Jonestown: How do you get 900 people to kill themselves?

The scene is Jonestown, Guyana, and today is November 18, 1978. Thanksgiving is nearly coming.

Population about 900. Men, women, children, all followers of an enigmatic and charismatic fellow named Jim Jones. Thus the name "Jonestown". They are all part of a religious movement, led by Jones.

Today, congressman Leo Ryan is set to visit. He will not make it home.

On this day in Jonestown, something terrible is going to happen.

During the mid-day, Congressman Ryan is shot dead while attempting to leave, along with everyone on the plane out of there. These deaths are only a foreshadowing of what's to come, however.

During the evening, a meeting is called. Everyone is to attend. And so they do.

They brew up a special concoction for this meeting, and then create the etymology for the phrase, "Don't drink the kool-aid". Though it was flavor-aide, actually. Not legitimate kool-aid. But the cyanide, the benzodiazepine, the chloral hydrate, and don't forget the promethazine for it's anti-emetic properties, otherwise, they might vomit the poison out, were all there in spades.

By November 19th, 1978, there are 900 corpses rotting in the tropical paradise. No rhyme, nor reason.

The only people who truly knew are dead, the only record the garbled ramblings of Jim Jones, who seems to be doing his best imitation of "Colonel Kurtz" out of Apocalypse Now. I can't make heads or tails of what he says during this 44 minute transcript.

There are allegations of a murder-cult, of communist involvement, of CIA involvement, that it might have been an MKULTRA plot.

Anyone have any insight into how you get 900 people to kill themselves? At some point, wouldn't self preservation kick in? Is there more to this story than we know?

reply to post by Grifter42


put any of miley cyrus's music on repeat and then take away the ability to turn it off

in all seriousness though It would be interesting if you could post the transcript of jim jones last words. I would give it a listen. I remember seeing a documentary on the event and did a little reading

Andd it seemed to me he prayed on the weak made them feel empowered and used that use do what he did.

Why? I don't know. I never actually thought of CIA or MKultra in this case thank you for bringing it up

I do believe the documentary I saw was on History channel but I cant remember the name. But it goes into Jim's personnel life and his bought with drugs.

Not all of them killed themselves.
A lot of them were shot, injected with poison or force fed the poison.
Many were children and likely just did what they were told.
It's frightening what one charismatic but utterly evil leader can do with a lot of people.

Seems to me that if you get enough people brainwashed to follow somebody charismatic and hypnotic, with a promise of going to a heavenly paradise, that's all that is needed for a bunch of people to drink the kool-aide. Naturally, quite a few didn't want to, but then the mob mentality kicks in and the pressure overrode their instinct for self-preservation. These weren't people off the street, you know....they chose to follow Jim Jones into the jungle and live in that commune.

Also, there may have been the threat that, if you didn't drink the kool-aide, you would get a bullet in the head.

I read about the senator, and from the one guy thay did make it back the tale he spoke of was chilling. I mean the people there were just brainwash except for a few, And the ones born into it don't know anything else, so you lose that self preservation i think. From what I read, he had them conditioned for it, going as far as doing dry runs of the mass suicide. He made mothers give the solution to the children first, aiding there motive to drink the kool aid as well since they now have nothing to live for. Now i haven't heard of the CIA or others and the involvement. I always look for what they gained from it, I dont see much here other then 900 dead bodies, but, and please correct if I am wrong, this wasn't a stepping stone to something bigger

reply to post by Grifter42


Ask the ATF and FBI, they tried it at Waco, storm the building and force the inhabitants to jump into deliberately set firestorms, or get caught in hails of government issue bullets. I'd say getting people to "kill themselves" is pretty easy

Theres clear recordings out there, I listened to it awhile back and I dont think Ive ever heard anything more sad or disturbing.

Alot of people werent willing participants and were basically forced at gun point.

That said enough of them did drink it by choice knowing full well what they were doing and what was happening.

The worst part is in that recording he didnt sound intelligent or charismatic at all.

I have absolutely no idea what was going through the minds of the ones who did it by choice, maybe it was a case of extreme peer pressure that they felt???

Zcustosmorum
reply to post by Grifter42

 

Ask the ATF and FBI, they tried it at Waco, storm the building and force the inhabitants to jump into deliberately set firestorms, or get caught in hails of government issue bullets. I'd say getting people to "kill themselves" is pretty easy

Waco is totally different though. The Government actively shot all of those people on live television. And the people under siege didn't start that fire. The Government did when it fired gas grenades that generate intense heat in a localized area. And maybe it's been a while, but I remember tanks, punching holes in walls. That lets in oxygen. Now, admittedly, my understanding of Waco is cloudy because I was young. But why would they start a fire in their own fortified compound? That's unlikely to me.

Koresh and Jones were cut from slightly different cloth. For one, I find Koresh to be less of a nut-job. Slightly less, but still less. They had enough ammo and firepower to hold off the assault on their compound for a good long time. And no one would choose fire as a method of suicide. That's the worst way in the book to go. The cops burnt them out as a tactical maneuver.

Compare Jones, who had armaments, but significantly less, and had been stockpiling cyanide for some time. Jones wanted his people to die. But why? Premeditated insanity.. Seems like an oxymoron. I just can't fathom what went through his mind, or how he got so many folks to listen.

Personally I think this thread would have been a lot more interesting if you asked how we can get 900 politicians to kill themselves. Just like Jonestown, I think we would have to help a few out. Somehow I am okay with that.

What the madman did was mass murder. It was possibly not what was planned for that day but with the congressman's vist of a "Fact Finding Mission" on abuse and his death at Port Kaituma Airstrip.
This seems to have pushed the time table up a notch and Jones though he had no other choice as his fantasy world was falling in around him.
300 of the dead we kids with no real way to understand nor stop thier own demise.

This is of course my thoughts on the matter as I was not there...thank god.

This might shine a light on what Jonestown was all about. MK Ultra wasn't the only game in town....
Jim Jones had some unusual connections for a simple preacher man!

cluesforum.info...

The way I understand Jonestown is that they didn't just all suddenly drink koolaid and drop dead,... like all mind control projects they ran thru many rehearsal runs of drinking whatever,...for ritual, or for discilpline practice, then one day they spiked it... to see how many they could kill...or to end the project. CIA doesn't like to run these kinds of ops in one place for too long...

reply to post by coastlinekid
Yes, they did run rehearsals and no, the choice of drink was NOT koolaid but rather Flavor Aid.

I think this was setup from the start to be a nightmare scenario so other people would then become reluctant to separate themselves from society to go and live on their own in a nice happy go lucky, everybody pitch in, tribal living but with the benefits of modern technology, all races living together in harmony with nature type of lifestyle. Can't be having people leaving the system. The beast need to be fed. It needs constant attention. So they set an example for anyone else who might have such ideas, which I believe were rrather popular back then. People still do it to an extent but not on as grand a scale as Jonestown I don't think. So, yeah, I think it was planned from the start as a way of saying this is what happens if you try to leave the loving safetynet provided by "The Benevolence". Of course like many government ops I'm sure it had multiple purposes such as practicing mind control, demonizing certain religious groups, and I've hear d a number of other theories like that extra bodies were smuggled in with the massacre victims from some conflict nobody was supposed ti knkw abiut between US special forces and Russian military who had a secret base nearby.

I seem to remember this event being called even in msm sources "The Jonestown Massacre" but I could be misremembering...but if not, I just wanted to point out that the term "massacre" does not denote a suicidal event. As another member mentioned, I also do not believe they all willingly committed suicide. The ones who refused were shot or force fed poison. The bodies were then stacked in a way to hide the gunshot wounds. There is a lot of information about this on the Internet and im sure here at ats. The way the bodies are in the pics doesn't make sense. Everybody just happened to land face down?

Eta- oh and the famous Jim Jones ranting and raving recording could have been made later. Jones' death being faked by use of a body double and the real Jones flown somewhere and then killed after his usefulness had run out.


eta- oh and I heard some higher ups had reasons for wanting Ryan dead...

reply to post by coastlinekid


I dont think that it was just a spiked version of the dry runs. He had always told them that it was possible that the vat they were drinking from could kill them and it was a test of faith. They did do it mutiple times to practice but from what i read after the reporters left, Jones told every one that the visitors are ruining the way we live, that they are going to tell the US Gov things that are not true to condemn us. That this is the end and the start of a better live and all that mumbo jumbo. And most of what i have to add is form a time mag i own with an artice by Tim Reiterman, one of the survivors of the last outsiders there

Like someone above said, many were forced into drinking via gunpoint.
Imagine if the victims themselves had been armed, they could have had some control on their destiny.
And most probably taken out some of the bad guys.
At the very least they might have been able to hole up somewhere until the cavalry arrived.
Oh well, just don't trust your life and livelihood to ANY religious group, it always ends in death.

Jones town was ahead of its time, it represents perfectly the new age cults. If Project Camelot invites its followers down to an island to live in new age harmony you know whats in store for them.

(CNN) -- Thirty years ago, 909 Americans were led to their death by the Rev. Jim Jones in a mass murder-suicide pact in a South American jungle, shortly after Jones' gunmen killed a visiting U.S. congressman and four others at a nearby airstrip.

One-third of the victims were children. Many were killed by Jones' aides, who squirted cyanide down their throats.

Of the nearly 1,000 church members who began the day in Jonestown, a cult commune, only 33 survived to see the next day.

The following is a thumbnail history of the Jonestown tragedy on Nov. 18, 1978:

What happened? More than 900 Americans died in a South American jungle upon the orders of Rev. Jim Jones, who had tried to create a socialist paradise that survivors called a slave camp.

What led up to this? When California Rep. Leo Ryan arrived on a one-man investigative mission, bringing along a TV camera crew and various reporters, 15 church members asked to leave with him. Jones sent gunmen to a nearby airstrip, where they killed Ryan, an NBC correspondent and his cameraman, a newspaper photographer and one of the departing family members.

Who was Jim Jones? He was a self-appointed minister from a small town in the Midwest, who first led his flock to California, where he hoped to avoid fallout from a possible nuclear war. He then moved his people to Guyana when he came under criticism for church beatings and financial abuses.

Where did the money come from? Jones was a phony faith healer, and much of his money came in mail-order donations from the desperate. Elderly members handed over their Social Security checks, working adults gave 25 percent of their wages to the church and some signed over all their property. Government investigators would later find at least $10 million in Swiss banks, mainly in Panama. Another $1 million in cash was recovered in Jonestown.

Did anyone survive? Thirty-three people who began that day in Jonestown escaped with their lives. There were two main groups of survivors. Eleven people, four of them small children, walked almost 30 miles through the jungle to another town. Fourteen departing church members lived through the airport ambush -- five of them youngsters who were lost for three days when they ran into the jungle to hide. See list of survivors

What happened to the killers? All but one of the airport gunmen died in the mass suicide. Larry Layton, who posed as a defector, was captured after badly wounding two people inside a plane trying to take off. He was not paroled from an American prison until 2002.


How did Jones die? He did not drink the cyanide. He was shot in the head, probably by a trusted aide, at the very end. His body was among the first to be identified -- through fingerprints that had been taken after a vice squad arrest five years earlier in the men's room of a Los Angeles movie theater.

What is left of Jonestown today? Nothing. The settlement has disappeared, the buildings dismantled and carried away by native Indians. Jungle weeds and trees have overgrown the area again. The only notable relic left to be found are the remains of one small rusting garden tractor. What persists is simply silence.

reply to post by Grifter42


Same way you get 100s of millions of people to believe the official media story of 911.
Same way you get everyone to want an iPhone, Android phone or Tablet.

Mind control - charasmaric leader, separation from one another (noone truly trusts the next), choices and decision making taken away over time, which conditions one to not think for themselves. They gave their personal power away over time.
Hmmmm - sounds like a more dramatic example of what our government does. Actually - as long as we can question authority and don't allow leaders to get out of control (to make personal choices for us, entrance us with their slick talk, wear us down, or have us look to them rather than one another), it wouldn't happen in society. But it's a fine line.

Some of the people of Jonestown did not kill themselves and escaped (had not been fully conditioned and had enough of self left - independent thinking). Some didnt have the capacity to understand what was happening and therefore make a conscious decision (children). I sense most were conflicted - didn't want to do it but had put all of their faith and control of their lives into the hands of another so had fully lost their sense of self as separate (will). The smallest portion probably - no hesitation or second thought.

If these people would have been living in a community where they could question authority and have a say in day to day life this would not have happened. I think of it like a muscle - if you don't exercise it, it atrophies. When it came time to exert a voice (and to act in their best interest), they were either too weak to muster it up, too afraid, or had lost it altogether.

We can also ask why other cults allow leaders to sleep with their children, murder for their chosen one(s), etc., - will bypass all moral codes - as if in a trance or like they had a labotomy.
The mind is strong but some have an uncanny abilility for manipulation. I venture to say these people were every bit as intelligent as any of us but were conditioned over time. To make sense of their deaths the best thing we can do is learn from it.

i remember reading about this years ago one minute the death count was 400 the next 900 and the way the bodies were brought back in bodybags to america made me wonder about the cia drug running with soldiers bodies stuffed with coke .

but the name colonel bo [rambo ] sticks out in my mind in that article anyone remember this