Reverend Moon and the ‘Unity of Sciences’ Cult

21stcentury Science and Technology Magazine ^ | 1-12-2003 | Laurence Hecht

[mjp]

In 1972, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, better known in contemporary circles as the Mephistopheles of Poontang, took over the franchise on the Unity of the Sciences movement. The latter, a cult operation as evil as Moon’s, but more intellectually damaging, was founded in the mid-1930s under leadership of John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Otto Neurath of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. In the 1950s, it merged with Robert M. Hutchins’s University of Chicago publishing operations to become the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was one of its more successful ventures.

It would be wrong to suppose that the many Nobel Prize-winners and other leading scientists, who have graced the dais at the annual Reverend Moon-sponsored International Conferences on the Unity of the Sciences, were merely taking advantage of a nice honorarium and a chance to sound off in public.

Some, like physicist Eugene Wigner, for example, or the neurophysiologist, Lord Edgar Douglas Adrian, were perfectly witting in what they were about. Much more so, than the psychologically damaged Korean preacher, who calls his religious vision in a North Korean torture cell “my brainwashing,” and never misses a chance to remind his audiences that the highest truth is that the male and female sex organs fit together—“unity.” (Yes, he would be a joke, were it not for the fact that he owns, or is right now buying up, a good chunk of the U.S. Congress, the President of the United States, and a spectrum of religious figures from Jerry Falwell to Louis Farrakhan—paid for by the flow of dirty money from the drugs and arms trade that has financed the rise to prominence of the Moon cult.)

It is only possible to make sense of the curious marriage of the Reverend Moon with the leadership of world science, by taking a step back in history to examine some developments which will strike the typically miseducated college graduate as rather strange. We will be publishing the full case in the near future. We have only the space here for the short version. Every word we write is carefully researched and documented. So pay attention, and keep an open mind. If you should discover that your college education was largely a consumer fraud, there will be plenty of time later to bring the lawsuit.

The Moon cult and the Unity of the Sciences Movement are two operations spun out of a London thinktank in the early part of the 20th century, known variously as the Coefficients Club, the Roundtable, and Milner’s Kindergarten. Leading strategists included Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Alfred Milner, Leo Amery, Halford Mackinder, H.G. Wells, and Lord Bertrand Russell. The problem facing them was how to maintain the power of a maritime-based, financier oligarchy, in a world threatened by the growing industrial strength of the United States, Germany, France, and, Japan. World War I was their first big project; the failed League of Nations the second.

The Program In 1928, their propagandist Wells, issued the program of the grouping in a book titled The Open Conspiracy. The plan, openly discussed, was to create a “new world religion” that would channel the power of self-sacrifice, characteristic of religious zeal, into implementing the goals of the conspiracy. These were, as summarized by Wells:

“Firstly, the entirely provisional nature of all existing governments, and the entirely provisional nature, therefore, of all loyalties associated therewith:

Secondly, the supreme importance of population control in human biology and the possibility it affords us of a release from the pressure of the struggle for existence on ourselves; and Thirdly, the urgent necessity of protective resistance against the present traditional drift towards war.”

The first action of the “Open Conspiracy” was to be the cultivation of a mass-based peace movement. It began at Oxford University, and spread among student populations in Europe and the U.S.A. in the 1930s, in the form of a solemn, signed pledge never to participate in any war, and to refuse service if drafted.

The organizer of the movement, which later became known as Moral Re-Armament, was an American preacher turned British intelligence agent, named Frank Buchman. He was an ardent admirer of Hitler, and included Gestapo chief Himmler and Rudolf Hess in his membership lists. But Buchman was also supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and counted Edward VIII, when he was Prince of Wales, as a member. In the U.S.A., his pre-war supporters included movie mogul Louis Mayer, Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandlee, and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

After World War II, Buchman’s Moral Re-Armament emerged as a major cold war vehicle, particularly in Western Europe and the Far East. His 1949 conference in Switzerland was attended by European parliamentarians and a bipartisan delegation of the U.S. Congress, flown in by military aircraft.

Moon’s Korean ministry got plugged into Moral Re-Armament at the time of the Korean War, or before. After the war, the small Moon operation was picked up by military intelligence circles connected with the notorious MK-ultra program for psychedelic drug experimentation, and Tavistock-originated group dynamics programs for social manipulation. He was set up in the United States, under highest level intelligence cover, in the early to middle 1960s.

The Cult of Science Apart from the mass peace movement, the other side of the Open Conspiracy involved science in two ways:

First, to build a weapon of mass destruction so terrible it could be used to force nations to forego their sovereignty. Wells’s Hungarian disciple, physicist Leo Szilard, played the leading role in this. Szilard was the real-life model for Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s famous film of that name, and also the lifelong friend and political adviser to Eugene Wigner.1

Second, to turn biology from the science of life into a branch of inorganic physics.2

To accomplish this, it was necessary to first degrade the scientist’s conception of himself. Another member of the Coefficients Club, Lord Bertrand Russell, played the key role in this. Russell was a product of the Cambridge Aristotelian Society. His early career was built on an absurdly incompetent attack on philosopher Gottfried Leibniz3 and Carl Friedrich Gauss’s greatest student, Bernhard Riemann. The essence of it all was to prove that universal genius was impossible, human creativity did not exist, and the mind is only a collection of logical elements (which artificial intelligence would later attempt to replicate out of electronic spare parts).

Russell’s dilletantish excursions into philosophy were consistent with the program of the Machian-influenced logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, and John Dewey’s pragmatism. The denial of the synthetic a priori, i.e. creativity, and consequent reduction of all knowledge to mere logical formalism, is the common feature of both systems.

In 1935, refugee members of the logical positivist Vienna Circle joined with a collection of American Trotskyists grouped around John Dewey in the first meetings of the Unity of Sciences movement in New York. At a 1938 meeting at the University of Pennsylvania, with Russell in attendance, the Unity of Sciences movement was launched in earnest.

This was the operation that the Reverend Moon’s Unification Church incorporated under its wing in 1972.

Dr. Strangelove, meet the Reverend Moon.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes 1. Wells had already foreseen the use of an atomic weapon in a 1913 work of fiction, based on physical chemist Frederick Soddy’s 1908 The Interpretation of Radium. Its realization was made possible by the collaboration of Szilard and Eugene Wigner in winning Einstein’s backing for a letter urging President Roosevelt to begin research on an atomic bomb, arguing with no basis in fact, that Hitler was about to develop one. Very few of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project as a patriotic duty knew that some people actually intended to find a way to use the bomb before the war was over. 2. Niels Bohr’s colleague Max Delbruck and physicist Szilard, who reinvented himself in the postwar period as a molecular biologist, were crucial players. The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, founded by Harriman family funding in the 1920s to promote the “perfection of the race” through eugenics, was the center of this effort in its early days.

3. Russell claimed to have comprehended all of Leibniz’s philosophy under five logical premises, which he (Russell) had discovered. Finding that almost none of Leibniz’s published work was consistent with the five premises, Russell decided that Leibniz was lying about what he really believed.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[dighton]

The usual gibberish from LaRouche & Company. Quote:

21st Century Science & Technology magazine challenges the assumptions of modern scientific dogma, including quantum mechanics, relativity theory, biological reductionism, and the formalization and separation of mathematics from physics. We demand a science based on constructible (intelligible) representation of concepts, but shun the simple empiricist or sense-certainty methods associated with the Newton-Galileo paradigm.

Our unique collection of editors and scientific advisers maintain an ongoing intellectual dialogue with leading thinkers in many areas, including biology, physics, space science, oceanography, nuclear energy, and ancient epigraphy. Original studies by the controversial economist Lyndon LaRouche have challenged the epistemological foundations of the von Neumann and Wiener-Shannon information theory, and located physical science as a branch of physical economy. In science policy areas, we have challenged sacred cows, from the theory of global warming to the linear threshold concept of radiation.

21st Century is the successor to Fusion magazine (published from 1977 to 1987), and has sister publications in French and German, both called Fusion.

[Maedhros]

bump for later

[dighton]

Lyndon says, "Beware of cults!"

[weikel]

I don't care if Moon's religion is nutty hes not a terrorist and he helps out the American right big. He and Rupert Murdoch are the only ones fighting to deny the left uncontested control of the mainstream press. Without Murdoch and Moon we might all be in Hilary's gulag right now.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Szilard wasn't the model according to Kubrick; Teller was.

[exmoor]

Is that dude still around????????????

[mjp]

Szilard wasn't the model according to Kubrick; Teller was.

I thought it was a combination of Von Neuman and Kissinger.

[general_re]

In 1972, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, better known in contemporary circles as the Mephistopheles of Poontang...

And it was all downhill from there.

[Congressman Billybob]

Warning!

This is a LaRouche piece. For him to "warn" about "cults" is like Mussolini warning about fascism. Anything from a LaRouche source has three characteristics. 1) It is a pistache of facts and lies in equal measure. 2) It is written for the purpose of extracting money from the unwary, and, 3) At bottom, it is crazier than an outhouse rat (to tidy up the quote a bit).

I am one of the few attorneys in the nation ever to have obtained a slander judgment against the LaRouchies. We never wound up collecting the money, because those people are slicker'n a greased snake. But we got the judgment, on bahalf of a "public figure" no less, a candidate for the Maryland legislature.

Congressman Billybob

Click for latest column on UPI, "Three Anti-Endorsements" (Now up on UPI wire, and FR.)

As the politician formerly known as Al Gore has said, Buy my book, "to Restore Trust in America"

[Constitution Day]

("Mephistopheles of Poontang" is still available as an FR handle, tho...)

LMAO!

[general_re]

LOL - I forgot all about this thread. Kind of a catchy handle, isn't it? Too bad JR would undoubtedly kill it on sight ;)

[Constitution Day]

I bet he would too, but damn! what a handle that would be.

I bumped this because the Admin Mod says that "It's LaRouche Day!".

[ASA Vet]

Cult \ n [F & L; F culte, fr. L cultus care, adoration, fr.]
1. someone elses system of religion.