5. Jan, 2019

Murder Mountain and the Waco Seige

Having watched these two very different documentaries about communes set up to deliver, one a secular ideal, the other a religious one, the conclusions were alarming.  One thing is for sure, wherever there are people, you’re never going to create another Garden of Eden.

Murder Mountain, in northern California, was established by a set of hippies in the sixties, post Vietnam, to live on the land and establish a peaceful community.  Hippy culture being imbued by pot smoking, one of the founders planted 20 Mexican marijuana seeds, from which 12 plants grew. And from these dragon's teeth, over time, this place now grows sixty percent of all the marijuana in America.  Since those early days, growth of it for medical purposes was legalised and now the black market is transitioning into a white market as growing it with permits has been passed by law. In the meantime, the original settlers were persecuted by Nixon, who used the drugs war to destroy the counter culture where he could and drive them out.  Hard core criminal gangs from all countries moved in to profit from the drugs and it’s called Murder Mountain for obvious reasons. People disappear with alarming regularity, especially those who come to it to help with the harvesting of the buds, ‘trimmigrants’ as they are called, often again young hippy style international travellers, naively thinking they’re going to smoke some weed, hang out and make a fortune.  Many have met very different fates, as along with drugs goes trafficking but sadly most of their fates go undiscovered and the local police seem inured to the inevitability of it and their own inability to patrol Murder Mountain, leaving families coming to seek and search and put up another among the many posters of the missing.

The Waco seige was the culmination of a bizarre leader’s reign over a world’s end cult called the Davidians.  Prior to the arrival of one highly peculiar individual in the guise of being a harmless hippy musician who just drifted in but, in his case, being the antithesis of that, they had their prophets and the wife of the last had just been voted as their new prophet. But poor Judith, age seventy, was soon under the (to me invisible) charisma of the now self renamed David Koresh, as were others.  He showed his burgeoning godhead by having her thrown out of the back of a moving van as she had to be expelled for some trumped up reason or another. And then, oh glory, he was leader. Footage was shown of him ‘teaching’. Survivors still banged on about his knowledge, the spell he cast.  I suppose like all narcissistic demagogic ranters, perhaps you had to be there to understand why it worked. In his case he ranted his way through the Bible and in particular fixated on the seven seals in Revelations. He ‘preached’ elsewhere in the world and people joined him.

To me, he operated in the way all new rulers have done in primitive start up societies.  Create a religious environment of which you are the patriarch and which you control, take sexual ownership of all the women to spread your seed (25 children I think he had in the end), cow the men by separating the families and making sure you arm and train the upcoming youth to do your bidding. Above all make them believe that you love them and are the true messiah or even, as he came to style himself, the new lamb of God.  This was in nineties America, though, not an ancient world. He wanted Armageddon for his cult and he got it. Through a blundering series of escalating interventions and the bringing in of die hard killer army forces, the place was gassed, shot up and burned to the ground. The jury’s out on whether the invaders or those under siege started the fire. Koresh saved none of his infant children and seemed to be part of those finished off in mercy killings by someone inside, with a shot to the forehead.  The most chilling thing to me now is hearing people who made it out, either before or afterwards, still inculcated with belief in the lunatic and survivor guilt that they didn’t die ‘for God’ in the fire. The parallels with what is going on today, brainwashed people, whether mentally vulnerable or not to start with, piling into the innocent believing it’s killing for ‘Allah,” are inescapable. They call it blind faith, don’t they?