There's no reason to have more sympathy for Koresh and the Branch Davidians than for any other sect -- or any less, for that matter. These sects are like populations through which an altruistic gene has spread -- all love and self sacrifice -- and then there appears a mutant defector who has the selfishness gene and subverts the population. Christianity led to the Medicis; communism led to Stalin; "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" wound up with Napoleon; and The People's Temple gave us Jim Jones.
Koresh seems to have done what so many charismatic leaders have done before and after him. He speaks smoothly, he reasons intuitively, he flatters his flock, and somehow or other he emerges as the guy who can have sex with anybody he wants, just like Father Divine, Jim Jones, or hundreds of others. Not to say that he's a fraud. He may very well genuinely believe in what he preaches. He may really think that he is a conduit for God's messages and that he will live forever. All it takes is a slightly imbalanced mind.
It's a pretty good documentary and gives us the view from both sides of this preposterous conflict. Actors "reenact" the events in Waco, although there are interviews and inserts of the "real people" involved. (These reenactments are becoming so common that they may be our new version of the inexpensive B feature.) Even taking into account the sincerity of the Davidians' religious beliefs, the sect doesn't come across as looking in any way particularly admirable. Koresh is boffing everybody's wife and an underage girl or two and getting them proudly pregnant. Sounds bad, but so what? The human family is a malleable thing and until the globalization of Western values polygyny (multiple wives) was more common than monogamy. We can disapprove if we like but the sect was hardly a danger to society. Unlike its fearful collection of guns, its social structure deserves a collective shrug.
Instead the might of the federal government was brought down on the sect members and resulted in several deaths on the side of law enforcement and many deaths, including children, on the part of the sect members.
Armored vehicles rolled around the compound. Annoying music was blasted towards them. Koresh agreed to surrender, then backed down, then released some of the children, and no one seemed to know how the scenario would play out. A team of negotiators were making some progress in dividing the group but another FBI team, trained to attack, interrupted the negotiations and did what they were trained to do and the results brought the stand-off to a satisfying climax on TV.
Indeed, there were times when the incident seemed to be largely media driven. Reneging on a promise is anticlimactic. It ruins the dramatic scenario we think real events should adhere to. If the other side doesn't come across, you force them to. (This is known as "first-order change" in counseling circles.) Janet Reno's comment on the conflict was, "We couldn't wait forever." Why not? Why not deescalate, remove the tanks, isolate the compound, leave behind a working team of FBI negotiators and an armed emergency force, and just wait? Because the media would stop covering it? Because the public would be disappointed at the lack of closure? That seems to have been part of the motive for the attack.
People who don't think "the cult brought it on themselves and deserved what they got" are liable to think "Janet Reno mismanaged the affair." But the problems illustrated in this documentary don't belong to just Koresh or Reno or the federal government. They are part of American national character. We are a "can do" nation, much more than a "can think" nation. Talking to an adversary is a sign of weakness. We "negotiate from strength." Or, as John Wayne might have put it, "Talkin' words is fer wimmin." We can see this psychological dynamic at work on the world stage today as we demolish other cultures in order to democratize them.
As it turned out, the initial problem was to separate the sect members from their gun collection. And we good people certainly managed to do that.