Book Review & Analysis: The Making Of a Moonie by Eileen Barker

The Making Of a Moonie:

Brainwashing or Choice?

by Eileen Barker

      During the Cult Scare of the 1970s-80s, the Unification Church, otherwise known as the Moonies, were a lightning rod for controversy. Their interface with the public was through proselytizers with glassy eyes and smiles that were a little too big to be true. Accusations of kidnapping, con artistry, teaching false religious doctrines, deceptive recruiting techniques, and brainwashing were common. Those last two issues are examined in an academic study by the sociologist Eileen Barker in The Making Of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice?

By the end of the 1970s, the Unification Church was spreading rapidly throughout North America, Western Europe, and Asia. Their belief system was ecumenical in its pursuit of uniting all religions into one under their leader Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a charismatic Protestant from South Korea. Church belief and ritual was syncretic, combining elements of Evangelical Christianity, Confucianism, Taoism, and Korean shamanism. Moon claimed to be the Messiah sent to Earth because previous leaders of world religions have failed to save humanity. The church was famous in those days for having mass weddings in which Moon chose brides and grooms at random to marry each other.

Sun Myung Moon had a colorful past. During the Korean War, he was tortured by the Chinese Communists in a prison camp. He claimed to have met Jesus Christ who told him that the crucifixion proved that he had failed as a messiah and it was Moon’s duty to pick up where he left off. After establishing the Unification Church in South Korea and Japan, Moon opened its world headquarters outside of New York City while overseeing a vast network of corporate businesses and real estate that included a weapons manufacturing plant and a newspaper with a right wing extremist editorial bias. Moon later went to prison in America for tax evasion and money laundering. Eileen Barker neglects to mention that Moon had worked for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and liaised with members of the American CIA during the era when they were conducting brainwashing experiments in the MK Ultra program. She also doesn’t mention that the Unification Church has deep financial ties to the Republican Party through lobbying and campaign contributions.

Eilen Barker’s goal is to investigate whether accusations of brainwashing are accurate or not. “Brainwashing”, as she defines it, means erasing the contents of a person’s mind and filling it with the authority’s chosen contents thereby turning people into robots who do whatever they are commanded to withlut question. I have immediate suspicions of her definition. It isn’t hard to disprove her definition of brainwashing becase it doesn’t define what is done during thought reform conditioning.

A point of comparison could be made with the training of soldiers in the military when they are taught to obey commands from officers and to do so without thought or hesitation. This is necessary because anybody with common sense would be reluctant to walk into a battlefield with people shooting and bombing each other unless they have a death wish. But soldiers learn to do this on command. This could be considered a form of brainwashing and yet those soldiers still have the ability to make choices. The number of soldiers who go AWOL proves this as well as what they do during leisure time. Plus soldiers can and sometimes do disobey orders with the caveat that they suffer consequences for it. So I’m not convinced that brainwashing entails the idea of turning people into mindless robots. People inside high pressure control groups can still think for themselves and make choices. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t authorities setting the parameters of what choices they are allowed to make though. I’m not comfortable with the term “brainwashing” anyhow. I much prefer something like “psychological/social conditioning”. So right off the bat, there are problems with Barker’s study.

The fieldwork was done using two methods. One was participant observation in which Barker attended Moonie recruitment workshops. The other was having workshop participants fill in surveys. The workshops were held in attractive-looking buildings in rural areas outside San Francisco and London. Participants are brought in from cities on buses owned by the Moonies. Initial workshops run for three days with subsequent workshops running for one week or one month before a member commits to joining full or part time. Barker makes the observation that no one tried to leave the workshops, disproving the accusation that the church holds people against their will during the recruitment process. But I find her conclusion to be hasty as I think something more subtle was going on. It may be true that anybody could leave the premises any time they wanted. The doors weren’t locked as she pointed out. But being in a rural area without transportation was a factor she didn’t consider. Most people would be smart enough not to walk the long distance back to the city, especially when they didn’t have sufficient directions. Hitchhiking might be an option, but by the end of the 70s, violent crimes against hitchikers had made the practice almost obsolete. It would make the most sense to put up with the remainder of the workshop and be taken back at the end. So yes, the individual who wantsedto leave had a choice, but the parameters of the choice were limited, something that Eilen Barker never took into consideration.

The workshops consisted of group discussions, meals, walking, game playing, singing, group prayers, and listening to sermons. Sleep time was limited and potential recruits were woken up early to walk and play sports before breakfast. All activities were closely monitored and guided by Unification Church recruiters. Critics of the cult have made accusations of sleep deprivation being used to make members too fatigued to think clearly. But Barker dismisses this by saying she didn’t see any evidence that workshop attendees weren’t thinking clearly. Of course, the attendees weren’t allowed to have any in depth conversations during the workshops so it is hard to know what evidence she based her conclusion on.

Another accusation made by critics is that the Moonies brainwash people by inducing altered states of consciousness. Barker also dismisses this by saying she saw no evidence. But she never operationalizes the concept of “altered states of consciousness”. She doesn’t consider that singing or praying in groups could fall into this category. During the act of singing, for instance, the individual’s ego can get dissolved into the collectivity of the group, making the individual more susceptible to peer pressure and suggestion from outside. That doesn’t mean every time people sing they are being brainwashed; it means by submitting to the activity they can be softened up and made more receptive to suggestions, some of which may not be in their best interest. Singing and prayer can also be a way of creating an emotional bond between the individual and the group as well as being a means for controlling and regulating moods and emotions. Something similar can be achieved through group prayer or playing team sports, activities in which the group’s solidarity supersedes the importance of the individual in a goal directed task. Combine sport activities with sleep deprivation and some people can be turned into putty in the hands of an authority figure. Sleep deprivation works in the military and it is commonly used in cults too.

Also the constant supervision and guidance of recruiters was dismissed by Barker as being harmless, but it is easy to see another perspective. Aside from maintaining regulation of the groups through a daily organized program of activities, recruiters monitored and guided conversations so that potential members couldn’t discuss and evaluate their situation freely without someone watching over them and steering the conversations. Barker didn’t feel this direct control over the socializing of attendees had any influence over whether or not they chose to join. Even if you take the subjectivity of each workshop attendee out of the equation, the strict scheduling of workshop activities without sufficient time for unguided socializing indicates a high level of environmental control on the part of the Moonies.

Eileen Barker’s other method of data collection involved surveys of participants in the Unification Church’s recruitment workshops. These surveys were given accodring to rigorous scientific standards, including control groups and peer review, and were, in my opinion, the strongest and most interesting part of her study. One survey petitioned participants to explain why they chose to join or not to join the Unification Church after having attended the workshops. The most common reason for those who joined was that it potentially would fulfill the spiritual purpose they felt they lacked outside the cult. Most of them were spiritual seekers. For those who refused to join, reasons varied so widely that it was difficult to draw a definite conclusion. But for Barker, the larger point is that they didn’t join which to her means that they weren’t brainwashed and, further, this means that the Unification Church never brainwashed anybody or even had any intentions of trying to brainwash members.

Of more interest, from a legitimate standpoint from my perspective, were the second set of surveys which categorized the personality types of people who did join the church. The majority of recruits were white, middle class or working class young people. They came from stable and comfortable homes, claiming to have had happy childhoods. Contrary to public perception, none of them suffered from mental illness or trauma. They tended to be religious but not fanatical. Most of them were unhappy with the wider society, but were too conservative to become part of the hippy movement. The ambiguities of life outside the comforts of their childhood homes caused them distress and they sought comfort and stability in a protective and tightly structured group that sheltered them from that outside world with its conflicts and uncertainties. They were people with a low tolerance for ambiguity. You could say they were people who weren’t well-prepared or tough enough for the world the rest of us live in.

While Eileen Barker raises some interesting counter-arguments to the accusation that the Unification Chrch brainwashes its members, her study seems naive and short-sighted. You could say that her study proves her conclusion according to her definition of brainwashing, but her argument is based on a false premise if you don’t accept her definition of brainwashing to begin with. I find her definition to be too narrow to be of use in a study of this kind. Her fieldwork and collection of data yield some significant insights, but she draws some hasty conclusions without fully examining the full range of possible explanations. For example, she claims that the large number of people who decided not to join the cult after the workshops proves that no brainwashing took place, but she doesn’t take some things into account like the possibilities that brainwashing is not effective 100 percent of the time, or that some people are resistant to it, or that the workshops might even be designed to weed out the people who don’t fit into the church’s social dynamics. In other words, it is possible that they don’t want everybody to join and limit their recruitment to finding those who fit a certain personality type. The fact that potential recruits are monitored so heavily during activities like sports or group discussions makes me question whether they apply recruitment pressure equally on all members of the workshop. Maybe they target certain individuals or even alter their approach to nudge potential members into joining while simply letting those who don’t fit well to leave without a fuss. In a cult based around mass conformity and mind control, they don’t want people who are going to go against the grain. On top of all that, from what I have read about other high control groups, the process of mind control is incremental. Social conditioning isn’t something done instantly. Barker’s conclusion that brainwashing didn’t take place is based on observations made of two different workshops and doesn’t take long range membership in the Moonies into consideration. From my perspective, it looks like the workshops are designed to lay the groundwork for stronger, long range conditioning and control over time and she says almost nothing about what happens to members once they have joined. Her study is like judging the quality of an 800 pages novel after only reading the first two pages.

The Making Of a Moonie is limited in its scope. The subject of whether or not the Unification Church brainwashes its members can’t be conclusive on her testimony alone. She doesn’t gather enough information to have a final say. Even if the Moonies don’t practice mind control, there are plenty of reasons to stay away from them. Like so many other versions of corporate Christianity, the church has been wracked with scandals including sexual abuse, fraud, and ties to extremist right wing politics. Sun Myung Moon died a few years ago and now the cult is run by his two sons who are fighting over who should inherit their father’s kingdom in just the way that sons of the Messiah would. Considering that Moon claimed Jesus Christ failed because he died, I wonder how they explain that the church is legitimate now that the Messiah Sun Myung Moon is dead. One son has formed a subsect of the Unification Church called the Rod of Iron. No that isn’t the title of a cheesy porno movie from the 1970s. It is a church that worships guns. You can watch their sermons on Youtube. The preacher wears a crown made of bullets and talks about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the need to end democracy in America delivered in a voice that alternates between a conversational tone and hysterical screaming. This church sent busloads of members to Washington D.C. for the attempted coup on January 6, claiming that the Democrats are controlled by demons. It’s best to stay away from these kooks. Nothing good can come from this.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Don't Call Me Brother by Austin Miles

Don't Call Me Brother:

A Ringmaster Escapes From the Pentecostal Church

by Austin Miles

      Pentecostal Christianity is just over one hundred years old. It originated in the post-Confederate South and emphasized the “presence of the Holy Spirit” as its followers would say. This includes music and singing, faith healing, and glossolalia or speaking in tongues, an altered state of consciousness in which a church-goer gets possessed by the Holy Spirit and vocalizes nonsensical sounds. Speaking in tongues is rooted in West African culture and is something that was brought over by slave communities then appropriated by white Christian Revivalists. All this is directed by the pastor of the church, a fiery speaker who brings the emotional pitch of the congregation up to an extreme. The circus, of course, is an entertainment tradition that dates back at least to the Roman Empire. The show is conducted by the ringmaster in tuxedo and stovepipe hat. So when a ringmaster becomes the preacher at a Pentecostal church, the lines between religion and entertainment get blurred. This is what happens in Austin Miles’ autobiography Don’t Call Me Brother.

Austin Miles had a miserable childhood. He came from a broken family in Indiana and ran away to join the circus when he was a teenager. As a clown, he took to the carny life with ease, being impressed with the showmanship and spectacle of the performances and the colorful characters who lived the transient circus life offstage. It was a traveling village of multi-ethnic misfits with talent. Miles moved on to become a ringmaster as he matured and again, he had a natural talent for it.

He met his wife Rose Marie in New York City. After marriage, they traveled to Switzerland to meet her aristocratic family who didn’t readily approve of him. These details of the marriage are interesting up to a point, but Miles dwells on his time in Switzerland with the family for far too long to serve the purposes of this story.

When they settle back in New York, Miles’ daughter from a previous marriage comes to live with them and everything is great, at least for a little while. Behind the scenes of the circus, a creepy German trapeze artist named Bobby Yerkes begins proselytizing Christianity to Austin Miles. Then something strange happens at a circus performance in the Bible Belt state of Tennessee. When the show is about to begin, a man in the audience has a heart attack. Being the good ringmaster he is, he asks the audience to pray for the victim’s recovery. Being a leader in such a venue means keeping the audience’s mind alert at down times like this so they don’t fret and ruin the whole show with a soured attitude. The next day, Miles learns the man recovered from his heat attack. The ringmaster attributes this to the prayer and then decides to convert to Christianity. Of course, not everybody who has a heart attack dies. But this is proof enough so Austin Miles approaches Bobby Yerkes and throws himself headfirst into the world of fundamentalist Christianity. He later learns that Yerkes is a pervert.

When the Assemblies of God ministries learn that a circus ringmaster has converted to Christianity, they see green and ask him to become a pastor. Enticed by the lure of the religious spotlight, Miles can’t resist. He meets with high level officials, let’s call them businessmen, and begins touring the country to give church services. Finally he meets up with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and becomes regular guest on their fledgling PTL Club TV show, helping to usher in the age of televangelists. The transition from circus performer to Christian evangelist is an easy one to see. In comparison to the dour and dust-dry congregations of the Protestant denominations and the solemn, downbeat masses of Catholicism, Charismatic Christianity offers an emotionally charged performance with audience participation, histrionic sermons, stimulating music, and intense visual displays of faith healing and glossolalia. The draw is that it is more of spectacle than traditional religions. Christian theology is never discussed. In a media and entertainment saturated culture like the United States of America, Pentecostalism has an advantage. The PTL Club becomes just one choice of TV shows out of a handful of others in the days when cable TV was beginning. Channel surfing rubes might pause as they run through their options when they see the showmanship of a faith healing, a band playing, or, an exorcism complete with demonic voices and foaming mouths straight out of The Exorcist.

Life starts going south for Austin Miles quickly. His wife Rose Marie rejects the Pentecostal church and eventually this drives a wedge between them that results in a nasty and humiliating divorce. His daughter converts to the church, but they later convince her that her father is satanic so she refuses to have anything to do with him.

Aside from the destruction of his family, Miles gets a behind-the-scenes view of what goes on in the shadows of Assemblies of God. The organization is little more than a Reagan era corporation complete with a board of directors and tax-free status because they are registered as a religious organization. The higher ups live lavishly in mansions, own private airplanes, and fleets of Mercedes Benzes. Miles’ work as a circus performer is cut out for him when they open Heritage U.S.A., a Disneyworld like theme park for born again Christians. By the end of the 1980s, financial scandals are tearing Assemblies of God apart; charges of tax evasion, fraud, and financial mishandling are rampant. Sexual scandals of all kinds are revealed too, including adultery, pedophilia, prostitution, wife swapping, and gay sex. Jim Bakker’s involvement in gay sex orgies and his affair with Jessica Hahn ruin his career.

Austin Miles has his own personal misgivings too. Tithing, or the donation of money to the church, is prioritized over all other religious practices. He learns that people being healed in faith healings are often shills. He also learns that ordinary stage magic is being used by some pastors to demonstrate their gift for performing miracles. With hindsight he knew all this is happening, but he doesn’t listen to his conscience because he feels he is doing something to help his congregations.

The darkest, and possibly the least credible, part of Miles’ story is that he thinks there is a conspiracy against him. For reasons he can’t understand, the Assemblies of God churches start to shun him. Vicious rumors about his immoral conduct spread and his engagements at preaching gigs are canceled one after the other. He believes he is being persecuted and blames the FBI. He claims his first wife, who he otherwise says nothing about, gave him a diary that proves the government assassinated Marilyn Monroe. That diary has since disappeared. Therefore the FBI is pulling strings with the Pentecostals to ruin his career as a pastor. This whole story sounds suspicious to me as if he is peddling a conspiracy theory to cover up some dirt he has in his past. This makes me wonder how much of his story is actually true. I suppose a lot of it is, considering the accusations he makes against Assemblies of God are easily corroborated in other sources, but I wonder if he isn’t being sufficiently forthright about other things he might have done. Anyhow, Austin Miles quits the church and successfully resumes his career as a ringmaster. If the FBI really wanted to ruin him, why didn’t they interfere with his circuses? Or true to form, why didn’t they just disappear him like you wold expect?

Aside from the conspiracy theory, possibly relayed in bad faith, the worst part of this book is its tendency to give long lists of bad things being done by the Pentecostals. Miles keeps repeating stories of scandals in different branches of the ministries, but it reads like the same story over and over again, just happening in different places with different people. Austin Miles also spends too much time on his private life outside the church. While his relations with his wife and family are relevant, the excessive detail he gives on these matters is overdone to the point where I just wish he would get on with the story and tell us about something more exciting.

The better side of this book is that it brings you close to the people caught in this Christian cult. It is an insider’s view of a lifestyle I can only see from an outsider’s view and. to be frank, I wouldn’t want to see this from the inside anyways. It is easy to dismiss Christian fundamentalists as a bunch of lunatics, but Miles shows us how even the worst of these grifters have a human side. They worry about their children’s future, they struggle with their marriages, they have health problems, a lot of them are having a hard time being comfortable with their sexual orientation. They care for each other and offer emotional support I times of distress. It shows how sad it is that so many gullible people get caught up in this religion-for-profit ponzi scheme. Some of them are born and raised with Evangelical Christianity. Some fall into it because the harsh circumstances of an uncertain world drive them to a place of comfort. Once inside that comfort zone, they are trapped by indoctrination, social conditioning, and the magical belief that giving all their money away will come back to them in the form of spiritual grace and healing. If they ever speak out against the wrong doings of the church, they get chewed up and spat out without mercy.

Assemblies of God and the PTL Club are a corporate den of thieves and the domain of narcissists and con men. It is an overblown version of the Southern revival tents which are only one step away from the carnival midway. The marks are unable or unwilling to admit that the pastor in the thousand dollar suit is a money grubbing charlatan just as much as the bearded lady in the circus sideshow is nothing more than a bearded man wearing make up and a dress.

The psychological profile we get of Austin Miles is interesting too. On one hand, he presents himself as a true believer in the gospel and someone who genuinely believes he is the only real person in a religion full of fakes. But having said that, you have to question why he played the game for so long. He is also quite an egomaniac who never shrinks from an opportunity to be in the spotlight whether that means preaching, being a ringmaster in the big top, doing radio interviews, or making television appearances with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. In one passage, it is the first Christmas Eve he spends alone because his wife Rose Marie has left him. To cheer himself up, he wraps Bibles in wrapping paper and walks around Times Square handing them out to needy looking people. One woman is shivering because her coat is too thin for the winter, but all Miles can think of is how grateful she and the other recipients are because he gave them a Bible. It’s little more than a big ego trip for him to show how generous he is for proselytizing his religion. I’m sure the woman would have been a lot more grateful if he had given her a coat that was heavy enough to keep her warm, but that thought probably never crossed his mind. He is the typical kind of person who seeks out fame and popularity because he didn’t feel loved when he was a child. Still, he isn’t an unsympathetic character. He certainly isn’t a bad person. He is more like a lost soul who thought he found himself and then suffered terribly when the illusion wore off. That could happen to any of us considering we can never know for sure if we are ultimately doing the right thing or not.

Don’t Call Me Brother is good for what it is. The story is predictable and Austin Miles is an amateurish writer. But the meaning of it rings true. In the year 2025 when Prosperity Gospel megachurches are fleecing people all around and the Pentecostals are in the White House whispering into the ear of the worst president in American history, it is a message that needs to be heard more than ever.

 

Book Review: Voice Of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba by Ivor L. Miller

Voice Of the Leopard:

African Secret Societies and Cuba

by Ivor L. Miller

     The general public is familiar with African diaspora religions in the Caribbean and South America via popular culture. Most of what people think of in association with Voudou (voodoo) or Lukumi (Santeria) involves skulls, drums, zombies, and black magic. It isn’t hard to see how film makers, artists, writers, and musicians have appropriated elements from these religions since mystical and sometimes dark imagery can easily capture the imagination. But not so many people realize that African diaspora religions are complex social systems that exist within broader historical, socio-political, and economic systems and thereby have function and meaning as groups within those larger systems. One of the lesser acknowledged African diaspora religions is Abakua, a secret society that began in Cuba in the 19^th century and continues to thrive today. Voice Of the Leopard, by the American anthropologist Ivor L. Miller, gives a broad overview of this group and the role they played in Cuban history.

When West African people were brought to Cuba as slaves, their religious practices accompanied them. While these religions were mostly forbidden in the United States, slave owners in places like Brazil, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Cuba allowed them to flourish, mostly because they relieved some psychological pressure that built up under the living conditions of slavery. This may have worked to some degree, but the number of slaves who escaped to live in isolated communities in the Sierra Maestra mountains, called “cimmanrones” or “maroons”, proves their situation was not one to envy. Nonetheless, Cuba was unique in that the colonialists allowed slaves to earn and save money which they could use to buy their way to freedom. That is one reason for Cuba having a small population of free African criollos who survived by working as craftsmen. According to members of Abakua societies, there was even a smaller number of West African immigrants who voluntarily came to Cuba to give slaves guidance on how to safeguard their religion in the new land. The accuracy of that belief is of no importance in this book because that is what the Abakua believe and it influences how they see the world.

Using linguistics and cross-cultural comparisons along with historical records, Miller has traced the origins of Abakua back to the Cross Rivers region along the border of Nigeria and Cameroon. In that part of Africa, fraternal societies called Ekpe have existed since times long before colonialism. The language, rituals, and mythologies of Abakua and Ekpe bear too many similarities to be coincidental. This is especially true because Abakua initiates have their own language that is only spoken with Abakua members and, although time and distance have caused morphological changes, it is essentially the same language spoken by Ekpe initiates. A similar linguistic analysis has been used to trace the origins of Roma (Gypsy) people to Rajastan in northern India, a significant discovery since that ethnic group existed for centuries without knowing precisely where they originated. The mapping of the human genome has recently justified these ancestral histories.

Miller gives some brief explanations about what Abakua members do. He starts by analyzing what kind of a group they are. He prefers the term “initiate society” over “secret society” since membership in the group is not kept secret, only their beliefs and practices are. Readers hoping for a detailed explanation of those beliefs and practices will inevitably be disappointed since such information is only transmitted to initiates who have risen through s series of degrees and offices to widen their scope of Abakua. Some basic information is shared with the public though, for example various motifs from the Ekpe/Abakua mythology, their transmission of historical narratives through call and response chanting done to the accompaniment of drumming and dancing, and the presence of the fundamento in every juego (lodge). The fundamento is the ceremonial centerpiece, or omphalos, of each juego. The original is said to have been brought over from Africa by the aforementioned voluntary immigrants from the Cross Rivers region who taught the slaves how to practice Abakua in Cuba. The Abakua juegos are open to men only. There is no discussion as to whether Abakua is actually a religion or not. From my limited knowledge of the society, I prefer to think it doesn’t fit easily into any category, containing elements of religion, magic, political secret societies, social clubs, and mutual aid fraternities.

Abakua juegos serve various functions. One is that of a mutual aid society. Dues collected by each juego can be used as health or life insurance for each member. Money is also collected for charity or educational funding. During the 19^th century, illiterate slaves who joined Abakua could receive some education they wouldn’t get elsewhere. At a local level, lodges provided a means for upward social mobility in a colony where such mobility was limited for free Afro-Cubans and usually unobtainable for slaves. Membership in a lodge required the mastery of knowledge, commitment, and responsibility. Money could also be raised in an Abakua society to help a slave buy their own freedom. Plus, the hierarchical nature of the juegos gave motivated individuals a means for moving up a social ladder thereby growing and maturing as people.

Abakua was also important for historical reasons. Since juego activities were secret and only accessible to initiates, they served as near-perfect places for clandestine political activity. Afro-Cubans who sought for an end to slavery were deeply committed to the two Cuban Wars of Independence and used their gathering places for planning military and political strategies. The Independence leader and national hero Antonio Maceo was a member of Abakua for this reason. Freemasonry also had a strong presence in 19^th century Cuba and pro-Independence Masons collaborated with Abakua to fight against the Spanish crown. The Wars of Independence also led to the establishment of Abakua juegos for both white and Chinese members who were dedicated to the Cuban nationhood cause.

Other topics covered by Miller include the reasons why Abakua has not spread further geographically than it already has and the influence Abakua has had on Cuban music and art. In the latter case, Abakua drum rhythms have a strong presence in the syncretistic styles of mambo and son. The chapter covering music is not highly detailed so deeper insights into the subject should be looked for elsewhere. In the former topic, the explanation is that strict and complicated protocols for establishing new lodges has made it nearly impossible for Abakua to spread much farther than the regions surrounding Havana and and the nearby city of Matanzas. If you want to join, your only option would be to move to Cuba. Miller also writes about recent contact and collaboration between Ekpe initiates in Nigeria and Abakua members in Cuba who have traveled to Nigeria recently with assistance from the author who is an Ekpe initiate himself aside from being an anthropologist.

Since the practice of Abakua is kept secret and only accessible to members, this book is mostly historical in nature. However, some of their ceremonies, including dances, drumming, and call and response chanting, are publicly accessible since some ceremonies are done in the yards of juegos were neighbors can observe them or hear them from a distance. I speculate that this is done as a means of proselytizing and arousing the curiosity of potential recruits. Despite not providing much information about the inner workings of this society, its influence on Cuban history is a fascinating story to learn about, especially because mainstream historians have given so little space to Abakua’s role in achieving independence and building national identity. Unfortunately, there is nothing said about Abakua in their relation to the Cuban Revolution of 1958 and Fidel Castro’s subsequent dictatorship. Abakua survived throughout all of that so there must be something to be said about them during those times.

Voice Of the Leopard gives a good overview of Abakua and its history. It serves the purpose of demonstrating how such a secret society can maintain social stability and mental health in the midst of a chaotic and ever-changing world. By giving members a sense of participation in history and having roots in an antiquarian culture, a direct line between past and present is maintained which contributes stability to the community. In this way, Abakua has acted as a positive force in Cuban society. Up until recent times, America had societies based around common interests in much the same way that the Cubans have Abakua. In 2025, fraternal orders like the Masons or the Elks, hobbyist groups, bowling leagues, labor unions, social clubs, and other societies in which people create social bonds and a sense of belonging are mostly on life support if they still exist at all. As a result of the internet, people spend more time looking at screens on laptops and cell phones then they do in the presence of others. As a result, the rates of loneliness, depression, mental illness, and suicide have spiked, especially among young people. It would be interesting to research what the rate of these ailments are in African diaspora religions. My educated guess is that they would be far less frequent than in American society. Maybe a few more groups like the Abakua could save us from ourselves.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology by William S. Burroughs

Ali's Smile/Naked Scientology

by William S. Burroughs

      A lot of William S. Burroughs’ readers don’t realize how much Scientology influenced his writings, especially the science-fiction novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In those years, Burroughs was introduced to Scientology by Brion Gysin and the two of them unofficially practiced those techniques outside the cult. This actually is not as bizarre as you might think at first since a lot of science-fiction authors of the 1950s were heavily influenced by Scientology as well. This is largely because the cult’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, started out as a science-fiction writer and moved in the circles of those other authors. But none of those writers took their interest to such an extreme as William S. Burroughs did. In the 1970s he was still convinced of the veracity of Scientology so he decided to join the organization and receive the official teachings and methods. According to biographers, he specifically thought they could cure him of his homosexuality and his heroin addiction. Of course, he continued being a gay junky until he died so that doesn’t reflect well on the efficacy of Scientology. While being a member of the cult, Burroughs wrote three magazine articles and some brief columns about being a member. Along with a Scientology-themed short story, two of these articles were published as Ali’s Smile/Naked Scientology.

The first articles included in this slim volume originally appeared in the L.A. Free Press and the East Village Other, two underground newspapers spawned by the hippie counter-cultural generation. Burroughs here wrote polemically against the Church of Scientology because of their rightward leaning political values. He accuses them of being an authoritarian organization that is racist and politically aligned with the values of the John Birch Society. He laments this because he thinks that Scientology has a lot to offer the psychonauts of the LSD generation with their taste for drugs, occultism, meditation, yoga, and altered states of consciousness in general. He argues that Scientology would be better off aligning with the Esalen Institute rather than the Barry Goldwater wing of the Republican party. Burroughs’ writings on this subject are more interesting than convincing, though he is right about the disturbing nature of the Church’s quasi-fascist political leanings.

The other article of most interest in this collection appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. Previous to its initial publication, Burroughs had written an in depth article about life in the Church of Scientology for the British porn magazine Mayfair. The cult sued the publishers for defamation and all remaining copies of that issue were ordered destroyed. Under British law, that article, unfortunately, could not be included in this book. But anyhow, a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology wrote a response to it which is published here. In response, Burroughs dissects the Scientology representative’s critique line by line and point by point in the article for Rolling Stone. The first thing to notice about the Church’s representative is that he has poor spelling and grammatical skills; his reading comprehension skills are almost as bad. Burroughs doesn’t comment on this, but it fits in with other things he has said in other places about the shabbiness of the whole Scientology operation. Burroughs does respond in an overly polite manner by pointing out the representative’s misinterpretations of the Mayfair article, along with criticisms that he stands by. He even points out some places where he said he felt some degree of satisfaction with the results of Scientology auditing and e-meter techniques. This article is brief, simple, and doesn’t qualify as something you would read if you wanted any real information on Scientology.

The standout piece in this book is the short story “Ali’s Smile” which previously appeared in Burroughs’ novel Exterminator. It involves a British colonial linguist, stationed in Malaysia, who takes a local boy home, presumably for sexual purposes although that isn’t clearly stated. The linguist inherits a kris from the boy whose name is Ali. A “kris” is a tribal and ceremonial dagger carried by males in some Islamic cultures. Meanwhile back in an unnamed village, which is probably in England, an aristocrat hires a private espionage agent to infiltrate the Church of Scientology and return to administer the techniques to the aristocrat who doesn’t want to join the cult. Meanwhile, a riot starts in the village center. A gang of hippies begin fighting with locals and an army of uniformed Scientologists show up to fight too. The previously mentioned linguist attacks the rioters with Ali’s kris and they all end up dead. My knowledge of Scientology is limited, but I do know that they believe negative thoughts and behaviors are caused by spirit invaders from outer space. Burroughs appears to be saying that such a spirit is possessed in the kris and it causes those who bear the kris to become violent. But this is a William S. Burroughs story so he also appears to be saying that such a spirit can be useful when used against your enemies. Making sense of this story requires some thinking outside the box. In fact, you may have to destroy the box altogether. But it’s a story that is both acerbic and horrifying for those who care to grapple with its obscure meaning.

While “Ali’s Smile” is a good story if you are a devoted Burroughs reader, the articles in “Naked Scientology” don’t add up to much. It would have been more compelling if the notorious Mayfair article had been included. I wish Burroughs had written an essay where he goes more in depth into his involvement with the Church of Scientology since it had such a big influence over his writings and most readers would concede that he had a unique mind and a wild imagination. As it stands, this book is probably best for archivists and collectors, not so much for general readers.

I remember the first time I became aware of the Church of Scientology. While walking down Yonge Street in Toronto, I passed by their building. Men wearing suits were standing in front handing out pamphlets to passersby, most of which threw them on the ground creating a giant pile of litter. The front of the building had large plate glass windows so you could see into the reading room. A bunch of men were sitting inside smoking cigarettes. This was back in the day when smoking was common and done freely in public. It looked about as inviting as a bus terminal in a Midwestern city struggling with its economy. I thought it was a trashy looking place. William Burroughs was a man of some intelligence and it seems surprising that he would get so caught up in such a scam of an organization. But he always did have a fascination for pseudoscience and pop occultism like the fake shamanism of Carlos Castaneda. But I’ll forgive him that considering he wrote some of the most imaginative and provocative books in the history of American literature. John Coltrane, one of the greatest jazz musicians ever, was was deeply inspired by junk mysticism like Theosophy. Arthur Conan Doyle was a true believer in Spiritualism. If this kind of stuff serves as inspiration for great art then I’m willing to set my convictions aside for a short time and tolerate a con game or two. 

 

Book Review: Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte the Skeleton Saint by H. Andrew Chesnut

Devoted to Death:

Santa Muerte the Skeleton Saint

by H. Andrew Chesnut

Over the last two decades, interest in a skeleton saint has grown in both Mexico and Latino communities north of the border in the U.S.A. In fact, the popularity has begun to spread outside of Latino communities too as different ethnic groups become familiar with each other. This saint is called Santa Muerte and it has also begun to attract media attention because of its popularity with Mexican drug cartels and other people associated with the underworld. What the media doesn’t tell you is that Santa Muerte’s appeal is wider than realized and in fact most of her devotees are ordinary people without any nefarious intentions. Anthropologist R. Andrew Chesnut sets the record straight in his study of this fledgling religious movement in Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte the Skeleton Saint.

After stating his intention to save the Santa Muerte community from negative publicity, Chesnut examines the history of this saint. He starts by discussing the Uto-Aztecan death goddesses. But he is more convinced that the image of Santa Muerte was not part of pre-Conquest culture and actually arrived with the Spanish invaders and the Catholic church. They brought over images of the Grim Reaper which sprung up during the Black Plague. The intention was to scare the people of Mexica into submission, but secretly some people were secretly putting the Grim Reaper on altars and making sacrifices to him for favors. Similar traditions have proliferated in Central America and Argentina, but these involved a male Grim Reaper and appear to be unrelated to the current phenomenon of Santa Muerte. In recent years, due to syncretism with African diaspora religions like Candomble, Vodou, and Santeria, Santa Muerte has emerged from hiding and taken on a new life.

In Mexico City, a grocery store with a shrine to Santa Muerte started attracting so much attention that the owner began offering monthly prayer and worship services complete with mariachi bands. Another chapel called the Temple of Death opened and the cult has been snowballing in membership ever since. Chesnut uses the word “cult” in the Latin sense of the word “cultus” which means “religious community” and in no way applies to the more current usage indicating authoritarian, high control groups led by charismatic leaders.

Each chapter in this book is about the different ways Santa Muerte is worshiped and petitioned for favors with some commentaries on who her devotees are along the way. Whether people are making offerings for money, work, love, or protection from harm, most ceremonies are relatively benign and innocent. Offerings of candles, incense, food, and drinks are common. The most controversial gifts include alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana. Animal and human sacrifices are mostly the stuff of urban legends and media sensationalism.

While there are Santa Muerte devotees from all walks of life, a quick survey of the book reveals that most of them are working class mestizos like truck drivers, small business owners, police, and prison guards. There are, however, some upper class and educated followers too. Some are lawyers, some are teachers, and some are celebrities or corporate businessmen. A couple people the author interviews are goths with black clothes, nose rings, and tattoos. It should be considered that some people from a counter-culture like that might be pre-disposed to being receptive to a saint whose appearance is that of the Grim Reaper in women’s dress. And while Chesnut does rightfully downplay the media’s negative association of Santa Muerte with criminal activity, he does provide a chapter detailing the appeal of Santa Muerte to drug cartel members and organized crime gangs since altars to the Mother of Death are commonly found on their premises during police raids.

While the author does provide a lot of details regarding the practices and culture of the Santa Muerte cult, he doesn’t do any heavy theorizing and there is only minimal explanation as to why it has grown in popularity. He does identify some causes though. One is that Santa Muerte is available to everybody regardless of class, gender, ethnicity, or position in life. Santa Muerte is also amoral in a way that has caused the Catholic church to condemn her; she is believed to do favors for good or bad purposes without passing judgment on the devotee and that is why doctors as well as drug kingpins can approach her. Santa Muerte has a strong presence in the ambient popular culture too. She appears in novels, TV shows, horror movies, song lyrics, tattoos, and t-shirts. Finally, Santa Muerte is believed to be more powerful than other saints, especially those approved of by the church.

Chesnut doesn’t explain much beyond that. You are left to your own thoughts as to the proliferation of the Skeleton Saint. Personally I feel that the issues of power and condemnation from religious leaders are a part of the appeal. The skeptic in me that doesn’t believe in magic says that there is an equal statistical chance of any saint, spirit, or deity delivering what a devotee asks for in exchange for ritual offerings. There would be a random chance of obtaining the desired outcome no matter who or what is prayed to. But the perception that any one of these supernatural entities is more powerful than the others is what matters to the believer. Therefore as more people align themselves with the cult of Santa Muerte the more stories of successful rituals will circulate socially making it appear that she is the most powerful of them all. Meanwhile, people are more likely to remain silent about the ceremonies that fail creating a socially derived illusion that Santa Muerte ceremonies have a higher rate of success than they really do.

There might also be a subversive element in the worship of Santa Muerte. Since she is not recognized by the church, interacting with her could be a way of rebelling against traditionally accepted authority. This trend might be wider than Santa Muerte since the author points out that Evangelical Christianity is currently catching up in popularity to the Catholic church while African diaspora religions and secular humanism are also making inroads into Mexican society. This would indicate that Mexico is in a time of social transition and attraction to Santa Muerte is one manifestation of that change in answering to people’s needs.

The issue of power might also say something about who follows Sants Muerte. Occupations involving criminal activities on both sides of the law are extremely high risk. Life is just as dangerous for prison guards as it is for prisoners. People who work in construction, poorly regulated factories, the sex industry, or the taxi business are risking their safety every time they go to work. An unemployed man on the verge of going homeless would have extreme levels of anxiety. Santa Muerte, the most powerful saint, often appeals to those whose lives have put them on the front line of danger or despair so it would make sense that they would petition and desire to placate the representative of death to bless them with the gift of life. As for more mundane concerns like winning a poker game, passing an exam, or attracting a lost lover back, those desiring such favors might as well turn to the most powerful saint available. Why turn towards weaker saints? But otherwise the widespread devotion and rapid spread of Santa Muerte’s cult might be an indication of growing social anxiety. If magic is about power and control, than the growing popularity of a religion involving magic might indicate that wide sectors of society feel as though they have little or no control over the circumstances of their lives. While that lack of control could be present at any given time throughout history, the beginning of a new cultural practice addressing that anxiety might be a sign that the old ways are failing and the younger generations are searching for something more effective. Widespread anxiety might be commonplace, but changing cultural practices could indicate that a precarious rupture with the past might be happening.

R. Andrew Chesnut’s intentions here are to clear up misconceptions about Santa Muerte and advocate for the variety of people who are attracted to her rising popularity. It is written for the general reader. This is good because clarifying the beliefs and practices should encourage people to tolerate something about Mexican culture that they don’t understand. It’s too bad Devoted to Death doesn’t go deeper into an analysis and explanation for what is happening on both the south and north sides of the border though. It would be nice to have heard a professional anthropologist’s views on what this says about Mexican society. He just leaves you hanging to draw your own conclusions.

Anyhow, the next time you see a veladora decorated with an image of Santa Muerte, probably beside candles depicting the Virgen de Guadalupe, in a grocery store, a market, or a bodega you can ask the people selling it how to do a ritual. My experience with Mexicans and Chicanos has been that they are usually eager to talk about their culture with non-Latinos like me if you show a sincere interest. You might open some doorways, make some new friends, and maybe, if you’re lucky, you might even be blessed with good fortunes from the Skeleton Saint herself.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Secret Life Of a Satanist by Blanche Barton

The Secret Life Of a Satanist:

The Authorized Biography of Anton LaVey

by Blanche Barton

Back in the 1980s, there were two books my friends had that they would leave out for people to see. One was The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell. The other was The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey. Nobody took these books seriously. They were just for show and as far as I know, no one from back then ever used the former book to build any bombs although I do know a couple people who took the book’s advice and tried smoking banana peels. Don’t bother. The bombs don’t work and neither do the banana peels. Regarding the latter book, I also don’t know anybody who read it who became a Satanist, although I do know some who got into Wicca but that had nothing to do with The Satanic Bible. In fact, I’d say The Satanic Bible amounted to little more than bathroom reading. If you dug into the pile of dirty magazines stashed under some guys’ sinks you might find a copy and having a good read while doing what all humans do at the end point of their digestive systems.

Believe it or not, some people really do care about the biography of the Church of Satan’s founding father. The Secret Life Of a Satanist by Blanche Barton theoretically fulfills that need. There are better sources for legitimate information though.

This authorized biography starts out with lies and half truths about Anton LaVey’s ancestry and childhood. He was born in the 1930s to parents he claimed to be of Romani and Jewish heritage, having grandparents who emigrated from Transylvania, Romania. They were actually exclusively Ukrainian Jews according to immigration records. There isn’t a whole lot said about his upbringing except that he got bullied by his classmates and, according to him, it was because he was hung like a horse and they were jealous. Reading between the lines, I get more of a sense that they beat him up for acting like he was better than everybody else. Guys who carry the biggest baseball bats don’t ordinarily talk about it and those that do are usually just insecure. In any case, this pobrecito had a lonely childhood. In his teenage years, he had a striking appearance, not exactly handsome, but striking and photogenic. He liked wearing zoot suits and I can imagine people used to tell him he looked like the Devil which is something he probably took a little too close to heart.

The story gets interesting as he learns to play the organ, lives the life of a carny, and works for the Clyde Beatty circus as a lion tamer. I’m a real sucker for stories about carnies and circuses, but then I was sad to learn from other sources that the Clyde Beatty circus has no records of LaVey ever having been employed by them. The same can be said for other jobs he claimed to have had like being a crime scene photographer for the San Francisco police department, a psychic detective, and an organ player for the San Francisco ballet. Regardless of his dishonesty, LaVey says one significant thing about being a psychic investigator: people willingly want to be deceived. People sincerely want to believe their house is haunted when in reality the eerie moaning sound they hear is nothing but wind blowing through a small crack in an attic window. This insight is all you need to know to understand where Anton LaVey was coming from.

The book continues on with more lies. LaVey tells stories about a love affair with Marilyn Monroe, something which has been denied by people who knew both LaVey and Monroe. He claims to have had an affair with Jayne Mansfield which is a half truth. LaVey says she was in love with him but others say she thought he was a dork and she liked to tease him so she could laugh behind his back. Oh the cruelty of women. The interesting part of this story is that LaVey claims to have accidentally killed her. He says he put a curse on her jealous husband and then while cutting a clipping out of a newspaper, he accidentally cut through a photograph of her on the other side. The slice went through her neck and then she died in a car crash. You can believe that if you want, but beliefs aren’t facts. Besides, autopsy reports show that Jayne Mansfield’s head was not severed from her body in the car crash as many people believe. That was simply a rumor that spread after she died.

In Barton’s version of the founding of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in the 1960s. LaVey was making a living by giving lectures about dark subjects in the living room of his house which he painted black and kept a pet lion in. Since this attracted all kinds of eccentrics he came up with the idea of starting the world’s first Satanic church and began performing rituals involving pentagrams and nude women on altars for audiences. The media got excited about all this and drew the attention of hippies and other counter culturalists who LaVey despised. He also attracted a few people who were more sincere and possibly more clever than he was; when they challenged his leadership, he was unable to maintain control over the church and excommunicated them. Many went on to form their own cults and LaVey wrote them off as fakes. In reality, this exposed his weakness as a leader so he became a recluse and had minimal contact with other Satanists throughout the rest of his life. His daughter Zeena Schreck says he did little else at this time in his life besides lying around in his living room and barking out orders to his wife who kept the Church of Satan running mostly on her own. She divorced him in the 1980s which drove LaVey into bankruptcy. I guess his curses and spells couldn’t prevent that from happening.

The first half of this biography is a somewhat interesting story even if it buried under a half ton of bullshit. The second half isn’t so much of a biography as it is Anton LaVey making an awkward attempt at explaining his “philosophy”. I use the word “philosophy” loosely because there is no structure or well-thought out stances in it. It is more a rambling collection of thoughts and ideas that don’t add up to anything definite.

LaVey had some odd ideas. He believed trapezoids could be used to bring demons into our dimension from who knows where. These demons are like the monsters in H.P. Lovecraft stories. Never mind that Lovecraft wrote fiction and never tried to convince anybody otherwise. LaVey talked about what kinds of music and movies are sufficiently satanic for him. I’m not sure how Irving Berlin or Cole Porter were satanic; I guess he heard something there that the rest of us don’t. Although he believed in right wing politics, authoritarianism, and eugenics, he also didn’t like racism, censorship, or homophobia. Science fiction movies and TV shows are meant to program people to live in outer space and in the future, people will mostly have social and sexual relationships with androids. Isn’t this a somewhat accurate prediction of AI? Despite being a quasi-fascist ideologue, LaVey shared some views with counter-culturalists like a hatred of TV, a dislike of consumer culture and the soulless, mechanical lifestyles of mainstream Americans who do little more than work, sleep, and then go to work again. How any of this is a satanic philosophy, I don’t know. It’s just satanic because it’s what he thought and that’s all there is to it.

Speaking of androids and soullessness, Anton LaVey’s main hobby, aside from performing satanic rituals, was building androids which the rest of us would call “mannequins”. He talked about himself as if he was a modern incarnation of Michelangelo sculpting statues in his basement. But really he was just a guy making mannequins and dressing them up. He put all his androids on display in a speakeasy scene in his cellar. I admit it might be an interesting installment piece to see, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it. I guess these androids make a good substitute for the friends he didn’t have. At least they wouldn’t challenge his authority or talk back when he was being a dick the way real people would. Female mannequins never say no either so he could always get what he wanted from them. You’d think a guy who claimed to be the John Holmes of the San Francisco occult scene would have had a better sex life than that.

LaVey admits near the end of the book that he is nostalgic, particularly for the years prior to World War II. The way I see him now is that as a kid, he was fascinated by the world of adults and probably fantasized about what he would do when he came of age. Then he suffered an unremarkable adolescence in the blandly conformist restraint of the 1950s, invented a fabulist biography to cover it up, tried to get in on the counter-culture scene of the 1960s by starting a satanic cult but didn’t approve of the kinds of people he attracted. So he dropped out of society to be a solitary king in the castle of his house, a replica of the life he imagined adults having when he was a child, never growing up and ruling over a court of mannequins while peddling Church of Satan merchandise to pay the rent. Anton LaVey reminds me a lot of Jean des Esseintes, the eccentric aesthete in J.K. Huysmans’ novel Against Nature who can’t handle living among the nobodies of the real world and so retreats into the isolation of his chateau. I find a certain kind of appeal in living that way but it is undercut by a certain kind of cowardice and social incompetence too.

Anton LaVey always said that being satanic meant embracing the role of adversary. I’m not sure what he was adverse to or why he rejected it. It can’t simply be Christianity. Although he pointed out some of the hypocrisy in its followers, like the way Christians go to burlesque shows on Saturday night and then show up at church on Sunday, he didn’t display enough of an understanding of Christian theology to truly be against it. Was he an adversary to the entire world? That’s just too vague to be valid. His attitude was like a blind, knee jerk reaction to life without any depth of understanding behind it. LaVey tried to make himself look menacing and powerful, but he sounded more like a sloppy drunk sitting next to me in a bar, babbling about whatever came into his mind. Since I admit I like hearing from and reading about weird people, some of this is amusing but none of it is anything I can take seriously. The Secret Life Of a Satanist didn’t convince me to join the Church of Satan or any other cult. I’ve always thought Anton Szandor LaVey was a dork and this biography further confirmed that opinion. He’s like a strange guy at a party that takes his own oddity seriously when in reality, people just like having him around for the freaky kicks.

Anton LaVey claimed P.T. Barnum as an influence and so I will leave you with two paraphrases from that iconic American con man. People don’t mind being ripped off if they have fun in the process of being cheated. There’s a sucker born every minute. And that’s all you need to know to understand Anton LaVey.

 

Book Review: Attention, MOVE! This Is America!

Attention, MOVE! This Is America!

by Margot Harry

      By the 1980s, the number of radical political activist groups in America had begun to dwindle. Those who were most serious about change got more involved in things like lobbying, holding public office, and working in the educational system. Urban guerilla movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground might have been exciting to other radicals, but they largely scared mainstream America away from the Revolution. As African American people moved into the middle class and the mainstream, the Black Panthers and other Civil Rights and Black Power organizations began falling by the wayside. But there were some diehard, holdout groups that refused to go away. One was MOVE, a predominantly African American anarchist faction based in Philadelphia with several communal houses around the city. MOVE did not get along with their neighbors and the conflict ended in deadly violence, perpetrated by the police and the city government. Activist journalist Margot Harry in Attention, MOVE! This Is America! gives an account of the police’s acts against MOVE in a style that is both analytical and incendiary.

In Harry’s book, not much is said about MOVE’s history, beliefs, or practices. They started in the 1970s as a Black Power group, practiced communal living, vegetarianism, organic farming, and preached an ordinary message of ending racial inequality. They wore their hair in dreadlocks, each member changed their last name to “Africa”, and were led by an obscure man named John Africa. They had the outward appearance of a political cult, a perception reinforced by their unwillingness to socially engage with people outside their group. Although they had communal houses in several locations around Philadelphia, it was the one on the south side, located in an upwardly mobile African American middle class neighborhood, where the violent confrontation with the police occurred. Neighbors complained about them to the police because their yard was messy and vermin-infested due to the compost heaps the kept for growing their own organic food. Some neighbors made accusations of child abuse and neglect against MOVE because the four children living in the house were often seen wearing ragged clothes. The worst of it was that MOVE boarded up their windows, built a barracks on top of their roof, and set up a loudspeaker so they could give obnoxious sounding speeches, loaded with profanity, about armed revolution that the whole neighborhood could hear. Sometimes these amplified rants went on all night long. In short, they were bad neighbors and many feared they were planning some kind of violent confrontation with the government.

The conflict ended with the police fire bombing the MOVE house, killing all its members except for one child who escaped.

There are no spoilers in this story. Harry starts her book with the bombing of the MOVE house and most of the story isn’t linear. Most of this book is her investigation into how the government planned the attack, what happened during the day of the attack, and how the government responded to the public outcry that resulted. The whole issue started in 1978 when police raided a MOVE house in another part of the city. The result of the raid was humiliating to the police and Harry’s unproven claim is that the bombing, which happened in 1985, was a retaliatory attack for that humiliation. The whole story is complicated by the fact that the mayor of Philadelphia at that time was Wilson Goode, the city’s first Black mayor who also organized the military-style assault on the MOVE house. The author tests Goode’s claims that the operation was poorly executed, the bombing was a mistake, he had no knowledge of the bombing when it happened, and he had not worked with the police in any way to plan an attack the group. She digs deeply into publicly accessible records to disprove all of these claims. Not only had the mayor lied about his role in organizing the action, but he had also been planning and preparing it with the police for over a year before the killings took place. She also digs deeply into why the local police force had access to military grade weapons, including bomb making materials, that were heavily restricted to anybody outside the armed forces.

Harry’s account of the police attack is just as harrowing as you can imagine. They raided the house before sunrise with snipers located all over the neighborhood. They used water hoses, tear gas, and explosives to drive MOVE out of their home. It is impossible to know why they decided to hide in the basement rather than come out, but one can conjecture that since the house was surrounded by cops with rifles pointed at them, they were probably afraid of getting killed. Such fears could later be justified since after the bombing, the house caught fire and the four children ran out the back door to escape, only to be shot dead by police in the back yard. Fortunately, one boy did survive the shooting and ultimately was the only survivor of the massacre. The fire then spread from the MOVE house, burning down 66 other homes in the neighborhood. And all this happened while the fire department was on the scene with firehoses ready to be used. The police later claimed that they were afraid of an armed confrontation with MOVE, but after looking through the wreckage, investigators found only four guns, not the arsenal they claimed would be there and certainly not enough fire power for eleven adults and four children to use against an army of police using military tactics and weapons.

Margot Harry can’t be accused of not taking her opponents’ positions into account. In fact, almost this whole book is an examination of their accounts and her dismantling of their excuses for the onslaught. If anything, Harry can be accused of not taking her own side into account, at least not to the extent that she could have. She says very little about MOVE as an organization. She doesn’t say much about who they are, their history, their beliefs, or their practices. That’s not to say she portrays them in a positive light either since she never holds back in saying that they were not the kind of people you would want to live next door to. A more complete explanation of MOVE would have done more to make this book more rounded and probably would have made it more gripping as a story too. But her intention in writing this was to prove the government’s role in the injustice and that is something she accomplishes with ease.

So MOVE were bad neighbors. There is no death penalty for being a bad neighbor. Even if there was, the members of MOVE still have a Constitutional right to due process of law. Their neighbors should not have had their houses burned down. And no matter what crimes the adults in MOVE might have committed, there is no justifiable reason for murdering three of their children when they tried to escape the burning house. Even worse, there are so many other non-violent ways the police could have gotten MOVE to vacate their home. Negotiation with them was never even considered. In the end, nobody from the police or the government who were involved in the attack were found guilty of any crimes and many of them even claimed to be proud of what they did. If you can read Attention, MOVE! This Is America! Without getting angry, then obviously there is something wrong with you.

 

Book Review: The Rajneesh Chronicles by Win McCormack

The Rajneesh Chronicles

by Win McCormack

     The USA had a lot going on in the 1960s and 1970s. Aside from the social changes initiated by the hippy counter culture and the New Left, American political hegemony and newly relaxed immigration restrictions resulted in an influx of exotic ideas, lifestyles, and practices. One result of this was the Cult Scare of the 1970s. Disillusioned with failed utopian dreams and an unfulfilled desire for structure and meaning, a lot of counter culturalists turned to new religious movements like the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and The Family International. Traditional Christianity had proven to be dull and lifeless and people craved something new to reflect their changing values. But not all was well in cult land. Within one decade there were the Manson Family murders and the mass suicides of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. Some high profile cults were accused of brainwashing, kidnapping, and dishonestly appropriating people’s money. The big Cult Scare was upon us. Within only a couple years after the Jonestown massacre, a new cult arrived on the scene and red flags were flying all over the place. They were the devotees of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their leader’s intentions were no more noble than the aforementioned scoundrels. Win McCormack’s The Rajneesh Chronicles is a colleciton of magazine articles written contemporaneously to Rajneesh’s invasion and his eventual expulsion from America. 

     This book is somewhat annoying from the start. It begins with a timeline of events in the rise and fall of the cult. Reading lists like this can rarely be fun, especially when you know nothing about the people involved. It just is not an engaging way of telling a story. But it is necessary since the magazine articles that make up the bulk of the book do not run in chronological order. Reading them on their own would be messy and confusing without the timeline to guide you. 

     But anyways, the story starts at a controversial ashram in Pune. India where Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh attracted followers, mostly naive Westerners with lots of money, where he twisted standard Eastern practices like yoga and meditation to his own ends. Sexual orgies and other darker things were a large part of what went on. After having trouble with the Indian government over tax fraud, Rajneesh moved to America where his cult took over the isolated farming town of Antelope, Oregon and began building their own city called Rajneeshpuram. Needless to say, the people of Antelope didn’t take too well to the orange-clad so-called sanyasins, especially since they outnumbered the locals and eventually took over the city council and school board. The passages on the politics of Rajneesh are somewhat muddled and incomplete so if this part of the story is truly interesting to you, you might want to look to a better source for information. 

     Rajneesh himself mostly disappears from the articles after his arrival in America. He decides to take a vow of silence and appoints the sociopath Ma Anand Sheela to run the Rajneeshpuram cult. Narcissistic, machiavellian, and cruel, she runs the commune’s affairs like a true tyrant and eventually gets arrested for attempting to poison a city called The Dalles by putting salmonella in restaurant salad bars and the water reservoirs. 

     The best parts of this book detail the lifestyle and practices of the cult. Characteristics that mark Rajneeshpuram out as a typical cult include sleep deprivation, information control, unpaid and intensive physical labor, use of trances and altered states of consciousness, control over sexual behavior and diet, and, most importantly, infallible leadership. Encounter therapy groups involving physical violence, verbal abuse, sexual assault, and psychological trauma were used to break down members’ egos thereby dismantling their sense of individuality and the ability to think for themselves. Ecstatic trances involving yoga and dancing were used to facilitate an emotional bond with the larger group. Rampantly promiscuous sex was used to prevent individuals from forming intimate friendships or romantic relationships. Long work hours, sleep deprivation, and poor diet were used to make people too weak to think clearly or rebel. The questioning of leadership led to harsh punishments. They even built their own private crematorium to dispose of dead bodies due to the number of people dying from exhaustion or other causes that have never been revealed. Meanwhile, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela lived high on the hog with expensive jewelry, luxurious houses, a massive fleet of Rolls Royces, and frequent steak dinners at expensive restaurants in places nearby. It was an open secret that Bhagwan’s taste in girls was similar to that of Jeffrey Epstein’s. 

     The last section of the book backtracks to 1980 when the Rajneeshees first arrived on the shores of California where they infiltrated and took over a new age church. Considering the millions of dollars Rajneesh had brought over from India, you might wonder why they felt a desire to do such a thing. They had enough money to buy their own land and build their own church without having to dispossess anybody of their own space. But the beach-front chuch had luxurious grounds and beautiful architecture as well as a senile minister who had fallen in with Rajneesh while traveling in India. More importantly, the sanyasins used this as a test run for later taking over the town of Antelope. While this is an important part of the Rajneesh story, the internal affairs of a new age church’s board of directors is not exciting to read about. It is made worse because the author writes as if he can’t wait to finish writing so he can go home and do something more exciting like mowing the lawn or watching TV. 

     In fact, most of the writing in this book is dull. The story of this dangerous cult that fell apart before its leaders got chased out of America is interesting enough on its own to keep a reader engaged. But the writing is dry and lifeless. A fascinating story gets turned into a work of journalistic mediocrity. It’s like listening to somebody making a speech in an unemotional, dead monotone. Aside from that problem, it would have been nice to learn more about the biographies of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela since almost nothing about their lives previous to the cult is mentioned. 

     The Rajneesh Chronciles is one of those books where the story is good enough to stand on its own  while the delivery is subpar enough to make reading it a chore. Anyhow, most reasonable people would consider Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Ma Anand Sheela to be grifters, but maybe they really did understand the Truth with a capital T. That Truth has nothing to do with spiritual enlightenment and everything to do with an understanding of human nature and the world we live in. The Truth is that a vast number of people are suckers and sheep and are easily led around by people who take advantage of them out of pure selfishness. Gurus like Rajneesh are enlightened enough to know that these people will gladly give away their money and their freedom of mind if it means access to unlimited sex and religious experience. When the infallible teacher arrives with a taste of what it is they want, they get trapped and the ones doing the trapping don’t have their best interests in mind. Freedom means being neither predator nor prey. Maybe that is the ultimate form of enlightenment.