It was Houteff who first purchased the compound in Waco, Texas, that he called Mount Carmel, after the biblical mountain of the same name. That apocalypse, he taught, was imminent. Houteff argued that he and his supporters would help bring about the future вЂњDavidic kingdomвЂќ - mirroring the empire of the biblical King David - during the apocalypse. Houteff believed that the Messiah prophesied in the biblical book of Isaiah was not Jesus, but was yet to come. The Davidian movement was spearheaded in 1930 by a Bulgarian immigrant, Victor Houteff, who dissented from aspects of standard Seventh-Day Adventist theology. The group began as the вЂњDavidiansвЂќ (also known as вЂњShepherdвЂ™s RodвЂќ), an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, a Christian religious movement that flourished in the late 19th century in America and that boasts about 19 million members worldwide today. While David Koresh is the figure most commonly associated with the Branch Davidians, the story of the group begins several decades before his ascent to leadership. The Branch Davidians didnвЂ™t start with David Koresh The story of Waco is also the story of disagreements over religious freedom, the rights and boundaries of the federal government, and what it means to be a legitimate religion. I felt it my duty to tell the true story of a group of people who were trying to live according to their religious beliefs and the teachings of a man they all considered divinely inspired.вЂќ In his book Waco: a SurvivorвЂ™s Story, David Thibodeau writes: вЂњSo many of the Davidians have been demonized by the media. Indeed, some of the few survivors of the siege have expressed anger with the way they feel that official accounts of the siege removed Branch DavidiansвЂ™ agency, portraying them as victims rather than believers. But itвЂ™s also much more complicated than a story about a cult. The story of Waco is, without question, a tragedy. Like the story of another so-called cult of the late 20th century - Jim JonesвЂ™s Peoples Temple, in which almost 1,000 people died by mass suicide - Waco persists in the popular imagination as a story about a group of people who brought their fate upon themselves. The prevailing narrative, in other words, presumed that all inhabitants of the Branch Davidian community were crazy, and that therefore, any violent means used against them would be justified. The only people that may be sorry are the parents who had to let their children be released.вЂќ A Newsweek article published during the ongoing siege, for example, uses as its closing kicker a quote from the estranged son of one Branch Davidian suggesting that the inhabitants of the Mount Carmel compound wanted to die: вЂќThey are waiting to get zapped up to heaven where theyвЂ™ll be transformed and fight a war where they get to kill all their enemies. Media coverage almost uniformly referred to the Branch Davidians as a вЂњ cultвЂќ and was unsympathetic not just to Koresh but to his followers as well. What happened at Mount Carmel was not suicide it was Holy War. They kept assuring that they werenвЂ™t about to be drawn into a firefight, then permitted exactly that to happen. The feds were the hostages, the ones who were surrounded without hope. The authorities must have known that it was all a sham.

A 1993 Texas Monthly story captures this mentality well:ДЇor 51 days federal agents camped outside the compound, paralyzed by their own ineptitude, while this notorious liar and con man was permitted to broadcast his incoherent message to the world. The 1993 media coverage of the Waco massacre - which depicted Koresh as a single-minded genius exerting power over his fellow Branch Davidians via mind control - has by now become the defining story of the siege. ItвЂ™s the story of a maniacal and apocalypse-minded cult leader, David Koresh, whose delusional stubbornness led to the deaths of 76 people. This week marks the 25th anniversary of one of the strangest and most tragic incidents in American religious history: the bloody ending of the siege between FBI agents and members of the Branch Davidian religious group in Waco, Texas.ДЇor many people, Waco is a lurid story about a cult - a story that has lent itself to decades of sensationalist media coverage (and, recently, a television miniseries).

Day 4 of the hostage situation meme