#yes I'm in the middle of moving yes I have a 9-day writing streak that I haven't fucked up yet yes I am also an insane person

[essektheylyss]

I definitely could've watched this series at a reasonable pace but instead I watched five episodes of acoc today and have four episodes left to watch tomorrow and I will be finishing it all by 4pm, goddammit.

[sigmadecay]

You said you can info dump about Jonestown massacre? I'm here to learn about Jonestown massacre.

OHOHOHO YES

okay so if I start from Jim Jones’ early life this is literally gonna take me hours to write and probably take you forever to read so I will try to cliffnote the context of....y’know, his life

He didn’t have super present or even very parental parents, his mother worked a lot & his father was a disabled WWI vet. A neighbor took him to church w her family on Sundays and that began his interest in religion. He went to different churches all the time to see what they were about but had a particular interest in the Pentecostal church, it was loud & interactive & joyful but they did get a bad rep for “speaking in tongues”

Jim married his wife Marceline when he was 17 or 18 and she was like 20-21. She was working as a nurse in a hospital that Jim did custodial work in while he was trying to get himself through school. I have a lot of thoughts about Marceline Jones and most of them are “she deserved better” but we will come back to Marceline later.

Fast forward fast forward and Jim & Marcy have a number of kids, their “rainbow family” which consists of one bio child and a number of adopted children I think?? Listen in my defense he ended up with nine (!!! NINE) kids and they’re hard to keep track of but I know Stephan was their biological son and they adopted Jim Jr. who was black and Lew & Suzanne who were Korean which was a bigass deal at the time. More kids cropped up over the course of things but y’know. When Jim founded the Peoples Temple he got the MLK Jr award for racial equality because his church was the first fully integrated church at least in Indiana which was fucking nuts at the time??? Lots of people liked him. It appeared that he was doing good things.

And then shit like faith healings started where he would stage religious healings from cancer and shit and his congregation began regarding him as a deity. Someone would be blessed and would spit out a “tumor” (a piece of chicken liver) or the woman in the wheelchair who got up and walked turned out to be Jim’s secretary. Completely bogus nonsense, but it was a good, integrated church and they all thought he was a good person.

So, (and I’m leaving out details here sorry) Jim starts teasing like an escape to a “promised land” type deal. And he goes to a bunch of places looking for one—he spends time in Brazil especially—until finally settling on Guyana. The Guyanese govt was excited to have Americans coming bc they were at war with Venezuela and it was...sort of like insurance, but yeah. They gave the Peoples Temple a couple hundred acres in the middle of basically the fucking rainforest. And it was touted as like this socialist utopia and shit. It’s work but there’s housing and you grow your own food, and it seemed nice! Especially for people who were so disillusioned with the government and racial inequality. So they move out to Guyana and start to build houses, and shit is pretty alright at first, but...The soil isn’t fertile and almost no food actually grows. The hours are long and the work is backbreaking, not to mention the HEAT, but it’s like, deal-with-able until Jim Jones gets there. At this point Jones is like completely totally paranoid and he’s losing his grip on reality. He’s been doing drugs for years and his sermons have gone from “the US government is bad because it’s capitalist and racist” to “the US government is literally plotting to kill us.”

Some people managed to get out, and formed a group called the “concerned relatives.” They were, you guessed it, concerned relatives of the members who’d been whisked off to the Guyanese wilderness. Lots of people wrote off their concerns because of how many people, namely politicians, liked Jim Jones for his work in racial equality, but the one guy who listened to them was Congressman Leo Ryan, who was by all accounts a Pretty Solid Dude. He didn’t think anything fishy was happening, necessarily, but his whole stance was “I hear you & your concerns, and we should check it out to put your mind at ease! :)”

By this point, life in the Temple is falling! the fuck! apart! Jim Jones has a PA system set to run 24/7 that either play a) recordings of past sermons or b) his announcements happening Right This Second. People work for like 16 hours a day, there are armed guards at the entrance and around the fields to keep people in, the housing is cramped and overcrowded and they do Not have enough food for the almost 1000 people there. They are also getting record low amounts of sleep because Jim Jones, Nutjob Extraordinaire, has gotten into the habit of blaring the air raid siren at god knows what our and calling all his followers into the pavilion for a White Night. Which is, if you can even fucking believe it, a PRACTICE MASS SUICIDE BY KOOL AID.

Talk about foreshadowing.

So anyway, Leo Ryan rolls up to the compound, relatives and an NBC camera crew in tow, and is like “hey what’s up! :)” Jim Jones has been COACHING PEOPLE to tell him how much they love it. It’s fucked up. But okay

So they put on this dinner and a show type deal for the congressman and all the visitors, and Marceline (remember Marceline?) gives them a whole tour and shows them her pride and joy, the school she’d built and helps teaches at, and the medical center, and the daycare, like Marceline ADORES children this cannot be overstated. There are about 300 children in Jonestown and she loves them with her whole heart. ANYWAY

And everyone is having a funky good time, except Jim Jones, whose sanity is coming unraveled like an old sweater and his 950-ish overworked undercompensated cult members

But as Leo Ryan is leaving, someone slips a note to one of the reporters, BEGGING him to get them out of there. And then someone else comes forward. And then another. There are like....maybe 10 people total that come forward? Jim Jones loses his mind, naturally, but Leo Ryan is still like “hey, 10 out of 950 isn’t bad at all! They just miss their families :)” and they get going.

Unfortunately, because the number of people traveling back to the US from Guyana is greater than before, and they came on a small plane, they’re all posted up at the Port Kaituma airstrip waiting for a second aircraft. And this is when shit gets fucking real.

Jim Jones secretly sends his Red Men (read: “guards” with shotguns) to the airstrip to kill everyone because they’re going to give their secrets to the CIA or whatever. So they fucking roll up in this trailer and...open fire. Leo Ryan is killed, an NBC cameraman is killed, some of the defectors and concerned relatives are killed, many of them are wounded.

The Red Men return to the compound and report back to Jones. And then he gets on the PA and tells everyone that the USA’s destruction of them is imminent. He lies and tells them that the pilot will be shot and the plane will go down, and the US government will come into the compound for retribution and kill their seniors and kidnap the children and rape the women. You can hear a recording of this on YouTube! It’s called the Jonestown death tape and it will absolutely ruin your day if you listen to it. Anyway.

People are panicking. It’s time for the real White Night. Jones gets a vat of Flavor-Aid (off brand Kool-Aid) filled with cyanide and narcotics and says “drink :)” and...everyone is...understandably afraid. They’re tired and exhausted and terrified and have no idea what’s true or not. One woman, Christine, argues and pleads for another solution, like running off to the Soviet Union. The entire rest of the compound shouts her down.

So, finally, people drink. Those who won’t, and young children, are injected with it. The death is not painless. People suffer for a long time, and move to the back of the line, lie down, and die. At a reception house in Georgetown, one of Jones’ aides kills her three children and then herself with a steak knife.

A handful of people get out. Maybe five are able to hide, and three of Jones’ sons are away at a basketball game in Georgetown while this is all going down, so they live.

Jim Jones does not drink the poison. Jim Jones shoots himself in the head, and his private nurse does the same.

Marceline Jones screamed, sobbed and struggled until every single child had died, hoping at least one of them would be spared. And when none were, she dried her eyes, resigned herself to her fate, and drank the Kool-Aid.

The 900-something bodies, about a third of which were children, began rotting in the tropical sun almost immediately. Many of them were decomposed beyond recognition by the time the US troops got there. Those unidentified are buried in a mass gravesite in...California, I think? It was the largest loss of American life not due to a natural disaster up until 9/11. The place is still there, though now it’s overgrown, and it’s just...haunting. There’s a number of documentaries on it (recommend) and if you have a really masochistic streak, the Port Kaituma airstrip shooting and the Jonestown death tape audio are both on YouTube the last I checked.

Thank you for indulging me my special interest, and I’m happy to expand on anything here or give more details :3