ARMED AND DANGEROUS?
Moonie splinter church gets tooled up and a German WWII weapons nut gets busted
MAGA GUN MOONIES
After Reverend Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Koreanbased Unification Church, popularly known as the Moonies, died in 2012, there was bitter infighting among his family as to who was his rightful heir. The struggle eventually resulted in Moon’s wife Hak Jar Han becoming the new leader and her sons Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon and Kook-jin “Justin” Moon splitting from the Church. They have since described their mother’s rule over the church as “Satanic” and view any “ancestor liberations”, a key activity of the Church, carried out under her tenure as invalid due to the holy wine involved being “desecrated”.
In 2017, Hyung Jin Moon set up his own version of the Unification Church in the US, known as The World Peace and Unification Sanctuary, but often called the Rod of Iron Ministries. This is backed by Kook-jin Moon, who is now CEO of the US gun manufacturing company Kahr Arms, and supplements its Unification Church-derived theology with an obsession with firearms.
Moon wears a crown of polished bullets as part of his regalia
Hyung Jin, who likes to be known as “The Second King”, customarily wears a crown of polished bullets as part of his regalia and has his followers carry high-powered AR-15 rifles (which he equates with the biblical “rod of iron”) during their worship, including at his version of the mass weddings for which his father’s church became infamous.
The Moon brothers are also fervent right-wing conspiracy theorists and took part in the 6 January invasion of the US Capital, posting videos of themselves wreathed in teargas. They also use Church channels to claim that Trump won the election as well as raffling off a specially engraved Trump edition AR-15 for church funds. Hyung Jin sees getting involved in politics as vital for defending both the Church and the US from “globalists, Satanists, and political Satanists that want to take power and genocide like-minded communities, and of course, gun-owning communities.”
In recent years the Church has held an annual “Freedom Fest” at the Kahr Arms’ HQ that brings together a blend of church members, gun activists, right-wing figures like former Trump crony Steve Bannon, Proud Boys associate Joey Gibson and Republican congressional candidates. At these, Hyung Jin generally turns up wearing his bullet crown and carrying a gold AR15. Seemingly unconcerned about the US’s track record of dealings with paranoid, heavily armed religious sects holing up in remote compounds, The Rod of Iron Ministries has now bought a large property in rural Tennessee as a retreat, which, as well as having a spiritual function, Hyung Jin Moon sees as being a hot-house to develop future right-wing MAGA politicians. They also have a campsite in Texas where Trump flags fly prominently, seeing it as a sanctuary for the Church’s “patriots” from the impending war with the “deep state”. Whether they actually achieve their aim of becoming a force to be reckoned with on the US political right or remain a fringe sect of rifle fetishists remains to be seen. vice.com, 12 Oct 2021.
TANK HOARDER
In Germany, a pensioner has been given a suspended sentence of 14 months and a fine of £200,000 after police discovered a hoard of World War II era weaponry in his home in the northern town of Heikendorf.
Klaus-Dieter Flick, 84, had a vast collection of weapons including an anti-aircraft cannon and a complete Panther tank. Authorities discovered the armoury after searching the house for stolen Nazi-era art in 2015 and removed it with help from the Army – the tank alone took 20 soldiers almost nine hours to extract from the property. As well as the tank and cannon, Flick was also in possession of a torpedo, mortar, 70 assault rifles and more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition. D. Mail, 4 Aug 2021.