Every year, I used to dread and rage on this dark, agonizing anniversary.
For a time, my blog vented the despair and anger over one of the most preventable, senseless crimes of the century and at the people who continued spewing apologist drivel about the Peoples Temple cult.
Nooooo, it really was NOT a “cult,” even if its lord and master Jim Jones was a bad guy. No, no, no; these cult captives weren’t “brainwashed,” they were simply idealists in search of a better world.
Such were the same old outrageous, ridiculous claims made in a recent interview by a former nemesis of mine, Fielding “Mac” McGehee. He runs the Jonestown Institute with his wife, Rebecca Moore, sister to two of Jonestown’s vicious executioners, Annie and Carolyn, who after helping orchestrate the mass murder (notsuicide in most cases) joined their Antichrist Jim for a final resting place in Hell.
Mac and Becky are no longer my enemies. They’re actually two very affable people who never reciprocated the vitriol I’d hurl at them. I will, however, always recoil at their relentless delusions, shared by their cronies, about the reality of this horrific cult. And I eventually became numb from the appalling fact that they and their fellow Temple apologists pulled off a memorial to the nearly thousand dead Americans, with the names of Jim Jones and his murderous gang of assassins also inscribed.
Six years ago I made my final blog entry about this atrocity heaped onto another. What else was there to say to such added madness?
Today, the big 40 Year Anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre has arrived. There’ll be the usual shallow, distorted mass media coverage, of course, but on this day amplified, because that’s protocol for specially numbered years.
Rest In Peace, buried hope, indignation, and the spirits of those babies, children, mothers, fathers, and grandparents.
(Tom Kinsolving’s previous article for this site is Stacking Of Arms After Fighting The Good Fight. His blog is the Jonestown Apologist Alert. He may be reached at mrtpk@yahoo.com.)