What do you guys know/remember about Jim Jones?

[Phoenix86]

A lot of you should look more into this, but probably won't. It is rumored that a large portion of the dead were forced to drink at gunpoint, so that doesn't fit into your sociopathic statements about Darwinism and other nonsense.

There's a great PBS documentary on this, and yeah there were people who didn't want to commit suicide and lots of armed guards.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPtl2xR3Zzc#t=1h14m

 

[sportage]

He had issues needless to say. Control freak. But with a lot of charisma.
He might have meant well in the beginning.
He did take in many that society would have nothing to do with.
People down and out. The hopeless. The people society only knows to treat as outcasts and criminals, pushing them aside or locking them up as the only solution.
Jones was, or became paranoid.
I always wondered at what point his drug use came into play?
Seems the drug addiction might have had a lot to do with fueling the paranoia.
But the complicated angle coming into play was the mind control he felt necessary to play on his followers.
He tried to spread his paranoia within his followers to control them, or something?
Why he felt that necessary, I can't imagine.
He did do some good for the outcast of society, to a point.
And moving past the paranoia if you will, the society he tied to build in Guyana did have its positive aspects. Giving a feeling of acceptance and inclusion to those outcast of society.
Building a community people felt they were a part of.
Giving people a sense of usefulness.
Just too bad the paranoia escalated to such a point of no return. No doubt consisting of a mix of his flawed personality, and the drug use.
His followers we're totally loyal to him, but he betrayed them.
Was it the drugs? His paranoia? The control freak in him?
It was like he reached the goals he had set for himself and his people, and became disillusioned and lost in himself after reaching those goals.
He felt the people belonged to him. In his mind he became their life and death.
He felt he had saved them from complete despair, and he now owned them, they worshiped him, and in the end he had the power to tell them when to die.
It is an interesting lesson in mind control. Good intensions gone sour?
Flawed personality? Drug use twisting reality around?
A bad combination of paranoia, the feeling of immorality, personal charisma, and heavy drug use.
If he would have had people around him, especially a strong wife, to steer him away from the pitfalls and drug use, keeping him grounded in reality, then just maybe things would have or could have turned out much differently for him and those outcast of society.
Society wasn't about to do much differently for these people than Jim Jones.
Many of the would have been lost regardless, on the streets and in the jails.

Jones was really screwed up, and really screwed himself up, and no one around him had the foresight, wisdom, influence or power to steer him straight.
Talk about a train wreck in play.

 

[Jodell88]

We fly high, no lie, you know this
Foreign rides, outside, it's like show biz
We stay fly, no lie and you know this
Hips and thighs, oh my, stay focused

Ya boy gettin’ paper, I buy big cars
I need fly rides just to drive in my garage
Stay sky high, fly wit the stars
G4 flights, 80 grand large

Oh, you didn't mean the rapper?

He was one of those guys with a magnetic personality that developed a cult. They moved to Guyana for some reason and got his followers to drink poisoned kool-aid.

 

[Corporate Thug]

What more do you need to know?

my first thought as well.

 

[AreaCode707]

A lot of the pre-Guyana activity took place where I live, and the places are really familiar to me. The old temple building was sold; I used to baby sit there when I was growing up.

What amazes me is how different this cult was; instead of hiding away from the world they actively infiltrated an entire county, and kept recruiting en masse. They used state and federal funds and programs to an incredible degree. Very strategic, very disturbing.

In the 1960′s California Pioneered in what came to be called deinstitutionalization. At Mendocino State Hospital where several People Temple Members worked, the patient census dropped from 3,000 in the 1960′s to 1,200 in 1969.

As the Hospital “deinstitutionalized” it’s patients, The Peoples Temple began organizing “Care Homes” to cash in on the SSI Payments from the Government. Over 6 Peoples Temples Members including Marceline Jones worked on the “Psychiatric Hospital Staff”, the upper elite of the Hospital Staff.

Over the years Temple members acquired houses off East Road in Redwood Valley , they opened “facilities” with names like Green Acres, Whispering Pines, Fireside Lodge and Hilltop Haven. They then began streamlining Mendocino State Hospital patients into their “care homes”through the Peoples Temple ran Mendo County Social Services Dept. and the Mendocino County Juvenile Court. There were no less than nine Temple residential homes for the elderly, six homes for foster children who would later end up as victims in Guyana, as well as Happy Acres, a State Licensed forty acre Ranch for mentally retarded persons with developmental special needs. No doubt other Temple care homes and individual temple familes took in smaller numbers of clients, some even adopting juvenile foster children as their own.

The Peoples Temple not only ran the Mendocino State Hospital, but also held a strangle hold on the Mendocino Social Services as it rerouted authority to provide care in the established social welfare network. The temple could now ok it’s own clients for benefits as well as provide foster care to the regions foster children, meanwhile working to place as many Patients from the Mendocino State Hospital into their care homes to make the maximum amount of cash possible from the establishment for the care they provide, many of these very patients would later end up in Guyana as part of the master experiment.

Once Jim Jones moved his “flock” to Jonestown, thousands of doses of “mind control” drugs were smuggled into Guyana most likely stolen from the Mendocino State Hospital. Two Jonestown Survivors said the drugs were used to brainwash or control would-be defectors. The inventory list obtained by the San Francisco Examiner, shows large supplies of anti-depressants and downers. Survivors and law enforcement officials said the drugs were used to control people Jones Team found to be dangerous or to brainwash possible defectors. Included in the inventory were mass amounts of quaaludes, Demerol, Valium, Morphine, and 11,000 doses of Thorazine used to calm manic depressants and others with extreme mental disorders.

Another former Jonestown defector said ” People who wanted to leave were fed drugs like Thorazine so they would come to their senses”. – If a person wanted to leave Jonestown or if they broke the rules, one was taken to the “extended care unit” ” he said, ” It was a rehabilitation place, where one would be reintergrated back into the community The people were given drugs to keep them under control”

– Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZgWh_E1f0asC&pg=PA81&dq=mendocino+state+hospital&hl=en&ei=Way8TorWL4mliQKXlciIAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEUQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=mendocino%20state%20hospital&f=false


http://www.topix.com/forum/city/ukiah-ca/TQFR7S9ULCDM3VN5A

Through his connections in government Jones arranged to be
appointed to several positions of power in Mendocino. He
first approached the superintendent of the Anderson Valley
School District located in Boonville some fifty miles
southwest of Redwood Valley. A deal was struck in which
Jones would enroll sixteen Temple children in the school
district in exchange for a position teaching social studies
to sixth graders in Boonville. The district received
thousands more in state aid and Jones received a paying job
that was more important to his plans than has been previously recognized.

In 1967, Superior Court Judge Robert Winslow appointed Jones
foreman of the Mendocino County Grand Jury. The following
year, he was appointed to the Juvenile Justice Commission,
an advisory board to the courts. Between the two positions
he had the ability to bring charges for or against anyone in
the county, especially considering his close relationship
with Assistant District Attorney Tim Stoen.

In May of 1967, Jones formed the Legal Services Foundation
of Mendocino County, a nonprofit group offering free legal
services to the needy, most of whom were his followers who
needed the services of an attorney to petition the courts
for welfare support, to transfer property, or to settle a divorce or child custody
case. In August, Marceline Jones resigned her seat on the
foundation's board of directors to make way for her husband
to be appointed vice president. Also in August, the
foundation acquired the free use of an office in Ukiah and
their first directing attorney, the former Assistant
District Attorney Tim Stoen. Tim Stoen always played an
important role in the Peoples Temple as Jones' second-in-
command and the Temple's legal counsel. Some say he remains
so to this day, but must believe Stoen's claims that he
defected from the Temple in 1976.

However, back in April of
1969, Tim Stoen was on a mission for Jim Jones when he left
the Legal Services Foundation to accept a position with the
Legal Aid Society of Alameda County where he was assigned to
the West Oakland Black ghetto. Stoen counseled Blacks who
were on welfare and in trouble with the law; the perfect
demographic for the experiment. Many were offered a fresh
start in the country atmosphere of Redwood Valley. A Temple
aide in the Mendocino County Welfare Department would
register the recipient who would sign over his check to the
Peoples Temple in exchange for the housing, food and
camaraderie he enjoyed under its care. His time was then
free to work as a volunteer in whatever project the Temple
had undertaken. The test persons themselves would provide
the money and the labor for the experiment in which they
would die.

Patty Cartmell the head of Jones' intelligence operations
founded the
"Ukiah Answering Service;" operations, home-operated
business that employed seven Temple members to monitor the
phone messages of the county's professionals and the radio
communications of the sheriff's department. It was one of
Cartmell's more overt intelligence operations.

Aside from the donations it received from the outside and
the tithes it received from its members inside, the Temple
was financed almost exclusively by agencies of the federal
government through tax-funded jobs, poverty programs and
give-aways. Many members were employed at the Mendocino
State Mental Hospital or in the school system or the welfare
office, all under the U.S. Department of Health, Education
and Welfare. Under the Department of Justice, there were
Temple members in law enforcement, in the grand jury and the
district attorney's office. Black members contributed their
government checks from the Social Security Administration
and the welfare division of HEW. The USDA provided food and
the California Highway Patrol provided inexpensive, high-
powered police cruisers that Jones purchased at auction and
issued to his aides as company cars. Though they removed the
CHP emblem from the car doors, they neglected, possibly
intentionally, to repaint the familiar "black and whites."

 

[Jodell88]

A lot of the pre-Guyana activity took place where I live, and the places are really familiar to me. The old temple building was sold; I used to baby sit there when I was growing up.

What amazes me is how different this cult was; instead of hiding away from the world they actively infiltrated an entire county, and kept recruiting en masse. They used state and federal funds and programs to an incredible degree. Very strategic, very disturbing.

People like Jim Jones are far from stupid and they have the ability to make masses of people like them and follow them. I remember watching a documentary about it many years ago (early teens) and wondered why people were so stupid to follow a man like that.

 

[zinfamous]

I know the broad strokes. Now I'm interested though. Surely there's a good documentary about it on Netflix somewhere. BRB

there was a ~2 hour Jonestown doc that I watched a few years back. I don't remember much about the stuff pre-Guyana, but it had surviving cult members telling mostly about life in Guyana.

creepville for sure.

 

[Poulsonator]

It made "drink your kool-aid" a great phrase for shutting up and doing what you're told.

Mixing the kool aid?

I remember when it happened and it was pretty crazy and horrifying at the time. And yes, this is where the expression "drinking the kool-aid" came from.

Flavor Aid was actually used, and I've always wondered how the publicity has affected both companies (since it's such a common misconception).

 

[Phoenix86]

there was a ~2 hour Jonestown doc that I watched a few years back. I don't remember much about the stuff pre-Guyana, but it had surviving cult members telling mostly about life in Guyana.

creepville for sure.

Probably the one I linked, it's around 1.5 hours long with interviews of the survivors.

 

[ch33zw1z]

hmmm, things I remember from reading / movies. He filled people's heads with lies, they believed in him enough to die.

 

[Craig234]

People like Jim Jones are far from stupid and they have the ability to make masses of people like them and follow them. I remember watching a documentary about it many years ago (early teens) and wondered why people were so stupid to follow a man like that.

I remember the 2012 Republican primaries similarly. Unbelievable anyone supported them.

 

[Craig234]

Flavor Aid was actually used, and I've always wondered how the publicity has affected both companies (since it's such a common misconception).

There is an earlier source for the phrase, the Kool-Aid 'acid tests' of the 1960's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Tests

 

[highland145]

I remember the 2012 Republican primaries similarly. Unbelievable anyone supported them.

True enough and the slew of scandals makes me proud of our leaders....no, wait....

Americans, getting what they deserve.

 

[iRONic]

Concrete Blonde - Jonestown

 

[Murloc]

I read about it on wikipedia. I know a few cliffs.
Pretty incredible how something like this can happen.
I mean, developing a big crazy sect and moving to guyana and founding a town?
I don't even understand where he found followers for something like that.


Anyway I also read that drinking the kool aid may come from the acid tests, which makes sense.

 

[chihlidog]

I've watched and read quite a bit about it. I'd say Im quite familiar. It was a horribly twisted situation, but given the times, I can understand the appeal at first to some of the members.

If you really want to be creeped out, listen to the recording of the mass suicide/murder itself.

http://archive.org/details/ptc1978-11-18.flac16

 

[Linflas]

I remember the 2012 Republican primaries similarly. Unbelievable anyone supported them.

Amazing, really no reason to mention Republicans in this thread at all, especially given that Jim Jones associates while he was in California reads like a Who's Who list of California Democrats in the 1970's yet leave it to you to somehow find a way.