I know we all hate the feds here, but the atf didn’t start the Waco fires. Denying reality to own the cops isn’t something that we should be doing. This and killdozer are like 2 of the things that pisses me off with the left trying to co-opt libertarian folk heros because pig bad
as someone who has studied cults in great depths for years, very excited for a struggle session i can actually partake in
anyways koresh was bad, but no one else deserved to die, ATF is definitely mostly at fault here for the amount of deaths (especially of the kids), and proved all the members’ beliefs to be true. It affected even the kids released before the final attack as they too saw how koresh had been right all along. Many of the kids told the social workers stuff like “you’re going to kill my family,” and then they did. Just really sad insight from those kids. Luckily the kids were kept track of for years afterwards in the system and some seemed to be doing pretty good.
also to add ATF killed all those people and this lead to McVeigh. So ATF killed 200+ people with that decision.
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I mean he himself mentioned Waco as his reasoning more than once. Sure something else may have triggered it eventually, but Waco is what did, so ATF deserves some of the blame.
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Really upsetting. I hate when people call it a mass suicide because I feel it is better described as mass-murder. There are (in my opinion) a lot of differences between what happened there vs the suicides of Heaven's Gate for example. They're one of the best examples of physical brainwashing in cults given the intense sleep deprivation and other stuff. I've started recently looking into the potential MK Ultra theories, which I haven;t read too much on yet, but it's interesting.
I feel Jim Jones though -- and other various smaller groups -- shows that some cults lean a bit into socialist-y ideas sometimes as well.
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i mean all cult leaders are more nuanced than the average person gives them credit for. people can do horrendous things while still being complex, having good intentions (not saying Jones had those but ykiw), and etc. Jones was fucked up, but if you looked into some of his earlier ideas, i'm sure you'd be like "oh i agree with him." nothing is ever purely black and white!
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Highly recommend reading the book (pdf actually, the book is impossible to find) Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment. I'm kind of obsessed with this story rn.
A few interesting points off the top of my head:
The Layton family were all up in the leadership of the people's temple. The patriarch of this family was a cia scientist who came to the US via operation paperclip. The author of the book thinks that Layton was running the whole Jonestown thing. One of his daughters was the accountant for the PT and involved in laundering money and keeping it in offshore accounts.
Jones was doing some real suspect "missionary work" in south america pre Jonestown.
Before Jones and the PT took it over the site of Jonestown was used to train mercenaries who were going to angola.
Jones had an old friend named Dan Mitrione who became a cia torture expert, and trained contra groups. He was kidnapped and killed by a revolutionary group.
This is just scratching the surface