Linda’s Reviews > A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown > Status Update

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.

“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.”