Our Present Responsibility

Dan Fefferman August 1, 1976 The Seventh Anniversary of the Freedom Leadership Foundation Washington, DC

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In Reverend Moon’s message at Yankee Stadium he said that America has passed through three great trials — the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and thirdly, the ideological struggle between democracy and Communism.

The Declaration of Independence states very clearly that America is founded upon belief in God for it says right in the beginning that we hold certain truths to be self-evident — that the Founding Fathers had certain beliefs in common and that these were unchallengeable beliefs. They were the assumptions upon which they were basing their philosophical statement which would then be a justification for their radical step of declaring independence from Great Britain. What they said was: All men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed.

God Gives Rights

The Declaration of Independence emphasizes that the gift of liberty, the right of freedom, is endowed on men by God. That’s a very important concept. If you don’t believe that God has given you certain inalienable rights, by what authority can you claim any rights at all? Otherwise, the rights of men are transitory; they can change according to circumstances and they are relative to the cultural environment. They don’t have any absolute, eternal and unchanging standard. But when you say that God has endowed man with inalienable rights, you set up an absolute, eternal and unchanging standard. You say that all men, regardless of their nationality, race, creed, or color are given the right of liberty by God. This is an important basis of the American philosophy.

Coupled with this is the idea that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed, that a government cannot long endure if it’s in opposition or antagonism to the people. If the government totally fails in its responsibility to provide for the rights of the people, then the people have the right to take matters into their own hands, as free men who have rights given to them by God, as free men who in covenant with God, in reliance on divine providence, are fulfilling their portion of responsibility to set up a just world order. This is why the Declaration of Independence closes with the phrase, “With firm reliance on divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives and our sacred honor.”

So from the beginning, American ideology was centered upon God, upon a firm belief that our rights and liberties come from God. Yet at the same time as the Declaration of Independence was being written in 1776, the school of materialism was beginning to flourish in Europe, and it was having its effect in

America, too. People were beginning to challenge the idea that God had set up a certain order. They began to analyze things strictly in materialistic terms, saying that all of our ideas about God actually came from the material world. The school of deism taught that although God exists, He created the world once, set up certain laws and principles, but He doesn’t have any direct relationship at all and isn’t personally involved in it. The idea that there is a personal God who loves us was already being challenged back in 1776, not only in Europe but in America, too. The roots of the ideological struggle go way back to the beginnings, to our first great challenge.

Judgment Came

In the second stage of her providence, America faced the reality that it was not living up to the principles that it had set forth in the Declaration, which stated that all men were endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. But it was very plain that many men and women in America didn’t have those rights at all. A whole race of people was subject to the inhumanity of slavery. This could no longer be tolerated by God and the judgment of the Civil War came upon our nation.

President Lincoln believed the Civil War to be a type of judgment or chastisement from God because of the evil of slavery. His second Inaugural Address, which is engraved on the stones of the Lincoln Memorial, stated that if every drop of blood which was taken by the whip of the slave driver would have to be paid for by another drop of blood shed between brothers in the Civil War, nevertheless, the judgments of God are good and just altogether. He was a man who was very much aware of his role and the role of America as God’s nation.

Yet while Abraham Lincoln was proclaiming that these dead shall not have died in vain, but this nation under God shall receive a new birth of freedom, and government of the people, by the people and for the people will not perish from the earth, the Communist Manifesto had already been written in Europe. It proclaimed that God does not exist, that the institutions of our society exist only for the purpose of maintaining the position of the ruling class, that all of our ideas about morality and religion are just an opiate to keep the masses under the impression that they are not really being oppressed. For the true liberation of man certain kinds of bourgeois freedoms would have to be taken away including freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press — and a proletarian dictatorship would enforce its own morality by any means necessary.

Revolution Against God

This revolution against God and against the values of our Judeo-Christian tradition began roughly at the time of our second great crisis, the Civil War. Over the next hundred years, the United States grew into the most powerful nation in the world, while the Communist movement seized sovereignty in the Soviet Union and began to spread to the point where it now controls more than one-third of the world’s people. Moreover, Cain-type thinking and Cain-type behavior began to infiltrate America, not so much directly by Communist agents but because of evil spiritual influences which were beginning to affect our country. The corruption of business, the exploitation of laborers by business, the continued discrimination against blacks by whites, racial hatred and bigotry, strife between different national groups, immorality, adultery, pornography — these things began to eat away at the moral foundations of America. With the influx of Marxist thought into American culture, the resentment of the people could easily be mobilized against the ruling class.

Even though there may be 20, 30, 100 different Communist groups, not all controlled by Moscow, they are all mobilizing the hatred of the masses against the ruling classes in America. They are also mobilizing the resentment of the people, the Cain-type feelings of the people, against God and against America’s true purpose. They are antagonizing relations between the races by zeroing in on the weaknesses of America and exacerbating the tensions by making unreasonable demands upon the state and blaming everything upon some so called ruling class, the racist, white, male chauvinist ruling class.

Now our ideological struggle has reached the final stage. In addition to the ideological struggle within the people of America, or among the people of the world, there is also a direct confrontation between the two most powerful nations of the world, the United States and the Soviet Union. These two ideological powers also have tremendous military might which could destroy the world’s population many times over. So the third great trial has come to America. This time it is not so much a trial of just one nation, but of America’s relationship to the whole world.

Satanic Imitation

We have to realize that although Communism is a Cain-type ideology, not every aspect of it is evil. In fact, it wouldn’t have so much appeal if it didn’t have a lot of goodness and truth in it. It’s a very subtle, satanic imitation of God’s ideal which completely distorts the meaning of freedom and lures men into a slavery in which Satan, not God, is the ruler, in which Mammon (the god of money) or economics is the sole determinant of man’s future in life. Marx, Lenin, all of the Marxist scholars proclaim that man’s will

has nothing to do with what his future is. What determines a man’s life is strictly the economic conditions in which he lives, the need to survive, the need to provide for himself, the need to struggle to overcome economic problems. In order to liberate man you need to establish an economic state where socialism provides for all of the people. You create a state which becomes god and do away with the God of Israel, the God of Jesus, the God of the United States of America. In this way, Satan would come to power and rule the world.

When a Communist regime takes power there’s total control of news and people are not allowed to come in and out freely, so we don’t have very good facts about what life in Communist countries is really like, what the real horrors have been. The best estimates of scholars are that between 60 and 100 million people have died as a direct result of Communism. This includes people who died prematurely in slave labor camps, people who died as a result of enforced famines, people who died during the Cultural Revolution in China. Not every death was intentionally created by the Communist regime, but the effect of their policies was that these people died unnaturally, prematurely.

One hundred million people doesn’t mean anything to me. I could hardly relate to the six million people killed by Hitler. One hundred million is just beyond my comprehension. I can’t imagine it. I don’t know what 100 million people look like. But I know what this group looks like; I know what each individual looks like. When you think of one human being, how valuable and precious he is, then you can realize what a terrible abomination took place. It happened not only in Russia, but in China as well. They are now revealing that there was a mass famine in China when people here thought that everyone had enough to eat. The Great Leap Forward in the early 1960’s was a total failure and wrecked the economy of the country. It’s possible that millions of people starved to death during the famine.

Disregard For Life

Look at what’s happening in Cambodia today. After the Communists took over, they marched all the people out of the cities. Phnom Penh, a city of more than 1 million, now has only 50,000 people living in it. Young and old, the sick, were just marched out. Thousands of people were seen dying along the roadsides. It was their belief that bourgeois society had so corrupted and weakened the people that these weaker people would have to die in order to make way for the wave of the future who would survive and build a new Cambodia. This total disregard for the absolute value of human life was based on the idea that the ends justify the means.

It could happen elsewhere as well. It could happen in Korea. It could happen in America.

But the real abomination is the life that people are forced to lead. It’s not being able to teach your children religious values without endangering your own relationship with them. In the Soviet Union and every Communist country, children have to take courses in scientific atheism and dialectical materialism. If a child goes to school and says, “My mother taught me that God is the Creator of the universe,” the children and the parents are actually separated. The children are taken to a state school where they are raised under the principles of atheism.

It’s not only that either. The press is totally controlle.t. People in the Soviet Union didn’t hear that Americans had landed on the m, ·on until several years later. The Chinese still haven’t been told to my knowledge. Anything that happens in the Western world that we know about the people in the Communist countries may not know about. They’re completely blinded from seeing both sides of the truth. They only receive the news that the state wants them to receive.

In the Soviet Union today there may be up to one million people who have been imprisoned for political reasons, not because they are thieves but because they disagreed with the state or because they taught their children religion too vehemently, or because they made some demonstrations.

America’s Responsibility

When we think about the freedoms that we have in America, we have to remember most of all that these freedoms are a gift of God. It’s essential that we bring to the American people the important understanding that freedom does not come alone. Freedom comes with responsibility. Because freedom is a gift from God, we must fulfill our responsibilities to God on the individual level, on the national level, and_ on the international level. America doesn’t exist for America’s purpose alone. America was created by God as a microcosm of a world united in love, where all nations and races could live together in mutual respect, harmony, and unity.

America cannot base its policies on what’s good for its own short-term national interests. It has to remember that our national interests are inseparable from the interests of the world, because the world is shrinking. We are living in a global village, and we can’t escape this responsibility. We have to clean up the problems that we’re facing now — of drug abuse, immorality, pornography, and the root of pornography which is adultery and fornication. One of the greatest problems that we’re facing today is

racism in America. Those forces which are seeking to establish a Marxist order in America are exacerbating the racial struggle and using it as one of their primary means of mobilizing the hatred of the masses.

We have to be the ones to show the true meaning of America, to show America a pattern of racial harmony and unity. I think it’s significant that the greatest event thus far ever held at the Washington Monument was the rally held by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. more than a decade ago. At that time, Dr. King represented a great hope to the black people and really to all conscientious people in America, that America could overcome the problems of discrimination and racial hatred.

Positive Ideology

His message was one that was centered upon God. He completely rejected the Communist doctrine that hatred and struggle are the only way to make progress. He preached non-violence and Christian love. In an essay which Dr. King wrote for his book Strength to Love, he specifically dealt with the question: Can a true Christian be a Communist? His answer was emphatic: No! He stated that a true Christian cannot be a Communist because these philosophies are absolutely diametrical and not any of the dialectics of the logicians can reconcile them. The Christian believes that at the heart of the universe is a loving Father, but the Marxist believes that only economic conditions will determine man’s fate. He also dealt with the question of Leninism, the doctrine that the leaders of the revolution must seize power by any means necessary and enforce the so-called proletarian consciousness on the people whether they want it or not. That is absolutely in diametrical opposition to the Christian spirit. He made it very plain that his movement and what he represented was not based on Marxism, was not based on hatred, was not based on resentment, but was based on the positive ideology of Christian love.

We are now faced with a very serious problem, because our movement not only has to take the message that Dr. Martin Luther King preached and make it a reality in America, it also has to take that message up to a new level. Where Martin Luther King stood up on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said, “Let freedom ring from every mountain in America,” Reverend Sun Myung Moon will say, “Let freedom ring throughout the world” — in the Kremlin, in Communist China, in Cambodia, in North Korea, everywhere that men are oppressed by the atheistic ideology of Communism, let freedom ring.

But in order to make that a reality, America must unite, centered on God. If we’re going to make the voice of God known to the people of the world, then our nation must be beyond the accusation of Satan. We must overcome the problem of racial bigotry. Here in the Washington Monument campaign, this is the essential point: To lead the people to understand that we can realize the vision of Martin Luther King and bring it to a new stage, to a stage that teaches worldwide freedom. Freedom comes from God. Not just blacks and whites but even men and women regardless of their color under Communist control deserve freedom. The responsibility of America is to extend this gift of freedom as God’s representative through manifesting a positive Christian movement in the same spirit as Martin Luther King — nonviolent, with a new hope and vision for the future that can inspire all people.

Movement For Victory

Reverend Moon’s message at Washington Monument will be a strong one — proclaiming America’s responsibility to God to lead the movement for ideological victory over Communism. It’s a beginning of the movement for America to fulfill its mission. I know that this group is the only group that can save America and save the world. There is no other group that has the vision. I’ve been active in the anticommunist struggle for seven years and I’ve met virtually all of the major leaders of the anticommunist movement in America today, young and old alike. It’s a dying movement.

I remember very well when Vietnam was falling and I had hundreds of friends in Vietnam. I remember seeing the headlines in The New York Times and not being able to stop myself from crying because there was nothing we could do. I was so depressed I almost couldn’t go on. Then I had the occasion to call Barrytown to talk to someone in the office and in the background was a chorus of people singing holy songs. I realized that the only hope that God had was right there in Barrytown, that our movement could be trained to be His representatives to take the message to the American people so that in the future no tragedy like that would ever happen again.

The time is very critical. Whether or not we can do it is not determined yet. But I know that we are the only ones who have the possibility of accomplishing it. When we realize that responsibility we have to work hard, we have to pray hard, to allow God to speak through us and represent Him.