Last night I watched this documentary/exposé on television that I thought would be a little boring but had me riveted!! Set in the late 70’s, it was all about the last few months of Jim Jones life and his madness the strange cult that he created called Peoples Temple. Apparently due to ‘persecution’ and ‘false claims’ of child abuse and sexual abuse (among other things) he felt that he and his cult clan could not practice the ‘true essence’ of socialism in the unites stated and so moved all the way to Guyana on the premise he was going to be ‘helping’ the poor underprivileged. So they built this town and because he is such a humble man he names it after himself; Jonestown (hmmm… egocentric much??).

His son managed to get away along with a few other people but this man was seriously tapped (I am making this claim at a professional level therefore it holds far, far more credence). He was totally loopy (although aren’t most cult creators?) and most famous for the mastermind of the mass suicide of his followers. The doco showed how children were poisoned first (and that there was nearly 300 children!) resulting in the headline from a quote made by a survivor’s account of Jonestown’s final hour “they started with the babies”! Even today, a little more than 30 years after the incident there is a mass grave in Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery, where 406 unidentified bodies from Jonestown, mostly children, are buried.

Jones would wake up people in the compound and “rehearse” the mass suicide; claiming that to do so (kill yourself) is to prove your loyalty and faith to him(!!!) and that their greatest show of protest would be to  “die with dignity”  I did a very quick search (to find a pic of the man for this post) and Wikipedia claims that this mass suicide was one of the largest (such mass suicides) in history, and that aside from September 11 has been the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster.

Followers signed over their assets to Jim Jones, gave him (Jim) legal rights to their children… they all lived on this compound with no phone, no television, located in a very remote part and very distant from the city centre… I couldn’t get over it! In no way am I doing this documentary any justice – there was one scene at the end where 1 follower (a mother) and her 21 year old daughter (and 2 younger children) were told that it was “time” (to kill themselves). So this mother grabs the kitchen knife and goes up to bedroom (with the kids) and just starts killing her 2 younger kids! Then, because of their (the mother and 21 year old daughter) innate, unwavering belief for Jim Jones they “help” each other kill one another (autopsy results show that the daughter must have slit her mothers throat as the mother was slitting her throat)!!!

What is wrong with these people??? I am baffled? Stunned… shocked… I wonder how this man lived with himself – was there any sort of guilt? Any notion that what he was doing was wrong? Did he think that because he had gone that far he had to go the rest of the way? Or was he really mentally unstable? I would argue that their may be some level of mental instability towards to end of his life but that during the formation of the Peoples Temple he seemed to have all his marbles intact! His son (who was of a small number that managed to get away) believed that Jim Jones’s personal knowledge of being a fraud drove him to take high does of drugs and prescription medication. Whatever the ‘theory’ this is a man who ordered more than 900 of his followers to commit “revolutionary suicide” by drinking fruit-flavoured punch laced with poison! Now, forgive me for being naïve but if you kill yourself how will you know if your ‘protest’ is successful? Will not be pointless as no one (in the cult) will benefit form the possible success of said ‘protest’? Here’s another perspective: if the US want to bring you in for questioning; if they think your mad and that your so dangerous you shouldn’t be a member of the greater (‘sane’) community wouldn’t killing yourself be essentially doing them a favour?