{"id":107577,"date":"2020-12-14T10:37:29","date_gmt":"2020-12-14T18:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=107577"},"modified":"2022-12-22T15:13:13","modified_gmt":"2022-12-22T23:13:13","slug":"conspiracies-sell-but-whos-buying","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=107577","title":{"rendered":"Conspiracies sell…but who’s buying?"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Henri Helander\u2019s contributions to this website include the <\/em>Alternative History (Conspiracy) Theory Index<\/a> and a compilation of videos all placed online in 2018, <\/strong>40 Years After Jonestown<\/a>. He lives with his daughter in \u00c4\u00e4nekoski, Finland and works with disabled people. He became aware of Jonestown and Peoples Temple \u2013 in about 1985 when he was 9 years old \u2013 through Manowar’s song Guyana (Cult of the Damned)<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

People can be led to believe most unbelievable things and most outrageous scenarios. Conspiracy theories have been on the rise for quite awhile and keep flourishing as Republicans are spreading conspiratorial lies about COVID-19 vaccine. Former President Trump even \u201dconfirmed\u201d that the so-called \u201dDeep State\u201d is operating among our midst. Then he proceeded to undertake an attempt to steal the presidential election of 2020 with totally unfounded conspiracy theories, to the point of insurgence when his core followers invaded the US Capitol at his behest on January 6th. Fruitless effort didn\u2019t stop him from repeating the same lies to his uneducated fan base while the cult surrounding him shows no signs of waning down. Just ask Ted Nugent. People taking QAnon seriously seem far beyond the reach of rationality.<\/p>\n

Conspiracy theories can be big business. Countless amounts of currency are cast in survivalist bunkers, soldered in cables and DACs of high-end (of the Hi-Fi) people. Belief in these theories can be a misguided hobby or \u2013 as in the latter case \u2013 a hobby can become the genesis for a conspiracy theory. (Actually, cable conspiracy is easily one of the more plausible, and harmless theories around).<\/p>\n

Not many people deny that there are Unidentified Flying Objects, but are those UFOs inhabited by delegates of alien civilization? That is a different matter entirely. For UFO believers as well as conspiracists alike, the slightest shred of evidence is proof enough, be it a blurry picture or a handheld shaky videocam footage. It\u2019s all good\u2026 until the stage is set for the men in black to appear. Hard at work with no smiles on their faces and no song in their hearts, they prevent any leaks of classified knowledge, concealing hard evidence by harvesting all the crashed UFOs, suppressing all information about what they\u2019re doing and what they\u2019re finding. Dr. Steven Greer\u2019s documentaries are a prime example of all of this. He mixes highly dubious \u201cevidence\u201d of alien spacecrafts with conspiracy theories of government cover-ups, then chokes up to drive his message home. So did another UFO enthusiast by the name of Marshall Applewhite of Heaven\u2019s Gate cult fame.<\/p>\n

The World Trade Center attacks of 2001 saw the U.S. Government taking very drastic measures against its own people, according to other theories. Instead of religious extremism, 9\/11 attacks were orchestrated by people at the very top, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Bremer. To what end? Why, it\u2019s simple: to gain control over the world\u2019s oil production, to wield more power over Americans, to justify and to benefit from the upcoming military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It\u2019s incredible that people actually believe that their own government would be willing sacrifice so many lives, although we\u2019re not talking Hitler\u2019s Germany here. But then again, flat-earthers are still around. They never went away.<\/p>\n

Jim Jones was both an avid consumer (at least he said so) and origin of numerous conspiracy theories. As a self-proclaimed god, he saw himself as so important, such a threat to the U.S. establishment, that the CIA and FBI needed to take him down by any means necessary. Huge part of implementation of the tragedies in Guyana (Jonestown, Georgetown, Port Kaituma) is how Jones\u2019 inner circle bought into his drug-fueled, paranoid, conspiracy-driven wavelength of mind and eventually saw no other solution except mass murder\/suicide to the community\u2019s problems. They generated those problems themselves with their manufactured conspiracy theories, supplemented with prison camp tactics.<\/p>\n

Conspiracy theories about Jonestown did not die on November 18, they just changed the identities of their adherents and the details of the plots. Why was Jonestown built, what purpose did it serve, why did people die? Author Michael Meiers described Jonestown as a testing site for an AIDS outbreak, while the Black Panther Party suggested that the whole population was exterminated by neutron bomb explosion. \u201cWell-documented\u201d articles on CIA\/FBI-based conspiracies are abundant on the web. Those don\u2019t include Guyanese explanations: that Prime Minister Forbes Burnham ran Jonestown as a prostitution ring, or as a drug-manufacturing center, until things got too hot and he had to shut it down. At the end of the day I think what really happened in Jonestown was so horrific in every sense, people just can\u2019t wrap their heads around it, so they need alternate theories to make senseless seem sensible.<\/p>\n

The mother of all conspiracy theories is the alleged existence of God. Religion was conceived to prey on human weaknesses, it has been maintained and especially profited by lots of \u201dchurches\u201d and their \u201dministers.\u201d The crimes of Catholics, Laestadians and Jehova\u2019s Witnesses are burdensome on the whole institute of religion, as those are some of the worst crimes in the world. Hypocrisy is paramount. If you believe in God (or any kind of deity), you can be led to believe anything, therefore eventually at the grip of the \u201dright\u201d misleader you might be ready to obey anything. Mere knowledge that up to 40% of American adults believe in the claims of young Earth creationism is somehow chilling as it is appalling, since it\u2019s so unimaginable in face of all the science that has been taught to us. Finding God can be a good thing for an individual suffering from addictions, but on a larger scale, religion\u2019s power over humans manifests itself in religious wars, discrimination, hate, people choosing not to get medical treatment for themselves, in saddest cases for their offspring, bizarre cult tragedies and terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n

Terrorist attacks are today\u2019s cult tragedies. Manson family members committed the Tate-LaBianca murders, members of Peoples Temple killed Leo Ryan at Port Kaituma, Branch Davidians shot ATF agents at Waco, Aum Shinrikyo spread the deadly sarin gas. Still, the destructive cults of yesteryear more often seemed like a danger to their own participants, their chidren, ex-members, and in some most tragic instances like Order of the Solar Temple, their immediate family. The cult of today is a danger to people at large.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not a slightest shred of evidence of God\u2019s existence, not even the most blurriest picture, vaguest sound recording or the shakiest camcorder footage, but still people believe, pray for their lives and \u201csow the seeds\u201d of thousands upon thousands of dollars to scam ministries.<\/p>\n

On the other hand there\u2019s mountains, or in this case piles of bodies, proving God\u2019s absence. Why didn\u2019t God hear the anguished cries of children of Jonestown? Why didn\u2019t he see when the bodies started to pile up? On a much smaller scale, these are shades of Auschwitz indeed.<\/p>\n

One thing is certain. On November 18, 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana, no God nor any kind of savior sat on his throne with a mic in his hand, urging his followers to kill themselves. Alone, consumed by all-too-human madness, Jim Jones made the final fateful decision. There\u2019s no amount of conspiracy thinking to get past that fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Henri Helander\u2019s contributions to this website include the Alternative History (Conspiracy) Theory Index and a compilation of videos all placed online in 2018, 40 Years After Jonestown. He lives with his daughter in \u00c4\u00e4nekoski, Finland and works with disabled people. He became aware of Jonestown and Peoples Temple \u2013 in about 1985 when he was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":111220,"menu_order":25,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-107577","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/107577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=107577"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/107577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119047,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/107577\/revisions\/119047"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/111220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=107577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}