When It Turns Outward
Most coercive groups harm their own members and no one else. A few turn on the world outside, a poisoning in Oregon, a nerve agent on the Tokyo subway, a congressman shot on an airstrip. These are the cases everyone knows, and they are deliberately a minority of this archive, because organising the subject around them mistakes the exception for the rule. The dead are counted here, and not shown.
Part of Cults
19 moments in this segment.
- - Charles Manson booking photograph, 1968. A California corrections booking photograph made in April 1968, a year before the killings for which Manson and several followers were convicted. It is a public record document of a convicted leader, kept here as a single anchor rather than a gallery.
- - The courthouse scrum, 1970. Unedited press-corps footage from the murder trial that opened on 15 June 1970 and returned guilty verdicts on 25 January 1971. The coverage is the point: the 1969 killings, rather than any mechanism of control, fixed what the public would mean by the word cult for the next fifty years.
- - Charles Manson leaving a Los Angeles courtroom. Manson, manacled hand and foot and with his hair cut short, escorted from a Los Angeles courtroom in February 1973, where he had appeared as a witness at another trial.
- - Damaged aircraft photographed by the FBI in Guyana. One of the damaged aircraft recorded by FBI agents in Guyana after 18 November 1978. A visiting congressional delegation was attacked at the airstrip as it tried to leave, and the killing of a sitting US congressman is what turned the settlement into a federal investigation.
- - Network news reports from Guyana. CBS News coverage broadcast in the days after 18 November 1978, when 918 people connected to the Peoples Temple died across three locations in Guyana. Congressman Leo Ryan, killed at the Port Kaituma airstrip that day, remains the only member of the US Congress killed in the line of duty.
- - A staffer's account of the airstrip. An interview recorded in 1978 with a member of Congressman Leo Ryan's delegation who was wounded at Port Kaituma on 18 November. Five people were killed there and eleven injured as the delegation tried to leave with departing members.
- - Antelope, Oregon under the name Rajneesh. The small Oregon town of Antelope after commune members took control of its council and renamed it Rajneesh in 1984. The takeover of a neighbouring town's government was the point at which the commune's expansion became the outside world's problem.
- - Detection paper reads positive for sarin. Detection paper showing a positive result for sarin, held during the response on the Tokyo subway on 20 March 1995. Aum Shinrikyo released the nerve agent on five trains during the morning rush.
- - Decontaminating the subway carriages. Self-Defense Force personnel spraying decontaminant inside contaminated subway carriages after the sarin release of 20 March 1995.
- - Self-Defense Force units prepare to deploy. Troops report that preparations to depart are complete at the Ichigaya garrison, part of the response to the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. A chemical unit of the armed forces was sent into the centre of the capital.
- - Plaque at the Antelope post office. A plaque at the base of the flagpole outside the post office in Antelope, Oregon, dedicated to residents who resisted the Rajneesh movement's takeover of the town between 1981 and 1985. It was photographed two decades after the commune disbanded.
- - Wanted notice for Aum fugitives, 2004. A Japanese police wanted notice for Aum Shinrikyo members still at large in 2004, nine years after the Tokyo subway sarin attack. The last of the fugitives sought on posters of this kind was arrested in 2012.
- - The street in Kamiosaki where a notary was seized. The spot in Kamiosaki, Shinagawa, where Aum Shinrikyo members abducted a Tokyo notary in late February 1995 after a relative of his left the group. Photographed thirteen years later.
- - The salsa bar at a restaurant in The Dalles. A self-service salsa counter in a restaurant in The Dalles, Oregon. Open bars like this one were contaminated with Salmonella by members of the Rajneesh commune in September 1984, in an attempt to keep local voters away from the polls in a county election.
- - Salad bars in The Dalles. Between 29 August and 10 October 1984, restaurant salad bars in The Dalles, Oregon were deliberately contaminated with salmonella to suppress turnout in a county election. 751 people fell ill and 45 were hospitalised; nobody died. It remains the largest bioterrorist attack recorded in the United States.
- - How the raid began. A 2018 network documentary segment reconstructing the ATF raid of 28 February 1993, including an account from a man who was inside the building. Ten people died that day: four federal agents and six Branch Davidians.
- - Executions in Japan, 2018. News report on 6 July 2018, when Aum Shinrikyo's founder Shoko Asahara and six senior members were executed; thirteen members sentenced to death were all executed that July. The 20 March 1995 sarin release on five Tokyo subway trains killed fourteen people. Injury figures vary widely between sources, from roughly a thousand seriously hurt to several thousand who sought treatment.
- - Twentieth of March, 1995. A documentary account of the coordinated sarin release on the Tokyo subway during the morning rush of 20 March 1995, which killed fourteen people. A smaller sarin attack at Matsumoto in June 1994 had been treated as an isolated crime, and a local resident was wrongly suspected of it.
- - Thirty years of claims. Japanese television reports that bereaved families are still pursuing Aleph, the successor organisation to Aum Shinrikyo, over compensation. The organisation remains under state surveillance decades after the attack.
