Jonestown

I saw a special on the History Channel about Jonestown the other day. Now I always knew OF Jonestown and approximately what happened, and I even knew that Jim Jones's first church was in a building vacated by my synagogue in Indianapolis. I knew he had a cult in South America, and that his followers eventually committed suicide via cyanide in Koolaid. I knew the drink the koolaid saying.

I did NOT know that he had one of the only interracial churches in Indiana in the 50s, and that he generally subscribed to a social justice doctrine. I had always assumed that the church embraced some sort of fanatical fringe set of religious millenarian thought; certainly not that the church element fell away in South America and the group actually became more socialist/ Marxist/Communist than religious. I basically thought everyone involved was a kook, not people who believed something *relatively* close to what I believe in. So that was eye-opening.

I also thought that there were only about 100 people in the church who then died. Apparently it was nearly 1000.

And I didn't know the series of events that prompted the final showdown in Jonestown. Again, I had kind of assumed that they all committed suicide as part of the aforementioned millenarian the-world-will-end-date-x. But actually what happened was that various family members approached a US Congressman about how Jim Jones was holding their relatives captive in Guyana. This Congressman went to Guyana to investigate personally, bringing along some of the relatives and a few journalists. Once he arrived in the settlement, a few members managed to approach a journalist, asking his help to get them out. The Congressman intervened, and by the next day 15 people defected. The Congressman planned to stay longer to help others get out, but changed his mind after a member of the Jonestown attacked him with a knife. Then Jim Jones, fucked up on prescription drugs and probably bat-crazy to begin with, ordered some of his followers to follow the defectors, Congressman, and journalists to the airport they planned to leave from. The followers shot and killed the Congressman AND two of the journalists and injured a lot of the defectors. Jim Jones then told his followers what he had ordered and explained that since the US government would come after them because of this, everyone had to commit suicide. So then parents forced 300 kids to literally drink the koolaid and then drank it themselves. Anyone who didn't want to was injected with the cyanide with a needle. Jim Jones himself died much less painfully from a gunshot wound to the head. A few people escaped by running into the jungle, hiding under a bed, etc, but most people were killed, killed themselves, or pressured into kililng themselves.

I guess I'm somewhat fascinated by this, mostly because both the core beliefs and the fact that many people were actually killed rather than committed suicide makes this all much more disturbing to me. It's intellectually easy to dismiss a few religious fanatics, but dealing with a lot of probably normal people who started down a bad path and then met a very tragic end is a lot harder. It's just so fucked and sad. I would definitely recommend the History Channel special--I thought it was really even-handed and enlightening.

*This image is actually from neat-o-rama, not the History Channel documentary.