According to most German- and American memories, Jim Jones was simply a leader of a Doomsday Cult, which eventually carried out its plan to move on to a better universe or heaven.
Both the documentary I saw on German TV and have read on various websites claim : "The Peoples Temple was initially structured as an inter-racial mission for the sick, homeless and jobless. He assembled a large following of over 900 members in Indianapolis IN during the 1950's. 'He preached a 'social gospel' of human freedom, equality, and love, which required helping the least and the lowliest of society's members. Later on, however, this gospel became explicitly socialistic, or communistic in Jones' own view, and the hypocrisy of white Christianity was ridiculed while 'apostolic socialism' was preached.'" Click here.
However, websites also typically note of the People's Temple, "It was an interracial congregation -- almost unheard of in Indiana at the time. When a government investigation began into his cures for cancer, heart disease and arthritis, he decided to move the group to Ukiah in Northern California. He preached the imminent end of the world in a nuclear war; Esquire magazine listed Ukiah as one of nine in the U.S. that cold survive a nuclear attack. They later moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles."
Actually, the interracial congregation throughout most of the 20th century remained in most corners of the United States unheard of.
That is, Sunday mornings remained the most segregated time of each week in America, a supposedly free and open country.
One documentary reviewer noted, "Many of the cult followers were struggling with the social injustice and racial discrimination in the 60s and 70s. Jim Jones offered them equality and sense of belonging that the society didn't offer. So Peoples Temple becomes their utopia where they could be so happy and united. Only the sad part is that later some of them realize they were betrayed and they had no way out."
BETRAYED WITH NO WAY OUT
At times, many Americans (and of course others around the globe) feel they are "betrayed and they had no way out." I understand that the Americans who supported America's war on terrorism and other idealists who have gone to war over the past 8 years have certainly felt at some point that they were betrayed but that they had had no way out.
These Americans (and America's allies) may have gotten into the army, air force, marines, or National Guard with good intentions or ideals but at times they have felt misspent and betrayed. They feel they are victims.
Meanwhile, many of these same American victims of the Cult of the War of terrorism call themselves Christians but, in turn, cannot fathom how Christians, like those who had ideals like those in the People's Temple (which was originally a spin-off from the Disciples of Christ in Indiana), ever found themselves moving to equality and then mass-suicide in Guyana.
Nor can they imagine why there are suicide bombers all over the Middle East--and sometimes in the USA, Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere.
The fact is that most of us learn all our concepts about suicide, war, fraternity, God and memory by what our immediate elders, schools, topography, or society is teaching us. (By topography, I mean our physical landscape, including schools, statues, theaters, etc.) That is one reason why Jim Jones fled with his tribe from the USA to build a community in Guyana anew. In this way, Jonestown in Guyana could be built up from one side to look like a very idyllic community here on Earth, where race and gender didn't matter and where other artifacts of America's racial, political-economic and social messes and injustices were banned.
On the other hand, as one watched the film (in German) about the Jonestown camp, one realized immediately that what was being narrated was the story of a concentration camp. Jonestown, like some military and concentration camps around the globe, was a camp where American radio and other news were not to be heard in 1977-1978. The only news reports allowed in the camp were made-up news reports by Jim Jones and his immediate followers. In this context, Jones could drum into the inmate's heads that America was killing itself in a horrible class war and that nuclear annihilation was coming on any day now.
Moreover, the inmates of Jonestown were told that the world hated them and that any day invaders from America might come to take away their dreams. REMEMBER: The USA government had been drumming this idea of a nuclear annihilation into the American children's heads since World War II. Many of those adults in Jamestown Guyana had experiences as children the now-infamous duck-and-cover training at U.S. taxpayer expense in American schools growing up.
Similarly, many Americans who had stood by and allowed America in 2003 to be marched into a war in Iraq were in some ways victims of the same sort of control of media and mass propaganda of the Bush administration (acquired during the Reagan era)-carried out in the most systematic and efficient way from media-manipulation masters and charismatic leaders.
I believe that if counselors, churches and educators do not deal better with the past and memory, we will continue to repeat the debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam.
What is required is that physical monuments (1) to the stupidity of war and (2) the crimes that have been done to Americans in the name of ideals or in the name of a faith-whether it is a faith in country or faith in a church-need to be immortalized in stone much more often than has been the case in U.S. developmental history to date.
The need for physical monuments and memorials in the American landscape becomes more important as the U.S. wages wars far from the continental USA (and bomb other nations remotely by their drone robot flights.)
America is already a place where people move away from their villages and towns quite regularly. Americans thus need to have constant physical reminders as to where they (and their people) have been and who they are.
Without the visual- and physical places of memory and commemoration, our children will never wrestle with their pasts as the Germans have been forced to.
The society cannot depend on TV or any single electronic nor print media to teach and raise citizens who are ready to fight for what is right-ie. when the government is wrong.
In conclusion, the physical place of mourning and loss of innocence needs to be much more ever-present in our lives (especially in the case of long distance war-making carried out by remote-control battalions).
Without such monuments and memorials, we are no better educationally than many of the Middle Eastern Muslim lands where statues and memorials are forbidden in much of the public domain.
FAST FORWARD: Middle Eastern Suicide Cadres 2000-2009
In case you aren't aware, many Muslims in the Middle East are quite certain that both Islam and the Koran ban images of people.
This is, of course, not correct at all.
Nonetheless, the ban against image laws have been in place in many Muslim regions for centuries. This means that in the many centuries when few Muslims in the Gulf Arab states could neither read nor write, there developed an overdependence on the spoken word for interpreting or acquiring one's belief systems. Neither images of Islamic characters nor images of Koranic stories can be found anywhere.
Even today, there are not many pictures or statues for a community of religious believers to discuss or reflect on anywhere in most Gulf state lands. This is naturally why Muslims in many countries point-blank oppose images of Prophet Mohammed.
Behind this self-taught (or cultural) belief in (and tradition concerning) the prohibition of images, the authority of one's elders is becomes primary to interpret and understand one's world-even well into adulthood for many.
This is one reason (among many reasons) why so many young people in the Middle East and elsewhere fall for the message-controlled-by-authorities in these Gulf State (and neighboring) lands and end up ignoring what contrary views there are in our planets multimedia world.
This controlling of the message is one reason I wasn't surprised to learn of the Iraqi woman who is purported to be the Mother of Suicide Bombers in Iraq. The martyr-making woman is in her 50s. Her name is Samira Ahmed Dschassim.
After her capture, a video of Samira confessing to having persuaded dozens of Iraqi youth to go through suicide bombing training-i.e. to actually be prepared to die in such suicide attacks all over Iraq. Samira's motherly face has been shown repeatedly on Iraqi TV and around the world this past week.
Samira claims to have persuaded already around 80 young Iraqis to sign up to become mass-killing suicide-bombers, claiming that the only-way-out for them to have a better life is through suicide.
In the case of many young suicide-bombing girls, these young ladies often had been attacked and raped by some people known by Samira.
In their shock and consternation, these young women then turned to Samira for help. (In these same Middle Eastern lands, a non-virgin unmarried girl is threatened with death or shame over the whole family.)
In short, Al-Qaida, for whom Samira indirectly was active for in Iraq, was doing what Hitler, Jim Jones, and the Bush-Cheney administration had done.
They played on the fact that they could control information and manipulate the youth and adults whom they worked with by playing on love for culture, faith, tribe, or family/.
Recall that in the Iraq of the Baathist (or Sadam Hussein) era that the media and PUBLIC ART was controlled by the Baath party. Only Sadam Hussein and Baathist party statues or monuments could be created in those days.
Starting in 2003, there would be no more statues from Saddam Hussein and the despondent youth and adults in Iraq reverted to pre-Baathist cultural and religious identities.
In the last 6 years, there were few alternative memorials created in Iraq-even in the ruins for the world that Hussein had left behind and that Americans and their allies had helped create.
Ruins, however, remind only of loss and do not teach the stupidity of endless wars and other educational factors cultivated in Iraqi poverty of recent decades.
The U.S. should both build memorials to this war of stupidity in the USA and leave memorials that can teach peace and reconciliation whenever they leave (or after they have left) a land. Like the German government, American church's and states need to even pay in foreign countries for monuments of apology, which are to be maintained for eternity to remember the crimes to be commemorated.
What do you think?
In the meantime, religious leaders must control their messages less and teach adults and children to identify stupidity where they see it.
Moreover, I believe that church leaders or mosque leadership need to stop using the terms suicide or martyr for what is a cruel and horrific act of self immolation, i.e. with each suicide bomber or freedom fighter. (This includes soldiers of nations who considered themselves to be freedom fighters as they invaded Iraq.)
Only by building permanent education campaigns which include permanent memorials as historical witness for crimes will we grow up spiritually and mentally as nations and statesmen.
Appendix 1: Anniversaries in 2009 of last 300 years of German history
As some of the readers of my writings may have noticed, I am spending a bit of time this year in Germany. This is a particularly interesting year to be in Germany witnessing the struggle which present day Germans always face in dealing with history, culture, and religious heritage.
You see, this is the 20th anniversary of the Wall separating East and West Germany being opened up.
2009 is also the 60th anniversary of the modern federal German democratic republic.
2009 is the 65th anniversary of the failed coup of von Stauffenburg and other generals.
It is the 70th anniversary of Hitler's Nazi Germany invading both Czechoslovakia and Poland, i.e. officially kicking off the European portion of WWII. (It is also when the Nazis signed a secret treaty to divide up Poland and the Baltic states.)
2009 is the 75th Anniversary of President Hindenburg's passing away and Hitler taking over all governmental leadership posts in Nazi Germany. Only months before the Nazis murdered the Austrian Chancellor Dolfuss.
2009 is the 90th anniversary of the somewhat unequal Treaty of Versailles.
It is the 95th anniversary of the start of WWII.
2009 is the 120th anniversary of the birth in Austria of one Adolf Hitler.
It is the 160th anniversary of the Hohenzollern turning down the crown from the first Democratic National Assembly in Frankfurt.
2009 is 175th anniversary of the first major European customs union, i.e. putting Germany on the path to becoming a federal state.
It is the 195th anniversary of the start of the Congress of Vienna, which under Austrian and Prussian leadership would redraw the map of Europe.
2009 is the 220th anniversary of the French revolution, which eventually leads to the invasion and transformation of Germanic Kingdoms across the continent.
It is the 300th anniversary of the Catholic Union being formed, which eventually helped lead nearly a decade later to the 30 Years War.
NOTES
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