On November 18, 1978, over 900 members of the American cult called the Peoples Temple died in a mass murder-suicide under the orders of their cult leader Jim Jones. It took place in the settlement known as Jonestown in the South American nation of Guyana. The event is known as the “Jonestown Massacre”.

MYTH: Jim Jones was a devout Christian who convinced his congregation to commit mass suicide so that they would all go to heaven.

REALITY: This is false. Jim Jones was either an atheist or agnostic. Jonestown was not a religious compound, it was a socialist commune. Jones ordered his congregation to commit “revolutionary suicide” because he believed outside forces were threatening his socialist commune. Most of his congregation was murdered and the rest were manipulated into killing themselves. It was closer to mass murder than it was to mass suicide.

(Read the Explanation, Jim Jones quotes, and more information below)

EXPLANATION

Jim Jones was either agnostic or atheist, and he frequently identified as such. He repeatedly was documented insulting God, Jesus, the Bible, or Christianity altogether. There were reports of Jones, during his sermons, throwing the Bible on the ground and stomping on it. Jones was documented saying, “The God of the King James Bible doesn’t exist …. Lying bastard, strike me dead if you exist …. See! He didn’t …. I’ll say it again. Lying bastard, strike me dead if you exist.”

He also said, “Well, I’m really heart and mind with you. I’m uh, you know, an agnostic. We have a— some emphasis on the terms of paranormal, because uh, it brings results, uh, there is something to therapeutic healing, all medical science has proven, but we don’t link that with any kind of causative factor of a loving God. Off the record, I don’t believe in any loving God. Our people, I would say, are ninety percent atheist. Uh, we— we think Jesus Christ was a swinger.” (Check below for more quotes by Jim Jones about Religion and Atheism)

Tim Reiterman, the author of “Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People”, describes in his book that “Jones disguised his agnosticism—or atheism—and hid the fact that he was using religion for social goals.” (Read below for more information on Tim Reiterman)

Jim Jones was a progressive and devoted Marxist. He had a close connection to Democrat political figures, like Hubert Humphrey, Harvey Milk, Walter Mondale, Willie Brown, Jerry Brown, and Rosalyn Carter.

He used religion as a front to push Marxism. Jones said, “I decided, how can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church. So I consciously made a decision to look into that pro— that prospect.” (Check below for more quotes by Jim Jones about Marxism)

According Michael Novak, a journalist from the Washington Post, “If Jonestown was a religious colony, why did it have no church, no chapel, no place of prayer? It had a day care center, a school, a clinic. The religion of Jonestown was explicitly and unequivocally socialism, not Christianity. The cult in Jonestown was socialism.”

Jones believed the United States and Capitalism were evil. He said, “If you’re born in a socialist community, then you’re not born in sin. If you’re born in this church, this socialist revolution, you’re not born in sin. If you’re born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you’re born in sin. But if you’re born in socialism, you’re not born in sin.”

He was frequently documented discussing moving his congregation to a Communist country, like Cuba or the Soviet Union. Here’s a transcript of Jim Jones addressing his commune about moving to the Soviet Union: “I would like to say again – I want no talking – that to those that are worrying about going to Soviet Union and opportunities, you are completely ignorant. Not only are there opportunities when you get there, to go to any degree of college you want to free, there will be scholarships next year that will come through for young people here on the project…. There’s a million opportunities. But some of you who are fearful of language, don’t worry, you’ll learn enough to get by and, in our own commune, they’ll allow us to speak English, and Russians –Soviets, by the way, don’t ever call them Russian – the Soviet Union, the United Soviet Socialist Republics, (Pause) their second language is English. Everybody practically knows English. They teach English from nursery school on up. That’s how important they consider English is, because their principal enemy is America, who is trying to (unintelligible word) socialism all over the world and so they want to be able to speak the language, to know the nuances, and to understand the communications closely in the nuclear age. But after you get there, you do not like it, you have the privilege to go back to United States, in Babylon, and die in a concentration camp or be blown up in a nuclear war, where there’ll be no underground shelters and cities like there is in the Soviet Union and China. That’s your privilege.”

He also said, “In the Soviet Union, the nationalities problem has been fully solved. Equally [Equality] of citizens before the law, regardless of their nationality or race, has not only been proclaimed and laid down in the constitution, but is affirmed and guaranteed every day by the entire way of life of socialist society and the socialist political and economic system in the avant-garde of liberation of the world force, USSR.”

He didn’t convince his congregation to commit mass suicide, he forced and manipulated them to commit suicide— it was mass murder.

Experts agree that calling it mass suicide is misleading. They go with the notion that it was mass suicide and mass murder. But the evidence is heavily in favor of mass murder.

On November 18, 1978, Jones ordered his followers to swallow a fruit drink that was laced with a lethal mixture of cyanide and sedatives. Over 900 people died from the poison. This is where the phrase “drinking the kool-aid” comes from.

A majority of the people at Jonestown did not commit suicide— they were murdered. Nearly half (48%) of the congregation that died were elderly or children. Another 7% were people who were injected with poison. So, a possible total of 56% of those in Jonestown had the poison forced upon them. (Check below for more information on the breakdown)

Many of those who were not children, elderly, or injected, felt they had no choice. Jim Jones had convinced his congregation that the U.S. government was out to kill or enslave them. 68% of Jonestown was made up of African Americans. Jim Jones had convinced them that back in the United States, black people were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps. He had also told them that the U.S. government was coming to kill every man, woman, and child in Jonestown. Jones, during one of his sermons, was quoted saying, “I came to save you from jails, torture, concentration camps, a nuclear war which your skin will roll off your back. Your eyeballs will be burned out. That’s what I came to save you for.” (Check below for more quotes by Jim Jones about fear mongering)

Religious studies professor David Chidester explains, “The message of liberation from American fascism, capitalism, and racism was intensified by being linked with this apocalyptic anticipation of nuclear war.”

Of course, everything Jones said was a lie and manipulation tactic meant to induce fear and subservience in his congregation. He convinced them that it was better for them to take their own lives than to be captured alive and tortured. Jones said, “Don’t be afraid to die. You’ll see, there’ll be a few people land out there. They’ll torture some of our children here. They’ll torture our people. They’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this.”

The commune was isolated in the jungle and Jim Jones was in control of all communication. There was no way for his congregation to verify the claims Jones was making. According to Katherine Hill, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Metropolitan State University of Denver, “To outsiders, especially 30-some years later, the notion of U.S. citizens being rounded up by our government and imprisoned in concentration camps seems ludicrous, but to Jonestown residents who were completely isolated from the rest of the world and thereby unable to challenge or verify what Jones said, his statements may have seemed plausible.”

Jim Jones Jr., the son of Jim Jones, explained how his father manipulated the congregation to take there own lives: “They had been told that people were going to come in and take their children away. They were going to separate us, and they were going to invade our community, What [my father] does, very manipulative, he has the children ingest the cyanide first. And, I mean, I have three boys, and I’ve got to tell you, if I saw my kids dying, why would I want to live?”

One of the survivors of Jonestown, Eugene Cordell, explained how his sister, Carol Ann Cordell McCoy, was manipulated by Jim Jones into committing suicide. He said, “I tried to talk Carol Ann out of it, but Jimmy was her God, He told ’em they didn’t need to read the Bible. He tried to change the word of God. He said ‘I’m your God.’ Oh yeah, I went through all that.”

Jim Jones is responsible for the deaths of every member of his congregation. It was mass murder.

The other claim that’s very easy to debunk is that the mass murder-suicide at Jonestown was because of religion. Religion had nothing to do with it. Jim Jones described the event as a “revolutionary suicide.” Jones said, “Take our life from us. We laid it down, we got tired. We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”

Jones’s concept of “revolutionary suicide” was inspired by his friend, Huey Newton, a Marxist and the co-founder of the Black Panther Party.

Newton said, “The concept of revolutionary suicide is not defeatist or fatalistic. On the contrary, it conveys an awareness of reality in combination with the possibility of hope—reality because the revolutionary must always be prepared to face death, and hope because it symbolizes a resolute determination to bring about change.”

Jones manipulated his followers to kill themselves and their children because he believed his socialist commune was at risk of coming to an end.

Jim Jones Jr. explained how his father would make the congregation conduct practice drills of suicide. He said, “It was a test of loyalty, you know? People would line up and pledge their life to the cause,”

He explained that “the cause was non-isms. Non-racism, non-sexism, non-ageism.”

This of course fits in line with Jones’s teachings that the United States was “racist” and “fascist.”

It wasn’t religion that drove Jones and his congregation to annihilation, it was Marxism.

As Catherine Abbott described, “For Jim Jones, the ultimate reward was not salvation or the promise of heaven in another life for his followers. The promise was creating a socialist commune here and now, in the living world.”

(Check out my article “True Communism Death Toll” to get more information on the scale of destruction that Marxism causes)

QUOTES BY JIM JONES: RELIGION AND ATHEISM

“The God of the King James Bible doesn’t exist …. Lying bastard, strike me dead if you exist …. See! He didn’t …. I’ll say it again. Lying bastard, strike me dead if you exist.”

“There are a lot of closet atheists in the church.”

“Those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment — socialism.”

“I decided, how can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church. So I consciously made a decision to look into that pro— that prospect.”

“Well, I’m really heart and mind with you. I’m uh, you know, an agnostic. We have a— some emphasis on the terms of paranormal, because uh, it brings results, uh, there is something to therapeutic healing, all medical science has proven, but we don’t link that with any kind of causative factor of a loving God. Off the record, I don’t believe in any loving God. Our people, I would say, are ninety percent atheist. Uh, we— we think Jesus Christ was a swinger.”

“In order for fascism to be avoided, there has to be a strong communist party, a strong socialist movement, and free, independent strong trade union, none of which exist in USA, and that is why to avoid your utter destruction, materially of most of you, and murder of the rest, I brought you here to regroup, recoup, rehabilitate and gain strength, and militancy, and a proper education in Marxist-Leninism, which you had never picked up, even though I was avowedly, openly Marxist-Leninist and atheist, you have never picked it up, for the most part, in United States, except for a handful.”

“The early years, I’d approached Christendom from a communalist standpoint, with only intermittent mention of my um, Marxist views. However, in later years, there wasn’t a person that attended any of my meetings that did not hear me say, at some time, that I was a communist.”

“We want people to recognize that (Breathless) they are God. And quit worshipping the sky, because the rich, the oppressors, the international bankers will use that to tell you to quit working against injustice.”

“I felt somewhat hypocritical for the last years as I became uh, an atheist, uh, I have become uh, you— you feel uh, tainted, uh, by being in the church situation. But of course, everyone knows where I’m at. My bishop knows that I’m an atheist. He— He knows that I— I— I recognize only love, when I say— I’ll say, “God is Love”— well, you heard my preaching. You know where I’m at.”

“The head of our entire church, who’s very friendly to our program, said that he must have spent twenty thousand dollars traveling around, hoping to get my denomination to remove me, because I was so uh, atheistic and so involved in such unholy uh, c— uh, efforts as Angela Davis.”

“We are all holier than thou, I tell you, I’ve got as much use for him, why, you know before I’d join some of these outfits, before I’d join some of these Pentecostal outfits, I’d join the Communist Party and say Hail Stalin… I’m so sick of it, I believe a Communist’ll have a better chance of gettin’ through than this so-called pack of wolves that call themselves the Church of God.”

“If there were no rich, no poor, if everyone were equal, religion would be soon to disappear. People only develop religion when they’re unhappy with this world… If this world were equal… people would soon lose their religion… People only make religion because this is so much a hell. They can’t stand to look at this place… The earth is in the hands of the robber-baron rich. It’s in the hands of the capitalists. Heaven was created by poor people that were working cotton fields and working in mines and living in hell, so they had to create a golden city somewhere. They had to dream, because they knew they’d never get anything out of this earth. So religion is a dark creation of those who are oppressed, those who are in bondage.”

“Sister Bates two years ago, she found out where her lord was. And she lay in a hospital bed, knowing that she didn’t know no Skygod come and took her out of the hospital bed. I’d like to do a whole lot more for her, but I did that for her. She’s up now and around. Oh, yeah. She was laying on a hospital bed over there in Oakland giving up to die.”

“I said, my people need me, I’m not ready. Not ready yet. Ah, the Skygod never did that. No, he never did that. (Pause) And he’s not gonna do that. Now I’m here.”

“Damn the torpedoes of religious systems that will try to put our light out.”

“I am the only fully socialist. I am the only fully God. So I’m now on the scene. I’m going to project myself, I’m going to push myself, I’m going to declare myself.”

QUOTES BY JIM JONES: MARXISM

“I’m so purely socialistic and some of my family is so purely socialistic, some of the members of this glorious Temple are so purely socialistic, that you’d be glad to work to see that everyone had the same kind of house, the same kind of cars.”

“If you’re born in a socialist community, then you’re not born in sin. If you’re born in this church, this socialist revolution, you’re not born in sin. If you’re born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you’re born in sin. But if you’re born in socialism, you’re not born in sin.”

“I have been imprisoned in my mind for many, many years, constantly trying to conceal a lifestyle alien to the American society, that would have caused great pain for my devoted and precious wife, and uh, those who followed on in my footsteps to become socialist or communist — some I don’t think understood the difference, but everyone in our parish certainly subscribes to some form of socialism.”

“We have the fruit of socialism. We are the most productive tree that’s come out of America in our century. And so we’re grateful. But they find it fit to attack us.”

“I think I’m the only pure Communist, I’ve had pure loyalty to this entire family, and I’m not now going to start splintering off which ones I’m going to take care of.”

“They’ve not come down the communist path I have, and uh, a whole lot of (struggles for words) the leaders haven’t come down the communist path that some of the rest of you have.”

“We’ve delivered those that were crippled from the paralysis of capitalism, we’ve lifted those that were bound by the capitalist, and we’ve set them free to be healed. We can unseat the oppressors.”

“I am saying to the world, damn the torpedoes of capitalism.”

“Look out, injustice, wherever you are. Look out, old landlords and capitalist class, whoever you oppress, whether it be in Wounded Knee or Harlem, whether it be in Madison Avenue or in Watts, look out, child.”

“What a socialist father we have, what a socialist father we have, well, we were out in this world when our father brought us in, what a socialist father we have.”

“I’m a Socialist today, (unintelligible word)— I’m a Socialist today, I’m a Socialist all the way.”

Marceline, Jim Jones’s wife said, “We are – what’s most important – dedicated to living for socialism, total economic and racial and social equality. We are here living communally, and we’re also here working on ourselves to make ourselves more loving, more justice, more just, so that the whole world might be free, and we will follow Dad’s instructions to the T as to how we are to meet these people.”

QUOTES BY JIM JONES: FEAR MONGERING

“I’ve prophesied the date, the hour, the minute and the year they’re gonna put people in this country in concentration camps. They’re gonna put them in gas ovens, just like they did the Jews… They’re gonna put you in the concentration camps… They’ve got them already.”

“The United States is calling for the removal of all blacks and Indians. So is England. They want to have their immigrant black, Indian population removed in six months.”

“This country has always had to have a war or a depression. I tell you, we’re in danger tonight, from a corporate dictatorship. We’re in danger from a great fascist state… and if [we] don’t build a utopian society, build an egalitarian society, we’re going to be in trouble.”

AUTHOR TIM REITERMAN

Tim Reiterman is an expert on Jim Jones and his commune. He visited locations where Jim Jones stayed and conducted numerous interviews with people who personally knew him. In November of 1978, Reiterman accompanied Representative Leo Ryan to Guyana to investigate Jonestown. Both men were shot by armed men from the Peoples Temple. Representative Leo Ryan was killed, but Tim Reiterman survived. He went on to publish his book about the research he conducted on Jonestown.

Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People, by Tim Reiterman—October 1, 1982

MASS SUICIDE OR MASS MURDER?

According to an “Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple” article by Josef Dieckman, “Of the 913 people who died in Jonestown and at the Port Kaituma airstrip, 279 were 17 years old or younger. By themselves, the children and adolescents of Jonestown comprised more than 30% of the total population… At least 162 of the Jonestown victims were 65 years old or older… Adding the seniors with the children, the numbers show that at least 48% of the dead in Jonestown – nearly half the population – didn’t commit suicide because they simply could not commit suicide. They had to have been murdered. Based on this figure alone, the argument for “mass suicide” begins to lose credibility.”

Dr. C. Leslie Mootoo, a chief medical examiner and top pathologist for the Guyana Government were the first to reach the scene at Jonestown. He believed that more than 700 of the 911 people who died at Jonestown were murdered. He said, “I do not believe there were ever more than 200 persons who died voluntarily.”

Mootoo examined 200 bodies and found that 70 of them had injection marks.

Many more could have been injected, but Mootoo only examined 200 bodies.

Dieckman wrote, “Remember, Mootoo did not examine each of the 913 bodies, but of the approximately 200 bodies that Mootoo did look at, 70 of them, or 35%, had been injected.”

SOURCES

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