In many ways Manson was close to a David Koresh or a Jim Jones. IOW, the charismatic crazy guy with a deranged and dangerous clan of followers.
The big difference is Koresh & crew were killed by the Feds before they did any harm to the outside world. (Note I’m not suggesting they had plans to harm the outside world; I don’t know the details well enough to say whether they did or didn’t.)
And Jim Jones’ followers killed themselves, not others. And did it in a small foreign country. Had they instead lived in the Midwest somewhere the hoopla would have been even more extreme than it was.
Bottom line: for the typical audience member, those groups were equally weird as Manson, but didn’t have the same potential menace to John Q Public. Its easy to look at Koresh or Jones and say “*I’d *never fall in with somebody like them, so I’m not scared.”
I also think this is one of those things where each of us remembers the big event that happened in our teens or early adult years as especially extraordinary. It wasn’t really; it just seems so from your POV.
I don’t know - I was in high school when all that happened, and here in Canada we got a lot of the US media - but I never realized it was any more or less than any other murders of the time. Certainly murders of JFK, RFK, MLK had a much larger impact than Manson. Maybe I was too young to see “dirty hippies” as a threat, but it seems to me by the time one of his girls took a pot-shot at Gerald Ford he was more of a joke than a horror in the popular media.
Maybe the whole episode is a good Rorschach test of what we perceive about society at the time, each person’s private fears and obsessions. The whole “Helter Skelter” as guide, women who did his bidding and bedding, raving looney religious stuff - you can’t make this stuff up, if he hadn’t been lethal he’d be hilarious, like Doug Henning and his yogi buddy claiming to fly and bring world peace. But certainly it seemed to me there were a lot more “iconic” incidents of the sixties. From what I recall of the media at the time, it certainly didn’t stand out as one of the “one of the most socially and aesthetically disturbing crimes ever committed in America”.
Of course, from my perspective, Canada was less obsessed with Christianity in general and so less obsessed with seeing Satanism and satanic cults everywhere. From my perspective, 99% of that Satanic carp was teenagers looking for something to piss off their parents.
The difference with Manson is the cultlike following and getting people to do his dirty work for him. Is there anyone else like that, especially in another country?
Charle Manson murders are well known in France, but I guess in good part due to the Hollywood connection, and I suspect probably less so amongst the younger generations.
Regarding famous French crimes, I’m not sure. I’d guess that Landru(on whom Charlie Chaplin based his “Mr Verdoux”) and the Dr Petiotmight be the most famous French murderers of the 20th century.
IIRC, even during WW2 with all the horrible stuff going on then, when the local people began to notice that the postal-buses that delivered patients to the “hospital” (euthanasia center) at Hadamar always seemed to go in full and come out empty, someone wrote “HAARMAN” in the dust on the back, and everyone knew exactly what that was suposed to mean.
I think the fact that ‘his girls’ did things years later to bring him back into the news has helped him to stick in the mind of the public. Charlie also had a really good instinct for how to freak the mundanes and was delighted at how the press ate his antics up.
Because we are talking about garden variety murderers. Political figures kill because they demonize their victims and feel that society needs to eliminate them from the mix to achieve their warped sense of fairness. They would not kill for pleasure.
