Last night I finished watching the Netflix limited series “Waco,” about the events leading up to the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in 1993. In case you are not familiar with the situation, here’s a quick summary. A religious group led by a charismatic leader named David Koresh lived in a communal setting near Waco, Texas. Koresh had some unusual teachings and practices. For one thing, he believed himself to be the Lamb who is mentioned in the book of Revelation, the only person found worthy to open the seals of a scroll that would trigger the end times. For another, he “married” all the women and girls (some as young as fourteen), even those who were already married to other members of the group. Those men were required to remain celibate while Koresh impregnated his “harem.” He believed God spoke to him, and he passed the intelligence along to his followers. Oh, and the group had a hefty stockpile of weapons and military gear in readiness for the apocalyptic battle that was to come.
The trouble started when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), fresh off a disastrous and embarrassing encounter with a family of anti-government survivalists at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, decided to try to make amends by going after the Branch Davidians. There were rumors that the children at the compound were being abused, and the movie depicted a conversation between a couple of ATF officials in which they reasoned that if they made a public rescue of abused children they would be able to put the Ruby Ridge fiasco behind them. What followed, however, was a botched effort to gain entry into the compound in which someone fired shots, leading to a full-scale firefight in which a couple of Davidians and several ATF agents were killed.
Waco fire, April 19, 1993. Public domain.
The FBI took over and a standoff ensued. A 51-day standoff in which the government agents used psychological warfare tactics such as cutting off power to the compound and shining bright lights and playing the sound of grating feedback at high volume at all hours of the night. The Davidians, however, dug in their heels and refused to come out. An FBI negotiator finally worked out a deal to get Koresh and his “family” to leave the compound in exchange for making Koresh’s manifesto public. While Koresh was busy writing, however, Attorrney General Janet Reno gave the go-ahead for an assault on the compound using tear gas to try to dislodge the Davidians once and for all. The FBI used tanks to punch holes in the walls of the building and deliver the gas, but in doing so they collapsed parts of the walls and ceilings, trapping the women and children in an interior vault-like room. Because there were no child-size gas masks, many of the children were already unconscious or dead before the fire started. Then, when the tear gas caught fire the building went up in flames in a matter of minutes, killing all but one person who managed to jump through a window to safety. Koresh’s right-hand man shot him and then turned the gun on himself before the flames reached them. It was another disaster, and a completely avoidable one.
I was in seminary at the time all this was going on, and I followed the news reports as well as I could with everything else I had going on. My main memory of the standoff was the way the government and the media kept characterizing Koresh’s group as a cult. Marginally acquainted with Koresh’s ideas, I thought that sounded like an accurate description. I figured they were dangerous, considering all the weapons they had stored up, so I was not entirely outraged when things turned deadly. I was sorry for the loss of life, but having accepted the government’s story that the Davidians had been the aggressors, firing on the ATF agents who were simply trying to deliver a search warrant, I figured they had brought the destruction on themselves.
If the show I just watched is at all accurate, I, like a lot of other Americans watching idly from a distance, was very much mistaken.
“Waco” is based on two memoirs, one by David Thibodeau, the lone survivor of the assault on the compound, and one by the lead negotiator for the FBI, Gary Noesner. From Thibodeau’s account I got the sense that Koresh had some bad theology, and the way he demanded that all the other men to remain celibate while he impregnated their wives was awfully shitty, but he was not the demon the media had made him out to be. The rumors of child abuse were apparently not true, and Koresh came across as a sincere but misguided crank, and his followers as sincere believers. Some of them were highly educated, reasonable people who had not been hoodwinked but for reasons of their own had put their faith in their “Lamb of God” leader. In addition, Thibodeau’s side of the story is that the ATF had shot first.
It’s Noesner’s remembrances, however, that had me fuming with rage. If he is to be believed, he represented an arm of the FBI with a philosophy of seeking nonviolent resolutions, while his counterparts in the tactical division represented a philosophy of escalation. Over the course of the six episodes we see the two sides going back and forth, with Noesner sometimes winning the argument and sometimes losing to Decker, his counterpart. And of course we know who won out in the end.
Early in the series Noesner expresses his dismay that Decker’s team, which in Noesner’s opinion unnecessarily exacerbated the situation at Ruby Ridge, ending in the death of an innocent woman, instead of being reprimanded receives an additional $10 million in funding. He decries what he sees as the FBI’s transition from a law enforcement agency to a quasi-military operation. He says the goal of law enforcement is to de-escalate a situation, while the goal of the military is to overpower the other side with greater force, and he fears that giving them all this new killing machinery will only make them want to use it. His concerns turn out to be quite prescient. As songwriter Joe Jackson once observed, “When you’ve got power you’re gonna use it for a while.”
Noesner is in a sense a Christ-figure in the story, which is ironic considering his own agnosticism and Koresh’s outlandish claims in that direction. But Noesner’s approach resembles Jesus’s way of doing things better than anybody else in the series. He is committed to nonviolence just as Jesus was. He offers his warning about the use of military force in law enforcement, which sounds a lot like Jesus’s words in Gethsemane, “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matt 26:52). And his commitment to negotiation reminds me of Jesus’s counsel to seek reconciliation whenever possible and to offer forgiveness seventy-seven times. As I have suggested before, Jesus did not pull that number out of a hat. He was deliberately countering Lamech, the Old Testament figure who swore seventy-sevenfold vengeance on anyone who tried to harm him. Lamech’s way guaranteed an ever-expanding spiral of violence; Jesus sought to arrest that spiral and heal its damage. In Noesner’s warnings about what would happen if the military boys got the upper hand in the Bureau I thought I could hear echoes of Jesus’s voice.
I found “Waco” all the more poignant in light of the events of the past week, as we watched a police officer in Minneapolis kneel on the neck of a black man until he died and as we then saw police in cities all over the country, including here in Columbus, crack heads and fire tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of protestors. It is all the more poignant when we consider the militarization of our police forces and their deployment in poor neighborhoods where people of color predominantly live. Starting in the 1980s and 90s, federal money flooded local police departments so they could buy automatic weapons, armored personnel carriers, tanks, and other heavy military equipment. True to form and in line with Noesner’s predictions, the police who found themselves the beneficiaries of these deadly windfalls found reasons to use them.
The officer in Minneapolis used an illicit tactic to kill George Floyd, and he did it because he could. Police in riot gear with zip-cord handcuffs hanging in bunches from their belts pepper-spray protestors and shoot tear gas canisters into crowds because they can. Police officers all over the country shoot and kill or choke and kill young black men because they can. Vigilantes in Georgia killed a black man jogging through their neighborhood because he “fit a description” and because they could. “Stand Your Ground” laws give citizens permission to kill anyone (usually young black men) they perceive to be a threat. These well-armed civilians do that killing because they can. The tactical division of the FBI stormed a church compound in East Texas twenty-seven years ago, killing nearly a hundred people whose only real offenses were holding some unorthodox religious views and stockpiling guns, a right that, whether it’s a good idea or not, is guaranteed by the US Constitution. And they killed all those people because they had the necessary equipment and because they could.
At what point are we going to demand better reasons for exercising power than “because we can”? When are we going to realize that Jesus wasn’t just flapping his gums when he warned that those who take the hilt of a sword are destined to be killed by the blade of a sword? What do we have to do in our time to break Lamech’s cycle? To put the lie to Joe Jackson’s observation—to say, just because we have the power doesn’t mean we have to use it to dominate, punish, and murder? When are we going to start forgiving instead of avenging, repenting instead of compounding our sins, and seeking reconciliation instead of spoiling for a fight?
I hope it’s soon. I’m not holding my breath, but I hope it’s soon.