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Remember about the Black Dragon Secret Society in Japan?
We should have a prize for whoever connects up Rev. Moon with the
American Enterprise Institute first!
http://www.americanatheist.org/spr00/T2/fitrakis.html
Dark side of the Moon
by Bob Fitrakis
(Reprinted with the permission of Columbus Alive. This article
originally appeared in the 24 February 2000 issue of that
newspaper.)
After Texas Governor George W. Bush faltered in New Hampshire, a
spooky and shadowy right-wing network came to his rescue in South
Carolina, turning a certain primary defeat into a double-digit
victory. As the Washington Post noted, “An array of conservative
groups have come in to reinforce Bush’s message with phone banks,
radio ads and mailings of their own.”
Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen asserted that “Bush embraces
the far-right fringe.” From the racists who prohibit interracial
dating at Bob Jones University to the moronic Confederate flag
wavers, from Rush Limbaugh to Pat Robertson, and from the most
extreme elements of the right-to-life movement to the Moonies, the
Bush family network prevailed. NBC’s Tim Russert pointed out that
George W. was now “indebted to Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell” and the
Christian right.
Dutifully, the Washington Times - a paper owned by self-proclaimed
messiah and cult leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon - ran a headline
stating, “Bush scoffs at assertion he moved too far right.” The
bizarre and almost unbelievable relationship between the Bush family
and the 80-year-old Moon is the dirty little secret of George W.’s
campaign for President.
To understand the role the Moonies play in U.S. politics, one must
start with Ryoichi Sasakawa, identified in a 1992 PBS Frontline
investigative report as a key money source for Reverend Moon’s
far-flung world empire. In the 1930s, Sasakawa was one of Japan’s
leading fascists. He organized a private army of 1,500 men equipped
with 20 warplanes. His men dressed in black shirts to emulate
Mussolini. Sasakawa was an “uncondemned Class A war criminal”
suddenly freed with another accused war criminal - Yoshio Kodama, a
leading figure in Japan’s organized crime syndicate Yakuza - in
1948.
In January 1995, Japan’s KYODO news-service uncovered documents
establishing that the one-time fascist war criminal suspect was
earmarked as an informer by U.S. military intelligence two months
prior to his unexplained release: Declassified documents link
Kodama’s release to the CIA. During World War II, the Kodama Agency,
according to 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 and Kodama’s CIA ties are a reoccurring theme in their
relationship with the Moonies. In 1977, Congressman Donald Fraser
launched an investigation into Moon’s background. 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 Korean
Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) Director Kim Chong Phil as a
political tool to influence U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. CIA was
the agency primarily responsible for the founding of the KCIA.
The Moon organizations have denied any links with the Korean
government or intelligence community.
Moon, who is Korean, and his two Japanese buddies, Sasakawa and
Kodama, first joined together in the 1960s to form the Asian
People’s Anti-Communist League with the aid of KCIA agents, alleged
Japanese organized crime money and financial support from Chinese
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. The League concentrated on uniting
fascists, right-wing, and anti-Communist forces throughout Asia.
In 1964, League funds set up Moon’s Freedom Center in the United
States. Kodama served as Chief Advisor to the Moon subsidiary Win
Over Communism, an organization that served to protect Moon’s South
Korean investments. Sasakawa acted as Win Over Communism’s chair.
In 1966, the League merged with the anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations,
another group with strong fascist ties, to form the World
Anti-Communist League (WACL). Later, in the 1980s, the retired US
Major General John Singlaub emerged as a key player in the
Iran-Contra scandal through his chairmanship of the WACL. Singlaub
enlisted paramilitary groups, foreign governments and right-wing
Americans to support the Contra cause in Nicaragua.
Moon’s Freedom Center served as the headquarters for the League in
the United States. 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 US in 1965
and obtained an audience with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Ike, along with former President Harry S. Truman, lent their names
to the letterhead of the Moon-created Korean Cultural Freedom
Foundation. In 1969, Moon and Sasakawa jointly formed the Freedom
Leadership Foundation (FLF), a pro-Vietnam War organization that
lobbied the US government.
In the 1970s, Moon earned notoriety in the Koreagate scandal after
female followers of the Unification Church were accused of
entertaining and keeping confidential files on several US
congressmen whom they “lobbied” at a Washington Hilton I-Intel suite
rented by the Moonies. The US Senate held hearings concerning Moon’s
“programmatic bribery of US officials, journalists and others as
part of an operation by the Korean CIA to influence the course of US
foreign policy.”
The Fraser report noted 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 US at that time, was not religious at all but was
political, it was 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, a
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 investigatory magazine
IF, 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 Washington Times. Vice President Bush immediately
saw the value of building an alliance with the politically powerful
Moon organization, an alliance that Moon claims made Bush president.
One ex-Moonie’s website claims that during the 1988 Bush Dukakis
battle, Reverend Moon threatened his followers that he'd move all of
them out of the US if the evil Dukakis won.
Also in 1982, Moon was convicted of income tax evasion and spent
more than a year in jail.
During the Gulf War, the Moonie-sponsored American Freedom Coalition
organized “support the troop” rallies. 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, Sasakawa’s virtual monopoly over the Japanese speedboat
gambling industry allowed the money to continue flowing to Moon’s US
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. Then-President Bush downplayed accusations of
brain-washing and coercion against the Moonies. The New York Times
noted that Bush’s presence “is seen by some as lending the group
[Moonies] legitimacy.”
Longtime Moonie member S. P. Simonds wrote an editorial for the
Portland Press Herald noting the Bushes “didn’t need the reported
million dollars paid by Moon and were well aware of the Church's
history.”
Bush shared the podium with Moon’s wife and addressed a crowd of
50,000 in the Tokyo dome. Bush told the true believers, Reverend and
Mrs. Moon are engaged in the most important activities going on [in]
the world today.”
The following year Moon bankrolled a series of “family values”
conferences from Oakland to Washington, DC. The San Francisco
Chronicle reported, “In Washington, Moon opened his checkbook to
such Republican Party mainstays as former Presidents Gerald Ford and
George Bush, GOP presidential candidate Jack Kemp and Christian
Coalition leader Ralph Reed.”
Purdue University Professor of Sociology Anson Shupe, a longtime
Moon watcher, said, “The man accused of being the biggest
brainwasher in America has moved into mainstream Republican
Americana.”
Moon claimed at these family values conferences that he was the
“only one who knows all the secrets of God.” One of them, according
to the Chronicle, is that “the husband is the owner of his wife’s
sexual 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
not know,” 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, President Bush 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
principal speaker at the paper’s opening dinner on November 23.
The former president then traveled with Moon to neighboring Uruguay
to help him open a Montevideo seminary to train 4,200 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 an Uruguayan bank, according to the
St. Petersburg Times.
The Times also reported that when Reverend Jerry Falwell’s
university faced bankruptcy, Moon’s group bailed it out with
millions of dollars in loans and grants.
The New York Times noted in 1997 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 appeals to
the Second Amendment crowd. In March 1999, the Washington Post
reported that the messiah owned the lucrative Kahr Arms Company
through Saeilo, Inc.
It’s the shadowy network around the Moonies that the elder Bush
could have called in to bail out his son's campaign in South
Carolina. Make no mistake, George W. of Texas is little more than a
frontman for the restoration of his father’s unsavory connections,
who hide behind the veil of national security to avoid
accountability.
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