CNN has been running a documentary called Escape from Jonestown. The story is basically about and told from the perspective of the few people who escaped the mass suicide that took the lives of 909 people (300) of them children on November 18, 1978. Has anyone else seen this program? I have always found what was called the "revolutionary suicide" of these people very disturbing. But the CNN program revived that in me or I should say made it more disturbing then ever.

There have always been questions in my mind about this event which before 9/11 was the biggest loss of life by a non-natural event in US history. The leading question I still struggle with is; How? How do you not only convince so many people to kill themselves, but to kill their own children first? Why? Why did they do this when it just seems to me all logic and reason would go against it. And can this happen again?

Anyone got the answers to those questions let me know. I can still hear the voice of the Reverend Jim Jones telling them to stop crying and retching and die with dignity.

And the fact that some trusted aid had to put a bullet through Jone's head instead of following his own command to drink the poison Koolaid just drives me to inner rage to just think about it.

 

People like being told what to do, apparently.

 

5 words:

The World Is Fucked Up.

 

I need not reply to this, but I was moved once again having been reminded of this horrible tragedy.

I do not know nor understand how, but I do feel the rage against it. If there is any conceivable understand it would be that maybe called the sheep complex and the total surrender in ones self for that of a leader.

The very word "devotion" rings of submission.

 

Yeah, I'm filled with rage. But it subsides quickly because what's done is done, and no one can bring those people back.


I am devoted to following someone, but that person is not of this earth.

Ooh, and devoted to my wife. Can't forget her. I love you hunny!

 

I agree with Dpm, other than to family, your love, and your friends, devotion will get you nowhere. I pray I will also have the will not to submit. If you act like a sheep, you invite slaughter!

 

Maybe you didn't need to reply but I'm sure glad you did because you phrase my emotions when it comes to this better than I could. "Moved" is such a good description. As if I am being pulled and pushed at the same time. It was like that the day it happened and I think gets worse as time goes on. And the descriptions and the recounting of the few survivors who were left just tore at me.

And "rage" I can't escape that feeling when it comes to this. Worse now then it was 30 years ago. But as I write this now I can not name that rage or even tell in which direction it is supposed to go to. Jones to be sure but maybe even more so at the people or that handy word sheeple. And not just the ones that killed their own children and themselves but in a way all of us, that somehow we could all be susceptible to that. So I guess I also have to throw in "fear."

From the first time I saw and heard Jim Jones all I could feel was revulsion and disbelief that anyone would not take one look at him and see a phony and yet he was able to persuade thousands of people to, as you say, totally submit to him in blind devotion.

There are a couple other elements that struck me hard when I watched the program last night. One was the utter vicious brutality in the way Congressman Ryan and the others were murdered at the airport. It was more than simply killing people. These people were supposed to be there to worship God, and yet when it came to killing they were not just thorough they were more brutal than any street gang.

The other was three men who were assigned, for reasons that were never explained, to take a half million dollars in cash to the Russian embassy instead of joining in the mass suicide. One of them had just watched his wife inject the poison into their babies mouth after she had drank her's. He held her until she died. but then as soon as they were out of the compound they just threw the cash away and ran for their lives. I can't get over that. As if the insanity and the influence was that localized, that all it took to regain reason was get out of the compound and out of hearing range of Jim Jone's voice. Is this the power one voice, no matter how twisted and hypocritical, can have on people? I shudder when I ponder that question.

Thanks man for replying to this. I guess it was what I hoped for when I put it up. Some response or means to get at my own feelings about this which have seemed to just haunt me for all this time. I needed something more than just the rainbow colored pattern of bodies that has been burned into my brain from the aerial photograph taken after the suicide.

 

Jones got to desperate people, in a desperate time, for these individuals.
Think of David Koresh.
I remember when it happened well, and saw the documentary, very moving, at some points.
There will always be a `reverend Jim Jones' or people will invent him!

 

Wasn't there an "end of the world suicide cult" that wanted to go meet the great spaceship in the sky? Aint it a bitch when the world doesn't come to an end...and you're not around to be wrong?

 

Yes, in Canada(Montreal), and the US, known as "Heaven's Gate", founded by Marshall Appelwhite I believe.
That guy in the street? "John 3:16", he's been saying this for around 30 years,
from where I'm from!

 

I think that was called temple of the sun and moon. They claimed a space ship was flying behind Haley's Comet and was going ah... Well... I don't really know... I'm not an insane, desperate for any kind of hope, even the ridiculously outrageous kind of hope that you would go through a slow and painful death for, kind of person. Honestly? I feel a great sorrow in my heart for these people who follow false teachers, willingly and blindly marching toward a death that is not necessary. It is a terrible thing that we allow the continued existence of these people who give the innocent poison to quench their thirst.


GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*cough*

Ahem

That felt better

I just realized temple of the sun and moon was a different cult that ended in a small group suicide that occurred in both the US and... Sweden, I think?

 

Yeah, that's about right...let's go to Heaven's Gate on a spaceship. Crazy huh?!

 

Marshall Herff Applewhite, Jr. (1931–1997), leader of the Heaven's Gate cult, convinced his followers to commit a mass suicide, because he believed a spaceship following the Hale Bopp Comet would take them to their "new world destination." (
AP/WIDE
http://www.unexplainedstuff.com/Religious-Phenomena/UFO-Cults-Heaven-s-gate.html

I didn't see ..hmmm, yep, a different cult

 

Wow, at least Jim Jones had a look about him, Applewhite has the look that says run the fuck away! Makes you really wonder about his followers.

 

The way I look at it is, most of the people who were able to convince so magnificently appealed to those who believed they had nothing else to turn to. Very few had any form of religion or beliefs to begin with, and these "leaders" basically drew on that blank slate. There were also drugs and threats by some...I'm not as familiar with Heaven's Gate (I only know the basics from a CNN special I watched) as I am other cult followings, but some (in those followings) who realized what was going on wanted to leave and they were threatened or talked back into that realm of stupor. I guess it just takes to right kind of manical ranting and you've got some people eating right out of your hand.

 

Man, I tried Googling "Temple of the Sun and Moon" and all I get is a literal temple in Columbia. -_- And some Astrology.

 

I watched a two-hour program on MSNBC on the same subject, and it was certainly a chilling reminder. When I was a child, Leo Ryan was my congressmen, and Jackie Speier, an aide to Ryan who survived the massacre, currently represents the district my parents live in.

Peoples Temple seemed to follow the patterns of other cults: a charismatic leader whom the members of the cult revered as God, or at least god-like...followers who seemed to desperately NEED to follow someone else's lead...tight restrictions or prohibitions on leaving the cult (some of them had to leave their own children behind)...and a certain paranoia and fear of contact with the outside world. You can see the pattern repeat itself over and over.

I don't think I'll ever understand why so many people are willing to submit. Watching the program, I was struck by the fact that the survivers still try to justify their allegiance to Jones -- they really thought they were building a kind of utopia, and were blind to the authoritarian nature of the group. They were willing to sacrifice everything for that ideal. NOW they can see that they were misled, betrayed...but they still have the view that ANYONE can be taken in by maniacs like Jim Jones, whereas I can't imagine myself doing such a thing. Nevertheless, I see that need to follow someone in so many of my acquaintances. It's scary.

 

There are remarkable similarities to the Manson Family, which was flourishing at about the same time. It's tempting to say that some of these cults were the fruits of the 1960s -- lots of disaffected people wandering around looking for something to cling to. Many people in the late 60s were gravitating to communal living experiments (Jones was an avowed socialist), in search of something that gave their life meaning. Gradually, they all concluded that utopia wasn't so easily achieved.

 

The Manson Family is actually what was going through my head as I was typing earlier.

 

This is probably the crux of it -- people who are missing something in their lives, and feel betrayed by mainstream society. I imagine most of the people drawn into a cult like this are damaged goods to begin with.