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April 20, 1993, The Washington Post, Authorities Had Feared Tragedy That Koresh Foretold, by Gustav Niebuhr,

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April 20, 1993, The Washington Post, Authorities Had Feared Tragedy That Koresh Foretold, by Gustav Niebuhr, 700+ words

In the seven weeks he spent barricaded against an army of federal agents in Waco, Tex., David Koresh increasingly warned anyone who would listen that events of great violence were coming.

He foresaw the end of the world and quoted continually from the Bible's Book of Revelation, a dark and symbolic text that tells of the opening of Seven Seals, which in turn brings warfare, earthquakes and -- after the final seal is broken -- conflagrations that destroy much of Earth.

"Do you want me to laugh at your pending torments? Do you want me to pull the heavens back and show you my anger?" Koresh said in a letter he sent several days ago to federal authorities, in which he spoke as if in God's voice. "Fear me and the 'hour of judgement' for it has come."

For a full year, federal authorities feared that the plight of Koresh and his Branch Davidians might very well end tragically. In April 1992, the U.S. Embassy in Australia, on a tip from individuals familiar with Koresh, sent a cable to the State Department warning that the Branch Davidians were planning mass suicide, a notice that triggered a long investigation that eventually led the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) to the gates of the Waco compound in February.

Still, the question remains why so many people - apparently more than 80 men, women and children - chose resolutely to stand and die with David Koresh.

"We do not get the impression that people were being held against their will," said Stephen N. Dunning, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. "If indeed there has been a mass suicide, it appears that the victims have chosen to be victims" - at least in the case of the adults.

Many who join authoritarian groups such as Koresh's are idealists "who hunger for an absolute truth for which they can give themselves absolutely," Dunning said. The longer they remain in the group, the deeper their isolation from outside influence. "People there no longer maintain diverse relationships. All of their relationships are with people in the compound," he said.

To such cultic groups, a show of force by outside authorities may only drive believers closer together, adding to their sense of isolation from mainstream society, said Marc Galanter, professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center. "You cannot assume that people with an intensely held ideology are going to relent if you push them around," he said.

Adding to the tension at the Waco compound was the prospect of trial and imprisonment, stemming from the deaths of four ATF agents in the initial Feb. 28 raid. "Remember what faces them on the outside when they leave," Dunning said. "What they're looking forward to is a very grim outlook."

The Rev. Daniel C. O'Connell, chairman of the psychology department at Georgetown University, said there likely was an increasing mood of despair inside the compound as the siege went on.

Within that atmosphere, it is possible that the Branch Davidians began to recall the actions of another small, beleaguered religious group that chose suicide, he said. "I think probably everyone in the compound - certainly the adults - were aware of the Jonestown history. So there was a precedent for this sort of thing."

The name "Jonestown," from the utopian colony founded in the jungle of Guyana by the charismatic San Francisco preacher Jim Jones, has become synonymous with religious self-destruction. After gunmen from the group shot down Rep. Leo J. Ryan (D-Calif.), who was visiting the enclave, in November 1978, Jones led more than 900 followers to their deaths.

What is also important to remember, authorities on religious groups said, is that choosing death over submission to outside authority is not a path exclusive to cults or groups on the margins of society.

The world's great faiths - Judaism, Christianity and others - recognize their own martyrs. History is full of examples, among them: the 1,000 Jewish warriors who killed themselves rather than surrender to the Roman legions besieging them at Masada; and St. Thomas More, the English official sent to the executioner's block for refusing to side with King Henry VIII when the latter broke with the pope.

"Refusal to violate personal integrity is the acceptable form of martyrdom," said O'Connell. "The fanatical {decision to choose death} is not the studied, principled maintenance of personal integrity - quite the contrary."

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