On the 40th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre, an event that caused the death of close to a thousand people (about a third of them children) who were killed in the group’s compound in Guyana.
Note that I write “were killed” rather than “killed themselves.” One of the many many misconceptions about the Jonestown tragedy was that for most of its victims it represented an act of suicide. For some it did, but for many it did not. The children, of course, did not have that capacity (some were infants and toddlers). And although the adults had all signed onto the Jim Jones enterprise of their own free will, many (perhaps even most?) had essentially been kept prisoner there against their will, long after the nature of the movement had changed. What’s more, as I wrote previously in a lengthy post on the subject:
There is also forensic evidence that those adults who did protest or try to escape were forcibly injected with cyanide as they attempted to flee…
According to the testimony of many of the survivors (a small group, but an articulate one), once they realized the true character of the man in whom they’d placed such hope and faith, it was too late. They were in a prison, subject to various forms of physical and psychological torture in Jones’ attempt to control the inmates. And in the final year before the terrible end, the prison we know as Jonestown was at least as isolated as Alcatraz, because it was located in the heart of the Guyanese jungle.
Two forms the psychological torture/indoctrination took are especially instructive. The first is that as Jones became increasingly paranoid, he regularly harangued his followers that they would be under attack soon, either from the CIA or the Guyanese authorities, and that mass suicide would be the only way out. In fact, he had many rehearsals for the killings, which had the effect of getting people used to what would be happening and more ready to accept it, as well as more doubtful when the real thing began to happen that it actually was the real thing; maybe it was another rehearsal?
The second was a particular type of psychological coercion described in Deborah Layton’s very fine and highly recommended book Seductive Poison. I am describing this from memory (I read the book many years ago), but my recollection is that they were encouraged to inform on each other if they heard anyone complain about or criticize Jones or Jonestown. The tattler was then publicly praised, while the complainer was subject to public harangues, physical punishment, withdrawal of privileges, and ostracism. In a totally controlled environment, this was especially difficult to take, even for those with strong personalities.
What was even more terrible—and diabolical—was the fact that Jones made some of his close confederates pretend to be be discontented, confiding their criticism of Jones and Jonestown to others. The listeners had no idea that these were false “confessions.” If they listened sympathetically and perhaps shared their own discontent, they were reported and punished. But worse, if they failed to report the confidences of their “friends”—who were actually, unbeknownst to them, Jim Jones plants—then they were punished as well.
And it is no accident that Jim Jones himself was a socialist who apparently was not really religious at all but who used religion as a screen to further his socialist ends.
Not only do I highly recommend Deborah Layton’s aforementioned book, I also recommended this much shorter article (from a book I haven’t yet read) by Jackie Speier. She was in Guyana as an aide to Congressman Leo Ryan, who had led the delegation to investigate Jonestown. Ryan and four others were murdered at the airport by some of Jones’ most devoted followers. Speier herself, 28-years-old at the time, was wounded severely.
Speier’s story is astounding. It not only tells some of the tragic and terrible tale of Jones and Jonestown, but because she was part of Ryan’s crew it sheds some light on their approach and activities there. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but it seems to me that some of Congressman Ryan’s actions were somewhat naive in view of what he did know even before going down there. There was enough evidence of possible violence to come. Ryan and Speier had met with defector Deborah Layton (the same person who later wrote the book I read) and this is what they learned from her:
We listened as she offered a detailed and disturbing account of her experience. She mentioned a Bay Area couple, the Stoens, who had defected and were fighting for the return of their young son, John. Debbie said the couple had gone to court to try to compel the Guyanese government to intervene; Rev. Jones responded by telling them that if any actions were taken to remove John, the entire Jonestown population would commit suicide.
Once, Debbie continued, Jones woke up the camp in the early hours of the morning. It wasn’t unusual for Temple members to be awakened at dawn over the loudspeaker and summoned to the pavilion for one of his increasingly unhinged sermons. But this particular morning, Jones told his followers that they had to kill themselves to keep from being tortured by mercenaries who were preparing an ambush. Debbie stood in line to drink the red liquid that she was told would kill her in a matter of minutes. When the time of their supposed deaths came and went with everybody still alive, Jones announced it had just been a drill to test their loyalty. They had passed.
We compiled similar testimonies from other defectors who corroborated Debbie’s reports of physical and sexual abuse, forced labor and captivity. We heard that the church had weapons, and that Jones was paranoid and possibly on drugs. He had engineered complete authority—collecting members’ Social Security and disability checks, and determining when and how his disciples could communicate with their families. Anyone running afoul of Jonestown’s security detail was put in a labor camp and forced to clear jungle. Repeatedly, the defectors mentioned forced participation in mass-suicide rehearsals known as the “White Night trials.”
Leo Ryan wanted answers. Never one to accept second-hand information, he decided to embark on a fact-finding—and potentially life-saving—trip.
Knowing all of that, wouldn’t it make sense that there would be terrible repercussions if the Ryan group helped a whole bunch of people defect? That was what they arranged, and not only did it cost many in the Congressional delegation their lives, it also cost the entire population of Jonestown their lives. The intentions of the Ryan group were laudable, but their failure to protect themselves (or even to take a security detail) proved fatal—although I assume that had they brought obvious security, they wouldn’t have been allowed in.
And all of this occurred at the hands of one demented, paranoid, and powerful person who had initially attracted followers to a Utopian ideal through his charisma and eloquence but turned out to be a Pied Piper leading them to their doom. By the time many of them realized their error they were trapped.
The details of Jonestown were unique, but the trajectory of leftist Utopian promises leading to murder was not.
RIP to all the victims of Jonestown and to all the victims of other leftist Utopias that turn into nightmare.
Infants, toddlers… and babies. RIP, indeed.
Evil, maybe. A “wicked solution”, certainly.
Jones technique of encouraging followers to disclose their doubts and antipathy reminds me of Mao’s “Hundred Flowers Campaign.”
Mao gave a 1956 speech in which he seemed to be relaxing his rigid ideological control by pointing to the competing ideologies and intellectual ferment of the Warring States Period and saying, “The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science”.
Encouraged to speak their minds, many dissatisfied intellectuals and others did air their grievances, and hundreds of thousands of letters of complaint poured into the Central Committee.
This unexpected torrent of criticisms and dissatisfaction with how Mao and the Communist Party were running China apparently scared Mao, ideological control was re-imposed, and self-identified and thus exposed, those who had spoken out became the targets of the 1957 “Anti-Rightest Campaign” that followed, which saw many of them publicly criticized, fired, assaulted, sent out to the countryside to work, or sent to re-education camps.
Socialism always devours…even its own adherents, especially when the promised “utopia” doesn’t arise.
Jones was one crazy evil SOB…That he was friend to the far left in the US should tell us all we need to know.
Jeff Guinn’s ‘The Road To Jonestown’ is another good book on this. It spends more time on his youth and the early years of the Peoples Temple as well as his relationship with his wife which is a strange aspect (she also died at Jonestown).
AMC/Sundance aired a two part doc this past weekend of which I’ve watched the first half. It was pretty good and one of the things I think that makes this story still fascinating is the existence of so much audio of Jones and his disturbing behavior. That laugh is just plain creepy.
The current tensions in the US are very uncomfortable, and we are right to worry. However, I do think people tend to forget, or the younger ones never knew, how truly crazy and frightening the 1960s and 1970s were. I remember clearly the horror of the headlines and stories about the Jones massacre. Evil is real.
Its interesting to read about the relationship of Harvey Milk and Jim Jones.
Milk clearly found his association with Jim Jones exhilarating. “It may take me many a day to come back down from the high that I reach[ed] today,” he wrote Jim Jones after one Temple service. “I was sorry that I had to leave after 4 short hours …. I found something dear today. I found a sense of being that makes up for all the hours and energy placed in a fight. I found what you wanted me to find. I shall be back. For I can never leave.”
In exchange for all that, Milk provided legitimacy to Jim Jones. He spoke at Peoples Temple. He praised it in his column in the Bay Area Reporter. He lobbied on Jones’s behalf to President Jimmy Carter, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph Califano, Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, and other powerful figures. As Cult City shows, this proved disastrous for many people.
So many local leaders enthusiastically vouching for Jim Jones made it easier for people in positions of responsibility far away to dismiss the charges against him as fantastical. Before the poor drank Jim Jones’s Kool Aid in South America, the powerful did in San Francisco.
Jim Jones, a modern-day combination of Rasputin and Hitler, was for a long time the darling of the liberal establishment in San Francisco. The question is, Why do liberals unfailingly fall under the spell of dangerously crackpot socialists and their promised utopias. Why are people such as Dianne Feinstein, Herb Caen, Willie Brown, Harvey Milk, etc., who at first glance appear to be normal human beings, always bewitched by far-left psychopaths, such as Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho, Chavez, and Jones?
Has it been 40 years?
Wow! I remember reading about it in time or Newsweek (we didn’t have the 24/7 news cycle back then), and being utterly shocked at the whole thing.
And, even today, I cringe when I hear someone in a younger generation talk about someone “drinking the Kool-Aid” as they clearly don’t know the origin of that phrase and how using that phrase comes across as being in poor taste.
Bob Kantor…if I might offer a thought to your question…
There is no “spell” & no “bewitching.” Jones, Milk, Pol Pot, Sharpton, Clinton are not a skerrick different from one another. Name a leftist then imagine yourself thwarting their desires…small or large matters not…Simply stand between them and their wishes or in opposition to their goals…any one of them would wish you dead or kill you.
An interesting question. Various thoughts….
Sen. Feinstein is said by some on the anti-left to be less nuts than a lot of the Dem senators. What do the folks who hang out here think? And,
Is she, or libruls/lefties generally, really more likely than the more conservative contingent to become bewitched by bad guys?
Personally, I really do think Slick Willy had charisma — even over the TV. I once saw an interview, I think it was, in which he was so sincerely on-board with the whole American project (in the traditional sense). But I never saw anything particularly charismatic about the Sith. He just struck me as a wannabe-con-man, as opposed to WJC, who was the real deal. Seems to me WJC would have him for lunch in a con contest.
Is it possible that Jones wasn’t all that nuts at first, when H. Milk and others fell for him?
Just musing….
I had seen a documentary, perhaps the one Griffin mentions. I think everyone understood the sociopathy of the man after the fact, but the doc. I saw emphasized the duplicity. They had interviews with people in the inner circle. He would preach from the bible, yet in private he would ridicule people who believed in a “sky god.”
He was obviously interested in communes, but he was not a “bible communist” like some of the 19th century communes in New England. Check out Wikipedia’s “Jim Jones” page. He read Marx, Stalin, Mao, Gandhi, and Hitler avidly. He was involved in the Communist Party USA and wanted to demonstrate his Marxism. He started with the Methodist church, and gravitated to Seventh Day Baptist and faith healing so that he could better swindle people out of their money.
Hm, no Edit just now. Anyhow, my remark above was prompted by Bill Kantor’s comment.
For additional information on Jim Jones’s role in San Francisco politics: Jim Jones, Made in San Francisco.
This was from a review of Daniel Flynn’s book, Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco.
An old article in the San Francisco Chronicle gives us more detail about the involvement of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple in San Francisco politics.Jones Captivated S.F.’s Liberal Elite / They were late to discover how cunningly he curried favor.
Politicians liked Jim Jones because he delivered votes.
Not only did Jim Jones deliver votes, he delivered political supporters to political events.
Jones also delivered political campaign workers.
Most important for San Francisco politicians, Jim Jones delivered to politicians what famed California state legislator Jess Unruh called “the mother’s milk of politics:” money.
The deep involvement of Jim Jones in San Francisco liberal Democrat politics is something most Democrats would like to have swept under the table.
Several days after my company sent me to Bolivia for drilling engineering services work, I read of the Jonestown deaths. That was, for me, a rather somber introduction to South America. Several weeks later, I got another introduction to South America when Bolivia had its coup-of-the-month- this time a failed one. Fortunately, coup-of-the-month has died out in Bolivia, but authoritarian government has not, as Evo demonstrates.
Julie near Chicago: no edit
It goes up and down. Most times I get the edit, but occasionally not.
Gringo, Edit: Yes it does.
Thanks for the info on Jim Jones. Yuck.
Thanks also to TommyJay.
Sen. Feinstein is said by some on the anti-left to be less nuts than a lot of the Dem senators. What do the folks who hang out here think?
Diane started as a pretty sensible politician by SF standards. I think she, like almost all politicians, learn to lie early on. Her husband has made millions from her relationships in government.
Here is some info on him and his business.
I don’t know what his net worth was when she was Mayor of SF. The assassination of Moscone and Milk put her there, unexpectedly.
Blum is the billionaire founder of the private-equity firm Blum Capital Partners. Colony homes are owned under the umbrella of Colony Capital, one of the largest investment firms in the world. The senator’s disclosure describes Colony American Homes as a “leading owner and provider of high-quality single-family residences for rental across the United States.”
What it doesn’t say is that the rental stock is made up of foreclosed homes purchased by a handful of investor groups and hedge funds in the aftermath of the 2007–08 financial crisis and real estate crash.
Blum is often identified as a quintessential Democratic Party insider, with ties that run the gamut from Jimmy Carter to the Dalai Lama. His private-equity firm manages about $500 million in assets, and the bulk of the fund’s portfolio is dominated by holdings in CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services firm.
Though Blum has taken pains to deny it, reports say he’s worth at least $1 billion. According to a recent Roll Call survey, Feinstein’s net worth is $45.3 million, which puts her in the top tier of wealthy Washington lawmakers.
Like most politicians of both parties, she ended up a millionaire.
The comments to that linked article are interesting.
Like most politicians of both parties, she ended up a millionaire.
1. She was at least well to do by birth (patrician, I think).
2. She married well. Her 2d husband (Bertram Feinstein) was a surgeon. They had a small family. IIRC, just one child between them.
3. If I’m not mistaken, Richard Blum was already wealthy when he married her (he was 46 at the time). It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if his net worth (and Paul Pelosi’s) benefited greatly from a politician in the family. That’s not why Richard Blum’s been in the 1% for decades, nor why his wife has lived out her life in that stratum.
‘The current tensions in the US are very uncomfortable’…’I do think people tend to forget, or the younger ones never knew, how truly crazy and frightening the 1960s and 1970s were.’
Kate, today is the 60s and 70s, upside down. The social movements that emerged during that period, the nonsense that the young people in the elite classes absorbed and internalized, is coming out again 40 years later as those young upper-class students and hippies and kids are not the elder class running the society. It’s producing a disaster because those values and ideals of the 60s (really the 70s, but everyone calls them the 60s because it emerged at the very end of that decade) are false and invalid, but they are dealy, firmly held by much of the ruling elite today.