{"id":70875,"date":"2017-10-27T02:17:57","date_gmt":"2017-10-27T09:17:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=70875"},"modified":"2022-12-21T16:12:05","modified_gmt":"2022-12-22T00:12:05","slug":"jonestown-victims-died-of-murder","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=70875","title":{"rendered":"Jonestown Victims Died of Murder"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Jakob Harrison is a Seaman in the Royal Australian Naval Cadets at Magdalene Catholic High in New South Wales, Australia. This paper is adapted from a Powerpoint presentation.)<\/em><\/p>\n

I literally went into the depths of hell for this presentation: I listened to all the recordings Jim Jones made, over 149 hours\u2019 worth; I listened to the so-called \u201cdeath tape,\u201d the tape in which he instructs his followers to commit suicide and murder; I watched over 32 hours of news reports radio broadcasts and documentaries. But probably the most grueling part was searching through the 4,000+ documents which the FBI sent me.<\/p>\n

Have you ever heard the term, \u201cDon\u2019t drink the Kool-Aid?\u201d or \u201cYou have drunk the Kool-Aid.\u201d? The saying refers to the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project \u2013 better known as Jonestown,\u00a0and means that you have or are going to do something dangerous or doomed due to peer pressure.<\/p>\n

Jonestown\u00a0was\u00a0a commune located in the jungle of Guyana, South America. On November 18, 1978 Reverend James Warren Jones \u2013 or Jim Jones, as he preferred to be called \u2013 led a group of 909 women, children and men in a \u201crevolutionary suicide\u201d by drinking cyanide-laced fruit punch. Although many refer to this as \u201cKool-Aid,\u201d the actual brand was a British version of the drink known as Flavor-Ade. It was the single largest non-natural disaster in US history before 9\/11 and the greatest loss of life in a single day since WWII.<\/p>\n

Now what would cause this? The main contributing factors to the \u201cmass suicide\u201d were the airstrip shooting, Jim\u2019s constant control of power, his allegiance to the Communist Party, and the belief that he was a prophet.<\/p>\n

The first factor of the \u201cmass suicide\u201d was the shooting at an airstrip several miles from Jonestown, where several young men \u2013 members of a security unit at\u00a0Jonestown known as the \u201cRed Brigade\u201d\u00a0\u2013 opened fire on two planes which were boarding members of a congressional fact finding team and several defectors. The shooting killed Congressman Leo Ryan, three newsmen covering the congressman\u2019s trip, and Temple defector Patricia Parks, and wounded several others.<\/p>\n

The second main contributing factor to the \u201csuicide\u201d is that Peoples Temple was the only thing that Jim had absolute control over. After the shooting at the airstrip, Jones knew that his community would be destroyed. He was so fixated on maintaining power over his creation that he decided to end it on his own terms rather than submit and allow others to intervene.\u00a0To maintain this absolute control, he ended everything that he and the members of Peoples Temple worked for. Forcing Peoples Temple members to commit mass suicide was Jim Jones\u2019 ultimate expression of control.<\/p>\n

You may have noticed that I refer to the events at Jonestown as \u201cmass suicide.\u201d This is how it was portrayed by the press in the immediate aftermath of the deaths and for several years thereafter. To be honest, many including myself and survivors dispute this characterization and claim it to be murder, as evidenced by the coroner\u2019s report which showed that a large number of fatalities were caused by injecting cyanide in unreachable places, meaning that a second party needed to inject it. And that makes it murder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Jakob Harrison is a Seaman in the Royal Australian Naval Cadets at Magdalene Catholic High in New South Wales, Australia. This paper is adapted from a Powerpoint presentation.) I literally went into the depths of hell for this presentation: I listened to all the recordings Jim Jones made, over 149 hours\u2019 worth; I listened to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":70228,"menu_order":12,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-70875","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70875","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70875"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70876,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70875\/revisions\/70876"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}