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In Reply to: Re: Porous disguises posted by Mark on November 07, 2010 at 23:50:46:
Mark,
Legally speaking, ignorance of the law is not a tenable defense. One could still be fully prosecuted for breaking the law due to ignorance.
I'm sure everybody in The Family International would prefer not to see themselves as crooks, and as such, they will always beg to differ with this assessment. However, as a rule, they are crooks to some degree, some more than others.
When I was in the group, I know I was always deceiving people.
First of all, we were never up-front about what we really believed. We never told people the whole story, but gave the "babes" "milk first" and hid the the more controversial doctrines, the "meat," for later, when we'd conditioned them to trust us unconditionally. To trick someone into supporting or joining your organization is against the law.
Whenever we were out provisioning or litnessing, members were taught by leadership to say that we were collecting donations for the poor. That was an outright lie, because as we all knew, any money we collected always went to helping ourselves first. To misrepresent ourselves and what were did with the donations we collected was against the law. I would venture to say all Family International charity fronts misrepresent themselves to some degree, to this day.
Nobody likes to think of themselves as child abusers or responsible for actively institutionalizing child abuse, yet almost all oldtimers and first generationers have read the Davidito book, or read The Last State. By doing nothing about it and continuing to tithe, they/we were guilty to some degree for enabling the child abuse.
According to your info, I gather your parents left in 1996. If they joined in the early 90s or before that, then they definitely read enough of the literature to be considered guilty of conspiracy to defraud the public. If they formed a charity org and had any dealings or financial transactions with FCF (such as tithing), they were conscientiously conspiring to defraud the public.
Sure, a few things may happen once in a while, like a "caravan with diapers, oatmeal, flour" reaching the former Yugoslavia. But these are the questions that come to mind, that you should be honest and ask yourself:
1) how often were such caravans of goods delivered per year?
2) what else did your parents raise during that year, while telling donors that they were raising funds "for refugees" or "the poor"; i.e. how much actually went to the people they were claiming to help?
3) were the goods not skimmed first and only the unneeded stuff left for the poor/refugee Yugoslavians?
In all probability, if your parents were anything like the average family home or charity, they in effect raised much more for themselves and took care of their own needs first, and only a relatively small amount of funds or goods they collected actually reached the people they claimed to be helping.
As for current members being naïve, I think I have to agree with Jules of movingon.org: the longer you stay in, the higher you go, the later the date, the more guilty you are. After a certain point, there is no such thing as innocence or naîveté, but rather willful ignorance of the facts, a conscientious decision to be a collaborator. There is way too much information out there and it can't be ignored anymore, so naïvité is not a tenable defense. The Family International leadership is certainly "fucked up" as you say, but so is anyone who follows them in this day and age of information in 2010.
