40th Anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre

Growing up in Washington DC in the 1950s and 1960s, Laura Johnson was no stranger to activism.
By 1970, when she joined the Peoples Temple in California aged 22, she had already been tear-gassed protesting against the Vietnam war, worked with the Black Panthers and attended the famous 1969 Woodstock festival.
"My life was in turmoil, I had a failed marriage and I was looking for a place to be political in a safer environment after a series of bad decisions," she recalls.
She attended a few meetings at the group's headquarters in Redwood Valley in northern California and was soon won over by their ideals of benevolence and racial equality.
Jim Jones, a charismatic Christian preacher, had set up the People's Temple as a racially-integrated church group in Indianapolis in 1956 before relocating to California a decade later.
Jones spoke of an impending nuclear apocalypse, and believed his separatist "apostolic socialist" community could thrive in the aftermath.
"In 1974, the cult leader Jim Jones said he wanted us to find a place away from all the drugs and alcohol in America," she recalls.
"We found Guyana, in South America, which was the perfect country for us to move to. It was a beautiful country with remote areas that we could populate."
In 1977, Laura and hundreds of others uprooted their lives to re-settle to the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project - informally known as Jonestown after its leaders' name.
The "socialist paradise" abroad would allow Jones and his group to practice their way of life away from the intense media scrutiny that was beginning to amass back in California.
But it wasn't the complete paradise they were promised.
The settlement, in the north of the Guyana, was extraordinarily remote but became plagued by agricultural deficiencies that prevented the group from being self-sufficient.
"Jonestown wasn't set up for so many people - we were 1,000 - and we were not self-sufficient. So Jim Jones was feeling the pressure," Laura recalls.
"His drug addiction and his personality disorders were getting worse. He was less and less able to function."
Survivors recalled "white night" events, sometimes weekly, where Jones would declare a crisis about the compound's safety.
Sometimes these involved mock mass-suicides where followers, including children, lined up and drank liquid they were told was laced with poison, only to be told it was a test of loyalty.
When Congressman Ryan visited with a delegation in November, he brought along concerned relatives of Temple members and journalists to document the trip.
As the delegation waited for their returning flight, a cohort of Temple gunmen ambushed the group and opened fire, killing five people including Congressman Ryan.
Back at the compound, Jones simultaneously urged his more than 900 followers to take their own lives, warning that the Guyanese military would invade and take their children because of the airstrip shooting.
Back at the Guyana headquarters 150 miles (240km) away, members were alerted to the order.
"Jim Jones's secretary, Sharon Amos, received a message on the radio sent to Georgetown, San Francisco and Redwood Valley," Laura recalls.
"It said: 'Everybody in Jonestown is dying or dead. Everybody else needs to commit revolutionary suicide right now. We are all doing right now.'"

archive.fo/wlFBl

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archive.org/download/RevJimJonesLetTheNightRoar/Rev Jim Jones - Let the night roar.mp4
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Another reason and story that demonstrates two things:
1. Faith based religion is terrible
2. Schools do not teach people the scientific method, and that this method can be applied to anything in life.

The man had charisma.
archive.org/download/RevJimJonesLetTheNightRoar/Rev Jim Jones - Let the night roar.mp4

The death toll at Jonestown on November 18, 1978 was 909 people

You have no idea how badly I wish you were there, and made it 910

in the eyes of betas maybe

lol @ your misinterpretation of charisma

He was ALMOST as charismatic as Elliot Rodger as a Holiday inn lounge Roy Orbison imitator with schizophrenia.

……almost…….

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He convinced even very well educated and professionally successful people to give him all their worldly possessions and follow him into a South American jungle to build up a huge compound from nothing. Then when the authorities closed in, he commanded his followers to kill a U.S. congressmen and the "traitors" who left with him. Then he commanded his followers to kill their own kids and then themselves. Even his followers in other locations obeyed his commands.
It might not be a positive kind of charisma, but it is charisma. Manson had it too.