Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Pied Piper of Pusan, 17 Jul 2008
When looking to explain the ascendancy of the paleo-conservatives in U.S. politics, few commentators have remarked upon the sinister and seminal influence of the enigmatic and unfathomably wealthy Sun Myung Moon. Who else has the resources to unflinchingly lose billions on a newspaper, The Washington Times, merely to champion conservative causes, in the teeth of all evidence and in defiance of all flagrant hypocrisy? John Gorenfeld in Bad Moon Rising chronicles the rise of a pseudo-Messiah to the point of fooling a brace of senators and congressmen into crowning him "King of Peace" at the Senate Dirksen Building in 2004, in a wide-ranging account that moves back and forth from Moon's early years in Korea in the 1950s to his dotage claiming imaginary converts from among the ranks of dead U.S. presidents.
This is the story of a man who would not be deterred, even by his failure to live up to his own teachings, from aspiring to the title of "King of Kings" and leader of all the world. The fact that he must make this claim by subterfuge, by staging events that appear to mean one thing to the general public but another to his own disciples, means little to him. Appearances are all to this would-be Messiah.
If I was to fault this important book in any way, it would be for minor errors of fact. I was a member of Moon's Unification Church from 1976 to 1986, so I know what I'm talking about. In particular, Gorenfeld's claim on page 13, which he repeats on page 75, that the American branch of the Unification Church reached a "one-time peak of thirty thousand members" is simply untrue. The 30,000 figure was a goal that I often heard the members being urged to attain in the late 1970s, when achieving that level of membership was considered crucial to Moon's success in America. When this goal could not be reached, members took to claiming that it had anyway by including people who had merely attended a Moon-inspired lecture or shown mild interest in the ideas of the "True Father". In truth, even at its peak, the Moon movement likely never exceeded 5,000 full-time, committed members in America.
Some fault can be found in the confusing structure of this account, which moves associatively from personality to personaltiy, instead of providing a meticulously chronological record of Moon's rise, fall and (seeming) resurrection. This structure, which works well enough in a magazine article, is confusing in the context of a book.
These are quibbles. This book deserves 5 stars because it exposes the heinous influence of a rarely acknowledged foreign influence upon American politics -- one which has provided bottomles cash contributions to conservative causes, and which has in consequence helped to puff up the hubris of the Bush presidency to the point where it may fairly be likened to the Roman imperium.
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