Communism has one enemy it cannot negotiate with, cannot co-opt, and cannot ignore. It is not a nation. It is not an army. It is not a political party.
It is the family.
Every communist regime in history has understood this. The family is where loyalty forms before the state can claim it. It is where values are passed from parent to child before ideology can replace them. It is where a person learns to love something more than the collective โ and that, to any totalitarian system, is the most dangerous thing in the world.
This is not an interpretation of communist theory. It is written plainly in the founding document. Marx and Engels declared:
"Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain... The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital."
Marx argued that communism would ensure children would be educated by the state, not by their parents. Communists, he wrote, would "rescue education from the influence of the ruling class." The making of the "New Man" was the priority, and the family was an obstacle.
Once the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, theory became policy. Soviet commissar Alexandra Kollontai put it plainly: "The old family, narrow and petty, where the parents quarrel and are only interested in their own offspring, is not capable of educating the 'new person.'"
So the family was not a casualty of communism. It was the target.
What Happens When They Win
If you want to see Marx's vision made concrete, look at what North Korea built.
Kim Il-Sung declared that any person with anti-government sentiments should be wiped out entirely, and that up to three generations of their family should be punished. These words became law.
A truck comes in the middle of the night and sweeps every family member away. They are taken to a prison camp without trial. Only after entering do they learn what "sin" their family member committed.
Children. Grandparents. Cousins. All imprisoned for a thought crime committed by one relative they may not even know.
Particularly horrifying is the incarceration of entire families โ including children and grandparents โ to isolate and punish them because of their relationship to someone accused of political crimes. Rooting out "class enemies for three generations" was specifically ordered by Kim Il-sung, which at times has led to comparisons with Nazi death camps.
From 1981 to 2013, an estimated 400,000 people out of 500,000 imprisoned in these labor camps were killed.
This is not a distortion of communism. This is communism operating exactly as designed โ a system that sees the family as a threat, and treats it accordingly.
Two Children Who Survived It
Before Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Dr. Hak Ja Han built one of the most consequential anti-communist movements in modern history, they were both children fleeing the same regime.
Moon was arrested in 1948 and sentenced to five years at Hungnam labor camp. In 1950, he was liberated by United Nations troops. He emerged from those years as a staunch anti-communist, teaching that the Cold War between capitalism and communism was the final conflict between God and Satan, with divided Korea as its primary front line.
Dr. Hak Ja Han's story begins with the same enemy. Born in what is now North Korea in 1943, her mother and grandmother were arrested by Communist police when she was five years old and jailed for eleven days. After their release, Hak Ja Han, her mother, and her grandmother fled their village in the middle of the night.
A man who survived a communist labor camp. A woman who fled communist police as a child. They met, married, and spent the rest of their lives building the direct opposite of everything that had been done to them.
On April 11, 1960, the young Hak Ja Han married the church's founder, Rev. Sun Myung Moon. She stands as co-founder of the Unification Church, now known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.
The heart and soul of their lifelong ministry was the re-establishment of God's ideal of the family as the foundation for harmonious societies and the cornerstone of world peace.
Two survivors of communism's war on the family. One marriage. One mission.
The Movement They Built
The Unification Church did not simply preach against communism from a pulpit. It built an international institutional campaign to defeat it โ across three decades, four continents, and ultimately inside the Soviet Union itself.
In 1963, Rev. Moon initiated what became the International Federation for Victory over Communism (IFVOC). By the early 1970s, VOC theory had become one of the principal sources of anti-communist education in South Korea, training hundreds of thousands of civil servants, soldiers, and local officials annually.
On June 7, 1975, the campaign reached its most visible moment. The World Rally for Korean Freedom was held at Yoido, Seoul, directly confronting the increasing communist threat in Asia as the Indochina peninsula had just fallen.
Over one million demonstrators gathered. Representatives from sixty nations stood together.
Rev. Moon's address that day carried a prophecy he had already stated publicly: "Communism, begun in 1917, could maintain itself approximately 60 years and reach its peak. So 1978 is the borderline and afterward communism will decline; in the 70th year, it will be altogether ruined. This is true. Therefore, now is the time for people who are studying communism to abandon it."
The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.
While Rev. Moon built the ideological infrastructure, Dr. Han was building a global movement of women. In 1992, she co-founded the Women's Federation for World Peace and delivered its inaugural speech in 113 cities, in 12 countries, in three languages, within eight months. Despite inclement weather, 150,000 women from 72 countries gathered at Seoul Olympic Stadium for its inaugural rally. That fall, she addressed 50,000 women in the Tokyo Dome.
Her 1993 American tour saw her welcomed by 35 governors, 131 mayors, and 25 U.S. senators. In dozens of states and cities, the day of her speech was declared "National Parents Day," the "Day of Women and World Peace," or "Hak Ja Han Moon Day." It culminated when she spoke before ambassadors from 67 nations at the United Nations.
In December 1991, she and her husband traveled to North Korea itself โ putting her life on the line to meet with President Kim Il Sung for the purpose of pursuing Korean reunification.
The woman who had been driven from that country at night as a five-year-old walked back in as a peace envoy.
And then came the moment that shook the communist world to its foundation. Rev. Moon stood in Moscow and told Gorbachev directly: "The Soviet Union must know God. You have to go back. Otherwise, there is no way. You will suffer!"
More than 800 retired high-ranking U.S. military officials attended CAUSA presentations on VOC ideology, including a sizeable number of retired four-star generals and full admirals.
In 1984, The Washington Times was founded specifically to advance the peaceful fall of communism, a goal achieved in conjunction with the Reagan Administration.
When historians make a final analysis of why communism came to an end, they will recognize that no single person did more than Reverend Sun Myung Moon to bring about the peaceful end of communism.
Standing beside him throughout was Dr. Hak Ja Han.
The Counterattack โ 70 Years and Counting
An ideology that has identified a movement as its primary enemy does not walk away. What has unfolded over the past seven decades is not a series of unrelated controversies. It is a coordinated, multi-country campaign to destroy the one organization that beat communism on every front where they met.
It started in Japan. The National Network of Lawyers Against Spiritual Sales was a pro-communist group formed in 1987 with the express purpose of destroying the Unification Church precisely because it was openly fighting communism.
For decades they pursued civil claims and pressured members who left to file lawsuits as proof of departure โ a process one investigative journalist compared to the 17th-century practice of forcing Christians to trample icons to prove they had abandoned their faith.
In November 2022, Japan Communist Party Chairperson Kazuo Shii declared openly in a magazine interview: "This is a final war against the Unification Church for the Communist Party. This time we will never give up until we win."
They made good. On March 25, 2025, the Tokyo District Court ordered the dissolution of the Unification Church โ the culmination of forty years of effort by politically motivated lawyers whose stated aim was to destroy the church because of its anti-communist activities.
The Chinese Communist Party celebrated publicly. The China Anti-Xie-Jiao Association released a statement expressing satisfaction that the church had been dissolved as "a tool of the anti-Communist ideology," praising the lawyers who made it happen.
In South Korea, the attack moved directly to Dr. Han herself. In the predawn hours of September 23, 2025, Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon โ 82 years old โ was arrested after hours of questioning at Seoul Central District Court.
She had arrived in a wheelchair. She denied all charges, stating she had no interest in politics and neither ordered nor permitted the acts attributed to her. She said the alleged bribery was carried out by a fired federation official acting on his own initiative.
She was indicted on charges of bribery, embezzlement, violating political funding laws, and instructing the destruction of evidence โ part of an expanding probe into figures linked to imprisoned ex-President Yoon Suk Yeol.
The arrest is widely seen as part of a coordinated campaign between South Korea and Japan to simultaneously dismantle the Family Federation. The United Nations has formally warned Japan that its dissolution proceedings may violate international law.
The leader of the opposition People Power Party called South Korea's new government a "pro-China dictatorship."
The Rev. Demian Dunkley, president of the U.S. branch of the federation, stated: "This arrest is not just an attack on Holy Mother Han. It is an attack on freedom of religion itself. It is a warning shot to every church, mosque, temple, and synagogue in Korea โ and beyond โ that faith is not safe from the grasp of government overreach. If they can arrest the Mother of Peace, they can come for anyone."
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich named the motive plainly: "It was an effort, frankly, by the communists to create an environment where there could be a closer relationship with China and a more distant relationship with the United States."
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo identified the geopolitical stakes: "If there is anything the Unification Church undermines, it is indeed communism. We should see the Japan Communist Party's attack for exactly what it is โ an attempt to undermine and weaken the vital US-Japan alliance while encouraging better relations between Japan and the Chinese Communist Party."
The Only Question That Matters
The woman who fled North Korea at night as a five-year-old child was arrested again at 82 by a government her own country's opposition calls pro-China. The ideology that drove her family into exile as a child has pursued her across a lifetime and across borders.
Ask yourself why.
Communism does not hunt organizations that pose no threat. It does not spend seventy years orchestrating the legal, political, and judicial destruction of a movement unless that movement represents something it genuinely fears. Chinese Communist Party operatives are covertly supporting anti-cult campaigns in both Korea and Japan to destabilize anti-communist religious movements across the region.
This is not paranoia. This is documented, on the record, and confirmed by former U.S. secretaries of state and speakers of the House.
What does communism fear? A movement built entirely on the premise that the family โ not the state โ is the foundation of civilization. A church that has spent sixty years proving that men and women can build something together the state can never replace. Dr. Han is the mother of 14 children and the grandmother of more than 40 grandchildren โ exemplary above all as a woman who has created a God-centered marriage and family of four generations.
Marx called for the abolition of the family in 1848. Rev. Moon and Dr. Hak Ja Han spent their lives building one โ and calling the world to do the same.
That is why communism has never stopped trying to destroy them.
And that is why you should pay attention to what is happening to them right now.
Sources
Primary Ideological Sources
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Chapter II https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
Communist Family Policy in Practice
Heritage Foundation โ "Socialism and Family" https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/socialism-and-family
Mises Institute โ "Why Do Socialists Hate Families?" https://mises.org/mises-wire/why-do-socialists-hate-families
North Korea: Three Generations of Punishment
George W. Bush Presidential Center โ "Han Nam-su: Three Generations of Punishment" https://www.bushcenter.org/freedom-collection/han-nam-su-three-generations-of-punishment
George W. Bush Presidential Center โ "Ahn Myeong Chul: Three Generations of Punishment" https://www.bushcenter.org/freedom-collection/ahn-myeong-chul-three-generations-of-punishment
Committee for Human Rights in North Korea โ The Hidden Gulag, David Hawk https://www.hrnk.org/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/publications/eng/HRNK_HiddenGulag2_Web_5-18.pdf
U.S. State Department โ Prisons of North Koreahttps://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Prisons-of-North-Korea-English.pdf
U.S. House Resolution 115 (116th Congress) โ North Korea Political Prison Camps https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres115/BILLS-116hres115ih.htm
Communist Attacks on the Church โ Japan
Behind the Dissolution of the Unification Church: Japan's Communist Party, North Korea, and China โ Massimo Introvigne, Bitter Winterhttps://bitterwinter.org/behind-the-dissolution-of-the-unification-church-japans-communist-party-north-korea-and-china/
Persecution of the Unification Church in Japan Is an Attack on All Religious Freedom โ World Religion Newshttps://www.worldreligionnews.com/religion-news/christianity/unification/persecution-of-the-unification-church-in-japan-is-an-attack-on-all-religious-freedom/
Communist Attacks on the Church โ Korea & Current Events
South Korea: The Attempted Assassination of a Faith โ Human Rights Without Frontiers https://hrwf.eu/south-korea-the-attempted-assassination-of-a-faith-the-unification-church/
Religiocide in Korea: The Attempted Assassination of a Faith โ Bitter Winterhttps://bitterwinter.org/religiocide-in-korea-the-attempted-assassination-of-a-faith/
Free Mother Han! Free Pastor Son! โ Bitter Winterhttps://bitterwinter.org/free-mother-han-free-pastor-son-confronting-south-koreas-crisis-of-democracy/
Religious Freedom Advocates Condemn South Korean Arrest of Family Federation Head โ The Washington Timeshttps://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/sep/23/religious-freedom-advocates-condemn-south-korean-arrest-family/
South Korean Investigators Indict Hak Ja Han Moon โ The Washington Timeshttps://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/oct/10/south-korean-investigators-indict-hak-ja-han-moon-head-family/
Korean Prosecutors Seek Arrest of Family Federation Head โ The Washington Timeshttps://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/sep/18/korean-prosecutors-seek-arrest-octogenarian-head-family-federation/
'Grave Consequences': Japan Warned on Campaign Against Church โ The Washington Timeshttps://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/feb/4/grave-consequences-japan-warned-campaign-church/
Unification Church Leader Arrested in S. Korean Ex-First Lady Bribery Case โ Al Jazeerahttps://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/23/unification-church-leader-arrested-in-s-korean-ex-first-lady-bribery-case
Unification Church Leader Detained โ The Korea Heraldhttps://www.koreaherald.com/article/10581613
U.S. Political Commentary
Newt Gingrich โ International Religious Freedom Summit 2025 โ The Washington Timeshttps://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/feb/4/grave-consequences-japan-warned-campaign-church/
Mike Pompeo โ International Religious Freedom Conference, January 31, 2024 โ quoted in The Washington Timeshttps://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/feb/4/grave-consequences-japan-warned-campaign-church/