------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date: Fri, 28 May 1999 11:01:24 +0100
To: Para <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: Para <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Who Was Jim Jones?
Who Was Jim Jones?
By Jason Jeffrey
While the mainstream media, influenced by Cult Awareness Network
propaganda, portray Jim
Jones as an 'evil demagogue', a number of independent 'conspiratologists'
view Jones as a
conscious agent of the CIA. For these writers Jonestown was simply a CIA
organised slave labor
camp and the People's Temple just an elaborate facard hiding a bizarre
intelligence agency
experiment.
Other researchers see Jim Jones as the victim of a U.S. government
operation. His People's Temple fleeing
to Guyana to escape intense U.S. government harassment.
Early Years
The People's Temple began in 1954 as the Community Unity Church, a
multiracial Pentecostal-style
congregation in Indianapolis, Indiana. The church was founded by a
twenty-three-year-old white preacher,
Jim Jones (1931-1978), who had made a name for himself in Pentecostal
circles throughout the United
States as a healer and prophet. By 1955, Jones's ministry had been renamed
the People's Temple Full
Gospel Church and was attracting large crowds for Sunday faith-healing
services. Jones later insisted that
the healing dramas of his early ministry were conducted mainly to draw
people who could then be taught his
more important messages of apostolic social justice and equality. The young
preacher's efforts to promote
interracial harmony were heralded by the Indianapolis Recorder, a weekly
Black newspaper, and earned
Jones the position of director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission
in 1961.
During the early 1960s the People's Temple set up soup kitchens,
distributed free groceries and clothing,
and organised other community programs. Jones was ordained as a minister in
the Christian Church
(Disciples of Christ) in 1964.
Religious scholar J. Gordon Melton points out that: "Jim Jones' Peoples'
Temple, labeled a `cult' after the
deaths in Jonestown, was in fact a congregation within mainline
Christianity. It was a full member of the
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) which in turn is a member of the
National Council of Churches.
"Liberal Protestants heralded it for its social action program, and during
the mid-1970s, several
denominations such as the United Methodist Church devoted an entire adult
church school lesson to
extolling its virtues."
In 1961 Jim Jones had a vision in which the American Midwest was destroyed
in a nuclear war and moved
his congregation to Ukiah, California, shortly thereafter. By 1969 Jim
Jones opened a large complex called
"Happy Acres" which contained a meeting hall, a swimming pool, a child care
facility, and a senior citizen
centre.
Jim Jones's ministry, which now claimed to have twenty thousand members,
expanded into Los Angeles
and into the predominantly Black Filmore district of San Francisco in the
1970's.
The spectacular growth of the People's Temple saw Jim Jones emerge as an
outspoken, uncompromising
foe of U.S. imperialism. Through evangelistic rallies and radio broadcasts
Jones addressed literally
hundreds of thousands of people in cities all over the United States. In
simple, yet forceful language, Jim
Jones exposed the smug corruption, the blatant hypocrisy, the abuses,
disgraces, and contradictions of
American capitalism. The vast congregation of People's Temple helped plan
and attended en masse
countless demonstrations in support of freedom movements, peace, and human
rights causes around the
world.
The newspaper of the People's Temple People's Forum, which reached over
half a million people, tackled
the sacred icons of the U.S. Establishment provocatively asking: "The
Rockefeller brothers - How they got
their fortunes and increase them daily. Their influence over U.S. policy.
How does Henry Kissinger, e.g.,
hop right over from being Secretary of State to become a Board member of
the Chase Manhattan Bank?
Jim Jones soon became the target of organised Establishment opposition. He
was attacked and threatened.
His family members, children, congregants were terrorised, beaten and spied
on. Attempts were made to
infiltrate the organisation with provocateurs. Peoples Temple was subjected
to harassment, bogus
investigations, yellow journalism, and torrents of malicious gossip and
highly publicized lies.
Addressing a rally in 1977, just prior to the exodus of People's Temple to
the rural community in Guyana,
Jim Jones, showing signs of the covert harassment and media attacks,
declared "just remember there's
nothing worse than putting someone in the corner when they have tried to do
righteousness..."
Jim Jones rallied his congregation with the vision that they were pilgrims
on a quest for enlightenment and
safety. In Guyana they would establish a community of their own - Jonestown
- free from the harassment
and persecution they faced in North America. Here at Jonestown they would
fully practice Jone's dictim
that "service to my fellow man is the highest service to God."
Jonestown
In a statement he made to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House
of Representatives, Rev. John
Moore of the United Methodist Church wrote:
"The people went to Jonestown with hope, hope which grew out of a loss of
hope in the U.S. There can be
no understanding of movements such as People's Temple and Jonestown apart
from this loss of hope. They
migrated, because they had lost hope in any commitment of the American
people or the Congress to end
racial discrimination and injustice. They had lost hope in the people and
the legislature to deal justly and
humanely with the poor...Older people went to Jonestown hoping to become
free of purse snatchings,
muggings, and the harshness of the urban scene. Some young people hoped to
learn new skills, or to
become free from pressures of peers in the crime and drug scenes. People
went to Jonestown to find
freedom from the indignity our society heaps upon the poor. They went with
hope for a simple, quiet
life...They saw themselves leaving a materialistic society where things are
valued more than people. Many
went as pioneers to create a new community in the jungle. Still others saw
in Jonestown a vision of a new
society, a wave of the future."
The leading Guyanese newspaper Guyana Chronicle, December 1977 had this to
say about the
Jonestown community:
"Some 800 people, all members of the Peoples Temple, are living at the
giant agricultural project at
Jonestown, aiming at helping Guyana with farming while also helping make
Jonestown self-sufficient in food
and housing.
"At the area known as Jonestown, the Pastor and founder, the Rev. Jim
Jones, has come under fire from
reactionary forces in the U.S.A., who see the prosperous agricultural
project and the communal life
enjoyed by its members there as a threat to the old established order."
U.S. Attorney Charles Garry, who visited Jonestown on November 6, 1977,
told The Sun Reporter on his
return to the United States, "I have been in paradise. I saw a community
where there is no such thing as
racism." At a press conference in 1978 the prominent civil rights lawyer
Mark Lane stated: "I have been
deeply impressed with what I have seen there [in Jonestown]...It makes me
almost weep to see such an
incredible experiment, with such vast potential for the human spirit and
soul of this country, be cruelly
assaulted by the [US government] intelligence organisations..." On another
occasion, Mark Lane called
Jonestown "the closest thing on earth like paradise I have ever seen."
Continued Persecution
The CIA and their allies launched an elaborate campaign against Jim Jones
and the Jonestown community.
Shortly before Christmas 1977 the U.S. government stopped sending social
security payments to senior
citizens at Jonestown. Reports appeared in the North American press that a
father of a member of People's
Temple publicly threatened to liberate his son from Jonestown using
mercenaries.
In his book The Strongest Poison Mark Lane tells how one opponent of
People's Temple admitted that
"during September 1977 he had led a group of men armed with rifles and
bazookas [to Jonestown]... He
said that a huge jet was standing by to carry all of the children back to
America... What they found [in
Jonestown] was about ten building and a clearing - no barbed wire, no
guards with automatic weapons,
nothing like what they had been led to expect. For two days, the invaders
watched the compound and tried
to figure out what the hell was going on. The only guns they saw were
shotguns used to kill snakes."
Amid mounting tension and heightened fear of attack by hostile forces the
Central Committee of the
Jonestown community held a press conference, via shortwave radio, with
journalists assembled at San
Francisco People's Temple centre.
>From the transcript of this press conference it is obvious that the
Jonestown community were a people
under siege. In a desperate attempt to end the harassment engineered by
hostile U.S. agencies, a People's
Temple spokesman read a prepared statement. It said in part: "Finally we
would like to address ourselves
to the affect that we prefer to resist harassment and persecution even if
it means death...We affirm before
we will submit quietly to the interminable plotting and persecution of this
politically motivated conspiracy,
we will resist actively putting our lives on the line if it comes to
that...We choose as our model not those
who walked submissively into gas ovens but the valiant heroes of the Warsaw
ghetto."
Clearly this was not the plea of a 'suicide cult'. Pushed into a corner the
people of Jonestown made a public
declaration to resist and if necessary, fight any aggression against their
community. Consequently late in
1977 a small security force was set up to protect Jonestown. In a final,
desperate bid to escape continued
persecution and avoid conflict Jim Jones announced that the people of
Jonestown had decided to leave
Guyana and move to the Soviet Union.
As part of the preparations to relocate to the U.S.S.R. People's Temple
developed close contact with the
Soviet Embassy in Guyana. On September 27, 1978 the Soviet Consul Fyodor
Timofeyev made a visit to
Jonestown.
The Soviet Consul found a thriving community in the jungle of Guyana. Dr.
Nikolai Fedorovsky
accompanied the Consul to Jonestown. Jim Jones explained that they were
expecting more than a hundred
new arrivals. "I am not sure they'll be able to get through to us here,"
Jones told the Russian doctor. Adding
that:"Somebody must have it in for us over there, in the States. Even the
books, tools, and many other
things reach us in an unstable state. The same happens to the medical
supplies we receive from the USA.
This must all be the job of the CIA."
Dr. Fedorovsky inspected Jonestown's medical dispensary. In The Jonestown
Carnage, he states "the
pharmacy did not impress me very much. Everything here was very much like
in any other pharmacy of this
type. Later, after the terrible events in Jonestown I tried to recall if
there had been anything unusual about it.
Cyanide? No, I did not see any. Tranquillizers and sedatives in tablets?
Yes, I saw them, but only in
moderate quantities that did not arouse suspicion. And how many of these
preparations would be required
to kill almost a thousand people? All that did not hang together. And
another discrepancy: where did all
those numerous ampule injectors come from, the ones which, according to
American newspapers, the
victims of the Guyana massacre used to inject the killer-poison?"
Dr. Fedorovsky's observations, detailed in the 1987 Soviet Progress Press
book The Jonestown
Carnage, are significant. After the massacre Guyanese troops reportedly
discovered a large cache of
drugs, enough to drug the entire population of Georgetown, Guyana. One
footlocker contained 11,000
does of thorazine, a dangerous tranquilizer. Drugs used in the notorious
CIA MKULTRA project were
also found in abundance. Were these drugs planted in Jonestown by the killers?
Back in the United States, The Sun Reporter, October 5, 1978 carried an
article titled People's Temple
Strikes Back. Conspiracy to Destroy Jonestown Charged. The report announced
that: "People's Temple
plans to launch a massive, multi-million-dollar lawsuit against various
government agencies, which the
temple says have conspired to disrupt its activities and destroy its
operation..."
Mark Lane was quoted as saying "the intelligence community in the United
States has participated in
deliberate efforts to destroy People's Temple, Jim Jones and Jonestown".
Lane said he thought the government targeted People's Temple because its
experiment in socialist living was
an "embarrassment" for the United States government. "Twelve hundred
Americans have fled to the jungles
of Guyana in search of human rights and an opportunity to lead fulfilling
lives-opportunities that are not
available to them in the ghettos of America," Lane added.
Assassination
The last visitor to Jim Jones and the People's Temple in Jonestown was U.S.
Congressman Leo Ryan.
Accompanied by reporters, 'concerned' relatives of Jonestown residents and
People's Temple lawyer's
Mark Lane and Charles Garry, Leo Ryan arrived on November 17, 1978.
Congressman Ryan was warmly received at Jonestown and toured the community.
After dinner Ryan told
the assembled crowd: "I can tell you right now that by the few
conversations I've had with some of the folks
here already this evening that...there are some people who believe this is
the best thing that ever happened
in their whole lives."
People's Temple member Richard Tropp told Washington Post reporter Charles
Krause that Jonestown
was a living and working experiment in how society should work. "I think
it's a tragedy we couldn't do it in
the United States." Asked by Krause why he thought the People's Temple was
under attack in the U.S.,
Tropp replied, "Because we believe there is some group, some force that is
working to disrupt and agitate
against the People's Temple". (Guyana Massacre)
Leo Ryan told Jim Jones that Jonestown was a "beautiful place" and he found
no proof of the allegations
about the Temple which were in circulation in the United States. Ryan and
the rest of his group left for the
nearby airstrip. Charles Krause sums up the results of the investigation
into Jonestown:
"I rather admired Jim Jones's goals... The People's Temple hadn't struck me
as a crazy fringe cult... It
seemed to me that the People's Temple had a legitimate purpose, a noble
purpose, and was more or less
succeeding... No one...had offered any proof that the 900 or so people at
Jonestown were being starved,
mistreated, or held against their will... The hundreds of people still at
Jonestown, who had chosen not to
defect, seemed ample proof that they were relatively content." (Guyana
Massacre)
Preparing to board a small aircraft for the return journey Congressman Leo
Ryan and some members of his
entourage were shot and killed. News of the assassination soon reached
Jonestown, panic swept the
community.
What happened on the night of November 18? Genuine information was supplied
by those few people who
survived the massacre and escaped into the jungle. They said that Jim Jones
had called a general meeting of
all the residents of Jonestown in order to set out a course of action in
the wake of Ryan's assassination.
Attorney Mark Lane, who was at Jonestown, told a November 20 press
conference in Georgetown,
Guyana, that he counted 85 bursts of semi-automatic weapons fire when the
community gathered for the
supposed "mass suicide". Jim Jones shouted "Mother, mother, mother,
mother!" Lane said. "Then there
was the first burst of shooting." Lane said he and lawyer Charles Garry
then fled into the jungle, but they
heard "lots of gunfire and people screaming, including children".
Jim Jones was found days later at the foot of his chair in the centre of
the meeting hall. He had been killed
by a gunshot to the head. Surrounding him were dead bodies of hundreds of
members of People's Temple.
Prof. I.R. Grigulevich, a distinguished Member of the USSR Academy of
Sciences, after studying the
Jonestown massacre wrote:
"The United States has closed the case of the People's Temple by dismissing
it as 'one of those irrational
episodes in our mad world'. A thousand political protestants were declared
'votaries of a cult of death', a
bunch of lunatics who committed an unparalleled act of mass suicide. This
version which had been tailored
long before the Jonestown massacre not only made it possible to conceal the
crime but also to use it for
discrediting the People's Temple: it was labled a 'sect of suicides' and
was formally disbanded.
"In spite of the incontestable proof that the Jonestown commune had been
deliberately destroyed, the
authorities in Washington...did not stir so much as a finger to conduct a
fair and objective investigation into
the tragic death of several hundreds of their fellow-countrymen. On the
contrary, the authorities in
Washington went to great pains to put the lid on the whole thing.
"The Jonestown massacre was part of an extensive complex of actions
undertaken by U.S. punitive
agencies (Operation 'Chaos' and others), whose goal was to clamp down on
political movements, such as
the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the New Left, etc. To carry out this
program, the CIA set up a highly
secret group concerned with 'special operations'...
"We hope that now everybody will know about the act of savagery committed
by the American imperialists
in Guyana in order to suppress political dissent, to kill those who dared
to build a new life free from the
omnipotence of capital. The crime committed by the CIA laid bare the
monstrous hypocrisy of the
Washington administration which spares no words about defense of human
rights. It was the Washington
administration that gave the go-ahead for the extermination of people in
the Guyanese jungles, those men
and women for whom human rights became a reality only after they had made a
clean break with the
American capitalist system.
"The political refugees from the United States were killed because they had
thrown down the gauntlet to the
oppressive regime in the United States."
Extracted from New Dawn No. 29 (January-March, 1995)
c 1995 by New Dawn International News Service,
__________________________________________________
せカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせ
__________________________________________________
Today's mighty oak
is just yesterday's nut
that held its ground.
http://www.davidicke.com
__________________________________________________
せカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせ
__________________________________________________
Check out his website & books at:
http://www.davidicke.com
.... "The Biggest Secret" ....
"...And the Truth Shall Set you Free"
====================================
Because e-mail can be altered electronically,
the integrity of this communication cannot be guaranteed.
.
