Word: jonestown
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Dates: during 1978-1978
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...quotation seems like the moral at the end of the Jonestown fable, the epitaph of the whole affair...
...ritual importance. It is a way of keeping absolutist beliefs absolute. It is not the first the time Americans have heard of loyalty tests: McCarthy once advocated them. In both men it is the old Puritan penchant for the absolute truth surviving deformed through history, breeding paranoia and, in Jonestown, total tragedy...
...Jonestown has even been rivaled as a mass suicide. The Jewish Zealots defending the fortress of Masada against besieging Roman legions in A.D. 73 chose self-slaughter rather than submission; 960 men, women and children died. The event occupies a place of some reverence in Jewish memory and is not really comparable to Jonestown; the Zealots faced the prospect of slaughter or slavery, and their choice therefore possessed a certain passionate rationality. In the 17th century, Russian Orthodox dissenters called the Old Believers refused to accept liturgical reforms. Over a period of years some 20,000 peasants in protest abandoned...
...their worst, the cults acquire a psychosis of millennialism. This chiliasm, playing at the drama of the last days, nourishes when life is no longer seen as ascendant. But no matter how democratically advertised, visions of the New Jerusalem, Utopia or an Edenic Jonestown are bathed in a totalitarian light. And they are shadowed by glimpses of enemies: Antichrist, Gog and Magog; paranoia is often a cult's principal instrument of discipline. Even in 1978, one catches whiffs of an old dementia and witchfire...
...transcendental significance - in fact with all the mystery and majesty of the final, eschatological drama." To be human is to live inside history, to accept a reality that does not respond to dogma or a megalomaniac's discipline. One escape is that found by the people in Jonestown. - Lance Morrow