Word: cults
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...liked doing his own investigating of constituents' concerns, Ryan began inquiring about Jim Jones and his followers, who had just started clearing some 900 acres in the rain forests of Guyana. Other unhappy relatives of temple members, as well as a few people who had fearfully left the cult, told the Congressman that beatings and blackmail, rather than brotherly love, impelled the cultists to work on the new colony. Articles in New West magazine and the San Francisco Examiner in August 1977 further documented the temple's increasing use of violence to enforce conformity to its rigid rules of conduct...
...numbers of American bodies to the East Coast (at a cost of some $3 million), the FBI moved into the case on the basis of a 1971 law making the assassination of a Congressman a federal crime. The FBI was also probing persistent reports by surviving members of the cult that Jones had decreed that if his community was destroyed, a "hit team" of other members would be dispatched to hunt down and kill any defectors who had turned against the cult, as well as any public officials considered guilty of harassing his group...
Inevitably, bitterness erupted over whether the tragedy at Jonestown could have been prevented. Members of Congressman Ryan's saddened staff claimed that the U.S. embassy in Georgetown should have known of the cult's potential for violence and warned him. Sorrowing relatives of the victims charged that both the State Department and FBI should have long ago heeded their warnings about Jonestown. Yet both agencies had a valid point in claiming that there are important legal restrictions against the Government's prying into the private affairs of Americans living abroad, as well as constitutional protection of groups claiming...
...they join an organization like the Peoples Temple? And why did they stay in it? Few if any of the thousands of cult groups in the U.S. are as violent as the Guyana group was in its last days, but many of them share a number of unusual characteristics. Social scientists who have studied these groups agree that most cult members are in some sort of emotional trouble before they join. Says Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer, a psychologist at Berkeley: "About one-third are very psychologically distressed people. The other two-thirds are relatively average people, but in a period...
...from family and friends, the new member gets repeated infusions of the cult's doctrines. The lonely, depressed, frightened and disoriented recruit often experiences what amounts to a religious conversion. Former members of such cults frequently say that something in them "snaps," report Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, authors of Snapping, a new book on what they call "America's epidemic of sudden personality change...