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Book Review:
Communities in Peril
by Joan Kennedy Taylor

The Davidian Massacre: Disturbing Questions About Waco
Which Must be Answered, by Carol Moore. Gun Owners
Foundation (8001 Forbes Place, Suite 102,
Springfield, VA 22151. 1-800-417-1486), paperback,
$8.00, 494 pp.

Community Technology, by Karl Hess, Introduction by
Carol Moore, Loompanics Unlimited (P.O. Box 1197,
Port Townsend, WA  98368.  1-800-380-2230),
paperback, $9.95 + $4.00 s & h, 107 pp.

Carol Moore is a free lance libertarian journalist who
has been a member of ALF and of the Libertarian
Party, and has even contributed her libertarian
feminist perspective to ALF News in the past. 
With the publication of The Davidian Massacre and
her introduction to the republication of Karl
Hess' Community Technology (both of which have
1995 copyrights), she is focusing on a slightly
different area — the importance that some of us
find in a commitment to community living, and the
hostility that others have to these communities. 
The Davidian Massacre is an eye-opening exposé of
government wrong-doing and Community Technology is
a libertarian classic that has been too long out
of print, but both books are important reading. 
Not just for libertarians, but for all those who
wonder what inspires the libertarian dedication to
nongovernmental solutions.
Mount Carmel Center at Waco, Texas, was founded in
the 1960s in a group of ramshackle houses by Ben and
Lois Roden as an offshoot of the Seventh Day
Adventist Church, the "Branch Davidians."  In
1981, 22-year-old Vernon Wayne Howell, a
self-taught student of the Bible, came there
seeking a prophet.  He became the leading
contender for the role of prophet himself after
the Rodens died.  His rival, George Roden, drove
him out at gun point in 1984, but most of the
Davidians left with him.  There were years of
conflict and even a gun battle between Howell and
Roden, who owned Mount Carmel Center, ending in
the Spring of 1988 when Howell and his Davidian
followers paid 16 years of back taxes on Mount
Carmel (after Roden went to jail for threatening a
judge) and repossessed it under an agreement with
the county that they would finally own the
property if they occupied and paid taxes on it for
five years.  Carol Moore points out that
"significantly, that five-year period would end
during the 1993 siege."  She postulates that one
of the main reasons that the Davidians were
reluctant to surrender to the authorities and
leave the property during the siege was a fear
that by giving up occupancy they would forfeit
their property to the county.
In 1990, Vernon Howell legally changed his name to
David Koresh.  In 1991, the Davidians started
tearing down separate homes at the center and
building one large building where the community
would live and study together.  In 1992, 
Davidians from all over
the world came to the Center to celebrate Passover
— Koresh's preaching centered on prophecies of the
Apocalypse, and he said this might be the last
Passover.  The group was unconventional in other
ways; beginning in 1989, Koresh had taken a number
of women in the community as his wives, including
some teenagers, saying that he was acting on God's
command.
Not everyone agreed with Koresh's leadership.  Between
1990 and 1993, according to Moore, "as many as
twenty former members made various allegations to
the government and press," including tax fraud,
stashing of weapons, sexual goings on, violation of
immigration laws (a number of Koresh's followers
came from Australia, Canada, the Philippines, New
Zealand, and England), and "exposing children to
explicit talk about sex and violence."  Many of
these charges were orchestrated by Marc Breault, a
former Davidian who left the group to become a "cult
buster."
As a result, the Center was investigated by social
workers in 1992 for child abuse (the charges were
dropped for lack of proof), the television program
"A Current Affair" filmed an exposé, and various
federal agencies received complaints.
Perhaps because of such investigations, Koresh became
convinced that the Apocalypse would begin with an
attack on Mount Carmel Center.  For protection, the
group not only built an underground tornado shelter
but reinforced the front wall of the new building
with an additional two-foot high concrete wall and
built a concrete room to house the Center's guns.
The community ran several businesses, including a
profitable legal gun business, using a licensed dealer
who was not a member of the church.  Among other
trades, they invested in a large number of legal
semi-automatic weapons, assuming that a profit
could be made on their resale if the government
restricted their manufacture in the future.  Most
of these were kept in boxes and had never been
fired.  This activity brought them to the
attention of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms (BATF) as early as July of 1992.  When he
was informed at that time that the BATF was
questioning the gun dealer about possible illegal
weapons at the Center, Koresh invited the agents
to come there and inspect his weapons, an
invitation that was refused.
Despite its defectors, Mount Carmel Center was not
falling apart as a community when agents from the
BATF stormed it at the end of February 1993,
supposedly to serve a warrant for David Koresh's
arrest.  It was a self-supporting, interracial,
family community of men, women, and children united
by unconventional religious and sexual ideas.  It
was a community that had cooperated with
investigative authorities, who had not been able to
find any evidence of child abuse or
illegal weapons, two of the main charges later
asserted in the media.
And it was a community whose lives and property were
then destroyed by agents of the federal government.
The Davidian Massacre is an invaluable resource book,
detailing day by day, sometimes minute by minute,
the events that led up to the first attack by the
BATF, the attack, the ensuing siege by BATF and FBI
agents, the final destruction of the center by
government forces using tanks and gas, and the
aftermath, through subsequent revelations in the
media and in Congressional hearings up to 1995.  In
fact, the only
criticism I would have of this book is that there
is so much information here that it is at times
very dense reading.  But for those concerned about
the subject, Moore presents a convincing theory in
some detail — that the BATF involved the National
Guard by falsely postulating drug activity at the
Center, as the Guard's involvement was otherwise
illegal; that in the BATF raid, armed National
Guard helicopters shot and killed four Davidians;
and that the evidence of bullet holes in vehicles
and doors and walls of the Center would not only
have exonerated the Davidians from murder charges
for killing agents in self-defense, but would have
discredited the government agencies.  Therefore,
it was necessary that the Center be destroyed in
order to destroy this evidence.  And she further
establishes a subsequent government cover-up, to
hide the facts from the general public.
The book is extremely credible, particularly because
it also painstakingly examines the evidence against
the Davidians — for example, that there may have
been some illegal weapons and that there was one
allegation that Koresh sexually used a ten-year-old
girl.  In
pursuit of the truth, Moore not only draws on a
vast array of media reports, books, e-mail
reports, and government documents, but "over fifty
hours of video tapes, over twenty hours of radio
and conference audio tapes, news and government
photographs, and personal discussions and
interviews with participants in the events and
with other investigators and interested parties."
She has a skeptical view of the two videos that have
been going the rounds of some conservative
gatherings: "Waco, The Big Lie," and "Waco, The Big
Lie Continues," since they make several allegations
she
finds to be untrue.  She concludes that in spite
of "these faults, the videos do contain enough
shocking footage and real truths to have mobilized
hundreds of thousands of citizens to seek more
information about federal crimes against the
Davidians."
One of the most chilling details about the siege and
its denouement is that the FBI cut off all
electricity to the building in March, which meant
that the Davidians were totally dependent on
flammable fluids
for heat and lighting for a month.  Kerosene lamps
were filled near the kitchen and carried to
bedrooms where they were hung on walls.  Some
rooms had propane gas tanks and butane gas
heaters.  Says Moore, "Many find it incredible
that the FBI would order tanks to smash away at a
building filled with flammable fuel and lighted
lanterns.  Some wonder if knocking large holes in
the building and collapsing the gymnasium was not
a conscious attempt to maximize the ‘flue effect.' 
Others wonder if the injection of flammable CS gas
and methylene chloride solvent — both of which
produce toxic gases when burned — was part of a plan
to accelerate the fire, and even disable
Davidians so they could not escape....  Tanks
drove thirty-six Davidians into the concrete room,
where they died, and most of the rest to the
second floor.  Many suspect tanks purposely
destroyed all three staircases, preventing easy
exit from the second floor.  There is no doubt
that Mount Carmel was systematically turned into a
fire trap.  The only question is, was it done
through criminal negligence or with intent to
commit mass murder?"
Moore is especially careful not to overstate her case
because of the increasing danger that groups with
antigovernment ideas — especially "patriots" and
militia movements — will take government excesses
such as occurred in Waco as justification for
violent actions of their own.  In her Preface she
refers to the bombing in Oklahoma City on the second
anniversary of the fire at Mount Carmel.  She says
she prays that "governments will learn to resolve
conflicts with citizens cooperatively and
non-violently — and that citizens angered by
government tyranny will learn the techniques of
assertive and effective non-violent civil
disobedience and non-violent direct action."

   On a happier note, Karl Hess and his wife, Therese,
lived and worked with community activists in the
Adams-Morgan section of Washing-ton, D.C. for five
years, convinced that independence from government
depends on economic self-sufficiency.  They
struggled to make their neighborhood self-sufficient
by raising rainbow trout in basement tanks, growing
vegetables hydroponically on rooftops, installing
self-contained bacteriological toilets, starting
their own newspaper, and holding weekly "town
meetings."  And it did work.
This community was not stormed from the outside; it
fell apart from the inside.  Specifically it was
crime that drove the Hesses from Adams-Morgan into
the hills of West Virginia.  More generally, the
community split along racial lines, with the black
majority of the
residents less interested in joining in community
work and more interested in appealing for
government grants.  "Meeting after meeting, for
instance," wrote Hess, "the idea of pooling money
was brought up, pooling money to establish
neighborhood ownership of key properties, to provide
homes for the evicted, to set new patterns
of ownership for a new kind of neighborhood. 
Plenty of ‘right ons.' No cash.  Was there any
cash?  Of course.  Even people on welfare have
disposable incomes.  The pool of money needed to
buy our neighborhood would have been relatively
modest, the weekly equivalent of a carton of
cigarettes or a bottle of whiskey from each member
of the assembly."  Instead, a "culture of poverty"
remained focused on what Hess called "program
handouts," and sometimes even on crime.  He
concluded that he and his friends couldn't break
through that culture.  "I am convinced, however,
that if the culture of poverty is to be broken in
any black neighborhood it will be broken by black
people, not by starry-eyed whites talking soul
patter."
The Hesses may not have transformed the Washington
inner city (although one delightful section of this
book tells in some detail how it might have
happened), but their story ends happily.  They went
on to build their own house and to gather together a
group of community technology enthusiasts in a small
town in West Virginia.  It is good to have this
detailed, inspiring book in print.


Libertarian Party Politics
   Ayn Rand once said that the only thing that would
transform society is books, books, and more books. 
Carol Moore is to be thanked and congratulated for
having contributed these two to our ongoing public
discussion.
[In February of this year, in response to an
autographed copy of Why Government Doesn't Work, the
National Coordinator of ALF, Joan Kennedy Taylor,
wrote a letter to Harry Browne, explaining that ALF
had an official position on abortion that his
position contradicts.  That letter is repeated here. 
The fact that ALF as an organization cannot support
Harry Browne as a nominee for the presidency doesn't
mean, of course, that individual members of ALF
cannot support him — it only means that, if they do,
it will be in spite of his position on this
important issue.]

Dear Mr. Browne:
On behalf of the Association of Libertarian Feminists,
I want to thank you for sending an inscribed copy of
Why Government Doesn't Work to ALF at the above
address.
Our members agree with the vast majority of your
positions, but unfortunately, on the one issue on
which ALF has taken an official position as an
organization, we do not agree with you.  That issue is reproductive freedom.
In the fall of 1977, ALF sent ballots to all its
members asking them to vote on the following
resolution:
"The basic human right to limit one's own reproduction
includes the right to all forms of birth control
(contraception, including sterilization, and
abortion), recognizing the dual responsibility of
both sexes.  ALF therefore opposes all practices and
all governmental actions that restrict access to any
of these means of birth control, and advocates the
elimination of all laws and practices that would
compel any woman to bear a child against her will."
The resolution was adopted.
I myself realized in late 1989 that it would be more
complete to have had a resolution that addressed
both sides of the choice question — in 1977 we had
not yet known that there were groups, such as many
secular
humanists, who supported a right to abortion, but
were very doubtful about a corresponding right to
have a child.  I therefore suggested, in ALF News
#32 (Autumn-Winter 1989) that we consider adopting
wording proposed by NARAL which the conservative,
solidly Republican legislature of New Hampshire
passed in April, 1988 (188-167 in the House and
13-11 in the Senate), substituting it for three
nineteenth-century laws still on the books that
made abortion criminal.  (Unfortunately, the new
wording was vetoed by New Hampshire's governor.)
The wording was very simple: "The state shall not
compel any woman to complete or to terminate a
pregnancy."
Although ALF took no action on this suggestion, it
indicates, I think, that many of our members,
including myself, are aware that the many people who
think as you do that abortion is wrong should also
have their right to choose against abortion
protected from an intrusive government.  Therefore,
we have no objection to your statement on abortion
calling for education and persuasion to dissuade
people from abortion.  No objection, that is, until
your last paragraph.
But we have several strong objections to your ending
your statement by saying:
"And if we have any respect for the Constitution, it
surely isn't a matter in which the federal
government has any role — either to facilitate or
stop abortion, or to prevent state governments from
stopping them."
As libertarians, we consider the action of state
governments to be government action, and the implication
that you as president would call on the states to enforce
your moral viewpoint is not acceptable to those who feel
as we do that reproductive freedom is a right.
Those of us who are constitutional scholars know that
the Supreme Court is part of the federal government,
and find your statement incomplete if not
misleading.  As president, would you be willing to
appoint Supreme Court justices who believe in the
Ninth Amendment protection of unenumerated rights,
even if that
included a right to privacy?  Or would you have a
"litmus test" as present conservative Republicans
do, accepting only those justices who do not
consider the Ninth Amendment (or as some decisions
have put it, the due process clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment) binding on the States in the
matter of abortion?  In any case, the Court (and
the president, in his position of nominating
justices) has a very important role in this
debate, which cannot be sidestepped by asserting
that it doesn't exist.
It is very disappointing to us that mainline
Republicans who are personally opposed to abortion,
like Steve Forbes and Lamar Alexander, are taking a
more libertarian position on this issue than the
frontrunning candidate for the Libertarian
nomination.
Because of your stand on this issue, ALF as an
organization cannot support your candidacy.

Sincerely yours,

Joan Kennedy Taylor
National Coordinator
Association of Libertarian Feminists



Update
"Loving Freedom: Voltairine de Cleyre," a lecture
sponsored by ALF in "The Individualist Feminist
Heritage" series, was given by Sharon Presley on May
12 at the facilities of Resources for Independent
Thinking in Oakland.  De Cleyre, a contemporary of
Emma Goldman, was a prominent anarchist-feminist
activist, writer, speaker, and poet in the 1890s
and the early 20th century. A passionate and
eloquent writer and speaker, she campaigned
ceaselessly for the cause of individual freedom
and the independence of women.  Sharon is
currently working on an anthology of de Cleyre's
essays entitled Loving Freedom: Selected Works of
Voltairine de Cleyre.  The collection will include
a "lost" essay by Emma Goldman written in
commemoration of de Cleyre as well as a greatly
expanded version of Sharon's biographical essay
about de Cleyre published by ALF. 
Earlier in the Spring, Sharon also gave two seminars
on "Myths of Gender" for Resources for Independent
Thinking. "Are Men and Women Really Different
Species?: Myths vs. Realties about Gender"  was
given on March 2. This covered what psychological
research shows about the actual differences or
lack of differences in behavior.  Contrary to
popular myths, current research suggests that
there are no group differences between males and
females in either verbal or math abilities, only a
small but  statistically significant difference in
spatial abilities (mental manipulation of
three-dimensional forms).  Nor is there sufficient
evidence to back up the much-touted claim by
psychologist Carol Gilligan that men and women
have different styles of moral decision-making.
On April 6, Sharon spoke on "Do Women and Men Have
‘Different Brains'?: Sex, Gender and Biology."  In
spite of the popularity of books like Brain Sex, it
is not clear that there are brain differences, let
alone differences that lead to gender role-related
behavioral differences.

A seminar entitled "What You Can Do About Sexual
Harassment In The Workplace When You Don't Want To
Call The Cops," was presented by Joan Kennedy
Taylor, on Saturday, May 18 at the facilities of
Resources for
Independent Thinking in Oakland, California.
Joan, who is writing a book on the subject, presented
strategies gleaned from managers, union officials,
and workers in construction, engineering, and Wall
Street.
  
Joan also spoke May 14 at Laissez Faire Books in San
Francisco, about the collection of Roy Child's
essays, Liberty Against Power, that she edited. 
Several members of the audience shared their fond
memories of Roy.