Some thoughts on current world threats and on Israel

 

Postcard I sent home from Israel in December 1985. I did have a camera then but was short of money, so I didn't buy film – thus I took no photos during my 2-week stay there.

Diary Monday 19 February 2024: 

The world is in a horrible and parlous state. The “evil empire", the US and its lackeys, is threatening war with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and others.

If a direct confrontation begins and cannot be stopped before it escalates (the US always seeks “escalation dominance,” of course – and ultimately “full spectrum dominance”), there is a real danger of nuclear weapons being used. The US would likely launch a preemptive strike and try to “decapitate” its adversaries, as I understand its doctrine states or at least implies. ** SEE NOTE BELOW AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST.

As far as I can see, both Russia's and China's nuclear postures are defensive, and they fear the USA.

The situation in Ukraine, where “western” powers are engaged in a proxy war with Russia, is going from bad to worse as Russia advances there. Moscow has been willing to compromise for the sake of peace from the beginning, but the “west” refuses to negotiate, as it wants to weaken and ultimately dismember Russia, if possible without spilling too much blood of its own military forces. 

(see my first post on the Ukraine conflict, from March 2022, here: My view of the US-Russia conflict )

Israel, the darling of the “west,” is meanwhile committing wholesale genocide against the Palestinians, the long-time indigenous inhabitants of the land the Zionists have stolen by force and extreme, racist violence. Zionism was always an evil scheme and an aberration, but it has been encouraged and almost slavishly supported by the “west,” no matter how much it made the indigenous populations of the region suffer (not just the Palestinians but also the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Jordanians and others).

There are signs that the blind support of Israel by most people in the “west” may be changing, and that critical voices are increasingly being heard. But there is also a strong pushback from governments and very powerful forces in the “west” and elsewhere against any criticism of Israel.

One of my brothers and some of my friends are pro-Israel to the hilt. He and other evangelical Christians believe Israel must be supported at all costs because Christ will return there at the end-times, which they think are upon us. They believe Christ will return in glory and with irresistible power to Jerusalem, and smite those who serve Satan, etc. – or something like that. To me, this belief is simply insane. 

I believe the Zionist state as it exists today is a blight on the world and must be dissolved. A truly open and democratic society should take its place, and those Israelis who have no real roots in that land should return to where they came from in North America, Europe, Australia, Russia and elsewhere – unless they really have nowhere else to go, which is the case for many from the Soviet sphere and, of course, from Arab countries. 

Zionism should really be condemned as a kind of racism. Palestinian refugees and their descendants should be allowed to return. Non-Zionist Jews could, of course, be welcomed, too.

I support several Jewish and Israeli organizations, and news outlets that oppose Zionism, including conscientious objectors who are jailed in Israel because they refuse to serve in the Israeli military as they are appalled at what their state is doing to the Palestinians.

I think especially non- or anti-Zionist Jewish organizations are the best hope for change in Israel, and also in the USA. As far as Jewish people in general are concerned, I couldn't help noticing that they play very important roles almost everywhere in the world. It seems to me that Jewish people are on average more talented than most others in many respects.

They do seem special, indeed. I don't know why this is the case. As a people, if they can be described as such despite their incredible diversity, they seem especially gifted for some reason. This has both good and bad effects in human history, and I think it is important that the good should be encouraged and supported.

There is a lot of good in Israel itself, too. I was quite positively impressed when I spent 2 weeks there – mostly in Jerusalem, but also in Tel Aviv, Bethlehem, the Dead Sea and Haifa – just before Christmas 1985, coming from Limassol / Cyprus by boat. 

I felt welcome everywhere, almost as if people regarded me as a local, not a foreigner. 

However, as Einstein warned, nationalism of any kind is dangerous. And Israel was created based on a very strong, radical and yet artificial idea of nationalism, like an Israel “über alles.”

This can only lead to disaster, and if Jewish people use their special gifts to dominate and oppress others when they are armed with such an ideology, this is a great evil upon the world. 

See also: The Evil Empire Is in the West 

** This reminds me of a personal experience back in June 1979 (or it might have been March 1981, when I was in DC again – not sure): I got a small booklet for 10 cents (IIRC) in Washington DC from the US Government Printing Office, entitled "COUNTERFORCE STRIKE OPTIONS." It was a study commissioned, I think, by the US General Accounting Office (as it was then still named -- nowadays it's "accountability") -- again, if I remember correctly. The study analyzed the possibility of launching large numbers of America's latest Trident C-4 or the then-planned D-5 nuclear ballistic missiles from US submarines in either the Arabian Sea or some parts of the North Sea, or even the Mediterranean / Black Sea or the Arctic Ocean, in depressed trajectories to take out all of the Soviets' feared SS-18 and other ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple independently targetable nuclear warheads) before they could be fired out of their silos.

Even back then some in the US believed they had the capability to launch a devastating pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Jimmy Carter was president back then. He had served in the Navy on submarines in the 1950s and knew something about the US' "boomers," the nuclear ballistic missile subs -- warning more than once that a single such American ship could wipe out well over 100 targets in the Soviet Union. 

SLBMs were originally second strike weapons, but as technology advanced they became potential devastating first strike weapons. 

All of this is madness, of course. 

On Nature and God - and myself

 

Cyprus Troodos Mountains northeast of 1,950-m (6,400-ft) Mt.Olympus / Khionistra, March 1987

(picture taken with cheap Yashica fixed-focus camera)

From my diary Tuesday 4 July 2023:

Today, as I was in the forest up the hill behind our house with our dog Hana, I thought of my relationship with nature – our natural environment – and God. 

There was a time, in 1974-75, when I became convinced that humankind could only survive if we destroyed our present world civilization – in a nuclear war, for example – and returned to a Stone Age existence in nature to start a new history, hopefully without making the mistakes I thought had led us down our disastrous path.

I wanted to try to become one of the survivors of such a nuclear war, which I expected to take place around 1979 (no idea how I came up with that time frame). This is why I went to America, to try to survive in nature on my own – as a test. If I survived in the woods of British Columbia/Canada for at least a year, becoming completely attuned to nature, I wanted to travel south to Patagonia, which I thought would be spared most of the deadly fallout caused by a central nuclear war since the vast majority of likely targets were in the northern hemisphere.

Of course, I met the “Moonies” (then known as the Unification Church, founded by the Korean Sun Myung Moon) in New York on my way to Canada and decided to join them.

When I took a “vacation” from the Moonies eight months later in November 1975 and hitch-hiked to California (see:  https://diamir.blogspot.com/2006/12/memory-of-california-thanksgiving-1975.html ), I wanted to try again to go to the woods in British Columbia. But I got stuck in Sacramento, where I tried unsuccessfully to hitch-hike north on Interstate Highway 5 for more than 2 days, sleeping among some bushes near the access ramp.

After some adventures over the next few days I gave up and returned to the Unification Church in Berkeley on Thanksgiving Day (among other things I had been robbed of almost all my possessions earlier that same day).

During the years I lived in Cyprus (1983-87 and 1990-91) I came closer to nature than ever before or since.

In the summer of 1984, about a year and a half after I moved to Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, I started hiking in the Troodos Mountains, almost always alone. Walking through those mountains and later sleeping many nights outside under the stars (without a tent) was the most exhilarating activity I had ever experienced.

I thought I might finally meet God there, meaning the God I had learned about from the Bible, the Catholic teachings I absorbed in my youth, the very strict monotheistic concept of Islam I had encountered in the Middle East in 1972-73, and the idea of a long-suffering but loving Heavenly Parent promoted by the Moon church in its Divine Principle.

I never did meet that God, though I always tried to be open to Him/Her/It.

I now believe there is no such God in nature.

To me, the highest expression I can see of a God is in us humans – and it is nothing like the perfect, unchanging, all-knowing deity postulated by all of the monotheistic religions.

This God encompasses great beauty, goodness, love, empathy, magnanimity, compassion, intelligence, wisdom, and so on, but also their opposites, ugliness, evil, hatred, stupidity, selfishness, etc.

This God is evolving, changing, learning through us and with us, humans, at least in this tiny part of the universe, our Earth. I think this is the single most important insight I have found in my life, so far. 

My first serious doubts about God -1994

The end of religion

Escape from God ...?

https://diamir.blogspot.com/2020/05/father-figure-and-inner-voice.html

More information on my background

Cyprus Troodos Mountains: Sunset above clouds on Madari ridge, May 1985

(picture taken with cheap Yashica fixed-focus camera) 

Diary, Sunday 19 February 2023:

It's time to write about deeper things. … Who am I, really? Where do I stand? What do I believe?

The world is a mess in so many ways. It's a mess mostly caused by the so-called “western” powers and their vassals and quislings in other countries.

I have left the ideology of Sun Myung Moon behind but I cannot replace it with another. I don't want to adhere to any ideology. In a way I have one of my own, but it's not elaborate at all and could not actually be called an ideology. There is too much vagueness and too much uncertainty.

There is just too much I simply don't know.

It was comforting to have a ready-made ideology, to adhere to certain beliefs that somebody else had cooked up for me.

It took me several years to free myself of that belief system. There was a big gap left when I finally ditched it. I have found very few ideas that could help me plug that gap. After all, I followed Moon's ideology for more than 20 years, and I cannot deny that it left a deep impression.

Also, I am reminded of it often because my wife remains a committed believer and insists that I go through at least some of the motions to go along with her. Doing this doesn't hurt me, so I have no excuse to refuse. But I do feel just a little bit hypocritical. More important, however, is my strong desire to avoid friction, and even more so, confrontation over our different beliefs or ideas.

We both believe in a God. But my idea of God is very different from hers. She believes in the traditional God, the creator of all and “heavenly parent” of us humans.

To me, God is its own creation, and we humans are the best proof of its existence because we are at least in part what you could call the very mind of God. Without us and perhaps others like us in the cosmos, God would not have a fully developed mind that can explore the creation – which is basically God's body. Yes, I think we are the mind of God, or at least an important part of it.

There are forms of consciousness at every level below us, and the cosmos as a whole is conscious. But we are the highest level we know in our tiny part of the universe, and thus we are part of the evolving mind of God.

So, what can I do with this wild idea? Nothing, really. I can think about it, and I have done less of that than most who read these lines might imagine. I can write about it here. It doesn't serve me much in my life at all.

Nonetheless it feels to me much more authentic than anything I learned from Moon and the Moonies, which I always regarded as somehow artificial. It was something I had decided to impose on myself, both because it seemed to make a degree of sense and it helped me to connect with other people.

I never made any really close friends among my fellow Moonies, though. Of course, I didn't have any close friends before either, even though I was 24 years old when I first encountered the Moon movement in the USA.

Maybe I am just too strange, too weird to be able to forge close friendships. …

View from my former 'bedroom' under a juniper tree on Troodos summit, Cyprus. Photo Oct. 2016 

Brief account of my experiences in the Unification Church - now Family Federation -etc.

 

Unification Church members gathering at Tarrytown upstate New York in early 1975.

Adapted from a story originally written for the Facebook group Unification Church under the Microscope (*)

I'm from Luxembourg but I met and joined the Unification Church in the United States – twice, in 1975. The first time was during its teaching workshops in Barrytown (on the Hudson River in upstate New York, later the site of the Unification Theological Seminary) that spring, where I went through 3-, 7-, 21- and 40-day programs and also saw Moon (Sun Myung Moon – the Korean church/cult founder who died in 2012 and whose followers regard him and his still active wife Hak Ja Han as "the True Parents of humankind" representing God on Earth) for the first time. I must say he didn't make a good first impression because to me he seemed terribly arrogant. I was mostly impressed with his "Divine Principle" teaching and the friendliness of a majority of the members, which is why I stayed in the movement. 

In the summer I worked in Boston for a few weeks with a group from Barrytown led by Henry S. to restore a basement apartment that we later used as a witnessing center.

Peter S. (a member of that FB group at the time I wrote this) was my central figure for a short time at 4 W 43rd St. (the church headquarters in New York City) under Neil Salonen (then-president of the American church) in the fall of 1975. During that time I traveled a couple of times with Larry O. in a big truck down to the Sophie Mae factory in Atlanta to pick up loads of peanut brittle, which we dropped off for Mobile Fundraising Teams (church members who move from town to town selling various items door-to-door or in parking lots or bars to raise money for a "good cause" – the church) in the Carolinas, the Virginias, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Later I worked for a few weeks with Ron P. and Toni M. at the Going-Up Press printshop in Washington DC under its director George E. 

After telling everyone I needed a break I left the job and the Washington DC branch of the church on Veterans Day (11 Nov.), and hitch-hiked down to Durham/North Carolina, then west along Interstate 40 all the way to California, sleeping under highway bridges a couple of nights. I briefly visited Brad B., a member friend who had quit, in San Rafael/Marin County, then tried for a few days hitch-hiking north from Sacramento, sleeping in bushes. 

Later I rode freight trains with a hobo I met at a Sacramento soup kitchen but didn't get very far. He was badly hurt on one train and I took him to a clinic (27 Nov.), then I was robbed near Livermore of all my meager possessions, and finally I was invited to a free Thanksgiving dinner in a house near University of California Berkeley campus by two "students" who said they belonged to a local “Creative Community Project” organization. I recognized quickly enough that it was the Unification Church by another name, but by that time I was ready to rejoin the fold anyway. 

After a few weeks attending Divine Principle workshops and working in their garden at Boonville, and a few more mostly spent "witnessing" (proselytizing mostly young tourists) at Fisherman's Wharf / San Francisco with Matthew Morrison I was sent east in a bus with many new recruits. Then came Moon's big religious rallies at Yankee Stadium in New York in June 1976 and at the Washington Monument that September, and before the end of that US Bicentennial year (1776-1976) I became part of the editorial staff of our new daily The News World in New York City. At first I worked briefly in the National Department with Josette S., and then I was transferred to International under, first, Hal McK., then Robin K. and finally Betsy O. 

I might mention here that I was an illegal alien the whole time I was in the US, never qualified to get a "green card" residence permit.

I pressured my bosses, publisher Mike W. and chief editor John D., to let me go to Bangkok, Thailand as correspondent, and after some time they agreed but told me I had to pay for the trip and most expenses from my own pocket.

In July 1979 I went home to Luxembourg to make some money working with local church members. In October I took the trans-Siberian train across the Soviet Union (from Luxembourg to Nakhodka, a journey of well over 11,000 kilometers on trains in 11 days, stopping overnight only in Moscow and Khabarovsk on the way), then a Soviet ferryboat through a typhoon in the Pacific to Yokohama, where I arrived exactly two weeks after leaving my country (6-20 October), followed by another two weeks traveling in Japan with my “spiritual mother” -- a Japanese lady who had introduced me to the church in New York and who had invited me to visit her in Tokyo (her husband had been one of the first followers of Moon in Japan in the early 1960s – they are both deceased now). 

In early November I went to Bangkok to try to work as correspondent. I didn't manage to get a work permit and the high spiritual atmosphere in the local church center (I didn't have enough money to afford a place of my own) was not at all conducive to journalistic work. 

In New York, Mike W., John D. and others left their jobs and the church during that time, and the paper was in trouble -- so in early 1980 after three months in Thailand I was called back. 

Over the following two years I spent another 18 months working for The News World in NYC and several months in Luxembourg or traveling in Europe on my own, once spending 3 days in prison in Czechoslovakia in March 1982 because I was found in possession of “anti-Soviet” literature and documentation on nuclear weapons. My last time in the US was March-June 1982 when I did research for Russian émigré author Lev Navrozov in NYC. 

-- I'm telling you all this only so that you can see I was nothing at all like a model member. I was always more or less on the fringes of the movement, even though I believed in Divine Principle, True Parents and all that, and was deeply troubled by my own inability to completely "submit" (=this word always reminds me of the meaning of Islam; my few weeks as a practising Muslim in the Middle East in 1972-73, when I performed the full Haj pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, had left a lasting impression). 

Despite my status as a sort of loose member I was strongly urged by many friends and former central figures to participate in a matching (of couples by Moon himself for an arranged marriage – one of his many publicity-seeking mass weddings) in Seoul in October 1982, and this is where I had my one and only close encounter with Moon himself. 

In the school of the Little Angels (a children's singing and dancing troupe founded by Moon to charm world leaders, and whose large hall was crammed this time with men and women members waiting to meet their matches) he asked Western men who wanted to be matched with Oriental women to come forward. I was one of several dozen or more who did so. 

After matching a few others he reached over somebody else's shoulder, gently took me by the chin and – to my great surprise – asked me directly in English why I wanted an Oriental wife. I said I thought it was more interesting and I could learn more. He seemed to like my answer, then he asked where I worked and where I was from, and after hearing my answers he took me along a row of Oriental women and chose my wife, who is Japanese. 

I realized later that I was chosen for the “Blessing” not because I was a good member or ready but simply because they needed to try to get as close to 6,000 couples together as possible. So bodies were needed to fill the quota.

Later I helped to start the weekly newspaper Middle East Times in Cyprus and worked there and in Greece for a few years while my wife worked in one of the church's secret accounting offices in Japan and also went out fundraising (street selling) there. 

I didn't see my wife again until almost 4 years later, and then only for a week when we went to Luxembourg to meet my parents. In 1987 we got legally married in Japan but did not stay together as I took up an assignment as correspondent in Pakistan. We only started our family in 1988 when I returned to Japan, and later lived in Greece, where our first son was born (1989), then a year in Egypt, and Cyprus again until we finally settled in Luxembourg in late 1991 after my father died. 

We had another son in 1994 and a daughter 2 years later. Both our sons turned out to be seriously mentally handicapped and autistic, totally unable to live independently. They inherited the fragile-X chromosome syndrome. Luckily, our daughter did not inherit any of it and is not handicapped at all.  

During the late 1990s I completely turned away from the Divine Principle teachings about "God" and "True Parents", and developed my own ideas about how we and the universe came into existence, etc., but I did not impose anything on my wife, who remains a loyal follower of Moon and now his wife. I no longer believe in the "God" postulated by the monotheistic religions at all.

I don't hide the fact that I reject Divine Principle from leaders here in Luxembourg but nonetheless my wife and I are regarded as regular members – though I don't participate in most church activities, including one of the most basic – prayer.

Our daughter knows I don't believe, but I let her choose her own way – though under the influence of my wife -- so she has gone to several short workshops to learn Divine Principle in the Netherlands and has also been to Cheong Pyeong (the church's main spiritual headquarters in South Korea, in a resort area by a lake of the same name) for 21- and 40-day workshops. It seems she fits in well and can take it all in stride without the terrible mental/spiritual struggles I went through, and also without becoming any kind of fanatic. 

She studied for 5 years at Sun Moon University (the church's own university) in Korea, which she really seemed to enjoy. She met an American fellow student and member there, whose parents contacted us because he had told them he was interested in our daughter as a matching partner. When our daughter agreed we arranged a matching with him and his parents, and they were "blessed" by Mrs. Moon in 2018. 

So, somehow I am both still inside as well as outside the church – inside in a practical sense through my wife and daughter, even tithing, but outside because I don't believe any of their teachings at all and don't follow any instructions. Of course, it's like a house of cards, and it could all come crashing down if my wife insisted on following a course that would go totally against my convictions. 

* Originally written March 2016. Updated May 2023. 

More info on my background

On why I cannot return to Unification Church beliefs

On my ideas about "God" today

Father figure - and the inner voice

About the nefarious political activities of the Unification movement

Snow-capped mountains of Nuristan, formerly Kafiristan, beyond the Kunar Valley, Afghanistan, Oct. 1987. The setting of Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King." 

ON DEATH - MY OWN ...

I feel I should add part of a previous post here:

Diary entry Thursday 3 September 2020 (adapted):

I’m reading an article in Psyche magazine about how to overcome our fear of death. 

Do I fear death? In one sense, yes. It’s the fear of the unknown, a natural fear. 

But I believe in essence I do not fear death itself – being no more. What I fear far more than anything else is the likely and the possible consequences of my death for those I leave behind – my immediate family. My wife and our children. 

How could they cope when I am gone? I worry about that much more than about myself dying. Also, I worry very much that I might become a burden to them if I lose my mind or parts of my body. 

This is what I fear and what I worry about much, much more than my own demise. I believe I am now fully reconciled with the idea that I will die. I certainly would not want to live too long – only long enough to be able to take care of my family as much as possible. I do want to leave this existence once I feel I have done my best in this. … And I definitely do not want to exist beyond this earthly life. 

I, this self – whatever it is – clearly began at some point in time after I was conceived in my mother’s womb. I believe it is quite natural that I should cease to exist at some point in time.