http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

On November 18th, 1978, 909 members of The People's Temple led by charismatic leader Rev. Jim Jones died in the jungle of Guyana, South America.   

Jones was devoted to the ideals of racial harmony and social equality.  He founded the People's Temple as a young preacher in Indiana.  Plagued by hatred for his radical beliefs in the 1950s, Jones moved his Temple to Redwood Valley, California.  Jones was also paranoid about nuclear war and had rad an article that said Redwood Valley would be safe in case of one.  However, it was the left-wing politics of San Francisco that turned out to be a boon for People's Temple.  By the mid-1970s, Jones was a darling of the Left in the Bay Area because of the People's Temple fought on the side of social justice and racial integration. 

The problem was Jones had an evil side.  He controlled his flock with psychological abuse, coercion of conformity, and even corporal punishment.  Few outside the Temple membership ever knew about the dark side of Jim Jones in the San Francisco period.

Jim Jones had his eye on South America since visiting Brazil in the early 1960s.  He wanted to set up a communist utopia free of the racist, classist, militaristic American establishment.  A decade later he started to realize this dream.  Jones aquired a large plot of land in the jungle of Guyana and began building an agrarian community he called Jonestown. 

Land was cheap because jungle soils respond poorly to intensive farming.  Jones blazed ahead anyway. 

The taste of communist utopia early residents got was a facade to lure more followers to Jonestown.  When they got there they found the reality was a life of dawn-to-dark toil, privation, and fear.  The paranoid delusions of Rev. Jones grew ever more sinister and alarmist.  He was convinced the American government was out to get the People's Temple and they wouldn't be taken alive.  His martial autocracy brooked no dissent.  Temple members learned to keep quiet for fear of violent retribution and ostracism.  Jones began conducting suicide drills, calling congregants to the main pavillion in the dead of night for mass-poisoning.  The people didn't know if a drill was going to turn out to be the real thing.  Jones was psyching them out for their own doom.  Isolated in a South American jungle with no money, no passports, and no free communication with the outside world, the People's Temple was trapped.  Members fell into adulation for Rev. Jones or terrified silenced dissent. 

Call it a self-fulfilling prophesy.  Former member Tim Stoen formed a "Concerned Relatives" group in San Francisco in 1977.  After all, families had heard nothing from their loved ones for months, and sometimes years.  Horrifying rumors were circulating.  What was going on at Jonestown? 

California Congressman Leo Ryan decided to pay a visit to Jonestown in 1978.  He brought a small cadre of aides, Temple relatives, and reporters.  While Ryan was there, most dissenters kept their mouths shut, but a few passed notes stating they wanted to leave Jonestown.  At first Jim Jones put on a mask of acceptance.  He said anybody who wanted to part ways was welcome to.  However, as the number of dissenters grew, Jones became wrathful.  He sent henchmen to the airstrip as the plane was preparing for take-off.  The gunmen killed Representative Ryan, a few media people, and one temple member.  It was November 18, 1978. 

Then Jones panicked.  He knew Jonestown was over.  He called for one last suicide drill, only this time it was no drill.

The media called it a "mass suicide," but in reality, only some Temple members willingly swallowed the conconction of fruit punch and cyanide (it was not Kool-Aid," but an off-brand called "Flavor-Aid").  The children were force-fed the stuff.  Others were injected with cyanide.  In the ensuing chaos, a few more were shot, including Rev. Jim Jones himself.  Only 33 temple members survived that day, and seven of the visiting party, one of whom was Jackie Speier, then an aide to Ryan.  Decades later, Speier, who narrowly survived multiple gunshot wounds, would win the same seat Ryan held in the California legislature.

The final death toll was 918 by cyanide and gunshot.

I will never forget the lurid photographs of all those corpses lying in the mud.  The overview shots looked like a patchwork quilt, but closer in you could see it was an illusion created by the garments clothing the dead.  There were hundreds and hundreds of them.  I was nine years old and the evil of the carnage was too much for me to comprehend.  I can barely get my head around it 30 years later! 

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/West/11/17/jonestown.anniversary/index.html

I was 18 when this happened and it still defies all logical belief!

What a tragedy.  You wonder how some people can get so lost between what they're looking for and what they find.

I was 18 when this happened and it still defies all logical belief!


Me, too.  I remember being just astounded by the tragedy.  :-\\  I admit I was very confused at that time about why this could even happen.

I was 15 when it happen. I heard about at school only because it was a current events question on a quiz (yeah, I didn't watch the news much in those days). I have to confess, on the time, it didn't really mean much to me-it was something happened far away and I was a teenager worrying how I can get the boy who I liked to ask me out.  ::)


Fast forward 30 years, I realize how tragic the whole thing was. I wonder how anyone can have that much control over people. It is his henchmen who he had the most control over. Without them, people would have been able to leave. There was a special on CNN this weekend about it. I wasn't too sure if I wanted to watch it or not-I did but didn't. I ended up watching it and now the images of it are haunting me (which I kind of knew it would which is why I didn't want to watch it-but it is like watching a train wreck-you know it is going to happen but you can't help but watch anyway). I asked my husband as we watched, "Who are more of the victims, the ones who died or the ones who lived?" He didn't know the answer. The ones who lived are now scarred for life-and many of them couldn't live with it. One guy said that you can smell death in the air that day.

There was one guy on the CNN special who was one of Jones' henchmen and was spared because Jones asked him and someone else to get the cash that Jones stole from his followers and get it out of the compound. He said that he watched his son die and held his wife as she died in his arms. Afterward, he had to go back to identify bodies. He said that he saw needle marks in people's arms, legs, etc. and knew that they were murdered rather than taking their own lives. He said that to this day, he cannot smell almonds without getting violently sick-because cyanide smells like almonds and that is what it smelled like that day. The other guy who left with the cash, he put a gun to his head a few months after. 

What really PISSES me off is when people like Bill O'Reilly uses the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid." To me, that is just so disrespectful of the victims of that tragic event.



Cat

I was 18 when this happened and it still defies all logical belief!

This is true. Tim & I were talking about it the other day,how could so many people willing take their own lives and take the lives of their kids.Could someone have that much control over people.Were they loking for a better way of life,or were they at the crossroads of their lives and easily influence by false promises.

Wow, that was 30 years ago...

I was 7 years old at the time and I can remember watching the evening news and seeing footage of all the bodies lying there. I can also remember being shocked, even as a young boy, at how high the death toll was.

I vaguely remember asking my mom and dad what happened to all of those people and my parents told me that they had all killed themselves. I then asked them "Why?" and they really couldn't give me a good answer, because they couldn't make any more sense out of it than I could. 

It wasn't until many years later when I was in my early 20s and I found a newspaper clipping about Jonestown, which immediately piqued my interest because I was just a kid at the time and I never really understood what happened to all of those people. So I went to the university library and checked out a book about Jim Jones and the People's Temple and the events leading up to the Jonestown Massacre. It was a fascinating read, but what happened at Jonestown still didn't make any sense.  :-\\

Religious cults can be really scary.  Can Joel Osteen be the next Jim Jones / David Koresh?  Hmmm.

Mandatory Viewing: American Experience: Jonestown.  Includes video/audio taken from within the cult, and interviews with survivors (and the relatives of those who didn't survive.)

If one were to google for the documentary, one might even be able to find a means of viewing it, even if it's not being aired on your local PBS affiliate.

As for drinking the Kool-aid?  I like the term, and use it regularly in the context of business.  It's the most vivid and stark reminder in modern history that groupthink - whether in religion, politics, or even something as mundane as project management - destroyer of souls, nations, and businesses.  It's a reality check:  when one is about to commit to a course of action ("drink the Kool-Aid"), one must be sure that one's logic is sound, and that the course of action is one that is worthy of such a commitment.

But back to the business at hand:  What's the lesson to be learned about religious cults?  Jones himself provided the answer.  The answer is on a sign that stood over his throne pretty much since the settlement was built.  The sign is there in the background of a lot of the video shot by cultists and their visitors alike.  The sign was still there when the throne was empty except for the decomposing bodies of the dead.  It's a sign inscribed with a quote from Santayana: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

  Messed-up.  People shouldn't do that...

I was 18 when this happened and it still defies all logical belief!


  Some would argue - makes a mighty strong case for nuclear winter...

Mandatory Viewing: American Experience: Jonestown.  Includes video/audio taken from within the cult, and interviews with survivors (and the relatives of those who didn't survive.)

If one were to google for the documentary, one might even be able to find a means of viewing it, even if it's not being aired on your local PBS affiliate.

As for drinking the Kool-aid?  I like the term, and use it regularly in the context of business.  It's the most vivid and stark reminder in modern history that groupthink - whether in religion, politics, or even something as mundane as project management - destroyer of souls, nations, and businesses.  It's a reality check:  when one is about to commit to a course of action ("drink the Kool-Aid"), one must be sure that one's logic is sound, and that the course of action is one that is worthy of such a commitment.

But back to the business at hand:  What's the lesson to be learned about religious cults?  Jones himself provided the answer.  The answer is on a sign that stood over his throne pretty much since the settlement was built.  The sign is there in the background of a lot of the video shot by cultists and their visitors alike.  The sign was still there when the throne was empty except for the decomposing bodies of the dead.  It's a sign inscribed with a quote from Santayana: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it".


The pop culture meaning of "drink the Kool-Aid" misrepresents what happened at Jonestown.  The popular reference makes it sound as though the People's Temple members were all compliant drones with no free will.  As I say in my initial remarks, they were prisoners of Jim's jungle.  They were terrorized, confused, and coerced.  Certainly a portion of the population were brainwashed syncophants who poisoned themselves and their kids without hesitation because Papa Jim commanded it.  However, there was quite a bit of objection and resistance, which you can see on the Jonestown films, and forensics revealed needle punctures on a great many of the victims. 

There are similarities with the Branch Davidians, but there are stark differences, the biggest of which is sheer numbers.  More than ten times the number of people died at Jonestown than died at Waco.  The majority of the Waco victims died from being confined in a burning structure and when a building is not within fire codes, it's easy for scores to die of smothering and smoke inhalation before the flames reach them, as was the case at the Station Club fire in Warwick, RI, back in 2002 (more than 400 people died in the Boston Coconut Grove fire in 1942, which was a catalyst for many fire codes we know today).  The Davidians were an armageddonist cult from the start.  The People's Temple became "armageddonist" only after Jones went completely nuts.  Trapping people in a burning building is one thing, psyching people into drinking cyanide bug juice is quite another---even if only, say, 200 of 900 victims did it! 
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/05/grim.gif

Jim Jones to me is a far more interesting case than David Koresh because I think he was sincere in his convictions regarding racial harmony, egalitarianism, and social justice.  However, Jones was also an autocraticy and self-deifying megalomaniac, which was the first poison he gave his flock!  Always beware of the charasmatic figurehead!

What really PISSES me off is when people like Bill O'Reilly uses the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid." To me, that is just so disrespectful of the victims of that tragic event.

Cat


I'm with you.  I was only 7 when it happened so I don't remember much, but I did watch a documentary that was done from the perspective of one of the survivors.  He lost his wife and son.  He said it bothered him when people used that expression because it meant so much more than what it was used as.  I felt so bad for him talking about holding his wife and son as they died.  It was awful to hear about, let alone live through.

Wow, that was 30 years ago...

I was 7 years old at the time and I can remember watching the evening news and seeing footage of all the bodies lying there. I can also remember being shocked, even as a young boy, at how high the death toll was.

I vaguely remember asking my mom and dad what happened to all of those people and my parents told me that they had all killed themselves. I then asked them "Why?" and they really couldn't give me a good answer, because they couldn't make any more sense out of it than I could. 

It wasn't until many years later when I was in my early 20s and I found a newspaper clipping about Jonestown, which immediately piqued my interest because I was just a kid at the time and I never really understood what happened to all of those people. So I went to the university library and checked out a book about Jim Jones and the People's Temple and the events leading up to the Jonestown Massacre. It was a fascinating read, but what happened at Jonestown still didn't make any sense.  :-\\



I remember being 8 years old and asking my mother what's Jonestown? It was a week or two later after that event and I wasnt allowed to watch any evening tv news in those days. I just happened to overhear conversations my parents were having discussing it.  My mother thought the subject matter was too mature to talk about mass suicide to an eight year old. She just explain some people took some kool-aid and died from it. I actually thought drinking kool-aid made you sick for a short time. Of course as I got older and found out about Jonestown it defies all human logic. It saddens me to think of the tragedy and the devastating loss of life. How could one man have that much power and influence over your own life?
To me Congressman Ryan, his personal aides and the camera crew were like soldiers who went over there and sacrifice their own lives for freedom. About a two weeks ago MSNBC rebroadcast the Jonestown Massacre documentary which Ive seen again. I feel its important we are reminded every anniversary so we can teach every generation about not to repeat history but to learn from it.

I think they made a movie about Jonestown released in the mid to late 80s don't remember the title.

I remember being 8 years old and asking my mother what's Jonestown? It was a week or two later after that event and I wasnt allowed to watch any evening tv news in those days. I just happened to overhear conversations my parents were having discussing it.  My mother thought the subject matter was too mature to talk about mass suicide to an eight year old. She just explain some people took some kool-aid and died from it. I actually thought drinking kool-aid made you sick for a short time. Of course as I got older and found out about Jonestown it defies all human logic. It saddens me to think of the tragedy and the devastating loss of life. How could one man have that much power and influence over your own life?
To me Congressman Ryan, his personal aides and the camera crew were like soldiers who went over there and sacrifice their own lives for freedom. About a two weeks ago MSNBC rebroadcast the Jonestown Massacre documentary which Ive seen again. I feel its important we are reminded every anniversary so we can teach every generation about not to repeat history but to learn from it.

I think they made a movie about Jonestown released in the mid to late 80s don't remember the title.


A lot of adults didn't know how to process it either.  It was nowhere near as scary as 9/11 because it happened so far away in the jungles of a country most people had never heard of.  I think it disturbed people more than other stories of mass death in foreign lands because Americans were killed.  Sometimes when parents try to shelter kids too much it only leads to confusion, such as thinking Kool-Aid makes you sick. 

I was about five when I heard about the Manson Family.  That's because my parents knew Linda Kasabian, which in itself is a weird story.  I overheard the grownups talking about Manson and why Linda fled the area when the FBI started hassling her again.  I started asking questions about what I'd heard.  My mother wanted me to understand that Linda did not kill anybody.  She didn't....she just drove the car to Roman Polanski's house!
:o
She didn't tell me THAT much!
Anyway, my mother explained that there are some very, very bad people in the world who will kill other people.  I wanted to know why Linda (who sometimes babysat for us) was with these very, very bad people.  My mom said that sometimes people got to be friends with bad people before they knew the people were bad, and then when they find out how bad their friends are, they're too frightened to get away from them. 

It was chilling.  I couldn't really grasp everything she was saying at that age.  However, when Jonestown went down a few years later, the concept of evil people killing other people was not alien, though I had a hard time getting the pictures I'd seen in Newsweek out of my head. 

The weird thing is about a year after Jonestown, thre was a grisly murder in Wilton, NH, which was only two towns over from us and where we went to school.  As far as I can remember (I've never been abile to track down the case subsequently) a crazy guy was jealous of another guy moving in on his girlfriend, so the crazy guy dragged the new lover into the woods, shot him in the head and dismembered his body.  It made the local news and I heard some older kids at school discussing the gory details at recess:
"I heard he cut the guy up before he shot him!"
"No way!  He blew the guy's brains out and then he cut him up trying to hide the body from the cops!"
"No way! I heard....(etc. etc).

The other killings I had ever heard about happened in Boston, or hundreds of miles away, or thousands.  This one made a giant psychic dent because of the geographical proximity.  That murder sh*t was supposed to only happen "out there."  The houses, roads, fields, and woods that enclosed our little micropolis were safe!  There couldn't be people capable of murder living down the road, passing us in cars, or standing in line with us at the movies!  The cops caught the guy who did the murder and he was in jail, but the psychic shift from "It can't happen here" to "It did happen here" was more terrifying the Manson and Jonestown put together when I was ten.  I was totally freaked out and couldn't sleep for a couple of nights.  I guess I've always had a morbid curiousity and when something piques that curiousity, it can still alienate me and depress to this very day!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/10/sqcold.gif

A lot of adults didn't know how to process it either.  It was nowhere near as scary as 9/11 because it happened so far away in the jungles of a country most people had never heard of.  I think it disturbed people more than other stories of mass death in foreign lands because Americans were killed.  Sometimes when parents try to shelter kids too much it only leads to confusion, such as thinking Kool-Aid makes you sick. 

I was about five when I heard about the Manson Family.  That's because my parents knew Linda Kasabian, which in itself is a weird story.  I overheard the grownups talking about Manson and why Linda fled the area when the FBI started hassling her again.  I started asking questions about what I'd heard.  My mother wanted me to understand that Linda did not kill anybody.  She didn't....she just drove the car to Roman Polanski's house!
:o
She didn't tell me THAT much!
Anyway, my mother explained that there are some very, very bad people in the world who will kill other people.  I wanted to know why Linda (who sometimes babysat for us) was with these very, very bad people.  My mom said that sometimes people got to be friends with bad people before they knew the people were bad, and then when they find out how bad their friends are, they're too frightened to get away from them. 

It was chilling.  I couldn't really grasp everything she was saying at that age.  However, when Jonestown went down a few years later, the concept of evil people killing other people was not alien, though I had a hard time getting the pictures I'd seen in Newsweek out of my head. 

The weird thing is about a year after Jonestown, thre was a grisly murder in Wilton, NH, which was only two towns over from us and where we went to school.  As far as I can remember (I've never been abile to track down the case subsequently) a crazy guy was jealous of another guy moving in on his girlfriend, so the crazy guy dragged the new lover into the woods, shot him in the head and dismembered his body.  It made the local news and I heard some older kids at school discussing the gory details at recess:
"I heard he cut the guy up before he shot him!"
"No way!  He blew the guy's brains out and then he cut him up trying to hide the body from the cops!"
"No way! I heard....(etc. etc).

The other killings I had ever heard about happened in Boston, or hundreds of miles away, or thousands.  This one made a giant psychic dent because of the geographical proximity.  That murder sh*t was supposed to only happen "out there."  The houses, roads, fields, and woods that enclosed our little micropolis were safe!  There couldn't be people capable of murder living down the road, passing us in cars, or standing in line with us at the movies!  The cops caught the guy who did the murder and he was in jail, but the psychic shift from "It can't happen here" to "It did happen here" was more terrifying the Manson and Jonestown put together when I was ten.  I was totally freaked out and couldn't sleep for a couple of nights.  I guess I've always had a morbid curiousity and when something piques that curiousity, it can still alienate me and depress to this very day!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/10/sqcold.gif


This is the feeling most Australians had when the Port Arthur massacre. This sort of thing only might happen in America ...but not here!  But it did....and it was on a larger scale than any similar event overseas..

The Port Arthur massacre of 28 April 1996 was a killing spree which claimed the lives of 35 people and wounded 19 others mainly at the historic Port Arthur prison colony, a popular tourist site in south-eastern Tasmania, Australia. Martin Bryant, a 28-year-old from New Town, eventually pleaded guilty to the crimes and was given 35 life sentences without possibility of parole.[