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Government Mass Murder
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1132/waco.htmlDate Written: 2018-04-20 Publisher: Workers Vanguard Year Published: 2018 Resource Type: Article Cx Number: CX23526 "This is not an assault." Twenty-five years ago, that was the lie blaring over government loudspeakers as the FBI and the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) carried out its plan to obliterate the Branch Davidians, an integrated group that formed as a breakaway from the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Orchestrated and overseen at the highest levels of the Clinton administration, the 19 April 1993 assault outside Waco, Texas, engulfed the Branch Davidians’ Mount Carmel commune in an inferno that killed over 80 people, including some two dozen children. Abstract: - Excerpt: The Waco massacre was the bloody signature of the Clinton years, just as for the Reagan years it was the 1985 massacre of MOVE: a mostly black back-to-nature commune known for denouncing “the system” and promoting armed self-defense. Alongside the ATF and FBI, the Philadelphia cops bombed MOVE’s home, killing eleven members, including five children, and burning down an entire black neighborhood. The carnage in both cases was preceded by media campaigns slandering the group under siege as a violent “cult” and was followed by the government punishing the few survivors. In fact, all three members of the Treasury department inquiry that whitewashed the Waco atrocity had been involved in the execution or cover-up of the MOVE massacre. Immediately after Mount Carmel was burned to the ground, the Spartacist League organized protest demonstrations in several cities. We picketed federal government offices with signs including, “We Will Not Forget: MOVE Massacre, Desert Slaughter in Iraq, Waco Holocaust.” From the outset of the state’s vendetta, our defense of the Branch Davidians was unambiguous. In a protest letter to Clinton early in the siege, the Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social defense organization associated with the SL—demanded that all troops, tanks, police and federal agents be removed from the area and pointed out: “We think you would do well to take the advice of the newly elected President Lincoln, who when asked what he proposed to do about the polygamous Mormons replied, ‘I propose to let them alone’.” Reno’s twisted rationale for killing the children was to “save” them from Koresh, who was demonized as a gun-crazed, sadistic polygamist and child abuser. In a letter to the PDC by Bob Buck, a West Virginia steel worker railroaded to prison for defending his union during a bitter 1991-92 strike, he rightly noted: “They were so damned concerned for the children they unleashed an armed assault on the house they lived in and filled it full of bullet holes...gassed them, and ultimately burned them to death. Ain’t America great. I’m glad Mrs. Reno isn’t concerned about me.” In fact, the year before the raid, Child Protective Services investigated and found no evidence of abuse at Mount Carmel. Children evacuated during the siege were interviewed by social workers, who found them to be “healthy, happy, well adjusted, well educated.” After the raid, Reno herself admitted that the lurid stories of “ongoing child abuse” were “inaccurate.” Breaking through the government’s brazen lies, which the liberals dutifully echoed, we remarked: “Child abuse, guns, cultism—these are all cynical pretexts which have nothing to do with what happened on the morning of 19 April 1993. An authoritarian religious commune is not how most of us would choose to live our lives, but it’s none of the state’s business” Subject Headings |