I realize this sounds like a wacky conspiracy theory but I just checked and Wiki has a page about it. Didn't read it, just checked to see if there was one...
Let me take that back. I started reading the page but got to a certain point and just had to share a section. Are you sitting down? Controversial leadership model Fellowship leader Doug Coe is described as preaching a leadership model, and a personal commitment to Jesus Christ, comparable to the blind devotion that Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao, and Pol Pot demanded from their followers.[30] In one videotaped 1989 lecture series, Coe said, "Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler were three men. Think of the immense power these three men had...But they bound themselves together in an agreement...Two years before they moved into Poland, these three men had...systematically a plan drawn out...to annihilate the entire Polish population and destroy by numbers every single house...every single building in Warsaw and then to start on the rest of Poland." Coe adds that it worked; they killed six and a half million "Polish people." Though he calls Nazis "these enemies of ours," he compares their commitment to Jesus' demands: "Jesus said, ‘You have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself.' Hitler, that was the demand to be in the Nazi party. You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people."[30][31]Coe also compares Jesus' teachings with the Red Guard during the Chinese Cultural Revolution:I’ve seen pictures of young men in the Red Guard of China...they would bring in this young man’s mother and father, lay her on the table with a basket on the end, he would take an axe and cut her head off....They have to put the purposes of the Red Guard ahead of the mother-father-brother-sister -- their own life! That was a covenant. A pledge. That was what Jesus said.[30][32]David Kuo states that comparisons such as these aren't representative of the picture Douglas Coe was trying to paint:Kuo says Doug Coe wasn’t lauding Hitler's actions. “What Doug is saying, it’s a metaphor. He is using Hitler as a metaphor. Jesus used that,” Kuo said. A metaphor for what? “Commitment,” Kuo answered. ... [A] close friend told NBC News that Doug Coe invokes Hitler only to show the power of small groups -- for good and bad. And, the friend said, Coe spends “99 percent” of his time during the sermons talking about the leadership model set by Jesus Christ.[30][edit]Secrecy The Fellowship has long been a secretive organization.[33][34] It maintains no public website and conducts no public fundraising activities.Prominent political figures have insisted that secrecy and/or privacy are essential to the Fellowship's operation. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan said about the Fellowship, "I wish I could say more about it, but it's working precisely because it is private."[35]At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, President George H.W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what he described as “quiet diplomacy, I wouldn’t say secret diplomacy.”[4]In 2009, Chris Halverson, son of Fellowship co-founder Richard C. Halverson, said that a culture of secrecy is essential to their mission: "If you talked about it, you would destroy that fellowship."[1]From the 1930s to the 1960s it was organized as a more traditional religious association. In 1966, Fellowship founder Abraham Vereide became concerned about his organization's growing publicity and declared in a letter that it was time to “submerge the institutional image of [the Family].”[36] Author Jeff Sharlet describes this shift in operation:Thereafter, the Fellowship would avoid at all costs any appearance of an organization... Business would be conducted on the letterhead of public men, who would testify that Fellowship initiatives were their own. Finances would be more ‘man-to-man,’ which is to say, off the books.[37]In 1975, a member of the Fellowship's inner circle wrote to the group's chief South African member, that their political initiatives...have always been misunderstood by 'outsiders.' As a result of very bitter experiences, therefore, we have learned never to commit to paper any discussions or negotiations that are taking place. There is no such thing as a 'confidential' memorandum, and leakage always seems to occur. Thus, I would urge you not to put on paper anything relating to any of the work that you are doing...[unless] you know the recipient well enough to put at the top of the page 'PLEASE DESTROY AFTER READING.'The recipient made copies of this memo for other Fellowship members in Africa, one of which survives.[38][39]In 1974, after several Watergate conspirators had joined the Fellowship, an LA Times columnist discouraged further inquiries into Washington's "underground prayer movement", i.e. the Fellowship: “They genuinely avoid publicity...they shun it.”[40]In 2002, Doug Coe denied that the Fellowship sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast. Jennifer Thornett, a Fellowship employee, said that "there is no such thing as the Fellowship."[13]Former Republican Senator William Armstrong said the group has “made a fetish of being invisible.”[41]In the 1960s, when the organization first went "underground," the Fellowship began distributing, to involved members of Congress, confidential memos which stressed that “the group, as such, never takes any formal action, but individuals who participate in the group through their initiative have made possible the activities mentioned.”[42]Fellowship Member and Senator Sam Brownback describes Fellowship members' method of operation: “Typically, one person grows desirous of pursuing an action”—-a piece of legislation, a diplomatic strategy—-“and the others pull in behind.” [43] Indeed, Brownback has often joined with fellow Family members in pursuing legislation. For example, in 1999 he joined together with fellow Family members, Senators Strom Thurmond and Don Nickles to demand a criminal investigation of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and in 2005 Brownback joined with Fellowship member Sen. Tom Coburn to promote the Houses of Worship Act.[44] Concerned yet? dmb _________________________________________________________________ Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. http://clk.atdmt.com/GBL/go/201469229/direct/01/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
