2,365 words
Shiva Naipaul
Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy
New York: Penguin, 1982
In 1997, thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide. A joke at the time went like this: “Why did Heaven’s Gate kill themselves? They had to keep up with the Joneses.”
Jim Jones’ Jonestown community infamously drank strychnine-laced Kool-Aid in November of 1978, ending in the deaths of 900 people of all ages. Jones and his cult were — and still are — seen as an awful aberration of the sixties spirit, a warped misreading of that period’s social revolutions not unlike the Manson killings. But this characterization isn’t entirely accurate. Jones was simply a prophet of what was to come — in a macabre sense, he’s a spiritual forebearer of our current political and moral mess.
In a splendidly cold and insightful recounting, Shiva Naipaul wrote Journey to Nowhere in 1980. Naipaul, an Indian from Trinidad, was a brilliant journalist and author, brother to V. S. Naipaul, one of contemporary English literature’s foremost writers. Naipaul begins his journey in Guyana, in the hoped-for paradise of Jonestown, a new community free of class distinctions, racism, and human pettiness. Naipaul notes Guyana itself was also a new community, an ex-British colony under the dictatorship of Forbes Burnham, a black leader determined to create his own version of socialist utopia.
Naipaul notes the charms of Third World settings and their appeal to the West:
The jungle can entice. It can allure the romantic; it can charm the ghetto-bred, turning thoughts away from “racist” evils to visions of primeval innocence and rapture. Given a chance, it could become part of the ideology, part of the commitment to a new life.
But the Guyana Naipaul visited was run down. It was corrupt, and hostile to industry and initiative whenever it contradicted the semi-Marxist cant about New Guyana, a made-up society with a bogus history of rebellion and struggle. As it was, Burnham promoted graft and theft for his party. When an architect refused to change his estimates for a building, so Burnham would not see most of the funds funneled into graft, Burnham raged at him, calling him a “stupid black man.”
As a Guyanan journalist told Naipaul: “Burnham and the people who surround him actually believe that black people have a right to steal and cheat and rob in order to get rich.” In order to overcome the disgrace and agony of colonialism and racism, of course. It goes without saying that reporting the corruption and failings of this world of the New Guyana Man was a dangerous pastime.
Naipaul considered this flawed part of the world a perfect magnet for Jones.
Visiting the ruins of Jonestown, Naipaul noted its shabbiness and strange mixture of American instruments of progress combined with a hopeless dedication to faith.
But what faith? Jones was ostensibly Christian, but Jonestown, as was the People’s Temple, openly spouted Marxist ideals and dogma. Jones mingled Christian faith with revolutionary change. He was an admirer of Stalin and mingling his adulation with his own personality cult. He demanded unquestioning loyalty from his congregation, and formed an interrogation committee to purge disloyal members that forced self-incrimination in public gatherings and, if necessary, beatings.
Jones didn’t hide his views from the congregation. He flung his Bible on the floor, spit on it, doubted the Virgin birth, and thundered forth class warfare, constantly warning his congregation that America was mad with racism, that Nazis were ready to destroy them, always waiting in the shadows. Jones even wondered how safe Jonestown was. For a while, he considered taking his flock to the Soviet Union and contacted their embassy. The Soviets, while intrigued at a delicious propaganda coup over a Carter administration constantly berating the USSR for human rights violations, decided that currying favor with an unsteady flame like Jones could backfire, and settled on sending Jonestown propaganda leaflets and films about Soviet culture.
Naipaul soon left Guyana for San Francisco, the breeding ground for Jones’s temple. The People’s Temple originally began in Jones’ birthplace in Indiana, but the Midwest lacked the soil needed to grow it. Of course, there were also all those Nazis and KKK in Indiana just waiting for a chance to exterminate the faithful. Jones had drummed this into people’s minds, and once in California, behold! The Nazis and KKK followed him, always ready to begin genocide. A sickened Jones even thundered to his devout followers in a Jonestown surrounded by jungle and cassava, that, yes, Nazis and KKK were on their way to kill them there, too.
Years earlier Jones had visited Brazil, but not as one of the usual American missionary set. He adopted black children. Teaching the Bible took second place to his studying African cults popular among Brazil’s lower classes. From an early age, he was keenly devoted to racial mixing and this, combined with Marxism and the desire for a personality cult, led him to California.
In San Francisco, Naipaul found fertile ground for Jones’s visions: “America’s wilder dreams have always rolled to the Far West. Fantasies flourish best in a warm, sensual climate.” California was a place for American visionaries and eccentrics. By visiting former members of the People’s Temple and San Francisco’s social and political set, Naipaul saw a mirror of Burnham’s Guyana, with its ideological adoration of blacks and a swirl of ideologies praising — for want of a better word — irrationality. Naipaul examined these, including the esoterica of the upper classes. They were ecological fanatics wanting to save the environment and create a new entity named Spaceship Earth and transform themselves, with Jain-like purity, into a new, enlightened race; thoughtful, noble rebels determined to change human consciousness.
Naipaul met women who argued passionately that toilet training was the cause of racism and racism; feminists demanded the language itself be made “human,” with genders omitted and the personal pronoun banned.
The political class in San Francisco readily embraced Jones. He turned out crowds for rallies and helped win elections with multiracial crowds, cheerful older people, and dancing children. His donations filled their coffers, and it was chic and pleasant to be seen with this swarthy, black-haired man of love and justice who bore a passing resemblance to Elvis Presley.
An Elvis of the Left. How irresistible.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s Here’s the Thing here.
But California, Naipaul noted, also possessed an undercurrent of happy-faced conformity. People he met there admired California, praising their good fortune at having escaped the dull, cold, boring America east of the Rockies to a new world. They expected him to be enraptured as well, and this demand for admiration was tinged with totalitarianism: “If you are rash enough to keep silent or even, God help you, murmur a few words of mild dissent, you are done for. Conversation lags. Everyone becomes remotely polite. To be reticent about California is to insult your hosts and their friends.”
A strange, benign tossed salad of California life had been created; a happy paradise, hope of human betterment, an end to white racism, and the liberation of the self. There was Leftist thought as well, but Naipaul observed that the political rigors of Marx soon faded to self-liberation. “Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you feel” was a common phrase.
Naipaul notes how, beginning in California, liberation came to mean personal and not social transformation. Sixties indulgence was seen by many as selling out revolutionary values. Naipaul disagreed. “The Me generation, as the seventies have been labeled, is not a betrayal of the sixties, a falling away from its ideals, but its predictable outcome.” Jones attracted people seduced by the gospel of change, who sought a new world they could escape to, free of the “old” life of middle-class morals and “racism,” and mix with the blacks and meld into one people. At the same time, the upper classes spent fortunes and time on meditation. Those that could afford it would find ways to seal themselves off from a corrupted world, to project their souls — and hopefully, their bodies — into that spanking-new Spaceship Earth that captured the imagination.
Naipaul noted how so much of this seeking and forsaking the old, stable (and boring, not to mention racist), life almost resembled a kind of virus:
They were absurd, these men and women; they were also, most probably, quite harmless — as harmless as the germs that go to make up a common cold. But a common cold, given a suitable twist of fate, can turn into bronchial pneumonia. In this hothouse atmosphere of pampered self-consciousness, ideas — or what passed for ideas — floated like viruses. They were a disease you caught: a contamination of the intellect.
In this world where ideas float like ghosts, Jones imposed himself. When the massacre came, politicians and social leaders naturally distanced themselves from him and many claimed he was an aberrant fixation. But Naipaul argues otherwise. “Jim Jones was a beachcomber, picking up the flotsam and jetsam washed ashore from the sixties shipwrecks. The ‘idealism’ on which he fed was not virginal but considerably shop-soiled, eaten up with inner decay.”
It was a Leftist world that rubbed uneasy shoulders with the Third World. Naipaul quotes the American Leftist I.F. Stone in his devastating analysis of American race relations:
The American Negro was condemned to live in Egypt, but it was an Egypt that had already built its pyramids and no longer needed slaves. Mechanization on the farm and automation in industry have at last set him free, but now freedom turns out to be joblessness.
Naipaul becomes harsher: “It would be more accurate to say that a technologically sophisticated society has no use for these people. They are redundant. They are good for nothing. . . the junk people, the human waste left behind by American history.”
Naipaul, like his brother V. S., was known for these bald statements. As V. S. remarked: “In London, I don’t see having an Arab piss on your doorstep as a praiseworthy multicultural experience.” Both men possessed an honesty lacking in the seventies, and, being Indian, could say things white people were forbidden to say.
The idealistic hopes of the sixties met the street corner despair of black America, and Jones offered a symbiosis of these worlds. If Jones could take black people off the street and make them useful, civic leaders of San Francisco were happy to let him carry on. Yet, Jones, while supposedly in love with blacks, purposefully made efforts to get them away from their own black congregations, offering them free lunches and a swimming pool. As one black minister bitterly said: “I can’t help thinking we black people can be very gullible.”
The bitterness was compounded as Jones denounced this black minister and others as “Cadillac-driving and chicken eating.” Jones seemed delighted pulling away hundreds of blacks from their own churches into his charismatic, Marxist, racially-mixed new order.
Naipaul stresses Christian fundamentalism had its part to play, for the basic Christian message of salvation, sin, and obsessions of apocalyptic destruction can easily be manipulated. Fundamentalism has no respect for human personality, because to be human is, by definition, to be sick.
A friend of mine is distressed at the radicalism sweeping the West. Wokeness, he says, is a new religion with all the traits of Calvinism, from absolutism, lack of humor, and hierarchies of perfection. Wokeness certainly has many elements of a radical religion, and its fanaticism again recalls sickness. Churchill noted Lenin’s 1917 journey from Germany “in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus” to foment revolution in Russia. Wokeness is a modern variant of both religious dogma and viral intolerance.
Naipaul’s chilling and brilliant diagnosis not only of Jim Jones, but the ideological and racial world that mixed into an uneasy shuffle and him possible, is a work that hardly dates itself. What has happened to America has been the Californiaization of its culture and politics.
The sickness of our society has come in no small part from this virus spreading throughout the country and beyond. President Macron of France warned Europe must guard against American domination of its culture, this mess of social justice, denunciations of racism, and the collapse of any agreed-upon social mores, even biological and sexual roles. (Naipaul, while in San Francisco, interviewed a prostitute ready to flee the city; too many men had that operation, becoming women. “It’s crazy, I tell you,” the hooker lamented. “A normal girl like me can’t make a living in this town.”) All the mental, sexual, and gender confusion Naipaul chronicled in his book has now become standard practice everywhere. The hothouse that spawned Jonestown is now safely ensconced in Washington, DC.
It’s worth noting that one of Jones’ friends was Willie Brown, who advanced from a radical in the city council and state legislature to kingmaker in the state. He was also mentor to Kamala Harris, who was his mistress.
Radio host Michael Savage predicted that a Biden presidency will soon become a Harris presidency, and Harris, a creature of the San Francisco political machine, the same one that so curried favor with Jim Jones, would usher in a regime like that city, transforming America into a national model of corruption, streets filled with human waste and drug addicts, police who can’t and won’t enforce the law, but will gladly silence anyone who opposes the government. It would become Marxist with a dash of degeneracy, overseen by a super-rich class who isolate themselves from the consequences of their political choices while they fulfill the emergence of Spaceship Earth.
Some wonder about plans heard of a great reset, with COVID as a catalyst for societal change. Presumably benign types like Bill Gates will offer a new vaccine, an end to global warming, and, yes, no more racism. Ever.
Now, we all live in Jonestown.
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39 comments
The Koolaid is multiracial integration itself.
Even the Branch Davidians were a mixed race cult.
Blacks almost certainly will refuse to take vaccinations. The compliance data suggests whites will jab 95% per invite from the NHS and blacks fail to comply 50% per invitation.
The great white Anti Vaxxer doesn’t exist. The 5% of whites who don’t comply generally have lupus or allergies or other legitimate excuses.
You’re overlooking a significant portion of that 5%, namely, that percentage of critical thinkers of whom have done the necessary (independent) research and conclude what they’ve expected all along, i.e. that vaccines are indeed yet another fraud perpetrated upon the non thinkers of our age. Ignorance is many things, but “bliss” isn’t one of them. Otherwise, why are there so many unhappy idiots walking among us, overly medicated unhappy idiots notwithstanding?
Who are you to say that I don’t exist? And I only insist upon “great white’ inasmuch as I derive an inordinate amount of satisfaction inducing and inciting those nincompoops that already hate me, to hate me all the more. Hate that TOO, bitches!
Here’s the thing, if white people who are critical thinkers behave like half the black population that’s a telling comparison.
For me 5% of white who opt out is a big deal. That’s an out the same as whites who don’t get a measles jab, I can live with that. There are also allergies and other conditions that justify opting out. But blacks are straight up paracite freeloading dangerous scum for only complying with vaccines in general at around 60%. Blacks are to be avoided and shunned after 2020. Absolute disease ridden filth.
Captain John Charity Spring MA: when you are vaccinated, what does it bother you if someone else is vaccinated or not? Can you be contaminated? Are you immune by your vaccination? Are you immune or are you not immune by your vaccination? If you are immune by your vaccination: why do you bother yourself with whether someone else is not vaccinated? If you are not immune by your vaccination and thus can be contaminated by a non-vaccinated and thus have a legitimate reason to bother yourself with the vacc-status of someone else: why do you take a vaccination if it doesn´t make you immune, i.e. safe against the disease?
Can you explain your position logically?
The reason people who are vaccinated should want others to get vaccinated is because the more people who are vaccinated, the less chance the virus has of finding new people to infect. This means that fewer people will get sick, fewer people will die, and the virus will have less opportunity to mutate into new, more destructive strains.
You are rehearsing a very widespread and bad anti-vaccine argument that assumes that the only reason for vaccination is self-interest.
Less people infected, smaller chance for the virus to mutate into something more dangerous.
Ok… the non-vaccinated are a possible breading-ground for diseases (mutations) (I do not share this view).
So it is our responsibility toward the community to get vaccinated.
So everybody should get a vaccination against sars-cov-2.
I would be interested to know how many CC-readers agree with this view and will take the sars-cov-2 vaccination. And what CC-readers think of the idea of obligatory vaccination which is implied in your view (responsibility for the community).
Maybe there can be a poll for CC-readers, or readers can share their view here.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7513834/
“The increasing frequency of SARS-CoV-2 mutation hotspots might select for dangerous viral pathogens. Alternatively, in a 29.900 nucleotide-genome, there might be a limit to the number of mutable and selectable sites which, when exhausted, could prove disadvantageous to viral survival. The speed, at which novel SARS-CoV-2 mutants are selected and dispersed around the world, could pose problems for the development of vaccines and therapeutics.”
What do you think someone should do??
The tests are invalid.
The official numbers are worthless.
Therefore, nobody knows what the situation is.
There is no increased mortality.
There is no pandemic, there is no epidemic, there is no emergency, there is no health crisis.
All institutions lie to us
-> so there is no basis upon which “I should do” something.
I only entered the discussion for a “hypothetical” case, what´s the right reaction IF there is actually a pandemic. That are legitimate questions but it depends on actual numbers. But presently there is no situation at all (there are numbers of positive results of a worthless test… so ? )
Every one of these statements is a lie or quarter-truth that circulates in the Right-wing Covid disinformation online circle-jerk.
Among whites these anti Vaxx opinions are fringe. Even if 10% of thr population let’s say.
My concern is the ethnics. Every other darkie is a vector. Inner cities will fester.
I’ve had the Oxford one.
I’m not concerned about other people based on the race data uptake. I don’t consort with nigs and most white people in my affluent area are getting on with it.
I will avoid central Birmingham, London’s darker areas and the nasty areas of Bristol. I will also avoid public transit where large numbers of blacks are.
I am a “minimalist,” I won’t get the covid vaccination unless I just have to. I arrived at this attitude after talking to health care professionals who were clearly evasive, and hesitant. The number of white people that refuse vaccination is much higher than 0.5%. There is a palpable distrust of the motives underlying the covid-19 scare,
10% refusal is workable. I’m not in favour of compelling this legally and am not supporting a passport. Blacks comply maybe 60% tops which will endanger whites in contact with that racial set.
David Lammy is probably going to be foisted on Labour as the leader after Starmer is squeezed out by Guardianista Jews like Freedman and Nick Cohen. The fat black bastard reminds me of Idi Amin and Mugabe.
Now I hear about the native black Guayanese. Jesus wept, they are like Zombie Cannibals.
Please note that Jim Jones was racially mixed. His grandmother was a squaw. Jim Jones did not fit in with his blond haired, blue eyed neighbors and the girls rejected him for the blond boys like themselves.
If Marxism is a virus, then the fanatical response to Covid is the Left’s version of what they call “the McCarthyite hysteria.
Branch Covidians.
My only regret is that nationists in the US UK and France failed to seize the plague and use it to smash up Liberal priors on borders and inner city non compli. Big What If…
You really are a voice of reason.
Now that the people of the right failed to follow the reason is clear. The question that remains is a big why!
I always laugh when liberals compare right wing politians to Jones, when his rethoric was identical to somebody like Bernie Sanders.
I still think Jones was a CIA asset if not a full blown agent and the entire thing was an experiment to test idealogical subversion tactics mainly to see if dumb fairly peaceful poor negroes could be radicalized with Marxism veiled in Christianity.
As for Manson, he was a broke poor white man on the fridge of some dope deals gone sour and his rights were stepped on by the likes of Nixon. They made him the post boy for all that is evil while the far left radicals got slaps on the wrists and even pardons…and they worked there way right into our system.
“I remember when being crazy was really somethin’. nowdays everybody’s crazy.” –CHARLES MANSON (in interview with Dianne Sawyer, 1994)
The evidence that the Jones cult was related to various CIA social dynamics experiments – something like “MK-ULTRA” – is overwhelming. Jones was a childhood friend of one of the most notorious CIA agent of the 60’s-70’s, there were known CIA agents at Jonestown – Jones is on tape discussing them – and the staff members of the Congressman who was assassinated gave a press conference saying as much. Part of Jonestown was a mass drugging experiment, the “cult members” were given cocktails of pharmaceuticals several times a day.
Also – mostly the children were poisoned with “Flavor-Aide” – the majority of adults were shot. It was not a mass suicide – it was a mass murder.
The bombing of the mental hospital in Grenada by Reagan was another part of the eventual coverup.
It’s a very interesting story and has great relevance to White Nationalism, as the CIA and other powerful factions in the US and Europe were extremely interested in racial issues. But the narrative is not particular convenient for anyone’s short-term political rhetoric so it will be ignored. C’est la vie.
Jones was a classic example of a type: charismatic, opportunistic, wonderfully gifted in the art of reading and working the mob mind. But — hubris — he let himself get played and double-crossed by the CIA. Whatever their specific ends were at the time, I think it can be called mind control, generally. (And as I understand it, nearly all of those people were shot. They were not suicides.)
Mob-driven cult power can always be rallied by such exceptional talents as Jones, and there will be more like him, of any political stripe. But alongside the degradation of cities, and of local, state and national political culture — exemplified by Kamala Harris — let’s admit there is a paralleland fully metastasized degradation in the ability, organization, direction and leadership of the US intel / counter-intel / ops apparatus. Heavy reliance on provocation — mistaking tactics for strategy — for example, usually signals a downward arc in the institutional life-cycle.
“Now, we all live in Jonestown.”
Excellent article — powerful summation.
Date the Fates line California up for this? Before Jim Jones or Harris, there was Norton.
In 1859 an English Jew named Joshua Norton went bankrupt after playing the market in a move more stupid than corrupt. He lost his mind, then declared himself “Norton I, Emperor of the United States.”
The Emperor Norton was crazy like a fox. Because of his notoriety issuing proclamations, mad demands such as abolishing Congress and so on, he was able to eat for free at fine restaurants and drink for free at any bar that wanted a cheap show. Credit Norton with one bit of foresight: He dissolved the United States of America on July 16th, 1860.
California’s elite seems to be walking in Emperor Norton’s shoes. They’d do well to remember his only known accomplishment: Mark Twain used Norton as the model for “The King” in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” And I’m sure California’s education eunuchs wouldn’t know this because they’ve banned the book.
Being grist for a humor mill is a bad end for a great state.
Whenever someone on the Left talks about building Utopia, one need only respond: “Jonestown.”
The intersection of radical egalitarianism, messianic pseudo-religiosity, and marxist sloganeering seems to end up with the same mass self-destruction, whether in a single apocalyptic afternoon in Guyana or the slow burn disintegration of once great cities like San Francisco. As the saying supposedly puts it: “As goes California so goes the nation.”
While the People’s Temple was an obvious manifestation, there has been a more subtler trend in the Democratic Party, the tendency to put politics in those pseudo-religious terms with a messiah to the forefront – a MLK, Nelson Mandela or Hillary Clinton – with roots going back to the American millenariansm of the 19th century. We have seen this play out in the mostly peaceful rioting, arson and iconoclasm of 2020, suicide of a once great nation so the eschaton might be immanentized.
Let us note that the Republicans, as usual, are clueless. And maybe a lot of others. There has been a serious underestimation of the role of Jim Jones style politicking on the Left in general. I believe it was William F. Buckley, jr. (OK, him), who once observed that marxists were evangelizing for the oldest recorded heresy: the creation of heaven on earth.
What we are seeing play out today is, in many ways, a 21st century edition of the late Renaissance Wars of Religion. And this time around only one side is fighting.
Something to think about in the continuing chaos…
I fear that the ‘Banana Republics’ of Central America (including Mexico, in my geographic and sociologic appraisal) are just like Guyana, and those sorts of people are exactly what is coming across our borders in droves, past and present, and unfortunately, far into the future. And our Leftists and our entire current, newly-minted government, are absolutely besotted with them. It is beyond my understanding, and I have run here to WN for refuge, but I still fear the worst. And since, in this article, you have reminded me of Jonestown, I think that if we attempt to set up a ‘country for ourselves, within this one’, we will be accused of creating yet another such creature. I do know that our members are far smarter, more well-educated, scholarly and philosophical, and not given to ranting and apocalyptic futures, but already the Left is conflating White Nationalism with White Supremacism, a deadly poisonous mix.
I can only envisage buying large tracts of land, here and there, within a day’s drive of one another, and build sort of ‘Del Webb’ 55-and-older communities, with anything from 25 to 100 homes, spread out innocently among farms and treed landscapes — something most non-whites are not interested in — and without the age limitation. We would, however, need very clever lawyers to get around the ‘racial exclusivity’ laws.
Well, these are just some random ideas. We definitely need to live together to keep our heritage, but we are up against a monster in this current administration, which they have made perfectly clear with their entirely ‘open borders’ policy. So, let’s keep working on defeating it, as well as finding suitable places to live. It is obvious to me, however, no one ‘perfect place’ will satisfy everyone — though I could be mistaken. I’ll be looking at the backside of the Sierras this spring.
The Koolaid is leftwing politics. Whatever wave Biden rode in on, it’ll end in mass suicides by factions in his coalition. Biden is like a calmer sounding Jones.
Seige: Naipaul examined the CIA associations, but considered them more conspiracy theories than grounded in fact. He noted a lot of leftists peddled that. He also maintained that even if Jones was backed by the CIA, the marriage of leftist thought and fundamentalist Christianity was the essential formula that allowed Jones to dominate these people; that and his charismatic personality among people who were black and ignorant, whites who were indoctrinated and wanted a racial utopia.
It’s also been proven in history that Christian millennial movements pop up every so often, and can be used to make revolutions or challenge the social order. The marriage of marxism and Christianity can offer a lot of potential for the right kind of demagogue, as Jones amply demonstrated. A stupid population certainly helps. or should I say ‘devout?’
Jones was a white preacher with a black congregation. Much like Biden in a sense. It’s the same pattern and dynamic. He rode in as grandpa curing a plague and forgiving 50k in student debt. It won’t end well.
The left are deeply confused by the JFK assassination and the JonesTown Massacre. LHO thought he was shooting a Fascist but the leftists avoid the fact that LHO was Antifa, leftists will tell YOU not to drink the Koolaid… It is absurd of course. Equally Waco is confounding to all superficial analysis. Many of the Branch Davidians were blacks. It was a Jonestown style multiracial cult in that sense, only with guns. The ATF and FBI ought to have left them alone but naturally once they started the raid everyone inside was going to die. Multiracial Cults are lethal.
Very interesting.
But there’s no “Jonestown” in Maine.
Old America still exists here.
There is a good documentary about Jonestown on Hulu at the moment.
Of course, any MSM documentary about Jonestown is going to be focus on Jim Jones being a sociopathic demagogue, with very little objective critique of his actual beliefs and the leftist utopian ideals of the People’s Temple. Nonetheless, one very insightful anecdote in the documentary discusses a rift that developed in the church in the early 70s, during their San Francisco based era. Evidently, the “diverse” factions of the congregation began to accuse Jones of being a hypocrite because his “inner circle” of followers were all white people. It basically was an internal war within the church. There were many defections during this time period.
Invariably, no matter how idealistic a group of people are, no matter how pure their intentions. There will ALWAYS be conflict when enforced diversity is the moral imperative.
Even when Congressman Leo Ryan’s delegation came to Guyana, the rifts showed up when the less enthusiastic cultists decided to defect. They blame it all on Jim Jones, but does anyone doubt that there was plenty of conflict in their little commune, and that the reason Jones had to behave as a tyrant was to maintain some kind of order?
Forced diversity always has to have an element of authoritarianism in order to keep things from unraveling.
Franz: Interestingly enough, in 2000 I was in a drama group and we did a radio play on ‘Emperor’ Norton, and I played Norton. He was well suited for San Francisco, and always had a sense of decorum. If you’re crazy, that will always get you approval, and a free meal. Not to mention an English accent. Does the trick every time.
Memebro: One good thing about Naipaul’s book is he spends a lot of time talking to the people in the People’s Temple, as well as outsiders. Jones, again and again, comes off as a catalyst for people’s actions and hopes. Blacks come off as just wanting a lot of stuff or being desperate for someone to lead them out of their screwed-up lifestyle; the whites (who were almost always in the upper tier) were, to be honest, wanting to be seduced, and intellectualized their submission. A lot of white women joined Jones, and I think the surrender of their reason to emotions is very apparent today in the Antifa, feminism, etc.
Note too that the Bader Meinhoff gang in 1970’s West Germany were predominantly driven by women, usually very well-educated. A correlation between rampant feminism and the present dissolution of western society simply cannot be dismissed. The true wages of Lysistrata.
Women are particularly vulnerable to these cults. As recently as just a few years back, there was this NXVIM cult that “Smallville” actress, Allison Mack, was a ring leader of. She was literally recruiting sex slaves (from the ranks of upper-middle class young women) who would submit to self-blackmail rituals and all sorts of bizarre things in order get close to that Keith Raniere fellow, who was running the group. it was all supposed to be about self help or some nonsense. My opinion is that these women desperately wanted to get into a crowd with social status a tier or two above the level they already existed in. Making connections in such a group was an easy way to do so, and we already know what kinds of degenerates and perverts populate the elite in our society. For these women, sleeping their way to the top was just a normal, expected thing.
No different with Jim Jones. You’ll see all these claims from these former People’s Temple females that Jim Jones intimidated them, threatened them, and forced them into sexual relationships. Bullshit. Having sex with him was a “privilege” in their mind, and it excited them to know that he had chosen them to be in his harem. He was the king of their little world, and young women want to be the king’s concubine.
Shiva Naipaul was a very good writer. A lot less snobby than his more famous brother. I recommend his book north of south for a very politically incorrect look at Africa.
I watched a documentary on Jonestown not long ago. They interviewed a survivor, a white man who got out before the massacre, but he left his black son behind– who couldn’t have been older than 10. I don’t know if this son was adopted, or where the mother was, the back story must have been complicated.
But this man explained his reason for not taking the boy with him; although Jonestown was going downhill and he was afraid something terrible was about to happen, America was still worse because it was irredeemable racist and black genocide was imminent. Or so he thought at the time.
How many liberals and hard leftists believe this today? How far are they really willing to go? All it takes is a charismatic leader like Jim Jones to come around.
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