WACO, Texas — For now 30 years, now we have heard the Waco tale instructed, retold, twisted and even exploited to suit an schedule.
A Netflix documentary debuting Wednesday is the most recent to inform the tale of the government’s tried siege of the Branch Davidian compound, leading to a 51-day standoff and the fiery finishing that took the lives of 86 other folks.
While views at the raid and its legacy run the spectrum, a Fort Worth author desires to concentrate on the reality … together with some by no means instructed earlier than.
“Facts still matter,” mentioned Jeff Guinn. “We live in a time when people ignore the ones inconvenient to them.”
After writing books on other famous cult leaders Jim Jones and Charles Manson, Guinn spent more than two years researching David Koresh, the Branch Davidians and the Waco saga. For the book named Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage, Guinn spoke to surviving Davidians as well as ATF agents who were part of the siege and discovered details still largely unknown three decades later.
“There are people that are pleased this is so much new information and everything is documented,” Guinn said.
Among the most surprising revelations to Guinn was ATF agents admitting the siege focused on the task of removing the weapons inside the compound but failed to explore the religious beliefs of the Branch Davidians.
A fateful lack of knowledge with dire consequences.
“The thing (ATF agents) emphasized was they were just going in there for the guns and had no idea what the Branch Davidians believed,” Guinn mentioned. “It was considered unimportant.”
Had they understood the group’s beliefs, they would have known Koresh and his followers welcomed the bloodshed. From his interviews with surviving sect members, they felt the raid fulfilled a prophecy.
“This was a group where death was part of their agenda,” Guinn said. “That is what Koresh prophesized.”
But it was another unexpected discovery that left Guinn astonished.
“We found definitive proof that David Koresh plagiarized all his major prophecies,” Guinn told WFAA.
As for the “Legacy of Rage” referenced in the title, Guinn believes what happened in Waco can be used to fit any agenda, any theory, or whatever political opinion a person or group wants to make either against the government or organized religion.
As he puts it, conspiracy theories and now a conspiracy industry, yet that does not make any of the theories true.
“There was never a conspiracy,” Guinn mentioned. “There used to be human fallibility, and it used to be tragic however we can not make this one thing it used to be now not. The conspiracy theories are handy however completely absurd.”
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