Trench Coat Mafia or Manchurian Candidates?
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by Richard Poe Thursday, April 29, 1999 12:00 am Eastern Time |
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THE PUNDITS have spoken. The massacre at Columbine High School, they say, was caused by video games, splatter films, Internet surfing and easy access to guns. But was it really?
Not likely. Consider the fact that young people in Switzerland surf the same Internet and watch the same movies as did the Littleton shooters.
Consider also that every able-bodied Swiss male between the ages of 20 and 42 serves in the militia. Swiss law requires its citizen soldiers to store their gear at home, ready for action. Every man keeps an assault rifle with ammunition in his closet.
By the pundits’ reasoning, Switzerland should long ago have drowned in an ocean of blood. So why hasn’t it?
Maybe because the pundits are wrong. Maybe because guns and video games do not really have the power to transform high school nerds into murderous psychopaths.
So what does? One answer is cult brainwashing. Evidence is mounting that the Littleton shooters did not act alone. And some of their conduct suggests a cult mindset.
“Do you believe in God?” one of the gunmen asked 17-year-old Cassie Bernall. When she said yes, he killed her.
News reports have painted the Littleton massacre as a vendetta against bullies. But Cassie Bernall’s death suggests darker motives. The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey was reportedly a favorite text of Columbine’s Trench Coat Mafia.
Police may or may not succeed in linking the Littleton bloodbath to a larger conspiracy. In real life, bad guys often go free. But, at the very least, cult brainwashing offers a plausible explanation for the boys’ behavior.
The word “brainwashing” comes from the Chinese hsi nao – literally “wash brain”. During the Korean War, Chinese interrogators used this technique, with great success, to convert U.S. prisoners into Communist drones.
In the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, an American officer is programmed by Chinese handlers to carry out assassinations. The plot seemed farfetched, at the time. But it was closer to the truth than most viewers realized.
Intelligence agencies from many countries had, in fact, been experimenting with mind control for years. In his book, The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’, John Marks recounts the CIA’s 20-year effort to create brainwashed assassins, through programs such as MK-ULTRA and MK-SEARCH.
The CIA claims to have abandoned this research in 1972, after determining that its brainwashing techniques were “too unpredictable … to be operationally useful,” in the words of CIA researcher Sidney Gottlieb.
Yet cult leaders, from Charles Manson to Jim Jones, have proved beyond doubt that normal people can indeed be transformed into murderous automatons.
Take David Berkowitz. The infamous “Son of Sam” was long believed to have terrorized New York single-handedly, in a 1976-77 killing spree that claimed six lives.
But new evidence suggests he did not act alone. While in prison, Berkowitz was born again as a Christian. His conscience moved him, Berkowitz says, to make a shocking confession in a 1993 televised interview on the program Inside Edition.
Berkowitz claimed that he had murdered at the behest of a powerful satanic cult, with a nationwide reach. At least two other shooters and several accomplices directly assisted him in the Son of Sam killings, Berkowitz said.
“When I got involved in this,” Berkowitz told A&E’s Investigative Reports in a November 22, 1997 broadcast, “I never knew that I was going to become a murderer… I just joined for a thrill, looking for some friends…. It was … a slow but methodical recruitment process.”
The cult taught that the world would end around the year 2000, Berkowitz says. It sought to “speed up the process” of Armageddon through bloodshed – specifically by killing innocent young people in middle-class neighborhoods, in order to maximize fear and chaos in society.
Strong evidence corroborating Berkowitz’s account had already appeared in a 1987 book, The Ultimate Evil by Maury Terry. Police have quietly begun reinvestigating the case, according to the A&E broadcast.
If Berkowitz is telling the truth, then the masterminds behind the Son of Sam murders have been running loose for more than 20 years. We can only hope and pray that investigators of the Columbine massacre will approach their work with more diligence than did their predecessors on the Berkowitz probe.
Political pressure is great, in such cases, to find quick and easy answers. But if we continue letting the real culprits run free, we will never eradicate this evil.
Cross-posted from NewsMax.com 04.29.99
