Word: pasting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What was it in America's spiritual heritage that could have inspired an endeavor like Jonestown--where radical politics, fundamentalist theology, Utopian optimism, black consciousness, psychological manipulation, inherent sexuality, violence, communistic tyranny and ultimate mass suicide were reconciled and united under that quotation from Santayana? The "past"--the irony is that those 900 people did not escape...
...little sense of their history--it is short and we are a people oriented to the future. We raze architectural treasures for tomorrow's parking lot. Unlike the European, who has an instinctive feel for tradition and the forces of his history, we have little sense of how the past can relate to things of the present...
...steadying of morals and manners. Their history is mostly a history of failures--the continent is littered with testimonies to American visions. And the People's Temple was really no different: it sought the ideal community, too. Like all its American predecessors, it longed to leave aside the past, and the fever of democratic license; but its own absolutism proved self-consuming. The impulse which inspired Jonestown is really no different from that which inspired the Mormons 100 years ago. What has changed is American society: a violent age produces violent events...
...which should be felt as the deepest horror in the Jonestown affair. For out of absolute belief comes the desire to test that belief absolutely; and only when faced with death can the believer know he truly believes. And so, in a twisted way Jones resurrected this task from past movements; and forgetting the past, he and his followers repeated...
...risk that the U.S. may make unwise concessions or disarm unilaterally is "non-existent," Warnke said. In past arms control negotiations, "rather than going too far or too fast, we have not gone far enough or fast enough," he added...