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The preacher who believed he was God and caused the suicide of more than 900 people

2023-03-29T10:42:57.835Z


His name was Jim Jones and he was a sex addict who hated his country, admired Marxism and also Hitler.


Flavor Aid

, powdered fruit juice, has been grouping for decades based on sugars and chemicals for the palates of children and adults in the United States.

It is also useful for diluting cyanide: even a baby can taste it.

With this cocktail,

on November 18, 1978, the largest mass suicide in American history occurred

: more than 900 deaths.

It occurred in the community of Jonestown, a settlement located between 1977 and 1978 in Guyana and led by

the Reverend Jim Jones

.

James "Jim" Warren Jones was born on May 13, 1931 in Lynn, a town east of Indianapolis, Indiana.

Remembered as a quiet student, Jones began working at a hospital in Richmond, just outside of Lynn.

There he met Marceline Boswell, his future wife.

In 1951 he entered Butler University, near Indianapolis.

At 19 he debuted as a pastor.

He ended the 1950s by joining the Disciples of Christ church, of Methodist roots, although behind closed doors he would resent his racism.

Shortly after, he had already founded the Temple of the People in Indianapolis.

He stood out as a good Samaritan who helped African-Americans and the poor, those excluded from the system.

He has been recognized as an important contribution to racial integration in the city.

But Jones had also begun to claim that he could perform miracles

, with tricks like curing fake concurrents or "exorcising" cancerous tumors using animal entrails.

In 1961 the couple had Stephan Ghandi Jones.

Seven adoptions followed, including Korean infants.

The pastor imagined a coming race war.

His love for his neighbor in need covered up a class resentment and he professed at the altar of that religion that paradoxically had branded the others as opium of the people: Marxism.

On a trip to Europe, Jones learned of the French preacher who introduced himself as Father Divine and his so-called "divine economic socialism."

He also started having extramarital affairs with a lousy excuse:

sex with his wife made him feel “dirty”

.

In 1973 Jones would be arrested for "indecent" conduct: masturbating in front of an undercover police officer in a movie theater.

He would come out unscathed thanks to his political connections.

Nor was there a lack of money for the media of the time in the name of press freedom.

And he had also given space in his pulpit to the ultra-right John Birch Society.

In his sermons, Jones boasted of his talent for sex and that in bed, when he slept with the women of the Temple, he was better than their husbands.


Jim Jones, the leader of the People's Temple with a group of children from his congregation.uwe

apocalypse now

In 1965, Jones set a date for the end of the world: July 15, 1967

.

The solution was to move seventy families to a rural area in Mendocino, California.

Jones claimed that the majority were equal parts Caucasian and African American, with the remaining twenty percent being Chicanos, Orientals, and Native Americans.

In private, Jones considered himself an atheist, something he would only admit to the press in the mid-1970s.

But before that the time had come when

he began to see himself as God

but rejecting the idea of ​​the long white bearded lord in the heavens.

By 1970, the People's Temple already had branches in San Francisco and Los Angeles, totaling some 20,000 members.

Some began to tire of Jones's sermons that lasted up to six hours.

Those who exposed their dissidence participated in “catharsis sessions”, which ended with the skeptics being insulted and lashed with rice paddies.

Each criticism was one more seed in the eventual paranoid seed in Jones's brain.

The rice paddies were exchanged for sticks.

The Reverend nightly projected images of the Holocaust

.

He closed the

soirée

warning that the United States was preparing crematoriums for African-Americans.

Jones hated his homeland, demanded belief in Marxism, and expressed his liking for – obviously – Lenin and – not at all obvious – Hitler.

"He went crazy, crazy," Fannie Mobley would declare.

In his marathon chatter he bragged about his talent for sex, and how he was better in bed with the women of the Temple than their own husbands.

Described as "a sadistic lover", he went so far as to rape acolytes.

Others spoke of a voracious appetite for both women and men.

He ordered not to have relationships until they reached the Promised Land, but he did not hesitate to prostitute women who could not provide money.

Those who could contribute capital suffered an increase in the tithe.

Some sold their properties, scared.

When he died, Jones had $5 million in Switzerland, along with other assets.

In a dark room, the children were subjected to shock therapy and required to never stop smiling at the Reverend.

A postcard of horror: more than 900 victims in Guyana.

the paranoid shepherd

In 1977, New West

magazine

made a note on the Reverend's proceedings.

With drug-fuelled paranoia, Jones moved forward with his plans to move his community to Guyana, a country in northern South America.

He conceived of it as his Promised Land and the basis of his “Socialist Utopia”

His.

An illegal son was another reason for leaving, taking the child with him.

Fannie Mobley tried to get the political class, starting with President Jimmy Carter, interested in the matter, but nothing happened until April 10 when a group of relatives of the devotees who had left for Guyana denounced Jones for rights violations. humans.

On the 18th, he reasoned that if Martin Luther King called for courage to die for a cause, the inhabitants of Jonestown should be capable of the same, "not like those who submissively marched into the gas furnaces, but like the brave heroes who resisted." in the Warsaw ghetto.

Jonestown had plenty of horrors, such as "The Blue-Eyed Monster," where

children in a dark room underwent shock therapy and were required to never stop smiling at the Reverend

.

Or a "relationship committee" that had to give the go-ahead to any couple: a woman who decided to see a man without following the protocol was forced by Jones to have sex with another man in front of everyone.

The Leader began to plant(e)ar the idea of ​​collective suicide.

On June 22, another former member, James Cobb, sued him in San Francisco accusing him of planning "mass murder."

The same Department of State, concerned in 1978 with the violations of Human Rights in Latin America, still found no reason to intervene.

By November, Leo Ryan, a congressman from San Francisco, decided to get involved.

It was the beginning of the end.

On a weekly basis, Jones had been scaring his followers with warnings of impending attacks.

They all lined up to drink a poisonous liquid that would kill them in fifteen minutes.

But it was a bitch for the Reverend, who wanted to test the fidelity of his people.

The drill would be repeated.

“The time has come for us to meet elsewhere,” Reverend Jones announced.

And he added: "Die with dignity, stop with the hysteria."

Bodies piled up after the Guyana massacre.

bloody denouement

On November 14, Jones hosted Ryan and a group of print and television journalists.

It all ended on the 18th: five people—two members of NBC, a photographer from the

San Francisco Examiner

, a former devotee, and Ryan himself—

were shot to death

when they tried to take off in two small planes rescuing dissidents.

The survivors managed to escape through the jungle.

Inside the central complex, a woman and her three daughters were beheaded.

The final solution to the Jones was underway.

“The time has come to meet somewhere else,” she announced.

Lawrence Schacht, a physician,

made punch with Flavor Aid and cyanide

.

Most lined up, drank with gusto, and joined in a big shoulder-to-shoulder hug as Marceline Jones said goodbye: "See you in the next life."

Five minutes later, after some convulsions, they were dead.

As they began to fall, Jones – this, as so many atrocities of the day are recorded on audio or even, like the tragic end of Ryan's visit, on video – proclaimed on 44 minutes of tape things like “Die with dignity (…) Stop with the hysteria.

This is not the way to die for people who are socialists or communists.

(...) Look, children, it's just something for you to rest."

The bodies of Jim Jones, his wife and their biological son were found in the pulpit.

Jones shot himself in the head.

Maria Katsaris, lover and daughter of one of the people injured in the attempt to escape from her, blew her face off but not before giving the toy to two children who were like children to her and the pastor.

Investigators would end up finding almost forty weapons and half a million dollars.

And bodies that were slow to be identified by forensics.

Dozens of corpses showed signs of having been injected, evidencing force poisoning.

Jones and his wife were cremated and their ashes scattered in the Atlantic Ocean.

Many ex-followers went underground for years, fearful that some surviving acolyte might want to settle the score.

While the total toll ended at 918 dead, 408 of them were buried in a mass grave in Oakland

.

Most were the corpses of children: the babies were placed in pairs in small hand-carved coffins.

look also

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Source: clarin

All news articles on 2023-03-29

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