Excellent points, BlackElkk! I remember quite a few "MO Letters" on this very subject. It would make for an excellent xF article. I also remember a cover-artwork of the "whore" that was very explicit. I think she had beads, was on a beach, had very black hair, etc.

In fact, any of these kinds of themes would be great to have on our site. That is, anti-semitism, America-the-whore, child brides, Churches, the "ACs", etc.

Keep these ideas coming, everyone!!

I remember
I remember it was during the U.S. bi-centennial celebrations in 1976 that the Family in America passed out red, white and blue ML's like "American the Whore", "The Deluge", "Green Paper Pig", and "The Hamburger Boat".
I remember the ML "Death to the Cities-New York's Destruction" was too long to pass out, but we maybe used just the cover.
The ML "The Amerikan Way" comes to mind. Also "The Amercian Holocaust", "Grandmother and the Flood"...Berg was on a rampage about the evils of America.
I wonder what he was reading to fuel his conspiracy beliefs... there was no computer back then... or maybe he was just mad because the U.S. rejected his message... so he was sending curses for their destruction!

Berg's anti-Americanism
I think Berg got his anti-American sentiments when studying Communism, etc., in college. It was also a popular sentiment for young people at the time of the 60s and fit right into teenage angst and anti-authority syndromes. Remember his "revolution" cries and "we're against the system" mantras? This was very popular with young people in that day and he very cleverly used it.

Good memory, BTW, news snoop.

Re: Anti-American Family Lit

This has been posted:

America The Whore! - text, covers, and PDF scan

I haven't been able to find an illustrated tract version of this yet but I'll keep looking.
I also posted an illustrated version of "Death to the Cities!" which evanman mentioned.

Awesome, Peter... I've been interested in finding a copy of that America the Whore image for a couple years now.

Many thanks for the most recent uploads
Oh my, seeing America the Whore again sure brought back memories! We were stopped & questioned by a police officer in St. Petersburg, Florida, when he discovered us passing out that ML. Then he told us point blank to get off the premises of the shopping center where we passing them out.

I gave that ML to a friend of mine, who was enrolled at U of F in Tallahassee. She was anti-war and critical of American policies, so I figured she'd be impressed. Barbara remarked there was a lot of bombast in Berg's critique of America. She asked if I really believed all that anger and vulgarity was helpful in getting change to happen. I was fortunate to have friends and family who got me to think critically about the stuff I was promoting.

I also read Mick Bysshe's "Strange Fire: Inside the Camp." I knew this guy & his wife in Atlanta. I remember some of the hubbub that went on when they left. I was on the camping team at Lake Lanier--that was quite a demanding physical experience, btw. We were wet more often than dry.

Mick owned a small, portable typewriter. The leaders were trying to get him to forsake it to the colony before leaving by shaming him with comments about his "selfishness" in front of everyone. So I asked him privately why he was holding onto the typewriter, because he was putting up with a lot of grief, and I wondered if it was worth it. He was very assertive: "The Lord showed me we'll need this for the ministry we're setting up, and I will be doing a lot of writing." I was impressed by his ability to stand up for what he believed in and not give way under the pressure of so much social disapproval.

So I'm more than a little curious about how Peter found Mick's unpublished manuscript. Also wondering what happened to this couple after they left. My exhusband & I left about 12 months later from Atlanta, largely due to the same MLs and group dynamics that Mick talks about in "Outside the Camp."

Re: Many thanks for the most recent uploads


Mick sent me the manuscript a few months ago. Until then I had no idea he had written a book but it seems quite a few ex-members have unfinished or unpublished manuscripts gathering dust. I found chapters 7 and 8 the most interesting. Chapter 8, which is titled "Outside the Camp" describes the first year or two after they left. I may post an exercpt of it when I finish cleaning up the previous chapter which still has several OCR errors.

I only have limited permission to publish selected exerpts online but I can send you a copy if you are interested.



Thanks for cleaning it up. Just of of curiosity, how did you do it? Some of the stuff I'm scanning is in poor condition or printed on very thin paper so it would be great if I can figure out some easy way to clean up the images when needed.

Re: Many thanks for the most recent uploads

Do you have Photoshop? (If you don't and you think your Windows box can take it I can send you a copy of v7 or CS.) The best and/or most simple methods for cleaning depend on the image, but the fundamentals are tools like (going by their Photoshop terms) Levels, Curves, Brightness/Contrast, selections via Color Range, and the Clone Stamp Tool.

My work on the America the Whore image was pretty quick & dirty (e.g. some of the text is a bit faded), but going from memory I think I first applied Auto Levels (for some quick contrast improvement), used Curves to darken certain shades while lightening others (partly to improve shading/contrast, but also specifically targetting certain darkness levels to increase the difference between gray I wanted to remove and keep), then I used Color Range to select the pixels which used shades I wanted to make completely white.

[size=92]For people who have no friggin' idea what I'm talking about, the above is a rather terrible explanation of how I changed this to this (took about 6 to 10 minutes).[/size]

Re: Many thanks for the most recent uploads

I have Photoshop 6.0. It seems to work fairly well although I may be interested in evaluating Photoshop 7 to see if the upgrade is worth it. Apparently it also works with wine. Thanks for the tips and suggestions. I'll definitely try them.

Re: Many thanks for the most recent uploads


Please excuse my intrusion here, and you might already know this: This is an old Copy Camermans trick for dealing with bleed-through of image, from the other side of a document that you are trying to reproduce, that is on thin paper. The optical physics are the same with a scanner. Put a thin piece of black paper behind the document. That's it.

Also about this subject, I don't know for sure what you already have, and I guess I could figure it out, but the stuff I have is all pre-79, I the first 2 Volumns of the mo letters that were pinted in Hong Kong in 76. The second volume ends at 299, the letter "Students Stand up" I have other misc, pubs. Honestly I have had it all buried, and just now looked at what I had, and it does make me feel sick to look at it. If you need any of it, let me know and give me alittle time to make up some kind of inventory.

Re: Many thanks for the most recent uploads
sorry, that last post was from me, I forgot to log in.

Re: Many thanks for the most recent uploads
Peter, if you're on running *nix you should try Gimp! I've got the Adobe Photoshop CS2 for PC/Mac should you need an evaluation *cough* copy.

Re: Anti-American Family Lit

Just read over this again...
The document you mention has been online for a while... both on exfamily and here:

http://media.xfamily.org/docs/fam/gn/gn_961.htm

ASctually in my opinion, one of the great Family problems was that they were racist and always favoured Americans over other nationalities. They tried to be multinational in flavour, but it was just a PR push, as they never really trusted those of brown, red, or coloured skin. They were racist and pro-American, and the America the Whore letters were just simply straight forward common sense prophecy, that any student could figure out for themselves.

But if you think Mo should have been even more pro-American, so be it, your choice..

Strange thing to say as one of the guys in charge in Portugal in the late 1970's was a tall Black American.

The bias in TFI promoting U.S. citizens or even Europeans over people of color into leadership positions is not the same issue.

Much of the anti-Americanism in Berg's writings are nothing more than a Marxist critique of capitalism, which clearly has its moral pitfalls--particularly from a Biblical perspective--but there's no way one can argue that a capitalist economic system is inherently anti-Christ in nature. That is, however, what Berg's teachings on "the System" and "the Great Whore" appear to say.

Many of Berg's anti-American teachings also are based on a rejection of U.S. policies in support of Israel. I am by no means 100% pro-Israeli at this point in history, but I do recall that a number of Arab states--including the Palestinians--have aggressively opposed Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state since it's inception in 1945. The U.S. has consistently upheld Israel's right to exist. Berg's position on the existence of a Jewish state doesnot affirm the Israeli right to self-determination, and his racism has a virulent, anti-semitic side to it.

Berg's & Zerb's teachings on America the Whore are rigidly black and white. United States = evil, anti-christ, godless, sinful, depraved, decadent, etc. At their heart, these teachings are very similar to those of the Islamic jihadists, whose political alternatives to the Great Satan are something less than ideal, particularly if you happen to be a female. The same holds true for the Kingdom of David, currently ruled by the blood-sucking Mosquito Queen. The U.S. is certainly guilty of unleashing evil on the world, but this country is not without redeeming features. For one thing, it IS illegal for adults to have sex with children in this country. That's not true in many places in the world.

Why is the U.S. more damned for its sins, than say, the Sudan or Saudi Arabia or China or Nicaragua or India?

Is the U.S. more deserving of damnation because it is among a handful of engines in a globalized economic empire? Aren't the Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans, Indians, and Southeast Asians also riding on this whore-mongering gravy train that improves standards of living, life expectancies, and educational opportunities? Yes, the gap between the richest and poorest nations is growing, but can anyone demonstrate how that a direct consequence of U.S. economic policies? Doesn't the European Economic Union also do its share of exploitative trade, particularly with Africa? The U.S. no longer controls the global economic system.

Perhaps the U.S. is more damnable because it fields one of the most powerful military machines in the existence of human life on the planet? The U.S. is like any other military empire that has existed. Empires rise, empires fall. Is that God's judgement for a sin unique to the U.S., or a simple fact of political history? If military might was the rationale for Berg's teaching that the U.S. is cursed by God, why didn't he make similar pronouncements about the Soviet Union, a serious military competitor of the U.S. for over 40 years?

I do not think the United States is above criticism, particularly in light of the teachings of Jesus Christ. I believe true prophets speak truth to power. They speak specifically about injustice and their "predictions" are the logical outcomes that befall unjust societies and corrupt political regimes. If you look at the prophets who currently are speaking truth to U.S. power and making public statements about social injustice, corruption, and the need for repentance, you do not hear them condemning and rejecting the U.S. as a nation cursed of God the way Berg did. (Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners Magazine, is an example of someone I consider a prophet who speaks truth to power. Daniel Berrigan is another.)

IMO, Berg's anti-Americanism is pathological, not prophetic.

In my opinion, being anti-American at this point of time is just a natural opposition to the way they attack country after ciountry for oil for their materialistic needs. It is for this reason that they have such a bad image worldwide, and I don;t reckon these citizens are prophetic or pathological just discerners of what's happenning in the here and NOW. It doesn't take a prophet to figure out worldly nations motivations.

But back to TFI and the history of the COG.

A black American leader is one thing as they would be favoured even over a European white, that wouldn;t be much of a twist for them, but a brown 4rd World leader over so called first world white/black male or female, now that I would like to have seen.

Mind you they also make exceptions like in the case of the rich Chilian fellow that Faithy stole his wife from, and then got another SGA as a wife. he has moved up the ranks, so they do make exceptions for the exceptionally rich elite from so-called poor 3rd world countries. If they can talk the talk like Peter Amsterdam who instantly went from joining to leadership ranks and never weashed a dish or pealed an apple there at Kerkstrat 7, when I was there, then they are leadership material. Talking the talk was the prime requirement, being a suck up was the prime quality all leaders looked for in upcoming leaders...

Leaders need suck up leaders under neath them, and yet want those leaders underneath them to look like quality on the outside, so as to elevate their leadershi[p status even further. Suck-ups need suck-ups, need suck-ups underneath them, and eventually you get to the workers who just had to suck it up and work and labour for the suck ups above them.

IMO

Blackelk


No argument from me on that point.

Second, you are probably correct about TFI's preference for First World leadership, regardless of the color of their skin. When I think about the history of the U.S. and its foreign policies as a colonial empire, I have a hard time segmenting out Europe, a major part of the First World. I wish that the U.S. would listen to its older, wiser cousins on the issue of its (nonexistant) energy policies and the pitfalls of militarism. But then, that would be like TFI listening to indigenous membership in developing countries about the pitfalls of such things as totalitarian, paternalistic control. Brazil rocks!

I beg to differ
I don't think it's all so sewed up like that - so neat and tidy. I had brown and Asian and European leaders over me that sucked just as much if not more than the Americans. And there were plenty of them. I remember quite a push to get nationals in as leaders. I think you are just convienentily politicizing something that is not what you are making it to be.