The Manson Buggies

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Pine
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The Manson Buggies

Post by Pine »

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Charles Manson died yesterday. Seems like his choice for a daily driver wasn't too bad.. :shock:
It's a strange feeling when you kind of agree with something that Charles Manson did. It's not a good feeling. But I just learned that Charles Manson's insane "Helter Skelter" global race war fever dream used battalions of VW and Porsche-based dune buggies as key components, and I gotta say, at least in this one detail, it makes sense.

I had no idea about this whole dune buggy part of the Manson story until my friend T.Mike sent me a link to a reddit TIL (Today I Learned) that talked about this. So I did some research. I found that Manson not only planned to have a fleet of specially-equipped dune buggies as a crucial element in his Helter Skelter vision, he and his deranged "Family" actually had a sort of dune buggy factory operating in a desert junkyard, and the whole stealing-VWs-for-coming-race-war-dune-buggies plan had a key in his eventual undoing, because you know how cranky people get over stolen VWs.

Now, don't get me wrong — Manson and his whole "Helter Skelter" concept were, if you'll forgive the medical jargon, batshit insane. Absolutely, irretrievably clamshit nuts. Essentially, he and his followers (called "The Family") were going to try and start a huge race war with some awful album they never quite managed to record and, while all the brutal destruction was happening, they'd wait it out in a secret underground city in the desert, after which they'd emerge to rule over everyone.

That's the insane part; the solitary semi-sane part of the plan was that in order to outrun the police and race-armies roaming everywhere so they could get from LA into the underground city in the Death Valley desert they'd use a fleet of light, agile, rugged VW (and Porsche) based dune buggies.

Southern California deserts are the Dune Buggy's natural habitat. They can handle the terrain, and when they get to some feature or boulder they can't drive over, three or four of Manson's insane followers could easily lift one out of trouble. The air-cooled engine requires no water, which will likely be scarce in the desert after a globe-destroying race war.

And that's about the extent of the sane part. As you'd expect, everything gets pretty crazy in practice. At first, donor cars were purchased, sometimes with bad checks, but very soon the Family graduated to just stealing VWs and the occasional Porsche 356 outright. The operation got pretty elaborate. As Ed Sanders describes in his book, The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion:
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Charles Milles Manson (born Charles Milles Maddox, November 12, 1934 – November 19, 2017) was an American criminal and cult leader who led what became known as the Manson Family, a quasi-commune that arose in California in the late 1960s. Manson's followers committed a series of nine murders at four locations in July and August 1969. In 1971 he was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder for the deaths of seven people – including the actress Sharon Tate – all of which were carried out by members of the group at his instruction. Manson also received first-degree murder convictions for two other deaths.

Manson believed in what he called "Helter Skelter", a term he took from the Beatles' song of the same name. Manson believed Helter Skelter to be an impending apocalyptic race war, which he described in his own version of the lyrics to the Beatles' song. He believed the murders would help precipitate that war. From the beginning of his notoriety, a pop culture arose around him in which he ultimately became an emblem of insanity, violence and the macabre.

At the time the Family began to form, Manson was an unemployed former convict, who had spent half of his life in correctional institutions for a variety of offenses. Before the murders, he was a singer-songwriter on the fringe of the Los Angeles music industry, chiefly through a chance association with Dennis Wilson, drummer and founding member of the Beach Boys. After Manson was charged with the crimes of which he was later convicted, recordings of songs written and performed by him were released commercially. Various musicians have covered some of his songs.

Manson was originally sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when California invalidated the state's death penalty statute in 1972. He served out life sentences at California State Prison in Corcoran. He died, aged 83, of natural causes.


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