Jonestown: Drinking the KoolAid

19 November 1978: It was my French teacher at the Alliance Française in Paris who first broke the news. “Something terrible has happened in your country,” said Mr Beaulieu at the start of the class, but he didn’t say what. I found out later, like everyone else who read about the almost ghoulish events of the night of the 18th.

Suddenly, Guyana was on the world map. Every Guyanese who has travelled abroad knows the annoying response of foreigners when they first hear the name of your country: “Oh, I’d love to go to Africa!” or some other sentence placing it in the wrong continent.

But now, in November 1978, the whole world knew where and what we were: a little backwater South American country covered in jungle, so remote from modern civilisation that this "bunch of crazies" – and a huge bunch it was too, a thousand all told! – had chosen it to recreate paradise, a paradise that had turned to hell. The photos of hundreds of dead bodies steaming in the rainforest shocked the world.

Jonestown became a code word for every movement that goes off-track; in this case, lethally so.  It was the world’s first mass suicide. In reality it was a massacre; a slow one, created by systematic brainwashing.

They must have been crazy, the world thought, and the world’s media dissected the story and analysed it and probed into the reasons and the motives and the background trying to explain it to themselves and everyone else, and after all of the  cogitation, the only answer they could come up with at the time was the same they had started with: they were a bunch of crazies. Nothing else explained it. Over the years, more and more truths have emerged, though, and we can look at the tragedy with a little more discernment.

Like everyone else I was fascinated, but even more so: this had happened in my own country, not far from  where I too, with a bunch of drop-out friends, had started a commune in the middle of nowhere a few years previously. My friends, in fact, still lived on the farm we had founded. What if? What if I’d still been there and had known these people, these Americans; met them in the early days, before things went so very wrong? After all, we all had the same idea, didn’t we? Escape from a civilisation which, in our eyes, was going so very wrong? When Jonestown's White Night, the night of death, happened,  I tried to understand.

Though I’ll never understand how mothers could poison their own children, I did understand how a beloved leader could turn from saviour to mass murderer. Because to me it was, finally, no longer mass suicide but mass murder. My own background and experience made it all perfectly logical: right up to the final fiasco.

You see, I know first-hand what, in the beginning, drove people to Jim Jones. Everything I have read on the subject suggests to me that Jones started off as a true humanitarian, a charismatic leader, a man of caring and goodwill, a friend of and fighter for the poor and downtrodden. And I, as a young adult, was a seeker, in quest of just such a leader. Someone who could show me a way out of my misery, guide me to a better, more wholesome life. There is nothing wrong with such a longing. It is a healthy need, a natural hunger.

I grew up in Guyana. As a child of divorced middle-class parents, I had a muddled if basically happy childhood. Guyana was a wonderful place to grow up in back then, as anyone who shared that background will agree: Georgetown, an overgrown village, lush and green, a tree-shaded haven where everyone knew everyone else, or at least everyone else’s aunty or second cousin. The Interior was untouched nature, mysterious and vast. Guyana would have been paradise, if not for the political turbulences.

My parents were political, progressive, liberal, leftist. My father, indeed, was a Marxist, for many years Press Secretary to the controversial Opposition Leader Cheddi Jagan. My mother was a leading feminist during feminism’s dawn, an icon of Progress. I grew up with all the “right” ideas on social progress. But something was missing.

My parents were also atheist, and I was raised to be the same; but in the contrary way of 18-year-old youth, I turned away from atheism and embarked on my own spiritual quest. It was a desperate and genuine search, for the political and social theories I’d been raised on could not quench the hunger I felt deep inside: that was spiritual, and could not be satisfied with intellectual explanations. Had Jim Jones come along at the time not only with his social reforms but also showing me a path to God, who knows: I might have been his, heart and soul.

I was luckier than those who did fall for his charisma. My spiritual interests eventual led me along a different path, one that led eastwards, to India and Yoga and the teachings known as Sanatana Dharma. I lived in India for a while, in a place steeped in genuine Vedantic spirituality and wisdom, and there I found the key to the missing Factor X of my life. It had been inside me all the time, and the practice of meditation, taught by reputable teachers, brought me the inner stability and confidence that had thrown me again and again in my younger days.

Over the years my personal bullshit-detector developed nicely; I can now tell the wheat from the chaff, the Pied Piper teachers (and there are hundreds of them!) from the genuine ones almost at the moment they open their mouths. But how different it could have been had I, as a young, eager, naïve and spiritually hungry teenager, stumbled across the wrong teacher! One driven not by the selfless need to lift up others, but by a power-hungry ego? One out to make a fortune? One who seduces his devotees, especially young, pretty, female ones? Would I, in my youthful naivety, have noticed that moment when things began to go wrong? Or would I have been drawn into the web of deceit, manipulation and control that surrounds such teachers? When I hear some of these stories I often think, there but for the Grace of God, go I. I’m not at all certain I could have peeled myself away in time.

And that’s why “the bunch of crazies” label used to describe the Jonestown victims has never sat well with me. These were hungry people desperate for real food, hungry for spiritual nourishment -- just as I had once been. Along came a charismatic leader, wrapping them with affection and goodwill and giving them a sense of security and family; we call it love-bombing for a reason. Love is addictive – and very easily faked. These people were sponges for love, but were given a pseudo-deal, offered by a man who used them to develop his own power and dominance over them -- as power-hungry men (and women) tend to do.

We are not trained to tell the difference. We cannot see it, feel it, taste it. Fake meat, I’m told, tastes very much like the real thing. There’s a huge market for fake cheese, and to those who’ve never tasted a true Brie or Gruyère, developed a palate for the genuine thing, it might even be delicious. And therein lies the danger.

Unless we can put ourselves in their situation – not the situation in November 1978, but the situation years before – we have no right to judge. These people were like the legendary frog in slowly heating water; unable to jump when the water turned hot. It was a case of slow brainwashing. The ability to discern comes only through experience and the passing of time; the ability to stand back and say, wait a minute. Something’s wrong. For most of the over 900 victims who died at Jim Jones’ bidding, it was like being slowly blinded with one veil after the other; their sight for truth growing dimmer as time went on, so that in the end they were completely blind.

Today we’d call it mass psychosis. There are many other examples: Branch Davidians (Waco), the Manson Murders, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Jim Jones used mental and physical abuse, blackmail, humiliation, and threats to break down the members of his community to get them to do his bidding. He convinced them that he and he alone was their redeemer. Peoples Temple was no longer a church; it was a cult with Jim Jones at its helm as their saviour, with those who weren’t persuaded simply too terrified to leave.

Even close family members were told to spy on each other. Anyone expressing doubt or rebellion could be denounced by friends or relatives. Extreme punishments were the order of the day, such as electric shocks and being locked in an underground box. Many had to sign blank power of attorney forms and false confessions to crimes, including child molestation and abuse. Children were beaten and removed from their parents. Jim Jones was their saviour who had to be obeyed absolutely.

This is the horrific process I wanted to highlight in my novel, The Girl from Jonestown. I wrote it many years ago under the title White Night, precisely with the question in my mind: how could this happen? Could it have happened to me? For fifteen years, I tried to get that book published, with varied results. One literary agent from a major US agency loved it and even found an editor at a major publisher who also loved it – but it was rejected at the critical sales and marketing team meeting. Another top US agent asked for the manuscript after reading the first few chapters – but in the end turned it down without ever reading it: “after all, we know the outcome.”
Yes, we do. But this novel is not about outcomes, (and anyway, the “mass suicide” does not end the book). It’s about understanding. It’s about compassion. It’s about being able to learn from what happened and then promise ourselves: I will always keep my eyes open, always look to the messenger as well as the message. Who is behind it all? Money, sex and power: one or more of those three are always the motivating factors when it comes to cultish abuse. With Jim Jones, it was all three.

And so we all need to stay awake and aware. We need to be able to see through the inviting cult propaganda to the naked and unpleasant truth beneath. It’s about self-preservation: waking up in time to spot the rot. I hope this book will help a few people to open their eyes. To be aware.