Helter Skelter (Manson scenario)

In the months leading up to the Tate/LaBianca murders in August 1969, Charles Manson often spoke to the members of his "Family" about Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war arising from racial tensions between blacks and whites. This " vision"—as it was termed by the court that heard Manson's appeal from his conviction for the killings—involved reference to music of the Beatles (particularly songs from their 1968 double album The Beatles, also known as "the White Album") and to the New Testament's Book of Revelation.

Manson and his followers were convicted of the murders based on the prosecution's theory that they were part of a plan to trigger the Helter Skelter scenario.

Manson had been predicting racial war for some time before he used the term Helter Skelter. His first use of the term was at a gathering of the Family on New Year's Eve 1968. This took place at the Family's base at Myers Ranch, near California's Death Valley.

In its final form, which was reached by mid-February 1969, the scenario had Manson as not only the war's ultimate beneficiary but its musical cause. He and the Family would create an album with songs whose messages concerning the war would be as subtle as those he had heard in songs of the Beatles. More than merely foretell the conflict, this would trigger it; for, in instructing "the young love", America's white youth, to join the Family, it would draw the young, white female hippies out of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury.

Black men, thus deprived of the white women whom the political changes of the 1960s had made sexually available to them, would be without an outlet for their frustrations and would lash out in violent crimes against whites. A resultant murderous rampage against blacks by frightened whites would then be exploited by militant blacks to provoke an internecine war of near-extermination between racist and non-racist whites over blacks' treatment. Then the militant blacks would arise to sneakily finish off the few whites they would know to have survived; indeed, they would kill off all non-blacks.

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Wikipedia