Peace and Love

Hare Krishna vs. Hippie Death Cults

I’m working on a novel based in the 1960s. It was a volatile time. I’m trying to reconstruct the era from memory, but sometimes research is needed. Looking back on that time perhaps no one captured it better than Joan Didion. Didion is arguably the best writer of her time. She wrote a book of essays called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It’s a classic and assigned reading in any writing course. Didion is a “writer’s writer.” Slouching Towards Bethlehem documents a few days in the Summer of Love of 1967 and does a great job.

And yet...

Didion, while a product of both California and the Deep South is a quintessentially “New Yorker” writer. She has the East Coast snide attitude towards all things California. And it is through this lens of polished cynicism that we are made to view the “Summer of Love.”

Included in her collection of essays is a brief story about one of the members of the so-called “Manson family.”

Didion’s acceptance in the canon of great writers means her “take” on the Summer of Love is the one that is canonized as conventional wisdom. And so it is that hippies are forever welded in the American psyche not as flower children, but as the children of the Manson family.

The Manson "family"

The conventional wisdom holds that the hippies were co-opted by hard drugs and cynical hustlers; the innocence of 1967s “Summer of Love” was lost after the 1968 killing of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The Woodstock Nation was a dream that died at Altamont, when the Rolling Stones celebrated nihilism and “Sympathy for the Devil” as the Hell’s Angels beat a man to death. Charles Manson’s hippie death cult was the final nail in the coffin of peace and love.

"Hippies?"

Charles Manson died a couple of weeks ago. The mainstream media trotted out the trite old memes, just as I have repeated them, chapter and verse. These memes were repeated in the echo chambers of blogs and twitter pages until anyone who paid attention had got the message, the received wisdom.

I mention this, because I am a member of an alternative religion. I believe in Krishna and like to chant the holy name. It is odd that my spiritual teacher, Swami Prabhupad, had nothing to do with the so-called hippies. And yet, since a few famous hippies liked him, the Hare Krishna movement has somehow been associated with the hippies.

The most prominent hippie to endorse the Hare Krishna movement was, of course, the poet Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was a Beat Poet, not a hippie. But even before his opposition to the Vietnam War, He was branded a subversive and his poetry censored as obscene. Ginsberg found refuge in the holy name of Krishna. He met Prabhupada in New York.

He liked him and tried to help his Hare Krishna movement. When Prabhupada visited San Francisco in 1967, Ginsberg arranged for him to speak at a concert event at the Avalon Ballroom. Prabhupada preached Krishna consciousness during the intermission of a Rock concert there which featured the Grateful Dead.

Didion’s book mentions all this and ties together in the public mind the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra and the hippie movement of the Summer of Love. Since the followers of Prabhupada had the temerity to preach the Hare Krishna mantra to Christians the public was alarmed. “Hare Krishna Hippie Death Cult” was a perfect newspaper headline. Of course there was no such thing as a Hippie Death Cult, much less a Hare Krishna one. But then along came Charles Manson. His drug-crazed “hippie” followers murdered a family in cold blood not far from where I lived in Hollywood.

The publicity surrounding the case seemed to prove what God-fearing Christian America wanted to hear: Hippies were not innocent flower-children. Hippies were drug-crazed murderers and cult members. The worst of these were certainly the Hare Krishnas, who shaved their heads and paraded around chanting weird mantras and pounding on drums as they worked themselves into a state of ecstasy.

Never mind that Charles Manson was a Christian. Working at Guardian of Devotion Press years after Manson was imprisoned I received a letter from a prisoner who had read one of our publications, The Search for Śrī Kṛṣṇa by Śrīdhar Mahārāja. It was from a prisoner on Death Row, who lived in the same cell block as Charles Manson. He thanked us for the book which he had found in the prison library. It gave him much inspiration he wrote, asking if we had any other publications. I sent him a catalogue but never received a reply. Some time later I saw an article in the newspaper. Charles Manson had been attacked by a fellow prisoner. It seems that he had prohibited another man from practicing his religion and chanting Hare Krishna. There was a fight and Manson had been injured. That Charles Manson himself hated the Hare Krishna devotees, however, doesn’t matter. Hippies are hippies. Manson was the “leader” of the hippies. The Hare Krishnas were hippies. Therefore Hare Krishnas are part of the whole hippie death cult thing. Case closed.

Later on in the 1970s there was the strange case of Jim Jones, a self-proclaimed prophet. He had convinced his cult members to follow him to Guyana where he had established his own community, Jonestown. Convinced that the end of the world had come he had his followers drink poisoned Koolaid in a mass suicide pact.

Soon after this, the Hare Krishnas were again attacked for being a “death cult.” It doesn’t matter that all these death cults were Christian. Never mind that Krishna Consciousness is a form of Vaishnavism, practiced for thousands of years in India and other parts of Asia as far away as Thailand and Cambodia.

I can’t really hold Joan Didion responsible. She was merely another cynical writer trying to impress her readers with some strange and salacious material. Manson himself never told anyone to chant Hare Krishna. But it doesn’t matter. Propaganda is powerful. Chess champion and social critic Gary Kasparov has said: "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."
Hannah Arendt, writing in the Origins of Totalitarianism, observes:  “The ideal subject of totalitarian rules is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

The purpose of propaganda is not to convince or persuade. Argument meant to persuade is logical. Propaganda exists to crush one’s capacity for critical thinking. Propaganda blurs the line between right and wrong to the point where we can no longer distinguish good and bad. We accept the invented “enemy” as the cause of our troubles. If Hitler blamed Germany’s problems on the Jews, Nixon had “dissidents, communist agitators and hippie death cults.” Nixon has since been rehabilitated, but it is prudent to remember he kept a black list of enemies and that John Lennon was on his “enemies list.”

I’m glad Charles Manson is gone. I hope he rots in hell. But I’m also impressed at how memes are created, turned into “history” and used as propaganda.

I’m not trying to advocate for the “hippies,” either. But I do remember that Woodstock Nation, for a brief shining moment gave us a glimpse at the idea that we could all get along despite our differences. I still believe that we can have a little peace and love, and yes chant Hare Krishna and be happy.

Chant Hare Krishna and Be Happy.