Saturday, January 10, 2015

The Family Part I


Across the blogosphere there are no shortage of accounts of "occult" secret societies infiltrating the American political spectrum in a bid to destroy Christianity and control the world. Certainly this blog has considered more than its far share of secretive orders over the years and this has required a great deal of research on the part of this writer. As this research has become more in depth over the years I have learned that, if nothing else, while there likely are secretive orders that influence international affairs, they are far stranger than the typical Alex Jones bot can scarcely imagine.

Case in point is the bizarre Christian sect known sometimes as "The Family" or "The Fellowship." It has existed since the 1930s, has steadily accumulated political influence for decades as well as cultivating a very close relationship with the US national security apparatus and has been involved in a host of intrigues. And yet it is rarely if ever mentioned by conspiracy theorists despite ample documentation of its extensive influence on the American political landscape. He's an overview of the outfit's more recent activities:
"The group is best known for hosting the National Prayer Breakfast each February with the President of the United States. Also known as the 'Family,' the group includes Republican U.S. Senator Don Nickles (OK), Charles Grassly (IA), Pete Domenici (NM), John Ensign (NV), James Inhofe (OK) --a sponsor of the Constitution Restoration Act --and Conrad Burns (MT). The 'invisible' brotherhood also includes Democratic Senator Bill Nelson (FL).
"The House is represented by Republicans Jim DeMint (SC), Frank Wolf (VA), Joseph Pitts (PA), and Zach Wamp (TN), as well as a lone Democrat, Bart Stupak.
 "Anthony Lappe, a former mainstream journalist who later became a founder and editor of Guerrilla News Network (www.gnn.tv), has written, 'The Fellowship is one of the most secretive, most powerful religious organizations in the country. Its connections reach to the highest levels of the U.S. government and include ties to the CIA and numerous current and past dictators around the world.' In the spirit of Straussian Neocon secrecy, its members, according to Lappe, have 'denied owing any allegiance to the group, and several professed ignorance of even the most basic facts about the organization.' 
"Jeffrey Sharlet, editor of another courageous and important alternative journalism Web site, Killing the Buddha (www.killingthebuddha.com) and co-author of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible (The Free Press, 2004), infiltrated the Fellowship's Arlington, Virginia, mansion, dubbed Ivanwald, then published an eye-opening article in Harper's magazine in March 2003.
"'I have lived with these men,' wrote Sharlet, a half-Jewish New Yorker, 'not as a Christian --a term they deride as too narrow for the world they are building in Christ's honor --but as a 'believer.' These powerful 'believers'... populate an 'invisible' association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men.'
"To foster the interests of God on earth, Sharlet reported, 'regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.'
"In a December 8, 2003, story in the Washington Post, headlined 'Northern Virginia Neighbors Up in Arms Over Secretive Enclave,' reporter Annie Gowen noted, 'In its mission to create global harmony, the Fellowship has for decades quietly brought together third world leaders, disgraced captains of industry, members of Congress, and ambassadors.' Among the Fellowship's famous guests, the Post revealed, have been Palestinian leaders and terrorist Yasser Arafat. In his Harper's article, Sharlet reported that other notable colleagues in Christ have included 'Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva... [Indonesian dictator] General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators)... Salvadoran General Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands... and Honduran General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and the death squads before his demise.'
"The Family's financial backers include, among others, Tom Phillips, former CEO of Big Three arms manufacturer Raytheon. Even more troubling, however, is the 'Christian' worldview that the Family forges behind closed doors.
"'The Family's leaders,' Sharlet established from his three-week infiltration, 'consider democracy a manifestation of ungodly pride and "throwaway religion" in favor of the truths of the Family. Declaring God's covenant with the Jews broken, the group's core members call themselves "the new chosen."'
"In a Guerrilla News Network interview with Lappe, Sharlet went even further than what he reported in Harper's. 'The goal [of the Family] is an "invisible" world organization led by Christ,' he said. 'The core issue is capitalism and power.' Sharlet left no doubt about the clear message he received at Ivanwald: 'You guys are here to learn to rule the world.'"
(Fixing America, John Buchanan, pgs. 69-70) 

This series will of course be greatly indebted to the above-mentioned Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor to Harper's and Rolling Stone, who's 2008 work The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power is the only in depth examination of this secretive organization yet published. In fact, prior to Sharlet's efforts to shed light on the history of the organization, it was rarely mentioned at all by researchers, even those such as Sara Diamond who specialize in chronicling the modern American Christian fundamentalist movement. And of course one can forget about "alternative" media icons such as Alex Jones seriously investigating the group.

As for the latter, this is hardly surprising. One of the early backers for the Family was the William Volker Fund, an NPO that played an enormous role in shaping the modern day libertarian and Christian fundamentalist movements.
"... That fall, the president of the ultraright William Volker Fund chipped in $500 from his own pocket. The Volker Fund had helped Friedrich von Hayek, until then an obscure Austrian economist, become a national celebrity in American by subsidizing editions of his Road to Serfdom. First published in the United States by the University of Chicago Press, the book appeared in shortened versions produced by Reader's Digest and Look magazine, which illustrated Hayek's argument that any attempt at 'central planning' (including FDR-style government regulation of big business) would send society down a 'road to serfdom' --and mass murder along the lines of Hitler and Stalin --from which there was no return. Hayek's economic ideas were considerably more complex that the uses to which they were put, but as understood by the American public... they seemed to lend a scientific imprimatur to the Manichean worldview of the country's most rabid red hunters. A decade later, the Volker Fund would hire Rousas John Rushdoony, a theologian who was to the far right of fundamentalism what Hayek was to economic conservatism; it was Rushdoony who helped marry the two with extensive writings on theonomy, a jargon term for what Abram's descendants would come to call biblical capitalism."
(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pgs, 190-191)

In addition to Hayek, the Volker Fund also subsidized Ludwig von Mises, Aaron Director and other stalwarts of the so-called "Austrian" school of economics in addition to the Family and Rushdoony, two of the chief ideological architects of the "prosperity theology" movement that has become ever popular in fundamentalist circles in recent years. The Fund eventually collapsed in the early 1960s after controversy erupted around Rushdoony and David Leslie Hoggan, an open supporter of Nazism and Adolf Hitler. Such were the circles the Family travelled in during the early days.

So, now that we've considered an overview of the Family, let us move along to the ideology bequeathed to the organization by its founder, Norwegian immigrant Abraham (Abram) Vereide. Vereide was a Methodist clergyman who claimed to have had a religious experience of some significance in 1935 that would serve as the cornerstone of the Family's ideological underpinnings.
"Abram prayed like this for years, and the years grew darker, the poor poorer, the world more broken, until one day in April of 1935 he received not just instructions for the day before him but a vision for the decades; God's hand moving His people in an entirely new direction. The revelation God gave him was simple: To the big man went strength, to the little men went need. Only the big man was capable of mending the world. But who would help the big man? Who would console him when he, as Abram did sometimes, wept in the early morning? That the big men of society wept Abram never doubted. He thought that powerful people, so clearly blessed by God, must surely possess equally great reserves of compassion and love that they wished to shower down on the weak, if only someone would show them how.
"Abram would show them how. This was his vision. His life thus far --in 1935, he was forty-nine, his once-dark brow gray like a North Pacific breaker --had followed an arc, he believed, but it had taken him a long time to see it. His ministry, he now realized, was not 'among those who have had the bottom knocked out of life, its derelicts, its failures,' as a friend would write years later, 'but, ultimately, among those even more in need, who live dangerously in high places.'
"For nearly 2,000 years, Abram concluded, Christianity --that is, the religion, the rituals, the stuff of men with their weak, sinful minds --had bent all its energies toward the poor, the sick, the starving. The 'down and out.' Christianity gave them fishes when it could and hope when it had nothing else to offer. But what good had it done? What been accomplished between Calvary and 1935?
"Just look at Seattle, Abram's adopted hometown: nearly half the city was on relief, and the other half was dark-eyed, eyeing the blessings of the 'top men' with envy, which is a blight on a man's soul. A rich man may have little hope of getting into heaven, but an envious man could turn to violence and lose all hope for this world or the next. Abram had to help such creatures, the derelicts, the failures. How? By helping those who could help them --the high and the mighty --that they might describe the Lord's blessings to the little men, whose envy would be soothed, violence averted, disorder controlled.
"Thereafter, Abram would spend his days arranging the spiritual affairs of the wealthy. It would be another decade --ten years spent cultivating not just Seattle's big men but those of the nation --before Abram would coin a phrase for his vision: the 'new world order...'"
(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 89-90)
Vereide
Essentially Vereide's vision absolved the rich of any real moral responsibility for their actions as it was God's will that they been in the positions that they were in. The poor, by envying the rich and demanding wealth redistribution, were in defiance of God's order. Naturally such an ideology had a certain appeal to Veredie's intended audience.

It probably goes without saying, but the circumstances surrounding the alleged vision Verdie had in April of 1935 are quite curious. Here are a few more details provided by Sharlet concerning it as well as how the "Idea" was put into action:
"That April, Abram had been having bad dreams of his own, unpleasant ones. Subversives stalked his sleep, hammers and sickles danced like sugar plum fairies, a Soviet agent 'of Swedish nationality' assigned to Seattle... roared his nightmare defiance of that which was godly. One night Abram could sleep no longer. He sat up in bed and resolved to wait for God. At 1:30 a.m., He appeared: a blinding light and a voice. Abram listened and took notes. 'The plan had been unfolded and the green light given.'
"A few hours later, Abram dressed and put on his coat and hurried to downtown Seattle for the morning rush, where he waited for God to bring him the means to put his plan into action. On a busy street corner, a local developer of means hailed him. 'Hey, Vereide, glad to see you!'
"The developer, a former major named Walter Douglas who still preferred to be addressed by his military title, cut straight to the matter on both men's minds: 'Where is this country going to, anyway?'
"'You ought to know,' said Abram.
"Indeed, the major did: 'The bow-wows,' he harrumphed, 'and worse of it is you fellows aren't doing anything about it.'
"'What do you mean?'
"'Well,' growled Douglas, 'here you have your churches and services and merry-go-round of activities, but as far as any actual impact and strategy for turning the tide is concerned, you're not making a dent.'
"Abram could not have agreed more. While San Francisco had boiled, Abram had developed the prototype of the Idea, preaching a manly Christ to a group of business executives who had no time for hymnals and sob sisters and soup kitchens and the Jesus of long eyelashes beloved by old ladies. Jesus, for such men, 'must be disentangled from church organization,' Abram had discovered. In the 1930s, the meaning of that was plain: a rejection of the 'Social Gospel' of good works for the poor in favor of an unhindered Christ defined by his muscles, a laissez-faire Jesus proclaimed not by spindly necked clergymen bleating from seminary, but by men like Major Douglas, officers who commanded troops who brought order to cities.
"'You ought to get after fellows like me,' Douglas told Abram. He was standing in just the right spot for chest puffing --behind him towered the city's Douglas Building.
"These were the words Abram had been waiting for, in the place, he was certain, to which God had guided him. He revealed the plan God had given him just hours earlier that morning: the Idea. He kept secret the bright light, the voice, the automatic writing in the dark hours. Men like Major Douglas, men of affairs would not understand. But Major Douglas got the Idea.
"'We are where we are,' Abram said --on the brink of anarchy, both men thought --'because of what we are.' By that he meant sinful, only his concept of sin was not so much concerned with immorality as with 'duty.' 'Top men' had a responsibility to do for God what lesser men couldn't. Their failure to take on this burden had led the nation to its terrible position. 'Obedience,' concluded Abram, is 'the way to power.' God wanted his chosen to rule --to 'serve,' as Abram liked to say. Were men such as Major Douglas ready to report for duty?
"Douglas stared at the silver-haired preacher. A 'piercing gaze,' Abram recalled. 'Vereide,' he said, 'if you will settle down in this city and do a job like that, I will back you.'
"Abram demanded specifics. Douglas delivered: a suite of offices in the building behind Abram and a check to get him started.
"'That's tangible,' said Abram.
"Then they set off together to see William St. Clair, one of the wealthiest men in Seattle. There's a whiff of The Wizard of Oz in Abram's later retelling of this story, the major and the minister popping lightbulbs over their fedoras on the Seattle street corner and rushing on to the man who would bring it all together, but that is, apparently, what happened: St. Clair, president of Frederick Nelson, the biggest department store in the Northwest, cleared his office and insisted the two men sit. 'We told him the story,' Abram remembered. 'And he, too, looked searchingly at me and remarked, "That's constructive."'
"St. Clair made a list of nineteen businessmen and invited them to breakfast at one of the city's finest hotels. St. Clair certainly didn't choose on the basis of Christian morality. Of the nineteen, only one was a churchgoer, and he pointed out at the first meeting that the other men there knew him mainly as a creature of cocktail lounges and poker tables. Among the nineteen sat a lumber baron, a gas executive, a railroad executive, a hardware magnet, a candy impresario, and two future majors of Seattle. 'Management and labor got together,' Abram would later claim, but there were no union representatives at the meeting, where nineteen businessmen plus Abram agreed to use the 'Bible as blueprint' with which to take back first the city, then the state, and perhaps the nation from the grip of godless organized labor."
(The Family, Jeff Sharlet, pgs. 109-111)

So, to recap: Vereide claimed to have received a vision from God and then, as he was walking along the street the next day, he encountered a man of means who also happened to be a "former" military officer who was still addressed as "Major" by his associates. After hearing of parts of Vereide's vision, he agrees to set up the minister with a group of wealthy Seattle businessmen who would back his calling.

Indeed, there is a more than a little suspect about the origins of the Family. In the next installment we shall consider some of the curious happenings in Washington state around the time the Fellowship came into being. Stay tuned.

13 comments:

  1. Dude, spot on! But it's so much worse than you think... The Family is helping bring to convergence nearly everything you have discussed previously of the military-intelligence-occult complex and neo-fascist/nazi/anti-'communists,' along with the entire 'New Age' movement and the completely co-opted 'Christianity' into one big, unholy, fetid 'transformation' of America.

    So, 1) The Family and the 'New Age' movement and 2) The Family and 'Christianity' (esp. the 'New Apostolic Reformation' or NAR):

    1) The Family and the 'New Age' movement

    There is substantial overlap in funding of the Family (Fellowship Foundation) and the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) by IONS co-founder and former Standard Oil executive Paul N. Temple and his Three Swallows Foundation. This is thus an indirect connection to IONS director from 1975 to 1996, Willis Harman (also Stanford Research Institute and director of "Changing Images of Man," a scientific study carried out from 1972-74 with the purpose of changing the “conceptual premises underlying Western society”, including radical transforming the rational worldview of western scientists... the transition from 'science' to 'spirituality' and physics to metaphysics). Marilyn Ferguson relied heavily on Harman's "Changing Images of Man" in her well-known 'New Age' book The Aquarian Conspiracy.

    Willis Harman addressed evangelical Christian leaders in a December 1979 conference hosted by the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College (which also happens to be the location of the Family's archives). Willis Harman's talk was titled “A Utopian Perspective on the Future,” in which he promoted expanding definition of science to include the psychic/metaphysical.

    In October 1987, a Colorado conference called 'Bridging Through Christ' was co-hosted by "two close friends, Barbara Marx Hubbard and Doug Coe" (according to an invitation issued by Robin Kline, Paul Temple's daughter). Barbara Marx Hubbard is another major 'New Age' figurehead.

    Even Christopher Knowles (whom you have referenced in previous entries) in his 'Everything Old is New Age Again' post, though he trivially dismisses the degree of occult mysticism found in the so-called 'New Age' movement, quite astutely observed the already-in-place infrastructure of the movement and the very potent danger of it merging with 'right-wing politics' to form a very frightening and authoritarian 'army.'

    That is exactly what I propose the Family has been working towards, with its substantial crossover between 'New Age' leaders and evangelical 'Christianity.'

    tbc...

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  2. 2) The Family and 'Christianity' (esp. the 'New Apostolic Reformation' or NAR)

    Bruce Wilson is a journalist who has exposed a group called 'The Gathering,' which is basically an annual meeting of the wealthiest hard-right families/companies. These include the Coors family (Russ Belant's book The Coors Connection is an excellent expose of their numerous connections to things like the John Birch Society, World Anti-Communist League, The Heritage Foundation, and the Council for National Policy).

    The Gathering also includes the Prince family (Blackwater) and the DeVos family of Amway notoriety, whose founder Richard DeVos is a 33rd degree mason and Erik Prince's father-in-law. Prince's parents gave the start-up funds for the Family Research Council (which will tie in later regarding General Boykin). The Green family (Hobby Lobby) and the Cathy family (Chick-Fil-A), as well as the Ahmanson family (Howard Ahmanson co-founded the Rutherford Institute with R.J. Rushdoony, the father of 'Christian Reconstructionism'/Dominionism), are also among the Gathering's participants.

    So how does the Gathering relate to the Family? It was created in 1985 at the Family's Cedars house!

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/09/25/the-1-billion-a-year-right-wing-conspiracy-you-haven-t-heard-of.html

    http://www.twocare.org/gathering-greens-etc/

    http://www.twocare.org/the-gathering-the-religious-rights-cash-cow/

    Both the Family and the Gathering have been at the forefront of funding major hard-right culture war causes like anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality, anti-regulation, and anti-environmental legislation. The Hobby Lobby case, which granted sweeping new 'religious rights' to corporations is only one of many dangerous precedents. The Family and the Gathering have also funded anti-homosexuality groups and legislation across the world, most notably in Russia and Uganda.

    In his follow-up book to The Family, called C Street, Jeff Sharlet exposes the substantial degree of influence the Family had with the "Kill the Gays" legislation that recently passed in Uganda. And this is where the goals of the Family and the Gathering overlap with another very dangerous 'Christian' group called the New Apostolic Reformation (the NAR is likely a major military-intelligence psyop that has basically created the hierarchy and infrastructure necessary to take over the American government.) The NAR is a radical offshoot from hyper-charismatic 'Christianity' and they teach that 'Christians' are to take dominion over everything (hence the term 'dominionists').

    The NAR was also majorly involved in pushing the anti-gay legislation in Uganda, and unfortunately this group is incredibly influential and connected. The NAR are the main purveyors of something called the "7 Mountain Mandate" which says 'Christians' have a Divine obligation to infiltrate and then dominate the 7 'mountains' or spheres of the culture (Business, government, entertainment, education, etc). The inventors of the "7 mountain mandate" were Bill Bright and Loren Cuningham, both of whom have long-standing ties to the Family. Bill Bright was the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ (see The Family p217,225-227) and Loren Cunningham was the founder of Youth With a Mission, the group which officially 'owned' the 133 C Street house when the scandals involving members of the Family broke.

    [Also members of the Family are Chuck Colson (founder of Prison Fellowship, also discussed on p80-87,94-95 in Scahill's Blackwater) and Norman Grubb (Vereide friend and biographer, founder of InterVarsity Fellowship, and major promoter of 'New Age' mysticism via UnionLife).]

    http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/1/20/131544/037 (NAR Resource Directory by journalist Rachel Tabachnick)

    http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/5/5/85049/41272 (NAR and Uganda anti-homosexuality)

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  3. The main NAR "apostle" involved in supporting the Ugandan "Kill the Gays" legislation was Lou Engle, of 'The Call' rallies. If you want to see something really frightening, look into the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, which Engle co-founded with Mike Bickle (another NAR 'apostle')... it's a straight-up brainwashing psyops on youth to create a "New Breed" of "Chosen Ones" (i.e. the new Hitler Youth called 'Joel's Army').

    And here the very popular mega-church pastor Rick Warren (likely also a member of the Family, given his 'Mao, Lenin, and Hitler' rhetoric) calling for 'Christians' to have the dedication of the Hitler Youth! It's not surprising given that Warren's thesis mentor at Fuller Theological Seminary was C. Peter Wagner (former head honcho "Apostle" of the NAR... he basically created it).

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fzwljL2LTQ (Rick Warren calling for 'Christians' to be the new 'Hitler Youth')

    Another crazy NAR "apostle" is Rick Joyner, who has openly called for a military coup against the US Government and martial law. He's also Knights of Malta along with his Oak Initiative co-founder retired General Jerry Boykin. Boykin is former Delta Force and commander of the JFK Special Warfare Center and School (including PsyOps), and he was also the Undersecretary of Defense under Rumsfeld (he pushed to legitimize torture and 'gitmo-ize' Abu Ghraib). Boykin is discussed in Scahill's Blackwater on pages 376-378, along with Blackwater's Schmitz, also SMOM. Jerry Boykin is currently the rabid vice president of the Family Research Council and is basically trying to create a 'holy war' or new Crusade between the 'Christian' West and Islam.

    http://www.twocare.org/pro-revolution-u-s-evangelicals-ally-with-putin-inner-circle/

    'Christianity' has been completely infiltrated and is being used with the 'New Age' movement as the two prongs of a pincer to move the American public to support the transition of American democracy into the American empire, with these crazies at the helm. And very powerful groups like the Family have funded and infiltrated both sides. All it will take is frightening economic events or false flags to create the fear necessary to sweep everyone else into the unholy 'Christian/New Age' movement and waiting infrastructure.

    The same military-intelligence complex behind this converging of many different psyops into the Mother of all Psyops, were also behind the transition of science into occult mysticism and the reimagining of metaphysics into quantum spirituality (as you have somewhat explored in various posts). I wouldn't be surprised if there are further 'aces' in sleeves to achieve their goals, including potentially faking an 'alien invasion' and/or finding a 'hall of records' under the sphinx (Check out 'Christian' teachers Lambert Dolphin and Chuck Missler, and their many ties to military intelligence and the SRI).

    But the end-goal will be the same... a corporate and governmental system of oppression, using every imaginable pretext of anti-labor, anti-regulation (de-reg), anti-homosexuality, mysogynistic, racist, anti-semitic, crusade-mentality, and anti-'communist' (i.e. neo-facism).

    It will be the "free market" neo-liberalism to plunder via 'privatization' and Kingdom-building neo-conservatism to crush any resistance, all wrapped in a deceptive cloak of a "Divine mandate" and the false piety of total submission to "God Dream/Work" (i.e., same as the 'Great Work' of occultism + the 'Opus' in Opus Dei).

    Jesus warned of great deception, but too few Christians (and everyone else) have seen through this, and the rest will go along just like the German people willingly went along with Hitler... only it's going to be much bigger and uglier this time around.

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  4. Lastly, my main references, in addition to the above links (Bruce Wilson and Rachel Tabachnick at Talk2action.org are invaluable for the exposes on the Family, the Gathering, and the NAR).

    http://www.insider-magazine.com/ChristianMafia.htm (an excellent and detailed expose on The Family, though again, not necessarily an endorsement of the author/site)

    http://apprising.org/2011/01/26/what-is-dominionism/ (excellent overview of 'dominionism' including their core teachings, which are very similar to key 'New Age' teachings, written from a Christian perspective.)

    http://cicministry.org/commentary/issue103.htm (good explanation of 'dominionism'/'New Apostolic Reformation' from a Christian perspective.)

    http://www.seekgod.ca/topiccnp.htm (a great directory to look up major CNP members and their other affiliations)

    http://www.thefullwiki.org/The_Family_%28Christian_political_organization%29
    http://u2r2h-documents.blogspot.com/2008/07/fellowship-foundation-they-are-all.html

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/25/AR2009062504480.html (the original C street expose)

    http://www.newswithviews.com/Cumbey/constance22.htm (part 2 has the "Bridging Through Christ" conference information - no endorsement of the author or website)

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  5. Dennis-

    That would be William Dudley Pelley.


    Anon-

    Thanks for all the information. I was aware of some of your points, but your insights on the ties between the Family and the New Age movement are quite eye opening. I had had some suspicious as Vereide seems to have employed automatic writing and such like during the early days. And then there's the almost demented Gnostic-slant of his ideology (as well as that of Opus Dei and its founder).

    I think Knowles' account of the infiltration of the New Age movement was quite groundbreaking but the links between the Christian right and the US national security state seem to have gone back to at least the 1930s, which shall be explored in the next installments. And then of course there's the Unification Church, an organization that displayed methods of indoctrination since its foundation in 1954 that closely resembled the behavioral modification methods being tested by the CIA and Pentagon around the same time. The modern Christian right really seems to have been a decades spanning project of the US intelligence community.

    I'll be sure to check out your links and thank again for this invaluable input.


    -Recluse

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  6. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  7. Anon-

    Thank you so very much for the information that you provided --it was invaluable in writing this series. I also apologize for taking so long to respond. Its been a busy few weeks and I'm just now getting around to my comments.

    I'm still taking in the links to the New Age community, which I hope to address in a latter series. Another figure in this context who is most interesting is EST "founder" Werner "Jewish weakness gives way to German strength" Erhard. The EST is surely one of the most vile manifestations of this unholy union...

    Increasingly I'm coming to the conclusion that Crowley is one of the most unjustly maligned figures of the modern era. Julius Evola makes Crowley look like a choir boy in comparison. And by all accounts Evola inspired a network of assassins and terrorists who far surpassed the wildest fantasies of the conspiratorial right concerning Crowley.

    -Recluse

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    1. Hi Recluse,

      I just now saw your reply. I'm glad to help because the more people who know about this the better, and you do an excellent job of researching and laying out the connections in context. I, for one, definitely appreciate it!

      Crowley, well he was definitely a piece of work, but yeah, I agree with you about Evola... I'd never heard of him until reading your blog, and once I looked into him and what he believed, it definitely fits the core 'mythos' of this converging mysticism better than anything else I've come across. I'll check into Erhard as well.

      I look forward to reading your future series on the New Age links (though I have yet to catch up on your recent P2 series :-).

      ------
      As a total aside, I was going to comment on your entries on the Human Ecology Fund about another New Age figure, but perhaps here will work just as well.

      In regards to the CIA/Human Ecology Fund connection, have you ever come across someone named William Thetford? I ask because he has a very extensive military/intelligence background. And he's also a co-author/'scribe', along with Helen Shucman, of the New Age 'A Course in Miracles' (ACIM). [At the end, I'll mention the most insidious aspect of ACIM, in my opinion, and it is one that fits seamlessly with many of the trends we've discussed above.]

      Spokespersons affiliated with ACIM have, quite unsurprisingly, denounced 'conspiracy theories' about Thetford's connections to the CIA, but with your extensive research, Thetford's long-standing ties to the Intelligence complex should be immediately recognizable.

      (con't)

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    2. William Thetford was part of the Manhattan Project (Atomic Research Program), before completing his PhD (1949) under Carl Rogers, studying personality development in children. He spent several years as a 'Senior Psychologist" for the U.S. Government in Washington D.C., where according to Dr. Colin Ross, Thetford worked on Project BLUEBIRD, as well as one year in Beirut under the State Department's Foreign Service Institute.

      Thetford joined as Chief Psychologist Cornell University's Program in Human Ecology at exactly the same time Cornell's Harold Wolff founded the CIA-front, the Human Ecology Fund. Thetford's CV states that he was, in fact, the PI (Principle Investigator) for five different Human Ecology Fund research grants and at least one grant from the Geschickter Fund. Most of this research was on John Gittinger's 'Personality Assessment System,' an assessment system Gittinger first devised while a psychologist at Central State Mental Hospital in Norman, Oklahoma in 1948-49 (here I'm reminded of your entry on Lee Harvey Oswald and Rose Cherami).

      BTW, Thetford's former PhD thesis mentor, Carl Rogers, joined the board of directors of the Human Ecology Fund when it officially separated from Cornell University in 1957 (under Lt. Col. James Monroe as director/treasurer, who was also the father of the guy who founded the Monroe Institute). According to Dr. Colin Ross, Carl Rogers also headed the 1958 MK ULTRA subproject 74.

      That same year (1958), Thetford accepted a professorship at Columbia University (as well as the Presbyterian Hospital's Psychiatry Institute, the eventual home of Dr. Sidney Malitz). The first footnote in Thetford and Shucman's 1968 paper on Conversion Hysteria (a psychiatric paralysis most commonly diagnosed in children/young adult sexual abuse victims) mentions the extensive research done on John Gittinger's 'Personality Assessment System' by David Saunders, with whom Thetford would go on to co-head the CIA MK ULTRA Subproject 130: Personality Theory from 1971-1978 - http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pr0.1968.23.1.231 (footnote 1) & Dr. Colin Ross].

      This isn't surprising, since David Saunders was funded by the Human Ecology Fund at least as far back as 1959 (frighteningly enough, while also affiliated with the Educational Testing Service, founded in part by the Carnegie Foundation) - http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pr0.1959.5.h.529

      Thetford retired in 1978, and moved to Tiburon, CA where he split his time between the Orwellian-named 'Center for Attitudinal Healing' of ACIM, and, of course, as a consultant for the military at Travis AFB... (Tiburon is right across the bay from San Francisco).

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    3. It's worth looking up 'Thetford WN' on pubmed.com to also get a look at his co-authors and their other publications... for example, Leo Golberger and his studies on sensory deprivation/isolation and visual hallucinations - http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pms.1961.12.1.91

      Some other classic research papers by Thetford's colleagues and co-authors include:

      - Cognitive effects of isolation /& LSD (L. Golberger, PMID: 13715548 & PMID: 5326508)
      - Effects of delta-9-THC in monkeys (LF Chapman, PMID: 116881 & 821783)
      - Communist interrogation, brainwashing, and POW (LE Hinkle Jr & HG Wolff, PMID: 13354036, PMID: 13460563, PMID: 13845696)
      - Effects of Mescaline & LSD on creativity (L. Berlin, T. Guthrie, HG Wolff, PMID: 13320148)
      - "Dormant Human Potential" (HG Wolff, PMID: 14008011)

      (Recalling that Project BLUEBIRD = drugs, hypnosis & isolation for interrogation)

      Thetford's co-authors also seemed inordinately interested in studying the influence of 'stress' and personality on illness, headaches, radiation health effects, schizophrenia (dissociative states), pain and pain threshold, hypnosis, and psychoactive drugs. Study populations included the usual subjects: prisoners, veterans, military, children, mental patients, elderly, and poor inner-city residents, as well as immigrants/refugees from other cultures.

      http://powerbase.info/index.php/Society_for_the_Investigation_of_Human_Ecology

      https://web.archive.org/web/20060118092415/http://www.miraclestudies.net/BillVita.html

      Dr. Colin Ross, BLUEBIRD, Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality By Psychiatrists, (2000) Manitou Communications, Inc., page 329 -- (I haven't directly verified this reference, but supposedly Dr. Ross has a collection of FOIA documents proving his allegations, though I can't shake the creepy feeling that he's quite deliberately presenting only part of the whole story... call it a gut feeling).
      ------

      It's particularly insidious when you get to the 're-definition' of forgiveness in ACIM, which fits seamlessly into the 'New Apostolic Reformation' as well as the New Agers.......
      They are pretty aggressive about copyright, so I'll just refer you to the first paragraph in the following link regarding ACIM's re-definition of forgiveness.

      Though I think an accurate paraphrase would be that to "observe and point out evil and injustice is to make them real, but true forgiveness is pretending that the wrong/injustice never even happened. It doesn't exist." Yup, that sounds about right.

      https://web.archive.org/web/20060111061206/http://www.miraclestudies.net/Forgiveness.html
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      That's several steps beyond the FMSF saying "you only think it happened, but it didn't really happen" all the way to "Even if it happened, it really didn't happen, and to insist it did makes you the problem."

      I have to hand it to these mil-intel folks, they are slick and long-range implementers... I'd laugh at the absurdity of the above-cited reasoning, except for the fact that three of my close family members have completely bought that whole line of 'New Age' thinking, and I also see the complete infiltration of Christianity with the same thinking.

      I know non-Christians may think it's irrelevant to them, but when people are deceived that 'real forgiveness' means 'pretending nothing ever happened,' things can quickly become even more oppressive of the victims and absolving of the abusers. In short, injustice and cruelty will be rampant while these deluded people tell you to smile more, think positive thoughts, and pretend it never happened, because that's the enlightened and 'loving' thing to do. Ugh!

      -AW

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  8. A correction to my comment from January 15, 2015 at 12:15 AM --

    General "Jerry" Boykin of Family Research Council and New Apostolic Reformation "Apostle" Rick Joyner (both co-founders of the Oak Initiative), are actually Sovereign Order of Saint John... NOT the other (catholic) SMOM.

    -AW

    ReplyDelete
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