Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle

Jonestown is a surprisingly good miniseries on the People's Temple cult started and ended (through mass suicide and murder) by Jim Jones. Very insightful and really helps to explain what sounds at first like an impossible event in Guyana.

Why was this man not locked up? How many years did he get away with conning and fooling the people, he was a con man and a junkie, the feds should of been on this man case years before they got to the jungle, getting invited to Jimmy Carter's inauguration I think tells its own story of where the country was at, the man should of been locked up.

If people think this kind of insanity cannot happen again, they aren't paying attention to what is being said or done in this documentary. The personality cult and 'philosophy' behind this madman is being recreated today, in a number of countries, including the U. S. When so many people mindlessly follow one person and give up their personal freedoms, then the road to destruction and oblivion is not far behind. A well-produced series with lots of original footage and a powerful reminder of what happens when you lose your way in life and let someone else dictate your path. Sad, scary and yet true. This story needs to be retold and be part of school curriculum.

This is by far the best documentary on the Jonestown massacre. It was very thorough and relied on interviews of people that were actually there. While other documentaries were also good this one had much more of an air of authenticity. Also it gave very much insight on the reason for the mass suicide. The people interviewed were considered complicit at the time which is probably while they were not used in earlier documentaries. Time has diluted that complicity.

The revolution will be televised. I'm quite a sucker for films about cults, but the remarkable thing is how many of them were caught on film. But the Peoples Temple was the cult-uber-ales, which ended in the murder-suicide of almost a thousand of its members; and even this is mostly on the record, including live action footage taken as Jones's followers shot and killed a U.S. representative. The documentary thus almost makes itself, although it's well put together, with interviews carried out with some survivors of the massacre. None of these now see any good whatsoever in the Temple (unlike some other cults who still retain some support amonst their ex-members); and they explain their past decisions as a mixture of beguilment and coerction. Founder Jim Jones had a certain charisma, albeit a creepy one; but the take home message is that people see what they need to (or, in the words of Bruce Springsteen, "at the end of every long hard day people find some reason to believe"). The scale of the tragedy makes the story compelling; you'd like to think it couldn't happen again, but you'd probably be wrong.