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.

Leave it to the right-wing nutjobs here to try to politicize this, especially considering that they belong to the cult of a corrupt, convicted felon and wannabe dictator. They mindlessly drink the Orange Kool-Aid of a pathologically lying megalomaniac who pardoned those who attacked, assaulted, and killed law enforcement on January 6. So of course they'd be obsessed with someone like Jim Jones and the mass murder st Jonestown. (They're also obsessed with absurd, nonsensical conspiracies.) It was a Democratic Congressman and his crew who tried to help cult members leave Jonestown before Jones had them murdered too.

The only "tragedy" of Jonestown was the murder of over 300 innocent children. Let the adult simpletons/religious fanatics follow a crazed con man into a jungle and kill themselves, but the children weren't given a choice. Cyanide is not an easy way to die, so imagine how those children suffered after being forced to drink Jones' Kool-Aid concoction. Jones should have done the world a favor and killed himself years before. Except for those adults who were murdered on the airfield, I have no sympathy for the rest.

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.

I was a little kid when this happened and I still remember it well. At least what was said of it in the media at the time.

In this documentary you watch it along with some of the people who were there from the beginning to the tragic end. So it's a different, more factual, and realistic view vs the more entertainment driven reenactment documentaries shown previously.

It's painful to watch, to revisit again, but maybe it should be required watching for students to learn from.

The lesson is us human beings haven't change that much in the last 70 years or so. There are evil minded that learn how to manipulate people. Know the human nature tricks of how to condition and train them with fear, anxiety, and lies. To combat this we know how to recognise the characteristics of cults, the psychopaths, and don't let them gain a position of power.

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.