Forty years ago next Monday, James Warren Jones died of a self-
inflicted gunshot wound in the jungles of Guyana, shortly after 918 of his followers
(including 304 children) died after drinking Flavor Aid that had been laced
with cyanide. In addition, Congressman Leo Ryan and some of his team were
murdered by followers of Jones when they attempted to board their return flight
to San Francisco.
Jones started the
Peoples Temple in Indiana during the 1950s. He was officially
ordained in 1956 by the Independent Assemblies of God and in 1964 by the Disciples of Christ. He moved the Temple to California in 1965 and gained notoriety with its activities in San Francisco in the early 1970's. He then
relocated to Guyana. In 1978, media reports surfaced
that human rights abuses were taking place in the Peoples Temple in Jonestown.
Early in his career as a preacher, Jones was active in the
civil rights movement, and was appointed the director of the Human Rights
Commission by Indianapolis mayor Charles Boswell in 1960. Jones and his wife even
went so far as to adopt several children who were partly non-Caucasian in order
to create a “rainbow family”.
In 1962, Jones and his family moved to Brazil because he had
read it would be a safe place in the event of a nuclear war. On the way to
Brazil, he briefly stopped in Guyana, which was then still a British colony.
Jones became plagued by guilt for leaving behind the
Indiana civil rights struggle and possibly losing what he had tried to build
there . When Jones' associate preachers in Indiana told him that the Temple was
about to collapse without him, he returned from Brazil in December 1963. He
told his Indiana congregation that the world would be engulfed by nuclear war
on July 15, 1967, and that would then create a new socialist Eden
on Earth. As a result, the Temple had to move to Northern California for safety. Accordingly,
the Temple began moving to Redwood Valley, California, near the city
of Ukiah.
By the early 1970s,
Jones began deriding traditional Christianity as "fly away religion",
rejecting the Bible as being a tool to oppress women and
non-whites, and denouncing a "Sky God" who was no God at all. Jones
wrote a booklet titled "The Letter Killeth", criticizing the King James Bible. Jones also began preaching that he was the reincarnation of Gandhi, Father Divine, Jesus, Gautama Buddha, and Vladimir Lenin. Former Temple member Hue Fortson,
Jr. quoted Jones as saying, "What you need to believe in is what you can
see ... If you see me as your friend, I'll be your friend. As you see me
as your father, I'll be your father, for those of you that don't have a father ...
If you see me as your savior, I'll be your savior. If you see me as your God,
I'll be your God."
Within five years of
moving to California, the Temple experienced a period of exponential growth and
opened branches in cities including San Fernando, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. By the early 1970's, Jones began
shifting his focus to major cities because of limited expansion opportunities
in Ukiah. He eventually moved the Temple's headquarters to San Francisco, which
was a major center for radical protest movements at the time.
The move led
Jones and the Temple to become politically influential in San Francisco
politics, culminating in the Temple's instrumental role in the mayoral election
victory of George
Moscone in 1975.
Moscone subsequently appointed Jones as the chairman of the San Francisco
Housing Authority Commission.
Unlike most cult
leaders, Jones was able to gain public support and contact with prominent
politicians at the local and national level. For example, Jones and Moscone met
privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on his campaign plane days before the 1976 election, leading Mondale to publicly praise the Temple. [First Lady Rosalynn Carter also personally met with Jones on
multiple occasions, corresponded with him about Cuba, and spoke with him at the grand opening of the San Francisco
headquarters, where he received louder applause than Mrs. Carter.
While Jones forged alliances with key
columnists and others at the San Francisco
Chronicle and other press outlets, the move to San Francisco
also brought increasing media scrutiny. After Chronicle reporter Marshall Kilduff encountered resistance to publishing
an exposé, he brought his story to New West magazine. In the
summer of 1977, Jones and several hundred Temple members abruptly decided to
move to the Temple's compound in Guyana after they learned of the contents of an
article by Kilduff about to be published, which included allegations by former
Temple members that they were physically, emotionally, and sexually abused. Jones
named the settlement "Jonestown" after himself.
Religious scholar
Mary McCormick Maaga argues that Jones' authority decreased after he moved to
the isolated commune, because he was not needed for recruitment and he could
not hide his drug
addiction from
rank and file members. In spite of the allegations prior to Jones' departure,
the leader was still respected by some for setting up a racially mixed church
which helped the disadvantaged — 68 percent of Jonestown's residents
were black. Jonestown was where Jones started propagating his belief in what he
called "Translation", where he and his followers would all die
together and move to another planet and live blissfully.
In the autumn of
1977, Tim Stoen and other Temple defectors with relatives in Jonestown formed a
"Concerned Relatives" group.
Stoen traveled to Washington, D.C. in January 1978 to visit with State Department officials and members of Congress, and wrote a white paper detailing his grievances against
Jones and the Temple.
Stoen's efforts aroused the curiosity of California Congressman Leo
Ryan, who
wrote a letter on Stoen's behalf to Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. The Concerned Relatives also began
a legal battle with the Temple over the custody of Stoen's son John.
In November 1978, Leo Ryan led a fact-finding mission to
Jonestown to investigate allegations of human rights
abuses. His delegation included relatives of Temple members, an NBC camera crew, and
reporters for various newspapers. The group arrived in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown on November 15. Two days later, they
traveled by airplane to Port Kaituma, and then were transported to the
Jonestown encampment in a limousine. Jones hosted a reception for the Ryan
delegation that evening at the central pavilion in Jonestown.
The delegation left hurriedly the afternoon of November 18
after Temple member Don Sly attacked Ryan with a knife. The attack was
thwarted, bringing the visit to an abrupt end. Ryan and his delegation managed
to take along fifteen Temple members who had expressed a wish to leave. At that
time, Jones made no attempt to prevent their departure.
As members of the
delegation boarded two planes at the airstrip, Jones' armed guards, called the
"Red Brigade," arrived on a tractor and trailer and began shooting at
them. The gunmen killed Ryan and four others near a Guyana Airways Twin Otter
aircraft.
The five killed at
the airstrip were Ryan, NBC reporter Don Harris, NBC
cameraman Bob Brown, San Francisco
Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, and Temple member Patricia
Parks. Surviving the attack were future Congresswoman Jackie Speier, then a staff member for Ryan, Richard Dwyer, the Deputy Chief of Mission
from the U.S. Embassy at Georgetown, Bob Flick, a producer for NBC, Steve Sung,
an NBC sound engineer, Tim Reiterman, a San Francisco Examiner reporter,
Ron Javers, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, Charles Krause, a Washington Post
reporter, and several defecting Temple members .
Later that same day,
909 inhabitants of Jonestown. 304 of them children, died of apparent cyanide poisoning, mostly in and around the settlement's main pavilion. This
resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate
act until the September 11 attacks. The
FBI later recovered a 45-minute audio
recording of the suicide in progress.
Although the tragedy of Jonestown lies in the distant
past, there is a cult leader in America today who is far more dangerous than Jim
Jones. He is pictured below:
Early in his presidency, Trump sent 59 missiles into Syria
on a whim, and he also authorized the use of “the mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan
– and then it got worse. Almost exactly a year after the first missile strike in April of 2017, he sent 118 more into the country. Each Tomahawk missile costs $1.4 million. If you do a little quick math, you'll discover that the cost of the two missile strikes was $250 million, slightly more than the $220 million that our country is spending to stop a non-existent threat from a caravan of asylum seekers heading north from dangerous Central American countries.
Golf trips to Trump properties have cost $72 million since his inauguration.
The massive "tax scam" that was passed in the spring will cause the budget deficit this year to hit $1 trillion.
If you can pronounce "emolument", you probably suspect that foreign governments have spent a LOT of money at Trump properties since his inauguration, but it will take someone smarter than me to find out the exact amount. (Are you listening, Mr. Mueller?)
If that doesn't make you shake your head, this will:
In the summer of 2017, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump, and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. "Three times [Trump] asked, if we had them, why can’t we use them.”
Golf trips to Trump properties have cost $72 million since his inauguration.
The massive "tax scam" that was passed in the spring will cause the budget deficit this year to hit $1 trillion.
If you can pronounce "emolument", you probably suspect that foreign governments have spent a LOT of money at Trump properties since his inauguration, but it will take someone smarter than me to find out the exact amount. (Are you listening, Mr. Mueller?)
If that doesn't make you shake your head, this will:
In the summer of 2017, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump, and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. "Three times [Trump] asked, if we had them, why can’t we use them.”
Trump supporters either don’t know, or don’t care, that
the vast majority of the red hats that read “Make America Great Again” are actually
made in Chine. They are also oblivious of the fact that the tariffs that Trump recently
made against China will cause their favorite hat to double in price:
Due to the fact that Trump managed a razor thin majority of
the votes in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (largely due to voter
suppression tactics by the GOP), he earned enough electoral votes to win the presidency
– even though he had lost the popular vote by more than 3 million votes.
The day after the election, my wife as so upset that she was
unable to eat, and there were MANY other people who experienced the same
symptoms.
On a recent trip to the library, I picked up a copy of “The
Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”, by noted Clinical Professor Bandy Lee. The
book is actually a compilation of thoughts by 27 well educated psychiatrists
and behavioral experts. Due to the Goldwater rule of 1964, psychiatrists are
not allowed to publish opinions of pubic figures they have not interviewed
personally. However, the Yale Conference of 2017 allowed mental health professionals
to voice their opinion if a subject was a danger to himself or others. As a result,
every single author in the book had come to the conclusion that Donald Trump
was dangerously mentally ill.
Fortunately, the Democratic Party recently regained control of
the House of Representatives, which will provide a much needed restraint on
Trumps’ worst excesses. Although it IS possible that impeachment proceedings
could start after January 20, I am of the opinion that the Democrats will use
other methods to control Trump.
Last week, protesters around the country protested the appointment
of Matthew Whitaker due to his obvious conflict of interests vis a vis the
Mueller investigation. If you are still in the mood for protesting, I would
recommend buying the t-shirt posted below:
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