On April 23, 2008 the UK Daily Mail reported on a new doll being marketed in the Ukraine, a Hitler doll with suitably Hitlerian attire and "a spare head" which, should demand for the doll be high enough said a spokesperson for the manufacturer, could lead to "a series of themed Third Reich toys, including interiors of Hitler's chancellery, toy concentration camps with barbed wire, barracks and operating models of gas chambers and crematoriums." Meanwhile, according to Norwegian journalist Tore Gjerstad, "Fellowship" head Doug Coe, described by Hillary Clinton as "loving" and a "spiritual mentor" but whom Gjerstad pegged as a "Hitler-admirer", was on the move. Coe's first stop: a meeting with the King of Norway...
Earlier this week, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, which has a circulation of roughly 140,000, ran a story, entitled (translated from the original Norwegian) "Hitler-admirer Received by King.", about "Family" head Doug Coe's visit to Norway, where Coe met with the Norwegian King. In the Dagbladet story, journalist Tore Gjerstad quoted Coe, from recordings of Coe's sermons, lauding the commitment of young Chinese Red Guard men who decapitated their parents and speaking with enthusiasm about the organizational methods and organizing prowess of Hitler, Lenin and Mao. Hillary Clinton, who denies having any links to Coe and his group, nonetheless has written of the "Fellowship" head as "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."
By far the biggest break for this slowly emerging story on The Family/The Fellowship, almost certainly one of the most influential secret political networks on Earth, was in ABC's April 3, 2008 exclusive, Political ties to a secretive religious group.
The NBC story featured a video in which "Fellowship" (or "Family" head Doug Coe extolled ensuing hubbub didn't quite convince the rest of mainstream media that the story trumped the hullabaloo over sermons given by Barack Obama's ex-pastor, Jeremiah Wright, regardless of the fact, as detailed by NBC, that there exist numerous ties between leading US politicians and Doug Coe, leader of a secretive fundamentalist religious group, who celebrates the commitment of people willing to decapitate their parents for the good of the state and waxes enthusiastic over the power inherent in the bond and covenant shared among Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler. The Family/Fellowship story has simmered down since NBC's April 3rd story but, Dagbladet's coverage, migrating back over the Atlantic, threatens to rekindle the controversy.
As NBC's story framed it,
For more than 50 years, the National Prayer Breakfast has been a Washington institution. Every president has attended the breakfast since Eisenhower, elbow-to-elbow with Democrats and Republicans alike. "I am really proud to carry on that tradition," President Bush said at this year's breakfast. "The people in this room come from many different walks of faith. Yet we share one clear conviction: We believe that the Almighty hears our prayers -- and answers those who seek Him."
Besides the presidents and first ladies--Bill and Hillary Clinton attended in 1997--the one constant presence at the National Prayer Breakfast has been Douglas Coe. Although he's not an ordained minister, the 79-year-old Coe is the most important religious leader you've never seen or heard.
"We were being taught the leadership lessons of Hitler, Lenin and Mao and I'd say 'Isn't there a problem with that ?' and they would even seem genuinely perplexed by the question. Hitler's genocide wasn't an issue for them. It was the strength that he emulated... they jokingly call themselves the Christian mafia."
Is Doug Coe, as described by Hillary Clinton, "a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God" or is he, as identified in the April 21, 2008 edition of the Danish newspaper Dagbladet, a "Hitler admirer" ? In response to the April 3, 2008 NBC story Hillary Clinton denied any ties to Coe's group regardless of of her own description of Coe as a friend and "spiritual mentor".
The answer depends on who one talks with.
Of course, Senator Hillary Clinton is not responsible for every word to issue from the mouth of "Family" head Doug Coe. Nor should she be.
But there are deeper issues involved here, and given that Clinton joined a an elite prayer cell of "The Family" back in early 1990's it would seem appropriate for Clinton to address her current relationship with the group. According to a September 1, 2007 Mother Jones story, Hillary's Prayer: Hillary Clinton's Religion and Politics, by Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce, Senator Hillary Clinton's maintains a current relationship to "The Fellowship"/"Family" and there seem to exist also ideological and theological resonances between Clinton's views and views espoused by "The Fellowship". Such resonances might be evidenced, for example, in Hillary Clinton's early support for "Charitable Choice" provisions [described as "radical" by Fellowship member David Kuo who helped draft the provisions while working with then Senator John Ashcroft, another Fellowship member] inserted by John Ashcroft in the 1996 'Welfare Reform' bill that was then signed into law by Bill Clinton. Clinton's motivations for supporting those "charitable coice" provisions might not have been exactly the same as those of Kuo and Ashcroft but Clinton's support did not seem antagonistic to one of the long range goals of The Family: unmaking the government social programs of Roosevelt's New Deal.
Why was Doug Coe meeting with the King of Norway ?
Coe's access to European royalty supports the claims of David Kuo, former second in command at the White House Office of Faith Based Initiatives, that the fundamentalist, sex-segregated group "The Family", which organizes in "prayer cells" in a structure favored by communist revolutionary groups, wields, at the international level, almost inconceivable influence and that influence is not always benign. As journalist Jeff Sharlet, author of an upcoming book, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power"" due to be released May 20th wrote in his landmark 2003 expose' "Jesus Plus Nothing: Undercover Among America's Secret Theocrats",
During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.
At its root, "The Family", or "The Fellowship" (its name and legal organizational structure is has changed over time) is profoundly anti-democratic; the group has its roots in an early Twentieth Century battle to combat the supposed spread of communist and socialist ideology in the United States and the M.O. - elite gatherings of wealthy businessmen and political elites in "prayer breakfasts" and "prayer cells" is more akin in spirit to the Italian fascism under Mussolini widely admired in America of the 1920's and 1930's and the ideology which was in fact embedded (as I'll cover in an upcoming special report) in certain US government buildings constructed during the period.
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Below: April 3, 2008 NBC expose' on The Family, by NBC's Andrea Mitchell and Jim Popkin :
