Word: jonestown
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Dates: during 1978-1978
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Later in the week, Correspondent Robert Geline arrived in Guyana. Lack of transportation to Jonestown kept him and other journalists in Georgetown. But on Thanksgiving Day many survivors from Jonestown took up lodgings at Geline's hotel and they were outwardly calm and willing to talk. Geline recalls, "I was deeply moved, fascinated and horrified by what I heard...
...reported TIME Correspondent Donald Neff, one of the first newsmen to fly in last week to the hitherto obscure hamlet of Jonestown in the jungles of Guyana, on the northern coast of South America. The scene below him was one of almost unimaginable carnage. In an appalling demonstration of the way in which a charismatic leader can bend the minds of his followers with a devilish blend of professed altruism and psychological tyranny, some 900 members of the California-based Peoples Temple died in a self-imposed ritual of mass suicide and murder...
...collective self-destruction. The followers of the Rev. Jim Jones, 47, a once respected Indianaborn humanitarian who degenerated into egomania and paranoia, had first ambushed a party of visiting Americans, killing California Congressman Leo Ryan, 53, three newsmen and one defector from their heavily guarded colony at Jonestown. Then, exhorted by their leader, intimidated by armed guards and lulled with sedatives and painkillers, parents and nurses used syringes to squirt a concoction of potassium cyanide and potassium chloride onto the tongues of babies. The adults and older children picked up paper cups and sipped the same deadly poison sweetened...
...stories told by those who survived were both fearsomely fascinating and ultimately inexplicable. How could such idealistic, if naive, people set out to build an idyllic haven from modern society's many pressures and turn it into a hellish colony of death? This is how the Jonestown dream turned into a nightmare...
Ryan repeatedly asked the State Department to check into reports about the mistreatment of Americans in Jonestown. The U.S. embassy in Georgetown sent staff members to the colony, some 140 miles northwest of the capital. They reported they had separately interviewed at least 75 of the cultists. Not one, the embassy reported, said he wanted to leave...