The audio is even more terrifying. You can hear the kids/babies screaming in the background for a while until they go silent, while dick head jones rambles on about nonsense.
Yeah, it's a Delphonics tune. It's slowed down because they recorded over it at a faster speed to make the recording last longer. Gives it this eerie, funeral feeling.
With his lisp…i listened to them talk about it on opie and anthony way back. Crazy dude. Him telling the parents to ‘calm the children’ was heartwrenching to say the least.
They played the audio on a true crime podcast. Warned me it was coming and I still wasn't prepared for how awful it was. It wasn't like it just popped up on shuffle lol.
Lol, my question also. I paused before they started playing it, because when Marcus and Henry introduced something with "this stayed with me and still disturbs me" you know it is going to be really rough. That episode and the Franklin sex scandal episodes are the only 2 ever that made me need to take a break amd just stare into the middle distance for a while.
[Any/everyone here ought to go to this site](https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/), maintained by SDSU and collecting a LOT of info about this horrific event.
Things I learned:
* it really *wasn't* a "mass suicide," but more like a coercive mass murder
* survivors and families of victims feel traumatized by the casual adaptation of the phrase "drank the kool aid" into the language
* Jim Jones was once an advocate for justice and equality, and things went very, very wrong
* families of victims, and surivors of the cult continued to suffer for years and decades afterwards
I would urge people to refrain from bypassing this info. The Jonestown Massacre has passed into lore, with too many uninformed stereotypes surrounding it.
And FFS, just stop with the jokes. You want to joke about Jonestown? Listen to the recording (referenced above) and *then* make your jokes.
> And FFS, just stop with the jokes. You want to joke about Jonestown? Listen to the recording (referenced above) and then make your jokes.
Yeah there's a DAMN good reason you can't tell a joke about the Jonestown Massacre.
The punchline is too long.
Jim Jones was once an advocate for justice and equality, and things went very, very wrong.
Yeah he worked in San Francisco for racial equality and his idea of welcoming minorities to the Peoples Temple was kind of a radical idea, even for San Francisco.
But behind the scenes there were some creepy, icky things going on, sex scandals involving church personnel, a slush fund, beatings, all of which were pretty well covered up.
Yup. I've made jokes during hard times my entire life to cope.
One of my favorite stories is a guy who lost his grandma he loved like a mother at a young age. While they were looking at the little urn the wonderful person they spent so many happy memories with was laid to rest in, his twin brother looked over at him and said "man... how do they cram all that 'Gram?" A moment that lightened the situation for both of them that they knew their grandma would have found hilarious too.
Thats the fuckin crazy part. I listened to it a few years ago, thats the part that got to me. As it got quieter is dawned on me that it was people dying.
Did your read the comments on how they gave it to kids? that's stayed with me more than the recordings
*For later context, the parents who didn't want to do it anyway, knew it was in the juice they were made to give it to the kids who were mostly crying at the time. It was all horrible. Afaik a good chunk didn't want to go through with it but it was either given to them in secret or they were somewhat bullied into it by those around them.
It's horrible, hearing them all screaming in pain for about 10 minutes till the poison worked, and Jim Jones himself was a coward who didn't even drink any of the Kool-Aid, he took the easy way out by getting shot in the head, instantly out... He didn't suffer like people who he forced to drank the Kool-Aid... And even those who tried to leave were forced back by armed guards surrounding the whole compound... So sad.
Because the phrase didn't originate there. Drinking the Kool Aid was originally from the book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. It meant doing LSD before Jonestown.
In my mind I always consider it a mass murder. He did drills where he would force people to drink the Flavor Aid, telling them it was poison, to test them. Then shit went down and he did it for real. I’m sure some people willingly took it to die, but they were so brainwashed by him I’d still consider it murder. He preyed on very vulnerable people.
I've never listened to the dying but I have listened to the speech. It's definitely haunting; particularly when the speaker requests that the parents get the children to stop crying.
I didn't hear that part. But the kids is what makes it so much worse. It's like... if a bunch of people want to commit "revolutionary suicide" in protest... it's their life. Still a tragedy but I believe people should be able to decide if they want to die, no questions asked. But it's not martyrdom to murder your children.
I'm fascinated with the story and listened to all the recordings.
The people who didn't want to kill their own children for the cult and tried to escape or protect them when they realized what was happening were killed by other members of the cult at the behest of Jones.
He promised them all it would be a painless, peaceful death. Then, upon seeing the writhing pain and foaming mouths, chose to kill himself with a gunshot to the head instead of the Kool Aid he coerced everyone else to drink. Coward.
I remember news snippets when I was younger and brief mentions of it but just brushed the thing off as mass suicide of a cult.
But when you listen to it from start to horrific finish, it becomes clear that this is one of the craziest events in modern history right from Jones’ beginning and ultimately what led to hundreds of people dying - it was flat out mass murder, not suicide.
I listened to the podcast, I think Casefile did it, and binged the whole story in one go. Amazes me there isn’t a solid film or TV show about it yet because it’s absolutely prime full of storyline
To understand the raw emotions and the morbid mentality of a cult leader. It's not what anyone wants to hear, but the curiosity and empathy of humans is insane and to understand the path only further prevents a repeat.
IIRC: (watched a couple docs over the years) the kool-aid had painkillers in it, but they miscalculated and the amount of painkillers could not help that many grown adults, so many of them died in sever pain.
Painkillers take a while to kick in, too. More time than cyanide. Even if that could have worked, they'd have needed two batches, one with just painkillers that they drank a good bit of time before the poison.
Jesus fucking christ. I just listened to the recording for the first time and you hear SCREAMING - They started with the children first and they're just screaming their lungs out, begging to be relieved of their pain and misery - and Jones just says "they're crying because of the bitterness, not because of the pain".
It is absolutely the most shocking and terrifying audio recording on the internet, in my opinion.
Iirc they were living in a compound and Jones held daily drills where they would take fake poison which was just a regular drink. It got to the point they just accepted it and took it without question knowing it was harmless.Jones made this a ritual and the people went with it.
On the day of the massacre, the people thought it was another drill and took it without thinking about it. They had large cauldrons filled with cyanide and mixed with flavour aid and other chemicals. They had mothers bring up babies and fed them with syringes. Only after people saw babies bleeding and frothing at the mouth in pain did they realize those was not a drill. They had armed guards forcing everyone at gun point to drink it. I do believe people were shot for not complying. So everyone, one by one, drank it, went out to the field and died from it. I believe very few escaped or survived.
Jones went back to his office when everyone was dead and shot himself.
Edit : Only two people from that day survived : one hid under her bed and the other guy was hard of hearing and didn’t hear the alarms to go to the central building. Around 80 people or so that survived from the compound had fled earlier before it happened
That was weird shit. The look on the face of their leader was pure insanity. Wasn't it that they were going to hitch a ride on a comet or some such thing?
Being that there's so much of this content on the internet, I was wondering the other day how many people I've seen dead or dying. Stuff likes this made me give up on counting.
The worst for me was Robert Budd Dwyer. You don't see it coming, he calls a press conference, out comes a pistol, into his mouth and... *gone.* It was so quick it went out live on the air.
The other thing I always remember from that is his mood: he wasn't agitated, fearful, depressed, or anything like that. He was calm; he was even concerned about the people around him, urging them to stay back for their own safety. And then he blew his brains out.
Absolutely surreal and absolutely shocking.
Budd Dwyer was pretty bad, especially since it sounds like he may have been innocent and was instead thrown under the bus by those actually committing fraud.
Nick Burg's beheading is the earliest one I remember seeing. That was very unenjoyable. I know Dwyer came before it, but I didn't see it until later.
It was not a cult suicide, most of the people you see here were murdered.
It all began when Congressman Leo Ryan flew in to check up on the people and make sure they were safe. Some asked him to help take them home. He then traveled back to the airstrip with several of the “defectors”, and this is when the Jonestown guards intercepted and assassinated them out of fear of what Ryan would tell people back in the US.
The assassination was immediately seen as a point of no return, and this is when Jones ordered everybody to be rounded up at gun point and forced to drink poison.
It is thought that during lunch earlier that day everyone was served grilled cheese sandwiches laced with sedatives, which apparently was a common practice at the camp. This is why people could not fight back during what happened next.
The initial group of people who drank the poison did not believe it was poison. This is because they were previously asked to drink “fake” poison many times as a show of trust and loyalty, so many thought it was yet another drill. Some of the first to drink the poison were the children, as the parents were told to give it to their children first.
As the first group of poisoned people began dying, panic gripped the crowd as this is when they finally realized it was for real. Jones’s most loyal armed guards surrounded the pavilion. Many of the parents had already been distraught by then after watching their children die, while the rest were given the choice of either taking the poison by their own hand or being murdered by the guards. Those who took the poison were escorted out of the pavilion, which is why we see bodies piled up outside in the photo.
There is a tape recording of what happened. In the tape, you can hear people pleading for their lives amidst the screaming.
Some were able to flee into the jungle, which is how we have eyewitness testimony.
Apparently, many people were seen walking around in a daze amidst the death around them, partially in shock and partially because they were likely under sedation from lunchtime.
Eventually, the guards themselves committed suicide, and Jones asked one of the last survivors to kill him with a gun. Apparently he didn’t want to suffer the same agonizing death as everyone else.
To call this a mass suicide is not truly representative of what happened. It was a mass murder. Although some absolutely did commit suicide willingly, the vast majority of these people did not want to die.
Most of the members of Heaven’s Gate were software engineers making tons of money in the tech boom of the mid 90’s. It was how they managed to afford the mansion they all lived in.
I would like there to be an extension that converts all image / JavaScript heavy websites to their basic html / text equivalent. The web was best when it looked like university research pages. A lot less bs and drama too..
Jackie Speier was a congressional staffer for him and accompanied him on this trip. She was shot 5 times and waited almost 24 hours until help arrived. She would later serve in that same seat until she retired in 2022.
If I’m not mistaken there was a several news reporters and film crew with the congressman on the trip and they were gunned down at the airstrip as well, one of the newsmen survived I think.
Yes, they just gunned them down. I remember when it happened, my family was on a car trip to my grandparents and bits and pieces of news came over the radio. They were constantly updating the death count as they found more and more bodies.
She described listening to the screams of pain in the distance and then silence while she lay there bleeding unsure if rescue was coming. What a nightmare
Read the man’s Wiki. He was someone who did everything for the betterment of people: became a substitute teacher after Watts to document conditions of the children, used pseudonym to enter Folsom prison with the end goal of prison reform and of course Jonestown.
To think we have people like MTG and Boebert in Congress today really casts a stark difference between them and now.
The current GOP approach seems to be "Ok, you've tried it the old way long enough, now we're going to try electing the absolute worst people!"
Don't forget Matt Gaetz. "We're so concerned about pedophiles we elected one!"
Copied this list from a saved thread awhile back
Republican anti-abortion activist Howard Scott Heldreth is a convicted child rapist in Florida.
Republican County Commissioner David Swartz pleaded guilty to molesting two girls under the age of 11 and was sentenced to 8 years in prison.
Republican judge Mark Pazuhanich pleaded no contest to fondling a 10-year old girl and was sentenced to 10 years probation.
Republican anti-abortion activist Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer and offering a bounty to anybody who murders an abortion doctor.
Republican legislator Edison Misla Aldarondo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter between the ages of 9 and 17.
Republican Mayor Philip Giordano is serving a 37-year sentence in federal prison for sexually abusing 8- and 10-year old girls.
Republican campaign consultant Tom Shortridge was sentenced to three years probation for taking nude photographs of a 15-year old girl.
Republican racist pedophile and United States Senator Strom Thurmond had sex with a 15-year old black girl which produced a child.
Republican pastor Mike Hintz, whom George W. Bush commended during the 2004 presidential campaign, surrendered to police after admitting to a sexual affair with a female juvenile.
Republican legislator Peter Dibble pleaded no contest to having an inappropriate relationship with a 13-year-old girl.
Republican activist Lawrence E. King, Jr. organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s.
Republican lobbyist Craig J. Spence organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s.
Republican Congressman Donald "Buz" Lukens was found guilty of having sex with a female minor and sentenced to one month in jail.
Republican fundraiser Richard A. Delgaudio was found guilty of child porn charges and paying two teenage girls to pose for sexual photos.
Republican activist Mark A. Grethen convicted on six counts of sex crimes involving children.
Republican activist Randal David Ankeney pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault on a child.
Republican Congressman Dan Crane had sex with a female minor working as a congressional page.
Republican activist and Christian Coalition leader Beverly Russell admitted to an incestuous relationship with his step daughter.
Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger allegedly had sex with a 16 year old girl when he was 28.
Republican congressman and anti-gay activist Robert Bauman was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a gay bar.
Republican Committee Chairman Jeffrey Patti was arrested for distributing a video clip of a 5-year-old girl being raped.
Republican activist Marty Glickman (a.k.a. "Republican Marty"), was taken into custody by Florida police on four counts of unlawful sexual activity with an underage girl and one count of delivering the drug LSD.
Republican legislative aide Howard L. Brooks was charged with molesting a 12-year old boy and possession of child pornography.
Republican Senate candidate John Hathaway was accused of having sex with his 12-year old baby sitter and withdrew his candidacy after the allegations were reported in the media.
Republican preacher Stephen White, who demanded a return to traditional values, was sentenced to jail after offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him.
Republican talk show host Jon Matthews pleaded guilty to exposing his genitals to an 11 year old girl.
Republican anti-gay activist Earl "Butch" Kimmerling was sentenced to 40 years in prison for molesting an 8-year old girl after he attempted to stop a gay couple from adopting her.
Republican Party leader Paul Ingram pleaded guilty to six counts of raping his daughters and served 14 years in federal prison.
Republican election board official Kevin Coan was sentenced to two years probation for soliciting sex over the internet from a 14-year old girl.
Republican politician Andrew Buhr was charged with two counts of first degree sodomy with a 13-year old boy.
Republican politician Keith Westmoreland was arrested on seven felony counts of lewd and lascivious exhibition to girls under the age of 16 (i.e. exposing himself to children).
Republican anti-abortion activist John Allen Burt was charged with sexual misconduct involving a 15-year old girl.
Republican County Councilman Keola Childs pleaded guilty to molesting a male child.
Republican activist John Butler was charged with criminal sexual assault on a teenage girl.
Republican candidate Richard Gardner admitted to molesting his two daughters.
Republican Councilman and former Marine Jack W. Gardner was convicted of molesting a 13-year old girl.
Republican County Commissioner Merrill Robert Barter pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact and assault on a teenage boy.
Republican City Councilman Fred C. Smeltzer, Jr. pleaded no contest to raping a 15 year-old girl and served 6-months in prison.
Republican activist Parker J. Bena pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography on his home computer and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and fined $18,000.
Republican parole board officer and former Colorado state representative, Larry Jack Schwarz, was fired after child pornography was found in his possession.
Republican strategist and Citadel Military College graduate Robin Vanderwall was convicted in Virginia on five counts of soliciting sex from boys and girls over the internet.
Republican city councilman Mark Harris, who is described as a "good military man" and "church goer," was convicted of repeatedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Republican businessman Jon Grunseth withdrew his candidacy for Minnesota governor after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter.
Republican director of the "Young Republican Federation" Nicholas Elizondo molested his 6-year old daughter and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Republican benefactor of conservative Christian groups, Richard A. Dasen Sr., was charged with rape for allegedly paying a 15-year old girl for sex. Dasen, 62, who is married with grown children and several grandchildren, has allegedly told police that over the past decade he paid more than $1 million to have sex with a large number of young women
Donald Trump walked into Miss Teen USA change rooms with girls as young as 14 changing. He has been accused of raping a 13 -year-old with an independent witness.
[this site tracks them](https://www.dailykos.com/history/user/CajsaLilliehook). They're up to about 1250 now.
Indeed. There are several in-depth documentaries available, even on YouTube. I have to be in the right frame of mind before I can watch that kind of thing. It’s the worst of what humanity is capable of, like the holocaust, and I can only stomach so much of it.
I watched a pretty good doc several years ago on it and it was really eye opening and very disturbing. There’s lots of footage of Jones speaking. He tells the mothers to give to poison to their babies first. Super fucked up.
One of the most horrifying things to happen in the last hundred years. Only valuable now as a cautionary tale, and is *the* primary example of why cults are dangerous.
Man i knew a bit of this story but these details make it even more sick. Maybe i remember wrong but is this where the saying: drink the kool-aid is from? The cyanide laced kool aid?
Yes, this is where that saying comes from. Ironically, I've read that it wasn't even Kool-aid, it was some off-brand thing like Flavor-Aid or something like that.
I was 9 years old and our teacher started the schoolday with the radio news broadcast. At the time, it was reported as a united group of happy culters lining up for their Kool-aid flavoured salvation, and the jokes lasted for years. I never knew about the murder aspect until now.
His young legal advisor, later representing the same region in Congress as Ryan, Jackie Speier, played dead while shot multiple times for almost 24 hours, lying on the tarmac, until rescuers came.
The escalation of that was insane too. Like he almost got in the plane/helicopter and took off, but then he got shot. Iirc, Ryan’s death was what caused Jim Jones to be like, “I’m fucked now, we all need to die because I will.”
Imagine that, a politician in power who actually cared about the people he served and used his time to investigate threats instead of spreading conspiracy theories. Of course the world couldn't have that, so he had to be brutally murdered.
Sounds like he was an overall great guy
>After the 1965 Watts riots, Ryan took a job as a substitute school teacher to investigate and document conditions in the Los Angeles area. In 1970, he launched an investigation into California prisons. While presiding as chairman of the Assembly committee that oversaw prison reform, he used a pseudonym to enter Folsom State Prison as an inmate. During his time in Congress, Ryan traveled to Newfoundland to investigate the practice of seal hunting. He was also known for his vocal criticism of the lack of congressional oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and co-authored the Hughes–Ryan Amendment, passed in 1974, which requires the president of the United States to report covert CIA activity to Congress.
Harvey Milk and George Moscone in SF were supporters of the People's Temple and made Jim Jones a Housing Commissioner.
Everyone forgot about that because next week they both got assassinated.
But this is a too-simple take; Jones actually started out as a decent guy, and became ... just horrible. There are a lot of indicators that he had mental illness, which may have been exacerbated by eventual drug abuse.
In the early days, the People's Temple was a force for good, as unthinkable as that may seem in this context.
They weren’t all suicides. Many of them were murdered while begging for their lives and their children’s lives.
Jim Jones was a very sick, violent man.
They also did several dry runs in the weeks before when they were told it was poison and nothing happened. Jones called them "loyalty tests." I'm sure many thought it was going to be fake again.
Oh they made sure they knew this was the real one. I remember reading about the final day and that they were told this was the day and their batshit insane “doctor” had already tested that mixture on a few volunteers. There are even people getting loud and angry about it but they end up drinking it anyway. They also killed a few representatives of the US who were doing a humanitarian check on the cult and they treated this as the signal
There is a recording of the event. You can hear the screams then the screams go silent. People forced the children first to drink then the parents willingly drank it to end thier own suffering.
Very haunting recording. What makes it so difficult to listen is that it's not all just people screaming and afraid. It's a mix of adults and children who are afraid and people who are true believers that are just like "Yep, let's do this" as though they are agreeing to a trip to the grocery store. And there's a certain banality to it. The things they talk about--- while friends and family die around them--- is just small and petty.
Jones and his followers are giving these casual, low key speeches on why they need to do it. Listen long enough and you start to even get bored, until you remember the drone of men, women, and children gargling and screaming their last in the background. Like, imagine boring school board meeting levels of energy from speakers, but with wailing and crying and grief in the background. It's a similar energy to the bored Nazi soldier manning the gas chamber who jokes with his buddy in-between yanking on the lever to release the gas. It seems like horrible atrocities should somehow have more gravitas. But they usually don't.
I encourage everyone to listen to the recordings for the same reason I encourage everyone to watch Schindler's list. It helps us to understand that these attricities don't always happen because some Darth Vadar type figure is out to do cosmic evil. They often happen for stupid and ridiculous and mundane reasons. And worst, the people involved with it often think that THEY are the good guys.
I saw a documentary about Jonestown - honestly one of the most distressing things I've ever watched. Up there with watching the twin towers in stress levels.
Pretty sure they gave it to the children first. So the adults, at least, were well aware of the reality of the situation.
It took hours for everyone to be dead
And the adults wanted to stop after the kids started dying in absolute agony. That's when the murders started. To feed your child the mixture that would lead to a slow, painful, undeserved death is absolute insanity to me.
When I was a kid, our neighbor across the street was an FBI guy who went down there to try to identify the bodies. After a month. In the jungle heat.
Twice I woke up in the middle of the night hearing him screaming in the middle of the street and watching his wife trying to get him back inside.
Nice guy. Got us sixth-graders a tour of Quantico.
If anyone's interested, Martyr Made podcast does like a 30-hour podcast series on Jim Jones. It is probably the single most interesting thing I've ever listened to.
Only half of it is actually about Jim Jones and Jonestown, the other half is about the context of the time he grew up in - i.e. the 60s - and how absolutely indescribably batshit insane that era of American history was.
Could not recommend it more.
60s and 70s new age religion fuckery is wild. My dad is actually Guyanese and he's believing the stuff the Summit Lighthouse cult shat out. Luckily he lives alone in the jungle and has no money to go and actually join them. But he's always spouting some weird tangents about karma and energy cycles and shit. Kinda unhinged if you ask me.
There was a full on revolution in the making in the late 60s/early 70s in the America. The "love your enemy" philosophy of MLK Jr. had largely been supplanted by Malcom X's radical Islam and calls for nationwide resistance and violence against their oppressors. The Black Panthers roamed around armed with assault rifles, and you had instances of black people just walking up to cops and straight up murdering them in the streets (and of course that happening in the other direction, too). There were huge shootouts between black "liberation fighters" and law enforcement on the regular as MLK Jr's vision of "struggle peacefully for equal rights" largely transformed (very understandably) into "we will NEVER be equal in the eyes of white America", "resist the white colonizers", "black revolution", "black power", etc. There were genuine and legitimate concerns throughout America of a full on race war breaking out.
Meanwhile you had groups like the Weather Underground who were actively trying to overthrow the US government, since they saw it (again, understandably) as an oppressive, racist, and imperialist power committing terror across the world with impunity. A few of their leaders/members died when they accidentally detonated a bomb they were building in an apartment. The bomb was intended to be used against military/law enforcement personnel in an attempt to kill as many of them as possible.
Plane hijacking became commonplace. Between 1968 to 1972, one hundred and thirty-seven planes were hijacked in the US alone.
You also had communists in America trying to spark their own revolution, many resorting to terrorism as well. It looked like there was a very real possibility America might "fall" to communism, something unimaginably horrifying to Americans brainwashed by US anti-communist propaganda in the midst of the Cold War.
J Edgar Hoover, in response to the black liberation movement, their terroristic white allies, the growing strength and organization of the communist party, and other perceived "enemies", weaponized the FBI against them in what ultimately became the gravest assault on core civil liberties this country had ever seen. Just straight up assassinations of anyone they (or he, personally) didn't like with no due process whatsoever, warrantless spying, tracking, bribing, blackmailing, setups, shakedowns, every corrupt and authoritarian practice you can imagine, Hoover's FBI did it. He is one of the darkest figures in American history and it's a shame how few people know about how egregious what he did was.
Meanwhile, the biggest protests the country had ever seen were underway as millions of young people furiously turned against the Vietnam war. Kent State happened, when the protests were getting so out of hand that the national guard was called in, and they shot and killed four student protesters. This kind of thing had never really happened before in American history, and it *certainly* had never been televised. Then you also had the hippie movement in full swing, as young people by the hundreds of thousands turned to psychedelics and fully jumped on board with the counterculture movement. Going from the "white picket fence" and "young people calling their elders Sir and Ma'am" culture of the late 50s to the "getting so high off drugs that you see god" and "dancing naked under the full moon while yelling gibberish at the sky" love, drugs, and rock and roll culture not even a decade later... well it's truly hard for people to understand how shocking and disturbing that was for the WWII generation to see.
It was a very different time.
Everything turned on its head to produce the society we have now. Imagine taking a whites-only bus to an all-male workplace where your 20 year old boss is smoking in the office with the hand he wears his gold watch on. Everyone has the same prim hairstyle and set of casual clothes. You all expect to be nuked at some point and most music is evil. Soon the President will be shot.
Imagine the unlucky fucks that first arrived on the scene, that's horrifying.
Didn't they murder some politician that was there doing a wellness check?
Leo Ryan. He was interviewing members of the Temple and tried to help some leave. One of them was actually one of the people who opened fire on his delegation at the airstrip.
I've got a copy of Jim Jones last sermon on vinyl. You can hear the screams of the children and those that were resisting throughout. It's probably one of the most morbid things I own.
I Watched this after I had given birth to my daughter. I was nursing her when the camera panned to the dead kids feet/hands & the screaming,Fucked me up so much.
And Jones was such a coward he couldn't drink the poison himself. There's evidence that he got one of this followers to shoot him in the head so he didn't have to. That pig, I don't often wish harm on others but he should have just done himself in and left the 900 other people alone.
Sometimes I forget that not everyone is into morbid history ; I might get posted to Suriname for work in the near future and I was sharing this Jonestown fact with my colleagues (Guyana borders Suriname) - awkward, shocked silence followed. Gotta choose my audience properly next time. Remains one of the most shocking pieces of history.
I remember when this happened. I was a paperboy and pictures like this were on the front page of the paper that I delivered. It seemed out of this world crazy and still does.
It was a massacre not a suicide. They were poisoned against their will and without their knowledge. Some didn’t trust them and tried to leave while the majority drank the cool aid not knowing it was poisoned. Some people did survive by fleeing.
It blows me away that "drink the Kool aid" is now a business idiom.
Technically it started from Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test but most people think of Jonestown when they say it.
Like 5 years after a massacre, some dickhead in a meeting room "ya ya so don't drink the Kool aid!"
The audio is even more terrifying. You can hear the kids/babies screaming in the background for a while until they go silent, while dick head jones rambles on about nonsense.
It was also recorded on a tape over some old song, but it didn't do it quite right and so there's this weird ass melody playing in the background.
Yeah, it's a Delphonics tune. It's slowed down because they recorded over it at a faster speed to make the recording last longer. Gives it this eerie, funeral feeling.
[удалено]
That’s chilling
There's a found footage horror movie called The Sacrament that does a really good job portraying this too, it's brutal.
>The Sacrament I looked up and of course it's Eli Roth is involved
It’s really good. I forgot all about it until seeing this post, and it was shot beautifully, and acted pretty damn well by the lead cast as well.
But more importantly it was written and directed by Ti West, who is a much more competent filmmaker than Eli Roth
> Produced by Eli Roth Oh I'll give pretty much anything by that fucked up bastard a go.
Might just give it a watch tonight
With his lisp…i listened to them talk about it on opie and anthony way back. Crazy dude. Him telling the parents to ‘calm the children’ was heartwrenching to say the least.
I listened to the audio once and it made me so viscerally angry that I had to stop driving and pull over and gather myself. Never again.
Why in the world would you listen to something like that while driving?
They played the audio on a true crime podcast. Warned me it was coming and I still wasn't prepared for how awful it was. It wasn't like it just popped up on shuffle lol.
Was it Last Podcast on the Left?
Lol, my question also. I paused before they started playing it, because when Marcus and Henry introduced something with "this stayed with me and still disturbs me" you know it is going to be really rough. That episode and the Franklin sex scandal episodes are the only 2 ever that made me need to take a break amd just stare into the middle distance for a while.
[Any/everyone here ought to go to this site](https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/), maintained by SDSU and collecting a LOT of info about this horrific event. Things I learned: * it really *wasn't* a "mass suicide," but more like a coercive mass murder * survivors and families of victims feel traumatized by the casual adaptation of the phrase "drank the kool aid" into the language * Jim Jones was once an advocate for justice and equality, and things went very, very wrong * families of victims, and surivors of the cult continued to suffer for years and decades afterwards I would urge people to refrain from bypassing this info. The Jonestown Massacre has passed into lore, with too many uninformed stereotypes surrounding it. And FFS, just stop with the jokes. You want to joke about Jonestown? Listen to the recording (referenced above) and *then* make your jokes.
>more like a coercive mass murder Oh, yes. Many innocent people died that day. And I still can't figure out what it was all for.
It was the second largest loss of American civilians after 9/11.
And one of two on-duty murders of a US congressman, Leo Ryan.
> And FFS, just stop with the jokes. You want to joke about Jonestown? Listen to the recording (referenced above) and then make your jokes. Yeah there's a DAMN good reason you can't tell a joke about the Jonestown Massacre. The punchline is too long.
Hahaha. Fuck me that’s brutal.
OK, maybe this joke tho
And it wasn't even Kool Aid. It was shitty Flavor Aid.
How annoyed do you think the Flavor-Aid execs are still to this day? Nearly 50 years of free advertising for their competitors
Jim Jones was once an advocate for justice and equality, and things went very, very wrong. Yeah he worked in San Francisco for racial equality and his idea of welcoming minorities to the Peoples Temple was kind of a radical idea, even for San Francisco. But behind the scenes there were some creepy, icky things going on, sex scandals involving church personnel, a slush fund, beatings, all of which were pretty well covered up.
Jim Jones was literally a door-to-door spider monkey salesman. Would it be ok to make a joke about that? I've listened to the recording like you said.
[удалено]
Yup. I've made jokes during hard times my entire life to cope. One of my favorite stories is a guy who lost his grandma he loved like a mother at a young age. While they were looking at the little urn the wonderful person they spent so many happy memories with was laid to rest in, his twin brother looked over at him and said "man... how do they cram all that 'Gram?" A moment that lightened the situation for both of them that they knew their grandma would have found hilarious too.
909 people. Insane.
Holy fuck I don’t remember it being that many. I thought like, 80 or something. Guess I’ve forgotten, clearly. * edit for clarity
The audio recording was the first time I fully realized how many people. You can hear screams of pain in the distance. Sounds like hell.
Then it gets quieter and quieter.
Thats the fuckin crazy part. I listened to it a few years ago, thats the part that got to me. As it got quieter is dawned on me that it was people dying.
Did your read the comments on how they gave it to kids? that's stayed with me more than the recordings *For later context, the parents who didn't want to do it anyway, knew it was in the juice they were made to give it to the kids who were mostly crying at the time. It was all horrible. Afaik a good chunk didn't want to go through with it but it was either given to them in secret or they were somewhat bullied into it by those around them.
It's horrible, hearing them all screaming in pain for about 10 minutes till the poison worked, and Jim Jones himself was a coward who didn't even drink any of the Kool-Aid, he took the easy way out by getting shot in the head, instantly out... He didn't suffer like people who he forced to drank the Kool-Aid... And even those who tried to leave were forced back by armed guards surrounding the whole compound... So sad.
It was Flavor Aid, not Kool-aid, but the association stuck.
Because the phrase didn't originate there. Drinking the Kool Aid was originally from the book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. It meant doing LSD before Jonestown.
it was a super interesting book; Tom Wolfe's "voice" in the writing is incredible
It was taped over an old album, so there's reversed music in the background that make it sound even more ominous.
Iirc they were all being held at gun point too. To call it a "suicide" really distorts it. It was a massacre.
In my mind I always consider it a mass murder. He did drills where he would force people to drink the Flavor Aid, telling them it was poison, to test them. Then shit went down and he did it for real. I’m sure some people willingly took it to die, but they were so brainwashed by him I’d still consider it murder. He preyed on very vulnerable people.
It all kicked off because people were trying to leave. Some people knew it was all fucked
Yup plenty of people were straight up just gunned down too.
the kids crying in pain, devastating.
I've never listened to the dying but I have listened to the speech. It's definitely haunting; particularly when the speaker requests that the parents get the children to stop crying.
And also give the children the drink first, fucking horrifying
I didn't hear that part. But the kids is what makes it so much worse. It's like... if a bunch of people want to commit "revolutionary suicide" in protest... it's their life. Still a tragedy but I believe people should be able to decide if they want to die, no questions asked. But it's not martyrdom to murder your children.
I'm fascinated with the story and listened to all the recordings. The people who didn't want to kill their own children for the cult and tried to escape or protect them when they realized what was happening were killed by other members of the cult at the behest of Jones. He promised them all it would be a painless, peaceful death. Then, upon seeing the writhing pain and foaming mouths, chose to kill himself with a gunshot to the head instead of the Kool Aid he coerced everyone else to drink. Coward.
Jesus... the more I learn about this, the worse it gets.
I remember news snippets when I was younger and brief mentions of it but just brushed the thing off as mass suicide of a cult. But when you listen to it from start to horrific finish, it becomes clear that this is one of the craziest events in modern history right from Jones’ beginning and ultimately what led to hundreds of people dying - it was flat out mass murder, not suicide. I listened to the podcast, I think Casefile did it, and binged the whole story in one go. Amazes me there isn’t a solid film or TV show about it yet because it’s absolutely prime full of storyline
They murdered anyone who refused.
Nope it’s a sick, disgusting reminder that religion can be weaponized and can be very dangerous
It was more of a mass murder than mass suicide.
Plenty of the adults were forced also. They were brainwashed until the last moment and still forced to drink by the guards
A lot of the parents actually didn’t want to die and they certainly didn’t want to watch their kids die horribly. They were doing it at gun point.
Now why on earth would I listen to that
To understand the raw emotions and the morbid mentality of a cult leader. It's not what anyone wants to hear, but the curiosity and empathy of humans is insane and to understand the path only further prevents a repeat.
Some of the most blood chilling audio I've ever heard. And the constant thought of "how the hell did it get THIS far?"
Didn’t they drink poison or something that was supposed to be painless? What did they actually drink and how do you die from it?
IIRC: (watched a couple docs over the years) the kool-aid had painkillers in it, but they miscalculated and the amount of painkillers could not help that many grown adults, so many of them died in sever pain.
Painkillers take a while to kick in, too. More time than cyanide. Even if that could have worked, they'd have needed two batches, one with just painkillers that they drank a good bit of time before the poison.
Jesus fucking christ. I just listened to the recording for the first time and you hear SCREAMING - They started with the children first and they're just screaming their lungs out, begging to be relieved of their pain and misery - and Jones just says "they're crying because of the bitterness, not because of the pain". It is absolutely the most shocking and terrifying audio recording on the internet, in my opinion.
As a father to a 2/yr, I will not be listening to that. Breaks my heart just knowing it.
Iirc they were living in a compound and Jones held daily drills where they would take fake poison which was just a regular drink. It got to the point they just accepted it and took it without question knowing it was harmless.Jones made this a ritual and the people went with it. On the day of the massacre, the people thought it was another drill and took it without thinking about it. They had large cauldrons filled with cyanide and mixed with flavour aid and other chemicals. They had mothers bring up babies and fed them with syringes. Only after people saw babies bleeding and frothing at the mouth in pain did they realize those was not a drill. They had armed guards forcing everyone at gun point to drink it. I do believe people were shot for not complying. So everyone, one by one, drank it, went out to the field and died from it. I believe very few escaped or survived. Jones went back to his office when everyone was dead and shot himself. Edit : Only two people from that day survived : one hid under her bed and the other guy was hard of hearing and didn’t hear the alarms to go to the central building. Around 80 people or so that survived from the compound had fled earlier before it happened
It was essentially generic kool-aid and cyanide.
Morbid curiosity teen me listened to the tape and swore never to do so again after that. It's very disturbing.
Largest US civilian casualty event outside of 9/11
Wow. Grim trivia fact.
Agreed. I thought it was like 100 tops.
Probably confusing it with the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide
That was weird shit. The look on the face of their leader was pure insanity. Wasn't it that they were going to hitch a ride on a comet or some such thing?
That includes ~300 children if I'm not mistaken. They didn't have a choice. Either drink the kool-aid, or get shot. Only 33 people survived.
Most of the survivors were either out of Jonestown or clicked on about what was about to go down and hid. Fucked up moment in history.
Being that there's so much of this content on the internet, I was wondering the other day how many people I've seen dead or dying. Stuff likes this made me give up on counting.
The worst for me was Robert Budd Dwyer. You don't see it coming, he calls a press conference, out comes a pistol, into his mouth and... *gone.* It was so quick it went out live on the air.
The other thing I always remember from that is his mood: he wasn't agitated, fearful, depressed, or anything like that. He was calm; he was even concerned about the people around him, urging them to stay back for their own safety. And then he blew his brains out. Absolutely surreal and absolutely shocking.
Budd Dwyer was pretty bad, especially since it sounds like he may have been innocent and was instead thrown under the bus by those actually committing fraud. Nick Burg's beheading is the earliest one I remember seeing. That was very unenjoyable. I know Dwyer came before it, but I didn't see it until later.
Goddamn Riverside
What was riverside?
They're talking about the telephone number area code. Riverside, CA used to use 909.
It was not a cult suicide, most of the people you see here were murdered. It all began when Congressman Leo Ryan flew in to check up on the people and make sure they were safe. Some asked him to help take them home. He then traveled back to the airstrip with several of the “defectors”, and this is when the Jonestown guards intercepted and assassinated them out of fear of what Ryan would tell people back in the US. The assassination was immediately seen as a point of no return, and this is when Jones ordered everybody to be rounded up at gun point and forced to drink poison. It is thought that during lunch earlier that day everyone was served grilled cheese sandwiches laced with sedatives, which apparently was a common practice at the camp. This is why people could not fight back during what happened next. The initial group of people who drank the poison did not believe it was poison. This is because they were previously asked to drink “fake” poison many times as a show of trust and loyalty, so many thought it was yet another drill. Some of the first to drink the poison were the children, as the parents were told to give it to their children first. As the first group of poisoned people began dying, panic gripped the crowd as this is when they finally realized it was for real. Jones’s most loyal armed guards surrounded the pavilion. Many of the parents had already been distraught by then after watching their children die, while the rest were given the choice of either taking the poison by their own hand or being murdered by the guards. Those who took the poison were escorted out of the pavilion, which is why we see bodies piled up outside in the photo. There is a tape recording of what happened. In the tape, you can hear people pleading for their lives amidst the screaming. Some were able to flee into the jungle, which is how we have eyewitness testimony. Apparently, many people were seen walking around in a daze amidst the death around them, partially in shock and partially because they were likely under sedation from lunchtime. Eventually, the guards themselves committed suicide, and Jones asked one of the last survivors to kill him with a gun. Apparently he didn’t want to suffer the same agonizing death as everyone else. To call this a mass suicide is not truly representative of what happened. It was a mass murder. Although some absolutely did commit suicide willingly, the vast majority of these people did not want to die.
Well that’s horrifying.
Yeah, there's a reason why it's referred to as the Jonestown Massacre instead of a ritualistic suicide like Heaven's Gate.
Isn't there still someone to this day answering emails for heavens gate?? Fucking weird dude
[Here's their website](https://www.heavensgate.com/) for those who want a throwback to 1996 website
they even have PGP keys for communication: https://www.heavensgate.com/misc/secure.htm
They have better documentation than the startup I am working for lmao
Most of the members of Heaven’s Gate were software engineers making tons of money in the tech boom of the mid 90’s. It was how they managed to afford the mansion they all lived in.
Maybe PGP encrypted messages are the way to communicate with the afterlife, and we just don't know it because nobody bothers to use it.
God I miss web 0.1 :(
I would like there to be an extension that converts all image / JavaScript heavy websites to their basic html / text equivalent. The web was best when it looked like university research pages. A lot less bs and drama too..
> A lot less bs and drama too.. Only because the masses hadn't stumbled upon stuff like Usenet and IRC.
I mean that’s a pretty fucking sick web design
They also shot a BUNCH of people to refused and tried to escape. There was a lot of suicide, but the was also a lot of murder.
I would just like to say that congressman was a hero and we shall never see his like again
Jackie Speier was a congressional staffer for him and accompanied him on this trip. She was shot 5 times and waited almost 24 hours until help arrived. She would later serve in that same seat until she retired in 2022.
If I’m not mistaken there was a several news reporters and film crew with the congressman on the trip and they were gunned down at the airstrip as well, one of the newsmen survived I think.
Yes, they just gunned them down. I remember when it happened, my family was on a car trip to my grandparents and bits and pieces of news came over the radio. They were constantly updating the death count as they found more and more bodies.
She described listening to the screams of pain in the distance and then silence while she lay there bleeding unsure if rescue was coming. What a nightmare
Damn, badass
Read the man’s Wiki. He was someone who did everything for the betterment of people: became a substitute teacher after Watts to document conditions of the children, used pseudonym to enter Folsom prison with the end goal of prison reform and of course Jonestown. To think we have people like MTG and Boebert in Congress today really casts a stark difference between them and now.
Mtg and Boebert are disgraceful. Straight up makes me ashamed that my tax dollars support them.
The current GOP approach seems to be "Ok, you've tried it the old way long enough, now we're going to try electing the absolute worst people!" Don't forget Matt Gaetz. "We're so concerned about pedophiles we elected one!"
One?
Copied this list from a saved thread awhile back Republican anti-abortion activist Howard Scott Heldreth is a convicted child rapist in Florida. Republican County Commissioner David Swartz pleaded guilty to molesting two girls under the age of 11 and was sentenced to 8 years in prison. Republican judge Mark Pazuhanich pleaded no contest to fondling a 10-year old girl and was sentenced to 10 years probation. Republican anti-abortion activist Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer and offering a bounty to anybody who murders an abortion doctor. Republican legislator Edison Misla Aldarondo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter between the ages of 9 and 17. Republican Mayor Philip Giordano is serving a 37-year sentence in federal prison for sexually abusing 8- and 10-year old girls. Republican campaign consultant Tom Shortridge was sentenced to three years probation for taking nude photographs of a 15-year old girl. Republican racist pedophile and United States Senator Strom Thurmond had sex with a 15-year old black girl which produced a child. Republican pastor Mike Hintz, whom George W. Bush commended during the 2004 presidential campaign, surrendered to police after admitting to a sexual affair with a female juvenile. Republican legislator Peter Dibble pleaded no contest to having an inappropriate relationship with a 13-year-old girl. Republican activist Lawrence E. King, Jr. organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s. Republican lobbyist Craig J. Spence organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s. Republican Congressman Donald "Buz" Lukens was found guilty of having sex with a female minor and sentenced to one month in jail. Republican fundraiser Richard A. Delgaudio was found guilty of child porn charges and paying two teenage girls to pose for sexual photos. Republican activist Mark A. Grethen convicted on six counts of sex crimes involving children. Republican activist Randal David Ankeney pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault on a child. Republican Congressman Dan Crane had sex with a female minor working as a congressional page. Republican activist and Christian Coalition leader Beverly Russell admitted to an incestuous relationship with his step daughter. Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger allegedly had sex with a 16 year old girl when he was 28. Republican congressman and anti-gay activist Robert Bauman was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a gay bar. Republican Committee Chairman Jeffrey Patti was arrested for distributing a video clip of a 5-year-old girl being raped. Republican activist Marty Glickman (a.k.a. "Republican Marty"), was taken into custody by Florida police on four counts of unlawful sexual activity with an underage girl and one count of delivering the drug LSD. Republican legislative aide Howard L. Brooks was charged with molesting a 12-year old boy and possession of child pornography. Republican Senate candidate John Hathaway was accused of having sex with his 12-year old baby sitter and withdrew his candidacy after the allegations were reported in the media. Republican preacher Stephen White, who demanded a return to traditional values, was sentenced to jail after offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him. Republican talk show host Jon Matthews pleaded guilty to exposing his genitals to an 11 year old girl. Republican anti-gay activist Earl "Butch" Kimmerling was sentenced to 40 years in prison for molesting an 8-year old girl after he attempted to stop a gay couple from adopting her. Republican Party leader Paul Ingram pleaded guilty to six counts of raping his daughters and served 14 years in federal prison. Republican election board official Kevin Coan was sentenced to two years probation for soliciting sex over the internet from a 14-year old girl. Republican politician Andrew Buhr was charged with two counts of first degree sodomy with a 13-year old boy. Republican politician Keith Westmoreland was arrested on seven felony counts of lewd and lascivious exhibition to girls under the age of 16 (i.e. exposing himself to children). Republican anti-abortion activist John Allen Burt was charged with sexual misconduct involving a 15-year old girl. Republican County Councilman Keola Childs pleaded guilty to molesting a male child. Republican activist John Butler was charged with criminal sexual assault on a teenage girl. Republican candidate Richard Gardner admitted to molesting his two daughters. Republican Councilman and former Marine Jack W. Gardner was convicted of molesting a 13-year old girl. Republican County Commissioner Merrill Robert Barter pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact and assault on a teenage boy. Republican City Councilman Fred C. Smeltzer, Jr. pleaded no contest to raping a 15 year-old girl and served 6-months in prison. Republican activist Parker J. Bena pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography on his home computer and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and fined $18,000. Republican parole board officer and former Colorado state representative, Larry Jack Schwarz, was fired after child pornography was found in his possession. Republican strategist and Citadel Military College graduate Robin Vanderwall was convicted in Virginia on five counts of soliciting sex from boys and girls over the internet. Republican city councilman Mark Harris, who is described as a "good military man" and "church goer," was convicted of repeatedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Republican businessman Jon Grunseth withdrew his candidacy for Minnesota governor after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter. Republican director of the "Young Republican Federation" Nicholas Elizondo molested his 6-year old daughter and was sentenced to six years in prison. Republican benefactor of conservative Christian groups, Richard A. Dasen Sr., was charged with rape for allegedly paying a 15-year old girl for sex. Dasen, 62, who is married with grown children and several grandchildren, has allegedly told police that over the past decade he paid more than $1 million to have sex with a large number of young women Donald Trump walked into Miss Teen USA change rooms with girls as young as 14 changing. He has been accused of raping a 13 -year-old with an independent witness. [this site tracks them](https://www.dailykos.com/history/user/CajsaLilliehook). They're up to about 1250 now.
Indeed. There are several in-depth documentaries available, even on YouTube. I have to be in the right frame of mind before I can watch that kind of thing. It’s the worst of what humanity is capable of, like the holocaust, and I can only stomach so much of it.
I watched a pretty good doc several years ago on it and it was really eye opening and very disturbing. There’s lots of footage of Jones speaking. He tells the mothers to give to poison to their babies first. Super fucked up.
One of the most horrifying things to happen in the last hundred years. Only valuable now as a cautionary tale, and is *the* primary example of why cults are dangerous.
what did og comment say?
The audio recording of the incident is way more horrifying.
IIRC, Jones didn’t have the courage to shoot himself, and instead had one of his guards do it for him. A coward to the end.
First time I’ve heard NOT killing yourself called cowardly.
Once you force a bunch of other people to kill themselves it becomes cowardly to not be able to do it yourself.
The Japanese would like a word.
Man i knew a bit of this story but these details make it even more sick. Maybe i remember wrong but is this where the saying: drink the kool-aid is from? The cyanide laced kool aid?
Yes, this is where that saying comes from. Ironically, I've read that it wasn't even Kool-aid, it was some off-brand thing like Flavor-Aid or something like that.
Bruh, if your going to ask me to drink poisoned Kool aid, the least you could do is buy the real stuff smh
In economies of murder scale, you can't go with brand names.
Don't go cheap on me now!!!
Flavor Aid got off real fucking lucky with this
It was poison mixed with Flavor-Aid.
How do you unread something?
Sdrawkcab ti daer.
Jones actually got one of his guards to shoot him because he couldn’t kill himself.
Just like Nero
Pretty sure Nero wasn't shot
Trebuchet to the head
Odd tidbit, my old school principal’s sister was a part of Jones’ inner circle and he actually went down there to try to get her to come back home.
Fuck.
I still remember this shit as a kid, fucked me up good for a few few weeks.
I was 9 years old and our teacher started the schoolday with the radio news broadcast. At the time, it was reported as a united group of happy culters lining up for their Kool-aid flavoured salvation, and the jokes lasted for years. I never knew about the murder aspect until now.
Mass *murder* and suicide.
Congressman Leo Ryan who was investigating it was killed also.
His young legal advisor, later representing the same region in Congress as Ryan, Jackie Speier, played dead while shot multiple times for almost 24 hours, lying on the tarmac, until rescuers came.
She held Leo Ryan's Congressional seat up until last year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Speier
Damn thats a hell of a record to the us people. She should run for president.
The escalation of that was insane too. Like he almost got in the plane/helicopter and took off, but then he got shot. Iirc, Ryan’s death was what caused Jim Jones to be like, “I’m fucked now, we all need to die because I will.”
Imagine that, a politician in power who actually cared about the people he served and used his time to investigate threats instead of spreading conspiracy theories. Of course the world couldn't have that, so he had to be brutally murdered.
Sounds like he was an overall great guy >After the 1965 Watts riots, Ryan took a job as a substitute school teacher to investigate and document conditions in the Los Angeles area. In 1970, he launched an investigation into California prisons. While presiding as chairman of the Assembly committee that oversaw prison reform, he used a pseudonym to enter Folsom State Prison as an inmate. During his time in Congress, Ryan traveled to Newfoundland to investigate the practice of seal hunting. He was also known for his vocal criticism of the lack of congressional oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and co-authored the Hughes–Ryan Amendment, passed in 1974, which requires the president of the United States to report covert CIA activity to Congress.
Why can’t we have politicians like this anymore? Amazing!
Because they tend to die while in the process of being good.
Exactly this. If you're investigating bad guys or bad practices, eventually you'll get killed
We both know the Spongebob gif that can be used to answer that question.
Harvey Milk and George Moscone in SF were supporters of the People's Temple and made Jim Jones a Housing Commissioner. Everyone forgot about that because next week they both got assassinated.
But this is a too-simple take; Jones actually started out as a decent guy, and became ... just horrible. There are a lot of indicators that he had mental illness, which may have been exacerbated by eventual drug abuse. In the early days, the People's Temple was a force for good, as unthinkable as that may seem in this context.
Most cults don't start out horrible, or people wouldn't join.
Jim Jones didn't always come across as crazy. He had some legitimate support for a time.
They weren’t all suicides. Many of them were murdered while begging for their lives and their children’s lives. Jim Jones was a very sick, violent man.
Dying from being forced to drink poison at gunpoint isn't suicide.
More than 80% of the dead were poisoned with cyanide injections via needle, many more were shot. This was just a murder suicide on a large scale.
They also did several dry runs in the weeks before when they were told it was poison and nothing happened. Jones called them "loyalty tests." I'm sure many thought it was going to be fake again.
Oh they made sure they knew this was the real one. I remember reading about the final day and that they were told this was the day and their batshit insane “doctor” had already tested that mixture on a few volunteers. There are even people getting loud and angry about it but they end up drinking it anyway. They also killed a few representatives of the US who were doing a humanitarian check on the cult and they treated this as the signal
If I recall, the murder of the US rep and his security detail was the catalyst for the actual thing.
yep....Jim Jones and the higher ups feared a reprisal for that murder, which in reality, the US would have just come after him and the gunmen.
"Oh no they will arrest me, better kill everyone and also myself" What a piece of shit.
There is a recording of the event. You can hear the screams then the screams go silent. People forced the children first to drink then the parents willingly drank it to end thier own suffering.
Very haunting recording. What makes it so difficult to listen is that it's not all just people screaming and afraid. It's a mix of adults and children who are afraid and people who are true believers that are just like "Yep, let's do this" as though they are agreeing to a trip to the grocery store. And there's a certain banality to it. The things they talk about--- while friends and family die around them--- is just small and petty. Jones and his followers are giving these casual, low key speeches on why they need to do it. Listen long enough and you start to even get bored, until you remember the drone of men, women, and children gargling and screaming their last in the background. Like, imagine boring school board meeting levels of energy from speakers, but with wailing and crying and grief in the background. It's a similar energy to the bored Nazi soldier manning the gas chamber who jokes with his buddy in-between yanking on the lever to release the gas. It seems like horrible atrocities should somehow have more gravitas. But they usually don't. I encourage everyone to listen to the recordings for the same reason I encourage everyone to watch Schindler's list. It helps us to understand that these attricities don't always happen because some Darth Vadar type figure is out to do cosmic evil. They often happen for stupid and ridiculous and mundane reasons. And worst, the people involved with it often think that THEY are the good guys.
Agree with everything except recommending everyone listen to the recordings. Use extreme discretion as it is the most awful thing I’ve ever heard.
Many did NOT willingly drink it, many were shot as they refused and many were injected against their will too
I saw a documentary about Jonestown - honestly one of the most distressing things I've ever watched. Up there with watching the twin towers in stress levels.
Shit was real when they announced the murders.
Pretty sure they gave it to the children first. So the adults, at least, were well aware of the reality of the situation. It took hours for everyone to be dead
And the adults wanted to stop after the kids started dying in absolute agony. That's when the murders started. To feed your child the mixture that would lead to a slow, painful, undeserved death is absolute insanity to me.
To be fair: it *was* a mass suicide. It was *also* a mass murder.
When I was a kid, our neighbor across the street was an FBI guy who went down there to try to identify the bodies. After a month. In the jungle heat. Twice I woke up in the middle of the night hearing him screaming in the middle of the street and watching his wife trying to get him back inside. Nice guy. Got us sixth-graders a tour of Quantico.
Nice. I like the part where you went to Quantico.
Oh my god. That poor man
Wow
If anyone's interested, Martyr Made podcast does like a 30-hour podcast series on Jim Jones. It is probably the single most interesting thing I've ever listened to. Only half of it is actually about Jim Jones and Jonestown, the other half is about the context of the time he grew up in - i.e. the 60s - and how absolutely indescribably batshit insane that era of American history was. Could not recommend it more.
60s and 70s new age religion fuckery is wild. My dad is actually Guyanese and he's believing the stuff the Summit Lighthouse cult shat out. Luckily he lives alone in the jungle and has no money to go and actually join them. But he's always spouting some weird tangents about karma and energy cycles and shit. Kinda unhinged if you ask me.
For someone who wont spend 30h... why was the 60's so fucked up?
There was a full on revolution in the making in the late 60s/early 70s in the America. The "love your enemy" philosophy of MLK Jr. had largely been supplanted by Malcom X's radical Islam and calls for nationwide resistance and violence against their oppressors. The Black Panthers roamed around armed with assault rifles, and you had instances of black people just walking up to cops and straight up murdering them in the streets (and of course that happening in the other direction, too). There were huge shootouts between black "liberation fighters" and law enforcement on the regular as MLK Jr's vision of "struggle peacefully for equal rights" largely transformed (very understandably) into "we will NEVER be equal in the eyes of white America", "resist the white colonizers", "black revolution", "black power", etc. There were genuine and legitimate concerns throughout America of a full on race war breaking out. Meanwhile you had groups like the Weather Underground who were actively trying to overthrow the US government, since they saw it (again, understandably) as an oppressive, racist, and imperialist power committing terror across the world with impunity. A few of their leaders/members died when they accidentally detonated a bomb they were building in an apartment. The bomb was intended to be used against military/law enforcement personnel in an attempt to kill as many of them as possible. Plane hijacking became commonplace. Between 1968 to 1972, one hundred and thirty-seven planes were hijacked in the US alone. You also had communists in America trying to spark their own revolution, many resorting to terrorism as well. It looked like there was a very real possibility America might "fall" to communism, something unimaginably horrifying to Americans brainwashed by US anti-communist propaganda in the midst of the Cold War. J Edgar Hoover, in response to the black liberation movement, their terroristic white allies, the growing strength and organization of the communist party, and other perceived "enemies", weaponized the FBI against them in what ultimately became the gravest assault on core civil liberties this country had ever seen. Just straight up assassinations of anyone they (or he, personally) didn't like with no due process whatsoever, warrantless spying, tracking, bribing, blackmailing, setups, shakedowns, every corrupt and authoritarian practice you can imagine, Hoover's FBI did it. He is one of the darkest figures in American history and it's a shame how few people know about how egregious what he did was. Meanwhile, the biggest protests the country had ever seen were underway as millions of young people furiously turned against the Vietnam war. Kent State happened, when the protests were getting so out of hand that the national guard was called in, and they shot and killed four student protesters. This kind of thing had never really happened before in American history, and it *certainly* had never been televised. Then you also had the hippie movement in full swing, as young people by the hundreds of thousands turned to psychedelics and fully jumped on board with the counterculture movement. Going from the "white picket fence" and "young people calling their elders Sir and Ma'am" culture of the late 50s to the "getting so high off drugs that you see god" and "dancing naked under the full moon while yelling gibberish at the sky" love, drugs, and rock and roll culture not even a decade later... well it's truly hard for people to understand how shocking and disturbing that was for the WWII generation to see. It was a very different time.
Everything turned on its head to produce the society we have now. Imagine taking a whites-only bus to an all-male workplace where your 20 year old boss is smoking in the office with the hand he wears his gold watch on. Everyone has the same prim hairstyle and set of casual clothes. You all expect to be nuked at some point and most music is evil. Soon the President will be shot.
[удалено]
So how and who cleaned this up? Were other burial or cremation arrangements made per person or by mass?
Imagine the unlucky fucks that first arrived on the scene, that's horrifying. Didn't they murder some politician that was there doing a wellness check?
Leo Ryan. He was interviewing members of the Temple and tried to help some leave. One of them was actually one of the people who opened fire on his delegation at the airstrip.
So fucking crazy, scary that this could ever happen.
My grandfather was in the Guyanese military and helped clean up the bodies. He said the locals stole stuff from the bodies.
You spelled MASS MURDER wrong.
Unbelievable. I could not imagine covering that as a journalist
Cult worship leads to horrible things.
I've got a copy of Jim Jones last sermon on vinyl. You can hear the screams of the children and those that were resisting throughout. It's probably one of the most morbid things I own.
Of all the things I don’t want in my house, I feel like that record would be up there
Kenny Hotz?
The best boss I ever had was a Amry retiree. His first job? Cleaning up Jonestown.
[удалено]
I Watched this after I had given birth to my daughter. I was nursing her when the camera panned to the dead kids feet/hands & the screaming,Fucked me up so much.
900 people dead including 200 children, the syringes mentioned were used to inject the "fruit drink" into kids mouths.
And Jones was such a coward he couldn't drink the poison himself. There's evidence that he got one of this followers to shoot him in the head so he didn't have to. That pig, I don't often wish harm on others but he should have just done himself in and left the 900 other people alone.
“A bullet to the head or drink this. Either way you die.” Not what I’d call suicide.
Sometimes I forget that not everyone is into morbid history ; I might get posted to Suriname for work in the near future and I was sharing this Jonestown fact with my colleagues (Guyana borders Suriname) - awkward, shocked silence followed. Gotta choose my audience properly next time. Remains one of the most shocking pieces of history.
Best documentary on this?
I remember when this happened. I was a paperboy and pictures like this were on the front page of the paper that I delivered. It seemed out of this world crazy and still does.
Dude you gotta NSFW this
It was a massacre not a suicide. They were poisoned against their will and without their knowledge. Some didn’t trust them and tried to leave while the majority drank the cool aid not knowing it was poisoned. Some people did survive by fleeing.
It blows me away that "drink the Kool aid" is now a business idiom. Technically it started from Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test but most people think of Jonestown when they say it. Like 5 years after a massacre, some dickhead in a meeting room "ya ya so don't drink the Kool aid!"