Word: jonesism
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A preventable tragedy occurred 28 years ago, in Jonestown, Guyana. Some 900 members of Jim Jones? People?s Temple - souls cleansed, brains washed - took poison and died at his command. Stanley Nelson?s documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of People?s Temple interviews survivors and kin of the dead...
(4 of 8) About Jim Jones, a childhood friend recalled, "There was something not quite right. He was obsessed with religion. He was obsessed with death." But he always had the spellbinder?s gift of bending people to his will, which meshed strangely with his seemingly progressive, inclusive social agenda...
Predominantly but not overwhelmingly black, Jones? faithful didn?t simply join his church; they became its complete dependents and indentured slaves. They received medical and dental care (when Jones or his board approved it) while they turned their paychecks over to the Temple, receiving a weekly allowance of $5. Jones...
His charisma did not go unnoticed by political potentates, in California (Jerry and Willie Brown sang his praises) and Washington (Walter Mondale and Rosalyn Carter appeared with him). For a time, he was head of San Francisco?s Housing Authority. But the whispers about his predatory sexual appetite (which devoured...
That afternoon, Jones poured out nearly a thousand cups of Kool Aid laced with cyanide and, in an excruciating parody of the Eucharist, told the faithful to take and drink. They were committing, he said, "an act of revolutionary suicide, protesting the conditions of an inhumane world." In the detritus...