In Reply to: Re: That letter was a sham then? posted by Think about it on April 04, 2005 at 00:40:45:
I was hanging out with the COG in 76, At that time, the Mo letters definatly WERE anti-semetic (though the more blatent ones were for leaders and long term members only.)
However, they were not anti-black racist, particularly. In fact, he used some of the black militant reheotric of the time, saying, for example that America was doomed because the military was becoming more and more black, due to black povrty, and that when the blacks rose up, the blacks in the military would not shoot them because they would not shoo there own people (which was a good thing since he wanted America to be doomed.)
Then, a letter came out saying that it was God's will that COG win over Africa, so we needed to recruit more black members to help us do it. This was signicficant to my group, which was in the heaviliy black (and Black Panther Party influenced) city of Oakland, California.
We only had a couple of balck members in the colony (Jim Jones was doing much better, alas) but after that letter came out, there was a push to recruit more. Still, the colony remained mostly white (and the same was true in Hawaii.)
I did read some anti-balck slurs Mo wrote against Ted Patrick, but that seemed to be different because, well, we all knew Ted Patrick (the famouse deprogramer) was evil.
Oh, and Faith wrote a letter delcairing that Jimmy Hendrix had been a prophet (when he played the star spangled banner at Woodstock.)