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My Four and One Half Years with The Lord of The Flies

by Allen Tate Wood


Henry Marshall, Allen Wood and Napier Burson
Sewanee fall 1968


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CONTENTS:

Prologue
Setting out On The Journey
Washington D.C. Capitol of The ArchAngel Nation
Partisan Political Activity
Meeting the Shogun
At The Feet of "The Master"
My Mission
Guilt by Accusation
Brainwashing: A glimpse into The Promised Land
    (100 Days Training Program at Tarreytown)
Kneeling Before the Master
Imperial Taster for The Royal Consort
Shades of The Grand Inquisitor
    (Forgiveness Through The Assumption of Power)
20th Century Protestantism's Captain Ahab
Up From The Abyss

Prologue

"I pulled the wings off the fly so that it couldn't get away," explained Moon to
a rapt audience of several hundred young disciples. He had been telling us about
one of his experiences in prison. "I was dreadfully lonely," he said. "My only
companion was a fly. I spent hours each day watching it. I watched it clean its
legs. I loved it so much that I didn't want it to escape. That is why I pulled
it's wings off."

This occasion contrasted with those meetings in which Moon brings his followers
to a fever pitch by exhortations and threats. "Are you willing to follow me?"

The response is a deafening "Yes" accompanied by clenched fists raised in
unison. Sun Myung Moon, a 76 year old Korean industrialist, owns a munitions
factory, a titanium plant, a ginseng refining plant and he is a successful real
estate entrepreneur in the U.S. He is also the increasingly well known creator
of, and alleged messiah of the Unification Church. Moon founded the church in
Seoul, South Korea, in 1954. Today the church claims more than half a million
members in 50 countries of which the big three are Japan, the U.S. and Germany.
Seventy percent of the membership has been claimed since 1971. In the State of
New York in the last few years Moon has purchased over nine million dollars
worth of real estate. Under the banner of the Second Coming, Sun Myung Moon
commands the allegiance of thousands of young people. They finance and operate a
network of front groups whose sole purpose is to catapult Moon into a position
of prominence and eventually of absolute power in American politics. By the fall
of 1969 the church was acting as a political pressure group in the nation's
capitol. From March to December of 1970 I was head of the Unification Church's
political arm in the United States(The Freedom Leadership Foundation). On Moon's
behalf we sought to defuse the Peace Movement and buttress the hawk position by
convincing senators and congressmen that there was substantial grass roots
support for a hard line stand in Asia. In 1969 we were just scratching the
surface. Today Moon's organization is in a position of vastly increased power
and prestige. Through the Freedom Leadership Foundation and it's descendant
CAUSA, Moon has won the gratitude and respect of many congressmen and senators,
not to mention former presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush. With The D. C.
Stirrers, an inner city track club, Moon parades as a conscientious church
leader doing his bit for black teenagers in the nation's capitol. The Little
Angels, a Korean Children's Folk Ballet gives him an entree into the
entertainment world. Thr ough the person of Jhoon Rhee, director of a
mushrooming chain of Korean Karate schools, he enters the world of amateur and
professional athletics. Through annual conferences on the "unity of science," he
presents himself as a philanthropic patron of the sciences and the humanities.
With his burgeoning fortune Moon has the resources to underwrite scientific
research and to endow fellowships in Universities. If Moon's movement in America
continues unchecked, he will soon be able to directly influence the outcome of
elections.

In Korea Moon's is the only "Christian" group that has not suffered at the hands
of President Park's brutal suppression of free speech and civil liberties. Moon
far from repudiating the Park government's beating and torture of Korean
ministers, sponsored and organized a pro government rally in which 1,200,000
people participated (according to a press release given by the Unification
Church in Washington.) Borrowing from Moon's historical metaphor(The Divine
Principle) this is the equivalent of Jesus holding a pro government
demonstration in Jerusalem in support of King Herod. When I was in Korea in
October of 1970, Moon told me that when the Unification Church gains control of
the South Korean government," every South Korean Embassy in the world will
become an expeditionary force for the Kingdom of Heaven.

Setting out On The Journey

My path to the Unification Church began in 1966 when I matriculated at the
University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. I entered college with little
concrete notion of what I wanted to do in life. I had rejected the establishment
rewards that my secondary education promised. To me the academic challenge at
Sewanee was meaningless. Absorbed in a search for values by which I could live,
the Peace Movement offered the only channel for my frustrated idealism. From the
steps of the burned out ROTC building at the University of the South in the
spring of 1968, I was the first student to speak publicly against the War at
Sewanee. That summer in New Jersey I worked for the Presidential campaign of
Senator Eugene J. McCarthy. In August I went to The National Democratic
convention in Chicago as a messenger for the New Jersey delegation. The ferocity
of the police riots during the convention destroyed what lingering faith I had
in the political process, and I returned to college in the fall bewildered by
our nati onal leaders' refusal to respond to the people's wish to end the war in
Vietnam.

Unable to concentrate on my studies, I began to explore Eastern religions,
specifically the religious synthesism of RamaKrishna. In the spring of 1969 I
dropped out of the University of the South and hitchhiked to California, a stop
on my way to India. In May I arrived in Berkeley, with a suitcase and a navy
duffel bag and a copy of the Gospel According to Rama Krishna. I didn't know it,
but it was the end of the line.

Early one afternoon a few days later I met a young man on the steps of the
student union on the campus at the University of California at Berkeley. I told
him I had no place to stay and no money. He said I could keep my bags at the
"Unified Family" a commune several blocks from the campus. He picked up my
suitcase. I grabbed my dufflebag, and off we went. At the commune Edwin Ang an
Indonesian man in his early forties greeted us at the door. He was the center
leader. We sat on cushions in the sparsely f urnished living room while he asked
me what I was doing. I replied: "I am searching for God." He asked me to dinner
and to a lecture that dealt with the commune's philosophy. Within a week I had
heard five lectures on the "Divine Principle." In the last lecture an
impassioned young woman spoke to us revealing that Moon was the "Messiah". I
already knew this. Earlier I had been looking for a sleeping bag in a closet and
there, on a shelf, was a photograph of Sun Myung Moon, a man of 40, kimono-clad.
He st ared impassively into my startled eyes. I knew then that my new friends
would soon tell me that this man was the Messiah. I joined the Unified Family in
Berkeley. It then had thirteen members. In those days there was no Freedom
Leadership Foundation, no CAUSA, no political activity and no fundraising. Our
communal life consisted of meals, prayer services, singing, witnessing and
studying the Divine Principle. At twenty-two I was the fourth oldest member of
the group in Berkeley.

In the summer of 1969 the Unification Church in America had no more than 6 or 7
centers with a total membership numbering around 150. During that summer Neil
Winterbottom from national headquarters in Washington D.C. visited the commune.
He was English, a bout my age, bright and well read. He seemed more dynamic than
my compadres in Berkeley.

He suggested that I should come to the headquarters in Washington. I came back
East to Princeton N.J., to visit my family, whose skepticism about my new found
religion only strengthened my commitment. Their suggestion that this group might
be a front for Korean neo-fascism was preposterous. I did not tell them then
that I knew Moon was the Messiah. Time was short. The world had to be saved. I
had found my work at last.

Washington D.C.
Capitol of The ArchAngel Nation

I arrived in Washington D.C. for the second FLF conference. Neil Salonen, who in
1975 was Moon's right hand man in the United States, was ordered by Moon in the
summer of 1969 to found the Church's anti-Communist movement in this country and
to name the or ganization the International Federation for The Extermination of
Communism. Salonen set the Freedom Leadership Foundation as the American Branch
of the IFEC. On paper the FLF exists as a nonprofit, non partisan educational
corporation whose stated objecti ve is to educate American Youth about the
dangers of Communism. From its inception FLF was funded by the Unification
Church. At this stage in the movement's development, the general membership was
politically unsophisticated. The idea of a political arm was new and the purists
in the movement who believed that a Church should have nothing to do with
politics voiced strong opposition. It was pointed out to them that the church in
Japan and Korea carried out extensive anti-Communist political programs and that
it was the "master's" express desire to begin political work in the U.S.
Thereafter opposition to political work was seen as infidelity to the Master.

In the fall of 1969 FLF launched a public relations campaign against the October
15 and November 15 Vietnam Moratoriums. Unification Church members went full
steam into the political operation as well as stepping up the usual witnessing
and teaching of the Divine Principle. From this perspective my paid job in the
office of Congressman Frank Thompson Jr., democrat from New Jersey, certainly
appears odd. "Thompy" was known as an opponent of the war and supported Gene
McCarthy for President in 1968. While my "boss" on the Hill was making stronger
statements than ever against the War in Vietnam, after hours I was in the
streets leafleting for the Master in support of it. In the fall of 1969 and the
winter of 1970 Salonen scouted the hard-line anti-Communist groups in D.C. The
fruits of his labor were winning the friendship and support of several
influential men, including David Martin, the late Senator Dodd's foreign affairs
assistant(later a member on the staff of the Senate's Internal Security
Committee), Dolph Droge and Sven Kramer, Nixon's special assistants on Vietnam
and Charles Stephens, an independently wealthy man in his early thirties, who
devoted a good deal of his time to promoting aggressive war policies through ad
hoc groups of his own creation on campuses throughout the country. In the fall
of 1969 and the spring of 1970 I worked increasingly with FLF.

Partisan Political Activity

In March of 1970 Salonen stepped down from the Presidency of FLF as a result of
internecine conflict between himself and W. Farley Jones(then President of the
Unification Church in America). Salonen was sent to Colorado to cool off and I
was made President of FLF. It was not until a year later that I discovered that
my sudden promotion over the heads of my superiors was a result of the
leadership's conviction that I could "easily be controlled, and that my clean
cut American good looks and the gift of gab made me an ideal front man.

In May Charles Stephens and I with coaching from David Martin, formed a
political lobby group called "American Youth for A Just Peace." I called
Unification Church members from all over the country to assist in a lobbying
campaign in defense of Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and against the
McGovern-Hatfield and Cooper-Church bills to limit American involvement. We ran
several full page advertisements in the Washington Star and Washington Post,
defending military aid to Cambodia, signed with my name as chairman. As a result
the South Vietnamese Embassy invited AYJP members on a VIP tour of Vietnam.
Eight Unification Church members, Stephens and two of his associates and I flew
to Vietnam on August 22, 1970 for a ten day visit crowned by dinner with South
Vietnamese President Thieu in the Presidential Palace in Saigon. While we were
in Saigon, the Cambodian government invited us to visit Cambodia. We spent five
days there. General Lon Nol gave us an audience.

We appeared on CBS national television evening news. Walter Cronkite transported
the audience at home in the U.S. to our group digging a fortification ditch
around the perimeter of Pnom Phen. Shovel in hand, I begged for more military
aid for Cambodia in its struggle against communist aggression. The CBS
correspondent described me, I remember, as a spokesman for a group of young
Americans who had come to Southeast Asia to "find the facts." The South
Vietnamese government paid for our round trip air fare with the explicit
understanding that we would use the information we gathered to fight the Peace
Movement on U.S. campuses and to generate support for the war. We were given
royal treatment. At each stop the red carpet was rolled out. In Cambodia when we
disembarked from the plane there were several thousand people waiting at the
airport to greet us. A double row of 100 school girls was holding red roses. I
felt like Lord Jim.

We left Cambodia and flew to Japan to visit the Japanese Unification Church and
to participate in the World Anti-Communist League's fourth annual conference
held in Kyoto. That was followed by a mass rally of 25,000 people in Tokyo at
the Budokan Sports Palace. The WACL conference was sponsored by the
International Federation for Victory Over Communism, the political arm of the
Japanese Unification Church. Delegates from 53 nations attended. The American
delegate was Senator Strom Thurmond and the honorary chairman of the conference
was a prominent Japanese industrialist, Ryoichi Sasakawa.

Meeting the Shogun

Sasakawa was a fascist youth leader in the 30's. The Japanese Unification Church
proudly told us that Sasakawa had helped create the Japanese Kamikaze program
and that he had been instrumental in the Hitler Tojo pact. Sasakawa was
convicted as a class A war criminal at the end of World War II and spent several
years in jail. In 1975 he was the president of 13 major Japanese corporations,
including the largest ship building company in Japan. He is also head of all
Japanese karate schools. Sasakawa, on a visit to the Korean Unification Church,
told church members that he was "Mr. Moon's dog."

After the WACL Conference we visited Unification Church centers in Japan. They
were awe-inspiring to all of us. Then there were approximately 3,000 dedicated
young followers who lived in Church centers for 20 to 100 members all over
Japan. Seventy percent of them were involved in full time fundraising by selling
flowers on street corners 14 hours a day. The rank and file members lived on a
diet of rice and bread crusts. Church centers usually consisted of two large
rooms with several smaller rooms adjacent. The large rooms served as separate
men's and women's sleeping quarters. Anywhere from 10 to 50 people would sleep
on tatami mats on the floor in one of the larger rooms. The center leader had a
room to himself. The atmosphere in these centers was one of rigid military
discipline and self-denial. All the Japanese martial virtues were harnassed and
focussed on the molding of a group psyche whose sole object was to exalt Moon.

At The Feet of "The Master"

After 17 days in Japan, 7 of us flew to Korea to meet Moon and to visit the
Korean Unification Church. We were housed in the dormitory of one of Moon's
Anti-communist training centers, inside the walls of the Unification Church's
air rifle factory, about an hour and a half drive from Seoul. Now after praying
in his name for 16 months I was finally to meet the "Master.". From our window
in the Anti-Communist training dormitory we saw Moon and his wife approaching
across the dry mud field separating the dormitory and the air rifle factory. I,
with the others, ran out of the building and raced across the muddy yard to
greet them. I saw a dark haired, heavy set man whose receding hairline
accentuated an already ample brow. He was wearing a white peasant tunic and dark
trousers. He looked as he did in his photographs but older and heavier. His
disciplined movements and compact body conveyed a sense of coiled power. Moon
shook hands with each of us, smiling broadly. I saw, as he turned sideways in
front of me, a large piece of red wax in his right ear. I treasured this
excrescence as a sign of his humanity.

My Mission

During my visit to Korea in October I was given a private audience with Moon. I
was ushered into a lounge adjacent to his private quarters above the main church
building in Seoul. We sat opposite each other on a plain rug separated by a
black lacquer table inlaid with two finely worked mother of pearl dragons. For
an hour he instructed me on various matters. The only interruption was the
arrival of a messenger, a Korean man in his forties who prostrated himself at
Moon's feet before addressing the "Master." Moon said to me," You have a great
responsibility. It is your job to initiate the work of winning the academic
community in America to my side." Further he said, " The allegiance of the
scholarly community is a vital key in my plan to restore the world. Since
universities hold the reigns of certification for all the major professions and
since universities are the crucible in which young Americans form their basic
attitudes and life directions, we must forge a path toward influencing and
ultimately controlling American campuses."

Moon held the Japanese Church up to us as an example of the true pattern of
serving the Messiah. It was his intention to shame us into greater fervor and
zeal, and his tactic was largely successful. The relative impotence of the
American church in comparison with the militancy, power and organization of the
Japanese Unification Church was a source of humiliation to us all. Moon told us
that he could not come to America until we had significantly increased our
numbers, demonstrated a higher level of persona l sacrifice, and achieved
greater organizational unity. On our return to the U.S. we brought intimations
of the future directions of the movement in America.

I returned to the U.S. on October 6, 1970, in time for an early morning press
conference with AYJP co-chairman Charles Stephens. Between October and December
Stephens and I spoke to civic groups in Washington , issued a bi-monthly tabloid
to congressmen and senators, and did all we could to beat the war drum in the
nation's capitol. AYJP was staffed entirely by Unification Church members.

In November of 1970 W. Farley Jones and Neil Salonen returned from Korea. There
they had been "blessed" in a mass marriage ceremony by Moon. Unification Church
doctrine states that marriage is available only to individuals who have attained
perfection and that marriage by Moon is the instrument through which fallen man
is grafted back onto the tree of life(Moon's revelation omits no detail and
leaves nothing to the imagination. Its rigorous orthodoxy even prescribes the
exact positions for consummation of the marriage.) On his return to the U.S. W.
Farley Jones was informed that I had exhibited a romantic interest in a
Unification Church woman. Any attachment of this sort not directly sanctioned by
Moon is considered to be a sign of weakness and a manifestation of "satanic
possession."

Guilt by Accusation

Without the benefit of facing my accuser or of defending my actions, my guilt
was established and tacit sentence was passed. For the time being this
condemnation destroyed whatever prestige I had as an up and coming Church l
eader, and it made it difficult for me to continue as President of FLF. The
Unification Church, lacking a philosophical or sacramental grasp of forgiveness,
employs character assassination and guilt through innuendo as powerful tools in
enforcing obedience. This incident was not a special case. It is an example of
Church policy. Salonen, resurrected from Colorado and "blessed" by Moon, was now
fit to reassume the Presidency of FLF.

In January of 1971, W. Farley Jones sent me to the Level Two Training Program as
an anti-Communist lecturer. This was the first in a series of national church
training programs conducted in Washington D.C.

In December of 1971, Moon came to the U.S. to take direct control of the
American Unification Church. All income was collectivized immediately. Outside
jobs were dropped. Membership in he Church became a full time occupation whose
sole material reward was room and board. At this point Moon established the
International One World Crusade, billed as a Christian revival youth movement.
It was,in fact, a clever maneuver to recruit more troops for the Unification
Church.

Moon assigned Travis Jones to start forming a center at the University of
Maryland campus at College Park. In January of 1972 a number of us joined Travis
in College Park. There we were left to our own devices. By June we had gained 12
new members, making a total of 21. Elated by this success and driven by the
labor of 15 full time fund-raisers, we purchased an estate in Upper Marlboro,
Maryland. The previous January we had started a candle factory to raise money to
support ourselves and to further the w ork of the Unification Church. From early
March of 1972 we delivered candles to church centers up and down the Eastern
Seaboard. The churches sold the candles for a 400% profit.

In August the entire Unification Church began to raise 294,000.00 for the down
payment on "Belvedere," an $800,000.00 estate in Tarrytown, N.Y. This money was
raised by young people selling candles and flowers 16 hours a day on a diet of
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and chicken soup~self-denial for the Master~.
We, in Uppermarlboro working three shifts, 24 hours a day for 40 days, produced
200,000 candles for the effort. The down payment was made. Moon stated,"Heaven
gave me this house." Belvedere served as Moon's private residence until the
purchase of a neighboring estate within the year costing $600,000.00

A year later, by March of 1973, we in Upper Marlboro began to have serious
doubts about Moon's claim to be the "Messiah" and about his autocratic methods.
That month, Travis Jones, who had pioneered the work in Maryland, was
arbitrarily relieved of his responsibilities and sent to Belvedere to be
reprogrammed. I was made One World Crusade Commander of Maryland, i.e., head of
the Church in the state. Travis' reports from New York State were grim.

Brainwashing: A glimpse into The Promised Land
100 Days Training Program at Tarrytown

The training program at Belvedere was aimed at breaking down the individual's
identity by subjecting him or her to an emotionally and physically exhausting
schedule of repetitive lectures, exercise and door to door soliciting. Trainees
were quartered in large rooms in army bunks with little or no privacy. Men were
strongly advised to cut their hair short. Mustaches and beards were unthinkable.
The entire scenario was an echo of Marine boot camp. The restructuring of the
trainee's ego was based on Moon's theology that projects absolute faith in Moon
as the essential building block of a "restored" personality. It attacks the
validity of the individual conscience. It explicitly denies the individual's
capacity to make morally responsible existential decisions. Somewhere along the
line in the theology, love of God is translated into blind obedience to Moon and
his representatives in the hierarchical chain. One is finally left with
submission to Moon as the only answer to fallen man's condition of moral
paralysis.

Kneeling Before the Master

During Travis tour at Belvedere and during my visits there throughout the spring
and summer our doubts about Moon and the Unification Church were crystallized by
a series of macabre demonstrations of Moon's essentially psychopathic
relationship with his followers. Shortly after Travis' relocation to Belvedere,
Moon spoke at a Sunday church service at National Headquarters at 1611 Upshur
St. in Washington D.C. The entire Maryland group was there. As One World Crusade
Commander of Maryland I was given a coveted seat on the front row next to
Unification Church President Neil Salonen. During his harangues, Moon hit me
several times on the shoulder. When he finished his speech, he motioned me
forward and asked me to kneel in front of the congregation. I thought he was
going to ask me to confess my sins publicly. As I knelt, he kicked me in the
hind quarters and then demanded of the audience whether they would follow him if
he treated them like this. The immediate response was a deafening "yes" with
clenched fists raised toward the ceiling.

Travis told me of a similar incident that took place while he was at Belvedere.
In front of the entire training group of 70 young converts Moon hit Young Whi
Kim, president of the Korean Unification Church, across the buttocks with a
wooden cane with such force that the cane snapped in half. At Belvedere Moon
also directly supervised the "War Games" in which One World Crusade Commanders
and State Representatives took part in a massive variant of tug of war. Two
groups of 50 would try to drag each other bodily across a certain line and back
40 yards to "prison camp.". Moon stood on the tip of a boulder in the path of
the line. On a signal from Moon the teams would charge across the line and
engage in a no holds barred battle to subdue and capture their adversaries.

Travis saw one guy with a broken arm, somebody else with a separated collarbone,
and bloody noses were on all sides. Moon conducts these games between different
nationality groups to stimulate competition and to reinforce a sense of pride in
victory and shame in defeat. I remember a day at Belvedere in May of 1973 during
a leadership conference. Moon had just finished a short speech and he then asked
for general questions. I rose to my feet to address him. I said, " as a One
World Crusade Commander, I frequently encounter the problem of homosexuality
among our men." I asked him if there was anything we could do to help these
people. He replied, "Tell them that if it really becomes a problem to cut it
off, barbecue it, put it in a shoe box and send it to me." The audience roared
with laughter.

The summer of 1973 we had three centers in Maryland: one in UpperMarlboro, one
in College Park and One in Towson, a suburb of Baltimore. We had approximately
35 members. In the late summer we began preparation for Moon's Day of Hope
speaking tour that opened in Baltimore in the first week of October. We
plastered the city with billboards. We flew a plane over the Columbus day
parade. We arranged a meeting for Moon with Sol Orlinsky, president of
Baltimore's city council. We rented the Lyric theater for three days for his
speeches. With the help of two international bus teams composed of Unification
Church members from Japan, England, Germany, France and Holland, we sold
thousands of tickets to his speeches. The evening of October 6 we held a
ceremonial dinner at the Baltimore Hilton. Political, business and social
leaders attended the dinner. Telegrams of encouragement and support were
received and read at the dinner from Cardinal Shehan and from Theodore Roosevelt
McKeldin, former Mayor of Baltimore and former governor of the State of Maryland
respectively. All our fanfare was of little avail. Not more than 350 people
attended Moon's lectures at the Lyric Theater.

Imperial Taster for The Royal Consort

At the dinner I and ranking members of the palace guard were armed with
concealed Billy Clubs to protect Mr. Moon. I was seated at the head table to the
left of Mrs. Moon. I was instructed to switch all my servings of food with hers.
In addition to my other titles, I had at last been raised to the exalted
position of imperial taster for the royal consort.

Meanwhile Travis Jones had been sent to Louisiana to be the One World Crusade
Commander there and to prepare for the Dayof Hope in New Orleans. A group of us
from Uppermarlboro visited Travis in New Orleans shortly after Moon's
appearances. Jones was distraught by the direction of events in the church. We
concurred in his disillusionment.

We returned to Upper Marlboro at the end of November to find "Doctor," Joseph
Sheftick, an unlicensed chiropractor, whose academic title was awarded to him by
Moon, had been sent to Uppermarlboro to diagnose the situation and to see if an
adjustment was needed. Sheftick felt that the prognosis was good, provided that
the four leaders at Upper Marlboro were removed. He assured Moon that the rank
and file would remain faithful.

In the days that followed, 26 Church members of our group in Maryland repudiated
Moon and his teachings. In mid December, Moon's full page newspaper
advertisements appeared in the New York Times and other major papers exhorting
the American people to forgive President Nixon before an indictment had been
issued or guilt established. That clinched our decision to leave the Church.
Early in the fall Moon had rejected the idea of publicly supporting President
Nixon; but, during a two week visit to Japan and Korea he had second thoughts.
On his return to the U.S. he publicly announced that God had instructed him to
forgive President Nixon.

Shades of The Grand Inquisitor
Forgiveness Through The Assumption of Power

We wrote Moon a letter explaining why we could no longer be a part of his
church. Moon responded to us through Colonel Bo Hi Pak, President of the Korean
Cultural and Freedom Foundation. He invited me and other leaders in Maryland to
come to Belvedere for a vacation to be followed by retraining, after which we
were to be awarded "positions of greater power and authority." We refused. It
was an extremely difficult time for all of us. Some returned to school, some to
their families. Approximately 12 who left with us are today living and working
with a pacifist Christian Community.

It was the unanimous decision of all three centers to sell all real estate and
to liquidate all assets and to give the proceeds to bona fide Christian
Charities. Unfortunately we were unable to do this, because the Unification
Church brought suite against us. They claimed that we had stolen the land and
properties from them. In a pre trial hearing the judge threw the case out of
court. He said that he seemed to remember something in the Bible prohibitting
Christians from suing one another or anyone else, for that matter. Mr. Moon is
apparently unswayed by this tradition for law suites seem to figure prominently
in his plan to restore the world.

It is now 27 years since I left the Unification Church. Time and distance have
allowed me the opportunity of scrutinizing and reflecting on my time with Moon.
Literature and mythology provide the parameters within which I attempt to
assimilate and resolve the grotesque variables of this dark Odyssey. In
literature and myth I find the type of myself in the young innocent, who is
proud, blind, self-righteous and idealistic. I also find the type of Moon, the
zealous Promethean whose paranoid delusions of grandeur become the altar upon
which thousands of souls are sacrificially slaughtered along the road to Xanadu.

20th Century Protestantism's Captain Ahab

Often I think of my years in service to Moon as an example, an instance of
Ishmael's journey with Captain Ahab on board the Pequod in search of the White
Whale. To me, Moon is twentieth century Protestantism's Captain Ahab, a titan
whose flailing hubris filled fists would have us take vengeance in our own hands
and send us all off after the white whale. In mythology, this experience lends
itself to analogies with the Hero's journey into the Underworld, where he must
overcome or outwit the forces of darkness to earn the right to reenter the world
of light.

Unification Church doctrine states that those who follow Moon are the chosen. In
that light they see themselves not so much as the servants of mankind, but
rather as the architects of history. Men who have been called out of the
anonymous masses to assist the messiah in laying the groundwork for the
millennium. They believe that as the chosen they are above the law. Like
Raskolnikov in Dostoievski's Crime and Punishment, they have arrived at the
humbling and exalting conclusion that they are more valuable to God, to history
and to the future than other people.

History is teeming with people whose desire for reform has led them to accept
the superman philosophy of men like Hitler and Moon. The fruits of this variety
of psychological and political titanism are always catastrophic. Moon is an
unfortunate and formidable by product of the West's inability to live within its
Judeo-Christian traditions.

In the name of the Second Coming and using the authority of Christian
apocalyptic prophecy, Moon promises to restore the world to a state of peace and
harmony essentially through the use of power. Jesus repudiated the use of force.
Moon, who claims to fulfill the promises of Christianity, is resurrecting divine
kingship on an Egyptian scale. He preaches genetic selection, and he practices
sympathetic magic.

Up From The Abyss

The daylight of this world to which I have returned after my sojourn in the
messianic abyss is not always clear or warm, but I rejoice in it, because I know
that whatever path I take, my conscience will never be the prisoner or
possession of another man.

The End