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FA few decades ago this Sunday, Reverend Jim Jones, charismatic leader of an American cult in the Guyanese jungle, ordered his supporters to assassinate a US congressman and several journalists, then to commit suicide by drinking cyanide fruit punch.
The Jonestown Massacre was, before 9/11, the largest incident of intentional death of civilians in American history. More than nine hundred people died, a lot of children. It was also a devastating cultural trauma: the end of the last tensions of a certain type of idealism of the 1960s and of radicalism of the 1970s. Jonestown's legacy is perpetuated in the ironic phrase "drink Kool-Aid" ( it is actually Fla-Vor-Aid).
Although he will later become a symbol of the darker side of the west coast counter-culture, Jim Jones was born into a poor family of Indiana. Described as an intelligent and strange child, Jones was instinctively attracted to religion, especially Christian charismatic traditions such as Pentecostalism. He made his way as a street preacher and was, unusually for the time and place, a strong advocate for racial equality.
Jones' idiosyncratic blend of evangelical Christianity, New Age spirituality and radical social justice attracted an enthusiastic audience. He called his nascent church the temple of peoples.
Although Jones' followers are later stereotyped as sinister and brainwashed idiots, journalist Tim Reiterman says in his founding book that many of them were "honest, hard-working, life-conscious people." social, some highly educated, "who" wanted to help their neighbor and serve God, not to embrace a self-proclaimed deity on earth. " The People's Temple preached socialism and community life and racially integrated them on an exceptional level, unequaled ever since.
In 1965, at the age of about thirty, Jones ordered the Temple of Peoples to be transferred to California. He distanced himself from traditional Christian teachings, describing himself in messianic terms and asserting that he was the reincarnation of characters like Christ and Buddha. He also claimed that his goal has always been communism and that, offending the famous saying that religion is "the opiate of the masses", this religion was only the way to make Marxism more acceptable. .
In the 1970s, Peoples Temple, now based in San Francisco, had gained considerable political influence. Jones's fierce defense of the oppressed earned him the admiration of icons of the left, such as Angela Davis and Harvey Milk, as well as the support of groups such as the Black Panthers, a tragically mistaken political affinity, given that more two-thirds of Jonestown's victims were African-Americans.
As David Talbot notes in Salon, the Peoples Temple was partly successful because it was politically useful: "We could count on Jones to deliver buses filled with obedient and well-dressed disciples to demonstrations, campaign rallies and political speakers. "
However, there were already signs of a sinister current underlying the temple of the peoples. The faithful were to be fully involved in the church's utopian project: they gave up their personal wealth, worked long hours of unpaid church work, and often broke contact with their families. They were supposed to raise their children in the commune. To show their commitment, members of the Peoples Temple were asked to sign false testimonies that they had assaulted their children, which the church kept to blackmail potential.
In his 1980 Jonestown study, the writer Shiva Naipaul, VS Naipaul's younger brother, claimed that the People's Temple was at the heart of a fundamentalist religious project – "obsessed with sin and images of destruction. apocalyptic, authoritarian in his deepest impulses, instinctively thinking of the terms saved and damned. "
The result, writes Naipaul, "was neither racial justice nor socialism, but a messianic parody of both".
Jones, who had long believed that the United States was in danger of an imminent nuclear holocaust, was looking for a place where his church would be "safe" during an apocalyptic event. A magazine article alleging abuse in the people's temple stimulated Jones' desire to move. He chose Guyana, a former British colony of South America whose socialist regime was politically friendly
In 1977, the Peoples Temple moved its headquarters to a remote area of the Guyanese desert. Here, Jones said, they could build a utopian society without interference from the government or the media. Confronted by an overwhelming tropical climate and limited resources, the people of Jonestown have begun to convert the dense jungle into an active farming community, soon to be known as "Jonestown".
The church delivered Jones' soliloquy to Jonestown's inhabitants by megaphone. In the evening, they attended compulsory propaganda classes. Jones' warrant was executed by armed guards called the "Red Brigade".
Jonestown had little reason to expect an interference from Guyana – a "cooperative republic" whose government happily ignored signs of the sect's authoritarian and paranoid tendency. Back in the United States, however, parents of Jonestown residents – worried about the strange letters or lack of letters they received from their children – had pressured the government to investigate.
In the United States, a family won a custody order for a child in Jonestown, paranoia escalated. The commune became an armed camp, surrounded by volunteers armed with rifles and machetes, threatening to kill strangers until death.
During the siege (imaginary), the Black Panthers Huey Newton and Angela Davis spoke to the inhabitants of Jonestown by radio to communicate their solidarity. Davis told the people of Jonestown that they were at the forefront of the revolution and had the right to resist what she called "a deep conspiracy" against them.
During this period, Jonestown began exercises called "sleepless nights", in which residents committed mass suicide.
In the United States, California Congressman Leo Ryan organized a delegation of journalists and others to conduct a fact-finding mission to Jonestown.
The delegation arrived in Jonestown on November 17, 1978 and heard a civil hearing from Jones. This visit was, however, hastily interrupted on 18 November after a member of the commune attempted to stab Ryan. The delegation returned to the airstrip, accompanied by a dozen Jonestown residents who had asked to leave the town and escorted by Jones' vigilant MPs.
Delegates never managed to take off. As they boarded planes, their escorts unsheathed rifles and opened fire. They shot down Ryan, painting his body with bullets to be sure of it, and killed four others, including two photographers who captured images of the attack before they died. Wounded survivors ran or dragged themselves, bleeding, into the forest. (Jackie Speier, one of Ryan's assistants, survived five shots and is now a member of Congress representing the 14th district of California.)
Back in Jonestown, Jones announced that it was time to undertake the last "sleepless night". To dispel the disagreement, he told locals that Congressman Ryan had already been murdered, sealing the fate of the town and making "revolutionary suicide" the only possible outcome.
The people of Jonestown, some accepting and serene, others probably forced, queued for cyanide punch cups and syringes. The children – more than three hundred – were poisoned first and can be heard crying and moaning on the community's audio cassettes, which were later recovered by the FBI.
When the Guinean troops reached Jonestown the next morning, they discovered a sinister and silent view, frozen in time and littered with corpses. A small number of survivors, mostly people who had been hidden during intoxication, emerged. An elderly woman, who slept throughout the ordeal, woke up to find out all the dead. Jones was found dead from a seemingly self-inflicted shot.
Photography: Ken Hawkins / Alamy Stock Photo / Alamy Stock Photo
One of the attacked reporters on the landing strip, Tim Reiterman, of the San Francisco Examiner, survived two gunshot wounds and then wrote Raven: The Unpublished Story of Reverend Jim Jones and his people, still regarded as the definitive story of the cult Jones.
Reiterman argued that it is impossible to separate Jonestown from its political and social context. "The temple of the people was, as are many communes, sects, churches and social movements, an alternative to the established social order, a nation in its own right," he wrote in Raven. "The temple I knew was not populated by masochists and demi-spirits. As a result, members who have dedicated years of work, savings, homes, children and, in some cases, their own lives have received something in return.
He "backed up," Reiterman added, "when strangers took for granted that they or their children would never be crazy enough or vulnerable enough to be part of such an organization. is a self-illusion.
