See Clip of New "Jonestown, Life & Death of Peoples Temple" Documentary

[otohara]

http://www.firelightmedia.org/#


From Salon.com

I can't imagine anyone not being both horrified and fascinated by Stanley Nelson's "Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple," but if you grew up in the '70s in the San Francisco Bay Area (as I did), you'll have that special cold-sweat feeling of revisiting an old trauma that has never quite been dealt with. It's one thing to know that on Nov. 18, 1978, a Pentecostal minister named Jim Jones persuaded 909 of his followers to kill themselves -- most by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid, infamously -- in the jungles of Guyana. That's become a dark legend of recent cultural history.

It's another thing to face the truth about Jones and his congregation: If they were a deranged, quasi-Maoist personality cult (and they certainly had become one by the end), they also were a multiracial and progressive political force, a combination of socialism and evangelical Christianity that seemed irresistibly attractive to many, many alienated people in the California of the 1970s. As Nelson details, Jones was a poor white kid from Indiana who grew up with an unusual sense of compassion for and connection with African-Americans -- but also with remarkable oratorical powers and a strange preoccupation with death.

Nelson has interviewed many surviving members of People's Temple, including two of the five -- just five! -- who escaped into the jungle rather than killing themselves on that day in 1978. Of course you know what's going to happen, and Nelson shows us pictures of the dead early in the film. But nothing, and I mean nothing, can prepare you for their stories of what actually happened, of holding a wife who has willingly drunk poison, or watching your infant son froth at the mouth and die. (We even hear audiotapes made as Jones exhorts his flock, over a chorus of weeping and moaning: "Die with a degree of dignity! Don't lie down in tears and agony!")

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2006/04/28/tribeca_1/

[IndyOp]

1. Fanaticism is fanaticism, whether right or left or Christian or Bushtian..

People seeking security, inspiration, and solidarity can lose themselves in groups of any sort. This explains fundies and Jonestown and David Koresh' Family and The Third Wave...

The Third Wave

[grunion]

3. Not every person into religion is a ''fundie''...

So this article does NOT explain Jim Jones, or his group, as them. Actually, they were very forward-thinking and progressive. Every cult isn't fundamentalist (witness Heaven's Gate--also a mass suicide within CA--or Japan's Aum Shinrikyo, the Moonies, Krishnas etc.). In fact, there's probably more cults who AREN'T ''fundies'' than those that are.

[IndyOp]

5. Right - that would explain the word 'and' in my sentence...

Boys and girls - not implying they are the same
Dogs and cats - ditto
Fundies and Jonestown and David Koresh' Family and The Third Wave - ditto, ditto, ditto

What does unite Fundies and Jonestown and Koresh' Family and The Third Wave? People seeking security, inspiration, and solidarity...

Not every person into religion is a ''fundie''. True. Like me! I mean, I guess I am into religion though I am not sure you would recognize it as such.

Welcome to DU (?) - :hi:

[NNN0LHI]

6. How do you tell if a person is just into religion or is a ''fundie''?

It seems like by the time the dangerous groups are identified it is too late.

Don

[grunion]

7. I don't figure it's my business to judge that.

Just like it's not THEIR business to call atheists ''immoral'', or gay people ''wicked''.

[malaise]

2. I still have the 1978 Time Magazine edition

from that Jonestown madness. I also have a copy of Mills' Six Years with God:Life Inside Jim Jones' People's Temple. That shook us up big time in the Caribbean. There was a lot of coverage of that in our part of the world complete with audiotapes. I think the followers were more crazy than Jim JOnes. People are really gullible. They sure drank the Kool Aid.

They were no leftists just lost people following a moron.

Add.

[Catherine Vincent]

4. Will never use the phrase "drink the kool-aid"

[kineneb]

8. People's Temple went from religion to cult

the participants followed every word of Jim Jones. I remember the whole mess, including the shootings that preceded the mass suicide.

Other groups have started out with high ideals and decended into cults - Synanon comes to mind.