Extractions: 2 June 2005 Use this version to print Send this link by email Email the author , written and directed by Leigh Fondakowski, with additional writing and dramaturgy by Greg Pierotti, Stephen Wangh and Margo Hall. At the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Berkeley, California, through June 5, 2005. Jones and about a hundred members relocated in 1965 to Redwood Valley, a remote area of Northern California near Ukiah in Mendocino County, a site selected because it had appeared on a published short-list of places in the US most likely to survive a nuclear attack. They soon had communal gardens, a communal kitchen, and a fleet of buses with which its members took to the road, evangelizing in San Francisco, Los Angeles and elsewhere. By 1973, with over 2,500 members and churches in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Peoples Temple voted to create an agricultural commune in Guyana. As work progressed at Jonestown, the group moved its headquarters to San Francisco where the Temple and Jones quickly became major players in the political life of the city. Their ability to turn out crowds of demonstrators on 30-minutes notice made Jones someone that leading Democratic Party politicians like San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, State Assemblyman (and eventual Speaker of the California State Assembly and two-term mayor of San Francisco) Willie Brown and vice presidential hopeful Walter Mondale needed to cultivate.
SUICIDE FOR SOCIALISM This wasnta rational decision like the mass suicide at Masada. Why didntmore people leave jonestown? It was because they would again be left without http://www.uncarved.org/pol/brinton2.html
Extractions: SUICIDE FOR SOCIALISM? - Maurice Brinton Part One Part Two WHAT DO SECTS PROVIDE? Throughout history religious or political faiths have exercised great influence. They have moved armies and motivated people to build both cathedrals and concentration camps. Their success had had very little to do with whether they were true or not. The fact that thousands (or millions) believed in them made of them real historical and social forces. SECTS IN HISTORY Historically, cults and sects have usually flourished at times of social crisis, when old value systems were collapsing and new ones had not yet asserted themselves. They usually start as small groups which break off from the conventional consensus and espouse very different views of the real, the possible and the moral. They have attracted very diverse followings and achieved very variable results. Christianity started as a religion of slaves. In The Pursuit of the Millennium A detailed analysis of cults would require an analysis of their rhetoric and ideology, and of the culture matrices in which they are embedded. The present appeal of cults is related to the major upheaval of our times. This is
Extractions: Freedoms: Ill Wind Behind the Terror Deadly Spiral Children of the State The Hidden Hand of Violence Ca$hing In The Great Brain Injury Scam Human Rights and Freedoms Buying off the Drug Traffic Cop Revisiting the Jonestown tragedy The Great Waste A Fire on the Cross In Support of Human Rights The Black and White of Justice Freedom of Speech at Risk in Cyberspace The Psychiatric Subversion of Justice The Story Behind the Controversy The Internet: The Promise and the Perils Page hether they liked him or not, most who knew Leo Ryan agreed he had flamboyance, tenacity, nerve and a knack for drawing attention to social abuses. A man who marched to the beat of his own drum, he galled bureaucrats, some of whom, according to a former aide, viewed the Democratic congressman from Northern California as the worst-case-scenario bull in their china shop. After the riots in Watts in 1965, Ryan, then a California state legislator, traveled to that community under a false identity and became a substitute teacher to investigate conditions in the black community. Five years later, he again went undercover and had himself strip-searched and locked up in Folsom State Prison to discover what life in such a facility was really like. In 1978, he made plans to spend that Christmas season incognito once again, this time as a Postal Service employee to investigate complaints of bad working conditions.
Gadfly Online. heard on a recording of the mass suicides and murders at jonestown, Guyana, Twenty years after the deaths at jonestown, the People s temple still http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/April99/archive-jonestown.html
Extractions: Hearing the Voices of Jonestown , has tried to debunk the idea that those who died were passive victims of Jim Jones and instead to explain the forces that shaped their decisions. Inspired by Maaga's friendship with the family of three people who died in Jonestown, Hearing the Voices has challenged some of the most deeply held ideas about Jim Jones and his followers, but it has also evoked criticism that it is too beholden to the current fashions of academia and, in its attempts to understand the motives of those involved in the killings, too forgiving of their actions. "I'm going to tell you, without me, life has no meaning. I'm the best thing you will ever have."
People's Temple (Jonestown) source not only for the history of the People s temple and the jonestown masssuicide, Alternative Considerations of jonestown People s temple http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/jonestown/Jonestwn.html
Extractions: On November 18, 1978 over 900 persons died in Jonestown, Guyana. For twenty years a small group of people have attempted to make the name Jonestown synonymous with Auschwitz. The tragedy of Jonestown is not diminished in the slightest by declaring this to be an inappropriate analogy. Indeed, it presumes that all there is to know is known and, hence, it discourages inquiry that can advance our understanding of this horrible event. It also invites bigotry of the highest against all new religious movements. Laurie Efrein Kahalas is a Jonestown survivor who has stepped forward to offer her account of what really happened in a new book entitled Snake Dance: Unravelling the Mysteries of Jonestown . This is not an easy book to read. Ms Kahalas' detailing of a conspiracy to bring down Jim Jones and trigger the mass suicides is both difficult to swallow and hard to put aside. I have not reached a judgement of the plausibility of her claim to tell "the explosive truths" of Jonestown. I hope that scholars, journalists and public officials will read this book and determine for themselves whether Snake Dance sheds light and insight to that terrible moment in the jungles of Guyana. Ms Kahalas has kindly granted us permission to reproduce two documents she prepared in conjunction with the publication of this book: (1) a personal statement entitled "About Jonestown..." An
Jonestown: 20 Years Later the temple was keeping them from loved ones and making veiled threats of masssuicide. I don t think young people even know what jonestown was. http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/jonestn3.htm
Extractions: by Tim Reiterman, Times Staff Writer November 14, 1998 Oakland, California For 20 years now, in sun, fog and rain, they have come to a grassy hillside overlooking San Francisco Bay to share tears, hugs and their private pain and to remember the unfathomable events of another Nov. 18. Often seeming outnumbered by reporters, they collect around a small stone monument in Evergreen Cemetery, link hands and pray. Later, in small clutches, they reminisce and trade news about their lives after that day. It is here, among these people who are forever entwined with one of the great tragedies, that Jonestown endures as nowhere else. Always present is the retired butcher, sad-eyed and bent by the years and the loss of his wife, seven children and 19 relatives. And always preaching is his wiry, iron-voiced niece, who also lost 27 relatives. Others have come, if not every year: