#unification church

[spurgie-cousin]

Wait til she hears about the Unification Church cult

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Jack C. Sparks - The Mind Benders: A Look At Current Cults - Thomas Nelson - 1977

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated in July 2022. Inset: Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, in 1984.

SEPTEMBER 18, 2023

On the last morning of his life, Shinzo Abe arrived in the Japanese city of Nara, famous for its ancient pagodas and sacred deer. His destination was more prosaic: a broad urban intersection across from the city’s main train station, where he would be giving a speech to endorse a lawmaker running for reelection to the National Diet, Japan’s parliament. Abe had retired two years earlier, but because he was Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, his name carried enormous weight. The date was July 8, 2022.

In photos taken from the crowd, Abe—instantly recognizable by his wavy, swept-back hair; charcoal eyebrows; and folksy grin—can be seen stepping onto a makeshift podium at about 11:30 a.m., one hand clutching a microphone. A claque of supporters surrounds him. No one in the photos seems to notice the youngish-looking man about 20 feet behind Abe, dressed in a gray polo shirt and cargo pants, a black strap across his shoulder. Unlike everyone else, the man is not clapping.

Abe started to speak. Moments later, his remarks were interrupted by two loud reports, followed by a burst of white smoke. He collapsed to the ground. His security guards ran toward the man in the gray polo shirt, who held a homemade gun—two 16-inch metal pipes strapped together with black duct tape. The man made no effort to flee. The guards tackled him, sending his gun skittering across the pavement. Abe, shot in the neck, would be dead within hours.

At a Nara police station, the suspect—a 41-year-old named Tetsuya Yamagami—admitted to the shooting barely 30 minutes after pulling the trigger. He then offered a motive that sounded too outlandish to be true: He saw Abe as an ally of the Unification Church, a group better known as the Moonies—the cult founded in the 1950s by the Korean evangelist Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Yamagami said his life had been ruined when his mother gave the church all of the family’s money, leaving him and his siblings so poor that they often didn’t have enough to eat. His brother had committed suicide, and he himself had tried to.

“My prime target was the Unification Church’s top official, Hak Ja Han, not Abe,” he told the police, according to an account published in January in a newspaper called The Asahi Shimbun. He could not get to Han—Moon’s widow—so he shot Abe, who was “deeply connected” to the church, Yamagami said, just as Abe’s grandfather, also a prime minister and renowned political figure in Japan, had been.

Investigators looked into Yamagami’s wild-sounding claims and found, to their alarm, that they were true. After a quick huddle, the police appear to have decided that the Moonie connection was too sensitive to reveal, at least for the moment. It might even affect the outcome of the elections for the Upper House of the Diet, set to take place on July 10. At a press conference on the night of the assassination, a police official would say only that Yamagami had carried out the attack because he “harbored a grudge against a specific group and he assumed that Abe was linked to it.” When reporters clamored for details, the official said nothing.

After the election, the Unification Church confirmed press reports that Yamagami’s mother was a member, and the story quickly took off. The Moonies, it emerged, maintained a volunteer army of campaign workers who had long been a secret weapon not just for Abe but for many other politicians in his conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which remains in power under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Later that month, the Japanese tabloid Nikkan Gendai published a list of 111 members of parliament who had connections to the church. In early September 2022, the LDP announced that almost half of its 379 Diet members had admitted to some kind of contact with the Unification Church, whether that meant accepting campaign assistance or paying membership fees or attending church events. According to a survey by The Asahi Shimbun, 290 members of prefectural assemblies, as well as seven prefectural governors, also said they had church ties. The rising numbers exposed a scandal hiding in plain sight: A right-wing Korean cult had a near-umbilical connection to the political party that had governed Japan for most of the past 70 years.

The Japanese were outraged not just by the appearance of influence-peddling but by a galling hypocrisy. Abe was a fervent nationalist, eager to rebuild Japan’s global standing and proudly unapologetic for its imperial past. Now he and his party had been caught in a secretive electoral alliance with a cult that—it soon emerged—had been accused of preying on Japanese war guilt to squeeze billions of dollars from credulous followers.

Follow LINK to read full story

[whatisonthemoon]

A solid episode from Things Observed providing a brief overview of the World Anti-Communist League

In this episode we cover the origins of the world anti-communist league starting with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and the Asian Peoples Anti-Communist League. This group brings together nazi collaborators from the Ustasha, Iron Guard and the Organization of Ukranian Nationalists. We also cover War Criminals from the days of the Imperial Japanese some of whom we've previously discussed in the Blood and Gold series on the Golden Lily Operation such as Yoshio Kodama and Ryochi Sasakawa. Some of the characters we find in the WACL would be involved not only with fascist movements across the world but would also peddle opium. We discuss the Kuomintang party's connection the world opium trade and the little-known fact that Chiang Kai-Shek's country was a narco-state that worked alongside the Civil Air Transport and the CIA and how the National Crime Syndicate would get in on the action as well. Oh, and how can I forgot to mention the Moonie connection!

Sources:

VISUP: Secret Societies, Narcoterrorism, International Fascism and the World Anti-Communist League Part I (visupview.blogspot.com) - Recluse

Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League - Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson

Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold - Sterling and Peggy Seagrave

One Nation Under Blackmail Vol I - Whitney Webb

Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism - Jonathan Marshall

History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East - Hans Derks

The Politics of Heroin - Alfred McCoy

[milkboydotnet]

The religious right plays an important international role in fighting political progress in developing nations. It is not surprising therefore that there has been an influx of these organizations into the Philippines. Intense and effective anticommunist propaganda arc trademarks in their religious campaigns. Vigilante death squads, civic action programs, "land reform," and U.S. military advisers are clear indications that the U.S. has chosen the Philippines as its next low intensity conflict testing ground and the religious right is there to lead the propaganda front.

Howard Goldenthal, Moonies, WACL and Vigilantes: The Religious Right in the Philippines (1988)

[sorenblr]

An Unification Church's offshoot founded by the late founder's 3rd son, Hyun Jin Moon, calls his mother, Hak Ja Han, the "Whore of Babylon". Incidentally Hak Ja Han wears purple a lot which coincides with Mother Harlot's gown by Kaneko. Purple isn't traditionally associated with the Whore of Babylon. Do you think Hak Ja Han somehow influenced the design of Mother Harlot?

Per Revelation 17:4 -

And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication...

Purple being associated with royalty, monarchy, and thus the imperial legacy of Rome etc. Kaneko's design plays it close, except she doesn't wear pearls like fucking Lisa Simpson.

A Moonie crib would be insanely funny, though, so don't stop looking on my account.

[dadsinsuits]

Shinzo Abe

[divinum-pacis]

May 6, 2023: The Family Federation of World Peace and Unification, commonly known as the Unification Church, hosts a satellite Holy Marriage Blessing Ceremony in Las Vegas, Nevada. The main mass wedding event was held in South Korea. Hundreds of couples participated. (Photo by FFWPU USA/CC BY-ND)

[derrickwildsun]

The assassination of Shinzo Abe has been on my mind for the past few months for a number of reasons, but chief among them is how it revealed that the Liberal Democratic Party, the de facto ruling party of Japan, had been taking marching orders from the Unification Church (a cult that originated in South Korea). I can’t stress enough that the LDP is a nationalistic conservative party that has appealed to xenophobia towards non-native Japanese, especially immigrants/citizens of Korean descent. They’ve also gone to great lengths to deny Japan’s war crimes during World War II, including the way the Imperial Japanese military forced Korean woman to be “comfort women” (read: sex slaves) for Japanese soldiers. To contextualize this for Americans, this would be like learning that America’s Republican Party has secretly been taking orders from the Taliban despite popularizing and spreading Islamophobia for the last few decades.

[spurgie-cousin]

The Unification Church is confusing. Is it a Korean cult? In some pictures, the crowds look mostly Korean, but in others, they look mostly white.

The Unification Church was founded in South Korea around the time of WWII, and spread pretty rapidly there and in neighboring places like Japan until the late 60s and 70s when it started to branch out to Russia, eastern Europe, South America and eventually the United States (esp in areas with big south Korean populations).

One of their big things is to "promote intercultural, interracial, and international cooperation through the Unification world view" which sounds innocent enough, but it's just a PC way to say that they put a big focus on finding people to convert. Once they find someone who they deem convertible (preferably of a different race compared to the majority members of the church) they pull a "Married at First Sight" and marry then to a random church member, in a huge ceremony with tons of other couples, where they basically get married and converted officially at the same time.

So that's why sometimes you see large homogeneous looking congregations with only a small bit of diversity, or vice versa, because diversity is the main thing they're looking for when looking for converts and some church are better at it than others lol.

[figgldygrak]

Thinking about how I’ve never seen another ex-moonie with the same experience as me particularly because my parents are European where matching was done through fax machines and the blessing ceremonies were like six couples watching a livestream of Moon in the middle of the night instead of a proper mass wedding and the cult is different there than in the US where I grew up so I was raised differently than most BCs in my area.

But mostly it’s because I was lucky enough to realize I was in a cult and become an atheist when I was pretty young so even though I was still in a moonie family I was involved in actual cult stuff as little as possible. Most of the stuff other ex-moonies talk about is stuff that happens to adults, or at least older teens, like with arranged marriages and labor trafficking.

I’m grateful that I got out before that could happen to me but it makes it hard to connect to other ex-moonies. The things I want to talk about and the things that effected me the most do not align with the other ex-moonies that I see.

[whatisonthemoon]

Ten Years After Jonestown, the Battle Intensifies Over the Influence of ‘Alternative’ Religions (1988)

by Bob Sipchen - November 17, 1988 - Los Angeles Times

Eldridge Broussard Jr.’s face screwed into a grimace of such anger and pain that the unflappable Oprah Winfrey seemed unnerved. It hurts to be branded “the new Jimmy Jones” by a society eager to condemn what it doesn’t understand, the founder of the Ecclesia Athletic Assn. lamented on TV just a few days after his 8-year-old daughter had been beaten to death, apparently by Ecclesia members.

At issue were complex questions of whether the group he had formed to instill discipline in ghetto youth, and led from Watts to Oregon, had evolved into a dangerous cult. But Broussard couldn’t have found a less sympathetic audience than the group gathered around the TV in the bar of the Portland Holiday Inn.

There last month for the annual conference of the Chicago-based Cult Awareness Network were people whose kin had crumpled onto the body heaps at Jonestown, Guyana, 10 years ago, and people who believed they or family members had lost not their lives, but good chunks of them, to gurus and avatars less infamous but no less evil than Jim Jones.

One group’s cult is another’s “new religious movement,” though, and in the 10 years since Jonestown, a heated holy war of sorts has been mounting over the issues of how to define and contend with so-called cults.

The battle lines aren’t always well defined. Ongoing guerrilla actions between those who see themselves as crusaders against potential Jonestowns and those who see themselves as the persecuted members of outcast religious groups comprise the shifting legal and political fronts. On the outskirts of the ideological battleground is another loosely knit force that sees itself as the defender of a First Amendment besieged by vigilantes all too eager to kiss off the Constitution as they quash beliefs that don’t fit their narrow-minded criteria of what’s good and real. As one often-quoted definition has it: “A cult is a religion someone I don’t like belongs to.”

“It’s spiritual McCarthyism,” Lowell D. Streiker, a Northern California counselor, said of the cult awareness cause. To him, “the anti-cult network” is itself as a “cult of persecution,” cut from the same cloth as Colonial witch hunters and the Ku Klux Klan.

The key anti-cult groups, by most accounts, are CAN, a secular nondenominational group of 30 local affiliates; the Massachusetts-based American Family Foundation; the Interfaith Coalition of Concern About Cults and the Jewish Federation Council’s Commission on Cults and Missionaries.

Although they contend that their ranks continue to fill with the victims of cults or angry family members, they concede that the most significant rallying point came in the fall of 1978 when the leader of one alleged cult put a rattlesnake in an enemy’s mailbox and another led 912 people to their deaths.

Even though nothing so dramatic has happened since, cults have quietly been making inroads into the fabric of mainstream American life, and the effects are potentially as serious as the deaths at Jonestown, cult critics say.

With increased wealth and public relations acumen--with members clothed by Brooks Brothers rather than in saffron sheets--the 1,000 or more new cults that some estimate have sprung up in America since the ‘60s have become “a growth industry which is diversifying,” said Dr. Louis Jolyon West, director of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. “They have made steady progress on all fronts.”

Uglier Connotations

In the broadest sense, Webster defines a cult as simply “a system of religious worship or ritual.” Even before Jonestown, though, the word had taken on broader and uglier connotations.

To make a distinction, critics use the term destructive cult, or totalist cult. The issue, they say, pivots on the methods groups use to recruit and hold together followers.

CAN describes a destructive cult as one that “uses systematic, manipulative techniques of thought reform or mind control to obtain followers and constrict their thoughts and actions. These techniques are imposed without the person’s knowledge and produce observable changes in the individual’s autonomy, thoughts and actions. . . .”

A 1985 conference on cults co-sponsored by the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute and the American Family Federation came up with this definition:

“A group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea, or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control . . . designed to advance the goals of the group’s leaders, to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.”

The “manipulative techniques” in question are what cult critics call mind control or brainwashing.

To critics of the critics, on the other hand, brainwashing amounts to hooey.

And both sides say the weight of evidence is on their side.

New Beliefs, Personalities

Cult critics often point to classic surveys on brainwashing, which catalogue methods which they say are routinely used by cults of every color, religious and secular, to manipulate unsuspecting people into adopting new beliefs, and often, in effect, new personalities.

Among the techniques are constant repetition of doctrine; application of intense peer pressure; manipulation of diet so that critical faculties are adversely affected; deprivation of sleep; lack of privacy and time for reflection; cutting ties with the recruits’ past life; reduction of outside stimulation and influences; skillful use of ritual to heighten mystical experience; and invention of a new vocabulary which narrows the range of experience and constructs a new reality for cult members.

Margaret Singer, a former professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, describes psychological problems that have been attributed to cultic experiences, ranging from the despair that comes from having suddenly abandoned ones previous values, norms and ideals to types of “induced psychopathy.” Other psychologists and lay observers list similar mental and emotional problems linked to the indoctrination and rituals of cults.

Sociologist Dick Anthony, author of the book “Spiritual Choices,” and former director of the UC Berkeley-affiliated Center for the Study of New Religions, argues the exact opposite position.

“There’s a large research literature published in mainstream journals on the mental health effects of new religions,” he said. “For the most part the effects seem to be positive in any way that’s measurable.”

He and other defenders of new religions discount so-called mind control techniques, or believe the term has been misappropriated by anti-cult activists.

“Coercive Persuasion is a bombastic redescription of familiar forms of influence which occur everyday and everywhere,” said Streiker. “Someone being converted to a demanding religious movement is no more or less brainwashed than children being exposed to commercials during kiddy programs which encourage them to eat empty calories or buy expensive toys.”

“An attempt to persuade someone of something is a process protected by our country’s First Amendment right of free speech and communication,” said attorney Jeremiah Gutman head of the New York City branch of the American Civil Liberties Union and an outspoken critic of the anti-cult groups. “What one person believes to be an irrefutable and obvious truth is someone else’s errant nonsense.”

‘Fraud and Manipulation’

But anti-cult spokespeople say they have no interest in a group’s beliefs. Their concern is when destructive cults use “fraud and manipulation,” to get people to arrive at those beliefs, whatever they may be. Because people are unaware of the issues, though, cults have insinuated themselves into areas of American life where they are influencing people who may not even know where the influence is coming from, they contend.

The political arena is the obvious example, anti-cult activists say.

Followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had a major impact on the small town government of Antelope, Ore., and Jim Jones had managed to thrust himself and his church into the most respectable Democratic party circles in San Francisco before the exodus to Guyana, for instance.

But recently the process has expanded, with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church the leading example of a cult that is quietly gaining political clout, they say.

“What Jim Jones did to Democrats in San Francisco, Sun Myung Moon is doing to Republicans all across country now,” Kisser said.

Moon’s most obvious stab at mainstream legitimacy, critics say, was his purchase in 1982 of the Washington Times, a D.C. daily newspaper, and his financial nurturing of the paper’s magazine Insight--both of which have an official policy of complete editorial independence from the church.

In September, 1987, the conservative American Spectator magazine published an article titled “Can Buy Me Love: The Mooning of Conservative America,” in which managing editor Andrew Ferguson questioned the way the political right is lapping up Moon money, citing, among many examples, the $500,000 or more the late Terry Dolan’s National Conservative Alliance accepted in 1984. When the church got wind of the article, the Spectator received a call from the executive director of the Unification Church’s World Media Assn. warning that if it ran, the Times “would strike back and strike back severely,” Ferguson wrote in an addendum to the piece.

‘Everyone Speaks Korean’

Therapist Steven Hassan, a former “Moonie” and the author of the just-released book “Combatting Cult Mind Control,” estimates that the church now sponsors 200 businesses and “front organizations.”

Moon “has said he wants an automatic theocracy to rule the world,” explained Hassan, who, on Moon’s orders, engaged in a public fast for Nixon during Watergate and another fast at the U.N. to protest the withdrawal of troops from Korea. “He visualizes a world where everyone speaks Korean only, where all religion but his is abolished, where his organization chooses who will mate, and he and family and descendants rule in a heroic monarchy.”

Moon “is very much in support of the democratic system,” counters John Biermans , director of public affairs for the church. “His desire is for people to become God-centered people. Then democracy can fulfill its potential”

Besides, he said, “this is a pluralistic society, people of all faiths inject their beliefs into the system on every level . . . Using terms like ‘front groups’ and ‘insinuating,’ is just a way to attack something. It’s not even honest.”

Some observers dismiss concern about alleged Unificationist infiltration as self-serving hysteria whipped up by the anti-cultists.

“How much actual influence (the Unification Church) has seems questionable,” said David Bromley, a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and the author of the 1981 book “Strange Gods, the Great American Cult Scare.”

Bromley estimates, for instance, that the church brings $200 million a year into the U.S. from abroad. But he sees no evidence that the money, much of it spent on all-expense-paid fact-finding tours and conferences for journalists, politicians and clergypeople, is money well-invested as far as political impact goes.

The church, he estimates, is losing about $50 million a year on its Washington Times newspaper and the ranks of Unificationists, and most other new religions, in America are thinning as well.

Veterans of the anti-cult front, however, say that the appearance that cults are fading is an illusion. “Like viruses, many of them mutate into new forms,” when under attack, West of UCLA said. And new types of cults are arising to fill the void, they say.

Cult critics point, for instance, to the rise of such groups as the est offshoot called Forum, and to Lifespring and Insight--all of which CAN characterizes as “human potential cults” and all of which are utilized in mainstream American business to promote productivity and motivation.

Observers such as Gordon Melton of the Institute for the Study of Religious Institutions in Santa Barbara explain that many of these New Age-type trainings have their roots in the old fashioned motivational pep talks and sales technique seminars that have been the staples of American business for decades.

But critics see the so-called “psychotechnologies” utilized by some of these groups as insidious. For one thing, they say, the meditation, confessional sharing, and guided imagery methods some of them use are more likely to make employees muzzy-headed than competitive.

Other critics say the trainings violate employee’s rights. Richard Watring, a personnel director for Budget Rent-a-Car, who has been charting the incorporation of “New Age” philosophies into business trainings, is concerned that employees are often compelled to take the courses and then required to adapt a new belief system which may be incompatible with their own religious convictions. As a Christian he finds such mental meddling inappropriate for corporations.

He and other cult critics are heartened by recent cases, still pending, in which employees, or former employees, have sued their employer for compelling them to take trainings they felt conflicted with their own religious beliefs.

Most observers scoring the action on the broader legal battlefield, however, call it a toss-up, and perceived victories for either side have often proved Pyrrhic.

Threats of Litigation

Richard Ofshe, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, fought three separate legal battles with the drug and alcohol rehabilitation organization Synanon over research he published on the group. Although he ultimately won the suits, he said the battle wound up costing the university $600,000. And evidence obtained in other lawsuits showed that Synanon had skillfully wielded threats of litigation to keep several other critical stories from being published or broadcast, he said.

Similarly, a recently released book “Cults and Consequences,” went unpublished for several years because insurers were wary of the litigious nature of some of the groups mentioned, said Rachel Andres, director of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles’ Commission on Cults and Missionaries and the book’s co-editor.

But the most interesting litigation of late involves either a former member who is suing the organization to which he or she belonged, or a current member of a new religious group who is suing a deprogrammer who attempted unsuccessfully to persuade the person to leave the group.

The most significant case, everyone agrees, is last month’s Molko decision by the California Supreme Court, which anti-cult groups have cheered as a major victory.

In that reversal of lower court decisions, the justices agreed that David Molko and another former member of the Unification Church could bring before a jury the claim that they were defrauded by recruiters who denied they had a church affiliation and then subjected the two to church mind control techniques, eventually converting them.

Mainstream religious organizations including the National Council on Churches, the American Baptist Churches in the USA and the California Ecumenical Council had filed briefs in support of the Unification Church, claiming that allowing lawsuits over proselytizing techniques could paralyze all religions.

“What they’re attacking is prayer, fasting and lectures,” said Biermans of the Unification Church. “The whole idea of brainwashing is unbelievably absurd. . . . If someone had really figured out a method of brainwashing, they could control the world.” The church plans to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary. Paul Morantz, the attorney who was struck by the rattlesnake placed in his mailbox by the “Imperial Marines” of Synanon, gave pro-bono assistance to the plaintiffs in the Molko case.

“For me, it was a great decision for freedom of religion and to protect against the . . . use of coercive persuasion,” he said.

Morantz currently is defending Bent Corydon, author of the book “L. Ron Hubbard, Madman or Messiah” against a lawsuit by the Church of Scientology. He said he’s confident of how that case will turn out.

But he shares the belief of others on several sides of the multifaceted cult battle, in concluding that education rather than litigation should be the first defense of religious and intellectual liberty.

He’s not, however, optimistic.

“If anyone thinks they’re ever going to win this war, they’re wrong,” he said. “As long as we have human behavior, there will be sociopaths who will stand up and say ‘follow me.’ And there will always be searchers who will follow.”

Source: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-11-17-vw-257-story.html

[many-bees]

Here’s a Twitter thread summarizing/translating an article on the background of the man who killed Shinzo Abe. I really really encourage everyone to read it.