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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.” (more…)

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The Peoples Temple, the utopian death cult best known for the Jonestown Massacre, recorded a gospel album under the name of the People’s Temple Choir in 1973. Far from an amateurish production, the album He’s Able features slick studio trickery and a surprisingly talented backing band for the choir to swing cuts of pop songs, (more…)

“However, remembering the past is one thing, understanding it is quite another.”–Tim Reiterman[1]

On November 18, 1978, the congregation of the Peoples Temple, a radical, socialist/Leftist congregation of the mainline Protestant Disciples of Christ, died in a massive murder-suicide event on the orders of their leader, Jim Jones. Their suicide method, drinking poisoned water containing fruit drink mix on the orders of a narcissistic, sociopathic megalomaniac, gave rise to the expression, “drink the Kool-Aid.”

Much ink has been spilled about how the theology of Jim Jones was so strange and false that it was only natural that the Peoples Temple would end in disaster. There has also been a great deal of analysis of Jones’ own nature. (more…)

Francisco Goya, “Saturn Devouring his Son,” c. 1819–1823

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Editor’s Note:

The following essay was later incorporated into Kerry Bolton’s The Psychotic Left: From Jacobin France to the Occupy Movement, available from Black House Publishing. 

In order to understand how such outbreaks of mass psychosis [as the French and Bolshevik Revolutions] manifest with the intent of bringing about the overthrow of civilisation and the resurgence of the atavistic, (more…)

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Jim Jones grew up in small town Indiana, in a community that epitomizes the White American people and our way of life. But Jim Jones didn’t. Jim Jones was a bit off, dwelling on death, killing stray cats, and holding bizarre funeral ceremonies for his dead animals. (more…)