FTR-291 From Kennebunkport to Pearl Harbor: Bush, Moon, and the Rising Sun (Two 30-minute segments) (Sources are noted in parentheses.)

1. The focal point of this broadcast is the Unification Church of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. In addition to providing a brief overlook at the history and methodology of his organization, the broadcast further develops the relationship between the Bush family and Moon, as well as historical links and structural similarities between the Japanese patriotic and ultra-nationalist societies and the Moon outfit. (The patriotic societies paved the way for the rise of fascism in Japan through a wave of political assassinations. For more about the patriotic societies, see also: RFA-7, Miscellaneous Archive Show M-26 and FTR-296. For more about the Moon organization, see also: RFA-27, FTR #’s 84, 247, 248, 256.)

2. Republican die-hard and televangelist Pat Robertson expressed reservations about George W.’s "faith-based charity" program because it would provide aid to Moon’s organization. "Robertson, a former GOP presidential candidate and one of Bush’s strongest supporters on the Christian Right, pointed to plans by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church to promote its sexual abstinence programs in public schools with government funds.". . . He said Moon’s church uses ‘brainwashing techniques’ on recruits." ("Faith-Based Welfare Puzzles Televangelist’’ by Don Lattin; San Francisco Chronicle; 2/22/2001; pp. A1-A15.)

3. Robertson’s stance is ironic in a couple of respects. Robertson’s televangelical colleague Jerry Falwell had his Liberty University bailed out of financial trouble by Moon. More importantly, the Bush family has important and long-standing contacts with the Moon organization, a fact that failed to dissuade Robertson from endorsing Dubya for president. (For more on Moon’s assistance to Falwell and the Bush family’s connections to the Unification Church, see also: FTR-84.)

4. Much of the first half of the program highlights the history and methodology of the Moon organization and further develops its ongoing relationship with the Bush family. This discussion relies largely on a fine article by Carla Binion, in the worthy on-line magazine Online Journal. ("Why is TV News Ignoring the Relationship between Moon and the Bush Family?" by Carla Binion; Online Journal; 2/22/2001; accessed from their web-site at www.onlinejournal.com/.)

5. After posing questions about the reluctance of broadcast journalists to pursue the Moon-Bush link, the article details the anti-American, anti-democratic nature of the Moon organization. " … here is evidence that Moon is openly anti-American and anti-democratic, with an agenda that includes undermining American democracy and individualism. These are only some of the reasons why a deeper investigation into the Moon/Bush alliance is worthwhile: (First 1) Frederick Clarkson (Eternal Hostility, Common Courage Press, 1997) reports that Moon has stated his goal is the ‘subjugation of the American government and population'. (Clarkson’s source: John Judis, ‘Rev. Moon’s rising Political Influence: His Empire Is Spending Big Money To Try To Win Favor With Conservatives,’ U.S. News and World Report, March 27, 1989.)

6. (2) According to the same U.S. News article, Moon also said, ‘History will make the position of Rev. Moon clear,’ and that ‘his enemies, the American people and government will bow down before him.’

7. (3) Clarkson reports that Moon has also said, ‘the entire world is our goal. . . Absolute obedience to the Father [Moon]—that one thing will bring certain victory. . . People here in America have to recognize the ability and power of Reverend Moon.’ (Excerpt from New Hope News, November 25, 1974, Reprinted in Frederick Miller’s ‘Confusion at the Fronts, Part three,’ True Light Educational Ministry, 1996.)

8. (4) On May 1, 1997, Moon told a group of followers that ‘the country that represents Satan’s harvest is America.’ (Unification News, June 1997.)

9. (5) In the 1970’s, Moon was investigated by a congressional committee headed by then-U.S. Representative Donald Fraser (D—MN.) Robert Boettcher was staff director of the Fraser committee. Boettcher’s interviews with former Moonies revealed that Moon was ‘appalled’ by American individualism and considered moving to Germany’ where people were trained in totalism.’ (Robert Boettcher, Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park and the Korean Scandal, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980.)

10. (6) Boettcher writes that according to former Unification church members, Moon’s program to ‘instill discipline’ included showing ‘Nazi films on organizing Hitler Youth.’" (Ibid.; pp. 1-2.)

11. The fascistic, anti-democratic and anti-American attitude of the Moon organization is made all the more alarming because of the enormous power Moon wields. One of the main areas of Moon influence is in the media. "In an effort to gain political influence, Moon has worked his tentacles into the news media. Frederick Clarkson writes that since its founding the newspaper the Washington Times ‘has been owned, controlled and bankrolled’ by Moon. Former Washington Times editorial page editor William Cheshire resigned because of alleged editorial interference from Moon’s officials. According to Clarkson, Cheshire also said he believes the Washington Times is operating in violation of the foreign Agents Registration Act. Passed in the 1930’s, the Foreign Agents Registration Act ‘requires entities whose activities are controlled by foreign governments and corporations to make financial and other forms of disclosure to the Justice Department’. Clarkson says the Act was originally passed ‘to expose covert Nazi funding of German-American newspapers.’" (Ibid.; pp. 2-3.) Another major source of power for the Moon organization has been its links with powerful Republican politicians. George H.W. Bush, in particular, has been very active on behalf of Moon, speaking out on behalf of Moon-owned media voices and accepting generous stipends for these engagements. "George H.W. Bush is one of the most politically powerful defenders of Moon and the Washington Times. Bush was CIA director when the Fraser committee investigated Moon, and he is well aware of Moon’s stated agenda and modus operandi. At the time of the congressional investigation, Bush handled sensitive matters on U.S. relations with Korea and the political figures involved. According to a Reuters report, (‘Bush Praises Moon as ‘Man of Vision,’’’ November 25, 19.)

12. When Moon held a banquet in Buenos Aires celebrating his new ‘Spanish-language newspaper for the whole of Latin America,’ his guest at the event, George H.W. Bush, praised Moon’s ‘respect for editorial independence.’ Bush’s speech ‘was full of praise’ for Moon’s Washington Times, according to Reuters. The report also says Bush described Moon as ‘the man with the vision.’ Reuters said Bush later traveled with Moon to neighboring Uruguay ‘to help him inaugurate a seminary in the capital, Montevideo, to train 4,200 young Japanese women to spread the word of his Church of Unification across Latin America.’ ‘I want to salute Reverend Moon who is the founder of the Washington Times and of the new paper,’ Bush said. According to Reuters, the Washington Post reported that Bush was paid $100,000 for his Buenos Aires appearance." (Ibid.; p. 3.)

13. In addition to speaking on behalf of Moon-controlled media voices, the elder Bush and his wife, Barbara, have been actively supportive of a front group founded by Moon’s wife. "Clarkson says Moon has often used George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush as a ‘warm-up act’ at his ‘family values’ rallies. When Bush gave a series of speeches at events sponsored by Moon’s wife’s organization, the World Federation for World Peace (WFWP), he claimed he did not know Moon was involved. Instead, Bush praised the WFWP for its ‘great emphasis on family.’ Bush also said, ‘Until I see something about the Women’s Federation that troubles me, I will continue to encourage them.’ (Clarkson’s sources: Peter McGill et al, ‘Ed Schreyer and the Moonies, MacLean’s, October 23, 1995; Andrew Pollock, ‘Bush Host in Japan tied to Rev. Moon,’ The New York Times; September 4, 1995.) (Ibid.; pp. 8-9.)

14. In addition to the Elder George Bush, Moon has clout within the administration of George the Younger. "Reporter Joe Conason said that at a Washington gathering celebrating the George W. Bush inauguration, at a ‘prayer luncheon’ held in the Hyatt hotel ballroom on Capitol Hill on 1/19/2001, Moon received an award for his ‘work in support of traditional family values.’ The featured speaker was John Ashcroft. (Conason, The New York Observer, February 12, 2001.) Tuesday (2/20/2001), a C-Span moderator said Rev. Moon plans to promote his abstinence program in schools with the help of George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative program. How might that work? Frederick Clarkson points out that Moon has been trying to get his tentacles into U.S. schools to promote his rightwing views for many years. The World Medical Health Foundation (WMHF) is a Moon front group. WMHF chief, Dr. William Bergman, once-director of Moon’s Unification Church, produced a slide program for schools called ‘The Private Plague: AIDS, Sexually Transmitted diseases & a Strategy for our Youth at Risk.’ Bergman’s program teaches that these diseases have roots in the ‘civil rights movement’ which allegedly led to ‘moral relativism.’ (Clarkson’s source: The Private Plague slide program manual, p. 23.) (Ibid.; pp. 7-8.)

15. Moon has influence with other key elements of the Republican establishment, as well as the Bush family (and administration.) "Clarkson writes that a 1994 congressional resolution sponsored by Rep. Dan Burton (R-In), Senator Trent Lott (R-MI), and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) supporting Parents Day turned out to be a Moon initiated effort ‘in which the ‘True Parents behind the resolution were quietly celebrated’ a fact possibly hidden from the congressmen. (Clarkson’s source: Lisa Gray, ‘Honor Thy Parents,’ Washington City Paper, September 1995; and Robert Boston, ‘Unholy Matrimony,’ Church and State, October 1996.) (Ibid.; p. 8.)

16. As detailed at greater length in RFA#7 and FTR#84, Moon’s pull with the Bush family and the Republican Party is the product of a long and concerted program to acquire power in the United States. "For example, when conservative direct mail entrepreneur Richard Viguerie was having financial trouble in the late 1980’s, ‘Moon directed more business his way and had a corporation run by Moon’s Lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak, buy one of Viguerie’s properties for $10 million,’ according to Parry. (Orange County Register, December 21, 1987; Washington Post, October 15, 1989.)" (Ibid.; pp. 3-4.) Among the centers of American power that Moon has [successfully] sought to penetrate are U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. "[Allen Tate] Wood also said Moon told him ‘part of our strategy in the U.S. must be to make friends in the FBI, the CIA and police forces, the military and business community . . . as a means of entering the political arena, influencing foreign policy, and ultimately establishing absolute dominion over the American people.’" (Ibid. p. 5.)

17. One of the organizations pivotally influenced by Moon is the former World Anti-Communist League or WACL. (For more about this organization, see also: G-4, RFA #’s 14, 15, 19, 27, 29, 30, 36, 37, FTR #’s 81, 142, 221, 237, 270, 296.) "In order to gain power, Moon has also aligned himself with organizations further to the right than the New Right Republicans, among them the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The WACL, according to Frederick Clarkson, is ‘an international alliance of conservative, fascist and Nazi groups, governments and individuals.’ The head of the Unification Church in Japan was a member of the WACL board of directors. Clarkson says, ‘the Japanese section of WACL, Shokyo Rengo, was founded in 1968 as an alliance between top Unification Church officials and leaders of the Yakuza (Japanese organized crime), notably Yoshio Kodama.’" (Ibid.; p. 4.)

18. Kodama and the aforementioned Ryoichi Sasakawa were both deeply involved in the Japanese patriotic societies. Before a discussion of both individuals’ involvement with the Moon organization, WACL and the persons and events involved with and leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the broadcast highlights the May 15 incident, the most important of the assassinations performed by the patriotic societies. (As indicated above, these assassinations paved the way for the rise of fascism in Japan, through the elimination of potential opponents of the Japanese fascists and militarists.) On May 15, 1932, the Japanese Prime Minister [Tsuyoshi Inukai] was assassinated by a conspiracy hatched by the patriotic societies, acting through a group of young military officers called the Blood Brotherhood. "The civilian wing of the young officers’ plot was a gang called the Blood Brotherhood (Ketsumeidan, literally the Blood Oath Band). Some of them were vicious youths, living on the borderland where patriotism and crime meet; others were idle, fanatical students. All of them were idealists, in their way. They were willing instruments, but they had hypnotized themselves with slogans and they regarded themselves as more than tools. The prospect that the army would become the active force of revolution had stimulated the patriots all along the line, and many currents met in the movement which culminates on May 15." (Government by Assassination; by Hugh Byas; Copyright 1942 [HC]; Alfred A. Knopf; p. 53.)

19. The officers of the Blood Brotherhood, in turn, were associated with the Native-Land-Loving School, run by Kosaburo Tachibana. This school, like others of its kind, was a direct outgrowth of, and vehicle for, the patriotic societies. "Kosaburo Tachibana was haunted by dreams in his boyhood and could not decide whether to become a statesman or a general or (sometimes) simply a good man. He had been born in the prefecture which afterwards became the site of the naval air training base and the home of the Blood Brotherhood, and his birthplace fixed his destiny . . . . In 1939, his admirers enabled him to establish a school. He called it the Native-Land-Loving School (Aikyojuku). Everybody in Japan with a message to deliver or an axe to grind opens a school. . . . Those schools in the hands of the patriotic societies are at once a method of training young men for strong-arm work and a plausible excuse for extorting contributions from the rich and timid." (Ibid.; pp. 63-64.)

20. Two days before the killing of Prime Minister Inukai, his assassins-to-be gathered to plan their crime. "Two days earlier, on Friday, May 13, two young naval officers had made a two-hour train journey from Tokyo to a place with which they wee familiar, the drab country town of Tsuchiura, railway station for the inland naval air base and training school called Kasumigra-ura, the Misty Lagoon. An army cadet and a Tokyo student accompanied them. They were met by a teacher of the Native-Land-Loving School, which trained farmer boys in agriculture and patriotism. They all went to a Japanese restaurant where they were, as usual, given a private room. . . .On Sunday, the same men met some others in various places in Tokyo and their actions became the May Fifteenth incident. At five o’clock that Sunday evening nine naval and military officers of ages between twenty-four and twenty-eight alighted from two taxicabs at the side entrance of Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. The shrine is dedicated to all members of the fighting services who have died in Japan’s wars. There is no holier place in Tokyo." (Ibid.; pp. 22-23.)

21. Later that day, the conspirators gathered at the Prime Minister’s residence and murdered him in front of his daughter-in-law and grandchild. "They found the Prime Minister, Mr. Inukai, a diminutive alert man of seventy-five. His first name was Tsuyoshi but his friends knew him as ‘Ki.’. . . He was a very small man, quick and fearless. His goatee beard was of a vague gray color which somehow suggested, quite erroneously, that it had once been blond. Late in life he had attained the goal of his ambition and he was intensely proud of being the Emperor’s first Minister. He led the officers into a room. His daughter-in-law, carrying her baby, was with him, and one of the officers ‘knowing what would happen in a few minute,’ as he said at the trial, told her to go away, but she stayed. The young men were rather confused and some were impressed by the old man’s calm demeanor as he asked them to take off their shoes and sit down and talk it over. He had a cigarette in his hand and he lit it. ‘As I observed,’ said one of the officers in his testimony, ‘our leader was willing to talk with the Prime Minister. The group that had gone to the back door burst in, headed by Lieutenant Masayoshi Yamagishi, a man of action, carrying a dagger. ‘No use talking,’ said Yamagishi. ‘Fire!’ The word was shouted like an order and they all began firing. One shot the Prime Minister in the neck and another, deliberately, in the stomach. The Prime Minister sank on the matted floor and never spoke again. ‘Believing the whole affair was over,’ the officers walked out." (Ibid.; pp. 24-26.)

22. Most of the second half of the program consists of an interview with Daniel Junas, an expert on the Unification Church. The interview, conducted on 12/8/1991 (observing the 50^th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor), focuses on connections between Japanese fascism and the Moonies. Specifically, the broadcast highlights the close connections between the aforementioned Yoshio Kodama, Ryoichi Sasakawa, the Japanese patriotic societies and the attack on Pearl Harbor. In the interview, Mr. Junas affirms the hypothesis presented in RFA-7—that the Moon organization constitutes an extension of the Japanese patriotic societies through the years and around the world. (It should be noted that, although nominally Korean, the Unification Church is rooted in Japanese fascism. Korea had been a Japanese colony, and many of the organization’s key early participants had been officers in the Imperial Japanese army. This interview develops the Moon/Japan link still further.) Both Kodama and Sasakawa were very close to, and involved with, the patriotic societies. (See FTR-296.) Both were also key operatives with the Unification Church. Sasakawa was very close to Admiral Yamamato, who led the fleet that attacked Pearl Harbor. Sasakawa was also very close to the Mitsubishi heavy industrial firm—one of the zaibatsu that was principally involved with shipbuilding for the Japanese navy. Kodama founded the Kodama Agency on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked (its founding actually took place on 12/8/1941 since Japan is on the other side of the International Date Line.) The Kodama Agency utilized (among other things) the trafficking of contraband from Japanese-occupied Manchuria in order to obtain strategic materials for the Imperial Japanese Naval Air Arm. As discussed in RFA-7, Kodama and General Minoru Genda were involved in the Lockheed scandal in 1976. (They were convicted of accepting bribes to effect the purchase of Lockheed aircraft for the Japanese self-defense forces. For more on the Lockheed bribery scandal, see FTR-290.) The commander of the air armada that attacked Pearl Harbor, Genda was awarded a medal by the U.S. Air Force for his work on behalf of Lockheed! One of the focal points of the interview concerns the funding for the Moon organization. Despite its numerous industrial and fund-raising operations, the source of its vast economic resources remains ambiguous. Most of the Moon-owned businesses are money-losers. Junas advances the hypothesis, based on his research, that the most probable source for the financing of the Moon organization is Japanese heavy industry—the Mitsubishi firm, in particular. The patriotic societies were also very close to the zaibatsu (the giant family trusts). Mitsubishi was one of the zaibatsu. (For more about the zaibatsu, see also: Miscellaneous Archive Show M-26 and FTR-290.) Junas discusses the Japanese economic imperial organization called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In discussing the support by Sasakawa, Kodama, the Moon organization and WACL for the Vietnam War, Junas underscores the importance of that war for the Japanese economy. The capital inflow Japan experienced during that conflict had much to do with the rise of the Japanese economic juggernaut. As discussed in FTR-290, the foundation of the post-war Japanese economy was the Kido flight capital program. The close relationship between the Republican Party and the Bush family with such an organization should give genuinely patriotic Americans pause to consider. (Recorded on 4/14/2001.)