World Famous Cults and Fanatics (17 page)

In 1991, his amazing history was reconstructed from memories of disciples by Vancouver writer John Oliphant in a book called
Brother Twelve.
It is probably the most remarkably detailed
case history of a “false messiah” that has ever been compiled.

The Ku Klux Klan

During the chaos and maladministration that followed the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the social order in the defeated Southern states was effectively turned upside
down.
Former slaves were not only given the vote, they were given virtual freedom to take revenge on their old masters.

Gangs of ex-slaves and opportunists from the North (nicknamed “Carpetbaggers”) pillaged, raped and murdered almost under the noses of the occupying Federal troops.
Where punishment
took place it was often ludicrously light and the whites grumbled that there was one law for “niggers” and another for “decent white folks”.
Into this gap in the justice
system stepped former General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his Klansmen.

Forrest (who had distinguished himself during the war by ordering the massacre of over 200 surrendered black Union troops at Fort Pillow in April 1864) told the Klansmen to dress themselves and
even their horses in white shrouds; thus to convince the superstitious and poorly educated blacks that they were the avenging ghosts of Confederate soldiers.

The Klan saw themselves as modern knights, dedicated to the Southern code of honour.
Indeed, in the beginning, they made some effort to catch the real offenders and the beatings generally
outnumbered the lynchings, but their very popularity eventually brought about their collapse.

By the 1870s, the Klan membership had swelled to tens of thousands and Forrest’s “secret army” was totally unmanagable.
He watched with growing disgust as Klan posses looted
and butchered almost indiscriminately among the black communities across the South and, along with his staff he resigned in 1872.
With the change in the political climate at the time (i.e.
the
North selling off the blacks’ rights in return for economic agreement with the South), the Klan’s reason for existence vanished and it soon died out.
It did not, however, stay dead.

In 1915, coinciding with the release of D.
W.
Griffith’s apparently pro-Klan movie,
Birth of a Nation,
an Atlanta Methodist preacher, “Colonel” William Joseph Simmons,
started to agitate for a rebirth of the “noble order”.
He received widespread support and the new Ku Klux Klan soon had a rocketing membership.
This time, though, its interests were not
in the restoration of social order, but the instigation of racial hatred.

Simmons’s and his fellows’ vitriol was not just aimed at the blacks; Catholics, Jews, non-Americans and all critics of the Ku Klux Klan were also attacked.
This broad appeal base
swelled the movement to hundreds of thousands throughout the First World War and on into the next two decades.
At the same time, its leaders became stunningly rich by skimming the Klan’s
funds.
By the 1930s, the Klan was one of the most powerful financial institutions in the USA.

The cost to human life exacted by this hate machine was appalling.
The actual number of lynchings and burnings is unknown – partially due to cover-ups by Klan-friendly police departments
– but other atrocities, deliberately publicized by the Klan, were also common.
Whippings, shootings, mutilations, rapes and brandings with the letters “KKK” were common throughout
the 1920s and 1930s.
The Government seemed powerless or unwilling to stop the persecutions.

Then, with the coming of the Second World War, membership started to drop off.
In an attempt to revive their fortunes, the Klan leaders forged an alliance with the Nazi American Bund.
When the
Bund was denounced as un-American and disbanded the Klan tried to erase its links with the group, but it was too late; the mud stuck and membership crashed.
In 1944, the Internal Revenue Service
charged the Klan with failure to pay massive back taxes; this was the final straw.
On 23 April 1944, the Klan leaders officially dissolved the movement; but, again, it refused to die.

Separate groups of Ku Klux Klansmen managed to keep the ugly dream alive throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
In the 1960s the movement received a boost during the civil rights troubles, but stood
little chance of a full revival.
The mood of the country had changed, and it was now the racists who were looked upon with distrust and loathing.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Klan hung on, but has undergone several important changes.
Its new emphasis is on religious fundamentalism (which was always a part of its belief, but never the
backbone, which had always been racism) and post-nuclear Survivalism.
The new creed predicts that the forces of Satan (led by Jews, Communists and non-whites) will cause a nuclear Armageddon which
will be followed by a war between the powers of Good and Evil.
In the preparation for this day, the modern Ku Klux Klan has set up several paramilitary training camps in the Southern states.

Charles Manson

A former Brother Twelve disciple alleged in court that Wilson had ordered him to kill one of his enemies by black magic, but that he had refused.
In that respect, at least,
Wilson had a less malign influence than Charles Manson, the “hippie” messiah of the 1960s.

Manson was born in Cincinnati in 1934, the son of a fifteen-year-old girl who had become pregnant by her seventeen-year-old boyfriend.
His mother was reported by neighbours to be
“loose”.
“She ran around a lot, drank, got in trouble.”
She also vanished for days at a time.
When Charlie was five, she was sentenced to five years in prison for armed
robbery.
Out again in 1942, she tried to have her son taken into a foster home, but none were available; at twelve, he was sent to a “caretaking institution” for boys in Indiana.
After
running away several times – his mother did not want him at home – he was arrested for burglary; escaping from custody he committed a series of burglaries and armed robberies, for which
he was sent to a reform school when he was thirteen.
A parole officer later said: “Charlie was the most hostile parolee I’ve ever come across.”
Small and not particularly strong,
Manson was nevertheless a highly dominant person who felt that his best defence was to “act tough”.
He also committed a number of homosexual offences, including rape, holding a razor
against the victim’s throat.

Released from reformatory at twenty, he married a seventeen-year-old girl and drove her to Los Angeles in a stolen car; in March 1956, a son was born.
Three months later Manson was sent to
prison again.
for car theft.
He was behind bars intermittently until 1967, when he was thirty-two.

Free once more, he drifted to San Francisco, which was then crowded with “hippies” who smoked pot and talked about flower power.
For Manson, this was a revelation; the world had
changed totally since 1956.
Older than most of the drop-outs on Haight-Ashbury, he was soon a local “character”, with his own admiring retinue of teenagers.
He took full advantage of
the new sexual freedom, and accumulated a kind of harem.
One girl, Mary Brunner, was later described as his “favourite wife”.
Another, Lynn (“Squeaky”) Fromme, joined his
ménage when he found her crying by the side of the road after a family row.
Yet another, Susan Atkins, later described how Manson had given her confidence by making her undress, then telling
her: “Look, you’re beautiful.”
What such girls found attractive about Manson was that he was a totally unthreatening father figure, a kind of mixture of Charlie Chaplin and
Christ.
He liked to point out that his name meant “Man’s son”, and clearly thought of himself as a Christ figure.

By October 1967, Manson was tired of Haight-Ashbury, and moved with his disciples to Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles.
There were about sixteen girls in the group by this time, and four men.
One of
the girls, Sandy Good, told him about a ranch owned by in old man named George Spahn, who was almost blind.
Manson went to look at it, and Spahn allowed the hippies to stay for several weeks.

Manson’s ambition was to become a pop star, like Bob Dylan; he played guitar and sang his own songs.
Terry Meicher, son of the film star Doris Day, talked about a $20,000 record contract.
Manson sold a song to the successful pop group, the Beach Boys, whose drummer, Dennis Wilson, allowed the “family” to move into his luxury home for a while.
It suddenly began to look as
if Manson might end up rich and famous too.

Another coup was persuading the owner of a small ranch near the Spahn ranch to give it to them – while they were all under the influence of drugs – in exchange for a painted
tent.

But success continued to elude him, and he developed an increasing tendency to denounce civilization and all its evils.
He was convinved that a nuclear holocaust was imminent and that blacks
were poised to take over America.
(Oddly enough, Manson was violently racist.) In October 1968, the “family” drove an old bus into Death Valley, in the Mojave desert, until the brakes
burned out, then moved into a derelict farm, the Barker ranch.
When winter came they moved back to Los Angeles, and Manson’s next-door neighbour commented that he was very opinionated and
very anti-establishment, and that Manson’s women said “they would give their lives for Charlie”.

It seems likely that at this period Manson’s non-stop psychedelic trips began to induce intense paranoia (although even at reform school psychiatrists had noted some paranoia).
The Beatles
song “Helter Skelter” provided him with a code name for the day of reckoning for the “pigs” – the bourgeoisie, the blacks and the authorities.
The family began to
acquire guns and knives, and two “dune buggies” – vehicles that would run on sand – one with a forged cheque and one with stolen money.
In 1969, he shot a negro dope dealer
named Crowe in the torso – although Crowe recovered in hospital and no questions were asked.
Manson was relieved when no Black Panthers came to seek revenge.

In July 1969, a Zen Buddhist convert called Gary Hinman – who had refused to sell all he had and join the family – was held at gunpoint while the family searched his home for money.
When Hinman showed fight, Manson slashed his face with a sword half severing an ear.
After that, Hinman was forced to sign over his car and bus to Manson, then stabbed twice and left to bleed to
death.

The police were now harassing the “family”, who were back at the Spahn ranch – looking for stolen cars and stolen credit cards.
In early August 1969, Manson told his followers:
“Now is the time for Helter Skelter.”

On the evening of Friday, 8 August, a murder party of four left for a house in Hollywood where Terry Melcher had once lived; Manson chose it because he knew it.
Tex Watson, Linda Kasabian, Susan
Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel drove to 10050 Cielo Drive, and Watson cut the telephone wires.
The house had now been let to film director Roman Polanski, who was in London, and his wife Sharon
Tate was giving dinner to three guests: Jay Sebring, an ex-lover, Voityck Frykowski, and his girlfriend Abigail Folger, who were staying.
Sharon Tate was heavily pregnant.

A youth named Stephen Parent, who had been visiting the house boy, drove down the drive on his way home and called to ask the dark figures what was happening.
Tex Watson shot him five times in
the head.
Then they broke into the house by cutting through a screen window.

Frykowski had fallen asleep on the settee under the influence of drugs; Abigail Folger had retired to bed for the same reason.
Sebring was talking to Sharon Tate in her bedroom.
Watson woke
Frykowski up and ordered Susan Atkins to tie his hands.
Sebring came downstairs asking what was happening and made a grab for the gun; Watson shot him in the lung.
Then a rope was thrown over a
beam and tied round the necks of Sebring, Abigail Folger and Sharon Tate.
As Sebring began to struggle, Watson stabbed him several times.
Frykowski began to run, and was shot in the back, then
clubbed.
Abigail Folger, also running, was stabbed by Patricia Krenwinkel.
Out in the garden, where Linda Kasabian was keeping watch, Frykowski was stabbed to death by Watson.
Then, back in the
house, Watson ignored Sharon Tate’s pleas for mercy and stabbed her in the breast.
Finally, Susan Atkins wrote “Pig” in blood on the door, and they left.

They stripped off their bloody clothes and washed themselves with a grass sprinkler on someone’s lawn; the elderly house owner came out and shooed them off, noting the number of their car
as they drove away.

Later that night, Manson seems to have come to the house to make sure everyone was dead.
And the next morning, the family watched with delight as news of the murders was broadcast on
television.