When President Bush added North Korea to his list of “Axis of Evil” nations, the influence of the self-declared reincarnation of Jesus Christ, the “Reverend” Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church, loomed largely over the White House decision-making process. The decision by Bush to throw into the trash heap of history eight years of a joint American-South Korean-Japanese dialogue with the reclusive Communist regime would ultimately result in Pyongyang returning to using the rhetoric of bygone years. Just as the Bush administration reintroduced to regular use the terms “segregation,” “civil rights,” and “ban on abortions,” the terms “demilitarized zone,” “Panmunjom,” and “38th parallel” would also re-enter the American political lexicon.
Bush, a self-described “born again Christian” who has maintained close links to Moon, hired David Frum as one of his speechwriters. Frum apparently came up with the term “axis of evil” for Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address but it seems likely that Bush, heavily influenced by the propagandists of the rabidly anti-Pyongyang Washington Times, decided North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il was Satan reincarnate. Years before North Korea announced it was restarting its nuclear enrichment facility at Yongbyon, The Washington Times splashed front page headlines about North Korea being a threat while other major newspapers and wire services treated the sensationalistic reports as a non-story or more probably, plain disinformation masked as “intelligence reports” and “leaked” by anti-Clinton Pentagon officials.
For twenty years, Moon’s main policy laundering enterprise for his incessant influence-peddling has been The Washington Times, the money-losing newspaper he owns outright through New World Communications, Inc., the paper’s parent publishing company. New World also owns Insight Magazine, The Middle East Times (based in Cairo), Zambezi Times (based in Lusaka, Zambia), newspapers in Uruguay and Canada, a textbook publishing company in Russia, and United Press International, the formerly well-respected wire service that fell on hard financial times and was bailed out by Moon’s seemingly unlimited cash flows.
Next year, an Insight magazine reporter is poised to take over as President of the venerable National Press Club in Washington. Thus, in a presidential election year, a Moon employee will have influence on what politicians and candidates are selected for televised luncheon speeches carried by C-SPAN and other cable news networks. Democrats and Greens should be very wary. Some former Washington Times officials claim The Washington Times and its affiliates are so tied in with Moon’s agenda, its reporters and staff should register with the Justice Department as foreign lobbyists under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Moon launched The Washington Times in 1982, just a few years after one of Moon’s associates, Tongsun Park, was indicted for paying bribes to a number of U.S. politicians. The paper, which has a dearth of advertising revenue, has lost more than $1 billion dollars since its inception. Nevertheless, it has become a powerful conservative voice throughout Republican ranks in both the White House and Congress. In 1996, former President Bush, who has taken millions of dollars in speaking fees from Moon, spoke before a Moon audience in Argentina and declared Moon to be a “man of vision.” Bush 41, who could never really grasp the “vision thing,” decided Moon had it.
Moon’s own background, which reportedly includes links to both the Korean CIA and its American counterpart, parallels that of other ethically-tainted individuals who have once again found sanctuary in a Bush administration: Elliott Abrams, John Poindexter, Otto Reich, and John Negroponte, all of Iran-contra infamy. The Washington Times was a leading supporter of the Nicaraguan contras and a chief apologist for the perpetrators of the arms-for-hostages scandal. Violating one of the main canons of journalism — that newspapers should not become part of or create their own stories — the Washington Times established the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to the contras circumventing the Boland Amendment that prohibited Federal money for the rightist guerrillas. Moon was also one of the few influential people who continued to defend Richard Nixon even as the President was resigning over the Watergate scandal.
In addition to his media empire, Moon also owns a Jonestown-type compound in Brazil called New Hope. He has also invested in the sparsely-populated and impoverished Marshall Islands. He has infiltrated one of the secessionist movements fighting for independence for the Angolan enclave of Cabinda. Moon’s favorites in Africa included some of the CIA’s most reliable clients: UNITA in Angola and RENAMO in Mozambique. Moon’s fronts even maintained a dialogue with Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge murdered 3 million Cambodians. More surprisingly, Moon reportedly partly owns a hotel in Pyongyang and a North Korean Fiat automobile plant. His flirtation with mind control techniques is legendary. Parents have spent millions trying to deprogram their children from the effects of Moon’s Pavlovian brain bending methods. Moon’s mass marriages of unwitting American males to Korean wives, while humorous on the surface, nevertheless managed to trap Zambian Roman Catholic Bishop Emmanuel Milingo. At least one pre-eminent Washington Times reporter is said to have been enticed into one of his boss’s mass marriage ceremonies.
At the 20th anniversary celebration of The Washington Times held last year in Washington, Moon seemingly endlessly spoke in Korean at the alcohol-free affair. He said The Washington Times would “spread the truth about God to the world.” But in Moon’s world, he is God. President Bush sent a message to the banquet stating, “Since 1982, people across America and throughout the world have relied on The Washington Times as a distinguished source of information and opinion.”
Bush seems to value Moon’s commitment to family values. Bush named David Caprara, the head of Moon’s American Family Coalition, as the director of VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). Moon’s commitment to family values was exemplified at his 20th anniversary celebration of The Washington Times. The keynote speaker was Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the holier-than-thou radio talk show host who is the psychiatric part of the daily ration of right wing AM radio venom that is complemented by the political indoctrination of Rush Limbaugh and his clones. Schlessinger’s own commitment to family values was highlighted recently when she claimed the body of her 77-year-old mother from the Los Angeles County morgue after it had remained there for ten days after her unattended death in her condominium. Schlessinger, who lectures callers on how to keep their families together and wholesome, had not seen her own mother since 1984.
To Moon, however, disowning one’s parents is a hallmark of his brainwashing techniques. In 1973, while a college student in Mississippi, I was once lured into a Moon recruiting function. I met a young Jewish girl from New Jersey who was traveling around the country in a van with her fellow Moon adherents. As a native of New Jersey myself, I asked the young woman what her parents thought about her roaming about the country. She replied, “Parents, I have no parents. Reverend Moon is my family.” I wanted to call the nearest rabbi to help the poor girl get home to her parents who must have been worried sick. Nevertheless, Bush believes that Moon’s family value system is credible enough to appoint one of his adherents to head VISTA.
But Moon is not only a danger to young people. While Bush accuses Kim Jong Il of all kinds of evil affronts he seems to ignore some of Moon’s more bellicose and threatening comments. According to a 1978 House of Representatives investigation of Moon some of the more outrageous comments include:
—Unification Church members are to regard Korea with great reverence and look forward to the day when the Korean language will be spoken throughout the world.
—Members are to maintain a view to establishing a “unified civilization” of the whole world, to be centered in Korea and “corresponding to that of the Roman Empire.”
—God was helping Moon to set up a final battle involving the United States, Russia, China, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan.
—Moon’s plans are to manipulate seven nations at least, to get hold of the whole world: the United States, England, France, Germany, Russia, and maybe Korea and Japan. “On God’s side, Korea, Japan, America, England, France, Germany, and Italy, are the nations I count on in order to gain the whole world,” Moon stated.
The House of Representatives report on the activities of the Korean CIA in the United States found evidence that the Moon organization had violated a number of Federal and state laws. In 1984, Moon was convicted of income tax violations and spent 13 months in prison. But remember, in 1996, Bush pere referred to Moon as a “man of vision.” It should be noted that while Bush was head of the CIA, Moon was organizing a number of pro-American and anti-communist rallies and front organizations around the world. Moon was a convenient agent of influence for the CIA and Mr. Bush.
According to intelligence insiders, North Korean intelligence has quite a dossier on Reverend Moon and his payments to politicians in the United States and abroad. Some of the intelligence may prove embarrassing for some politicians, including the Bush family. So, here we are again. Noriega of Panama had the goods on the Bushes. He is now in a U.S. Federal prison; Sadaam knows what the Reagan-Bush administration sold him in the way of components for weapons of mass destruction. We are about ready to go to war against him. And Kim Jong Il has the juicy bits on Moon’s financial links to Bush pere and dauphin. Kim is now a member of the “axis of evil,” a man who George W. Bush hates because he “starves his own people.”
Congress investigated Moon’s operations in the late 1970s. It was at a time when Moon was involved with smaller scale influence peddling and brainwashing young college students into joining his cultist Unification Church, popularly known as the “Moonies.”
Now, at a time when Moon may be influencing United States foreign policy vis a vis North Korea, a known nuclear power, and risking a nuclear war in northeast Asia and hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of deaths, it may be time for Congress to once again launch an investigation of a man whose sole purpose is to unify the world under his direction. It has been over 60 years since the world heard a man talk like that: his name was Adolf Hitler.
WAYNE MADSEN is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth.
Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com