Bad Groups That Weren't Evil Originally

As a young man, Jim Jones fought hard for racial integration, losing his position in the legit church as a result, and opened his own church for both black and white folks. Church members then worked to expand their radical idea of the races mixing to other businesses and restaurants. We're not joking about this being a radical idea -- Jones was doing this back in the 1950s when black people breathing within 100-feet of a white business was considered a jailable offense. This caused the bulk of Jones' congregation to be African Americans, most of whom were drawn in by his church's views on race.

Those who didn't join the church still made use of all the charitable services it offered, including legal advice, health care, and just plain no-strings-attached money. The Temple ran care homes for the disabled. It got poor people into housing. It opened a cafeteria to offer free food to anyone who wanted it. All of this went on for decades. To fund the charity, they received donations, but they also grew grapes and sold them to a company that made wine.

Jonestown Institute Speaking of intoxicating beverages, let's next address the whole Kool-Aid thing.

Even when they opened their compound in Guyana, the Jones gang had the most idealistic of motives -- aiming for a racial paradise beyond what America seemed capable of creating. But making the undeveloped jungle livable meant a whole lot of work. So with the Temple having provided so much to its members, it seemed only fair to a power-mad Jones to demand labor in return ... whether the workers were willing or not. Paternalism became authoritarianism, and the utopia became a prison. We're not going to argue that ritual mass slaughter was the logical conclusion to all this, but now you know why plenty of people assume any system of sharing will inevitably lead to death camps.

It didn't take too many of these rendezvous for the Somali fishermen to stop seeing the foreign ships as dreaded invaders and start seeing them as floating piggy banks. Pretty soon, one of these anti-pirate vigilantes said, "I'm the pirate now," and they expanded to robbing any ship that came by, even the ones licensed to be there. Loot's loot, after all. We could all take this as an important lesson on why we must leave law enforcement to the state ... except, when legit law enforcement sees the same opportunity to strip people of their valuables, they often turn into pirates too.

From the start, the Klansmen's literal horseplay scared people, which suited the members just fine -- cause, you know, pranks. It especially scared ex-slaves, which was a surprise but not an unwelcome one -- cause, you know, racists. As more bitter ex-Confederates kept filling up their ranks, they were more than happy to begin targeting ex-slaves on purpose. And when Forrest took the reins, he pulled all the informal social groups together into an organization that officially made slave terror its primary mission. They attacked voters, because even before the 15th Amendment explicitly recognized the right, some ex-slaves did vote. Once the 15th Amendment did pass, ex-slaves voted for Republicans in droves, so the KKK stepped up their efforts by turning from intimidating voters to murdering them.

But here's a weird twist: When the KKK got super violent, it was apparently beyond what even Forrest had envisioned. Fed up with what his men kept doing, he ordered the disbandment of the entire organization. After the members countered with a "U mad, bro?" Forrest offered his services to the governor of Tennessee in apprehending or killing the outlaw Klansmen. You can't count on your extremist followers just getting a little extreme, Forrest. That's not what "extreme" means.

It was very useful training by all accounts, the sort of training that we'd want the Mexican military to have. The overall goal was to teach them how to carry out counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics operations. This meant starting with Boy Scouts basics like learning how to read a map, then building up to military stuff like how to use automatic weapons and machine guns. More than 500 recruits from GAFE got this training.

But if you're skilled with a gun and head back into Mexico looking for a career, more lucrative opportunities than the army await you. The giant drug syndicate known as Gulf Cartel had recently been having issues with pesky rivals like the Juarez Cartel and the Mexican government, so they brought in Arturo Guzman Decena, a former GAFE dude who had enough skills to take on everyone. Decena hadn't trained at Fort Bragg, but he knew a whole lot of people who had, and he got them to desert and join up with the cartel.

That'd be a complete enough tale of how a team trained in North Carolina went bad, but Decena's guys didn't stick with the old-school evil Gulf Cartel. They split and formed their own group, Los Zetas -- which you may have heard of due to their reputation as psycho killers even by Mexican cartel standards. They post torture videos online, kill random teens at birthday parties, stick heads on spikes, and break the unwritten cartel rule against slaughtering pregnant women. One time, they pulled 200 people off buses for no apparent reason, made the men fight to the death, then buried everyone in mass graves.

2011 San Fernando massacre, not to be confused with the 2010 San Fernando massacre, which they also did. " width="300" height="319" class="lazy" data-src="https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/6/7/7/727677_v2.jpg" />via Wiki Commons That was the 2011 San Fernando massacre, not to be confused with the 2010 San Fernando massacre, which they also did.

The name "Zetas," by the way, comes from Decena's radio code back when he was an officer. So, we have yet another gang title taken from the founders' military history. Somebody should really start giving veterans hobbies so they don't go forming gangs. How much does a PlayStation Plus subscription cost nowadays?

Now, if you're thinking to yourself that "a group of youths who fight gangs" sounds suspiciously like the exact definition of a gang ... well, good job, you're right. Tookie's group gained strength and established a formal identity, and their encounters with gangs generally involved fighting them with decidedly gang-like tactics. Eventually, the Crips, oops, became one of the largest gangs in the world themselves.

When it comes to the Crips' lofty original goals, we pretty much just have Tookie's own words to go by, so you're welcome to remain skeptical. Keep in mind though, when he shared these thoughts at the end of his life, he wasn't exactly some crook looking to garner sympathy. He was on death row with zero chance of earning his freedom. By that point, he'd written several children's books and had been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yes, really: He'd been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times (and for the Literature prize once) for his efforts to fight gang activity -- which included brokering a truce between the Crips and Bloods, and speaking to at-risk teens about not joining up. In the end, he really was committed to countering the organization he himself had founded. You might even call Tookie Williams the black Nathan Bedford Forrest ... if, you know, you're a complete dumbass and want the Crips to come murder your ass.

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