin Sembler, who was also
a Finance Director of the Republican Party. (Melvin Sembler is the guy whom
Gary Trudeau lampooned in Doonesbury for buying an ambassadorship.)
Added an "Action Alley" web page
— quick, easy things that you can do to make a difference.
Right now, you should send an email to your one Congressperson and your two
Senators to oppose H.R.1258, which is just another attempt by the quacks to
steal some more of your money.
One clever correspondent, Rob, got the bright idea of
asking the A.M.A. to explain their policy
that "alcoholism is a disease". The results are appalling, outrageous,
and entertaining — It turns out that the A.M.A. actually let two A.A.
front groups write the definition of alcoholism.
Reworked, rewrote, and expanded the history of the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament,
and then split the one overly-large file into 34 smaller files,
here.
Got another account of Dr. Frank Buchman at the 1935 Nuremberg Nazi Party rally, from
Henry Williamson,
who described how Frank Buchman used his fat ass to shove Williamson out of his seat.
Got a scanner. Added many more historical pictures of the
Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, and fascists and Nazis, and Up With People to
the history of Frank Buchman
and his Groups.
A British journalist, Michael Burn, who went to
the 1935 Nuremberg Nazi
Party Day rally found Dr. Frank Buchman, Unity Mitford, and
Lady Diana Mosley
sitting together on the bench in front of him. Frank Buchman was, of course,
the founder and leader of the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament religious
cults. The madcap blond Unity Mitford was a passionate fascist and a
favorite of Adolf Hitler. Lady Diana Mosley was the sister of Unity, and
the wife of the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.
What a small fascist world it is after all.
Likewise, another British writer who observed the 1938 Nuremberg
Nazi Party Day rally noted that Heinrich Himmler "apparently
dotes on the Oxford Group
and writes to its English members discussing their troubles with them."
The debates about the torture and murder of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison
are giving us lots of examples of propaganda tricks like
distraction and
minimization and
rationalization.
More about Bill Wilson's narcissistic personality disorder:
Nina Brown's book on living with a narcissist explains a lot of Wilson's behavior.
Quotes
here and
here and
here.
Carolyn See is the stepdaughter of Wynn Corum, who was one
of Bill Wilson's paramours, and the author of the Big Book story
"Freedom From Bondage".
Carolyn recently
reviewed Susan Cheever's book
for The Washington Post.
Besides verifying her stepmother's affair
with Bill Wilson, Carolyn reported that the early A.A. members were
so extreme, so fanatical in their
opposition to medications
that they even
bickered about whether taking an aspirin for a headache constituted a slip
from sobriety.
Susan Cheever's new biography of Bill Wilson,
"My Name Is Bill"
is quite an apology for Bill.
More Big Lies — The A.A. propaganda
mill never sleeps.
Sentenced to A.A.:
Judges in the Westboro, Massachusetts area are sentencing people to A.A.
meetings for everything from exposing oneself in public to stomping heads
to being a bad cop who threatened to rape a 12-year-old girl. It seems like those
judges really do believe that A.A. is
magic snake oil that can cure anything.
Another AA/NA horror story:
First, a sponsor seduces the guy's girl-friend, then
the group seduces his 15-year-old god-son; then,
years later, another A.A. group nearly destroys his marriage.
A survivor of Dr. Miller Newton's "Straight"
concentration camp for children
tells her story.
And more about Miller Newton the child abuser
here.
Just when you thought it couldn't get any crazier:
Now there is even a 12-step recovery program for the
Adult Grandchildren of Alcoholics.
Frank Buchman the social climber actually had the nerve to tell
Queen Marie of Romania that
she was endangering
"the moral and spiritual development of her children" by not
attending any more of his tea parties.
The finances of the Oxford Group: Frank Buchman financed his cult by
collecting rich and famous members, and then
shaking them down in the name of Heaven.
Peter Howard, Frank Buchman's
disciple who took over the leadership of Moral Re-Armament and The Oxford Groups
after Frank Buchman's death, was a fascist — a real genuine fascist.
Peter Howard was a high-ranking member of Sir Oswald Mosley's New Party,
which morphed into the British Union of Fascists, and Howard was
the leader of the New Youth Movement, Oswald Mosley's copy of the
Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth).
Dr. H. H. Henson, the Bishop of Durham, pointed out that
Frank Buchman's doctrine of Checking Guidance created
"a paradox"
It was a classic example of a bait and switch trick — you started off
being told to listen to "God", but ended up being told to
listen to the cult leader —
and
Alcoholics Anonymous
still uses the same trick today.
Narcissism revisited, again:
Frank Buchman's outrageous behavior fits the criteria for Narcissistic
Personality Disorder, too.
Narcissism revisited:
Dr. Alexander Lowen wrote a great book on
the narcissistic personality disorder, and darned if it isn't a very
accurate portrayal of Bill Wilson's behavior.
In 1939, Percy Hutchison, the poetry editor of The New York Times
(and a hidden propagandist for A.A.),
declared that the new book Alcoholics Anonymous was
the best treatment of the
subject of alcoholism that he had ever seen, and it
had the best alcoholism treatment program (as if the poetry editor was
qualified to give medical advice to the public).
Rev. Sam Shoemaker, the American Oxford Group leader, invented
the "Act As If" routine to help
in the religious conversion of doubters, and A.A. has been using it ever since.
We know that Bill Wilson learned the cult religion routine from Frank Buchman and
his sequacious "Oxford Group" followers.
So, from whom did Buchman learn it? The answer was buried in
an obscure book that
was published in 1946.
Spontaneous remission:
alcoholics successfully quit drinking all on their own, all of
the time — plenty of them — in fact, far more than ever recover in A.A..
Bill Wilson's education:
Bill the "conservative atheist", "skeptical scientist", and
"icy intellectual" "whose God was science" was really just Bill the
superstitious college flunk-out.
This web site, all of these pages
and all of this information was suddenly totally erased
without prior warning or notice, or explanation,
on Sunday, April 20, 2003, by Geocities.Yahoo.Com,
whose friendly staff didn't seem to like something that I said.
They wouldn't say what it was that they were censoring.
Read the story here.
The censors and the book-burners are at it again.
Now my email is Blocked by AOL!
Wednesday morning, December 28, 2005, I answered an email
from somebody on AOL, and it immediately bounced back to me with a
big hairy error message.
I investigated and found that AOL had blocked my email
account and IP number because somebody complained about my
web site.
Read the story here.
And, if you are on AOL, you can help out by sending a letter
of protest to the [email protected]
It's fixed! AOL silently removed the blocks, without a word of explanation
or apology.
Thanks to all of the people who wrote in support
of this web site.
Footnotes:
1)
Michael has done a lot of research on that quote, and he found that it actually came
from William Paley, not Herbert Spencer. See Michael's paper here:
Survival_of_a_Fitting_Quotation.pdf
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