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
The ATF are the ones who escalated the situation into a siege in the first place.
How else do you liberate a compound where people were being held against their will?
You really believe the ATF didn’t start the Waco fire? They literally were pumping tear gas into the compound
Yeah my understanding was that it was the ATF but if anyone’s got sources saying otherwise I want to see
The ATF set fire to the building and massacred the people inside with automatic weaponry
OP is likely using untrustworthy ATF documents as evidence. I’m not gonna say they’re bad faith, they clearly aren’t. But propaganda is propaganda
CS gas is not flammable but the cartridges can light and have lit fires multiple times. Not one but two different fires were started in the same year in Athens by tear gas.
But the atf didn’t start any fires, the davidians were the ones who were pouring gas and other flammable shit and alluding to Isaiah 13 right before the fire started
You don’t think that the tank that rammed into the building could have sprayed gasoline alongside the CS?
It wasn’t an APC. It was an M728 Combat Engineer Vehicle, which I believe had a way to dump fuel out of the exhaust
Too much of a reach. Far easier to believe that the doomsday cult set themselves on fire before shooting their leader and stabbing a kid
The ATF is still ultimately responsible for the situation. They could have nabbed Koresh when he left the compound for a shopping trip (something he was known to do). Without the leader, the compound would have surrendered, imp
Nah, but the gas grenades they also used can potentially start fires. The ATF also lied about using them and when caught out said that they'd used them at a different time. Dunno if I believe them to be honest.
I don't think they intentionally set the fires, and it does seem more likely that those inside the compound did but the ATF did use devices that can sometimes cause fires and then lied about it. I reckon they realised there was a chance they'd accidentally caused the fires and lied to cover it up.
The really dodgy stuff is about who shot first in the initial firefight that started the seige. A few survivors insist the ATF fired first. The door of the compound would probably have proven it one way or another but mysteriously the whole door simply vanished.
But yeah, no one should idolize them at all.
Killdozer is simply the same fulfillment of the destiny of every small business tyrant, bonus if a family court divorced guy. Hence the meme ability of it
Only cuz he didn’t kill anyone. Psycho was out for blood and had things gone differently they’d be a few dozen squashed people.
Dude was the ultimate small business tyrant who flipped his lid because the city wanted him to pay for a sewer hookup. Dunno if you ever watched the Donoteat video on him but it's good
He had three guns in the dozer, and a hit list of people. I think the situation was funny but the dude who did it was a disturbed person who pretty clearly wanted to do something way more fucked up than he ended up pulling off.
It’s funny in the same way that dork in Texas who tried to do a shooting but got iced by a rent a cop before letting off a single round is funny.
Yes it’s funny he failed
What he was trying to do was mess up tho so I don’t like it when I see him get celebrated on social media
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
He was. The ATF still murdered 76 people. If they really wanted to arrest Koresh, they would have got him when he left the compound
Police brutality and corruption are the right reasons to hate pigs.
Tfw they try to corner me :dorner:
Dorner is one of the best memes & I’ll die before I give him up
They ultimately encountered officers of the law who were little more than unaccountable people with guns, and it's a nice shorthand to bring up when explaining to country folk how police officers impact minority populations in cities.
Well yeah, but they weren't going to get any graces in court unlike the pigs they stood against. People tend to be aware that such confrontations are never going to be justly handled.
i believe they were held plenty accountable, actually
They were a cult lead by a pedo but the ATF royally fucked the situation and gunned down a lot of people who probably didn’t need to be killed.
Dorner was fired for reporting brutality. He then made a manifesto about that, and took up asymmetric warfare against the LAPD
Dorner was basically going on a workplace rampage, and targeted the children of people who pissed him off.
a cop adjacent.
An innocent woman, yes. And he fully intended to kill more.
Everyone who focuses on that fact ignores the fact that he was fighting to expose brutality and his treatment by the racist LAPD.
How does murdering an unrelated woman expose police brutality? Plenty of people expose police brutality without murdering people.
He was fighting for revenge like any workplace spree killer and used brutality as an excuse. If he wanted to expose police brutality, why didn't he just record his colleagues doing some? Why did he have to kill them and their family members?
Although Dorner is another case like Waco where the cops totally burned him to death where they could have taken him peacefully and fucking lied about it.
MFer had already been fired at that point. He got fired for trying to do that. Was he supposed to just find cops while out on the street and film them? People have been arrested, killed, or both for that.
Then why didn't he join an anti-police brutality activist group? There are plenty of those around. There's nothing that can justify running around like some version of The Punisher that goes after cops and their kids. This entire line of defense is fucking idiotic.
a cop adjacent.
Former cops daughter. How dare that piece of shit be birthed by a cops wife!
Her fiancé was a cop, too. Just a mall cop type. And he still killed cops. He isn’t a proletarian hero but treating him like the villain is wrong and plays into the hands of the Police Media
I feel like a lot of discourse here about him boils down to “yeah but he was not good either” and I feel like both siding a situation about a POC having an ill intentioned struggle against the cops doesn’t do much to service leftism
For me it’s the Simpsons meme of the guys on the boat cheering at the monkey fight, I’m not gonna venerate the fucking branch davidians for shit but if they wanna fight the cops I’m making popcorn.
