(This paper was written as a research essay for a course in International History of the Cold War in the\u00a0History Programme of the School of Humanities (SoH)\u00a0at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). Comments and questions about this article are welcome at sohcmesmond@gmail.com<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n 1.1 Context and Research Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n The term \u201cJonestown\u201d can be used to refer to two phenomena. The first refers to an agricultural facility in Guyana developed by Peoples Temple, a Christian church that was founded by Reverend Jim Jones in Indianapolis in the 1950s,[1] <\/a>and that left the United States in the late 1970s to live at that commune.[2]<\/a> Secondly, the term can refer to the tragic events that took place on November 18, 1978, when the Cold War was in the final months of d\u00e9tente.[3]<\/a> It began when assassins from Peoples Temple shot and killed five people from an assemblage of approximately twenty people departing from Jonestown.[4]<\/a> Among the victims was Congressman Leo Ryan (D-Calif.), who, on the urging of the Concerned Relatives, a loose coalition of former Peoples Temple members, family members, and other critics of Jim Jones,visited Jonestown to investigate rumours that the commune\u2019s denizens were held against their will by Jones.[5]<\/a> Subsequently, 909 members of the Jonestown community who feared reprisals from the US for the murder of the congressman died in a mass murder-suicide ritual overseen by Jones. These murder-suicides caused by the ingestion of fruit punch laced with cyanide, subsequently gave rise to the popular neologism of \u201cdrinking the Kool-Aid.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n On this note, the hot dimensions of the Cold War remain,[7]<\/a> ironically, better documented than instances of cold conflicts that characterised the said period. Indeed, little has been said about the tragedy\u2019s relevance to the swinging pendulum of domestic politics in the US vis-\u00e0-vis its main Communist rival, namely the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Departing from the literature that stressed the pivotal role of Jim Jones as a wayward charismatic leader,[8]<\/a> I will analyse the discourse that was constructed around reports of the November 18 murder-suicides, as well as how these deaths became a catalyst for a departure from left-wing libertarianism towards a more conservative-centred alternative during the Cold War. I thus seek to answer the following questions: How did the Jonestown murder-suicides of 1978 prompt a conservative response to American politics, and how did coverage of the event galvanise a response towards the USSR during the last years of the Cold War under President Ronald Reagan?<\/p>\n 1.2 Scope of Essay and Key Arguments<\/strong><\/p>\n To be sure, I am not furthering a reductionist-deterministic version of interpreting the Cold War in America, where reactions to the murder-suicides in Jonestown had guaranteed the Democratic Party\u2019s departure from political prominence and Reagan\u2019s subsequent presidency. Here, I will examine how Jonestown\u2019s portrayal in American popular culture and history aroused reactions towards a largely-imagined communist contamination of the American way of life. Jonestown makes an excellent case to add to the growing literature of the cultural Cold War, since its legal and political status in Guyana had rejected the typical pigeonholing of organisations into the Soviet-communist and American-democratic dichotomy.<\/p>\n By studying the events after the Jonestown murder-suicides, this essay serves to forward two distinctive, albeit interrelated arguments. Using archival material, autobiographies and newspaper articles contemporaneous with the period, I will show how the Jonestown murder-suicides revived the Lavender Scare during the Cold War, where anti-American communist agents and their sexually-deviant alter egos posed a \u201csecurity risk\u201d to the lives of Americans.[9]<\/a> Discoveries of Jones\u2019 assault on the heterosexual American family swung American voters in the favour of a more conservative government who could protect Americans from Soviet advances. The press effectively constructed parallel discourses where similarities in the indoctrination techniques used by Jones were juxtaposed alongside the use of brainwashing techniques the USSR.[10]<\/a> Thus, descriptions like these, coupled with Jones\u2019 already staunch declaration of support for the USSR, crystallised America\u2019s distrust of the Soviets.<\/p>\n The Jonestown suicide-murders, as I will argue in my second contention, propelled domestic cynicism with left wing libertarianism to the forefront of American domestic politics. Thus, left wing libertarianism should no longer remain tolerated if the American nation was to win the Cold War. The solution thus manifested in the form of Ronald Reagan, who stood in contrast with the lackadaisical attitude adopted by the then-incumbent President Jimmy Carter, whose liberalist administration was accused of substandard performance at home and abroad. D\u00e9tente took its last breath as Reagan\u2019s rhetoric of an intensified Cold War became a reality.<\/p>\n 2. Discourse Construction: How Was Jonestown a Soviet Microcosm?<\/strong><\/p>\n 2.1 Reverend Jim Jones: An American Father\u2019s Shame<\/strong><\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, the deaths of 918 Americans spawned a media circus.[11]<\/a> The months following the murder-suicides were marked by numerous journalistic investigations, and most newspaper reports found it noteworthy to dwell upon Jones\u2019 ambiguous sexuality. Even before the murder-suicides, Jones was renowned for being addressed as a \u201cFather,\u201d[12]<\/a> yet subsequently-confirmed rumours about how he treated his \u201cchildren\u201d had failed to correspond with the responsibilities of an idealised American dad. Children, for example, were imprisoned in box-like prisons or thrown into wells as a form of harsh discipline[13]<\/a> until they acknowledged their mistakes to their Father.[14]<\/a><\/p>\n Instead of being the most basic social unit that staved off communism from the 1950s to the 1960s,[15]<\/a> the concept of \u201chome\u201d in Jonestown actively embraced the doctrine of communism amongst its denizens. The destruction of the family meant that the socialist collective \u2013 the American antithesis \u2013 took a life of its own. And the collective\u2019s displacement of the family, as Jonestown had done, opens a window of opportunity for the abuses of power \u2013 be it sexual or institutional.<\/p>\n Jones\u2019 sex-hungry nature was first revealed in a newspaper account of November 27, 1978, which reported how the Temple leader insisted on having sex with the women of Peoples Temple because \u201cDad knows best.\u201d[16]<\/a> Men were concurrently emasculated by their Dad, as they were forced to denounce themselves as homosexuals. Their wives were no better off, having to declare to the world that Jones \u201cwas the best lover that they had ever been with.\u201d[17]<\/a> Indeed, defector Debbie Layton confirmed how Jones, her father, had sex with her multiple times, on the pretext of \u201chelping her.\u201d[18]<\/a> The symbolism of sex, and its respective perversions in Jones\u2019 case served to drive this point home: every aspect of life in Jonestown was managed by an all-powerful \u201csingle master\u201d who \u201creduced the lives of his followers to that of a useful instrument\u201d[19]<\/a> like in the USSR.[20]<\/a> This was contrasted with the heterosexual and idealised American family, where sex was not controlled by the state,[21]<\/a> but determined by couples devoted to the raising of children rather than abusing and conditioning them to communist subservience.<\/p>\n The fact that Jones publicly affiliated himself with the socialist cause even before moving to Guyana, and the press\u2019 consistent branding of Jones as a \u201ccommunist\u201d or \u201csocialist\u201d after the murder-suicides, did not serve to support his case any further. Debates about subversive Soviet agents who pretended to be nation-loving Americans were also pushed to the forefront of the American public\u2019s understanding of Jonestown. A thinly-veiled reference of Jones was made, for example, to the Rosenbergs who peddled American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.[22]<\/a><\/p>\n The perversion of gender roles and Jones\u2019 failure to live up to his duties as a father shows most astutely over John Victor Stoen, the subject of the child custody battle that triggered the Jonestown mass murder suicides.[23]<\/a> The battle over John Victor Stoen was as much a product of how Americans defined a family in contrast with Jones\u2019 perversion of fatherhood. The clash of values was embodied within John\u2019s biological parents Tim and Grace Stoen, in contrast with Jones, although Jones claimed to have fathered the child even after a Superior Court Judge in San Francisco ordered the child\u2019s return to his biological parents.[24]<\/a> John Stoen died on November 18. His biological parents, in particularly Tim Stoen, who defected from being a once-stalwart defender of Jones, were singled out for being alert and individual in thought, in contrast with the many who chose to die alongside Jones. Tim Stoen, for example, bemoaned about how he was being forced into \u201ca collision course with a man [Jones]\u201d that \u201c[Stoen] was so fiercely loyal to\u201d ever since he realised that he \u201cdidn\u2019t like the authoritarianism\u201d enforced by Peoples Temple.[25]<\/a><\/p>\n Here, what I wish to drive home was not only the stark contrast between bright, individualistic white Americans versus the many black Americans who died alongside Jones, but the contrasted notions of idealised parenthood in the US as well. The Stoen couple tried to seize their offspring from the clutches of a communist-maniac through their use of American legal institutions instead of Jones\u2019 \u201ctyrannical hold\u201d by fiat.[26]<\/a> Although John ultimately perished along with the rest of the Jonestown community,[27]<\/a> the revolution of the entire crisis around the authenticity and potentially life-saving love of his parents contrasted with the abuse that Jones\u2019 communist-socialist children had to endure. The dichotomies of loving-American family versus the amoral-Soviet leaning Jones were constructed and continuously circulated by the American media, a trend that continued until March 1979.[28]<\/a><\/p>\n More dramatically, articles devoted their introductions to Jonestown with the image of how Jones insisted that \u201crevolutionary suicide\u201d was the only means for Peoples Temple to make a statement against the imperialist Americans. The mytheme of how mothers were forced to give their crying children cyanide-laced fruit punch before succumbing to the poisoned drink themselves were used as lead-ins to at least six periodicals in the immediate aftermath of 18 November 1978.[29]<\/a> Hence, the irony of Jones\u2019 claim that he was the only ideal father in Jonestown was not lost upon American readers. This emotional message was hammered home by images of loving mothers and their children dying at the hands of a communist-deviant father. Jones was also imagined to be detached from the chaos, which included graphic descriptions of screaming children who went \u201cinto convulsions, their eyes roll[ing] upward\u2026gasp[ing] for breath and then fall[ing] dead.\u201d[30]<\/a><\/p>\n Jones\u2019 biological son Stephan Jones, who happened to be away from Jonestown when Jones orchestrated the murder-suicides and who subsequently testified that he \u201chate[d] this [Jim Jones] because he has destroyed everything I\u2019ve worked for,\u201d drove the following point home:[31]<\/a> Jim Jones was a morally bankrupt, aspiring communist who undertook actions that were reprehensible even by his own biological children\u2019s standards, let alone the many fictive kin whom he had lured to their deaths. Imagery of this nature would have horrified any American reader, since Jones was already singled out for his egomaniacal and pro-socialist tendencies of \u201ctotal equality\u201d even before Leo Ryan\u2019s visit.[32]<\/a> The perversion of Jones\u2019 instincts, and how this concern was presented to the American public, was indubitably a mirror of the earlier Lavender Scare, where deviant Americans were metamorphosed as Soviet insurgents who sought to sunder American unity against the creeping Soviet force. In other words, there were communist demons within America\u2019s midst, masquerading as cults that were deceptively religious and benign, both traits that were hardly associated with communism. Yet, Jones turned out to be the proverbial communist wolf in Christ\u2019s clothing.<\/p>\n 2.2 Re-creating the USSR Through Discourse: Brainwashing, Potemkin Villages, Guns and Impenetrable Walls<\/strong><\/p>\n Images of brainwashing, a core contention in this section, likewise, has been a common trope in the descriptions of the \u201cmind-programming campaign\u201d that Jones had inflicted upon his own children.[33]<\/a> Arguably, while few direct comparisons made vis-\u00e0-vis the Soviet Union were made, the description of methods used by Jones would have rung true with Americans who were already steeped within American representations of brainwashing throughout popular media about the Korean and Vietnam Wars.[34]<\/a> Descriptions of Jones\u2019 borrowed indoctrination techniques from \u201cother socialist experiments, in China, in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, in North Vietnam\u201d were rampant after the murder-suicides.[35]<\/a> The New York Times<\/em>, for example, ran a feature on the extensive list of \u201cthousands of doses of dangerous drugs\u201d found in Jonestown, and corroborated these drugs\u2019 use with survivors who insisted that the \u201cpeople who wanted to leave were fed drugs,\u201d after which they \u201clost their desire to leave and no farther behavioural problems were anticipated.\u201d[36]<\/a> Although the Marxist Jones claimed that religion was the opiate of the masses, he was not averse to using physical drugs to keep his victims in check. The human mind, as these reports implied, was once a bastion of American individualism,[37]<\/a> was now to be subverted using materialist methods advocated by a prodigious agent of the USSR who called himself Jim Jones.<\/p>\n Sentiments of this idealist nature took on a more material description and subtle juxtaposing of Jonestown as a textbook instance of communist hypocrisy. Jones, in countless depictions after his death, was represented in a mold not unlike Stalin\u2019s own since the days of Kennan\u2019s Long Telegram \u2013 paranoid, neurotic, and most importantly, intolerant of dissent.[38]<\/a> The death of devotee Bob Houston in 1977 after he argued with Jones about socialism \u2013 and the concurrent suggestion that Houston was assassinated by Jones\u2019 agents \u2013 was a case in point.[39]<\/a> Ironically, despite claiming that dissidents were free to leave his \u201csocialist paradise,\u201d and Jones\u2019 criticism of the \u201cmalicious lies\u201d about Jonestown being home to a cache of \u201c200 to 300 rifles, 25 pistols and a homemade bazooka\u201d maintained by \u201ca squad of 50 armed guards,[40]<\/a> audio records of the commune\u2019s final moments prove how dissenters who refused to partake in Jones\u2019 poisoned punch were shouted down.[41]<\/a> The triangulated relationship between Jonestown, a concurrent experiment of fascism and socialism was hardly concealed, and in fact repeatedly peddled by the press.[42]<\/a><\/p>\n Accounts of this nature find a psychological and physical counterpart across the Atlantic Ocean in Berlin, where Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of a wall which cut the city in half as a \u201cdefensive\u201d structure that doubled as an \u201canti-Fascist protection wall\u201d[43]<\/a>: the physical barrier constrained both defection and the freedom of one\u2019s mind; within their respective confines, one saw no hope from escaping the communist dogma pontificated to them. Jones was no exception to the rule. Jones, for example, relied upon the dense jungles of Guyana as his physical \u201cprison,\u201d which proved to be an indomitable obstacle to potential defectors, although \u201canyone is free to come and go.\u201d[44]<\/a> Likewise, depictions of Jonestown\u2019s farce were no coincidence. The Potemkin village with sanitation that can \u201cnever be seen in any part of the world, except Switzerland [where] you can eat off the ground\u201d never existed, much less the \u201cconsistently high level of medical care\u201d and \u201csubstantial nourishing food\u201d found there.[45]<\/a> Jonestown plainly reflected the chronic shortages of daily consumer goods and freedom found in the USSR\u2019s planned economy under its contemporary leader Leonid Brezhnev.[46]<\/a> Instead, what one witnessed behind the scenes was a \u201cprison\u201d as rightfully suspected by Leo Ryan and the group of Concerned Relatives that accompanied him.[47]<\/a> The hypocrisy of freedom as pontificated by the USSR to Western Europeans and Americans, as the press had cleverly done in a roundabout manner, was mirrored in the fiasco called Jonestown.<\/p>\n Anxieties about how the US was replete with communist spies like that of Jones\u2019 own were naturally understandable after the wake of the murder-suicides. This section, however, wishes to point out the discourse that is shaped with an idealised evil in mind \u2013 namely, the Soviet Union and all its proxies \u2013 notwithstanding the fact that Jones refused to turn to the USSR in a final desperate plea to ensure the safety of his people.[48]<\/a> Subsequent discoveries of the wills left behind by Jones and his wife Marceline did not help their cause either. The American public would have been shocked that Jones not only sent messengers to deliver $500,000 to the Soviet Embassy in Guyana,[49]<\/a> but that Jones and Marceline insisted that their properties pass into the hands of the American Communist Party after their deaths as well.[50]<\/a> Jonestown was an inflexion point for Americans at home, and the Carter administration\u2019s management of the fallout would be one of the many nails hammered into the Democrats\u2019 coffin during the presidential elections of 1980.<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0<\/strong>The Carter Administration\u2019s Missteps: American Weaknesses and Reagan\u2019s Rise<\/strong><\/p>\n Naturally, the Carter administration\u2019s handling of the suicide-murders did not satisfy Americans who were desperate and angry with their government\u2019s lackadaisical attitude. What the Americans were confronted with was a contradiction of numbers \u2013 the final death toll of 918 was underestimated for several days, with the initial body count of 408 rising throughout the week.[51]<\/a> The bungled actions of the Carter administration\u2019s coordination with its Guyanese counterpart was merely the tip of the iceberg. As Americans looked to their colour televisions and news reports flooded with \u201cdreadful colour pictures (of)\u2026bloated bodies,\u201d horror turned to blame.[52]<\/a> Leo Ryan, alongside the Concerned Relatives, were once portrayed as suspicious fools who dared to challenge the victimised Jones. Now, they became martyrs and lone voices of truth.[53]<\/a> Questions then turned to the US State Department: How did Jones\u2019 communist-fascist experiment remain undiscovered for so long?<\/p>\n In response, Graham Hovey painted a picture of an ignorant State Department that was oblivious to the horrific socialist-communist experiment perpetuated under the nose of the American government. In a November 25, 1978 description of the chaos in Guyana, Hovey recognised that the State Department had been keeping an eye on Jonestown\u2019s residents since many Social Security cheques intended for Jonestown\u2019s residents were funnelled into Jones\u2019 custody.[54]<\/a> However, the US consular official in Guyana, Richard McCoy, insisted that those who were interviewed in Jonestown before the murder-suicides were away from \u201cany buildings and with unimpeded vison in all directions\u201d and provided answers that \u201cwere essentially genuine.\u201d[55]<\/a> The mockery of McCoy\u2019s gullibility \u2013 and by extension, the sloppy manner by which the Carter administration staffed its civil service \u2013 was apparent.<\/p>\n Four days later, Hovey wrote another article that aroused sentiments of pity for the \u201cthinly spread\u201d and understaffed State Department, while sandwiching accounts of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State\u2019s claim that they \u201care not FBI agents.\u201d Descriptions of this nature reeked of blame-shifting rather than a recognition of the State Department\u2019s limits.[56]<\/a> One exasperated State Department official\u2019s subsequent declaration that \u201cWe\u2019re not babysitters\u201d did not further their case.[57]<\/a> The State Department\u2019s substandard surveillance of Jonestown, when juxtaposed alongside the seeming irony that Social Security cheques funded Jones\u2019 socialist-communist utopia,[58]<\/a> left Americans fuming. Bashing of the lackadaisical Carter administration soon became fashionable.<\/p>\n 3.1 Subversion from Within: The Relationships Between American Democracy, The First Amendment and Jim Jones<\/strong><\/p>\n To add insult to injury, Jones had succeeded in stamping out any over-romanticised notion of the \u201cintrepid reporter\u201d that was part and parcel of American life after Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had successfully destabilised Richard Nixon in the aftermath of Watergate.[59]<\/a> Once denied an opinion upon the greatly-secretive and lawsuit-happy Peoples Temple,[60]<\/a> the press returned with a vengeance.<\/p>\n Following the murder-suicides, much light was shed on the extent of the overlaps between American politics and Jonestown. Intricate networks of support drawn from the upper echelons of American society were laid bare. Harvey Milk, the then-San Francisco Supervisor, assured Carter in February 1978 that Jones was \u201ca man of the highest character.\u201d[61]<\/a> Subsequent reiterations of Jones\u2019 \u201cremarkable ability to pull out \u2026 votes for candidates he favoured\u201d since \u201che became a powerful force in San Francisco\u2019s politics\u201d in the 1970s must have left Americans discomforted.[62]<\/a> The prospect of how American political freedom was being diseased from within by the pro-communist Jones would have been unsettling. Carter\u2019s laissez faire attitude towards the countercultures that forced their way to the forefront of American politics since the 1960s was also blamed, with suggestions that \u201cJonestown seemed to be a logical extension of the civil rights and antiwar battles\u201d that \u201cmiddle-class, educated whites\u201d had \u201cfought over the last decade.\u201d[63]<\/a> How could Americans remain convinced that their politicians were fighting against the Soviet Union, if their own leaders and political agendas were entwined with pro-communist cults like Peoples Temple? The Jonestown fallout was thus perceived as a microcosm of the Carter Administration\u2019s failure to assume responsibility for its citizens\u2019 wellbeing.<\/p>\n Certainly, the ability of cults to hide behind the thinly-veiled logic of the First Amendment sent the impression that Carter\u2019s America had gone too far with sympathising with those on the left wing of the spectrum.[64]<\/a> The First Amendment, which called for the protection of religious associations from state intervention, was also among Jonestown\u2019s many victims. By December 7, 1978, questions over the Carter Administration\u2019s need for \u201cdrawing the line\u201d became more prominent. The adults in Jonestown, no matter how seemingly consenting they may have been, were unable to protect themselves, thus the administration should cease being so obstinate about \u201cdiscourag[ing] intervention based solely on the desire to protect individuals from themselves.\u201d[65]<\/a>\u00a0Intervention, should it had happened in the case of Jonestown, was protecting American citizens from communist subversion, instead of a contravention of the individuality of Americans. Worse, the Carter administration appeared willing to give potential Soviet agents the benefit of the doubt while allowing their proliferation, when Carter, assisted by government officials \u201ctimid about breaching sanctuaries of religion\u201d reflected \u201can example of government failure to act.\u201d[66]<\/a><\/p>\n 3.2 The New Religious Right: \u201cHow Are We Cults?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n The nascent Peoples Temple did not seem to have any affiliation for socialism, much less communism. Notes from the 1950s on how the church interpreted the Bible revealed little departure from conventional analyses of biblical scriptures. Peoples Temple was initially committed to a literal reading of the Bible, arguing that there was \u201cno room for contradiction\u201d and \u201cno other logical explanation\u201d for the Genesis\u2019 account of creation.[67]<\/a> This contradicted not only the materialist dogma of Marxism, but Marx\u2019s scorn that religion was \u201cthe opiate of the masses\u201d as well.[68]<\/a> By 1954, not unlike other facets of Christian evangelism who scrambled to intertwine anti-Soviet propaganda with their own outreach efforts,[69]<\/a> Peoples Temple equated the \u201cspirit of anti-Christ\u201d with communism, and maintained that the communist party was in fact \u201cthe body of the anti-Christ.\u201d[70]<\/a> Subsequently, Peoples Temple situated their own Christian movement within the anti-communist camp as evinced by a strongly worded declaration that the \u201centire world will once again be faced\u201d by a strongly-worded ultimatum between \u201cChrist or Barabus, (Christianity or communism).\u201d[71]<\/a> Clearly, Peoples Temple in its beginning demonstrated little affiliation with then-incumbent left-leaning movements and parties, much less sympathy for communist ideals of any kind. In this manner, Jones cloaked his underlying resentment of an unequal world within the broader nationwide debates over desegregation and civil rights, the latter which have become a staple of the US\u2019 attempt at shedding its hypocrisy of being a bastion for freedom and democracy at home in relation to her foreign policy exploits.[72]<\/a><\/p>\n Christian conservatives, who began to organise themselves as the New Religious Right in the late 1970s would be shocked by Jonestown\u2019s fallout,[73]<\/a> particularly given Jones\u2019 earlier commitment to a Christ-centred ministry. Although Jones had been committed to awakening \u201cThe Christ in You\u201d since 1954,[74]<\/a> his subsequent hijacking of the role of Christ to spread his own pro-socialist doctrines was clearly sacrilegious.[75]<\/a> Moreover, Jones and Peoples Temple had underscored the ease of twisting Christian doctrines to further Soviet-backed communist-socialist interests rather than America\u2019s anti-communist ends. Accentuating the concern over blurred lines between organised religion and wayward cults became debate-worthy topics after Jonestown. In justifying the lack of intervention, The New York Times<\/em> mused how Webster\u2019s New International Dictionary \u201cdoes not distinguish between a cult and a religious sect.\u201d This, coupled with the Carter administration\u2019s opposition of \u201cany broad investigation of such groups on constitutional grounds,\u201d[76]<\/a> generated new anxieties among the Religious Right, who not only loathed at how the porous divide had conflated their own righteous ways with deviant cults, but the left-leaning government who obfuscated the once-obvious divide as well. Carter, who openly defined himself as a born-again Christian,[77]<\/a> did not help alleviate his image of post-Jonestown hypocrisy amongst conservatives.<\/p>\n I believe that these contradictions \u2013 namely how Jones inverted the tenets of anti-communist Christianity with ease \u2013 generated much anxiety amongst the New Religious Right. Concurrently, fears of how Christianity was being besieged needs to be contextualised against the Carter administration\u2019s indecision towards astray cults and the unrelenting communist spectre throughout d\u00e9tente. Domestic religious policy was no longer detached from what was perceived to be a sloppy foreign policy under Carter. Carter\u2019s sin thus extended to his failure to protect the well-being of the Christian conservative movement at home. Moreover, his \u201cpoor-to-average job of public speaking, image-making, and articulation of his policies\u201d had clearly failed to inspire confidence in tackling these communist enemies from within.[78]<\/a><\/p>\n 3.3 The Contrast of Two Fathers: Jim Jones and Ronald Reagan<\/strong>[79]<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Indeed, while Jonestown was rarely commented upon explicitly by Reagan,[80]<\/a> it is not hyperbole to associate Reagan\u2019s ascent to the bully pulpit in 1980 with the sentiments of resentment and frustration directed against the Carter Administration. Jonestown revealed the darker side of communist agents who had infiltrated the heart of American society, in part due to Carter\u2019s inaction. Reagan\u2019s assumption of a Christian identity in American politics since the 1960s, and his conviction in seeing that these ideals gained prominence through \u201cspiritual revival\u201d indubitably comforted the New Religious Right.[81]<\/a><\/p>\n The fact that Reagan harped heavily upon the need for the \u201cshared values of family\u201d to be restored in a July 1980 speech served to contrast his brand of American fatherhood against Jim Jones\u2019.[82]<\/a> While both Jones and Reagan portrayed themselves as avuncular, father-like figures, Reagan did not drive his children to their deaths with a cruel dose of cyanide-laced punch and communism like Jones did. Instead, Reagan promised Americans a self-confident way out of their post-Carter ruts.[83]<\/a> In the face of undeniable evidence that Jones had been keeping contact with the Soviets while toying with the initiative to move Peoples Temple to the USSR,[84]<\/a> Americans began to look inward for the forces that allowed pro-communist rot to breed within in the first place. Reagan\u2019s challenge to the \u201ccult of victimhood\u201d and \u201cleftist dissidents\u201d viz. Jonestown, seemed to provide the answer.[85]<\/a><\/p>\n Equally noteworthy was Reagan\u2019s self-confidence when he pledged to take the Cold War to the USSR.[86]<\/a> As Gaddis had noted, Reagan believed that \u201conly by killing d\u00e9tente\u201d could the Cold War end with America\u2019s victory.[87]<\/a>\u00a0Since 1975, Reagan predicted the inevitable demise of communism with the faith that capitalism and democracy would triumph, arguing that communism was nothing more than \u201ca temporary aberration which will one day\u2026disappear from the face of the earth because it is contrary to human nature.\u201d[88]<\/a> The hollowness of Jonestown as an unsustainable communist project thus contrasted with Reagan\u2019s envisioned America, which tolerated neither proxies of nor sympathy for the Soviets. Carter, in \u201chis initial hope to rejuvenate d\u00e9tente,\u201d appeared to be keen on sacrificing American lives to a Soviet enemy that refused to cower.[89]<\/a> Peoples Temple, which kept correspondence with the USSR and the Second World crystallised America\u2019s darkest fears.[90]<\/a> Discoveries of this nature could not point to any less obvious conclusion: The US\u2019 greatest enemies took the form of communist agents from within when the USSR could not be subjugated from without. Americans, sick and tired of Jones\u2019 mania, and after attributing Jonestown to Carter\u2019s supposedly over-liberal approach towards forces at home and abroad, would have concurred with Reagan\u2019s assertive posture vis-\u00e0-vis the increasingly menacing USSR.[91]<\/a> D\u00e9tente was finished with Reagan\u2019s election, and Jonestown had sounded d\u00e9tente\u2019s death knell all the way from Guyana.<\/p>\n 4. Conclusion: What did the Russians Say?<\/strong><\/p>\n Throughout this paper, I have contextualised the discourse of Peoples Temple \u2013 and by extension, Jim Jones \u2013 within the wider context of the cultural Cold War. Throughout this discourse analysis, I have outlined how the American press concocted striking parallels between Jones\u2019 failed experiment in Guyana with the possibility of Soviet access to American hearts and minds throughout the final years of d\u00e9tente. Subsequently, the lackadaisical effort by the Carter administration \u2013 coupled with Ronald Reagan\u2019s portrayal of himself as an antithesis to both Jones and the forces that paved the way for Jonestown to become a reality in the first place \u2013 pushed Americans towards the election of Reagan in 1980.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, although the Russians kept in contact with Peoples Temple, few primary sources from Russian archives are accessible or understood by the author of this essay. Future interpretations of Jonestown may want to consider inter-archival research of relevant Russian reactions and interactions with Jim Jones. A greater understanding into how the Russians conceptualised Jonestown\u2019s ambiguous position as a movement largely driven by First World citizens with Second World mindsets in a Third World country may shed further light on the ambiguities of analysing phenomena through the said paradigms. While it is not in this essay\u2019s interest to classify the footloose, transnational and technically-stateless Peoples Temple as a Fourth World phenomenon,[92]<\/a> this observation may be worth more than a shadow of truth in future studies of the Cold War.<\/p>\n Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cCharles Garry Visits Jonestown.\u201d In The Assassination of Representative Leo J. 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Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979. Originally published in Nation<\/em>, March 26, 1979.<\/p>\n \u201cJones Commune Found Stocked with Drugs to Control the Mind.\u201d The New York Times<\/em>, December 29, 1978, 13.<\/p>\n \u201cJones\u2019 Suicide Calls, Gunshots Heard on Tape Recording found at Jonestown.\u201d In The Assassination of Representative Leo J. Ryan and the Jonestown, Guyana Tragedy: Report of a Staff Investigative Group to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives.\u00a0<\/em>House Document 96-223, May 15, 1979, 96th Congress, 1st Session, 436-440. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979. Originally published in The Baltimore Sun<\/em>, December 8, 1978.<\/p>\n Peoples Temple Early Bible Interpretation<\/a>. Alternative Considerations. Accessed May 3, 2018.<\/p>\n Peoples Temple Statement in Response to New West article, RYMUR 89-4286-HH-1-C<\/a>. Alternative Considerations. 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