Jonestown Quotes

Any place with a founder who brings a teddy bear to meetings,” he writes, “is a step away from Jonestown.

Among other things Jonestown was an example of a definition well known to sociologists of religion: a cult is a religion with no political power.

Be careful of living your life based only on faith and signs, or you might find yourself standing in a South American jungle holding a glass of Kool-aid. Commonsense is the foundation of any good testimony.

Father Divine said to always establish a ‘we/they’: an ‘us,’ and an enemy on the outside,” explained Laura Johnston Kohl, our Jonestown vet. The goal is to make your people feel like they have all the answers, while the rest of the world is not just foolish, but inferior. When you convince someone that they’re above everyone else, it helps you both distance them from outsiders and also abuse them, because you can paint

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

No one listening [to Jones' sermons], even those who were the most devoted to him, could take it all in. But at some point each follower heard something that reaffirmed his or her personal reason for belonging to Peoples Temple, and for believing in Jim Jones. As Jonestown historian Fielding McGehee observes, "What you thought Jim said depended on who you were.

It was ironic—the great socialists could only survive by becoming capitalists.” But

People do not knowingly join “cults” that will ultimately destroy and kill them. People join self-help groups, churches, political movements, college campus dinner socials, and the like, in an effort to be a part of something larger than themselves. It is mostly the innocent and naive who find themselves entrapped. In their openhearted endeavor to find meaning in their lives, they walk blindly into the promise of ultimate answers and a higher purpose. It is usually only gradually that a group turns into or reveals itself as a cult, becomes malignant, but by then it is often too late.

The Trojan Horse Sterling had referred to reflected his belief that the truth about Jonestown had never been revealed to the American people. A belief shared by his fellow co-founders. They were certain that while there were undoubtedly suicides at Jonestown, the event could more accurately be described as a mass murder that resulted from an experiment of sorts carried out by various US agencies.

If anything, the people who moved to Jonestown should be remembered as noble idealists. They wanted to create a better, more equitable, society. They wanted their kids to be free of violence and racism. They rejected sexist gender roles. They believed in a dream. How terribly they were betrayed.

Animals have no control over their logic – they only rely on instinct.   When society is turned into an animal, they accept war as a necessity. They accept death as “as long as it's not me or mine.” We become a selfish society of paranoid fearmongers, who only live to make sure that they do not die.

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.

Jimmy’s two earliest and most enduring lessons from his mother were these: there was always some Them out to get you, and reality was whatever you believed.

Achieved art is quite incapable of lowering the spirits. If this were not so, each performance of King Lear would end in a Jonestown.

In fact, in its most basic form, socialism was a belief in more equitable distribution of wealth, with everyone afforded the opportunity to thrive in accordance with personal achievement regardless of race or social position.

Jim Jones was a dedicated Esquire reader, and for him its January 1962 issue (which reached newsstands in December 1961) could not have been timelier. One lead story, touted on the cover, was titled “9 Places in the World to Hide,” the cities and/or regions where inhabitants had the best odds of survival following nuclear war. Reporter Caroline Bird

In years to come, Jim Jones would frequently be compared to murderous demagogues such as Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. These comparisons completely misinterpret, and historically misrepresent, the initial appeal of Jim Jones to members of Peoples Temple. Jones attracted followers by appealing to their better instincts. The purpose of Peoples Temple was to offer such a compelling example of living in racial and economic equality that everyone else would be won over and want to live the same way.

Unfortunately, there’s a downside to the dopamine system, and that is addiction. Addictive drugs take over the role of reward signals that feed into the dopamine neurons. Gambling, pornography, and drugs such as cocaine cause the brain to flood itself with dopamine in response. So, too, do addictive ideas, most notably addictive bad ideas, such as those propagated by cults that lead to mass suicides (think Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate), or those propagated by religions that lead to suicide bombing (think 9/11 and 7/7).

Jim Jones had wanted his grand gesture to make an impression on the entire world, and, to that extent, he succeeded. But the Jonestown deaths quickly became renowned not as a grandly defiant revolutionary gesture, but as the ultimate example of human gullibility.

Why such a massacre had occurred, the Omegans could only speculate. Some thought it may have been to stop a large-scale emigration out of America to a fabled Utopian society; others wondered if it was intended to create fear in the populace – fear of cults, fear of Communism, fear of anything foreign; and still others believed it was to create a precedence whereby any groups labelled a cult would be vilified without due diligence by the public.

A nation could choose to observe socialist tenets. Communism meant rigid government control—people had no choice other than to comply, and government mandate rather than personal accomplishment determined the course of their lives. Peoples Temple socialism was intended to change hearts through example, not coercion.

The consensus was what they termed “Christian communism,” since they believed that “from each according to ability, to each according to need” was the proper church approach.

Individual suicide was wasteful, but mass suicide that sent a message of defiance, and that encouraged future generations to fight oppression to the death, was admirable.

Just as demagogues lead their well-intentioned followers into tragedy, so the jungle inevitable reclaims it's own.

If you have a devil within you, don’t hide him but put him in front of your wagon so that he will use up all his strength by pulling you forward.

Keep them poor and keep them tired, and they’ll never leave.” How well he understood his people.

On Jones’s instruction, Larry Schacht ordered one pound of sodium cyanide, enough for 1,800 lethal doses. It cost $8.85.

When your own thoughts are forbidden, when your questions are not allowed and our doubts are punished, when contacts with friendships outside of the organization are censored, we are being abused, for the ends never justify the means. When our heart aches knowing we have made friendships and secret attachments that will be forever forbidden if we leave, we are in danger. When we consider staying in a group because we cannot bear the loss, disappointment and sorrow our leaving will cause for ourselves and those we have come to love, we are in a cult… If there is any lesson to be learned it is that an ideal can never be brought about by fear, abuse, and the threat of retribution. When family and friends are used as a weapon in order to force us to stay in an organization, something has gone terribly wrong.

When society is turned into an animal, they accept war as a necessity. They accept death as “as long as it's not me or mine.” We become a selfish society of paranoid fearmongers, who only live to make sure that they do not die.

Shaw resented being questioned by the Temple Planning Commission. It felt especially offensive because, besides her constant responsibilities as a foster parent, she had a day job as well, contributing her entire salary to the Temple.

Cults tend to follow similar patterns. First, there's financial exploitation where members hand over money and assets to increase the cult's power over them and make them dependent on it. Then the sexual exploitation begins. Finally, there's physical exploitation involving confinement, punishment, and isolation from family members. If the cult's leader has become delusional enough to think they have the God-like power of life and death over their followers, they may demand the ultimate sacrifice - mass suicide.

Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things: John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolf Hitler. Caryl Chessman. Jeb Magruder. Napoleon. Talleyrand. Disraeli. Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan. Locke. Charlton Heston. Errol Flynn. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Gandhi. Charles Olson. Charles Colson. A Victorian Gentleman. Dr. X. Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why—at least to a degree—He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person… or, more properly, as a Person. Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did… and what they saw: The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed—badly, most undertakers say—Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies.

Today, few Americans born after 1980 are familiar with the Jonestown tragedy, although anyone with an Internet connection can listen to the haunting tape of the community’s mass extinction. And while the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” has entered the cultural lexicon, its reference to gullibility and blind faith is a slap in the face of the Jonestown residents who were goaded into dying by the lies of Jim Jones, and, especially insulting to the 304 murdered children. As the FBI files clearly document, the community devolved into a living hell from which there was no escape.

conformity. They believed in and followed the same rules, respecting parents and teachers above all. This was typical throughout Indiana—according to state historian James H. Madison, “Moderation has been the Indiana way, a moderation firmly anchored in respect for tradition. Among the revolutions that have not occurred in Indiana is a generational revolt.” Lynn

Society, in fact, often holds it to be a virtue to adhere to certain beliefs in spite of evidence to the contrary. Belief in that which reason denies is associated with steadfastness and courage, while skepticism is often identified with cynicism and weak character. The more persuasive the evidence against a belief, the more virtuous it is deemed to persist in it. We honor faith. Faith can be a positive force, enabling people to persevere in the face of daunting odds, but the line between perseverance and fanaticism is perilously thin. Carried to extremes, faith becomes destructive—the residents of Jonestown for example, or the Heaven’s Gate cult. In both cases, the faith of the believers was tested; in both cases, they passed the test.

One of the photos Yaken posted on social media after he made it to Syria showed a bucket filled with severed heads, hashtagged “#headmeat.”36 Irrespective of whether his adventure to the land of the caliphate was spiritually fulfilling, the imagery it produced was a kind of pornography. And like all pornography, it aroused strong reactions, ranging from titillation to revulsion, and sometimes both at once. These reactions share an intellectually disarming effect. As in the case of porn, they resist detached analysis. The scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith noted a similar tendency in the failure to understand the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978. The problem, he said, was an unwillingness to undertake the difficult task of “looking, rather than staring or looking away.”37

Carter, like almost everyone else in the Temple who got to know Milk, grew to like him immensely: “Before him, all I knew about gays were that some of them were bears and others were queens. But Harvey became a friend of mine, and I went to his house and spent time with him and his partner and realized that a gay couple was just that, a couple. See, that was something good about the Temple—if you were part of it, you always had the opportunity to grow as a person, to be around and learn to accept, to appreciate, all different kinds of people.

...there will be nights when they can't deal with all the space around them, the time passing, the schizophrenic burr of Father's voice in their brains. Nights in the years to come, when their stories are no longer theirs, and they can barely hear each other over the screaming headlines. Nights after everything's gone to shit and their dreams are decaying bodies in a distant place. Nights when their voices are the only thing to remind each other that the good things, love, beauty, family, still exist; that the night, endless as it seems, cannot undo their progress.

Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things: John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolf Hitler. Caryl Chessman. Jeb Magruder. Napoleon. Talleyrand. Disraeli. Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan. Locke. Charlton Heston. Errol Flynn. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Gandhi. Charles Olson. Charles Colson. A Victorian Gentleman. Dr. X. Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why—at least to a degree—He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person… or, more properly, as a Person. Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did… and what they saw: The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed—badly, most undertakers say—Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies. The man who cremated William Holden. The man who encased the body of Alexander the Great in gold so it would not rot. The men who mummified the Pharaohs. Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.

Here are some people who have written books, telling what they did and why they did those things: John Dean. Henry Kissinger. Adolph Hitler. Caryl Chessman. Jeb Magruder. Napoleon. Talleyrand. Disraeli. Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan. Locke. Charlton Heston. Errol Flynn. The Ayatollah Khomeini. Gandhi. Charles Olson. Charles Colson. A Victorian Gentleman. Dr. X. Most people also believe that God has written a Book, or Books, telling what He did and why—at least to a degree—He did those things, and since most of these people also believe that humans were made in the image of God, then He also may be regarded as a person . . . or, more properly, as a Person. Here are some people who have not written books, telling what they did . . . and what they saw: The man who buried Hitler. The man who performed the autopsy on John Wilkes Booth. The man who embalmed Elvis Presley. The man who embalmed—badly, most undertakers say—Pope John XXIII. The twoscore undertakers who cleaned up Jonestown, carrying body bags, spearing paper cups with those spikes custodians carry in city parks, waving away the flies. The man who cremated William Holden. The man who encased the body of Alexander the Great in gold so it would not rot. The men who mummified the Pharaohs. Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.

I have been anticipating tears but I have been hoping for a reprieve from them, at least until after we have eaten dinner. That was too much to ask for, apparently, so I will plunge into her latest emotional morass manfully, as I have a thousand times before.

Tears be’s de way a man keeps his heart washed clean of all de ugly things.

It be wrong to be questionin’ and frettin’ over what you ain’t, ’cause what you is, dat be real fine.

ifn you doan likes what you sees, you jes go on out theah and makes a more fittin’ world for yoselves and all the childrens.

I love this country. If it is not today the place where all the tired and poor are still welcomed, if it never was that place, it does not matter. Blood-stained and imperfect, it remains beautiful to me.

I have watched him fail as a man, let alone as a God, in every way that a man can fail, but, stained as he is, I love him still.

I am in a hellhole surrounded by your Goddamned unwanted family rejects.

it is as though they are forcing my hand. I don’t want to kill a thousand people. Regardless of their worth, regardless of whether or not they should continue living, it’s not a burden I should have to carry alone.

Just like before when I was Jesus, I shall have to drink this cup to the dregs.

I have been backed into a corner by these assholes, which means, if you think about it … what it means is that ultimately, when it all comes down, it really wasn’t me who did it after all, was it?

Today’s standard conception of The Sixties concerns youth and strife and hedonism. We remember the spectacular outbursts of spiritual weirdness—from Hare Krishnas to the Charles Mansonites to the Jonestown mass suicide in the 1970s—but that all rose and fell during those dozen cuckoo years and then ceased to matter, right? Meditation and yoga don’t require any specific beliefs. The 1960s branding is not Sex & Drugs & Rock ’n’ Roll & Irrational Belief in the Supernatural. In the popular understanding of the era, the most far-reaching and specifically religious craziness that detonated during those crazy years, extreme American Christianity, is omitted from the legacy.

We don’t get to choose our formative moments. Very often, adversity and failure shape us more permanently than fortune and success.

she had placed her husband’s cell phone, fully charged, inside the casket . . . and that she had called and left him messages for months after.

Nobody had the power to bury a gun violence prevention bill, take a nap on immigration, or sweep major legislation under the rug and not vote on it.

Movements originate when the truth is revealed.

The Member and Employee Training and Oversight On (ME TOO) Congress Act called for more transparency, streamlined the procedure for reporting harassment, and ensured that taxpayers weren’t paying for settlements. It stripped away the mandatory nondisclosure agreement and the mediation. The victims would be provided legal counsel, and interns and fellows would be covered by the law as well.

February 2018, the House passed the Congressional Accountability Reform Act, based on that ME TOO Congress Act.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.

Since arriving here I have had a perpetual fever of one hundred and five, which I hope quashes any criticism of why I do not wander around the fields spreading bonhomie.

Nature has designed every living creature for a specific purpose here on earth and their design makes it obvious to me what their needs and uses are. In allowing them exclusive run of the fields here I, have merely returned them to nature.

I fight the grim reaper for them and they begrudge me chilled pineapple juice

it is only because we are in the darkness, which is a generous light to a woman approaching her mid-thirties.

Then, smiling his darling gap-toothed grin, he begins, “Okay, okay, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna put Mommy Grace down the well. I’m gonna hang her there by her titties,” he giggles, “till she screams and screams. Are you real glad, Daddy?

Jonestown has shown me what true prejudice is,

you are a hell of a lot better off trying to avoid the free health care out in this place.

Ask not what I can do for my country,’ and I have done plenty. Ask better what hasn’t it done for me?

their belief in me is total. Nobody’s discrediting that. And causing contempt for the United States of America? Goddamned right. ‘Ask not what I can do for my country,’ and I have done plenty. Ask better what hasn’t it done for me?

So that’s how it is nowadays, only one way at Jonestown. You come in, you don’t leave.

ninety percent of my ‘flock’ can’t fucking read or write anyway, the illiterate assholes. Now I’m responsible for that, too? Blame the good old U. S of Ass for our educational system in the ghettos.

Many of those who left described their departure as if they had escaped Jonestown or Waco; those who remained were simply hopeful the company’s IPO would arrive soon so they could cash out and move on.

Even the Jonestown Peoples’ Temple Agricultural Project built community.

Goodbye (Butterfly)" I gave my soul to you and held your heart so true Funny how time files, things trouble my eyes Stars all in your hair, it's my hand you should bear My how time files, you shiver when I die

forensically deconstruct a game, identify weaknesses and figure out a program to remedy them.

spin a cocoon around herself.

Just as demagogues lead their well-intentioned followers into tragedy, so the jungle inevitably reclaims it's own.

Lizzie had once read a memoir by a survivor of Jonestown...It seemed too unbelievable but, then, Margaret Atwood hadn't included any scenario in The Handmaid's Tale that hadn't already occurred in some time or place.

They mistook access for influence.

Back then, “cult” merely served as a sort of churchly classification, alongside “religion” and “sect.” The word denoted something new or unorthodox, but not necessarily nefarious. The term started gaining its darker reputation toward the start of the Fourth Great Awakening. That’s when the emergence of so many nonconformist spiritual groups spooked old-school conservatives and Christians. “Cults” soon became associated with charlatans, quacks, and heretical kooks. But they still weren’t considered much of a societal threat or criminal priority . . . not until the Manson Family murders of 1969, followed by the Jonestown massacre of 1978 (which we’ll investigate in part 2). After that, the word “cult” became a symbol of fear. The grisly death of over nine hundred people at Jonestown, the largest number of American civilian casualties prior to 9/11, sent the whole country into cult delirium. Some readers may recall the subsequent “Satanic Panic,” a period in the ’80s defined by widespread paranoia that Satan-worshipping child abusers were terrorizing wholesome American neighborhoods. As sociologist Ron Enroth wrote in his 1979 book The Lure of the Cults, “The unprecedented media exposure given Jonestown . . . alerted Americans to the fact that seemingly beneficent religious groups can mask a hellish rot.

You should be picking me up Instead you're dragging me down You’re flying over my head You’re landing all over town

Year after year, we ask: What makes people join cults like Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate? What makes them stay? What makes them behave in wild, baffling, sometimes gruesome ways? Here’s where the answer starts: Using systematic techniques of conversion, conditioning, and coercion, with language as their ultimate power tool, Jones and Applewhite were able to inflict unforgettable violence on their followers without personally laying a finger on them.

Jones generally forbade drinking alcohol, but on this night at the Geary Boulevard temple he told the P.C. members that it was all right for once. Each of them drank some, and after their cups were emptied Jones informed them that their wine had been laced with poison—all of them would die within forty-five minutes to an hour. There was no antidote. They were doomed.

If there was something about Jones’s demands on his followers that they didn’t understand, it shouldn’t be questioned—God didn’t want them doing that, either. To challenge Jim Jones was to challenge the Lord, and God would respond accordingly.

For the first time, though only in private, he began incrementally revealing the considerable divide between the Bible-based religion he still preached and his true beliefs. Jones talked about reincarnation—not only his faith in it, but his conviction that “Jim Jones” was simply the latest physical manifestation of a spirit previously occupying the earthly bodies of other great men, all of them dedicated to equality and justice.

These Temple members felt that they were exhibiting the proper socialist attitude, living the way everyone else should—and someday would, thanks to them. They were better than anyone else because they proved that everyone was equal. None had either the leisure time or the inclination to consider the contradiction. Observing with satisfaction what had literally become his kingdom, Jones observed to Terri Buford, “Keep them poor and keep them tired, and they’ll never leave.” How well he understood his people.

Max, if you want to reach the top, you’ve got to play the part.

Laws permitting segregation had been struck down, but in the opinion of many whites the government continued to give blacks unfair advantages, everything from college and hiring quotas to a welfare system that leached away even the most marginal financial security from hardworking, law-abiding white folks. These beliefs were at complete variance from the daily experience of African Americans trapped in crushing poverty and inadequate housing. Far from effortlessly benefiting from federal largesse and rioting at the slightest perceived provocation, they struggled with bureaucratic red tape in the social service and legal systems. Applying for welfare, Social Security, and disability payments was a complex, often tortuous process. Gangs and drugs were rampant in slums and public housing. A disproportionate percentage of poor black males were either in prison or at risk of it. In too many instances, black women had to raise extended families without an adult male presence or financial support. And, always, there was the despairing sense that things were never going to get much better.

What the man lacked in sophistication, he more than made up for in charisma and genuine commitment.

But Jones never accepted limits. It stemmed from his mother, Lynetta, who, in her sporadic attempts at parenting, regaled him with tales of visions and reincarnation and how it was preordained that her son should do great things.

That’s just one of the reasons why it’s so important to encourage people from a range of backgrounds and circumstances to join the ranks of our government officials. If we don’t have diverse representation, simple needs will be overlooked, and our legislation will never be as far reaching as it needs to be.

I was sitting up in my drab gown when the doctor returned to the room with the kind of solemn look that you never want to see on your doctor’s face. There was nothing further to be done. The fetus would not survive. I felt like I was losing a part of my soul. I had let myself believe another beautiful child was on the way, but I was wrong. Steve held me close. Not only were we experiencing an unspeakable sense of loss, but with more anguish than I could imagine, I had to abort my pregnancy out of medical necessity. The crushing procedure, throughout which I was again sobbing, required dilating the cervix in order to extract the fetus. Ignorant or vindictive opponents have attacked that procedure—one of the great tragedies of my life—as a “partial-birth abortion.

The couple was odd, no doubt about it. But now, for the first time, little Jimmy Jones was loose on the town streets, and it soon became apparent that compared to the boy, his parents were almost normal.

could find him any time Jones wanted. I felt uncomfortable doing it, and I never went out on something like that again. But [Jones] had other people to send.” Juanell Smart, present at the Planning Commission meeting where Jones humiliated Laurie Efrein, was disgusted by the incident, and further offended when, at another meeting, someone alleged that her husband, David Wise, had tapped Jones’s phone with Smart’s full knowledge, if not cooperation. “I started crying, and I told Jim that I wanted out. He said to me, ‘Then you’ll have to move a hundred miles away.’ I told him I wouldn’t, that I’d lived in L.A. for most of my life. So then he comes up with these other conditions.” Jones told Smart that before she left, “I’d have to sign my four kids over to the church. Well, I realized that signing something like that wouldn’t mean anything in court. So I did it. Then he has somebody bring out this gun, and they make me put my hand on it, hold it, and after they had my fingerprints on it they put it in a bag and took it away. The threat was, if I went out and said or did something against Jones or the Temple, the gun could be used in some criminal way and I’d be [implicated].” For a while, Smart’s three youngest children lived with their father, and her nineteen-year-old daughter, Tanitra, lived with her grandmother Kay. All four remained active in the Temple. Smart believed that “at least there, they still were away from the streets and the drugs. Tanitra found a boyfriend in the Temple named Poncho, and of course she always wanted to be with him. So I stayed out and they stayed in.” Jones sometimes used emissaries to try talking defectors into returning, particularly former members who’d been of particular use to the Temple. Garry Lambrev was the first Californian to join the Temple and afterward ran a church antique shop and worked on the staff of The Peoples Forum. Lambrev had an ongoing disagreement with Jones about Lambrev’s desire for a long-term, loving gay relationship, and had left and rejoined the Temple several times. But in 1974, his latest defection seemed that it might last. Lambrev still kept in touch with Temple friends, and

In 1951, 20-year-old [Jim]Jones [of Jonestown massacre fame] began attending gatherings of the Communist Party USA in Indianapolis. He became flustered with harassment during the McCarthy Hearings, particularly regarding an event that he attended with his mother focusing on Paul Robeson, after which she was harassed by the FBI in front of her co-workers for attending. He also became frustrated with the persecution of open and accused communists in the United States, especially during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Jones said he asked himself, "How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church." Jones was surprised when a Methodist district superintendent helped him get a start in the church, even though he knew Jones to be a communist.

Another question to ask as you evaluate the story is, does it have a hook? In its simplest form, the hook is what got you interested in the subject in the first place. It’s that bit of information that reveals the essence of the story and its characters, encapsulating the drama that’s about to unfold. Sound and Fury, for example, is the story of a little girl who wants a cochlear implant. The hook is not that she wants this operation, nor that the implant is a major feat of medical technology. The hook is that the little girl’s parents, contrary to what many in the audience might expect, aren’t sure they want her to have the operation. It’s the part of the story that makes people want to know more. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, does not hook audiences with the horror of a mass suicide/murder that took place in 1978, even though the film opens with text on screen announcing the event. Instead, the film’s hook is that it promises viewers an insider’s look at what it means to join a community, only to be drawn inexorably into a terrifying, downward spiral. As discussed especially in Chapter 7, the hook is often the last piece of the film to come together, as the themes, characters, and story come more clearly into focus and are distilled into the promise you make to the viewers: This is what this movie is; this is why it’s worth your time; this is why this story needs to be told and demands your attention.

I’ve tried to not be a mad black man, because an angry black man in this society is a targeted black man.

Nothing was more important than the cause, facts included.

Because he voraciously read newspapers and magazines, Jones was conversant on a wide variety of topics. But mostly he challenged those who had been well educated and financially well off before joining the Temple, especially when they seemed resentful of the demands placed on them. They’d been spoiled by the privileges they’d enjoyed at the expense of the working poor, Jones

Because he voraciously read newspapers and magazines, Jones was conversant on a wide variety of topics. But mostly he challenged those who had been well educated and financially well off before joining the Temple, especially when they seemed resentful of the demands placed on them. They’d been spoiled by the privileges they’d enjoyed at the expense of the working poor, Jones said.

In every society there are inequities, and in America the most obvious of these affect people of color and the poor. Demagogues recruit by uniting a disenchanted element against an enemy, then promising to use religion or politics or a combination of the two to bring about rightful change.

As Jonestown historian Fielding McGehee observes, “What you thought Jim said depended on who you were.