He asked if we were religious. I said we were not, but like in his country we have a few, a very few who are still coming out of the religious realm, just a few older people, but that you were bringing them out of that I told him that we had started out as a church because it was the only way to reach the people, most of the poor and the oppressed were in the church and that the church was what kept people from protesting their surroundings, so you have slowly been educating us to Socialism e.g. by showing the different errors in the bible and how it says slaves obey your masters, so people didn\u2019t fight against slavery. He agreed, he said he wanted to know how you had educated the people.<\/p>\n
I told him that we didn\u2019t have church in Guyana but that we held classes on socialism and the classes are held at different levels, sometimes depending on the level of understanding of the people. They said before we left we should come by more often and that Terri should not have waited so long to come in and see them. Comrade Jo said they were always glad to see us because they wanted to stay in touch with us. They said they wanted a photo of Jim Jones and his wife, also Kim Yooni and family, they also wanted two copies of the people\u2019s Forum every month.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Following one meeting with the North Korean ambassador in Guyana, it was reported back to Jones that<\/p>\n
he asked a lot of questions; basically he wanted to know the nationalities of our members, the names of the people who coordinate here and in the United States. E.g.\u2026Leaders proper names, how many Koreans, blacks, whites, Chinese, American Indians? Leaders children\u2019s names here and in the U.S., asked several times about (Jim Jones\u2019 adopted Korean son) Lew, said they would like to see him if he comes into town,\u201d\u00a0reads to document recovered after the massacre.\u00a0\u201cHe asked for directions to our home offices in Georgetown, said he would like to come. Sharon asked what they found interesting about us? He said they liked our involvement in humanitarian projects, and after reading and making the contact with us, it will make them more knowledgeable as to how we can cooperate and work together with them.<\/p>\n
Sharon asked if he found it strange that a group of Americans were in Guyana living cooperatively? He agreed that they did. The Ambassador sent messages to us that he regretted he was not able to spend more time with us today, but he would see us another day. They gave us quite a bit of literature on Korea, and books written by their leader, comrade Kim Il Sung.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In addition, the North Koreans based at the embassy in Georgetown, Guyana traveled the arduous 250 miles through the jungle by private propeller plane, by river, and farm vehicles to reach the isolated Peoples Temple enclave.<\/p>\n
In the weeks prior to the mass murder, Jones formally requested a mass exodus of the nearly 1000 members of Peoples Temple seeking political asylum in North Korea, according to Peoples Temple documents recovered at the massacre site.\u00a0\u201cI had mentioned the possibility of our people moving to the DPRK,\u201d\u00a0Sharon Amos, a top Jones\u2019 lieutenant and founder of the Guyana-Korea Friendship Society, wrote Jones August 10, 1978\u00a0after meeting North Korean officials.\u00a0\u201cI told them we are concerned about what would happen to the children and the old people if the US put too much pressure on Guyana. [North Korean First Secretary] Comrade Li asked about us giving up US citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n
By then, an increasingly delusional and paranoid Jones was incapacitated by psychosis, growing political and legal pressure from enemies in the United States, and addictions to drugs, including methamphetamine, but simultaneously, his pro-Pyongyang rhetoric escalated until the days immediately prior to the mass murder on November 18, 1978.<\/p>\n
North Korea and Jim Jones: Brothers in Isolation\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nLike North Korea, Jim Jones\u2019 followers in the jungles of Guyana had no means of communication with the outside world. Even if they gathered the courage and resolve to leave, escape was nearly impossible. With no money or food and their passports confiscated, they would have to sneak out of the Peoples Temple enclave which was under constant monitoring by armed guards, traverse through the 250 miles of jungle that separated them from the Guyanese capital at Georgetown, and find their way to the US Embassy.<\/p>\n
Jones controlled the only communication with the outside world, a shortwave radio. Like those who live under the control of the North Korean regime, their minds and bodies were completely isolated. Survivors speak of having lost their personal identities and living an existence increasingly based on fear and survival.<\/p>\n
Those who opposed Jones were punished and sometimes tortured. Infractions included defying Jones; non-attendance at mandatory meetings; not reporting infractions of other members; not working hard enough; or expressing desire or attempts to leave. In order to survive, people had to keep their thoughts completely to themselves, remain silent, unquestioning, and obedient.<\/p>\n
These traits, remarkably similar to the conditions described by defectors from North Korea, are those that cost 909 Peoples Temple members their lives on November 18, 1978 as they drank the cyanide-laced poison fruit drink at gunpoint.<\/p>\n
The parallels between North Korea and Jonestown are stark.<\/p>\n
As a preacher in Indiana in the 1950\u2019s, Jones had been critical of the United States\u2019 led Korean War sparked by Kim Il Sung\u2019s invasion of South Korea, calling it a \u201cwar of liberation\u201d and stating that \u201cthe south is a living example of all that socialism in the north has overcome.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones first conceived of creating a\u00a0“socialist agrarian paradise\u201d\u00a0at Jonestown in 1970 and began plans to establish the \u201cPeoples Temple Agricultural Project.\u201d Jones, like Kim Il Sung, said of his model communist vision:\u00a0\u201cI believe we\u2019re the purest communists there are.\u201d<\/p>\n
There were numerous other parallels between Peoples Temple and the DPRK, and, equally between Jim Jones\u2019 and Kim Il Sung, their remarkably similar uses of organization of internal control, ideology, religious based tactics as a fundamental political strategy, and the reverence and perceived infallibility of single leader who was viewed as both a God King and a father figure to their followers.<\/p>\n
Mandatory hard manual labor and ideological study sessions, emphasized through loudspeakers that were placed throughout the work sites and living areas, often broadcast 24 hours throughout the day and night were shared features at Jonestown and throughout the DPRK. Required mass meetings presided over by Jones focused on criticism and self-criticism, and emphasized the rights of a collective above private property rights or the individual. These political tactics were central to Jones\u2019 vision of achieving a Socialist utopia, and no other nation on earth exemplified\u2013or was as strident in the use of\u2013these means of social organization more than Kim Il Sung\u2019s\u00a0Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea.<\/p>\n
Equally no nation in the world shared Jonestown and the Temple\u2019s central tenet of promoting itself as a new and unprecedented higher form of social and political organization and its citizens as an extended family with a single, revered leader with supernatural abilities than North Korea. As Jones lectured his followers during one sermon:<\/p>\n
What you need to believe in is what you can see \u2026 If you see me as your friend, I\u2019ll be your friend. As you see me as your father, I\u2019ll be your father, for those of you that don\u2019t have a father \u2026 If you see me as your savior; I\u2019ll be your savior. If you see me as your God, I\u2019ll be your God.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In 1977 Jones wife, Marceline Jones, said that, at age 18, when Jones watched his idol Mao Zedong overthrow the Chinese government, he realized that the way for Marxist revolution in the United States was to mobilize people through religion.\u00a0\u201cJim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion. He slammed the Bible on the table yelling, \u201cI\u2019ve got to destroy this paper idol!\u201d\u00a0said his wife.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re gonna help yourself, or you\u2019ll get no help! There\u2019s only one hope of glory; that\u2019s within you! Nobody\u2019s gonna come out of the sky! There\u2019s no heaven up there! We\u2019ll have to make heaven down here!\u201d\u00a0Jones preached to his followers.<\/p>\n
Kim Il Sung, the founder of the North Korean state, was the son of a pre-revolutionary Korean Presbyterian preacher and played the organ in his father\u2019s church, where he learned the effectiveness of religious tactics to secure loyalist followers as a means of mass indoctrination.<\/p>\n
Jim Jones and his Korean family<\/strong><\/p>\nOne great interest and focus of North Korean agents was that Jones and his wife had adopted three Korean War orphans in the 1950\u2019s: Stephanie, Lew, and Suzanne.<\/p>\n
All three have died since.<\/p>\n
Stephanie was the first. She was killed in a car crash in 1959 during the Temple\u2019s Indianapolis years. Lew was 21 when he died\u00a0at Jonestown, alongside his wife Terry and son Chaeoke. Suzanne, who was adopted at the age of six in 1959, had renounced her family and was not in Jonestown. After their defection, Jones referred to Suzanne openly as\u00a0\u201cmy goddamned, no good-for-nothing daughter.\u201d\u00a0In a signed will dated November 18, 1978, the day of the mass deaths, Marceline Jones directed that the Jones\u2019 funds were to be given to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and specified\u00a0\u201cI especially request that none of these are allowed to get into the hands of my adopted daughter, Suzanne Jones Cartmell.\u201d\u00a0Suzanne, who had married and divorced Mike Cartmell before the tragedy, later remarried and had two children before dying of colon cancer in November 2006.<\/p>\n
The Jones family had children of other races as well. Agnes Jones, who was a white 11-year-old girl when she was adopted in 1954, died in Jonestown. In June 1959, the couple had their only biological child, Stephan Gandhi Jones. In 1961, Jim and Marceline adopted James Warren Jones, Jr., becoming the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a black child. They couple also adopted another white child, Tim, whose birth mother was a member of Peoples Temple, although the formal date of adoption is unknown. Stephan, Jim Jr. and Tim were in Georgetown on November 18, and all survived.<\/p>\n
Final Hours<\/strong><\/p>\nIn the days prior to the mass murder, Jim Jones was nearly incoherent, delusional from weeks of no sleep and hopped up on methamphetamine. On October 21 1978, less than a month before the mass killing, Jim Jones, sitting on a makeshift throne on an elevated podium using a battery-powered loudspeaker system, lectured Peoples Temple members gathered in the dark on the dirt below. In the weeks before the mass murder at Jonestown, audio tapes of Jones\u2019 lectures reveal a man who appeared to be heavily drugged, delusional, and, often, incomprehensible, slurring his words and speaking incoherently.<\/p>\n
Much care and much love to you, comrades. I love you with so much deep, deep love. Us\u2013 bring us\u2013us to back to the discipline. I\u2019ve been reviewing, I\u2019ve been up all night, and today I\u2019ve been reviewing some new films that we have from North Korea that shows people working voluntarily sixteen hours a day, how happy and joyous they are and disciplined and how beautiful their country is. Building, organizing, has structure. Eight hours for rest, eight hours for study, eight hours for work, no less. And that is reality. You\u2019ll be seeing the film. It\u2019s not that long\u2013 it won\u2019t be long before you\u2019ll be seeing this beautiful Technicolor film of the People\u2019s Democratic Republic of North Korea under the great leadership of the communist Kim Il Sung (who) led the brave and victorious battle that won the victory at least for a segment of Korea.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Wearing dark sunglasses and surrounded by armed guards, Jones stumbled over words and darted to disconnected topics in a soft but ominous voice on the recovered audiotapes.<\/p>\n
But North Korea flowers in democracy with free health, free medical care that is, free meals, collectivism\u2026 Much love, I love you very, very deeply indeed\u2026And they exalt their leader as a\u2013 as a savior, as a God, Kim Il Sung. But that\u2019s necessary, because people who have been conditioned to worship for many, many, many, many generations and centuries, but they\u2013 he uses that power, not to corrupt, but to give power to the people. There\u2019re no political prisoners, by the way, in\u2013and freedom of religion still exists in North Korea.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In early November, Jones learned that Rep. Leo Ryan, a Democratic Congressman from California, was planning to come to Jonestown. The Temple leader began preparing his followers for what he perceived as acceptable behavior for Ryan\u2019s visit, however unwelcome it might be. His model, of course, was North Korea.<\/p>\n
Jim Jones:<\/strong>\u00a0\u201cWPK general staff of the Korean Revolution. The Workers Party of Korea, the DEPK\u2013 RK, that beautiful, practical, lovely co\u2013 country that we saw on our TV station, where all the children eat rice as a staple food, and how healthy they look, and how vigorously happy, enthusiasm on all their faces.<\/p>\nVoices in crowd:<\/strong>\u00a0That\u2019s right.<\/p>\nJones:<\/strong>\u00a0You certainly better be prepared, not sittin\u2019 on our bony\u2013 People say, there\u2019s too many meetings. I\u2019m rather tired of hearing about too many meetings, in that we\u2019ve got uh, Democratic Peoples Republic\u2013 which I could\u2019ve shown you tonight but I\u2019ll probably show you tomorrow in the language session. And all will be required to attend. Say, \u201cI don\u2019t like these meetings.\u201d Neither do I. But we\u2019ve got to get ourselves in readiness now to meet certain elementary requirements. In the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of North Korea, people work automatically 16 hours a day. And you will see their faces shining and beaming and healthy. I know that some of you gruntle [grumble] and\u2013 disgruntle and cry over that\u2026That means we got to make this a model. Everything\u2019s got to be up to par. It\u2019s going to take more work than we\u2019re now doing. You understand?<\/p>\nVoices in crowd:<\/strong>\u00a0(Scattered)\u00a0That\u2019s right.<\/p>\nJones:<\/strong>\u00a0Because they want a model of pure communism. Do you understand what I\u2019m saying?<\/p>\nCrowd:<\/strong>\u00a0Right.<\/p>\nJones:<\/strong>\u00a0They said we are the purest communist model that exists. No monetary system. It does not exist any place in the world. We don\u2019t use money between us. They want that to continue. But they also want productivity to continue, good health and hygiene, good education. So that means a constant input of correction.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\nNot only was Jones suffering from psychosis and drug induced delusions and paranoia, his threats to potential dissenters among Peoples Temple members became ominously darker.<\/p>\n
The North Koreans have built a socialist society, a socialist society with one of the highest standards of living in the world, in and of itself. Their success then have not been based on magic or good luck or favorable weather conditions, because cloud seeding has been uh, used against them by our tax dollars through the CIA\u2026 As developed by President Kim Il Sung, Juche or the Juche, or jussie, j-u-c-h-e concept \u2013 someone else can give you a proper pronunciation.\u00a0The DPRK industrialized its agricultural country in only eight years. Now this is the picture we saw the night before last. The beauty of their organization, where they work sixteen hours. Eight hours of work. Eight hours of study. And then eight hours of rest\u2026There is such unity and solidarity in this country that they do not have one jail in the country inhabited by over fifteen million people\u2026 Health care and education are free, with a universal eleven-year compulsory education system for everyone. Comprehensive daycare centers have been established for working women. Recreational centers have been provided throughout the country of the most modern variety like our carnivals and circuses. There are state subsidies on basic foodsubs\u2013 foodstuffs, particularly rice. Free clothing is given to schoolchildren and workers. Subsidies mean that the rice cost little or nothing. Large-scale construction of new housing has guaranteed livable housing all for now no rent at all. Now that\u2019s what work brings about. We can free so many people, and if we work now, we can get to a place that doesn\u2019t work that hard, but we must work and our observers\u2013 I\u2019m instructing the security to see that the job is done and that every name is put down.\u00a0Equality and prosperity\u2013 and the supervisors will be held responsible, by the way, for any of your workers that are not doing what they should be doing.<\/p>\n
We here in Guyana have the duty to help remove it by\u2013 for work and produce, we can send out funds to help other systems. We also already have helped the DPRK while we\u2019ve been here, but we\u2019ve got to do more. We\u2019ve got to get our people to freedom. I would think you\u2019d take joy in just working to make funds for Democratic People\u2019s Republic of North Korea. I would think that would turn you on. But some it doesn\u2019t\u2026Who in the world is better situated to take up this fight than we, the only socialist movement, as the different guests have said in the last few days, in the United States? If we don\u2019t take it up, who will? We must always work. We know the night\u2019s coming when no man can work. We know nuclear war looks inevitable. We know it looks like almost an absolute\u2026digest what you have for testing tonight in People\u2019s Rally. Thank you for your consideration and time, and I do love you more as I say than you\u2019ll ever know. Good morning. Good evening. Good day.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
On November 17, 1978, Ryan\u2019s delegation came to Jonestown to investigate reports of American citizens being held against their will. During his overnight stay, several members passed secret messages begging to be allowed to leave with him the next day. As the delegation and several defectors boarded their plane, they were attacked by Peoples Temple armed guards who killed the Congressman and a number of others.<\/p>\n
That night Jones ordered more than 900 Peoples Temple members to drink powdered juice drink laced with cyanide. Babies had cyanide injected into their mouths by syringe. 909 died. Jim Jones was found with a self-administered bullet hole to his temple.<\/p>\n
During the murders, Jones spoke from the podium, his voice often low and soft as babies cried in the background:<\/p>\n
How very much I have loved you. How very much I have tried to give you a good life. No matter how hard I have tried, a handful of people with their lies have made our lives impossible. There is no way to detach ourselves from what has happened today. Not only are there those that have left and committed the betrayal of the century.\u00a0You can\u2019t steal people\u2019s children. You can\u2019t take away people\u2019s children without expecting a violent reaction. If we can\u2019t live in peace, then let\u2019s die in peace.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The audience broke into applause.\u00a0It was the worst mass murder in American history.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Editor\u2019s note: This article was originally published on Nate Thayer\u2019s website on November 18, 2017.) \u00a0\u201cThere is no Heaven up there, so we are going to have to make Heaven down here\u201d\u2013Jim Jones Today is the 39th\u00a0anniversary of the worst political mass killing in U.S. history prior to the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001\u2013the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":81151,"menu_order":23,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-80857","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/80857","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=80857"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/80857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133724,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/80857\/revisions\/133724"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/81151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=80857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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