WHILE police in Britain continue to investigate the latest Islamic bomb plot, here in Los Angeles we have our own terror chief to worry about.
Like Osama bin Laden, and any number of other religious cuckoos, he insists that Armageddon is coming — or, to quote him precisely, that “the pit will be opened [and] a third of all Mankind will die”.
Naturally, this spiritual leader takes allegorical texts literally. And he believes that the only survivors of the coming global war will be “those who have the seal of God on their foreheads”. Not that he is taking any chances: there is a nuclear bunker with his name on it in the Mojave Desert.
Fortunately, this bearded lunatic is already in jail. His name may even sound familiar: Charles Manson. It was 37 years ago this week that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department first raided the failed pop star’s Topanga Canyon ranch and arrested him and his “family” on drugs-related charges — only to discover that he was responsible for something far, far worse.
Before his arrest, in the hope of triggering the race war he believed was inevitable, Manson had dispatched his “family” to the Beverly Hills mansion of the film director Roman Polanski, with orders to kill everyone there. One of the victims was Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, who was stabbed to death (Polanski was in London).
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Tate’s killer used a towel soaked in blood to daub the word “Pig” — a reference to the Beatles song Piggies — on the front door.
I mention all this not because of the anniversary of the killings — there were as many as 35 murders — or that Manson is up for parole early next year (at his last hearing, he impressed the parole board by cutting a Swastika into his forehead). No, the Manson killings fascinate because they are a reminder of the anxieties of a different age — a more gentle time, when all people had to worry about was all-out nuclear Armageddon, the LSD revolution, and Ku Klux Klan bombings in the South.
It’s worth remembering that in the Sixties it was Beatles songs — not verses from the Koran — that were allegedly inspiring the young to violence. Take George Harrison’s class-war lyrics to Piggies: “Have you seen the little piggies/ Crawling in the dirt . . . In their eyes there’s something lacking/ What they need’s a damn good whacking . . .”
Manson took this as a direct call to action against the wealthy of LA, even though he hoped to blame the violence on blacks, thus starting his global race war.
Manson found more proof of the coming apocalypse in another Beatles song, Helter Skelter, the lyrics of which go “Look out, ‘cause here she comes”. The Manson family took to writing this song title in blood on their victims’ kitchen appliances.
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So Manson was a madman — but can he tell us anything about those who use Islam as their own version of Helter Skelter? It would seem so. Although Manson’s family wasn’t bankrolled by any oil-rich governments (they funded themselves through drug deals), it was comprised of middle-class kids who were exploited during youthful periods of rebellion and self-doubt. Charles “Tex” Watson, who took part in the Tate murders, was a star football player at high school.
To this day, Manson remains the most written-to inmate in the entire US prison system, receiving more than 60,000 letters every year, many of them from teenagers who want to join the family.
Of course, it would be foolish to ignore the influence of the West’s behaviour in the Middle East on young Muslims across the globe, but we should also bear in mind that death cults (as opposed to pure suicide cults) have never struggled to turn religious doctrines into murder doctrines. In Tokyo, the terrorists who released sarin nerve gas into the subway were followers of Buddhism.
All of which reminds me of what the comedian Chris Rock once said of the Columbine killers — white middle-class kids (big surprise) who planned their 1999 schoolyard assault for a year, and who wrote in their diaries that what they really wanted to do was hijack a plane and crash it into a New York City building.
Rock was frustrated by the self-flagellation over what had warped these young men’s minds (music, movies, the internet?) and made a less complex suggestion: “Why can’t they just be f***ing crazy?” Whether it’s Rashid Rauf or Charlie Manson, that certainly makes sense to me.