Town Without Pity: 30 Years Later, Memories of Jonestown Evoke Guilt, Anger and Mistr

[#98QBKiller]

Being too young to remember it, I've been reading about the Jonestown massacre recently. Good article from the WaPo....for the people that were around for it what was the media coverage like back then?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/18/AR2008111803694.html?hpid=artslot

Town Without Pity

30 Years Later, Memories of Jonestown Evoke Guilt, Anger and Mistrust

By Charles A. Krause

Special to The Washington Post

Wednesday, November 19, 2008; C01

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 18

Jackie Speier now represents California's 12th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The last time I saw her, 30 years ago, her bloody, bullet-riddled body lay in tall grass at the side of a jungle airstrip in Port Kaituma, Guyana.

She had been gunned down by four assassins sent by the Rev. Jim Jones to kill congressman Leo J. Ryan -- and the rest of us who had accompanied him to investigate reports of violence, torture and sexual abuse in a place called Jonestown.

For 15 hours, Speier and the others who miraculously survived the airport massacre waited to be rescued, bleeding and fearful the gunmen would return. Meanwhile, five miles away, Jones was ordering more than 900 of his followers to commit "revolutionary suicide" by drinking fruit-flavored punch laced with poison.

Jones's exhortation to his followers, to "die with dignity," and a survivor's account of Jonestown's final hour -- "they started with the babies" -- became headlines sent around the world. Overnight, Jonestown would become more than a name or geographic location; it became shorthand for troubling questions about cults, the social and sexual revolution then underway in the United States, and the mixture of politics and religion that Jim Jones used so effectively to lure thousands of followers into his church and to hoodwink much of San Francisco's political establishment.

On Tuesday, 30 years to the day after the horrific events that resulted in Ryan's assassination, the deaths of three journalists and the mass suicide-murder, some 200 Jonestown survivors, relatives of those who died, television crews and journalists gathered at a mass grave in Oakland's Evergreen Cemetery, where 406 unidentified bodies from Jonestown, mostly children, are buried.

The Rev. Jynona Norwood, a black evangelical preacher from Los Angeles who lost her mother and 26 other members of her immediate family in Jonestown, asked the mourners to "reflect on the lives of our loved ones who trusted in a man who was the most evil man who walked the face of the Earth."

The memorial service was just one of a number of events, in the San Francisco area and nationally, commemorating Jonestown's 30th anniversary. Renewed interest has been fanned by two new television documentaries and a play, "The People's Temple," now touring regional theaters. For those too young to remember Jonestown, the mass suicide-murder has become a part of pop culture. Brian Jonestown Massacre is the name of a rock group. And "drink the Kool-Aid" has entered the popular lexicon for a toxic kind of malleability, a reference to my first reports from Jonestown for The Washington Post quoting Odell Rhodes, a Jonestown survivor, saying that the potion drunk or injected into those who died was a mixture of cyanide and Kool-Aid.

Many of the Jonestown survivors and their families find the Kool-Aid references and jokes insensitive and deeply hurtful -- reminders of the tragedy they suffered and, worse still, the widely held perception that the men, women and children in Jonestown were a bunch of crazies who willingly committed suicide out of blind devotion to their leader.

"The whole world looked at us as a bunch of kooks, that we were borderline people, uneducated and unstable," Debbie Layton, whose escape from Jonestown in May 1978 set in motion the tragedy that followed, recalled Sunday. "People think that all the people just drank the Kool-Aid," she said. "They have no idea of what that means or what happened. They just laugh about it."

Much more is known today about the inner workings of the Peoples Temple than was known in the immediate aftermath of Jonestown. For example, many of those who died that day were highly educated. And at least some did, in fact, commit suicide. But there is clear evidence that armed guards loyal to Jones forced mothers to poison their children and gave adults a choice: Drink the deadly potion or be shot. And it later turned out that Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid, was mixed with the cyanide, a minor footnote to the larger tragedy that transfixed the nation, indeed the world, in 1978.

As Norwood and others who spoke at the memorial service said Tuesday, there is still much healing left to do and many questions unanswered. Was Jonestown a cult, a religious commune or a legitimate experiment in racial harmony and social justice gone bad? Should Ryan have insisted on going to personally investigate Jonestown, taking journalists with him, after having been warned that Jonestown was an armed camp and Jones himself increasingly unstable?

Was Jones a sadistic egomaniac who cynically abused his followers? Or was he a decent man who fell victim to the drugs, power and paranoia that finally devoured him and the 913 other men, women and children who died in Jonestown? Why didn't more people resist when they were ordered to die?

The raw emotion that still surrounds these questions flared into the open on the eve of Tuesday's commemoration when one group of survivors unveiled a plaque with the names of those who died, including Jones. Lela Howard, whose aunt died in Jonestown and who arranged for the plaque to be made and displayed at San Francisco's African American Historical and Cultural Society (80 percent of those who died were black), said she included Jones's name because "he, too, was a victim." Many Jonestown survivors seem to agree.

But Norwood, who has raised $30,000 for a memorial to be located at the mass grave site in Oakland, said she and many other relatives and survivors are outraged. Their families, she said, have spent the past 30 years trying to erase the stigma and guilt of having been "deceived" by Jones's appeal to racial equality, free health care and social welfare.

"Jones was not a victim," she said, fire in her eyes, vowing never to succumb to pressure from Jones's family and some others to include his name on the graveside monument that was partially unveiled Tuesday and will be completed next year. "To me, that's like putting Hitler's name on a memorial to the Holocaust."

Clink link above for the rest of the article...

[BigMike619]

the grandson of Jim Jones plays ball out here for USD and he has been on TV all week with his father. Its weird that the dad feels guilt for not being there when it all went down but they seemed happy and the kid has skills.

Im just glad I am as strong minded as I am. I wouldnt allow someone to ever talk me in to doing what happened there and damn straight not doing it to my son.

[DCranon21]

I watched the special on MSNBC and CNN. While I was only 3 months when this happened, I must say, this is horrifying and sad at the same time. I know the media coverage was crazy when this happened. If you haven't seen both specials on this, you have to check it out.

[Kilmer17]

Everytime I see a documentary on it I get chills.

[#98QBKiller]

I watched the special on MSNBC and CNN. While I was only 3 months when this happened, I must say, this is horrifying and sad at the same time. I know the media coverage was crazy when this happened. If you haven't seen both specials on this, you have to check it out.

I'll have to see if I can find those for sure.

[LeesburgSkinFan]

There is audio of the mass suicide on youtube, or at least there was at one time. Chilling to listen to.

[SKINS@THEGOALLINE]

"Drinking the Kool-Aid" a part of our lexicon due to the massacre at Jonestown. Sad.

[#98QBKiller]

"Drinking the Kool-Aid" a part of our lexicon due to the massacre at Jonestown. Sad.

It's so much a part of our lexicon that it's even a smiley on ES:

:koolaid:

[Gary Clark Fan]

There is audio of the mass suicide on youtube, or at least there was at one time. Chilling to listen to.

heard it and it was kind of boring, like a drunk rambling on....At one point this lady is questioning the idea of mass suicide and why not just leave to go to Russia...yea its pretty bizarre and the sound of kids crying in the background as they are being given the poision is very disturbing.

[ECU-ALUM]

I was 9 years old and remember hearing about it in my mom's car...I remember the traffic light we were at and everything.

I watched the miniseries not too long ago...very chilling to say the least.

[ljs]

saw some reports on the news today, showing so many dead bodies, little kids included. sad sad sad.