{"id":16574,"date":"2013-03-11T00:56:10","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T00:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alternativejonestown.com\/?page_id=16574"},"modified":"2014-03-14T17:58:08","modified_gmt":"2014-03-14T17:58:08","slug":"hougan","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=16574","title":{"rendered":"Jim Jones and the Conspiracists"},"content":{"rendered":"

(The following article by Jim Hougan refers to two articles previously published elsewhere. The first is Reconstructing Reality: Conspiracy Theories About Jonestown<\/a>, by Rebecca Moore. The second is Hougan’s original article, to which Moore refers, Jim Jones: A Parapolitical Fugue<\/a>, by Jim Hougan. The reader is encouraged to read these two articles as well as this one appearing below.)<\/em><\/p>\n

In an article that appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture<\/i>, one of the editors of the jonestown report<\/em> considers the role that conspiracy theories have played in the unfolding narrative of \u201cJonestown.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a worthwhile endeavor to which few scholars could bring better credentials. Rebecca Moore is a professor of religious studies at San Diego State University. Her two sisters and nephew died at Jonestown and, together with her husband, Fielding McGehee, Dr. Moore has probably done more than anyone to explicate the Peoples Temple, while honoring the memory of those who died at Jonestown.<\/p>\n

She is, in other words, both brilliant and good—which makes it all the more upsetting to find that she has cast a cold, if not unkind, eye upon an article that I wrote for Lobster. That this article should have fallen within her purview is, in and of itself, something of a surprise. Dr. Moore\u2019s essay amounts to a survey of conspiracy theories, but my own article does not allege a conspiracy of any kind.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, I found myself perplexed, and not a little appalled to find myself lumped together with the unfortunately-named Dr. Peter Beter in what amounts to a clusterfuck of \u201cprofessional conspiracists.\u201d (Besides Herr Doktor Beter and myself, our mad forum includes the redoubtable John Judge, Mark Lane and the Church of Scientology.)<\/p>\n

To which, I can only say, Egad.<\/p>\n

I would much prefer to be called \u201can award-winning investigative reporter\u201d (which I am) than \u201ca professional conspiracist\u201d (which I decidedly am not). The two are very different occupations, I feel, and it is unfortunate that the good professor neglects to distinguish the one from the other in her article.<\/p>\n

For the record, here is the distinction: an investigative reporter mines the public record for news that has not yet broken, revealing circumstances and events that are at once important and concealed.<\/p>\n

A conspiracist does much the same, but his product differs from the investigative reporter\u2019s in a very important way. That is to say, it is unverifiable. That is how we know it\u2019s conspiracism, rather than reportage. The conspiracist\u2019s story can never be verified. His (or her) most important sources are unidentified, unworthy of belief or simply unavailable to the public. (Some examples, respectively: \u201cAccording to a high-ranking Pentagon official,\u201d \u201caccording to Bruce Roberts, author of the Gemstone File,\u201d \u201caccording to a secret CIA report,\u201d etc.) Citations of this sort are the investigative equivalent of smoke and mirrors.<\/p>\n

In the event, Dr. Moore defines a professional conspiracist as one \u201cwho see(s) all events through the hermeneutical lenses of conspiracy.\u201d In the context of the Peoples Temple, she summarizes the conspiracists\u2019 point of view, which holds \u201cthat people in Jonestown were murdered by U.S. government agents—either military or intelligence. These agents,\u201d she continues, \u201ccommitted the murders to conceal some other, more damaging information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, fair enough. The definition certainly describes the point of view of most Jonestown conspiracists. But I still don\u2019t understand why I\u2019m included among their number. Because I don\u2019t believe that anyone in Jonestown was murdered by a government agent.<\/p>\n

What I do believe is that, until 1970, Jim Jones was a government informant, working against black religious organizations such as Father Divine\u2019s. (The evidence for this is laid out in the article I wrote for Lobster. Whether that argument is convincing or not is for the reader to decide. But the footnotes are there. The sources are respectable. And the documents I\u2019ve cited are easily retrieved.)<\/p>\n

That said, my belief that Jones was a government informant is probably not the reason that Dr. Moore corrals me in the conspiracists\u2019 ghetto. After all, only a professional idiot would fail to question Jones\u2019 bona fides. Even if we overlook his 201 file at the CIA and his strange association with Dan Mitrione (a notorious spook), it is a matter of blatant fact that our Hoosier\u2019s lifework culminated in the violent deaths of more than 900 men, women and children of the Left. That this catastrophe occurred in what might be called \u201cthe age of COINTELPRO\u201d seems to me a circumstance sufficiently out of the ordinary as to merit unusual scrutiny and skepticism.<\/p>\n

So…if I don\u2019t allege a conspiracy, why does Dr. Moore include me in the conspiracist\u2019s camp? Perhaps because my article is conspiratorial in tone. That is, it retraces an extended and suspect hegira that Jones took to Mexico, Cuba and South America during the early 1960s. In the course of that trip, Jones is found to have met with CIA officers (in Brazil), and to have given anti-communist speeches (in Guyana)—a peculiar stance for a self-declared leftist such as Jones.<\/p>\n

But the real reason that Dr. Moore battens me into the conspiracists\u2019 hatch is, I suspect, my assertion that many of those who died at Jonestown were coerced into doing so. That is to say, they walked up to the poisoned vat for the same reason that a great many Jews walked to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. True, they moved under their own locomotion—but that is not to say that they acted under their own volition.<\/p>\n

On the contrary. They were \u201cunder the gun.\u201d Literally. And that means they were murdered. Because \u201cenforced suicide\u201d is an oxymoron.<\/p>\n

That mass-murder was an integral part of the last White Night is, moreover, apparent from the forensic evidence assembled by Guyanese pathologist Dr. Leslie Mootoo. Mootoo\u2019s medical investigation—on the basis of which he concluded that cyanide was forcibly administered to many of the people at Jonestown—was by far the most extensive conducted. Nor are Dr. Mootoo\u2019s findings the only evidence of murder. There is the harrowing account of Stanley Clayton and other survivors. According to Clayton, he escaped from Jonestown by talking his way past a cordon sanitaire of armed guards whose purpose (he tells us) was to keep people in, rather than to keep imaginary invaders out.<\/p>\n

Clearly, some of the Templars committed suicide. Just as clearly, others did not.<\/p>\n

That this should be a controversial statement is owing to the different equities that various individuals and institutions have in the story. \u201cAnticult activists,\u201d for example, would have us believe that Jim Jones was a sinister genius who brainwashed his flock, such that they committed suicide upon command. The message? Don\u2019t join a cult or it will turn you into a self-destructive robot. (Join us, instead. Now!)<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, the Church of Scientology repudiates this view. According to the Church, the Peoples Temple was a warm and fuzzy Org whose members were viciously snuffed out by a cabal of \u201canti-religious activists\u201d in cahoots with government secret agents. The message? We are a persecuted 501-c3 organization battling for your right to breathe free.<\/p>\n

Yet a third point of view is put forward by conspiracists such as John Judge, whose political agendas lead them to conclude that Jonestown was a mind-control experiment gone terminal. The message? Watch out for Big Brother.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/center><\/p>\n

My own findings are less absolutist, and so it would seem that they ought to be less controversial. Nothing that I\u2019ve written about Jones\u2019 background suggests the existence of a government conspiracy to destroy the Peoples Temple. On the contrary. What I\u2019ve tried to suggest is that the mentally unstable and physically ill Jim Jones, while under pressure from Congress, the media and the Concerned Relatives, initiated the last White Night in what amounted to an act of vanity. Fearful that his deepest secrets were about to be revealed, with the result that he would be discredited in the eyes of his followers, Jones pulled the plug on his congregation and the world.<\/p>\n

If I am right, this was the act of psychopath and, indeed, I would contend that it is only in the light of Jones\u2019 psychopathy that \u201cJonestown\u201d can be understood.<\/p>\n

It may be that I am mistaken. There are some who still insist that Jones was a saint. But whether he was a devil, as I believe, or a saint, as others would insist, is something that should only be decided on the basis of evidence.<\/p>\n

And that is where Dr. Moore lets us down. The message implicit in her survey is that \u201cconspiracists\u201d are wrong-headed—because they are conspiracists. Accordingly, the reader is encouraged to dismiss the conspiracists\u2019 arguments without ever bothering to read them. Because, of course, \u201cconspiracist\u201d is a term of art. Among academics, it is a synonym for \u201cnutter.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is obviously wrong-headed if the writer is guilty (as I am) of taking a heuristic approach to understanding events as strange as Jonestown.<\/p>\n

But even if a conspiracy is alleged, I would argue that this in itself does not make—or should not make—the writer a \u201cconspiracist.\u201d Because conspiracies are quite real. They exist, and they sometimes have profound effects upon our lives. Diabolical plots by evil geniuses are as real as 9-11 and the Holocaust. So, too, are the bumbling cabals of politicians and intelligence operatives bent upon adventures such as Iran-Contra, Watergate and the Bay of Pigs.<\/p>\n

Would Dr. Moore hold that the Nuremburg Trials were an exercise in conspiracism? Of course not. Would she deny that Hamas, al-Qaeda, the CIA, Enron and the Mafia are, by their very nature, conspiratorial? I doubt it.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, it is fair to say that there is an epistemological divide between scholars such as Dr. Moore and well-intentioned sleuths such as John Judge. On the one hand, we have the \u201cprofessional conspiracists,\u201d who tend to see evil everywhere. And on the other hand, we have the \u201cprofessional coincidentalists\u201d who (let\u2019s be clear about it) wouldn\u2019t know a conspiracy if they found themselves framed for the murder of Beowolf.<\/p>\n

The origins of this divide can probably be traced to an untimely coincidence of the 1960s. In 1964, the eminent historian, Richard Hofstadter, published an essay in Harper\u2019s Magazine. Entitled, \u201cThe Paranoid Style in American Politics,\u201d Hofstadter\u2019s piece inveighed against the \u201cheated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy\u201d of right-wing demagogues such Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society.<\/p>\n

What made the article untimely was the fact that its publication coincided neatly with the completion of the Warren Commission\u2019s report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That report, which validated the FBI\u2019s findings that the President had been murdered by a lone nut, was submitted to the Johnson White House on September 24, 1964. Exactly one month later, Harper\u2019s hit the newsstands with Hofstadter\u2019s article, attacking \u201cthe paranoid style.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Hofstadter did not mention the Kennedy assassination, his essay provided a convenient and respectable framework for subsequent attacks upon critics of the Warren Commission. Suddenly, it was intellectually disreputable—\u201dparanoid\u201d and unpatriotic—to question the edicts and findings of respectable institutions like the Warren Commission, CBS and The New York Times. Ambitious academics, desperate for tenure, took their cue.<\/p>\n

Serious researchers like Harold Weisberg soon found it almost impossible to publish. And when a publisher was finally found, Weisberg and his colleagues were as often as not dismissed as \u201cconspiracy theorists\u201d by journalists and academics who made little or no effort to evaluate their research.<\/p>\n

Nearly 40 years have now passed since Hofstadter\u2019s article first appeared, and in that time the world has been plagued by terrorism, assassination, genocide and war. Parapolitical structures headquartered in caves have laid waste Wall Street, killing thousands of Americans. Constitutional protections have been suspended, superseded or exempted to death, while a new regime of surveillance unfolds in the heartland.<\/p>\n

Surely, it is time that we put an end to the name-calling, and begin to follow the evidence. All of the evidence. Wherever it goes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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