Status Updates From A Thousand Lives: The Untol...

Stanley Clayton, watching nurses tearing open syringes and filling throwing deadly punch, “noted that (the 25 guards) weapons were trained on the residents, not on the jungle.” There were no outside forces coming to get them. They were chimeras of Jim Jones’ drug-addled, power-hungry Messiah complex.

Even what Jones told his followers about the cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid was a lie. “It’s simple. There’s no convulsions with it.” There weee no Guyanese Defense Forces coming through the jungle to torture the followers. They had already been tortured through sleep deprivation and public beatings and manufactured terror - and mass starvation.

“Deep in the Guyanese jungle, Jones created a vacuum of reason where his madness played out unfettered. He staged more ‘mercenary attacks’ with the collusion of his sons, which kept residents afraid and obedient.”

“Jones’s followers sensed their leader was losing control of himself. When he read the news over the PA system, his tongue lolled in his mouth as he slurred or mispronounced words. Sometimes he even sounded some words out, as though he were speaking a foreign language.”

“Jones had grown increasingly tyrannical, and the plan appeared less like Custer’s valiant final stand and more like the Nazi’s final
solution.”

“It was possible to get a sense of another resident’s true feelings by reading their body language during Jones’s harangues: a wince, a sigh, a moment’s hesitation during a death vote.” But risky.

Extreme duress (“chronic hunger, exhaustion, and fear”) made people not care about socialism. Constant anxiety about being reported and their leader’s death threats led to lack of confidence in family members. “They withdrew into depression and apathy and cynicism.” Socialism on steroids - or amphetemines.

Jones’ grip on reality versus fantasy weakens and he starts losing top aides like church financial secretary Debbie Blakey. State Department McCoy’s inner objections to Jones’s threats as nonsense start to crumble also. “He found it impossible to believe that nine hundred people would line up and kill themselves; it just wasn’t civilized behavior.”

Self-fulfilling prophetic behavior, or self-engineered consequences? Ham radio operators complain to FCC about repeat Temple violations to the WA6DTJ station, Temple pays $50 fines, ham users eventually refuse to patch through calls, so Jones sees this “as part of the widening campaign to destroy him.”

Jokes may have recruited a doctor to the cause but he had never finished his internship, though he could prescribe narcotics to Jones - and participate in an elaborate propaganda ploy to get a glowing press release for a ham radio exchange about a breech birth and necessary C-Section. Also, he researched germ cultures to poison a crowd.

“In San Francisco, Jones once told an aide that the way to control people was to keep them ‘tired and poor’. In Jonestown, he kept them tired, poor, and hungry.”

“There was only one reason Jones would post such a bleak picture of the outside world he (Harold Cordell) figured: to make death more appealing than life.”

One follower (Harriett Tropp) complained about Jokes’ droning monologues in front of the microphone. “I have entertained the thought that you were deliberately using a known psychological technique of interrupting people’s thought processes with specific information, so as to keep them in a kind of disjointed state” so they’re both more receptive and also less able to do concentrated tasks.

“Richartz also questioned Jones’s brand of socialism, writing, ‘all roads leads to you-there doesn’t seem to be any independent thinking…or collective element in the decision making.”

The ‘last stand demonstration’ interpretation of revolutionary suicide was also an inaccurate rendering of Huey Newton’s concept - as well as a manipulation of the historical record. Garry’s secretary wrote Teri Buford that “Newton urged revolutionaries to go down fighting, not to kill themselves”.

The PR Girls were sent with good whisky and short skirts to get friendly with local officials, bringing “greetings from their leader, who’d given himself the title of Bishop in Guyana. The designation certainly wasn’t used by the denomination that ordained him, the Disciples of Christ, but he thought intent him more gravitas than mere Reverend.”

Temple members were coerced into incriminating the drives on paper, as insurance against betraying the cause, like parents ‘confessing’ to molesting true children. “Most Temple members would have a moment like this at one point or another, a moment when they ignored what their gut instinct said was wrong or unfair and followed the crowd.”

Guyana’s Prinr Minister offered a 25-year lease at $1,000 per year for 3,800 acres so Bunyan could boast about the settlement as a model farm co-operative. Also as American life insurance against Venezuelan militants.

Not surprising that under the first prime minister’s tenure, British Guyana is declared “a socialist state” and “didn’t produce enough food. Large sectors of the population suffered from disease and malnutrition.”

October 1971, Indianapolis Star reporter noticed an “uncanny resemblance” between those headed in morning and evening services. So the Star got deluged with angry calls and letters (including one from attorney Tim Stoen). This was a finely tuned intimidation tactic.

“I love socialism,” Jokes told his congregation on September 6, 1975, “and I’d be willing to bring it about, but if I did, I’d take a thousand with me.”

Envy and sheep-stealing below assertions of disgust at Divine’s methods. “Over the years, Jones would copy most of Divine’s ideas and techniques. He’d even call his Guyanese agricultural project The Promised Land, the name Divine used for his communal farm in upstate New York.”

“Father Divine’ charisma and message of racial and gender equality drew thousands of followers. He controlled virtually every aspect of their lives, requiring them to remain celibate, live communally, and sign their wages and property over to them. They hung his photograph on the walls of their homes and called him Father.”