A broken clock was right for once. It still was a broken clock. They were xenophobic, religious (maybe racist, maybe not) bigots, who for once had their fears justified.
I didn’t say that the Rajneeshpuram community was good, or wholesome. There can both be bad actors here and they both were.
I took exception with the contention that:
The people of Antelope weren’t even tempered at all. They were xenophobic and as closed minded as possible. They were, and to lesser extent, so was the county and the state. The fact that the Rajneeshpuram community was later revealed to be a cult in no way changes that. I believe (you may not) that the townspeople made up their mind to oppose the community way before they have a rational reason to.
Not a direct linkage, but this made me think of "Making a Murder. I’m convinced that Steven Avery is guilty as the day is long, but that doesn’t prevent the patently obvious conclusion that he was framed by the police too. One thing doesn’t preclude the other.
Their “bigotry” consisted of thinking that this group was a bunch of dangerous nutters who would try to take over and do them harm.
This wasn’t “bigotry”, because it wasn’t irrational: it had solid basis in what this group was and how it acted.
This also isn’t ‘hindsight logic’. Looking at the group, at what they believed and how they acted, it was reasonable to find that they were dangerously crazy, though admittedly, just how crazy they would get was not possible to predict.
In short, not all negative reactions to outsiders are wrong. In this case they were right, and the fact that they were proved right doesn’t, somehow, make them less right.
From watching the documentary it doesn’t seem to me the townsfolk had any cartilage reason to believe that the Rajneeshis were dangerous or crazy or dangerously crazy when they first arrived. Rajneesh certainly had no reputation for being dangerous prior to that.
It’s abundantly clear to me that they were merely bigoted.
The fact that the Rajneeshis later proved themselves to be dangerous is irrelevant to that point.
Malthus I’m not going to argue with you. If you didn’t think there as any bigotry on display after watching 6 plus hours of that documentary, than there’s nothing I’m going to say to convince you otherwise.
Acsenray I failed to capture this in several posts as well as you did in four sentences.
The documentary fails to even mention the child sexual abuse that was taking place. It also makes no mention of coerced abortion or sterilization of women (and girls as young as 14), or claims of violence and rape against women. I would say that it made an effort to make the townspeople look bigoted and the cult harmless.
Did the townspeople have any indication of such things when they started?
And do you have a link for these?
“Cartilage reason” has got to be some autocorrect error …
The documentary went out of its way to make it look like there were “two sides” to the situation, because that increases drama. It’s “even handed to a fault” as one reviewer put it:
There was plenty of evidence, quite apart from “bigotry”, let alone “racism”, to be alarmed at the cult - evidence reasonably known to the people opposing it:
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The cult was establishing its own armed militia. This is alarming in and of itself, even when those sharing the same nominal religion do it - it doesn’t take a religious bigot to find that of concern.
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The cult bussed in numerous homeless people purely to stuff ballot boxes to win local elections. When this failed, they turfed these folks out to fend for themselves.
Not to mention that their leader was, by all accounts, run out of India after running into similar problems there.
Where the folks of this mostly Christian, mostly White rural community prejudiced against them from the beginning?
Maybe so - though it isn’t a necessary factor: any group who moved into a rural area to establish their own town would create a certain amount of resentment from the local inhabitants, who want the character of the area preserved - but this particular group provided ample evidence that they were willing to engage in unsavory activities, including subverting the local government, before their full criminality was revealed.
“No bigotry on display” is not the same as “had rational reasons to oppose”. Both can, and often do, exist side by side.
Were some folks there bigots? Undoubtedly. That doesn’t mean they didn’t have good reason to fear the cult.
As pointed out above, the documentary plays up the bigotry, because it makes for better drama.
I lived in Portland at the time, and I recall that, for a fairly cosmopolitan and laid-back town, there was a strong atmosphere of hostility toward the Rajneeshees. I saw a bumpersticker, “Jesus Saves / Moses Invests / Baghwan Spends”. There was just absolutely no love for those people, even a day’s drive away. We felt like the Rajneeshees had decided to storm in and take over the town and it was just wrong. I mean, if they had gradually built up a presence instead of trying to cram in their puram where it was not really wanted, maybe people would have been more tolerant, but they chose the asshole route and made a state-full of enduring enemies.
Yes for sure. Sorry I really should have posted one without being asked. It’s a bit of a long read.
All of this “evidence” at least according to the documentary occurred well after the community came to Oregon, and were clearly not welcome. When the townspeople pushed back and were hostile, they had no way to know any of this was going to happen.
The busing of the homeless people took place well after the county made it clear that they were going to legislate them out of the county. At that point it was open political warfare. But that was late in the game
You mentioned that they armed themselves. Are you at least going to acknowledge that that came after a hotel that they owned was bombed and the local police did next to nothing about that? Or is the root cause of that not an issue? I didn’t see any violence displayed previous to that. Again this happened way after the townspeople displayed their desire to have them leave.
Maybe so? Maybe? First I’d guess that this “mostly” Christian white community was 100% Christian and white.
So what you are appearing to say, is that while the community was predisposed to be bigoted and xenophobic to others that weren’t Christian and white, it really wasn’t a factor in them being bigoted and xenophobic. This is what you’ve been debating with other posters and me for several days now.
It really seems as though you realize that the townspeople were as bad as the community, but you can’t bring yourself to admit that.
It is obviously an escalating situation - but what you appear reluctant to acknowledge, is that the locals had plenty of completely rational reasons to be concerned about a cult suddenly deciding to build a town in their midst.
Even assuming all else being equal, even assuming they weren’t a cult, a sudden town-creation would create controversy and resistance.
Add the fact that they were a cult, and you get suspicion. That suspicion grew exactly because the cult made no efforts to win over the locals - rather attempted to subvert their political system, and eventually, to murder them.
Again, the pattern of behavior shows that the cult was engaged in an escalating pattern of bad behavior (eventually leading to attempted mass murder).
You go further than the documentary does - it attempts to be “even handed”, you seem intent on blaming the locals - as if they made the cult act the way they did, by using legal means to oppose them.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the point: that the locals had good, rational reason to fear a cult that had “armed itself”. Whether that cult was “justified” in arming itself by local police incompetence or partiality or not.
You’d do better with sticking with what I actually say, rather that paraphrasing up an inaccurate straw man based on what I am “appearing to say”, then beating the shit out of that. What I said made sense; your paraphrase doesn’t.
And really, making an argumentum ad populum on top of that? Based on - you and one other person?
What, are you competing in the informal fallacy Olympics? 
If the townspeople were “as bad as” the cult, this story would have had a higher body count.
Fact is, that what got the local’s dander up was the pushiness of the cult in attempting to create an entire city in their midst, by manipulating local land-use laws. The fact that they continually used lies and corruption to get their way created tons of resentment, and an escalating pattern that lead to the cult getting more and more militant – but at base it was all a land-use dispute about them wanting to build a city, and trodding underfoot the wishes of the locals and the regulations intended to control development.
This would annoy anyone, anywhere.
From the New Republic article:
Opposition to this lead to bussing in homeless ballot-box stuffers (whose experience at the cult’s hands was dismal) and, eventually, attempted mass murder … all to take over the political process, to allow for them to create their city despite the local land-use process.
I tried reading that New Republic piece, but it had way too much screed in it. I mean, holy crap, he literally godwinizes it by the eighth paragraph. There is probably a fair bit of truth to what he writes, but he could at least write it with a little less fury.
So the new season is of Documentary Now is starting next week, and the first episode has been posted on YouTube to promote it. It’s called bats*it valley, and you guessed it, it’s a parody of Wild Wild Country. It stars Owen Wilson and Michael Keaton, and it’s arguably less ridiculous than the real thing.
I just watched this series and I’m coming late to the thread. I thought the series was balanced to a fault, it didn’t ask the tough questions about the cult’s history of abuse, some of it documented before they came to Oregon and it didn’t ask the tough questions of the cult members who sat for interviews. Had any of them participated in the rapes that were reported to be common in the cult? And the one question I really wanted to ask the Australian woman who left the compound with Sheela was why did she always need a master (her words)? First it was Rajneesh and then later she said Sheela became her master.
I had vaguely remembered the salad bar poisoning when it happened.