Sun Myung Moon’s Dark Cold War Legacy
The Unification Church must reckon with its violent past
“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
Introduction
Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) was a Korean messiah claimant who founded the Unification Church (UC) in 1954 with the promise to bring peace on Earth. The language of peace is ubiquitous in the UC. Moon’s autobiography was titled As A Peace-Loving Global Citizen and his wife’s autobiography was titled Mother of Peace. The UC founded many organizations with names like the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), the Women’s Federation for World Peace (WFWP), and the Peace Cup (PC). When I was a member of his group, I sincerely believed that Moon would bring peace to the world in my lifetime.
The UC teaches in its central text, The Divine Principle, that the forbidden fruit in Genesis represented sex. Satan had sex with Eve and she then had sex with Adam. As a result, our blood lineage was corrupted with original sin. God could not forgive mankind instantly. The foundations for the messiah had to first be laid down. The events of the Old Testament are interpreted as God working through man to lay down the foundations for this arrival. Jesus was supposed to be this messiah, but the Principle taught that he was not meant to be crucified. Since the Fall occurred through premarital sex, the Satanic blood lineage could only be restored through Jesus having a wife and raising a family. Since Jesus was rejected by the people a the time, God had to work through human history again to lay down the foundation for a second messiah.
Moon claimed to be this messiah. In the position of a “True Adam,” he married a “True Eve,” Hak Ja Han, and they became the “True Parents.” They then raised a “True Family” of “True Children,” thus fulfilling God’s providence. By marrying his followers through what he calls “The Blessing,” Moon claimed that he was restoring their blood lineage. Children born of such marriages are called “Blessed Children,” and it is believed that they are born without original sin. Through these marriages, Moon claimed that he could create an ideal world, where everyone would live in peace as one family.
Some believe that Moon’s claims should be taken at face value. Bitter Winter, a “religious liberty” magazine, wrote an essay in 2022 defending the UC from what they call the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” or the belief that religious leaders sometimes have ulterior motives. They claim that the UC “derives both from the history of Christianity and from local religious traditions the idea of promoting world peace through dialogue, culture, and social development.” They conveniently decide to gloss over the UC’s Cold War activities, which is a significant omission on the matter of peace.
The Cold War (1947–1991) was an ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union for domination as the world’s ruling superpower. The Soviet Union promoted a state communist model, while the United States promoted a democratic capitalist model. Both sides were involved in proxy wars, espionage, and regime change across many countries. The conflict also saw the growth of nuclear weapons and the palpable threat of World War III. The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberation of its associated satellites, and the dominance of the United States as the world’s reigning superpower.
Moon was an active participant in the Cold War against the communists. State communism came with its share of horrors. Oppressive regimes such as the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and North Korea, failed to provide a viable alternative to capitalism, restricted freedom of expression, and were responsible for millions of deaths. What should disturb us, however, is that Moon, alongside many in the US government, believed that it was permissible to support right-wing terror, cruel dictatorships, and war crimes, in the name of fighting communism.
While the US claimed to be on the side of democracy, the CIA often supported brutal tyrants who were reliably anti-communist, like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, who killed 3,200 people and tortured 28,000. This naked hypocrisy does not excuse the crimes of the communist states, but these were shameful acts that went against America’s purported ideals of liberty and justice.
This support may, at first, appear to contradict Moon’s desire for peace, but if you read The Principle closely, there is precedent for it. The Principle repeatedly excuses morally questionable actions as necessary to lay down the messianic foundation. This is because the UC has a totalist view of morality. You are either on God’s side or Satan’s side. Even if you are a good person, innocent of any crime, if you are deemed to be on “Satan’s side”, you will then be subject to collective punishment. Whereas if you are on God’s side, anything is permitted in the name of defeating Satan. Consider how The Principle interprets the destruction of the Canaanites in the Bible:
“Likewise, the Israelites invaded the land of Canaan and killed many Canaanites seemingly without much justification. To someone ignorant of God’s providence, their action might seem evil and cruel; nevertheless, it was just in the sight of God. Even if there were more good-hearted people among the Canaanites than among the Israelites, at that time the Canaanites collectively belonged to Satan’s side, while the Israelites collectively belonged to God’s side.”
Keep this passage in mind.
I. Korea
In Moon’s autobiography, he spoke of working alongside communists to resist the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910–1945), but this alliance would only last until independence, “They were my good friends who were prepared to give their lives, if necessary, for the liberation of our homeland; but our way of thinking was fundamentally different. So, once independence was achieved, we had to go our separate ways” (249).
The Korean War (1950–1953) came in the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in World War II. With Korea now an independent nation, exiles from the rival camps of Marxist and ultranationalist both made claim to the whole peninsula. The Marxists, supported by the USSR, were led by Kim Il Sung, while the ultranationalists, supported by the US, were led by Syngman Rhee. The US and the USSR had agreed to temporarily divide Korea at the 38th parallel in 1945, until all Japanese forces could be evacuated.
After various failed attempts at unification and various outbreaks of violence on both sides, the North invaded the South in 1950, causing the US and its allies to intervene on its behalf. The Korean War escalated to such a point that the US General Douglas MacArthur wanted to bomb cities in China that he thought were aiding the North. Not wanting to risk war across Asia, US President Harry Truman fired MacArthur, and the war ended with an armistice in 1953 which divides Korea to this day.
Moon opposed the communists, not only because of his belief in God, but also due to his brutal torture in North Korea’s Heungnam prison camp between 1947 and 1950. The bombs of the UN intervention were what allowed him to escape, to quote his autobiography, “The night before my scheduled execution the bombs fell like rain in the monsoon season” (106).
The Divine Principle interpreted the Korean War as a divine struggle between God and Satan (318). With North Korea on “Satan’s side” and South Korea on “God’s side.” Moon was not pleased that the war ended in a compromise. Moon publicly admonished Truman for not listening to MacArthur, going so far as to imagine America using the war as an imperial stepping stone to conquer the world:
“Truman should have listened to MacArthur’s suggestion which was to attack the mainland of China and then stop Russia’s expansion. But he did not and thus lost a good opportunity. The United States could have governed the colonies which were controlled by England and France, China, and even all Asian nations. Two thirds of the whole world could have been governed by the United States. She had a great opportunity in which she could have governed the whole world. This opportunity was the providence of God.”
In spite of this perceived setback, Moon still dreamed of Korean reunification, as he believed that this would lead to world peace. For if North and South Korea can resolve their differences, then “the Korean peninsula will serve as an ideological model that can be followed to unify the world.” Moon made it clear, however, that Korean reunification could only come through the defeat of communism: “As long as Korea is unable to win over communism, the unification of Korea is but a daydream and peace will not come to the Korean nation.”
To this end, he was committed to supporting the Republic of Korea (ROK), which was a dictatorship throughout much of its history. After founding the Unification Church in 1954, Moon initially had a rocky relationship with the ROK authorities. The Unification Church Movement records that in 1955, Moon had been accused of practicing ritual sex with the students at Ehwa Women’s University. The government, however, lacked the evidence to convict Moon on this charge, so they convicted him for draft dodging instead. He spent three months in Seodanum prison before eventually being acquitted (18). I should add that in 1993, four founding members of the UC: Chung Hwa Pak, Hyo Min Eu, Shi Hee Eu, and Deok Jin Kim, all admitted to the ritual sex. Hyo Min Eu stated that Moon was only found innocent because the women were too ashamed to testify.
Relations between the UC and the ROK changed in 1962. Journalist Robert Parry writes that at this time, Kim Jong Pil, who founded the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) one year before, contacted UC authorities in San Francisco, California. Kim helped to organize the UC as a political tool for the Park Chung Hee regime. The Washington Post also reported that Moon’s right hand, Bo Hi Pak, admitted to accepting $3,000 from a KCIA agent in 1976 (Babcock). In 1978, a U.S. Senate investigation into the UC concluded: “While pursuing its own goals, the Moon Organization promoted the interests of the ROK Government, and at times did so in cooperation with, or at the direction of, ROK agencies and officials. The Moon Organization maintained mutually beneficial ties with a number of Korean officials” (388).
This was problematic because Park Chung-Hee who took power in a 1961 coup and ruled until his assassination in 1979, was a repressive dictator. In 1972, he dissolved the constitution and passed the Yushin Constitution, which gave him sweeping dictatorial powers. In 1973, he ordered the kidnapping of dissident Kim Dae Jung. In 1974, dissident poet Kim Ji Ha was sentenced to prison for writing a poem satirizing the Park regime, which apparently violated the “Anti-Communism Law.” In 1975, Park ordered the streets cleansed of vagrants ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and thousands of people, homeless, disabled, and dissident, were rounded up, tortured, and raped.
I could not find a single speech where Moon criticized the human rights violations of Park. Moon was well-aware of Park’s strong-arm tactics, because in a 1974 speech he praised them,
“People may think that President Park Chung Hee and his regime are not quite democratic, advancing forward too strongly; but without being strong he could not manipulate the nation. It is done, in a way, in God’s providence.”
Indeed, then UC President of America, Neil Salonen, once slighted those who protested against Park. In the 1978 pamphlet Ideology and Foreign Policy, Salonen wrote that in the face of the DPRK’s threat, the ROK could not afford to be divided, and that the dissidents “have contributed to the climate of tension in South Korea, provoked government crackdowns, and further isolated Korea internationally” (35). He suggests that the better alternative is for South Koreans to be passive in the face of injustice, and to try and quietly reform things from within. For him, these quiet reformers who keep their complaints to themselves, “do far more good” than those who openly protest the government (36).
Such defenses were deftly countered many years earlier by civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr, who warned of moderates that were “more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” Indeed, imagine telling civil rights activists in the 1960s that their struggle against segregation weakened America’s standing against the Soviet Union.
In 1975, UC member Dan Fefferman, also defended supporting anti-communist dictatorships. He did so on the basis that they will eventually liberalize with continued democratic support, “Semi-free societies which are anti-Communist in nature tend to become more free as they become more secure. Thus, the strong commitment of the United States to defend countries threatened by Communism is the best assurance of their liberalization” (“Critical Support for Undemocratic Allies”). If this hypothesis is true, then America’s unyielding support to the ROK would have made it a more liberal society, but a fateful day in 1980 would prove him wrong.
On May 18th 1980, university students in Gwangju protested the military coup of dictator Chun Doo Hwan. In response Chun ordered his troops to put down the uprising with bayonets, bullets, and sexual assaults. No one knows exactly how many people died, but a common estimate is between 1,000 and 2,000 dead. Many South Koreans regard the US as complicit, as they had long supported the dictatorships and in fact had been informed in advance of a military crackdown. The uprising at Gwangju is credited with leading to South Korea’s transition to a democracy in 1987, as well as inspiring other democratic movements in China, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Democracy in the ROK was not achieved thanks to American benevolence or to quiet reformers in the government. It came from the blood, sweat, and tears of freedom fighters on the ground who were willing to risk their lives for liberty and justice. Contra Salonen and Fefferman’s fears, these protests did not make the ROK vulnerable to the DPRK or risk world peace. In fact, when dissident Kim Dae Jung was elected to the presidency, he began reconciliation talks with the DPRK known as “The Sunshine Policy.”
I cannot find a single speech of Moon’s where he refers to the massacre in Gwangju. Its political dimensions are alluded to in his wife’s autobiography as the “heart of the leftist movement,” where Moon was almost assassinated during a 1983 speech. This is the only image we get from her of the activism in Gwangju. Radical would-be murderers of her husband.
Moon had a lot of influence in South Korea. If he had spoken out against the human rights abuses of the dictatorships, he would have been heard. Instead, Moon and his followers proudly supported the authoritarianism of the ROK and offered no support to those who fought and died for its democratic transition.
II. Bolivia
How far would you go to defeat Satan? Would you work with fascists? Moon did. Through KCIA founder Kim Jong Pil, Moon worked with Japanese war criminals Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama to grow the Japanese branch of the UC in the 1960s. In their book, Inside The League, John Lee Anderson and Scott Anderson wrote that in 1966, Moon collaborated with Sasakawa, Kodama, Park Chung Hee, and China’s Chiang Kai Shek, to create the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) (46–47). WACL, though, was filled with bigoted reactionaries, to the point that in 1974, UC member Dan Fefferman, expressed his worries about the number of Anti-Semites in the group (“One Step Ahead For WACL”). The Andersons write that while Moon denounced WACL as fascist and publicly disavowed his support, the UC and WACL still worked together on a number of activities in Latin America (106).
Journalist Robert Parry narrated a bizarre, complex story of a 1980 coup in Bolivia that involved drug lords, Nazis, and of course, the UC. The story began with Klaus Barbie, a Nazi officer known as the “Butcher of Lyons.” After World War II, Barbie escaped to Bolivia, where he worked as an intelligence officer. He allied with neo-fascist Argentine and European paramilitary operatives to plan an overthrow of the Bolivian government. Dr. Alfredo Candia, WACL’s Bolivian leader, organized the arrival of these operatives. Six of Bolivia’s biggest drug traffickers met with the neo-fascists to make a deal protecting the cocaine trade after installing the new government. They called their plan the “Cocaine Coup.”
For some context, Bolivia is no stranger to coups, and this period from 1978–1980 was turbulent for government stability. However, as Rex A. Hudson and Dennis M. Hanratty note in Bolivia: A Country Study, 1980 saw an election in which the leftist parties gained a majority and Siles Zuazo of the Democratic and Popular Unity Party was named president (46).
On June 17th 1980, however, democracy was interrupted, and the “Cocaine Coup” took place. Parry writes that labor leader Marcelo Quiroga was castrated and tortured to death, drug traffickers were freed from prison, several were killed, many women were raped, and by the end of it, Gen. Luis Garcia Meza was installed as dictator and the fascists celebrated with cheers of “Heil Hitler.”
Parry continues by saying Moon’s right hand man, Bo Hi Pak, congratulated Meza, saying, “I have erected a throne for Father Moon in God’s highest city.” Apparently, a UC representative invested $4 million in the coup, with nearly all the coup conspirators named as members of Moon’s anti-communist organization, CAUSA. In 1981, another UC follower, Thomas Ward, was often seen with Barbie in prayer. The UC also held a CAUSA reception with Meza where Pak again praised the Bolivians as the ones to defeat communism in South America, and gave 7,000 Bolivians paramilitary training. In 1982, Ward supposedly became disillusioned with the whole affair, saying, “It was stupid having Moon and CAUSA here.”
In what moral universe was it justified to overthrow Bolivian democracy and install a neo-fascist government? Well, Siles Zuazo was a leftist, and to their logic, either a communist or sympathetic to it. In Ideology and Foreign Policy, UC President Neil Salonen suggested that meddling in democracies is moral in the name of stopping communism. When asked if the CIA was justified in meddling in Chilean democracy ahead of the 1973 coup, Salonen replied, “Right and wrong can’t be judged solely according to the nature of the act; or even the intentions of the actor: the direction and result of the action matter far more” (32).
One reflective member of the UC, Erwin Franzen, said that after seeing Meza’s government kill anyone they deemed a leftist, he realized “that our stance of almost blindly supporting anyone who professed anti-communism was at least very naive if not outright dangerous.”
III. Nicaragua
“What economic objective or military gain is there to be had in killing a five year old child, or in raping a grandmother? What military objective can be found in slaughtering a young bride in front of her parents, or in burning the home of a coffeepicker, or in slitting the throat of an old man? The only achievement is that of imposing a climate of total fear. And therein lies the contra’s objective: to blanket the population in fear” (Brody, 7)
- U.S. Representative Sam Gejdensen
In 1979, the Sandinista rebels (FSLN) overthrew Nicaragua’s Somoza dictatorship which had been installed and supported by the US since the 1930s. In 1984, a fair election was held, which they won, with FSLN leader, Daniel Ortega, becoming president. Though the FSLN sought aid from the USSR, they were not communist and were trying to create a mixed economy. These facts did not deter President Ronald Reagan. According to attorney Reed Brody, he began to covertly fund the Contras, who opposed the FSLN, in 1981 (12).
The Contras were notorious for their human rights abuses. It didn’t help that the CIA gave them a manual in how to commit terror in 1983. A 1985 fact-finding mission entitled Contra Terror in Nicaragua, found that the Contras systematically murdered, raped, tortured, and kidnapped civilians, even going so far as to attack religious leaders who supported the government (21–22). In 1984, many in Congress became enraged when they learned that the CIA had secretly placed mines in Nicaraguan harbors to support the rebels. In 1984 and 1985, Congress passed laws banning military aid to the Contras, though some “humanitarian assistance” was still permitted.
Nonetheless, the lack of funds caused the Contras to seek money from other places. This is where Moon came in. In Messiah: Volume II, Moon’s right hand, Bo Hi Pak, said that when he informed Moon in 1985 of the congressional cuts to Contra, he was outraged. Moon ordered that his newspaper, The Washington Times, set up a fund for the Contras, and they ended up raising $27 million (61–68). Moon’s anti-communist group, CAUSA, also raised funds for the terror group.
Now the FSLN weren’t saints, either. By 1983, they had detained hundreds a month, with many of those imprisoned either tortured or never heard from again. CAUSA often promoted the 1985 documentary Nicaragua Was Our Home, which highlighted the very real oppression faced by the Miskito Indians. A 1984 human rights report found that the FSLN were responsible for the killings of at least 35 Miskitos. However, many Miskitos saw their struggle as separate from that of the Contras.
In 1976, Fefferman wrote that the “greatest single threat to world freedom today is the atheistic, totalitarian ideology of Communism” (“Fascism and Democracy”). In 1978, Salonen said in Ideology and Foreign Policy that “Communism, by its nature, presents a constant provocation and irreconcilable obstacle to peace” (17).
And yet the FSLN were not a communist government, and though Ortega has grown authoritarian with his recent return to power, at that time, his rule oversaw mostly fair elections which eventually led to his party’s downfall in the 1990s. Nor could little Nicaragua under the FSLN could conceivably be called a threat to world peace, let alone the US. What then was the moral justification for the UC to support the savagery of the Contras?
Fefferman’s “liberalization” hypothesis, for what it’s worth, also flopped with the Contras as strongly as it did with the ROK. In 1989, Human Rights Watch noted that in spite of ardent US military support, the Contras were still the “major and systematic violators of the most basic standards of the laws of armed conflict.”
Former UC member Kenneth Gordon Neufeld worked in CAUSA during the 1980s. I asked him in an interview if UC members who worked there were aware of the Contras’ human rights violations, and if they had any reservations about their support. He told me the following:
“Ordinary CAUSA members in 1985–1986 were just doing it because “Father” was into it. We feared the Communists so much that the depredations of the Contra seemed like an understandable reaction. If we heard reports of murders, etc., we would always reject these reports as coming from the left-wing press, and we gave such reports little thought.”
IV. A Dark Legacy
Moon’s theology regards Adam and Eve having sex as the worst crime in human history and yet it remained indifferent to atrocities committed in the name of anti-communism. This is why I always regarded the UC’s teachings so morally reprehensible. It has more outrage for pre-martial sex than for right-wing terrorism. When one looks at the cases of Korea, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, the UC defenses of right-wing terror by Fefferman and Salonen fall apart. The leftist Bolivian and Nicraguan governments were democratically elected, not communist, and not threats to world peace. The uprisings in South Korea did not lead to a communist takeover, and in fact, led to a more just society. There was no moral reason for the UC to support these forces without reservation.
Instead of consistently standing for human rights, regardless of country, the UC believed that the oppressed of anti-communist societies were less worthy of human rights than those in communist ones. If they truly were principled, they would’ve listened to MLK: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Until the UC begins to address their complicity and hypocrisy in these crimes against democracy, freedom, and human rights, they should no more profane the noble goal of peace.
Bibliography
Anderson Scott & John Lee. Inside The League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League. New York: Dodd, Mead. 1986. 46–47, 106.
Babcock, Charles K. “Rev. Moon Aide Concedes KCIA Sent Him $3,000.” The Washington Post. March 23, 1978.
Brody, Reed. Contra Terror in Nicaragua: Report of a Fact-Finding Mission: September 1984 - January 1985. Boston, MA: South End Press. 7, 12, 21–22.
Eu, Hyo Won. The Exposition of the Divine Principle. New York, NY: The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, 1996. 318.
Fefferman, Dan. “Critical Support For Undemocratic Allies.” The Rising Tide, May 1975.
Fefferman, Dan. “Fascism and Democracy.” May 1976.
Fefferman, Dan. “One Step Ahead For WACL.” The Rising Tide, April 1974.
Hanratty, Dennis M. and Rex A. Hudson. Bolivia: A Country Study. Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress. December 1989. 46.
Investigation of Korean-American Relations: Report of the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations U.S. House of Representatives. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. October 31, 1978. 388
Mickler, Michael L. The Unification Church Movement. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. 2022. 18.
Moon, Sun Myung. As A Peace-Loving Global Citizen. 2010. 106, 249.
Pak, Bo Hi. Trans. by Andrew Lausberg. Messiah: My Testimony to Rev. Sun Myung Moon: Volume II. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. 2002. 61–68.
Salonen, Neil. Interviewed by Gerard F. Willis. Ideology and Foreign Policy. Freedom Leadership Foundation, 1978. 17, 32.
