#unification church in latin america

[eternal-echoes]

“We can ask ourselves a further question: what does faith in this God give us? The first response is: it gives us a family, the universal family of God in the Catholic Church. Faith releases us from the isolation of the “I”, because it leads us to communion: the encounter with God is, in itself and as such, an encounter with our brothers and sisters, an act of convocation, of unification, of responsibility towards the other and towards others. In this sense, the preferential option for the poor is implicit in the Christological faith in the God who became poor for us, so as to enrich us with his poverty (cf. 2 Cor 8:9).”

-Pope Benedict XVI, INAUGURAL SESSION OF THE FIFTH GENERAL CONFERENCE OF THE BISHOPS OF LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, 13 May 2007

[frank-olivier]

Analysis of Linguistic Differences in East Asia and Their Interpretation in a Global Context

The interplay between language, politics, and culture is a fundamental aspect of societal development and identity formation. In East Asia, linguistic differences are deeply embedded in the region's historical and political landscapes, reflecting centuries of cultural evolution and power dynamics. This text explores how the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages and writing systems have been shaped by their respective political and cultural contexts. Examining these linguistic developments uncovers broader insights into the ways language functions as both a tool of unification and a means of cultural expression. Additionally, placing these East Asian examples in a global context provides a deeper understanding of the universal principles governing the relationship between language, power, and culture across different societies.

The complexity of the Chinese writing system and pronunciation with its tonal system reflects China's long centralist tradition and the diversity of its regions. The logographic script served as a unifying force for the various dialects and supported the power of the scholarly bureaucracy. From a political standpoint, one could argue that this system of knowledge control served to secure the rule of Chinese authorities.

In contrast, the phonetic alphabets of Japanese and Korean facilitated the spread of education among broader segments of the population. The introduction of the Hangul alphabet in Korea in the 15th century by King Sejong is often seen as a democratic measure to strengthen Korean culture against the overpowering Chinese influence. Similarly, one could interpret the adaptation of the Chinese script to the Japanese sound structure as an expression of a cultural emancipation movement.

The importance of honorifics and hierarchies, especially in Korean, can be seen as a reflection of a highly stratified social order with pronounced respect for authorities. From a critical perspective, however, one could also recognize remnants of a feudal social structure.

Overall, it becomes apparent that linguistic and written developments are often intertwined with power-political motives and structures of the respective societies. A purely linguistic perspective may fall short. The integration of political and historical viewpoints can provide a more complete picture of the cultural differences in East Asia.

The analysis of linguistic differences in East Asia can also be applied to other regions of the world, where language and script are deeply intertwined with political and cultural developments. Just as in East Asia, scripts and languages have been used as tools for the consolidation or democratization of power, similar patterns are found worldwide.

For example, one can consider the role of Latin in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Latin served as the lingua franca for scholars and the Church, which strengthened the intellectual and spiritual control of the Catholic Church. With the rise of national languages and their promotion by the Reformation and the spread of the printing press, Europe experienced a cultural emancipation and democratization of knowledge, comparable to the introduction of Hangul in Korea.

In Africa, postcolonial language policies are of interest. Many African countries adopt European colonial languages such as English, French, or Portuguese as official languages, ensuring political and administrative continuity, but often at the expense of indigenous languages and cultures. These language decisions also reflect power structures and cultural dynamics, similar to the role of the Chinese script in East Asia.

The diversity of indigenous languages in Latin America and the movement to revive and recognize these languages also show how language policy is used to strengthen cultural identity and address historical injustices.

Overall, the global context shows that linguistic and written systems are not merely means of communication but also important instruments for shaping societies, enforcing or challenging power structures, and promoting or suppressing cultural identities. Therefore, the political and historical examination of language can provide a deeper understanding of the complex social and cultural processes worldwide.

Thursday, May 16, 2024

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

CIA, Moonies Cooperate in Sandinista War

▲ Contras in Nicaragua

Washington Post page E-15 (and Indiana Gazette)

August 16, 1984 by Jack Anderson

In the Central American hinterlands, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish CIA operatives from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s disciples. They appear to be working in harness against the communist-tainted Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

This troubles at least one Pentagon analyst, now stationed in Korea, who has warned the White House that the CIA-Moonie connection could cause possible political damage to President Reagan’s re-election campaign.

The analyst’s unofficial memo, “Potential Problems,” has been slipped to my associate Donald Goldberg.

“Current Moonie involvement with government officials, contractors and grantees [in Central America] could create a major scandal,” the memo warns. “If their activities and role become public knowledge, it will unite both the left and the right in attacking the administration.”

The memo continues: “If efforts are not taken to stop their growing influence and weed out current Moonie involvement in government, the president stands a good chance of being portrayed in the media as a poor, naive incompetent who is strong on ideology and weak on common sense. …

“The likelihood of a reporter or a Democratic staff member piecing the total picture together is too great to be neglected. Any thought that this festering problem will go away if ignored is foolish.”

The “total picture” of Moon’s activities in Latin America is not clear. But there is no doubt that the Korean messiah – now in prison for income tax evasion [and document forgery and perjury] – has established a solid presence in the region, with ties to right-wing groups and U.S.-supported guerrillas.

My associate John Lee Anderson reports from Central America that CAUSA international, Moon’s political front, has representatives working in programs that help the CIA in its “contra” war against the Sandinista government.

CAUSA maintains a publicity office in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, but its principal activities are in the field. CAUSA provides cash and other aid to Honduran-based Nicaraguan contras and Honduran right-wing political groups. Many anti-Sandinista guerrillas wear red CAUSA T-shirts with a map of the world on them.

But CAUSA and its affiliate, the Refugee Relief Freedom Foundation, provide more than T-shirts to rebel groups. They also funnel supplies to refugee families in and near contra camps and pay for trips by rebel leaders to the United States.

One contra leader, Fernando “El Negro” Chamorro, told my associate that as early as 1981, CAUSA representatives sent him on an all-expenses paid trip to the United States to try to unify the Nicaraguan exile groups.

The airlift of supplies to the rebels by Moon’s Unification Church has escalated since congress cut off CIA funding for the contras. The administration has been attempting to “privatize” its war against the Sandinistas and is apparently willing to work with Moon’s people.

Footnote: A Unification Church official denied that the church is engaged in any but religious activities in Central America.

––––––––––––––––––––––––

“The UC is truly anti-Christian” and produces “a species of material and spiritual slavery.” Catholic Bishops in Honduras

Jorge Guldenzoph, deeply involved with CAUSA and Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, given 10 years in jail for torturing

The Unification Church and the KCIA – ‘Privatizing’ covert action: the case of the UC

Sun Myung Moon organization activities in Central & South America

Introduction

‘Illegal Aliens Joining Moonies’ – The Pittsburg Press

Moon’s ‘Cause’ Takes Aim At Communism in the Americas – Washington Post

Moon in Latin America: Building the Bases of a World Organisation – Guardian

Guatemala

Nicaragua

Honduras

Costa Rica

Bolivia

Uruguay

Paraguay

Brazil

[ghostonthenet2501]

What exactly Neon Genesis Evangelion was doing with Christianity is debatable. Personally, I think there is a deliberate paralleling with Gnosticism, the apocalyptic War Scroll of the Qumranite Essene Jewish community, and the syncretic Christian/Pagan chivalric mythologies surrounding the Holy Grail with the Britons and the Spear of Longinus in Austria that has so fascinated New Age conspiracy theorists to convey the big theme of the Human Instrumentality Project and the secretive interests surrounding it. After all, if the Human Genome Project throughout the 1990s was popularly referred to as the “quest for the Holy Grail”, a project to instrumentalize and control people is anticipated to follow exemplified by the toxic abusive relationship between Gendo and Rei, his genetically enhanced daughter cloned from his wife who died or otherwise escaped from him.

With anime and Christianity, I notice four basic tendencies, to which one can pick two or three in any given series.

1. Sexual fetishism. The cumulative potential of the Christian discourse on the themes of the flesh and martyrdom, and all clothing and practices pertaining thereto in the past, present, and future for a tension-filled sexually charged presence and BDSM imagery.

2. Christian allegory. Particularly prominent in film noir and its futuristic sci-fi descendants like cyberpunk. Encounters with worlds of corruption and characters alternatively seeking paths of redemption and justice or tragically striving for the powers of evil that will bring about their downfall according to their hamartia (tragic flaw or sin) lend themselves to this thematic imagery.

3. Gothic anticlericalism. In the gothic literature of a Protestant North that darkly romanticized a Latin South, one major tendency of works like The Monk by Matthew Lewis to characterize Catholic-majority lands as rife with superstition barbarism fueled by clergy who hide terrible wickedness behind a mask of piety. Not infrequently a mode of projection to cast out the evils within the society producing the gothic work into the scapegoated Other. Japanese anime commonly uses such Christian clergy in this way to cast upon domestic concerns about cults like Aum Shinrikyo, the Unification Church, and Soka Gakkai, and about negative experiences like excessive charges for Buddhist funerals.

4. The European/Christian mystique. Since the big boom in shoujo manga in the 1970s, one prominent tendency in Japanese pop culture is a kind of narrative escape from Japan into Europe or Europeanized places (i.e. boarding schools). Christian imagery and people can be a cultural extension of this, to the point Christian characters can operate as outsider magicians taking on functions Shinto or Buddhist characters couldn’t. This association typically locates Christianity outside Japan in multiple senses.

In America, we have the misfortune that the religious fanatics cast out of British society into the peripheral backwoods of the “New World” colonies were optimally positioned to define what this country would come to be in many ways. Such tendencies were amplified by the religious right becoming the loudest and most powerful voices in American Christianity in terms of refusing progressive reform in favor of a fascist scramble to seize power and impose itself by force. So many have come to experience it as the face of abusive domestic micro-fascism.

This lends a certain emotional appeal to the gothic anticlericalism side of anime, particularly as American media may be reticent to risk direct confrontation with the religious right. But this narrative possibility comes at the expense of amplifying the marginalization of a religious minority that has a history of being persecuted with extreme violence by the Neo-Confucian Tokugawa Shogunate. During the Fifteen Year War (1930-1945), the Empire of Japan sought to impose State Shintoism with the associated imperial cult over colonies like Korea, which resulted in more martyrdoms in the midst of a wider necropolitical context of mass murder and rape, forced labor, opioid trafficking, and unethical experimentation in Unit 731′s biological and chemical warfare program. 

Philip Jenkins’ book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity argues the locus of Christian faith in the 21st century has already shifted from Europe to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In this sense, the more anime and other Japanese media define Christianity in terms of the exo, the outside of the “exotic”, the more other Asian ethnicities like Koreans, Filipinos, and Chinese stand to be marginalized and discriminated against. In recent memory, the horror anime Housing Complex C illustrates this concern in terms of escalating conflicts between elderly Japanese holding Shinto/Buddhist/Confucian ideas of purity and pollution and young Muslim migrant laborers targeted for scapegoating by a hostile party.

There is, however, another set of possibilities for the appeal of Christian elements in anime. Attraction to Christian characters or characters associated with Christian imagery in terms of sexual fetishism is what it is. As I think about the English dub for Ghost Stories that turns its Christian mystique character into a more familiar American evangelical bigot of the Bush era, it occurs to me this underscores what is not being said through this act of interpolation. In other words, Japanese pop cultural fantasies about Christianity show that other Christianities are possible. 

For example, I think that much of the appeal of Maria Watches Over Us rests in terms of how the Catholic girl’s academy creates an alternative society from mainstream Japan. While Japan still does not recognize gay marriage and legally marginalizes queer identities from families, within the academy the sœur system of fictive kinship between self-declared “sisters” creates a system in which first loves between girls are publicly recognized and accepted. This love between the protagonists is to be symbolically begun before the very statue of the Virgin Mary.

Raise your hand if the exotification of Christianity in Japanese media has always held a weird appeal to you as a non-Christian.

Every time a video game or anime goes "lol this shit is weird I'm gonna flex on it and use it for evocative but shallow aesthetic reasons" it's like getting a little vacation into a world where all that shit is acknowledged as unsettling and weird. It's such a relief.

As much as we poke at shit like Evangelion for doing this, it's a bald-faced lie to pretend that seeing the dominant, domineering religion many of us are stuck in the shadow of treated like that isn't a delight.

[whatisonthemoonarchive]

CAUSA all around the World

CAUSA USA considers that its purpose is to "point out the lies and deceptions of communism, its theory and practice," and to "offer a positive philosophy for God-accepting people."(48) It therefore "seeks to develop an ideological offensive" throughout the United States which is designed to counter the "influence and expansion" of communism. (48) The group organizes conferences and seminars on communist ideology. These conferences promote "Godism" as an alternative to communism. (23,37,47) CAUSA USA also creates grassroots organizations in order to promote its anticommunist worldview. In addition, it runs a speakers bureau, supports voter registration and clean-up campaigns, conducts national and local leadership seminars, publishes the CAUSA USA Report, and coordinates the CAUSA Ministerial Alliance. (23,48) One of its programs is the CAUSA Veterans Association. (48)

CAUSA USA has organized expense-paid seminars and conferences for congressional staff members, Hispanic Americans, and conservative activists. (37,47) In 1985, about 10,000 people (mostly clergy) were recruited to attend all-expense paid CAUSA USA indoctrination conferences. (11) The group has financed trips by Latin American journalists and political leaders to Seoul, South Korea. (47) According to Silvio Arguello–a businessman from Miami who was attempting to establish a pro-contra

Nicaraguan exile group–CAUSA USA also held conferences for Nicaraguan exiles and other Hispanics in Washington DC and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (47)

CAUSA Intl began its work in Latin America in 1980. (23) From 1980 to 1982, the organization’s major activity was the organization of anticommunist seminars for political, military, and other influential groups throughout Latin America. (67)

The Freedom Leadership Foundation is another, though less active, political arm of the church. In 1984, it paid for a fact-finding tour to Central America for four Republican Senate staff members–including aides to Sens. Steve Symms (R-Idaho), Robert W. Kasten Jr. (R-WI), and William L. Armstrong (R-CO). They met with government leaders and officials of the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala and Honduras and joined the official U.S. delegation to observe the Salvadoran elections. (37)

The Intl Conference for the Unity of Science (ICUS) conducts annual conferences which promote interdisciplinary and international dialogues on issues concerning values and science. (56)

The Intl Security Council organizes retired military officers of the Western Alliance. It also sponsors anticommunist conferences. (67)

The Intl Seminars on the Unification Movement (ISUM) consist of seminars which describe the ideas and activities of the Unification movement. (56)

The Washington Institute for Values in Public Policy is a think tank sponsored by the UC organization. Based in Washington DC and founded by Moon in 1983, the institute conducts research, forums, and seminars, and produces publications. (37,43) It underwrites research and seminars at such institutions as the University of Chicago, the Institute for Energy Analysis (Oak Ridge, TN), and Stanford University. (37)

The World Media Association and News World Communications, both founded by Moon, co-sponsor the annual World Media Conference. (26) At the 1986 conference, the World Media Association presented its ethics award for journalism to two individuals. The FIEJ Golden Pen of Freedom went to Pedro J. Chamorro Barrios, former codirector and editor of Nicaragua’s opposition paper, La Prensa. (26) News World Communications Inc publishes The Washington Times, the New York City Tribune, Noticias del Mundo (New York), Insight magazine, and The World and I (monthly). It also operates the weekly Middle East Times and the Free Press Intl news service. (26)

The World Media Association is an intl consortium of organizations and individuals. It is nonprofit and is sponsored by News World Communications. Its projects include the World Media Conference, fact-finding tours, publications, and a special projects fund for research, scholarships, and publications. (26) It sponsors fact-finding tours in "crucial areas of the world" for members of the media and opinion leaders. It pays all expenses for participants and has sponsored tours to Cambodia, China, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, South Korea, the Soviet Union, Taiwan, and West Germany. (26)

Afghanistan: Lee Shapiro (see below) was killed in October 1987 while taking film footage in strategic areas along the Afghan-Soviet border. Shapiro was working with a $250,000 (another source says $300,000) grant from CAUSA and additional funds from the Bradley and Olin foundations. (27,58)

Angola: CAUSA Intl has provided assistance to Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, which has been trying to overthrow the Marxist Angolan government. (23)

Argentina: CAUSA was established in this country in 1981. The group’s first seminar had the backing of Archbishop Antonio Plaza of La Plata. (23)

Bolivia: CAUSA has run training seminars for the Bolivian military at the La Paz Military Academy. (23)

Brazil: CAUSA has held banquets, conferences, and training seminars for military, media, educational, and political leaders. (23) The UC organization apparently provided logistical and/or financial support to 57 candidates in the 1986 congressional elections in Brazil. (58,67) The Independent (London, Oct 8, 1986) reported that these contributions were part of a UC effort to build a neofascist political party in Brazil similar to the French National Front. (58,67)

Cambodia: On a 1984 tour to Southeast Asia, the World Media Association took participants to a refugee camp where they met with Gen. Dien Del, vice president of the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front. (26)

Guatemala: CAUSA first set up its office in Guatemala in 1982 under the regime of evangelical Gen. Efrain Rios Montt. (1) At a June 1983 CAUSA World Media Conference held in Guatemala City, conference participants called for "the constitution of a regional army of three million soldiers" to resolve the Central American crisis. There were some 250 participants, mostly owners or editors of newspapers. (36) Based in Guatemala, conference participants traveled throughout the Central American region, meeting with military and business leaders in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Honduras. (1) World Student Service Corps Inc. , a CAUSA group, has sent $30,000 in medical supplies to Guatemala. (10) CARP, working in conjunction with the World Student Service Corps, has sent volunteer work brigades to San Pedro and Santiago Atitlan to build community centers. (57)

Honduras: The Intl Relief Friendship Foundation has provided clothing, food, and medicine to Nicaraguan Miskito Indian refugees in Honduras. (33,37,44) According to the IRFF director (as of 1985), CAUSA Intl had paid to fly one of the former organization’s shipments to Honduras. (33) In Honduras, IRFF has provided assistance to refugees directly along the border with Honduras, rather than in the internationallysponsored camps further inland. IRFF’s work has thus been criticized by relief workers and U.S. congressional staff members for effectively maintaining MISURA (an Indian contra faction) military base camps. (33) In 1984, the IRFF shipped 1000 pounds of clothing, almost seven tons of

food, and medical supplies to Miskito refugees along the border. (37) It has provided some of this material aid–including medicines, food, and clothing–to Friends of the Americas, a private humanitarian assistance organization which has supported the Nicaraguan contras and their families. (65)

Edgar Chamorro, a former leader of the largest contra group–the FDN–said that 200 CAUSA members visited two contra camps in Honduras during 1983 or 1984. He said they did not come with aid but with "propaganda."(35) CAUSA has also sent food, clothing, toys, blankets, canvas for tents, and medicines to Nicaraguan refugees in Honduras. (35,44,75) As of mid-1985, CAUSA had sent an estimated $1 million in aid to the area, according to director E. David Woellner. (75) A field kitchen was included among the donations. (75)

CERT (Christian Emergency Relief Team) International, an evangelical Christian assistance operation, took over CAUSA’s humanitarian aid programs around 1987. CERT has been supported by the American Freedom Coalition, a political group with multiple links to the Unification Church, CAUSA, and the American Constitution Committee. (15,49,62,72,73,74)

CAUSA began working with the Nicaraguan revolutionaries based in Honduras in 1981 and has been a large supplier of humanitarian assistance to the contras (see also Nicaragua below). (71) Fernando ("El Negro") Chamorro, a contra leader, said that CAUSA representatives sent him on an all-expense paid trip to the United States in 1981. He was to try to unify Nicaraguan exile groups on the journey. (44) CAUSA airlifted supplies to the contras immediately after Congress first cut off aid. (12) In the past, contra fighters have been seen wearing red CAUSA T-shirts, and CAUSA has provided cash and other aid to the rebels. (44) CAUSA paid $11,000 for the rent and phone bills of the Tegucigalpa headquarters of the Misura contra faction when the leaders of that Indian rebel group were not able to pay their bills. (1,53)

CAUSA USA has made contributions to rightwing businessmen and military officers in Honduras. (47)

CAUSA maintains an office in Tegucigalpa from which it sponsors educational forums in Honduras and El Salvador. Many of Honduras’ leading intellectuals have participated in these forums which focus on education about the Marxist-Leninist threat in the Americas. After a large CAUSA conference in San Pedro Sula several years ago, the organization has concentrated more on small seminars with important sectors of the population, including businesses, community groups, and the military. These seminars purport to teach people how to recognize and fight communism while maintaining democratic freedoms. (71)

The World Student Service Corps, a CAUSA affiliate, was planning (as of 1988) to establish orphanages on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa within the next year or two. (71)

The World Media Association sponsored a 1983 tour to Central America for journalists from 55 countries. One of the areas they visited was a strip along the Honduran border with Nicaragua where they met with a leader of the Nicaraguan contras and visited a camp for Nicaraguan refugees. (26)

Nicaragua: CAUSA has been a supporter of the Nicaraguan rebel forces known as the contras (see also Honduras above). CAUSA contributed money to Phil Mabry to set up a taxfree organization for humanitarian aid for the contras. (7) The Washington Times sponsored the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund (NFF see separate GroupWatch profile) which planned to raise $14 million in aid to the contras. Bo Hi Pak donated $100,000 to launch the project. (23) The NFF was in existence only for four months, from May 8, 1985 to September 9, 1985. (39) It is now inactive but maintains its 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status by filing copies of its 1985 tax return each year with the Internal Revenue Service. (39,65)

CAUSA provided funding for an anti-Sandinista documentary on the Miskito Indians produced by film-maker Lee Shapiro, a graduate of Moon’s Unification Theological Seminary. The documentary–called "Nicaragua Was Our Home"–was shown on public television in the United States. (27) Shapiro presented a rushed version of the film to the 1984 U. N. Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva in 1984. (53) Investigative reporter Karen Branan has criticized Shapiro’s film for a number of reasons, including the film-maker’s claim that he observed a battle which Branan contends never actually occurred. (77)

Paraguay: CAUSA has held seminars for the Paraguayan military and government officials. (23)

Philippines: In the Philippines, CAUSA is helping to set up civilian vigilante groups, elect local rightwing officials, and influence public opinion regarding the U.S. bases negotiations. (52) The Special Operations Teams (SOTs) of the Philippine Army use a manual prepared by CAUSA Intl for their anticommunist lectures. The SOTs are counterinsurgency squads which use political and psychological methods–including anticommunist propaganda–to win the "hearts and minds" of Filipino peasants. (55) A CAUSA affiliate, the Asian Ecumenical Inter-Faith Council itinerated Father Bismarck Carballo for a speaking tour in the Philippines in August 1986. Carballo was an opposition clergyman in Nicaragua who at one time was evicted by the Sandinista government. (8) In October, 1986, CAUSA held a National Security Conference in the country that was attended by Ray Cline and John Singlaub, both experts on counterinsurgency strategy and low intensity conflict. (8)

Uruguay: CAUSA held its first seminar in Uruguay in 1980. (23) Julian Safi, a rightwing journalist with business and media links to the military government, was named head of CAUSA in the country. Under Safi, CAUSA started a newspaper, Noticias del Mundo, purchased Banco de Credito–Uruguay’s third or fourth largest bank–bought the country’s largest printing press, and took over the Victory Plaza, the country’s largest luxury hotel. Safi also took over ownership of Kami Ltd. , a holding company in the Grand Cayman Islands, allowing him and CAUSA access to international financial markets without undergoing government scrutiny. (23,34) As of 1984, the church had invested more than $460 million in the country. (34)

[cool2020calendar-blog]

July 2020 Calendar For Holiday & Work Schedule

July is the second month of summer and is known for its warm air. The best movement in July is to chill by a plunge in the sea or pool, swing in a lounger and look at get-togethers on a pre-summer night.

July is the most sultry month of the Northern Hemisphere and, regardless of what may be standard, it is seen as the coldest month in the Southern Hemisphere. July is the thing that maybe stood apart from January of the Northern side of the equator in the Southern side of the equator.

The second half of the year starts with July. In various workplaces, the assessments made around the beginning of the year are sketched out and the course is broke down. July is in like the way the comprehensive length of inquiring about decisions taken for the new year. You may even need to do a little cure. Since you may be gone in a general sense speedier, or more conceded than you orchestrated.

July is close to the immense piece of various festivals and there are various inspirations to experience this month flooding with fun. Because of each and every outside activity, coastline parties, weddings, national events and a wide degree of good occasions in July, you can be to some degree hard to contribute noteworthiness with each event.

HISTORY OF JULY

July was from the beginning of the great importance of Quintilis in the Roman timetable. It was the "fifth" month of the year until January and February were joined into the timetable in 450 BC. It got its entrancing name from the Latin word for fifth. Later the name was changed to Julius to pay tribute to Julius Caesar who was considered on July 12.

July is the standard time length known as "fence month," the shut season for deer in England. The satisfaction of England's High Court of Justice Trinity Term occurs on 31 July. July is in like the way the time wherein the races happen for the Japanese House of Councilors, held at standard among times and displacing half of its seats. In Ancient Rome, the festival of Poplifugia was adulated on 5 July, and Ludi Apollinaris was held tight 13 July and for a couple of days a brief range later. Everything considered, these dates don't identify with the progressed Gregorian timetable.

The name of the seventh month of the year – July – was given by the Roman Senate in 46 B.C. out of thankfulness for ruler Julius Caesar.

July is the most blasting month in the Northern Hemisphere all around. It takes after January in the Southern Hemisphere.

A touch of the time the sweltering, wide stretches of July are known as the "dog extended lengths of summer".

There are various countries which have their Independence Day during the hour of July. These set the United States, Belarus, Venezuela, Argentina, Belgium, the Bahamas, and the Maldives. The national days for France and Canada occur in July too.

It is a section of the time called the Hay month considering the manner in which that the grass dries out by excellence of a nonappearance of a tempest and can be made into a feed.

July's birthstone, the ruby, is reliably associated with fulfillment, love, centrality, and steadfast quality.

The regular develop of the great importance of July is the water lily, symbolizing joy, capriciousness, and sweetness.

No month completes on a general day of the week as July close to on the off chance that it is a ricochet year when January achieves everything considered.

More US presidents (seven) have passed on in July than in some other month.

The outdated British called July "Heymonth" or "Maedmonth" recommending haymaking and dales blooming.

JULY HOLIDAYS IN THE UNITED STATES

Opportunity Day (July fourth)

Opportunity Day 2020, generally called Fourth of July, is an association event observed yearly on July fourth. It is the acknowledgment of the dispersing of the solicitation of the self-rule of the United States of America from Great Britain in 1776.

On April 19, 1775, during the Battles of Lexington and Concord (Mass.), the fundamental shots were released among pioneers and British troopers, starting the American Revolution. After these first military conflicts, the strain among Britain and her American pioneers continued mounting. By then, on July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress controlled for self-rule from Britain.

Following two days, on July 4, the Congress authenticated the last draft of the Declaration of Independence, which had been made by Thomas Jefferson and changed by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. On July 8, the basic open researching of the Declaration happened at the Pennsylvania State House (genuinely Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Later that for all intents and purposes indistinguishable day, various readings occurred in Trenton, New Jersey, and Easton, Pennsylvania.

In the United States, Independence Day is an association event everything thought about celebrated with walks, shows, sparklers and picnics, and fire burns. Various people show the American standard outside their homes or structures. If Independence Day falls on seven days' end, by then the last Friday or following Monday will be an event. As this is a Federal event, not only will schools and libraries be closed. Most government and state working circumstances will correspondingly be closed and there will be no mail send on Independence Day.

In general Day of Friendship

The International Day of Friendship is a United Nations (UN) day that supports the activity that coordinated effort plays in actuating congeniality in various social solicitations. Before the 30th of July was recently nitty-gritty as the International Day of Friendship by the General Assembly of United Nations in 2011, the central thought for a day of the association began from Hallmark cards during the 1930s, various years back. It was from the beginning celebrated on second August, the day was, as they say, seen incredulously by general society as a business work out, offers of family relationship day cards didn't take off in Europe and by the mid-1940's the day had ended up being unsafe in the USA. The probability of a day to regard family connections was, in any case, understood by different countries in Asia where it remained a standard custom to hold a day for complimenting affiliations and the exchanging of headways between buddies.

The basic World Friendship Day was proposed for 30 July 1958 by the World Friendship Crusade, a general crucial affiliation that fights to connect with a culture of the comprehension through affiliation.

Because of the creation pervasiveness of electronic life all through the world, there has been a huge development in watching World Friendship Day and International Day of Friendship online similarly as in system practices in close to structures arranged for get-together ones of different establishments.

If you are an "all around sorted out" person who reliably says interest is fundamental, attempt to experience this day with your mates (by structure new memories)! You ought to just check this day on your July 2020 calendar printable!

National Parents' Day

Gatekeepers' Day lauds the monstrosity of the development of trustworthy youth raising in family life dependably on the fourth Sunday in July. Families are the most minor unit of the general people and a significant human establishment. The need of a family is to be as one through boundless love and responsibility.

Watchmen's Day was set up in 1994. In a time span where society ended up being genuinely self-devoured, President Bill Clinton meant congressional focuses to watch Parents' Day needing to move family duties and parental responsibilities. Kept up by the Unification Church, Senator Trent Lott passed on the bill into the senate and the National Parents' Day Coalition was made to help Parents' Day by dependably picking 'Watchmen' of the Year' at neighborhood, national and state levels. The Coalition similarly ensures informational activities for protects and might want to drive the dependable idea of family by enabling consistency among wedded couples, and of marriage between youngsters.

National Parents' Day isn't a day of gift-giving. Gifts are starting at now permitted on Mother's Day in May and Father's Day in June. The best way to deal with a watch this day is achieving something fun by contributing noteworthiness with your kinfolk. It's in like manner of key giant that you cause them to appreciate the entire they are revered and saw.

This year in 2020 National Parents' Day will be commended on July 26th 2020, Sunday.

In case you have to experience this novel day with your family or bring a journey through a huge field of cordial recollections, you may put a sign on your printable timetable.

Certainly UNDERSTOOD BIRTHDAYS IN JULY

July 6, 1946 – George Walker Bush who is the past (43rd) President of the United States was considered in New Haven, Connecticut.

July 10, 1856–Nikola Tesla who was a Serbian-American pioneer, best known for his advancement of substituting stream electrical systems was imagined in Smiljan, Austrian Empire (clearly in Croatia).

July 18, 1918–A Nobel laureate, Nelson Mandela who was the man submitted for toppling politically-grasped racial detachment and joining the country of South Africa was imagined in Mvezo, South Africa.

July 21, 1899–Ernest Hemingway who was a Nobel Prize-winning American essayist was considered in Cicero (legitimately in Oak Park), Illinois.

July 26, 1943–Mick Jagger who is a recognized entertainer, lyricist, craftsman, on-screen character and the setting up individual from 'The Rolling Stones' was considered in Dartford, England. July 6, 1907–Frida Kahlo who was a prominent Mexico.

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Arts and humanities research papers Humanities - Research Topic Ideas - LibGuides at University of Michigan

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It’s pretty much a given fact that we need food and water to survive. If you’re lost somewhere in a harsh environment, finding food and a source of water are pretty much a necessity. The human body can go three weeks without food, but water is a different story. Generally speaking, the human body can’t go more than three days without water, but there have been cases of people surviving for 8-10 days without water. We all need food and liquids to survive, but some people will put themselves on starvation diets in an attempt to lose weight. And then, others will abstain from eating food and drinking liquids for fasting purposes. Ascetics separate themselves from the world and fast for long periods of time. Ascetics may survive from eating small amounts of food, but they never stop eating it entirely. However, there are some people who have claimed that they don’t need nourishment from food and liquids but from other sources instead. These people are known as breatharians. Breatharians practice a lifestyle in which they get nourishment from air and sunlight. Some abstain from just food while others abstain from food and liquids. Scientists and medical professionals think of breatharianism as a dangerous pseudoscience with lethal consequences. And after doing research on breatharianism, I don’t think they’re wrong. If you want to know more about this somewhat eccentric lifestyle, then check out this list of 15 things to know about breatharianism, the belief you can live without food or water.

#1 Breatharianism Is Not Fasting It’s important to note that breatharianism is not considered fasting. Breatharianism and fasting are two different things. Weirdly enough, though, breatharianism is also referred to as “inedia,” which is the Latin word for fasting. Fasting has an end point. People fast for days, weeks, months, maybe even longer. But breatharianism doesn’t have an end point. It’s not fasting and it’s not dieting, though it has been used by some for weight loss. It’s a complete lifestyle change that forces you to put away for food and liquids for…well… forever. At least that statement is partially true. Some breatharians will drink water. One breatharian in particular admitted to eating mouthfuls of food every once in a while. She said just to keep her energy levels up.

#2 Breatharians Survive Off Prana Breatharianism seems to have some roots in Hindu philosophy. Breatharians supposedly don’t live off food or water. They live off prana instead. Prana is a Sanskrit word that means “life force” or “life energy.” It’s a comic energy that’s present everywhere and is believed to be responsible for all bodily functions. Because prana is thought to aid with bodily functions, breatharians believe this is all they need to survive. They claim to get their intake of prana by taking in plenty of air and sunshine.

#3 Breatharians Think Breatharianism Is The Cure For Hunger 11% of the world’s population faces chronic undernourishment. About 805 million people go hungry every day. There have been numerous campaigns to end world hunger, such as Cure4Hunger, an organization that seeks to build Food and Water Domes all over the globe. Everyone can probably agree that finding the solution is a complex issue, but breatharians believe that the cure is a lot simpler than the rest of us would think. Since breatharians believe that we all need to survive is air and sunlight, they recommend that people in famine-stricken countries take up a breatharian diet. There would be no death, let alone diseases, due to lack of food so millions of lives could be saved as a result.

#4 The Digestive System Is Believed To Be A Mistake The digestive system is made up of the digestive tract, the liver, the pancreas, and the gallbladder. Furthermore, the digestive tract is made up of the mouth, the esophagus, the stomach, the small intestine, the large intestine, and the anus. After food passes through the mouth, it then moves through all the organs of the digestive tract until it ends up in the anus. Without digestion, our bodies wouldn’t be able to break down the nutrients it gets from food, nutrients that the body requires for energy, cell repair, and more. However, breatharians believe the digestive system is completely wrong. Since all we supposedly need to live is air and sunlight, the organs that make up our digestive system are totally useless.

#5 The Most Famous Breatharian Is Jasmuheen Before you ask, Jasmuheen isn’t her real name. She was born Ellen Greve in New South Wales, Australia in 1957. She is a major proponent of the breatharianism lifestyle, claiming to not have eaten since the year 1993. However, she later admitted that she does occasionally eat a mouthful of food, whatever she fancies at the moment. Moreover, visitors to her home who came over for interviews with her took note of the food in her kitchen. She denied allegations that she ate food on a regular basis, saying the food was for her husband. Jasmuheen travels all over the world, speaking at lectures on breatharianism and encouraging more people to take up the lifestyle. In addition to that, she oversees the Cosmic Internet Academy. She is widely regarded by the scientific community as a sham diet guru who makes outrageous psychic claims.

#6 There Is A Six-Step Plan To Breatharianism If one wishes to take up breatharianism, they’re not supposed to abruptly cut off all consumption of food and liquids. The way is to slowly wean themselves off food and drink until they achieve a completely breatharianistic way of living. Jasmuheen laid out a six-step plan for new breatharians to follow. Step one is to cut out meat from the diet and become a vegetarian. Step two is to cut out dairy and eggs and become a vegan. Step three is to cut out processed and cooked food and only eat raw food. Step four is to only eat fruits. Step five is to only intake liquids. And finally, step six is to only take in prana. Once a new breatharian has reached step six, he or she has completed the process and has become an official breatharian.

#7 Nikola Tesla Supported Breatharianism Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, engineer, and physicist who is best known for his contributions to the fields of engineering and physics, namely towards the conceptions of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. A lesser-known fact is that he was a supporter for breatharianism. In 1901, he wrote an article for Collier’s Weekly titled “Talking With the Planets,” in which he said, “Why should a living being not be able to obtain all the energy it needs for the performance of its life functions from the environment, instead of through consumption of food, and transforming, by a complicated process, the energy of chemical combinations into life-sustaining energy?” To Tesla, it was still a question of whether or not chemical processes, such as metabolism, were necessary for the survival of living beings.

#8 Michelle Pfeiffer Used To Follow The Breatharianism Lifestyle There are quite a few cults out there. Breatharianism is no different. And actress Michelle Pfeiffer used to be a part of it. During her younger years, the Academy Award-winning actress was involved with a particular Breatharianism cult, though not willingly. She talked about her experiences in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph’s Stella magazine. Pfeiffer got caught up with a couple who were breatharians themselves and they forced her to stick to a strict and demanding diet. She didn’t live with the couple but she did visit their house a lot. However, they told her that she needed to come more and they constantly expected payments. The actress was “rescued” by her now ex-husband, Peter Moon, who was working on a film about Moonies or followers of the Unification Church started by Sun Myung Moon. She soon realized she got caught up in another cult as well.

#9 There Are Breatharian Gurus Just like in any kind of lifestyle, you can find gurus to learn from. One of them is a man by the name of Hira Ratan Manek, a 79-year-old Indian who’s also a former mechanical engineer and businessman. He runs the Solar Healing Center in Winter Park, Florida. Manek claims to have been living off nothing but energy from the sun and boiled water since 1995. Not only will one be free from hunger, but he and his followers believe that living off sun energy can cure mental and physical illnesses and improve one’s memory. Another Breatharianism guru is Tapaswi Palden Dorje (pictured above), born circa April 9, 1990, in Nepal. Dorje declares to have stopped eating and drinking after he was bitten by a poisonous snake. His followers believe that the snake gave Dorje enlightenment, claiming to see a light emanating from his head.

#10 Some American Teenage Girls Practice Breatharianism In Some Sort Of Way You may be surprised to know that some people adhere to breatharianism without even knowing they’re doing it. These people are teenage girls living in America. 10% of the female American population engage in breatharianism in some form. It happens during puberty when the body is experiencing major developments that affect the emotions and hormones. These changes can affect their eating habits, causing them to eat less to avoid obesity. The early teenage years can be difficult for many girls because their bodies are undergoing various changes they might not understand at first, and during this time, they become worried about what their peers might think of them based on how much they eat. So they’ll abstain from eating a lot of food in an attempt to keep their weight down.

#11 60 Minutes Stopped A Fasting Demonstration Due To Health Concerns In order to prove the naysayers wrong on what many believe to be a bogus “diet,” Jasmuheen decided to stage a fasting demonstration on the Australian version of 60 Minutes to show everyone what the breatharianism lifestyle was all about. 48 hours into the demonstration, Jasmuheen’s blood pressure rose and she started showing signs of dehydration. She blamed polluted air for the decline in her health so she moved to a different location further from the city. But she didn’t get better. Instead, she got worse. Her pupils started dilating and she started losing weight. Doctors supervising the trial ordered for it to be stopped, worried that Jasmuheen would suffer kidney damage if the demonstration continued any longer. However, Jasmuheen has a different belief on why doctors stopped the test prematurely. She believes they stopped her because they feared the demonstration would be proven successful.

#12 A Woman Broadcasted Her Breatharianism Experience Through Social Media Lots of people do crazy stuff on social media, so this case is no different. In 2013, 65-year-old Naveena Shine from Seattle, Washington decided to try out breatharianism. But unlike other new breatharians, Shrine elected to broadcast her experiences on social media. For four to six months, Shrine would ingest nothing but tea and water. She left several cameras running around the house to show her activities 24/7 and provided updates on Facebook and Twitter. She intended to get nourishment from air, water, and light. More specifically, the “source already embedded within our body/mind/Spiritual systems.” During the experiment, she lost 20 pounds and suffered from nausea and exhaustion. She terminated the venture after 47 days, due to strong negative response and financial issues.

#13 Several People Have Died From Breatharianism It probably goes without saying that people have died from taking up breatharianism. After all, any lifestyle that doesn’t allow you to eat or drink can’t have good long-term effects. At least four of Jasmuheen’s devotees have died from practicing breatharianism. One of them was a 31-year-old kindergarten teacher named Timo Degen from Munich, Germany who read about breatharianism on the Internet and decided to try it out. After three weeks of fasting, he fell into a coma and had to be hospitalized. He later died. Another case was that of a 49-year-old woman named Verity Lynn from Loch Cam, Sutherland, Scotland. Like Degen, Lynn read up on breatharianism on the Internet and was eager to try it out. She went fasting on a camping trip. Her body was found two weeks later. Jasmuheen deflected the blame for her followers’ deaths off herself, saying they didn’t find the light that would have nourished them.

#14 The Best Proof For Breatharianism Supposedly Lies In Prahlad Jani Prahlad Jani, also known as “Mataji,” is an 87-year-old Indian sadhu. A sadhu is a religious ascetic in Hinduism who has rejected worldly life. Jani has claimed he has not eaten anything since 1940, nearly 80 years ago. He claimed that when he was but a child, the goddess, Amba, told him that he didn’t need to eat food. He says that Amba sustains him and gives him nourishment. Doctors studied this man for two weeks but found themselves astounded when they didn’t see him eat or drink anything in the two-week period. And unlike Jasmuheen, Jani didn’t undergo any physiological changes during this demonstration. The doctors didn’t publish their findings in any medical journals, but even so, the veracity of these trials was disputed. Many believe the doctors were quacks, much like they believe Jani to be a fraud.

#15 The Founder Of The Breatharian Institute Of America Goes To McDonald’s You would think that the creator of breatharianism would follow the lifestyle to a tee, but not in the case of Wiley Brooks, the founder of the Breatharian Institute of America. Brooks claims to be the reincarnation of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ and claims to be continuing a process that was started during his supposed past life as Jesus Christ. Like other Breatharians, Brooks lives off air and sunlight…and McDonald’s. He eats double quarter-pounder with cheese meals and diet Coke as he believes these are the only foods that aren’t radioactive. Brooks says every other food and every other liquid on this planet contains radioactive energy. That is, except for his “Elixir Of The Gods,” a “special” water that will cost you $10,000 a bottle. If you think that’s steep, immortality workshops cost a whopping $1,000,000.

Source: TheRichest

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Secret Knowledge—or a Hoax?

The Voynich Manuscript edited by Raymond Clemens, with an introduction by Deborah Harkness Beinecke Library/ Yale University Press, 304 pp., $50.00

In 1969 America’s most significant dealer in medieval manuscripts, the Viennese-born bibliophile Hans Peter Kraus, donated a celebrated volume to Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Measuring ten inches by seven and bound in limp white vellum (the Renaissance bookbinder’s equivalent of paperback, and definitely not the original cover), Kraus’s gift was cataloged as Beinecke MS 408.

The manuscript’s celebrity is at first sight puzzling, since it is an unglamorous, even somewhat shabby object: 234 pages gathered in eighteen “quires,” or foldings, each consisting of between one and six double pages, or “bifolia.” Very unusually for a medieval manuscript, Beinecke MS 408 also includes eleven larger “foldout” pages, containing what appear to be astronomical or astrological diagrams. At some date after the book’s compilation, each folio was numbered in ink on the right-hand opening (technically known as the recto).

The first 130 pages of the volume are taken up with what appears to be an herbal, each page containing a large if somewhat sloppily executed drawing of a plant, depicting root, stem, flowers, and leaves, around which extensive text, in no recognizable language but written in a fluent cursive hand, has been carefully arranged so as to avoid encroaching on any part of the picture. This “herbal” section is followed by a cluster of large foldout pages decorated with circular zodiacal or astrological diagrams, and this in turn gives way to a section of ten folios containing yet more unrecognizable text, interspersed with decidedly unerotic drawings of groups of plump naked women, bathing in pools and conduits of blue or green water, which some students of the manuscript have suggested might be symbolic representations of bodily functions such as reproduction.

After a further group of large foldout pages with more astronomical images, there follows another cluster of “herbal” images. These consist of multiple small drawings embedded in the text of each page, alongside objects in the margin that resemble pharmacological jars, perhaps suggesting that this part of the manuscript refers back to the opening herbal, and was intended as a collection of medical recipes. The book’s closing section consists of twenty-three pages of closely written text without illustration, made up of short paragraphs of just a few lines apiece, each paragraph prefaced by a star or asterisk.

Kraus had bought this baffling manuscript as a commercial speculation in 1961, for $24,500 plus a half share in any future profit. The vendor was Anne Nill, secretary, professional collaborator, and ultimate heir of the manuscript’s first discoverer, a remarkable Polish-Lithuanian bookdealer and adventurer, Wilfrid Michael Voynich. Born in 1864 and a graduate in law and chemistry from the University of Moscow, Voynich had been arrested in 1885 as a revolutionary Polish nationalist and had spent five years in exile in Siberia. Escaping via Mongolia on a forged passport, Voynich had ultimately arrived penniless in England, having bartered even his spectacles and waistcoat to pay for his passage. Initially drawn again into revolutionary circles in London around the Ukrainian political agitator Sergei “Stepniak” Kravchinsky, Voynich was befriended by Richard Garnett, keeper of the British Museum Reading Room, the regular haunt of late-nineteenth-century Russian and other Eastern European exiles.

It was at Garnett’s suggestion that Voynich put his omnivorously eclectic learning, his cosmopolitan personal connections, and his gifts as a linguist to use as a buyer and seller of rare books, a field in which he rapidly established himself as a piratical and successful entrepreneur. A flamboyant personality regarded with hostility or condescension by less successful dealers and more orthodox bibliophiles, Voynich packed his catalogs with arcane bibliographical detail, which established his reputation for near omniscience: he was soon making money. Specializing at first in incunabula—books printed before 1501—he sold to prestigious collectors and libraries, including the British Museum, which bought the entire contents of his eighth catalog. The books from that purchase, now shelved together in the British Library, provide a snapshot of the rich contents of Voynich’s shop in Soho Square, later moved to the grander purlieus of Piccadilly.

The precise circumstances surrounding Voynich’s acquisition of Beinecke MS 408 are obscure, but it had certainly been one of a group of manuscripts and books from the library of Athanasius Kircher, the seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath and scientist. Kircher’s books were rescued from confiscation by the new state of Italy during its stand-off with the church in the years after unification in 1871, along with other rarities from the library of the Jesuit university in Rome, the Collegio Romano, where Kircher had been a professor for forty years. More than three hundred of these hidden Jesuit treasures ultimately ended up in the Vatican Library, but in 1912 Voynich, who regularly toured Italy in search of incunabula and manuscripts, managed to buy a few. One of these, described by Voynich as the “ugly duckling” of the former Collegio Romano collection, was the future Beinecke MS 408.

If Voynich labeled his acquisition an ugly duckling, he was nevertheless convinced that he had acquired an exceptional swan in the making, for he believed its baffling text concealed a scientific treatise of major importance by one of the greatest minds of the high Middle Ages. In this belief, he was following a letter from the Prague physician Johannes Marcus Marci to Kircher, dated August 19, 1665, which had been tucked inside the manuscript. Marci’s letter claimed that the manuscript was the work of the thirteenth-century English Franciscan scientist and alchemist Roger Bacon, and that more recently it had been acquired for the library of the emperor Rudolf II for the very large sum of six hundred golden ducats.

The alleged connection to Bacon would prove to be illusory, but Rudolf’s avid interest in alchemy, astrology, magic, and all manner of occult studies, together with the presence on the first leaf of the manuscript of the signature (now invisible to the naked eye) of Jacobus Hořčický de Tepenec (circa 1575–1622), court pharmacist to the emperor, ennobled by Rudolf in 1608, lends plausibility to the alleged imperial provenance. Marci’s motive for presenting Kircher with the manuscript was to induce him to decipher the text.

This was not the first such appeal. Marci had acquired the book from the library of another Bohemian alchemist, Georgius Barschius. In 1637 Barschius himself had copied extracts from the manuscript and sent them to Kircher, who, among much else, was an expert on Oriental languages and whose Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta (1643) would be regarded as a foundational text for the study of Egyptian hieroglyphics. So Barschius hoped that this all-knowing “Oedipus of Egypt” was just the man to decipher his enigmatic manuscript, “a certain riddle of the Sphinx,” which he believed must have been written in a code or cipher, as alchemical and magical treatises often were. Kircher told another Prague-based Jesuit mathematician, Theodor Moretus, that he had indeed tried unsuccessfully to decipher the text: marginal traces of an early effort to supply equivalents from the Latin alphabet for the mysterious letters in the manuscript itself may be relics of these attempts at decryption.

Voynich was immensely excited by all this. His knowledge of the court of Rudolf II was not very deep, and largely derived from a popular history of scientific and alchemical studies at the Prague court published in 1904 by Henry Carrington Bolton, an American chemist, bibliographer, and historian of science. Bolton’s book, The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolf II, 1576–1612, gave a prominent place to the English magician and alchemist John Dee, who with his assistant and “scryer,” Edward Kelley, spent years attempting to communicate with angels, in order to learn the universal language spoken by Adam in Paradise before the Fall.

Dee’s journals contained passages in an arcane alphabet purporting to be written in this language. To Voynich, here was the obvious background for his mysterious new acquisition, and Dee’s presence in Rudolfian Prague seemed to provide a plausible conduit for the transmission of a mysteriously encrypted text by Roger Bacon to the court of the alchemist emperor.

Voynich eagerly set about publicizing his manuscript, which he valued at the huge sum of $100,000, and which he invariably referred to as “the Roger Bacon Cipher Manuscript.” Especially after the outbreak of war in 1914, his business was increasingly in the United States, and on his many trips to America he did everything he could to talk up the importance of his find. He told The New York Times that “when the time comes, I will prove to the world that the black magic of the Middle Ages consisted in discoveries far in advance of twentieth-century science.”

To supplement his own attempts to decrypt the manuscript, he made photographs of individual pages available to inquirers. In a time of war, Voynich’s endless harping on decryption prompted suspicions that he might be a spy attempting to penetrate American security, but the decipherment of the so-called Roger Bacon manuscript aroused considerable scholarly interest. It was enthusiastically embraced by distinguished medievalists, including the Chicago-based textual scholar John Matthews Manly, who publicized Voynich’s find in an article in Harper’s Magazine in 1921 as “The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World.”

Even more sensationally, William Romaine Newbold, a distinguished medievalist and historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, toured academic and popular lecture halls with the announcement that he had cracked the code in which this mysterious manuscript was written, and that it did indeed contain amazing revelations. These included the claim that Bacon, in the thirteenth century, had understood and made use of both the compound microscope and the telescope, and with their aid had anticipated the discoveries of twentieth-century scientists about germ cells, spermatozoa, and other mechanisms of organic life.

Newbold’s supposed decryption of the Voynich manuscript was taken at face value by world-class scholars like the French medievalist Étienne Gilson, but it was in fact based on an elaborate set of misunderstandings and unfounded hypotheses. Newbold’s entire scheme was mercilessly demolished in 1931 in a devastating article in the medieval journal Speculum by none other than J.M. Manly, now disillusioned about all claims to have cracked the Voynich manuscript code. Voynich himself had died of cancer the previous year, but despite the disproof of Newbold’s theories and the inaccessibility of the manuscript itself (now locked away in a bank vault by Voynich’s widow, Ethel), interest in its mysteries grew. Although he rejected Newbold’s claims, Manly remained intrigued by Voynich’s manuscript. During World War I he himself had worked as a US Army cryptographer. In 1916 he had been befriended by William F. Friedman, America’s most talented maker and breaker of codes, and reputedly the world’s greatest cryptologist.

At that time Friedman was based in the department of ciphers at the private research institute funded by the textile magnate George Fabyan at Riverbank, near Chicago. Fabyan was an ardent believer in the theory that Shakespeare’s works had in fact been written by Francis Bacon (no relation to Roger Bacon), and the chief code-breaker at Riverbank, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, was the principal advocate of the theory that Bacon had not only written all of Shakespeare, but also the plays of Christopher Marlowe as well as Richard Burton’s immense Anatomy of Melancholy. Convinced that all these pseudonymous works were dense with encrypted secret messages, she devoted manic ingenuity to decoding them. Friedman and his wife Elizebeth, initially employed as Gallup’s assistants, came to reject her bizarre theories, but the world of American cryptology in the aftermath of the war was saturated with conspiracy theories and fascination with the idea of hidden mysteries in ancient texts.

Friedman, who ultimately became head of cryptology at the National Security Agency, was one of those who applied to Voynich for photographs of his manuscript. He remained intrigued to the end of his life by the attempt to decipher it, and built up what is probably the largest private archive of material relating to it. During World War II, Friedman’s team was at the center of successful cracking of the Japanese secret code, “Purple,” by US intelligence; but from 1944 onward he found time to establish a special study group devoted to decrypting the Voynich manuscript, which met regularly at Arlington Hall, America’s equivalent of Britain’s code-breaking center at Bletchley Park.

After the end of World War II, Friedman convened prestigious scholarly seminars devoted to the manuscript. He involved, among many others, Brigadier John Tiltman, the noted British cryptographer and assistant director of the British Intelligence Headquarters (GCHQ), in attempts to decode the manuscript. At Tiltman’s suggestion a young NSA cryptologist, Mary D’Imperio, was appointed to continue the ailing Friedman’s work on it, and in 1978 she would eventually publish, under the auspices of the National Security Agency, what is still considered the best introduction to its mysteries, The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma.

But all to no avail. Voynich’s find retained its secrets, and by the time of Friedman’s death in 1969, the year Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale, Friedman himself had concluded that rather than being an encrypted text written in cipher, the Voynich manuscript was an early-sixteenth-century attempt to create an artificial universal language.

This steady expansion of interest in the Voynich manuscript was the background to Kraus’s speculative purchase in 1961. Like Voynich, Kraus believed this “ugly duckling” might one day lay a golden egg. To preserve its commercial value, he rejected all requests for scholarly access to it and refused to lend it to exhibitions. He put it on the market for $160,000, but despite the escalating scholarly and cryptological fascination, there were no buyers. So in 1969 he decided to cut his losses gracefully and donated Voynich’s ugly duckling to Yale.

The deposit of the Voynich manuscript in a great university library at last made sustained scholarly analysis possible, and over the four and a half decades of Yale’s custodianship some certainties have been established, and some myths laid to rest. Exhaustive scientific and conservational analysis of the parchment on which the manuscript is written, the stitching of the binding in which it is contained, and the inks and paints with which it was written and illuminated have disposed of the notion that the manuscript dates from the thirteenth century or that it is the work of Roger Bacon. Radio carbon dating of slivers from a range of pages has firmly dated the book’s materials to the years around 1430. The vellum pages are made of good-quality (and therefore expensive) calfskin, commonly used in book production all over medieval Europe. (Goatskin vellum, by contrast, would have strengthened the case for a southern German or Italian origin, a provenance favored by many students of the manuscript.)

Equally, all this effectively rules out any possibility that the manuscript is a post-medieval forgery—it is inconceivable that the huge quantities of blank parchment needed for such a forgery could have survived from the early fifteenth century. The book’s pages, whose consistency suggests that they derived from a single source, would have required at least fourteen or fifteen entire calfskins. It is therefore overwhelmingly likely that the manuscript was written and illustrated soon after the parchment was prepared, in the first third of the fifteenth century. Its fluent cursive handwriting, without emendation of any kind, seems incompatible with the notion that it might nevertheless be a careful scribal copy of an earlier medieval text. The dating of its materials to the early fifteenth century rules out the suggestion, credited by art historians like Erwin Panofsky, but never very convincing, that the manuscript contains illustrations of plants such as capsicum or the sunflower, unknown before the discovery of the New World.

Scientific study has gone alongside steadily growing public interest. More than 10 percent of the visits to the Beinecke Library website relate to the Voynich manuscript, as do almost 50 percent of visits to the website’s zoom-viewer, which enables close-up examination of single pages. When Umberto Eco, the semiologist, medievalist, and author of the best-selling medieval puzzle-novel The Name of the Rose, lectured at Yale to celebrate the Beinecke Library’s fiftieth anniversary, the only one of its many treasures he asked to see was the Voynich manuscript. In an era when the fictions of Dan Brown can be imagined to have lifted the lid on ancient conspiracies, none of this is perhaps surprising. The publication by Yale University Press of an actual-size colored facsimile, with an informative set of specialist essays on the manuscript’s history, materials, cryptological puzzles, and public impact, will no doubt encourage wider engagement with its enigmas and set off a multitude of amateur as well as professional attempts to decipher it.

But if we can be fairly sure that the manuscript is not a modern forgery, it by no means follows that it is not in fact a medieval hoax. Four centuries of attempts to decode, decipher, or translate the text have all ended in bafflement. The finest cryptological minds of the twentieth century and sustained computer analysis alike have drawn a blank; the text refuses to yield meaning. Attempts to find parallels to the text in cabbalistical, hermetic, or alchemical code systems have all thrown up more disparities than resemblances. What if the book’s mysteries are in fact pure mystification, specious appearance that never had any real meaning?

This is a possibility strongly suggested by the manuscript’s single largest component, the herbal, with its crudely colored images of plants. No student of the herbal illustrations has ever succeeded in identifying convincingly a single image as any known plant. Medieval herbals were rarely based on exact observation from nature, but even by the conventions of medieval botanical representation, the Voynich images are, collectively and singly, biological impossibilities. Roots and branches bifurcate and then rejoin again to form a single stem (folios 5v, 22, 23, 40, 52), two separate stalks are joined by a single lateral branch or end in the same single leaf (23), slender stalks emerge from holes in the thick flat surfaces of roots that have been cut across like sawn tree trunks (14, 16, 16v, 19, 39v, 45v), and spiky leaves exactly mirror the forms of the same plant’s improbable roots (54).

In other words, the “plants” represented in the book’s herbal section never did and never could exist in nature: they are pure fantasy. And if the images are, then possibly the text is too. Even an uninformed observer examining any random pages of Beinecke MS 408 will be struck by the highly repetitious character of the text, with the same symbols and clusters of “letters” occurring in consecutive words and lines. This is a feature of the Voynich manuscript that has often been noted. It is one of the reasons for suspecting that the text is not in fact a real language at all, cunningly concealed, but an elegantly scripted but meaningless babble, deploying a limited number of forms over and over again.

Why might such a hoax have been perpetrated? The sheer scale, expense, and complexity of the Voynich manuscript would seem to preclude the notion that it was assembled as some kind of joke: it’s hard to imagine a punch line that required so elaborate a buildup. That leaves lunacy or lucre as possible motives. Madness can’t entirely be ruled out: mania takes many forms, and a well-to-do obsessive convinced he (or she) held the key to great secrets might drive the production of such a compilation.

But the likeliest motive surely must be money. The modern history of the Voynich manuscript, and the huge investment of time and effort by some of the most ingenious intelligences of the twentieth century in its decipherment, amply testify to human fascination with the possibility of uncovering secret knowledge. Back in the sixteenth century Rudolf II paid some persuasive soul six hundred gold ducats for Beinecke MS 408. It may well be that somewhere in early-fifteenth-century Europe another wealthy seeker after hidden truths was swindled by an equally enterprising purveyor of plausible nonsense. We shall probably never know. But maybe from the pages of Voynich’s “ugly duckling,” a long quack of derisive laughter peals down the centuries.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/20/voynich-manuscript-secret-knowledge-or-hoax/

[whatisonthemoon]

Uruguay is Fertile Soil for Moon Church Money (1984)

The Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who like Uruguay's military rulers is strongly opposed to Communism, has become one of the largest foreign investors here.

In the last three years, the church has invested some $70 million in buying Uruguay's third largest bank, a hotel, a daily newspaper and other businesses, according to business leaders, Western diplomats and a top church official. The sources said it had been aided by tax breaks and benefits from the Uruguayan Government of Gen. Gregorio Alvarez.

Opposition political leaders and newspapers have attacked the Unification surge, charging that the church is supporting the military at a time most of the populace is demanding democracy. The military, after a decade in power, has promised to step down next year. But General Alvarez is said to favor delaying the turnover and has been cracking down on dissent in recent months.

The Unification Church began moving into South America in the 1970's, attracted to countries with military rulers who were opposed to Communism. It started trying to win converts in Uruguay in 1978 but stopped, reportedly because it did not want to stir the same bristling Roman Catholic opposition that it encountered in other Latin countries. Uruguay Is their Base.

Business, diplomatic and church sources said it had been using Uruguay instead as a base to make money, strengthen anti-Communism and distribute its religious messages to the rest of the continent.

Of Uruguay's 2.9 million people, no more than 20 are Unification Church members today, according to one business executive who is running the church investments here.

''The Moonies are a suspicious presence,'' Julio Sanguinetti, president of one of the country's two largest political parties, the Colorados, said in an interview. ''They are religious fanatics with no religious activities.''

A popular political weekly, Correo de los Viernes, was recently moved to dub this capital ''Moontevideo.'' Another weekly, La Nacion, asked, ''Will Uruguay be picked by Moon to be the first Unificationist Republic in the world?''

Church officials declined in interviews to respond publicly to the criticisms. However, the church's newspaper, Ultimas Noticias, a daily that does not publicize its church connection, has in recent months toned down its once outspoken support for the Government.

The Unification Church says it has three million followers around the world and assets worth several billion dollars. Mr. Moon was convicted of tax evasion in 1982 in the United States; he is appealing the conviction. His church has been widely accused in North America, Europe and Asia of recruiting young people into an authoritarian cult. Mr. Moon, however, has rejected such charges and defended his church as a Christian organization. Riots two years ago largely chased the Unification Church out of Brazil, where it was estimated to have had some 6,000 members in 60 branches. Angry crowds stoned and sacked its churches in seven cities after a series of sensationalized television reports about the organization's activities.

The church has gained several hundred converts in Chile, where Gen. Augusto Pinochet is President, and in Argentina, which was ruled by juntas for nearly eight years until the inauguration of an elected Goverment last December. But it has aquired no particular influence in either country, apparently because of strong Roman Catholic opposition in their armed forces. In Paraguay, the church has had some success, closely associating itself with the Government of Gen. Alfredo Stroesser.

Church officials said Uruguay was especially attractive because of liberal laws that allow easy repatriation of profits abroad. Aiding church activities is the circumstance that General Alvarez's father-in-law, Segundo Flores, is vice president of the Uruguayan branch of the church's political wing, Causa, which this year will hold its third international congress here in as many years. The president of Causa and editor of Ultimas Noticias is Julian Safi, who for many years was the official spokesman for the regime. Country 'in Good Hands'

Church officials said the two men, who are Catholics, report abroad to Mr. Moon's assistant, Pak Bo Hi, a retired South Korean lieutenant colonel. A United States Congressional committee investigating South Korean-American affairs in 1978 accused Mr. Pak of lavish lobbying in Washington and of being used by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Pak, who has paid a number of visits here in recent years, said in a statement after the military appointed General Alvarez President in 1981, ''I know that the people and country of Uruguay are in good hands.''

The Unification investments began that year. The church deposited more than $50 million in the Banco de Credito and then took it over. It bought the newspaper, three printing plants and the Victoria Plaza Hotel, which sits on this capital's central square, facing the presidential palace.

In 1983, plans were announced for the building by the church of a 35-story office tower and convention complex across the street from the hotel. Ground is scheduled to be broken this year for the project, for which the Government granted generous tax concessions.

The Minister of Labor, Nestor Bolentini, a retired colonel close to General Alvarez, said in an interview that the concessions were normal inducements for needed foreign investment. As to church activities, he said, ''This is a free country.''

Opposition politicians have vowed to investigate the church once civilian rule returns, and some say this explains the recent de-emphasis by the church newspaper of its support for the military rulers. ''We're watching them very closely,'' Mr. Sanguinetti, the Colorado leader, said.

Related articles below

Speculating on Banco de Crédito

Banco de Credito out of Moonie hands

Rev. Moon’s followers turn Brazil swamp into paradise

New York Times: Suspicion Following Sun Myung Moon to Brazil (1999) $16,000.00 Life Offering and the Brazilian providence. Unification Church under siege in Brazil (2002) Brazil FFWPU has many corruption problems Ferabolli of FFWPU Brazil may be a child predator Sun Myung Moon’s Drug Paradise ‘Privatizing’ covert action: the case of the UC / FFWPU

UC member Barbara Burrowes had connections to the CIA-sponsored fascist dictatorship of Guyana

[whatisonthemoon]

Banco de Credito out of Moonie hands

Moon Bank Taken Over  - The Irish Times

Uruguay's Central Bank said yesterday it was taking over Banco de Credito, which is controlled by Korean Evangelist, Mr Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, due to liquidity problems. The bank has 30 branches throughout Uruguay.

Mr Moon's Unification Church has built up a presence in Uruguay and owns a newspaper and land across the River Plate in Argentina.

Moon’s Banking Woes by Robert Parry - Consortium News

The central bank of Uruguay has put Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s financial base in South America -- Banco de Credito -- under government supervision because of management and “liquidity” problems.

On Sept. 18, the central bank took the long-awaited move against Moon’s bank which allegedly has been kept afloat in the past by mysterious cash deposits carried into the country by Moon’s religious followers.

Since much of the money arrives as cash, authorities have had trouble determining if the money sources are legitimate or not.

According to a bank employees union, 4,200 Moon followers walked into the bank in 1996 and deposited a total of $80 million into a Moon-controlled account.

Besides Banco de Credito’s red-ink problems, the central bank stated that it was intervening to “improve the management” of the bank.

The move, however, raises other questions about the viability of Moon’s business and political operations in the United States, especially the financing The Washington Times, which costs Moon an estimated $100 million a year.

The developments in Uruguay raise the question: How can Moon afford such losses when his chief bank in the Western Hemisphere is on the brink?

Related links below

On Moon’s Political Network and their Deep Connections to Global Terrorism

4,200 female Japanese followers allegedly deposited as much as $25,000 each in the Moon-controlled Banco de Credito.

Consortium News: Rev. Moon’s Bank Scam

Uruguay’s freewheeling banking system that operated as a laundromat for drug money. Moon bought a bank.

Moon’s activities in South America

FFWPU President of IAPP (The International Association of Parliamentarians for Peace) Prosecuted for Money Laundering and Drug Smuggling in US Court; suspicions of connections to UC / FFWPU Leadership

Chicago Tribune: Unification Church Invests Heavily Uruguay (December 1994)

On Banco de Crédito

Notes on Moonie Drug Trade

The Irish Times: Moonies accused of involvement in drugs (2004)

“When the economy in Japan crashed, a lot of our money came from South America, mainly Brazil.”

$80 million was deposited in Uruguay over the course of a week. It still had the U.S. Federal Reserve band around it.

Sun Myung Moon’s FFWPU accused of involvement in drugs trade in Paraguay in 2004

Suspicion Following Sun Myung Moon to Brazil

[whatisonthemoon]

Saving The World With Mass Marriages | TO THE MOON Part 1

This is the story of the Sun Myung Moon and the rise of the Unification Church. I first noticed them at the mass wedding in South Korea in early 2020. While doing research the story just became bigger and bigger and I knew I had to cover them. This is Part 1 of that story.

Chapters: 00:00 Prologue 06:10 The Early Life of Sun Myung Moon 09:08 Basic Practices and Theology of The Unification Church 13:37 Unification Church and KCIA 14:56 The 1970's, Nixon and Watergate 18:39 Koreagate 22:03 "Weak" Democrats 24:04 Bo Hi Pak Vs Donald Fraser 26:24 Koreagate Report 28:11 The Moon Organization 30:15 The Washington Times 33:02 Background Of The Washington Times 35:14 Inchon: The Worst Movie Of All Time 37:11 Reagan Loves Times 38:40 Pruden and Coombs Leadership 44:08 The Death of Heung Jin Moon 46:31 Black Heung Jim Nim 48:42 Moon's Pardon Denied and The Cold War 51:53 Moon and Nicaragua and The Contras 58:41 Moon and Bolivia and Klaus Barbie 01:06:54 End of The Cold War 01:08:09 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) And American Freedom Coalition (AFC) 01:09:46 Moon And HW Bush 01:11:44 Moon In The 1990's And Chinagate 01:13:26 Moon and Korean Reunification 01:16:22 Nansook Hong In The Shadow Of The Moon 01:19:15 The Tragedy Of The Six Marys 01:22:31 Moon's Last Actions 01:25:00 Why Moon?

[whatisonthemoon]

'School Of The Americas' School For Training Assassins

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qtKHiqaQwN4

Related sites and notes below

Moonies offered to pay leaders of the Contras The Reinvention of the Latin American Right VOC, CAUSA & Moonie Anti-Communism in Central America in Bo Hi Pak’s Own Words On Albert Fujimori, Peru, and Puerto Rico: On Sterilization as a Tool of [Anti-Communist] Fascism and Neo-Colonialism John K. Singlaub, WACL Death Squad Leader, Dies at 100 CIA Used Sun Myung Moon and the Anti-Communist League as Proxy Forces to Liquidate Communists

The Magnificast podcast talks about the political Left and Christianity. Here’s their newest episode:

This week we’re back to talk through another of Tricontinental’s dossiers. This time we’re talking about fundamentalism and evangelicalism and how those theologies are connected to imperialism in Latin America. Read the dossier here: https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-59-religious-fundamentalism-and-imperialism-in-latin-america/

Bo Hi Pak - Did you join the Unification Church in February 1957 or February 1958?

In this text it is written that he received training at the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, future home of the School of the Americas, from 1956 to 1957. He also writes that soon after returning to Korea, in September 1957, he was invited into the staff of Maj. Gen. Willis S. Matthews, chief of the Korea Military Advisory Group. According to Pak, from September ‘57 to ‘59, he worked as the Special Assistant to Chief of U.S. Military Advisory Group in Seoul.   Though this mismatched timeline may seem like an innocent mistake, 1957-1958 was a huge year of development and growth for the Unification Church, and a pivotal time for Pak. If he had in fact joined the Unification Church in February 1957, a date he has often cited, including in court, he would have already been a member of the Unification Church by the time he was invited to work for KMAG. 

A glimpse into Bo Hi Pak’s military career

On Moon’s Political Network and their Deep Connections to Global Terrorism

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Sun Myung Moon’s failed soccer providence

▲ Sun Myung Moon, Hak Ja Han, and Pelé, with others

reposted from WIOTM

In June 2002, Korea hosted the world soccer cup. At that time Sun Myung Moon thought he could influence the results of the games and manage to have South Korea unexpectedly winning this 17th World Cup.

Since he had convinced himself and his followers that billions of “absolutely good spirits” were actively supporting all his improbable projects, the whole world would finally see his incomparable power and come to acknowledge him as the Divine Savior.

It happened that Korea was to play the semi-final against Germany. At that time Hyo Nam Kim (the so-called Dae Mo Nim) was in Poland to liberate and bless European ancestors for substantial amounts of money. So Sun Myung Moon asked her to immediately return to Korea “to make sure that the Korean team would win”, probably with the efficient help of billions of spirits. This was indeed an emergency, a providential priority…

However, the problem might have been that those spirits didn’t quite understand the rules of the game, for Korea was defeated by Germany. Furthermore a few days later Korea was again defeated by Turkey and so had failed to even be on the final podium.

In spite of it, the suddenly abandoned but nonetheless faithful European Unificationists kept believing that their ancestors had efficiently been liberated in Poland without needing the presence of Hyo Nam Kim (who had of course already received the mandatory liberation payments)…

▲ Moon speaking to the Sorocaba soccer team The next year, in 2003, Sun Myung Moon was still overconfident to be recognized as an outstanding patron and an unavoidable messiah by sponsoring a biennial professional soccer tournament.

As usual he mistakenly thought that showering money would at last buy him respectability, even though he might indeed have previously experienced that bribing politicians and religious leaders didn’t really work in the long term.

Anyway, that’s when he launched the ambiguous “World Peace King cup” with the bought support of Pelé, the greatest world known legend of soccer. For years Pelé has been named “the king” among soccer fans, but Sun Myung Moon was once again trying to ambiguously use someone else’s fame to promote himself. Finally, due to controversies about that name, the official project was changed to mere “Peace Cup”.

A lot of money was spent on this new “providential project”. The victorious soccer team would receive a 2 million dollar prize and the runners-up a 500,000 dollar prize. And according to the Washington Times article from July 16, 2007 it would cost 20 million dollars to stage the 2009 Peace cup in Spain.

It was there that Sun Myung Moon suddenly decided he would speak to professional soccer players. So a gathering was set up with Unificationist leaders and members as well as soccer players reluctantly attending (somehow out of good will they had to politely come to listen to their generous sponsor).

Sun Myung Moon wanted to impress them, but these professional players were not interested at all by the messianic talk about Adam and Eve. They couldn’t hide their boredom and were ceaselessly looking at their watches, secretly praying for the imminent end of this exotic interlude.

After this awkward speech, members and leaders went on their way back to their different countries probably thinking they had participated as usual in an unprecedented and victorious providential event.

But Sun Myung Moon was so upset and so enraged not to have been enthusiastically applauded by Cristiano Ronaldo and other professional players, that he ordered all members and leaders who had attended the meeting to immediately return to Spain.

The explanation was that Sun Myung Moon had to give the same speech again and be warmly accepted and cheered up by the audience. Otherwise terrible consequences would occur for Europe and for the whole world wide providence…

A last disenchanted “Peace Cup” took place in 2012 in Korea but this failed “Unificationist soccer providence” has definitely been abandoned since.

Divine Principle lectures teach to learn lessons from the courses of past “central figures”. Will one day Unificationists also learn something from their so-called messiah’s hectic “providential courses”? You can contact the author of this article by emailing them at: mercilavix@gmail.com

___________________________________

Do Moonies Still Own the Soccer Teams in Brazil? Are Clube Atlético Sorocaba and Clube Esportivo Nova Esperança still owned by the Unification Church? I do not know Portuguese and am struggling to find current information on their ownership, and if it continued after Moon’s death. That said, Sorocaba is clearly inactive.

tut557 said: No, both teams don’t exist anymore, the church pulled out funding from both after Moon’s death and hasn’t invested in any Brazilian soccer team since.

___________________________________

From Moonolatry to Hanolatry

Moon’s manipulation – and his court of complicit happy cuckolds

The Hidden Process of Salvation

Apologists for Unificationism have become Intellectual Contortionists

Unorthodox appraisal of True Parents

Epilogue of a Perverted Dream

[whatisonthemoon]

What Is Sun Myung Moon’s And Hak Ja Han’s Legacy?

Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han and their numerous organizations have been active leaders on the fields of religion, politics, business, media, education and culture during the last 70 years. What is their legacy on these different human enterprises?   RELIGION: Sun Myung Moon did not create any unique religious doctrine of his own. He did not have any revelations from God but borrowed (read: stole) the doctrine of the Divine Principle from the Jesus Church and its various branches. The Jesus Church was founded officially in 1933 by Rev. Lee Yong-do but for instance one branch The Holy Lord Church lead by Ms. Kim Song-do and it’s daughter church The In The Belly Church lead by Ms. Huh Ho-bin were functioning already in the 1920s. Sun Myung Moon was not a theologian nor was he an original thinker but borrowed his ideas from other religious teachers. So Sun Myung Moon has no religious legacy as a founder of a new religion. Hak Ja Han, Sun Myung Moon’s widow has been the leader of the Unification Church since 2012. She has tried to create some feminist doctrine in order to promote herself as a genuine religious leader. Her main doctrinal innovation is she claims to be The Only Begotten Daughter of God, Goddess Incarnate. But of course there is nothing new in her doctrine. Christianity (especially Roman Catholics) honours Virgin Mary as Heaven’s Queen who was born without original sin and she is regarded as a co-redemptrix with Jesus Christ. And in other religions there are a legion of mother goddesses like Shakti, Parvati, Kali, Isis, Hathor, Ashera, Anat, Ashtarte, Ishtar, Afrodite, Venus etc.   POLITICS: Sun Myung Moon’s and Hak Ja Han’s main legacy in politics is their Anti-Communist doctrine and practice. Sun Myung Moon established the World Anti-Communist League WACL in 1966 together with South Korean President Park Chung Hee, Generalissimo Tsiang Kai-Shek and Japanese Yakuza gangsters Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama. WACL was co-operating very closely with the CIA in the Cold War. WACL was active in the Phoenix Program in Asia in the 1960s - 1970s, in the Operation Condor in Latin America in the 1970s - 1980s and in the Operation Gladio in Europe after the World War II. These anti-communist operations tried to annihilate all communist and leftist activists on all continents. Hundreds of thousands of victims were kidnapped, tortured, disappeared and killed. And together with the CIA the World Anti-Communist League was controlling all the networks of anti-communist forces and co-ordinated their activities. WACL funded and lead the hit-death squads which operated quite freely across the borders of different countries. The political legacy of Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han is horrendous: hundreds of thousands of killed people in the anti-communist war all over the world  What was the crime of their victims? Their crime was that they wanted better salaries and better working conditions and living standards. They wanted decent housing for their families and bread on the table. They wanted better education for their children so that they would have more chances in life than their parents had. Was this a crime?   BUSINESS: Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han have had a myriad of different businesses but their main source of money comes from four “businesses”: drug trade, arms dealing, money laundering, human trafficking. Sun Myung Moon was closely co-operating with the Japanese Yakuza and they were involved in heroin trade in the Golden Triangle and after that in heroin trade in Afghanistan and then in cocaine trade in Latin America. Sun Myung Moon got limitless amounts of money and he could bribe influential politicians and presidents in Korea, Japan and the USA in order to further his cause and get immunity from prosecution. Sun Myung Moon has weapons factories in Korea and he sells arms to the South Korean army and worldwide. He does not discriminate anybody: all terrorist organizations are his clients like Mujahideens and Talebans in Afghanistan and Isis terrorist organization. Sun Myung Moon has been involved in money laundering from the beginning. He bought many banks in the USA, Uruguay and Cayman Islands and they are used for money laundering of his illicit money. Most of his “normal” businesses are losing money for instance in the USA but they are useful fronts for money laundering. And the fourth source of income for Sun Myung Moon is human trafficking: He uses Unification Church members as slave workers who do not get any salaries but must work for free for 24/7 in many of the Moon family businesses and in fundraising teams. They do not even get pensions when they get old and sick but are thrown to the street to survive by themselves. Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han are trafficking these slave workers from one country to another wherever they are needed. The last source of money are immense donations required from the members. This is just now a big scandal in Japan. Members are robbed by the Unification Church of their last dime and their children go hungry and do not have any money to go to college. The financial legacy of Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han is the following: the Moon family wealth is now about 100 billion USD. Sun Myung Moon’s own son Sam Park told in a conference in 2014 that the Moon family assets were 60 billion USD. This number is mentioned in the depositions of the UCI court case in Washington D.C. The court case was between Hyun (Preston) Jin Moon vs. FFWPU. Now approaching the year 2023 these assets must have risen to about 100 billion USD. The members of the Unification Church have not got anything from the enormous Moon family wealth. All assets are under the name of Moon family members.