Rajneesh:
What that Rajneesh Documentary Leaves Out
Matthew Remski
Matthew Remski Blog
March 28, 2018
Source
Excerpts...
Coincidence: I wrote this the same day that Win McCormack's masterful summary of his investigative reporting on the Rajneeshis from 1983-1986 was posted. It completely confirms the speculations I've assembled here based largely upon my own cult experiences. It also damns the Way's efforts to near irrelevance. For a fuller picture and citations, I encourage you to read it here.
I'm glad that Rajneesh doc was made and is out there, but I have to object to the notion going around that it adds to a general understanding of cult dynamics. It doesn't.
It can't. What the Way brothers have made is an intoxicating Bollywood Western, minus the choreography. Yokels vs. invaders stage a culture war on a battlefield of orgasms and guns, fuelled by diamonds and drugs and the budget of the DA, played out against pop abstractions of orientalist woo and Americanist fantasies of freedom.
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consider this short list of big things
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The Bhagawan is dangerous, we know, we KNOW... but who can resist goggling and chuckling at this swindler wearing his assortment of tea cosies and Star Trek priest robes, stoned on his upscale IKEA throne? And then there's Sheela! OMG Sheela! Cooking up salmonella special in her Jesus Grove kitchen. Now the Swiss are letting her take care of old people! OMG! And so on.
For me, the prurient high point was the retired DA saying:
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If you read reviews that laud their "objectivity", consider this short list of big things they left out:
- The effects of joining the Rajneesh movement on members' families and prior attachments.
- The effects of arranged marriages and divorces and forced migration.
- The effects of ashram life on the children born or brought into the organization.
- The money that members were required to give, and how the 30K "working members" of the Rajneesh movement worldwide - according to Sheela - were paid virtually nothing. For years. What it meant for 99% of them to hitchhike or drive out of the Oregon desert with a few bucks of gas in their tanks and the clothes on their backs, while the leadership scatters over the earth with trunks full of diamonds and gold.
[... the list goes on]
Read more from this blogger here.
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