EXPOSÉ: The “Christian” Mafia

[indigobusiness]

EXPOSÉ: THE “CHRISTIAN” MAFIA



Where Those Who Now Run the U.S. Government Came From and Where They Are Taking Us



By Wayne Madsen


Part I


After several months of in-depth research and, at first, seemingly unrelated conversations with former high-level intelligence officials, lawyers, politicians, religious figures, other investigative journalists, and researchers, I can now report on a criminal conspiracy so vast and monstrous it defies imagination. Using “Christian” groups as tax-exempt and cleverly camouflaged covers, wealthy right-wing businessmen and “clergy” have now assumed firm control over the biggest prize of all – the government of the United States of America. First, some housekeeping is in order. My use of the term “Christian” is merely to clearly identify the criminal conspirators who have chosen to misuse their self-avowed devotion to Jesus Christ to advance a very un-Christian agenda. The term “Christian Mafia” is what several Washington politicians have termed the major conspirators and it is not intended to debase Christians or infer that they are criminals . I will also use the term Nazi – not for shock value – but to properly tag the political affiliations of the early founders of the so-called “Christian” power cult called the Fellowship. The most important element of this story is that a destructive religious movement has now achieved almost total control over the machinery of government of the United States – its executive, its legislature, several state governments, and soon, the federal judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court.


The United States has experienced religious and cult hucksters throughout its history, from Cotton Mather and his Salem witch burners to Billy Sunday, Father Charles Coughlin, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite, and others. But none have ever achieved the kind of power now possessed by a powerful and secretive group of conservative politicians and wealthy businessmen in the United States and abroad who are known among their adherents and friends as The Fellowship or The Family. The Fellowship and its predecessor organizations have used Jesus in the same way that McDonald’s uses golden arches and Coca Cola uses its stylized script lettering. Jesus is a logo and a slogan for the Fellowship. Jesus is used to justify the Fellowship’s access to the highest levels of government and business in the same way Santa Claus entices children into department stores and malls during the Christmas shopping season.


When the Founders of our nation constitutionally separated Church and State, the idea of the Fellowship taking over the government would have been their worst nightmare. The Fellowship has been around under various names since 1935. Its stealth existence has been perpetuated by its organization into small cells, a pyramid organization of “correspondents,” “associates,” “friends,” “members,” and “core members,” tax-exempt status for its foundations, and its protection by the highest echelons of the our own government and those abroad.

===

Another organization affiliated with the Fellowship is the Campus Crusade for Christ, which, in turn, runs something called the Christian Embassy, its outreach arm in Washington. There is also an “International Christian Embassy” in Jerusalem that also houses the studios of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. Through the Campus Crusade, the Fellowship and its affiliates seek converts among college students in the United States and abroad. An additional Fellowship activity is the National Student Leadership Program and the associated Navigators, which seek converts among college and high school-aged young people. The Fellowship’s network can also reach out to other evangelicals for the purpose of political marches on Washington. Whether they are called “Jesus Marches,” Promise Keeper rallies, or anti-abortion gatherings, the fundamentalists have been able to tap the support of Falwell; Richard Roberts, the son of Oklahoma-based evangelist Oral Roberts; and Florida-based evangelist Benny Hinn. In addition, the Fellowship has its own aggressive “Youth Corps,” which is active seeking converts, according to Jeff Sharlet’s Harper’s article, in countries as diverse as Russia, Ukraine, Romania, India, Pakistan, Uganda, Nepal, Bhutan, Ecuador, Honduras, and Peru. The Fellowship seeks to groom young leaders for future positions of leadership in countries around the world. According to Sharlet, the goal of the Fellowship is “two hundred national and international world leaders bound together relationally by a mutual love for God and the family.” In Fellowship-speak, the “family” is synonymous with the Fellowship. The strategy of placing Fellowship “moles” in foreign governments would pay off nicely when George W. Bush and his advisers had to cobble together a “Coalition of the Willing” to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

http://www.insider-magazine.com/ChristianMafia.htm

[starroute]

1. Kick

It's my bedtime and I'm too sleepy to comment, but this one is important. Please keep it kicked for the morning crew.

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. kick

[Huckebein the Raven]

3. Have it bookmarked

Haven't finished it yet though...a good read

:kick:

[BadGimp]

4. yikes

:wow:

[TwentyFive]

5. Excellent!!!!!!!!! Kick this!!!!!!

[Petrushka]

6. Bookmarked --- and ---- KICK

:kick:

[undergroundpanther]

7. KICK

How do we stop these monsters?

[ClayZ]

19. We need some OUTSIDE help!

How could anyone untangle this?

:kick: :kick:

[whistle]

8. I'm kicking this to my email list, but these two paragraphs...

...from the piece got my attention:

<snip>

Another pro-Nazi Christian fundamentalist group that arose in the pre-Second World War years was the Moral Rearmament Movement. Its leader was Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister from Philadelphia. Buchman was a pacifist, but not just any pacifist. He and his colleagues in the United States, Britain, Norway, and South Africa reasoned that war could be avoided if the world would just accept the rise of Hitler and National Socialism and concentrate on stamping out Communism and Socialism. Buchman coordinated his activities with Vereide and his Prayer Breakfast Movement, which, by 1940, had spread its anti-left manifesto and agenda throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Buchman was effusive in his praise for Hitler. He was quoted by William A. H. Birnie of the New York World Telegram, “I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism.”<1> Buchman also secretly met with Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo and controller of the concentration camps. Buchman was at Himmler’s side at the 1935 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg and again at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The predecessor of Buchman’s Moral Rearmament Group, the Oxford Group, included Moslems, Buddhists, and Hindus. Buchman and Hitler both saw the creation of a one-world religion based largely on Teutonic, Aryan, and other pagan traditions mixed with elements of Christianity. Buchman saw Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism as being compatible with his brand of Christianity. Hitler, too, had an affectation for Islam and Buddhism as witnessed by his support for the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the anti-British Muslim Brotherhood, and Tibetan.

<end of snip>

The Oxford Group was also the force behind the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous in June 1935. Co-founders Bill Wilson (New York NY) and Bob Smith (Akron Ohio) were both Oxford Group members and used the movement to help them achieve sobriety. Their two groups in Akron and NY were known as the drunk squad of the Oxford Group. When the book "Alcoholics Anonymous" was published in 1938, the movement took on the name Alcoholics Anonymous or AA, but ties to the Oxford Group have remained to the present day. Until reading this article, I had no idea how just how politically involved the Oxford Group was with American Nazism. Granted, when Buchman formed the Moral Rearmament Movement, I think AA members began to putting distance between themselves and the Oxford Group. But, in the late 1980's the Oxford Group began to re-emerge in discussions about AA history. Very interesting indeed.

<link> http://www.recovery.org/aa/misc/oxford.html

[indigobusiness]

10. The whole damn thing sends chills up my spine...

but that excerpt is particularly chilling, indeed.

[yardwork]

12. Alcoholics Anonymous has no connection with Nazism!

I really have to make that point very strongly. I've been in recovery for years and attended many many AA meetings and I assure anyone that AA has nothing whatsoever to do with Nazis or any kind of political movement.

In fact, it is one of the tenets of AA that outside issues such as politics are not to be discussed during meetings, and AA has no opinion about or association with any outside issues or political groups.

[whistle]

13. No connection with the religious right, Dominionists, Federalists...

...Moral Majority, the New World Order, fundamentalist churches, and so on, for AA as a whole. But, the same traditions allow groups to be infiltrated and members to be recruited before and after meetings to these movements as no one can be barred from membership.

AA is referred to as "The Fellowship of AA" in many rooms and groups. The idea of the movement has been pure and seeks good purpose, to carry the message of AA. However, evil lurks behind many veils and in the shadows looking for opportunities to attract innocent and desperate people. Although AA has survived longer that any other movement of its kind throughout history, which have attempted to help the hopeless alcoholic (70 years this year), as with so many previous groups like the Washingtonians, current political pressures and divisive movements in this country I believe once again threaten its very existence.

[yardwork]

15. ANY group of people can be infiltrated

I think that this is getting a little silly. There are obvious, provable mistakes of judgement, perjuries, and flat out lies perpetrated by the Bush administration. Let's concentrate on those.

The fact that Christians are evangelical is not a news flash. It's been that way ever since Paul started tramping around Asia bossing people around. Christianity's insistence that everybody else has to be Christian too has caused an enormous amount of human anguish for the past two millenia. It's nothing new.

[Bridget Burke]

16. Most Evangelicals witness & preach.....

They have the right to do so, even if many of us find them annoying.

But this particular subset wants to sieze control behind the scenes. And they've been successful so far.

[yardwork]

20. I agree with that - they are dangerous, no question about it

But I think it is going too far to start suspecting AA and other organizations of being "in on" a huge global conspiracy.

We already have enough verifiable information about the damage the Bush administration is causing. If the news media did a better job publishing the facts we know, this group wouldn't get away with what they're getting away with.

[starroute]

28. More on the Buchmanites

There's a book called "God Is My Adventure" by Rom Landau, originally published in 1935, which contains profiles of a variety of self-proclaimed spiritual leaders. Landau was primarily interested in people like Gurdieff and Ouspensky, but he also checked out figures like Buchman, and though he never did get the promised interview with Buchman himself, he spent a while hanging out with Buchman's followers and attending their meetings.

What he found was that Buchman's Oxford Group was bascially a cult for intelletually-lazy rich folk whose notion of religion consisted of getting together at house parties and confessing their (generally trivial) sins before an appreciative audience. This undemanding view of spiritual attainment, together with Buchman's endorsement of luxurious living on the part of his followers, naturally had a great ability to appeal to the wealthy and highly-placed. Buchman's adherents included people like Queen Marie of Rumania and ex-king George of Greece. Even the group confessions were expected to be carried on in a mood of youthful high spirits:

My first experiences of sharing as practised by the Buchmanites surprised me greatly. ... Most of the confessions had all the signs of a carefully prepared performance. Though the production was clever, the utter lack of reverence made it singularly ineffective. ... Nothing upset me so much as the hilarity that accompanied most of the confessions. Dr Buchman always instructed converts preparing for their first public confessions in the way they should speak, and he then stressed the paramount importance of being hilarious.

<snip>

The only form of silence advocated by Buchmanism is that obtained during 'guidance.' This is 'direct communication from God', and 'the Holy Spirit taking a normal intelligence and directing it in the fullest harmony with His will for the good of the individual and of his neighbours'.

'Each morning', we are told, 'opens with a time of quiet, during which thought is directed towards God in full conviction that . . . He can make known His will.' To achieve this the groupers sit and 'listen in' to God with a pad and pencil ready to write down His instructions.

<snip>

The contempt of the groupers for intellectual conversation surprised me each time I came in touch with any of them. A movement that has adopted the name of one of the most distinguished universities in the world and yet expresses contempt for all intellectual methods or discussions, becomes, to say the least of it, incomprehensible.

Remind you of anybody we know?

[pelagius]

31. The most heinous Buchmanite group...

...of course was "Up With People."

http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/moralrearm.html

[Huckebein the Raven]

9. another kick

a good source of info on the plague infecting the halls of power

:kick:

[mitchum]

11. Kicked and bookmarked

[Freedom_from_Chains]

14. Thanks for the Post

I am having to bookmark and get back to later but I have maintained for some time now that it is much more in our best interest to worry about the terrorist we have operating in our own country, under the banner of "Conservative Christian," than foreign terrorists.
In the long run it is the group within our borders than stand to do much more damage to us.

However, seeing how they have established a strong foothold in government any such resistance is most likely to come from the grass roots.

[indigobusiness]

18. What once seemed like a lame joke on our collective self...

now seems like a serious and urgent threat.

[ClayZ]

17. WHAT A TANGLED WEB THEY WOVE!

While ONE finger points to "terrists", THREE fingers point to themselves.

Keep watching where the "Three Fingers Point!"






:kick:

[kypper]

22. It's amazing where it rings true...

I don't know if Wayne's gone too far down the rabbit hole, but it's utterly plausible, and thus frightening as all hell. I did not expect him to go before Truman's time.

[Huckebein the Raven]

21. kick

:kick:

[indigobusiness]

23. Thanks for keeping this kicked.

:yourock:

[realFedUp]

24. Is anyone archiving this stuff in the demopedia?

I haven't.

[indigobusiness]

25. I haven't.

Good idea, though.

[SpaceBuddy008]

26. Ken Blackwell is agent of The Fellowship

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2005_01_02_cannonfire_archive.html
see his name in bold in this report below

Or so, at least, claims Madsen.

His most intriguing data nuggets concern a Christian cult called the Fellowship -- the roots of which, so far as I can tell, go back to the work of a Methodist minister named Abraham Vereide in the 1930s, although the group was not formally named the Fellowship Foundation until 1972.

This is the same group which frightened the readers of Jeffrey Sharlet's seminal work "Jesus Plus Nothing: Under Cover Among America’s Secret Theocrats." Sharlet's article presents a frightening picture of religious zealotry and naked political ambition. Incidentally, the Fellowship -- also known as the Family -- owns a "Fellowship House" near the House of Representatives, where a number of politicians have stayed.

Madsen claims that the Fellowship story goes deeper than most of us suspected. He connects the group to the scamsters behind the "Nigerian" emails. Is this notion feasible? Missionary work did put the Fellowship in Africa, and the Nigerian scam was far more than a mere email ruse, since it involved on-the ground operatives in that country.

So far, I've seen no evidence for Madsen's allegation. It should be noted, though, that many variations of the Nigerian letters include theological overtones reminiscent of the Fellowship's beliefs. On the other hand, American churches were prime targets for the scam.

According to Madsen,


Some of those "419 emails" have been discovered by US intelligence to contain coded instructions to the money launderers and financial manipulators in the States and in off shore bank havens like the Bahamas and Tortola.
This allegation will strike most readers as far too Ian Fleming-esque, but don't be too quick to dismiss the notion. If you study the material produced by international scamsters, you'll come across passages which -- to put it bluntly -- make no sense whatsoever. Using "Nigerian letters" to convey coded data strikes me as downright ingenious.

Of course, we have no hard evidence that such trickery has taken place.

"Wait a minute," I hear you saying. "What on earth does this convoluted Nigerian business have to do with vote fraud?" Well, the Nigerian scams do connect with the Five Star Trust -- or so it has been alleged, and not just by Wayne Madsen. And Marion Horn of Five Star may possess links to the Fellowship -- links forged during his stay in the pokey:


The Fellowship has some very unsavory founders -- all pro-Nazis: Abraham Vereide, Frank Buchman, and Gustav Gedat, J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton were close to the Fellowship.

The use of prison ex-cons like Marion "JR" Horn in KY, John Elder and Jeffrey Dean in WA, and others in the financing and carrying out of the rigging, was mostly arranged through Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries, an organization that has carte blanche access to anyone deemed of value, especially computer programmers, after their incarceration and upon their release, especially if they promise service in return for parole.
SO far, I've seen no proof backing the claims in this paragraph. But I do note that Horn received a ridiculously attenuated sentence for massive wire fraud, which he committed while on parole for another offense.

I'll have to look more carefully through the bios of Angleton and Hoover to see if the links alleged by Madsen really do exist. (Alas, I've forgotten far too much of my Angleton lore. Wasn't he Catholic? His mother was a lovely lady from Mexico...)

Here are a few other Madsen allegations vis-a-vis the Fellowship:


The Prime Minister of Norway has just been outed as a member of this group.

In fact, most of the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" nations' leaders are members of The Fellowship, e.g., Tonga, Macedonia, Palau, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Solomon Islands, Uganda, Rwanda, Guatemala, El Salvador, Denmark, Romania, Iceland, Fiji, Georgia, Colombia, possibly also Howard of Australia and Blair of Britain.

The Fellowship believes that ANYTHING is permitted in order to bring about a 1000-yr Kingdom of Christ on Earth, and that includes stealing elections and even murder.

Some of the money used by the Fellowship to obtain real estate and maintain their group came from Saudi Arabia through lucrative defense contracts and pass throughs like the Islamic Institute.
And:


In their group homes in Arlington it is obvious they keep the troubled teens of GOP big businessmen and politicians out of sight through a combination of intensive Bible study and "drug treatment."

Noelle Bush may have been one of their "Guests/Victims."

There should be a focus on Infinity Software of Tallahassee, the place Noelle was put to work when she was busted for trying to illegally obtain prescription drugs in 2002.
(C'mon. Admit it. Even if you think Madsen is full of it, that allegation about Noelle must bring a wicked smile to your face -- presuming, of course, that you don't like the Bush family.)

Finally, and most importantly...


Tom Feeney, Ashcroft, DeLay, Bush (Dubya and Jeb), Cheney, Sean O'Keefe, Condi Rice, John Bolton, Ed Meese, Colson, Brownback, Ralph Reed, Frank Wolf, Ernie Fletcher, Katherine Harris, Gingrich, JC Watts, Burr, Jindal, Lamar Smith, Zach Wamp, Scalia, Ensign, Kyl, Kenneth Blackwell, Bob Ehrlich, Karl Rove, Jack Kemp, James Baker, Clarence Thomas, Tom Coburn, Asa and Tim Hutchinson, Gens. Boykin and Myers, DeMint, Curt Weldon, Grover Norquist, George Allen, Santorum, are all in this group. The late Lee Atwater was close to this group.

The Fellowship, which has strong links to the "Rev." Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, operates in cells and not only takes over governments but also local church congregations to further their goals.
Moon, as all must know, wants an end to democracy; he has made no secret of this ambition.

He also has access to seemingly illimitable wealth, which he uses to fund the right. Nobody knows where the money comes from. Some have alleged that his church launders recovered WWII booty -- popularly known as "Yamashita's gold." We thus return to Madsen's initial allegation that Five Star Trust was involved with transactions involving Yamashita's gold.

How much of this story squares with the facts? I'm not sure. Hell, I'm not really sure I yet comprehend the story!

In the Revolutionary war, General Washington's spies placed certain information in a special category: "Interesting, if true." That's my assessment of Madsen's work. He may be on to the story of the century -- but until his facts are both confirmed and organized, we cannot be certain.

# posted by Joseph : 4:28 PM 3 comments

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2005_01_02_cannonfire_archive.html
*****

Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist "Christian Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a theocratic takeover of American democracy, placing the entire society under the "dominion" of "Christ the King." This "dominion" includes the death penalty for homosexuals, exclusion of citizenship for non-Christians, stoning of sinners and we kid you not slavery, "one of the most beneficent of Biblical laws."

http://engforum.pravda.ru/showthread.php3...

Extreme Fundamentalist Regime

is guilty of false advertising

[starroute]

29. Yamashita's gold

This is one of those stories that been making me nuts since Madsen first referred to it a couple of months ago. On old hand, it's totally off-the-wall Indiana Jones stuff. On the other, it ties together a lot of loose ends and would explain things like how the Reverend Moon can afford to drop a billion dollars on the Washington Times.

The part of the story which seems to be generally accepted is that during World War II, the Japanese looted the riches of China and buried a lot of gold and other treasure in various caches, primarily in the Philippines, with the idea of retrieving it after the war. Some of this wealth was used by the US occupiers as a slush fund and eventually turned over to the Japanese government. Some of it was used to start up Moon's Unification Church and the World Anti-Communist League. Some of the more inaccessible caches may still be in place and in the 1970's and 80's various right-wing figures were setting off on treasure-hunting expeditions to try to retrieve them.

The wilder version insists that the amount of gold involved was not merely large but almost beyond measure -- literally the fabled riches of the East -- and that it has been accessed by everyone from Ferdinand Marcos to Adnan Kashoggi to the BFEE and may even have bankrolled 911. As I say, I'm not sure I believe all that, but I'm keeping an open mind.

Here are some links:

Moon's backers, fascist Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yakusa leader Yoshio Kodama
http://www.freepress.org/journal.php?strFunc=display&strID=147&strJournal=20
http://www.americanatheist.org/spr00/T2/fitrakis.html

Summaries of Gold Warriors: The Plundering of Asia
http://www.bowstring.net/valentine%20review.htm
http://www.bowstring.net/piper%20review.htm
http://www.spitfirelist.com/f428.html

Ferdinand Marcos and Adnan Kashoggi
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/khashoggi-911.html

Madsen on the link between Kashoggi and Theresa LaPore
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/120604Madsen/120604madsen.html

An entry in MinstrelBoy's blog mentioning a recent CIA-linked "treasure hunter" in the Philippines
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/01/you-will-find-my-power-then.html

[Name removed]

27. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[pelagius]

30. I'm a Christian kicking this topic!

I think some conclusions drawn ("AA linked to Nazis") are over-the-top, but there is very much a conspiracy -- in its literal Latin sense "a breathing together" -- of certain religious groups to channel information and secretly infiltrate governments to secure power.

Other groups of interest should include the Assemblies of God (and their involvement in Latin American countries) and the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) that is behind the movement to create schisms in mainline Protestant groups over the inclusion of gay people in the life and worship of their respective churches.