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In Reply to: Re: understanding TF as a social movement posted by excog on January 18, 2006 at 13:06:07:
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but perhaps you are a bit "reductive" in your own assessment.
I compare people sucked into cults as comparable to women in a relationship with a batterer. I am not about to blame the victims or give them equal standing in what the perpetrators are doing any more than I will give equal responsibility to a pedophile and his target.
Yes, in a sense people that get involved in a cult are part of what makes that wheel spin, but there are variables in cults just as there are in society at large. Even then, there are points where people step over the lines in cults from victim to co-perpetrators and then have responsiblity to answer for some of that if they ever own up to anything which is not likely.
The Family was not comparable to Manson in the same period of time because Berg was not overtly teaching racial hatred at the time, nor was he trying to create a race war and filling followers with drugs and sending them out to murder others in violent gory ways.
Yes, Berg has a trail of people that were damaged and lost their lives via suicide etc. But comparing Berg to Manson and saying cult followers were just as responsible is reductive in my book.
Here's another way of how I see it: People who joined up with Manson knew what Manson was about from the outset. People who joined the COG or People's Temple believed in the innocuous public front they saw of what the groups were supposed to be about. They believed in the smoke and mirrors. Only few saw behind the scenes. In the case of COG there was a definite discrepancy from what lower rank and file were initially exposed to and what the inner court saw. Still, I don't blame youth who don't have the wherewithal to make decisions based upon examination and life experience to see behind what cult leaders present. I wouldn't even expect it of poor people who were older that Jones snowed with the People's Temple faked healings and religious hysteria.
