I had heard about the Weaver incident before Waco.
Before that, there was the M.O.V.E. Standoff in Philly.
If these were isolated incidents, that would be one thing, but it seems these were part of a progression in apocalyptic behaviour on the part of Federal Agencies.
Add Gordon Kahl to the list, while you are at it. Protested taxes and farm policy, bushwhacked on the roadside near Medina, N. Dakota, hunted down and killed in Arkansas (the building was burned there, too). The case can be readily made, that like Koresh, Kahl could have been taken peacefully.
It seems these people are 'taken out' in grandstand fashion to make an example to keep the rest of the sheep bleating softly. Either they are hungry for press near budget time, or eager to frighten others into submission.
I happen to live right outside Philly, and am about at the highest point around. This gave me a very good seat for that "show". I even had a ladder up and a lawn chair on the roof watching the whole fiasco unfold that evening. What happened with MOVE (which, incidentally, means nothing) was more of an "OH S**t" deal instead of a JBT action.
This "group" had been shut down by Frank Rizzo(then the colorful, even if Democrap mayor of Philly) after a police officer had been killed. It was, by all standards, pretty spectacular, within 12 hours the house was gone and the lot paved over with asphalt (not uncommon for that period of time).
The '85 standoff started escalating from 0 to apocalypse in about 4 months. The group had installed loudspeakers on the property, and were screaming obscenity 24/7, in addition to no working toilets, a lot of health hazards, and general squalor. The neighbors, rather naturally got highly irritated and demanded the city do something. The mayor at that time was Wilson Goode, who would make a better minister than a mayor (Think Jimmy Carter). The police chief (Gregore Sambor) had an ego bigger than the damn city,(Anyone who stands in the middle of the street at 0630 and yells "Attention MOVE, this is America" definitely is missing a few cards out of the deck.
At any rate, there were a huge number of cops there, and at some point, which to this day, I don't believe has been determined, a shot was allegedly fired. OK, now you had to have been around to believe this, but over 10,000 rounds were fired in less than 1/2 an hour. This being said, I also know some Upper Darby cops who were on duty at a park next to Cobbs Creek, which fortunately has about an 8' hill (a real effficient backstop, it turned out) because these guys were literally scared s**tless by the rounds being fired without the people firing giving any thought to where the hell they were going...most wound up in the aforesaid dirt hill, to the relief of the Upper Darby cops who were eating dirt and praying extremely hard about that point. The firing stopped because the Philly cops basically ran out of ammo.
After that, nothing really happened all day, until the evning, when the infamous "bunker" was deemed a hazard, and someone came up with the idea of dropping a satchel charge. A small fire evidently started, and the Fire Comissioner, in another stroke of genius decided to "let the bunker burn" The rest, of course is history. From the viewpoint I had it was unbelievable. It turned into a firestorm. What has to be understood is these were all row houses, mostly identical to the same kind I live in in Upper Darby. They have been around since the late '20's and most have about 30 layers of flat roofs (code, we don't care about any steeenking code)..So you have one bodacious tar barrel. There are firewalls, and pretty good ones, between the houses, but a lot of the houses there were abandoned (That particular area of Philly looked like Beirut, you could film a decent post apocalyptic movie there), with burned out shells of houses, boarded up houses, and well kept houses virtually together. Since all the residents had been evacuated the night before, there was no chance of homeowners keeping sparks from setting their houses on fire. What happened then, of course, is that a domino effect set in, and next morning there were about 3 blocks and more of smoking rubble. Two people got out of the house, and whoever else was inside was pretty much reduced to unrecognizable charred matter.
Hearings for this lasted for weeks, and a lot of heads rolled, but, to this day, I believe this wasn't so much intentional as a whole lot of stupid idiots making one more poor decision after another. There were several movies made about this, but IMHO, the only thing I would have loved to see, and probably really happened during this fiasco would have been a shot of a cop and a fireman at the end of one of the streets, looking at what was happening, when the horrible truth that something monstrous and unstoppable was occurring, struck home, that one just looked at the other and said "OH F**k" (fade to black).
The MOVE thing wasn't a JBT action, it was a confluence of idiots who, given the choice of several all bad decision choices, chose the most destructive one. It was, however, from my roof at least, an unbelievably spectacular event, rivaling most of what I witnessed in the military.
As the old saw says "you had to see it to believe it"
Keep the Faith for Freedom
Greg