Episode 160: The Moonies Conquer DC feat Elgen Strait

QAnon Anonymous

September 24, 2021

1 hr 36 min

"A Korean cult leader with various sex crime allegations kicks off a relationship with Richard Nixon. Before you know it, a chain of Republican Presidents embrace the Unification Church (AKA "the moonies") and The Washington Times is born. Most recently, a splinter group of the cult — which has been manufacturing AR-15s — ends up participating in the January 6th storming of the capitol. Plus, we speak to Elgen Strait of the Falling Out Podcast about his life growing up in the Unification Church and ultimately deciding to leave it — and how the anti-communist, alt-Christianity promoted by "the moonies" is a blueprint for today's far-right media landscape."

https://www.qanonanonymous.com/

Other resources:

• CultNEWS101: Conspiracy Theories Collection
• CultNEWS101: QAnon Collection 

Lengthy Lawsuit Exposes Rifts Within Unification Church

Decade-long litigation between groups founded by Rev. Sun-Myung Moon nears its possible conclusion in D.C. Court of Appeals.

NATHANIEL EISEN

Washington City Paper 

SEPTEMBER 7  2021

The property at 16th Street and Columbia Road NW in Adams Morgan affiliated with the Family Federation for World Peace and Unificationism International

The property at 16th Street and Columbia Road NW in Adams Morgan affiliated with the American arm of the Unification Church 

If the Sunni-Shia schism or Martin Luther’s revolt against Catholicism had taken place in an American courtroom, they might have resembled the scene at the D.C. Court of Appeals (or rather, on its split-screen simulcast) on June 17. There, lawyers representing two of the main factions of the post-Reverend Sun Myung Moon Unification Church debated whether Unificationism was a religious denomination or a nondenominational movement and which exact peace festivals (there were many) Reverend Moon supported while he was alive. They became particularly entangled with the meta-issue of how to characterize their fight, with the defendants claiming it was a dispute over religious doctrine and leadership and therefore off limits to the court under the First Amendment, and the plaintiffs claiming it was a case about misappropriation of church property and violations of nonprofit law.

Americans under the age of 40 are far less likely to have heard of the Unification Church than their parents. Readers may also not know the Washington Times newspaper and the seemingly permanently-under-construction gray stone building at the corner of 16th Street and Columbia Road NW in Adams Morgan are both owned by the American arm of the Church. They also might be surprised by the millions of dollars the Church-affiliated nonprofit at the center of this litigation spent subsidizing the seemingly incongruous corps of the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Brookland and the Contras in Nicaragua. They might not have even heard of a mass wedding. But we get ahead of ourselves.

The oral arguments on June 17 were for an appeal of a D.C. Superior Court ruling from March 2019. That court found partially in favor of the plaintiffs, led by Family Federation for World Peace and Unification International. FFWPUI claims to lead the global religious movement of Unificationism, and is helmed at present by the widow of Reverend Moon, Hak Ja Han. It sued Reverend Moon’s eldest son, Preston Moon, his handpicked directors of the board of the nonprofit corporation Unification Church International, and UCI itself, in 2011 over a series of decisions that culminated in the UCI board donating assets, whose value was conservatively estimated at roughly half a billion dollars, to an unaffiliated Swiss foundation. Agreeing with the plaintiffs’ core arguments, the Superior Court ordered the offending directors to be replaced and the value of the assets returned to the nonprofit. The case—one of just several legal skirmishes among the factions—has been closely followed by members of the Church, estimated to number three million worldwide. They now await the ruling from the Court of Appeals. 

That court’s decision could either end the proceedings (assuming an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is not pursued and granted) or return the case to the lower court, likely for a jury trial. Regardless of the outcome, the case has already illuminated how Washington has continued to be a locus of business, religious, and ideological activities for the Unification movement. It has also illustrated the tensions between a charismatic religious movement (one led by a single individual whose followers view them as imbued with superhuman wisdom, spiritual, or other powers) and the secular rules by which American church-owned corporations operate.

The Unification Church

Reverend Moon founded the Unification Church in the Republic of Korea in the 1950s. The religious movement is dedicated to the unification of Christianity and eventually all religions under its banner, and its liturgy and practices contain a mix of Christian and Korean shamanistic elements. Moon, who proclaimed himself a messianic figure, eventually followed some of his early disciples to the United States in 1972. He and his wife Hak Ja Han, viewed by believers as the “True Parents of Humanity,” settled in New York’s Hudson Valley and raised a family while also founding church branches in numerous other countries. 

Initially known for the mass weddings of thousands it conducted among believers, the church was considered a cult by many in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. This was especially true among the parents who hired so-called deprogrammers to bring back their young adult children who had become devotees. The U.S. government was also suspicious—in the late 1970s, Congress investigated Moon and his top deputies for connections to a Korean Central Intelligence Agency campaign to bribe members of Congress and otherwise sway public policy. In 1982, Moon was convicted of tax fraud and served 13 months in prison.

In 1977, Moon established Unification Church International, a nonprofit corporation incorporated in D.C., to hold church assets, and in 1982, he founded the Washington Times. The reliably conservative and bombastic paper helped Moon gain acceptance and influence upon his release from prison, especially, though not exclusively, in Republican political circles. At a certain point, UCI took ownership of the Times’ parent company and, according to the briefs in this case, subsidized the Times with somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion between 1982 and 2006. 

Simmering battles between Hak Ja Han, and three of his children, Hyun-Jin (Preston), In-Jin (Tatiana), and Hyung-Jin (Sean) Moon for control of the religious movement, its money, and institutions, have erupted since his death in 2012. These were presaged by actions Reverend Moon took in his final decades.

In 1994, Reverend Moon declared that the Unification Church had achieved its providential purposes and declared an “end of the church” era. Under this new doctrine, Reverend and Mrs. Moon opened their mass wedding ceremonies to non-Unificationists and redirected some resources away from spreading Unificationism and toward initiatives ostensibly promoting families, peace, and interreligious dialogue. In 1998, Moon named Preston, his second-eldest living son, vice president of FFWPUI, which had been recently created to direct the movement globally under the new doctrine. During the inauguration ceremony, Reverend Moon named Preston the “fourth Adam,” indicating, some church scholars and officials and Preston himself say, that Preston would be Reverend Moon’s spiritual successor, although Hak Ja Han, who was publicly venerated with Reverend Moon during his life, has also claimed that title since his death.

In 2006, Preston added the titles of president of UCI and chair of its board of directors, and his hold on key institutions seemed near complete. However, after Preston sent a letter critical of church direction to his parents in 2008, they replaced him with his younger brother Sean, then pastor of the powerful Unification Church in Seoul, as vice president of FFWPUI and in several other institutional roles. The previously subterranean schism erupted. 

The circumstances and significance of the declaration of the “end of church era,” of Preston’s removal from various positions, and Sean’s ascendancy—and even more so the ultimate question of the direction and spiritual leadership of the Church today—are all disputed. (Sean and Hak Ja Han are, if anything, more estranged than she and Preston are. In 2019, Sean filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York seeking to be named rightful leader of the Church, which was dismissed. He and his U.S. congregation, the Sanctuary Church in Pennsylvania, have gained notoriety for his apocalyptic sermons, devotion to assault weapons, and his attempt to supplant Hak Ja Han via a posthumous arranged marriage for his father. Meanwhile, Tatiana, with the support of Sean, staged her own board takeover of the American arm of the Church in 2008 before resigning several years later, at least in part due to an extramarital affair.)

The Lawsuit

One prize all factions would like to claim is the tax-paying nonprofit Unification Church International, which now goes exclusively by the acronym UCI. When Reverend Moon formed UCI, its articles of incorporation charged it with supporting activities of Unification Churches around the world as well as educational and other activities in keeping with the principles of the Unification Church. UCI was the holding company for many for-profit enterprises, such as a real estate company called US Property Development Corporation and a lucrative fishing and seafood empire known as True World Foods, as well as net money losers such as the Times. For years it disbursed funds both from these enterprises and from donations from Unification Church entities, especially in Japan. (Multiple Japanese widows filed lawsuits claiming they were pressured to give money to the Church to ensure their deceased husbands’ souls would be saved.)

FFWPUI, now effectively under the leadership of Hak Ja Han, and the Church arm in Japan that provided the majority of donated funds to UCI have sued Preston Moon and other directors of UCI, as well as the corporation itself. They accuse them of unlawfully diverting half of UCI’s assets from their intended purposes, in breach of their “fiduciary duties” as directors of a nonprofit. 

In the years following Preston’s election as UCI board chair in 2006, the Board elected other directors loyal to him and what he claims is his non-hierarchical, non-sectarian vision of the Unification Church. These board members changed the name of the nonprofit to simply UCI. They amended its articles of incorporation, including by removing all references to the Unification Church, God, and the Divine Principle (the movement’s first core text containing the compiled teachings of Reverend Moon). They replaced these terms with a reference to the principles and theology of the “Unification Movement,” which they say is synonymous with “Unification Church,” but better reflects Preston’s (and, they claim, Reverend Moon’s) nonsectarian vision.  (The difference between “movement” and “church” took up hours of deposition testimony).

The plaintiffs cite emails from UCI’s lawyers who worked on those changes suggesting they were intended to allow for the transactions that immediately followed. Most prominently, UCI transferred title to multiple real estate assets in South Korea then worth at least half a billion dollars, to a Swiss entity named Kingdom Investments Foundation. The defendants claim that the donations’ only purposes were to gain preferential tax treatment and secure financing for final construction of “Parc1,” a commercial development long sought by Reverend Moon, on one of the parcels of real estate in Seoul. (Construction on the dual-tower building—the second tallest in Seoul—finished in 2020. The shorter of the two towers sold for roughly $1.2 billion). They also claim that the donations would have been acceptable under the old articles of incorporation regardless, and that the ultimate profits from the assets will be used by the Swiss foundation to support the aims of the Unification Movement. 

The core legal arguments in the appeal concern the First Amendment’s religion clauses. From the outset, the defendants have argued that the courts did not have jurisdiction to hear this litigation, because of a rule often known as the “ecclesiastical abstention doctrine.” The Supreme Court has said that the First Amendment requires secular courts to refrain from deciding what are essentially religious questions—issues such as religious doctrine or leadership. These courts may decide disputes over church property, but only where they can do so without doing the above, either by deferring to an established religious authority that has already determined the rightful owner of the property or by relying on “neutral principles of law.”

The plaintiffs claim this is not a dispute that implicates theology or church succession. It is, they say, purely about whether the UCI directors breached their “fiduciary duties” under nonprofit law, first by amending the articles of incorporation and then through the donations to KIF. The trial court ultimately agreed with them and granted summary judgment, which it is only supposed to do if there are no genuine disputes on any factual issues that would affect its application of the law.

The defendants claim that the trial court erred—and that in siding for the plaintiffs, it did exactly what the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine forbids. They point to the fact that the trial court relied heavily on its finding that the 2010 changes to the articles of incorporation were significant—a judgment they say is inextricably linked to interpretation of religious terms. They further contend that the trial court’s remedies—which included ordering the removal of Preston Moon and the other offending directors, restitution to UCI of the value of the assets transferred to KIF, and selection of new directors in consultation with FFWPUI—constitute impermissibly taking sides in an ongoing church schism.

As the briefs and oral arguments make clear, one complicating factor in the case is that prior to Preston’s takeover, no matter what UCI’s bylaws said, Reverend Moon effectively controlled appointments to the UCI board, including Preston’s in 2006, just as, no matter what UCI’s articles of incorporation at the time said about the corporation’s purposes, the practice seems to have been to fund those organizations Reverend Moon selected. It’s not immediately clear which way these facts cut. The plaintiffs cited evidence that Reverend Moon opposed some of the challenged donations by Preston and that the major donation to KIF was deliberately kept from him, demonstrating the break from past practice. But these practices also demonstrate the artificiality of the plaintiffs’ reliance on these secular corporate documents as the source of so-called neutral principles of law.

Those donations before 2006 should also be of interest both to church members and wider society. For example, the defendants have claimed that prior to Preston’s takeover, less than 5 percent of the donations made by UCI went to brick and mortar churches or Unification Church-affiliated entities. Instead, donations went to subsidizing the Washington Times, as well as other political and cultural activities favored by Reverend Moon, including the Kirov Ballet Academy, Bridgeport University in Connecticut, and the anti-communist organization CAUSA, which has been accused of funding right-wing paramilitaries, including the Contras, in Latin America. 

It is not apparent how much, if any, money donated by American church members or raised by their selling trinkets in airports and door to door wound up in the coffers of UCI. At the very least, those donations and efforts—such as the $2500 per family solicited to build a multi-million dollar events center in Las Vegas—freed up UCI funds for acquiring real estate and to fund Reverend Moon’s chosen causes.

It seems that the most likely paths the Court of Appeals could take would be 1) to affirm the lower court’s grant of summary judgment for the plaintiffs, 2) overturn that order but direct the case to go to trial or 3) direct the lower court to grant summary judgment to the defendants on the basis of their ecclesiastical abstention arguments, leading to dismissal of the case.

The procedural history taken on its own suggests the latter option is unlikely. A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals in 2015 overturned the lower court’s dismissal on ecclesiastical abstention grounds, arguing it was premature. Judge Stephen Glickman was one of the judges on that panel and also serves on the panel hearing the current appeal, perhaps indicating at least one judge unpersuaded by the abstention arguments. In 2018, the Court of Appeals upheld a grant of preliminary injunction that required UCI not to donate any more funds—again, over the defendant’s First Amendment arguments. However, with the more voluminous record now before it, the court may decide differently. 

Michael Helfand, a professor at Pepperdine University’s Caruso School of Law who has studied the origins and development of the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine, thinks dismissal is likely, given the law as it stands today. When asked about a more extreme hypothetical raised in oral arguments of a nonprofit founded to fund Lutheran churches, whose articles were amended so that it would henceforward fund Catholic churches, Helfand didn’t think a court could find those changes significant enough to violate some principle of nonprofit law without itself violating the present ecclesiastical abstention doctrine. While it may seem common sense that “‘there are certain types of religious propositions we should be able to tell the difference between’” as he paraphrased, “Courts generally, at least since the 1960s, have not said things like that.” 

Judge Glickman indicated some attraction to the second option of a full trial during oral arguments. Noting the numerous findings of the trial court judge as to a lack of care, diligence, etc. on the part of the directors (which might technically fall outside the scope of the duty of loyalty claim), as well as hints of self-dealing, Judge Glickman stated, in a colloquy with the defense attorney, “it might be the case that we would say summary judgment should not have been granted; that’s different from saying that the whole case has to end because we must abstain from treating of religious issues.”

Finally, if the district court upholds the lower court findings, it will likely be in large part because the Directors donated over half of UCI’s assets at once to a foundation over which they had no effective control. The judges at oral arguments were clearly wrestling with the question of why the donation to KIF would be outside the purposes of the 1980 articles, if subsidies to the Washington Times, the ballet company, and other non-religious causes were not. They seemed reluctant to endorse the idea that Reverend Moon’s approval or disapproval was enough to distinguish these donations, since nowhere do the 1980 articles make reference to seeking such approval and it’s unclear whether nonprofit directors could legally base their decisions on the whims of a single individual with no formal role in the organization. However, they also were troubled by the fact that the UCI directors had no real ability to predict, much less control, what KIF would do with the proceeds of selling the developed real estate assets. As stated by Judge Joshua Deahl during oral arguments: “They attached no strings to it at all to make sure it goes to its purpose, which has a bit of a stink to it, counsel.” (The defense argued that the donation agreement and Swiss Foundation’s own founding documents bound it to funding Unification Movement activities; the judges were skeptical of the enforceability of those documents).

Attempts to reach the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification International were unsuccessful. Defendants UCI and Preston Moon declined to comment through their lawyers.

American corporate law is dedicated to creating some daylight between the fictitious legal entities of corporations—i.e. organizations—and the so-called “natural persons” who run and staff them. What happens when those lines get blurred and the additional element of religion gets introduced? Something like the scene on June 17.

https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/530522/lengthy-lawsuit-exposes-rifts-within-unification-church/

Unification Movement Collection

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Wikipedia

"The Unification movement, also known as the Unification Church (UC), is a worldwide new religious movement whose members are sometimes colloquially called "Moonies". It was officially founded on 1 May 1954 under the name Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (HSA-UWC) in Seoul, South Korea by Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012), a Korean religious leader also known for his business ventures and engagement in social and political causes.

The beliefs of the Unification movement are based on Moon's book Divine Principle, which differs from the teachings of Nicene Christianity on its view of Jesus and its introduction of the concept of "indemnity". The movement is well known for its unique "Blessing" or mass wedding ceremonies. It also has unique funeral ceremonies for its members.

The Unification movement has attracted numerous controversies, and has been called a dangerous cult. Its beliefs have been criticized by both Jewish and Christian scholars. It also has been criticized for its involvement in politics, which include anticommunism and support for Korean reunification."

Scripture: Bible, Divine Principle
Acting Leader: Hak Ja Han
Founder: Sun Myung Moon
Origin: 1 May 1954
Seoul, South Korea
Members 1–2 million
Other name(s): Unification Church (very commonly), 
Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (currently; officially), Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity (historically; officially).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_movement#cite_note-1

Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center

Atlas Obscura

WINGDALE, NEW YORK
Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center An abandoned asylum, once on the cutting edge of lobotomies, is now the property of an unusual religious sect.

 

An ornate door

The small hamlet of Wingdale, within the town of Dover, New York, is home to the ruins of the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center.

Despite its proximity to New York State Route 22, the stunningly beautiful property has been shrouded in mystery for decades. In 1924, The Harlem Valley State Hospital opened its doors to the public. Later to be renamed the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center, the hospital was chartered “for the care and treatment of the insane” and included infrastructure that had previously constituted the Wingdale Prison.

Over the course of 70 years of operation, the facility treated thousands of patients who had been deemed mentally ill. Sprawling across almost 900 acres and encompassing more than 80 buildings, the hospital had its own golf course, bowling alley, baseball field, bakery, and a massive dairy farm that supported an in-house ice-cream parlor. At its peak, the facility housed 5,000 patients and 5,000 employees.

Over the years, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center adopted numerous experimental methods of treatment of the mentally ill. In the 1930s, the facility joined several other institutions on the vanguard of a new insulin shock therapy for the treatment of patients with schizophrenia and other compulsive disorders. Later, when the method of electro-shock therapy was created, the hospital was again a pioneer in implementing the method as a treatment for its patients in 1941. When neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman developed a new method for treating a wide range of psychological conditions that became known as a lobotomy, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center was the preeminent institution for frontal lobotomy in the state of New York.

As with most mental health institutions in New York and across the country, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center saw a gradual decline in enrollment upon the introduction of psychotropic drugs such as thorazine. When the hospital closed its doors in 1994, it had been on a trajectory of decline for a number of years. For the better part of 20 years, the once-busy campus slowly deteriorated. Visited only by night-watchmen and would-be vandals, the buildings sat unused and the grounds slowly grew unkempt. Ghost stories and whispers grew alongside the weeds of the property.

In 2013, however, a new chapter in the strange history of the Wingdale property began. A company called Olivet Management. L.L.C., representing Olivet University, a tiny evangelical Christian college in California, acquired 503 acres of the property for $20 million — with an option to purchase the rest of the property at a later date. Olivet University, led by a Korean pastor named David Jang, is a member of the Evangelical Assembly of Presbyterian Churches of America, a small conservative religious offshoot that is not affiliated with the main U.S. Presbyterian Church. Jang has been linked with a religious leader named Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who has been widely criticized as a cult leader.

Upon acquiring the property, Olivet immediately began pruning back the unruly growth on the property, creating a new soccer field, and removing asbestos from inside of the buildings. Representatives of the school say they plan on repurposing the existing buildings to create dining halls, dormitories, and classrooms.

The accelerated pace of renovation, however, attracted suspicion from regulatory agencies, and late in 2013 the Occupational Health and Safety Administration of the Department of Labor imposed $2,359,000 of fines on Olivet for exposing workers to unsafe quantities of asbestos and lead. The reason for the frantic pace of renovation remains unknown.

Until plans for creating this new school come to fruition, the remarkable structures that formerly composed the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center will remain objects of intrigue for travelers along the eastern border of New York State.

#INSANE ASYLUMS#ABANDONED INSANE ASYLUMS#CULTS#ABANDONED

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/harlem-valley-psychiatric-center

Religious 'relics' of a modern-day messiah in S. Korea

Giles Hewitt
Yahoo News
February 17, 2016

Mrs. Moon

Gapyeong (South Korea) (AFP) - A vintage Coca-Cola can, a pair of socks made from human hair, and an extremely large stuffed salmon.

As exhibits of religious relics go, it's an unusual collection, but then Sun Myung Moon, the late founder of the Unification Church was -- like him or loathe him -- an unusual man.

Revered by followers as a messiah but denounced by critics as a charlatan, Moon died of complications from pneumonia in 2012 at the age of 92, leaving behind a church noted for its mass weddings and diverse business interests.

The teachings of the Unification Church are based on the Bible but with new interpretations, and Moon saw his role as completing the unfulfilled mission of Jesus to restore humanity to a state of "sinless" purity.

His life and work are currently the focus of an exhibition at the church's Cheon Jung Gung Museum -- an imposing, neo-classical, domed building, with a startling resemblance to the US Capitol, that sits nestled in a hillside at the church's global headquarters in Gapyeong, South Korea.

Normally closed to the general public, the museum offered a restricted press tour earlier this week on the shared lunar calendar birthday of Moon and his widow, Hak Ja Han -- known to church members as True Father and True Mother.

The exhibition was a showcase of the couple's "lifetime achievements", and contained what were described as numerous personal "relics," that underlined the cult of personality built up around the church's founder over the years.

- Vintage Coke -

Exhibits included a vintage Coca-Cola can that Moon had drunk from, shortly after his "Holy Wedding" to Han in 1960.

According to the exhibit label -- printed in Korean, Japanese and English and reading like a Biblical parable -- Moon had sipped from the can, then handed it to a follower, Kim Hwee-Ok, to finish off.

"When True Father was giving out this can he said: 'This can must never be lost,' and added: 'If it gets lost you will be called to account'," the label said.

"Accordingly, Kim Hwee-Ok kept it safely."

A nearby display case showed two empty fun-sized Snicker bar wrappers, carefully pressed along with a hand tissue -- the remnants of a snack Moon took during a lengthy prayer and study session in October 2007.

"The prayer meetings usually lasted five or six hours, but once he pushed on for 23 hours," explained exhibition team manager, Park In-Gyeong.

The museum was formally opened in 2006 and, according to Park, manages around 30,000 visitors a year.

One section, titled "Suffering," charted Moon's incarcerations in various prisons in North Korea, South Korea and, in 1984, a US federal penitentiary where he served nearly 12 months for tax evasion.

Moon was born in what is now North Korea and, in 1948, was sentenced to five years hard labour in the Heungnam camp by the communist authorities for preaching in public.

- Hair socks -

On display was a pair of black socks that a devoted follower, Ok Se-Hyeon, had made from her own hair and given to Moon while he was in Heungnam.

"It is said that the True Father wore these socks and could stay warm even on the coldest winter days in prison," the accompanying label said.

"Stained with his sweat, blood and tears," the socks serve as a model of "how to serve True Father with devotion and dedication," it added.

A similarly themed exhibit titled "True Father's Hair and Moist Towel" displayed some of Moon's hair clippings taken in 2009 by his wife who always acted as his personal hairdresser.

Another section was devoted to gifts Moon and Han received from an eclectic mix of world leaders, including North Korea's founder leader Kim Il-Sung and his son and successor Kim Jong-Il, as well as the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and former US presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton.

- Meeting Kim Il-Sung -

Despite being an ardent anti-Communist, Moon travelled to North Korea in 1991 to meet Kim Il-Sung to discuss reunification of the divided peninsula.

North Korea's current leader Kim Jong-Un sent a personal condolence message when Moon died and, in 2013, kept up the tradition of his father and grandfather by gifting Moon's widow a pair of North Korean Pungsan hunting dogs.

Moon was something of an outdoors enthusiast, and one of the museum exhibits was dedicated to his joy of fishing.

As well as numerous rods and lures and photos of Moon wading through rivers, the display case was dominated by a giant, stuffed Alaskan king salmon he had caught.

"He felt fishing was a little like prayer or meditation," said church spokesman Steve Sakuwa.

"He could spend 11 hours fishing without a break. He'd always set himself a target -- a number or size of fish -- and then keep going until he reached it."

http://news.yahoo.com/religious-relics-modern-day-messiah-korea-044118945.html

Here are five infamous religious cults that used sleep deprivation to control their followers

VAN WINKLE'S
Raw Story
October 23, 2015



Marshall Applewhite

Marshall Applewhite

In the early 1970s, after suffering a heart attack, a bed-ridden Marshall Applewhite had a revelation. The army vet and mystic decided that he and his nurse, the Pynchonianly named Bonnie Nettles, were “The Two,” a biblically prophesied pair of divine messengers from the book of Revelations.

Applewhite’s apocalyptic delusions matured over the next two decades, and he attracted a mass of followers. Dubbing themselves Heaven’s Gate, he convinced them their bodies were temporary vessels for their journey to the “Next Level.” Ascension, though, required all followers to shed their human-like characteristics. So, with the exception of a fresh pair of Nikes, they relinquished all relationships, possessions and prior sleep patterns.

Were they to follow his commands, Applewhite ensured his followers they’d be brought to a higher evolutionary level. Once there, they had to travel upward by committing suicide, which would send them to a spacecraft trailing the passing Hale-Bopp comet. To keep them under his control, Applewhite forced members to adhere to a four-hour polyphasic wake/sleep cycle for months at a time.

During Easter week of 1997, the sleep-deprived followers literally drank Applewhite’s version of the cultist’s Kool-Aid of phenobarbital, apple sauce and vodka. And, just to be certain they didn’t miss their intergalactic lift, they also asphyxiated themselves with plastic bags.

Temple of Love, Yahweh Ben Yahweh

Love, it turns out, is a relative term in the case of Hulon Mitchell Jr., otherwise known by his tautological cult moniker, Yahweh Ben Yahweh (“God, Son of God”). In the 1970s, Yahweh built up his influence through intimidation, fear and hate, convincing thousands that his was a righteous mission to fight white supremacy. Conveniently, it was also a lucrative business scheme; at the height of Yahweh’s power in 1984, he held $8 million in property (so-called “Temples of Love”) in 22 states. Along the way, he murdered 14 people.

A la Marshall Applewhite, Yahweh employed imaginative theology, preaching “brotherly love” to justify controlling every aspect of his members’ lives. Those who disagreed with his spiritual teachings were made to stand at meetings while Yahweh showered them with insults. In certain cases, Yahweh ordered followers to beat up their fellow members.

To maintain control, Yahweh implemented a rigorous work schedule to help drive the Temple’s financial efforts, and he cemented this influence by personally regulating the food, medical care and (naturally) limiting the hours of sleep for his members each night.

Aum Shinri Kyo

Aum Shinri Kyo Logo, WikiCommons

When tired, delusional humans off themselves in a desert, it’s tragic (albeit, a bit Darwinian). It’s a very different story when they get others involved.

Such was the case on the morning of March 20, 1995, when the members of Aum Shinri Kyo (“Supreme Truth”) took to the Tokyo subway during rush hour, releasing deadly sarin nerve gas that killed 18 and injured thousands. The exact reasoning behind the attack remains unclear to this day, although it likely had something to do with the group leader, Shoko Asahara’s belief that the end times were upon us.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the attack, The Japan Times spoke with three former members of the Aum Shinri Kyo. They asked, how did Asahara indoctrinate and control his members? According to the three survivors, they ate just one meal a day and slept only “a couple hours each night.” Additionally, they were often woken at odd hours to put up propagandist posters for the group.

The Moonies, Rev. Sun Myung Moon

In 1954, the self-proclaimed “christ”-like Reverend Sun Myung Moon founded the Unification Church in South Korea. Soon, they became known as The Moonies, arguably the world’s most famous cult. Despite espousing good-old-run-of-the-mill Christian values, Reverend Moon was eventually busted for embezzlement and tax evasion.

Writing for The Guardian in 2012, former member Stephen Hassan detailed this indoctrination into the church and outlined how, through fast talking and a severe lack of sleep, Moon convinced him to fork over all of his money. It started in the early 1970s when, at the age of 19, Hassan was approached by “three women, dressed like students.” They told Hassan they were part of a student movement and, thinking he had a shot with them (he later learned they’d all pledged celibacy), he took the bait. Several weeks later, he dropped out of school, donated his money to the church and was convinced that his parents were Satan.

According to Hassan, here’s how life in the cult played out:

“I was with the Moonies for two-and-a-half years. I worked 21 hours a day, seven days a week – in prayer for between one and three hours. Then I would spend the rest of the day doing PR or lectures for the group, recruiting and fundraising. Everyone on my team was told they had to raise a minimum of $100 a day, otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed to sleep, and as a good leader, if they couldn’t sleep, then I couldn’t either. When I crashed a van into the back of a tractor trailer, I had gone three days without sleep.”

The People’s Temple, Jim Jones

If ever there was a cult leader who truly understood how to lord over exhausted followers, it was Jim Jones. But before the control, came the spiel and man. And, boy, did Jones have a good pitch. “The end is nigh —  let’s all move as one big family to remote, exotic South America.” He promised a socialist utopia, away from the greed and corruption of capitalism. This vision, sprinkled with the usual heady mix of religious fervour, was enough to convince nearly 1,000 American citizens to cut ties and haul ass to the jungles of Guyana. There, they formed The People’s Temple, otherwise known as Jonestown.

Jones tasked residents with ploughing fields six days a week from eight a.m. to six p.m., and then attending “agricultural meetings,” which often lasted until two a.m. Through this all, the members of Jonestown grew exhausted; their free will steadily fell away.

Throughout it all, Jones preached that sleep “proved that your head was in the wrong place, which made you more susceptible to committing treason.”

One former member and defector, Teri O’Shea, recalled, “One time Jim said to me, ‘Let’s keep them poor and tired, because if they’re poor they can’t escape and if they’re tired they can’t make plans.”

On November 18, 1978, after murdering an investigating committee that included United States Congressman Leo Ryan, Jones convinced more than 900 people to commit “revolutionary suicide.” Their method? The infamous (and now-metaphorical) Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.



This story, by Robin Scher, originally appeared at Van Winkle’s.

https://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/here-are-five-infamous-religious-cults-that-used-sleep-deprivation-to-control-their-followers/

FBI Documents: Sun Myung Moon

Sun Myung Moon (1920-2012) was the founder of the Unification Church.

This release consists of FBI records concerning Moon and his church. The files show that the FBI investigated Moon briefly for possible violations of U.S. bribery laws, but no charges were made. 

The Bureau also received a large number of public complaints about the Unification Church's activities, which constitute the bulk of this release.

FBI Records: The Vault "Sun Myung Moon"

1.  Sun Myung Moon Part 01 of 11
2.  Sun Myung Moon Part 02 of 11
3.  Sun Myung Moon Part 03 of 11
4.  Sun Myung Moon Part 04 of 11
5.  Sun Myung Moon Part 05 of 11
6.  Sun Myung Moon Part 06 of 11
7.  Sun Myung Moon Part 07 of 11
8.  Sun Myung Moon Part 08 of 11
9.  Sun Myung Moon Part 09 of 11
10.  Sun Myung Moon Part 10 of 11
11.  Sun Myung Moon Part 11 of 11

Archbishop Installs 4 Married Bishops

New York Times, September 24, 2006

 

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An African archbishop who wants to make celibacy optional for priests installed four married men Sunday as Roman Catholic bishops.

The Archdiocese of Washington did not recognize the installations. ''This means nothing within the church,'' spokeswoman Susan Gibbs said.

Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo -- whose marriage to a woman chosen by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon scandalized the Roman Catholic Church -- performed the ceremonies at a Capitol Hill church.

Installed were the Rev. George Augustus Stallings, Jr., of Washington, Peter Paul Brennan, of New York, Patrick Trujillo, of Newark, N.J., and Joseph Gouthro, of Las Vegas.

The four men claim affiliation to the breakaway Synod of Old Catholic Churches.

''We are not only validly ordained Catholic bishops, but we are ordained Roman Catholic bishops,'' Stallings said.

Sun Mying Moon's Lost Eco-Utopia

Outside
Monte Reel
February 20, 2013

A decade before his death, Sun Myung Moon—multimillionaire founder of the controversial Unification Church—sent a band of followers deep into the wilds of Paraguay, with orders to build the ultimate utopian community and eco-resort. So how’s that working out? Monte Reel machetes his way toward heaven on Earth.

Day three aboard this muggy cargo boat and I’m still incapable of turning around without bumping into a hanging bag of oranges, or a sack of wheat flour, or a jug of cooking oil. Crammed to the rafters with rapidly perishing produce, the Aquidaban is as colorful and claustrophobic as an Arabian souk. An unwritten rule confines pigs, chickens, and goats to the foredeck, but two plus-size rats, Carlos and Pepe, as named by the cook who ladles out the stew, have the run of the ship. The rawboned cats prowling around are wise not to pick fights.

For roughly six dollars a day, anyone can hitch a ride aboard this floating market, a 128-footer that runs a weekly route on the Paraguay River from the center of the country to its northern border. Dozens of locals have wedged themselves into the second deck. They include women and children, but most are bushwhackers: men who scrape out a living clearing trees and brush for small-scale livestock farmers along the upper stretches of the river. Some travel with their own chainsaws. Others carry machetes wrapped in newspaper. They huddle shoulder to shoulder, dulling their discomfort with cans of Ouro Fino, Paraguay’s cheapest beer. Most speak the indigenous language of Guarani first, Spanish second.

I’m with Toni Greaves, an Australian photographer. With my notebooks, her cameras, and our English, we’re conspicuous outsiders. Occasionally, I catch the men staring at us and speaking in lowered voices, as if taking bets on what exactly we’re up to. They’ll never guess. We’re looking for paradise. I’ve heard it’s under construction just upriver.

According to my GPS, we’ve crept into the southern edge of the Pantanal, a tropical wetland that’s about 30 times larger than Everglades National Park. The clear divide between the river and its banks has begun to dissolve. Floating islands of rubbery-stemmed water hyacinths grow big enough to be mistaken for solid land. Water encircles the trunks of riverside wax palms, and dark stains mark how much higher on the trees it can rise. The red-dirt roads in this part of the country are washed out for months at a time, and when temperatures as hot as 120 degrees bake them dry, they become dangerously rutted. This boat is the only reliable mode of transport serving the riverside villages.

A couple of times a day, we stop at a predetermined location, which can be as simple as a single shack with nothing else in sight but water and scrubland. A crewman shoves a long wooden gangplank out to the bank. Mattresses, motorcycles, chocolate cookies, oxcart wheels—there’s no predicting what might pass over those splintered boards to the families pacing with anticipation at the river’s edge.

One of the Guarani-speaking bushwhackers standing next to me on the foredeck can’t contain his curiosity. “Which stop are you getting off at?” he asks in rusty Spanish. Five or six of his friends—all, like him, in their twenties, with baseball caps pulled low over their brows—stop chatting and pretend not to eavesdrop. “Puerto Leda,” I answer.

He tilts back a can of Ouro Fino. I ask him if he’s heard of it. Of course, he says. He rides this boat once a month, and it always stops at Puerto Leda. But, like everyone else I’ve quizzed on board, he’s never walked ashore to look around.

“I know that some Japanese men live there,” he tells me. “They’re with the Moon sect.” He drains the can, eyeing me. “Are you?”

“No,” I say. An orange sun abruptly sinks under the tree line on the river’s west bank, and within 15 minutes an orange moon pops up over the opposite horizon, paling as it rises. I duck inside the pilothouse. The captain predicts we’ll reach Puerto Leda in the dark hours of early morning.

THE REVEREND SUN MYUNG Moon, who died in September 2012 at age 92, about a year after my trip to Puerto Leda, founded the Unification Church in South Korea in 1954. In addition to overseeing the church, which he said aimed to fulfill Jesus’ unfinished mission by establishing a new “kingdom of heaven on Earth,” Moon managed vast commercial interests and called himself a messiah. He was frequently accused of cult practices, in part because some of his hundreds of thousands of followers turned over very personal decisions—including the choice of marriage partner—to him. More than a decade ago, Moon told some members of his church that he wanted them to lay the foundation for a new Garden of Eden in one of the least hospitable landscapes on the planet—northern Paraguay.

Moon was notorious for attention-grabbing gestures: conducting mass weddings in Madison Square Garden, taking out full-page ads in major American newspapers to support Richard Nixon during Watergate, spending 13 months in federal prison for tax fraud and conspiracy in the early '80s. But during the final years of his life, his Eden-building project kept chugging along well out of the public eye, germinating largely unseen in this remote wilderness of mud.

In 2000, Moon paid an undisclosed amount for roughly 1.5 million acres of land fronting the Paraguay River. Most of that property was in a town called Puerto Casado, about 100 miles downriver from Puerto Leda. Moon’s subsidiaries wanted the land to open commercial enterprises ranging from logging to fish farming. But a group of Puerto Casado residents launched a bitter legal battle to nullify the deal. While that controversy continued to divide Paraguayans, the Puerto Leda project proceeded under the radar. Moon turned the land over to 14 Japanese men—“national messiahs,” according to church documents, who were instructed to build an “ideal city” where people could live in harmony with nature, as God intended it. Moon declared that the territory represented “the least developed place on earth, and, hence, closest to original creation.”

Moon wasn’t the first utopian to favor Paraguay. Examine many European maps drawn between 1600 and 1775 and you’ll find something labeled Lago Xarayes at the head of the Paraguay River. Conquistadores journeying up the river confronted the inundated plains and confused them for a massive inland sea. Tribes spoke about a Land Without Evil on the far side of Xarayes, and the Spaniards believed that the same area hid a gateway to El Dorado, the lost city of gold. By the 1800s, most mapmakers correctly recognized the Xarayes as a mirage and relabeled it as part of the Pantanal.

Still, the dream lived on for some. In 1886, a German anti-Semite named Bernhard Förster and his wife, Elisabeth Nietzsche—Frederich’s sister—founded Nueva Germania, a colony located about 115 miles southeast of Concepción that was designed to spawn generations of Aryan Übermensch. After three years of feverish struggle in the jungle heat, Förster mixed himself a cocktail of morphine and strychnine, drank deeply, died, and left the place in a state of irreversible decline. The next century brought utopian colonies of Australian socialists, Finnish vegetarians, English pacifists, and German Nazis. They all failed.

So how are Moon’s followers—or Moonies, as they don’t like to be called—holding up? Hard to say. I’m aware of two other journalists who’ve seen Puerto Leda. One, a British Catholic missionary, visited after the first colonists arrived and was unable to fathom their motives. Maybe they were smuggling drugs, she insinuated in a church magazine. The other, a Paraguayan newspaper reporter, visited in 2008 and published a few articles praising the Unification Church’s philanthropic work, which includes building schools in rural areas. The reporter championed the ecotourism potential around Puerto Leda but included no details about the people living there.

A few weeks before my trip, I got in touch with a Unification Church office in Asunción. The initial response was warm: I’d be welcome to visit, a representative said. But by the time I arrived in the capital, things had gotten complicated.

For much of the past decade, Moon’s surviving children (he fathered 15 from two marriages) have been fighting for control of the empire. The bickering has extended to Paraguay, where the Unification Church has established several corporations or foundations that oversee agribusiness interests. In 2010, Moon’s eldest living son from his second marriage, Hyun Jin Moon, organized a Global Peace Festival in Asunción, but the Unification Church’s regional director refused to recognize the event. He claimed that Hyun Jin Moon had fallen out of favor with his father. Moon’s eldest daughter, Ye Jin, later backed the director. Now the church’s various offices in Paraguay were pledging allegiance to different sides.

Just days before Greaves and I arrived in Asunción, one of Moon’s local subsidiaries announced that it planned to sue the office I had contacted. My calls and messages went unanswered. By the time I boarded the Aquidaban, I’d begun to suspect that the National Messiahs in Puerto Leda might have no clue we were coming.

Around 5 a.m., the boat begins to veer to port. We inch along the west bank, and I see nothing resembling the gates of Eden. It’s dark. My mind drifts to the British missionary’s 2000 account of Puerto Leda, which described her arriving “in the blackness of night on the crocodile-ridden bank,” where she was accosted by an attack dog “with a jawful of long white teeth.”

“Think positive thoughts,” Greaves tells me.

Greaves believes that positive conceptualization makes good things happen. During our first two days on the boat, we kept joking about the “friendly little lizard” that ate her bananas and scattered droppings all over the crime scene. There are no lizards on this boat, just Carlos and Pepe.

I succumb to negative thinking. My imagination fills the darkness with visions: the curled lip of a snarling dog, the slow, patient blink of a crocodile’s eyelid.

NO CROCODILES, NO DOGS. Just one man, a portly Paraguayan navy guard in military fatigues, awaits us at the end of the gangplank. He smiles without joy. “This isn’t where you want to get off,” he says.

“This is Puerto Leda, and the people here are expecting us,” I say. I drop some names: the man I had been leaving messages with in Asunción, his secretary. The guard has never heard of them. But the fact that we know where the hell we are seems good enough for him. He abandons the role of brick wall and welcomes us into this humid kingdom. Beyond the small wooden cabin where he sleeps, I see a string of lights farther inland—the heart of Puerto Leda.

“Do you have repellent?” he asks.

My skin is lacquered in a stiff coat of stale sweat and deet. “Lots.”

“Good,” he says. “You’ll see at night. We can’t even talk to each other because of the mosquitoes that fly into our mouths.”

Another man has arrived in a truck to siphon fuel from a tank on theAquidaban. He introduces himself as Wilson, a site administrator. He’s not a National Messiah but rather a 44-year-old Chilean with a youthful, friendly face, a polo shirt, and rubber boots, a Moon follower who moved here two years ago. His wife and children are still in Chile.

“I didn’t know anyone was supposed to be coming,” he says. Walking to his truck, he fishes out a phone and executes a minor miracle: he pulls a signal from the air and places a call, trying to figure out if anyone in the colony knows anything about our visit. He comes up empty but still helps us with our bags, tossing them in the back of his truck.

“Let’s go,” he says.

The Aquidaban drifts away, and we bounce along a dirt road, leaving the guard behind at his cabin. “It’s a naval station,” Wilson explains, a gift from the Messiahs to the Paraguayan government. In exchange for a permanent security presence, he says, the navy now has a base to patrol the upper stretches of the river.

Within a minute, the headlights reveal an indistinct cluster of buildings. I can make out what appear to be several two-story houses, a water tower, a couple of large communal buildings, and a cell-phone tower.

Wilson kills the engine in front of a structure that looks nothing like the humble river-side casitas found throughout this region, a district the size of South Carolina in which about 80 percent of the 11,000 residents lack running water. The building in front of us has a peaked terra-cotta roof, brick-and-stucco walls, expansive glass windows, and no fewer than five remote-controlled Carrier air-conditioning units. At the front door, a dozen pairs of leather slippers wait for us. “Very Japanese,” Greaves observes. We remove our dirty shoes and take our first steps into Reverend Moon’s Victorious Holy Place.

All is silent. Wilson flips a switch, throwing light on what appears to be a dining hall. The large wooden tables, each covered with a plastic tablecloth, could accommodate about 100 people. They are vacant.

“There aren’t many people around right now,” Wilson explains. “But sometimes we have 100 working here at once.”

I spot just one, a Paraguayan cook who emerges from a kitchen. With disconcerting efficiency, a buffet breakfast materializes on a table: fresh coffee, tea, miso soup, fried eggs, cereal, cheese, ham, fruit, bread, and marmalade.

“Wow,” I say, the word bubbling up from some primitive part of my brain as I attempt to take in everything at once: the kingly buffet, the decorative carvings on the high-back chairs, the FISH OF THE PANTANAL poster, the Ping-Pong table in a far corner, the neatly stacked Spanish-language copies of Reverend Moon’s autobiography, As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen, near the wall. An ascetically thin Japanese man in a polo shirt and jeans walks toward us, smiling behind wire-rimmed glasses.

“Good morning,” he says in English.

He pads across the glazed tiles with a hurried shuffle, as if he’s been waiting for us for years. He’s 62, and his name is Katsumi Date (pronounced dah-tay), or just Mister Date, as Wilson addresses him. He’s a National Messiah.

“Please enjoy your breakfast,” he tells us. “Would you like a hot shower?”

Actually, we would. On the Aquidaban, a rubber hose dangling into a stricken toilet doubled as a handheld showerhead. Here we’ll discover that individually wrapped soaps and shampoos are freely available in the tiled showers, as are clean towels. Indulging our physical comfort appears to be Mister Date’s only priority. He’s already made beds for us, he says, in case we need a nap after such a long journey. He apologizes repeatedly for not being better prepared. “We weren’t expecting visitors,” he reiterates.

“So,” he asks, “what is it you would like to see?”

Well, we’d like to see what 12 years of dedicated labor in pursuit of earthly perfection looks like. The Aquidaban is scheduled to hit the end of its weeklong route this afternoon, turn around, and stop here again sometime in the evening. We’ve got 15 hours, maximum, to find out. “Everything,” I answer.

The place, Mister Date says, is all ours.

A FEW HUNDRED YARDS from the guard station, I spot a sportfishing boat docked at the riverside. It’s big—about 30 feet long, fiberglass, with a prominent cockpit. I ask Mister Date about it.

“Ah yes,” he says. “Reverend Moon designed that boat himself. It was brought here from New Jersey.”

Does the Reverend fish? I ask.

“Oh yes,” says Mister Date. “He is a world-champion tuna fisherman.”

The statement, technically speaking, is not false. In 1980, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Moon’s boat was declared the winner of an international tuna-fishing tournament organized by the Unification Church. “I don’t want to be second even in catching tuna,” he said in a speech delivered a few months after the competition. “In every field and competition, I have been second to none.”

Apparently, the True Father’s fishing jones was a deciding factor in the placement of Puerto Leda. Moon first visited the Paraguay River on fishing trips in the 1990s, and by decade’s end he was cruising down it and ordering church members to wade along the muddy banks to plant 63 signposts demarcating the land he had decided to buy.

In 1999, Moon called his most devoted Japanese followers to join him on a 40-day spiritual retreat outside Fuerte Olimpo, about 25 miles south of Puerto Leda. I’d read a brief description of those days on a church website. One Messiah had written: “It was very hot and we wanted to bathe in the water. But we could not because piranhas would come. It’s a big problem! Also there are problems with ants. One National Messiah became very sick from an ant bite. It’s a dangerous place. There are all these problems, but Father just says, ‘Ah, the purity of nature!’”

Clarity was never the True Father’s specialty. Even Moon’s followers had trouble understanding him at times. In addition to calling for a return to Original Creation here, he told his devotees, in 2000, that “we need to build the best underwater palace in the world.” In 2011, he declared, “It is time to establish God’s throne at the top of the Grand Canyon.” Once, he held up his fourth finger and told some followers, “I was ready for today’s meeting before 1 a.m. Today is the seventh day of the tenth month. Today is the seventh day but there isn’t an eighth day. Who decided that? It was me, but I am in a position where I can’t do what I decided, because 10 fingers are related.”

A Moon website that publishes the English transcripts of his speeches warns that they’re based on notes and “may bear no similarity to what was originally said in Korean.” Deciphering Moonspeak is even more daunting when your task is building a new Eden. Back in 1999, when Moon called on the Messiahs to assemble in Paraguay for the 40-day retreat, he spent most of that time fishing. Near the end of their time together, he instructed them to build an ecologically sustainable city that could serve as a model for the whole world. The plan, such as it was, lacked specifics; not all of the founders agreed on what the city should look like. Yet they forged ahead, determined to create something extraordinary in a place where wilderness reigned.

Now, as I glance at the scene, I see huge dormitory buildings, guesthouses, and sheds for mechanical repairs. I count seven freshwater fish farms, fully stocked with pacu, a toothy species that looks like an overgrown piranha. I see no other people.

“Normally, there are about 10 of us who live here,” Mister Date tells me. “But this week six are away in Asunción. So there are just four now.”

WE WALK THROUGH EARLY-morning light on smooth sidewalks, past manicured gardens of hibiscus and bougainvillea, beside an Olympic-size swimming pool. A young man hired from a nearby village slowly sweeps a filtering net through the deep end. Nothing—not a single foreign particle—seems to mar the clean blue rectangle of water. We enter a two-story communal building that resembles an office complex. I see Wilson in a small room, tapping away at a computer. We climb a stone staircase to the second floor, following Mister Date into what appears to be a rec room. There’s a television hooked up to a satellite system, and Mister Date pops a disc into a DVD player. The DVD, Mister Date tells us, explains everything.

The footage that flashes across the screen dates from 1999. We see the founding Messiahs walk across untamed wastes—the grounds where we now sit. They lay bricks in wet mud. They sand metal frames. They wash dishes in the river. They wear heavy clothing, light fires to keep the mosquitoes away, and sweat in the wavy heat. They stagger through gale-force winds.

Then, in a clip from 2000, we see Moon himself, touring the partially cleared grounds, wiping sweat from his brow, eating lunch, leaving in a private plane. The footage segues into scenes of the men working feverishly to build a luxury house for Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han, who visited for a second and final time in late 2001. The rest of the DVD covers more recent developments, and the highlights—set to swelling orchestral music—unfold like a training montage from Rocky. Messiahs erect the water tower. Man-made fishponds materialize on the grounds. A landing strip is planed flat by tractors. The Messiahs unload saplings from the Aquidaban, then plant them in sprawling groves. A group of about a dozen visiting Japanese students—the children of Unification Church members—help the Messiahs build a school in a nearby village. When the DVD ends and the lights come up, I’m exhausted just from watching all that drudgery. I look at Mister Date’s corded forearms, his gaunt face, his waspy waist. Every aspect of his being seems molded by toil. Even with the help of the local hires, the Messiahs labor all day, usually outside.

“It’s a lot of work just to maintain,” he admits.

The fact that only 10 men live here comes rushing back to me. The colony has actually lost population since its inception, despite all the construction. Four of the original Messiahs have returned to Japan. Only the hardest of the hardcore have stuck it out.

And this raises a couple of questions: Who are these guys? And why have they put themselves through this?

MISTER AUKI WALKS ACROSS the dining hall carrying a basket filled with whole fish freshly yanked from the river. He’s a short, balding Messiah whose task this morning, as on most days, is to catch something for the grill.

“I caught lots of piranha today,” he tells the men, his face splitting into a smile. “And also a five-kilogram pacu.”

The pacu is now part of the lunch buffet, which the four Messiahs plus Wilson, Greaves, and I spoon onto plates. It’s noon, the midpoint in an unchanging daily regimen: up at 4:30 a.m. for a half-hour of silent worship, breakfast at five, then back to their bedrooms to prepare for work at 6:30. Each is assigned a separate job: one fishes, another tills crops, another feeds the fish in the ponds. Someone tinkers with the water-purification system and checks the pH level in the pool, though no one swims. (“We don’t take much time for recreation,” one Messiah tells me.) They generally work in 1.5-hour bursts, taking half-hour breaks in between. Lunch always runs from noon to 1:30. They’ll work until 5 p.m. and round out the evening with dinner and a short prayer meeting. That leaves them about two hours until the lights go out at nine. Most use that time to read, pray, or watch satellite TV.

Greaves and I tuck into our food and strike up a conversation with Norio Owada, whom I recognize from the DVD. Mister Owada is 64, and manual labor and a good diet of homegrown vegetables have pared him down to a taut, leathery minimum.

“Nice to meet you,” he says, bowing his head quickly. He speaks English well enough to feel self-conscious when it’s not quite right. Before he joined Moon in Fuerte Olimpo for the retreat, he worked as an English translator in greater Tokyo. He disliked the work and wanted out. Urban life felt meaningless.

“I needed a special challenge, and I couldn’t find one in Japan,” he tells me. “I had lost my motivation. When I came here I recovered it.”

Mister Owada is a good example of your average founding Messiah: a city dweller with very little experience in construction and even less in wilderness survival. His wife was selected for him by Moon, who was said to possess the ability to intuit good matches, and Owada left her in Japan with their children when he came here. He gets a church salary, which helps keep the colony solvent. His family and other members of the Japanese congregation provide more money, though no one can tell me how much has been poured into the place. Once every 11 months, Mister Owada gets four weeks of vacation, which he can use to go to Japan. His wife has visited him twice since 1999.

In the beginning, the colonists hoped they would be joined by their wives (as well as many, many more followers). Every August, they invite children of Japanese church members to visit for a couple of weeks, but so far none have chosen to stay on. “My wife thinks that it is not realistic for her to move here yet,” Mister Owada says, “because we still have to raise the standard of living more.”? When I press him on how tough and lonely this must get, Mister Owada says it doesn’t bother him. Moon sanctified his personal sacrifices, promising the men that spiritual rewards would make up for their suffering. “Even if you die, what regret will you leave behind?” Moon asked the founders in 1999.

“We’re risking our lives for this cause,” Mister Owada says, his left eye twitching convulsively. “I like to risk my life,” he continues. “That is doing something worthwhile. We have continued to stick with this.”

Months later, after Moon’s death from complications from pneumonia, I will once again reach out to Mister Date to see if the True Father’s passing affects the Messiahs’ dedication. It doesn’t. They have the blessing of his widow, Mister Date says, and the ongoing feuds among the Moon children won’t affect them. They plan to work on Puerto Leda for at least another decade.

“OF COURSE THERE IS ecotourism potential here,” says Mister Date. We’re standing outside an unfinished three-story brick building near a shed that protects three car-size generators. Mister Date refers to the brick building as “the hotel,” but for the moment its only occupant is a stick-legged baby goat nosing around the food pellets being stored on the ground floor. Mister Date begins running down the potential pluses of opening the place up to travelers: tourism would allow people to see examples of sustainable living and take the lessons home with them. This Eden is intended to be an environmental paradise, he says. He tells me the Messiahs are also considering building an insect museum.

“Why did you stop work on the hotel?” I ask.

He pauses and smiles politely. “In a small place, you can have disagreements easily,” he says. “They’re expecting us to be financially independent, but that’s not easy here.” The Messiahs, it seems, don’t always see eye-to-eye on the best way to reduce their dependence on member donations. Some want to concentrate on agribusiness and scrap the ecotourism idea. The hotel is unfinished because they aren’t sure whether opening the place to outsiders is a good idea.

We walk on, past planted fields of lemongrass, oranges, mangoes, grapefruit, asparagus, sugarcane. The crops are struggling. If agriculture alone is expected to support the colony, there are some kinks to work out. The men have planted thousands of jatropha trees, which can be used to make biodiesel fuel, but hundreds of parrots zeroed in on them and ate all the fruit. During the most recent wet season, rising waters flooded many of the thousands of neem trees.

“It’s been a hard year,” Mister Date admits. “A lot of things have died because they were three months underwater.”

It’s clear that these guys have faith in miracles, and that’s exactly what’s needed here in Puerto Leda. Without one, the Victorious Holy Place seems destined to be another curious monument to human ambition and folly. But watching how hard the Messiahs work, I can’t help but admire their tenacity. The fanaticism that underlies their devotion to this cause must burn hot, but they hide it well. They’re not evangelical. They’re friendly and welcoming to those who don’t share their beliefs. They’re reflexively humble and generous and—whatever I might think of their motives—admirably tough. They’re underdogs. The kind of guys you root for.

During the last hours of my visit, Mister Date shows me something that might actually work out. “Japanese yams,” he announces, staring down at a plot of tilled soil. “They grow very large underground, up to 10 kilograms. They do well here.”

My immediate impulse is to celebrate this victory with hearty congratulations. I’m thrilled for his indefatigable yams. Maybe all the sweat that Mister Date has sunk into this plot will bear a little fruit. Maybe little victories like this can help other people in the Pantanal live richer lives. Maybe that’s enough.

Mister Date stares down at the dirt. “Unfortunately,” he says, “they taste very bad.”

AT THE END OF the day, I’m alone in the dining hall. We have a couple of hours before the Aquidaban is due to arrive and take us back downriver. In the kitchen, a cook is slicing piranha into sashimi strips. I’m standing at the Ping-Pong table, absently bouncing a ball up and down. The hollow plock echoes around the high rafters. No one wanders in for a game, so I head out toward the pool.

He’s still there, the man with the net, sweeping as if he hasn’t let up since dawn. A shame: I didn’t bring any trunks. But I do have a pair of heavy cotton cargo shorts in my backpack. I walk to the dormitory and return wearing them. I ask the sweeper, “Does anyone ever use this pool?”

“Only the tourists,” he says.

The tourists? Based on a guest book I flipped through earlier, he must be referring to those Japanese students who visit every August, the occasional Paraguayan government official, and Greaves and me.

I resist the urge to plunge, mainly because it’s so quiet around here, and step down the foam-padded ladder. Floating on my back toward the deep end, struggling against the weight of my shorts, I look to the west and see a pink disc of sun teed atop the crown of a palm tree. A gentle wind rustles the fronds, stirring nesting parakeets. They erupt in flight. Above them, against a backdrop of high cirrus, I spot what I think is a hawk climbing out of view.

I wonder: from those elevations, do the straight lines and Windex blue waters of this pool appear to be jarring aberrations? Or do these man-made forms resemble natural elements of the landscape, considering that chasing impossible fantasies is something humans always seem to do around here? Could this colony appear, from such lofty heights, to be as organic and as transient as a parakeet’s nest?

I have no idea. All I know for sure is that the sun is starting to slide behind the palm tree. Darkness will fall within minutes, and the mosquitoes will follow. Right now this water feels perfect.

Monte Reel's Between Man and Beast: A Tale of Exploration and Evolution will be published in March by Doubleday.

Reverend Moon: Cult leader, CIA asset and Bush family friend

Scoop

Bob Fitrakis

September 5, 2012

The death of Reverend Sun Myung Moon hopefully ends one of the strangest chapters in U.S. security industrial complex history. The self-proclaimed "Messiah" who owned dozens of businesses including Kahr Arms, and who once claimed to have presided over Jesus' wedding posthumously in order to get the Christian savior into heaven, was ultimately a front in the United States for friends in the CIA like George Herbert Walker Bush.

Moon founded the Washington Times newspaper in 1982 and the Washington Post went out of its way to avoid any mention of the "the dark side of the Moon" upon his death Monday, September 3, 2012 at age 92. When George W. Bush faltered in New Hampshire in early 2000, it was Moon's shadowy cultish right-wing network that came to its rescue in South Carolina. Moon's forces helped turn a certain primary defeat into a double-digit victory by spreading Moonies, his zombie-like followers, throughout the state. As the Washington Post reported, "An array of conservative groups have come to reinforce Bush's message with phone banks, radio ads, and mailings of their own."

Meanwhile, Moon's Washington Times ran the headline "Bush scoffs at assertion he moved too far right." The bizarre, almost unbelievable political alliance between the Bush family and Rev. Moon is one of the dirty little secrets of CIA involvement in U.S. domestic politics.

To understand the historical significance of Rev. Moon and his Moonies, one must start with Ryoichi Sasakawa, identified in a 1992 Frontline investigative report as the key money source behind Moon's far-flung world religious/business empire. Sasakawa bragged to Time magazine that he was "the world's richest fascist."

In the 1930s, Sasakawa was one of Japan's leading fascists. He organized a private army of 1500 men equipped with 20 war planes. His followers were Japan's version of Mussolini's Black Shirts. Sasakawa was a key figure in leading Japan into World War II and was an "uncondemned Class-A war criminal." Following WW II, he was captured and imprisoned for war crimes. According to U.S. documents, Sasakawa was suddenly freed with another accused war criminal, Yoshio Kodama, a prominent figure in Japan's organized crime syndicate, the Yakuza. They were freed in 1948, one year after the National Security Act established the CIA as the successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). In January 1995, Japan's KYODO News Service uncovered documents establishing that Kodama's release coincided with an agreement he had made with U.S. military intelligence two months earlier to serve as an informant. Declassified documents link Kodama's release to the CIA.

During WW II, Kodama activities, according to the U.S. Army counterintelligence records consisted of "systematically looting China of its raw materials" and dealing in heroin, guns, tungsten, gold, industrial diamonds and radium. Both Sasakawa's and Kodama's CIA ties are a reoccurring theme in their relationship with Rev. Moon.

In 1997, Congressman Donald Fraser launched an investigation into Moon's cult. The 444-page Congressional report alleged Moonie involvement with bribery, bank fraud, illegal kickbacks, and arms sales. The report revealed that Moon's 20,000-member Unification Church was a creation of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The Moonies were working with KCIA Director Kim Chong Phil as a political instrument to influence U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. CIA was the agency primarily responsible for founding the KCIA after WW II. The Moon organization has denied any link with the U.S. intelligence agencies or the Korean government.

Moon, who is Korean, and his two fascist Japanese buddies Kodama and Sasakawa, worked together in the early 1960s to form the Asian People's Anti-Communist League with the aid of KCIA agents. The League allegedly used Japanese organized crime money and financial support from Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. The League concentrated its efforts on uniting fascist and right-wing militarists into an anti-Communist force throughout Asia.

In 1964, League funds established Moon's Freedom Center in the United States. Kodama served as a chief advisor to the Moon's subsidiary Win Over Communism, an organization that served as a conduit to protect Moon's South Korean financial investments. Sasakawa acted as Win Over Communism's Chair.

In 1966, the League merged with another fascist organization, the Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations. The merger begat the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Later, in the 1980s, the retired U.S. Major General John Singlaub emerged from the shadows of the League to become caught up in the Iran-Contra scandal. As Chairman of the WACL, Singlaub enlisted soldiers of fortune and other paramilitary groups to support the Contra cause in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas.

Moon's Freedom Center served as the headquarters for the League in the U.S. During the Iran-Contra hearings, the League was described as a "multi-national network of Nazi war criminals, Latin American death squad leaders, North American racists, and anti-Semites and fascist politicians from every continent."

Working with the KCIA, Moon made his first trip to the U.S. in 1965 and shockingly obtained an audience with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Both "Ike" and former President Harry S. Truman lent their names to letterhead of the Moon-created Korean Cultural Freedom Foundation. In 1969, Moon and Sasakawa jointly formed the Freedom Leadership Foundation, a pro-Vietnam War organization that lobbied the U.S. government.

In the 1970s, Moon earned notoriety in the so-called Koreagate scandal. Female followers of the Unification Church were accused of entertaining and horizontally lobbying U.S. Congressmen while keeping confidential files on those they "lobbied" at a Washington Hilton Hotel suite rented by the Moonies. The U.S. Senate held hearings concerning Moon's "programmatic bribery of U.S. officials, journalists, and others as part of an operation by the KCIA to influence the course of U.S. foreign policy." The Fraser report documented that Moon was "paid by the KCIA to stage demonstrations at the United Nations and run pro-South Korean propaganda campaigns." The Congressional investigator for the Fraser report said, "We determine that their (Moonies') primary interest, at least in the U.S. at that time, was not religion at all but was political, it was an attempt to gain power, influence and authority."

After Ronald Reagan's presidential victory in 1980, Moon's political influence increased dramatically. Vice President George Bush, former CIA director, invited Moon as his guest to the Reagan inauguration. Bush and Moon shared unsavory links to South American underworld figures. In 1980, according to the investigative magazine I.F., the Moon organization collaborated with a right-wing military coup in Bolivia that established the region's first narco-state.

Moon's credentials soared in conservative circles.

In 1982, with the inception of the propaganda tabloid the Washington Times. Vice President Bush immediately saw the value of forging an alliance with the politically powerful Moon organization, an alliance that Moon claims made Bush president. One former-Moonie website claims that during the 1988 Bush-Dukakis battle, Rev. Moon threatened his followers that they would be moved out of the United States if the evil Dukakis won.

Moon himself lacked clean hands. Moon was convicted of income tax evasion in 1982 and spent a year in a U.S. jail. Also in 1982, the Moon organization based at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio helped elect John Kasich, now Ohio's governor, to the U.S. Congress in 12th district. During the Gulf War, the Moonie-sponsored American Freedom Coalition organized "support the troops" rallies throughout the country.

The Frontline documentary identified the Washington Times as the most costly piece in Moon's propaganda arsenal, with losses estimated as high as $800 million. Still, the documentary asserts that his old friend Sasakawa's virtual monopoly over the Japanese speedboat gambling industry allowed money to continuously flow into U.S. coffers.

The Bush-Moonie connection caused considerable controversy in September 1995 when the former President announced he would be spending nearly a week in Japan on behalf of a Moonie front organization, the Women's Federation for World Peace, founded and led by Moon's wife.

Bush downplayed accusations of Moonie brain-washing and coercion. The New York Times noted that Bush's presence "is seen by some as lending the group [Moonies] legitimacy."

Long-time Moonie member S.P. Simmonds wrote an editorial for the Portland Press Herald noting that Bushes "didn't need the reported million dollars paid by Moon and were well aware of the Church's history." Other news sources placed the figure for the former President's presence at $10 million. Bush shared the podium with Moon's wife and addressed a crowd of 50,000 in the Tokyo dome. Bush told the faithful "Reverend and Mrs. Moon are engaged in the most important activities in the world today."

The following year, Moon bankrolled a series of "family values" conferences from Oakland to Washington D.C. The San Francisco Chronicle reported, "In Washington, Moon opened his checkbook to such Republican Party mainstays as former President Gerald Ford and George Bush, GOP presidential candidate Jack Kemp, and Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed."

Purdue University Professor of Sociology Anson Shupe, a long-time Moon-watcher, said, "The man accused of being the biggest brainwasher in America has moved into mainstream Republican Americana."

Moon proclaimed at his family values conferences that he was only one who knew "all the secrets of God." One of them, according to the Chronicle was that "the husband is the owner of his wife's sex organs and vice versa."

"President Ford, President Bush, who attended the inaugural World Convention of the Family Federation for World Peace" and all you distinguished guests are famous, but there's something that you do know now," the Chronicle quoted Moon as saying. "Is there anyone here who dislikes sexual organs? . . . Until now you may not have thought it virtuous to value the sexual organs, but from now, you must value them."

In November 1996, Bush the Elder arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, amid controversy over a newly-created Spanish language Moon weekly newspaper called Tiempos del Mundo. Bush smoothed things over as the principle speaker at the paper's inaugural dinner on November 23rd.

The former president then traveled with Moon to neighboring Uruguay to help him open a Montevideo seminary to train 4200 young Japanese women to spread the word of the Unification Church across Latin America. The young Japanese seminarians were later accused of laundering $80 million through a Uruguayan bank, according to the St. Petersburg Times. The Times also reported that when Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University faced bankruptcy, Moon bailed it out with millions of dollars of loans and grants.

In 1997 the New York Times wrote that Moon "has been reaching out to conservative Christians in this country in the last few years by emphasizing shared goals like support for sexual abstinence outside of marriage and opposition to homosexuality." Moon also appealed to Second Amendment advocates. In March 1999, the Washington Post reported that the cult leader owned the lucrative Kahr Arms company through Saeilo Inc.

It's the shadowy network around the Moonies and the CIA that helped propel both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush into the presidency. Recently the "Messiah's" newspaper has spent most of its time attacking President Obama.

Besides the Washington Times, the Unification Church had business holdings including the United Press International (UPI). Moon was often shown in the mainstream media presiding over mass marriages of his followers. More importantly was his marriage of convenience to the CIA and the Bush family. His corruption of American politics lives on.