Mass Suicide at Jonestown: Drink the Kool-Aid

With followers of charismatic leaders falling under the spell of their charm still a thing in this supposedly modern era, the events at Jonestown should send a salient message. Was it mass suicide or murder? It was certainly the origin of the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid".

DEATH IN THE JUNGLE

Did the followers of Jim Jones, leader of the People's Temple, really follow his example and take their own lives in the Guyanan jungle in a carefully orchestrated communal suicide? Or was 'Jonestown' the scene of the perfect mass murder.

The phrase "drink the Kool-Aid" originates from the 1978 Jonestown massacre, where over 900 members of the Peoples Temple movement died after consuming a poisoned drink, mistakenly believed to be Kool-Aid, laced with cyanide and other drugs. The actual drink mix used was Flavor Aid, a less expensive product. The phrase has since evolved to metaphorically describe someone who blindly follows a leader, ideology, or movement, often with negative connotations

 Late on the afternoon of November 18, 1978, Jim Jones, leader of the People's Temple, gathered the members of his sect in an assembly hall in the Guayanan jungle. He announced that they were not about to do another drill: this time it was the real thing. For a long time the inhabitants of 'Jonestown' had been regularly practising suicide by drinking Kool Aid together, knowing that one day the scarlet liquid would contain poison.

That day, the drink was lethal. Babies and small children, the first to be given the draft, died as their parents watched. Audio tapes made at the time indicate that there was little resistance; one or two women raised their voices in protest, but were shouted down by the crowd. The adults then followed their leader to their deaths, some by swallowing the drink and others with injections of potassium cyanide.

DRAMA AT THE AIRPORT

At around the same time, at the airstrip at Port Kaituma - in the northwest of Guyana not far from the border with Venezuela - a delegation of American politicians, reporters and other US citizens under the leadership of Congressman Leo J. Ryan was preparing to take a flight back to the capital, Georgetown. On November 17-18 they had visited the nearby commune of 'Jonestown', in its tropical jungle surroundings. They were there to get a first-hand impression of conditions at the settlement, where members of the sect known as the People's Temple had been living since the mid-1970s. Around a dozen of the estimated 1200 inhabitants, who were mainly Americans, had decided to return home and waited by the runway for the planes to arrive.

Journalists were among those who travelled with Congressman Ryan to Jonestown. Cameraman Bob Brown, photographer Greg Robinson and reporter Don Harris were killed.

At about 5.10 pm, two aircraft, a single-engined Cessna and a Twin Otter, landed. The small Cessna boarded six passengers and taxied to the start of the runway ready for take-off. Suddenly, one of the occupants pulled a gun and fired at the other passengers. Almost simultaneously, a tractor with a trailer drove straight onto the airstrip and a group of men opened fire on the members of the delegation, who were about to board the Otter. The shooting went on for five minutes, until the unknown gunmen melted back into the jungle, leaving five people including Congressman Ryan dead and six seriously wounded.

Late that night, two men arrived in Port Kaituma and report that 408 people had been killed at 'Jonestown'. Units of the Guyanese army who searched the commune on the morning November 19 found the bodies. But the massacre had actual claimed the lives of more than twice as many victims as first reported: 913 people.

AN ALL-POWERFUL FATHER FIGURE

The chain of events that led to the death of Ryan and his companions had begun almost exactly a year before. On November 13, 1977, in San Francisco, Ryan read an article about the mysterious death of a member of the People's Temple. The man decided to leave the sect but was crushed to death by a train the next day. Ryan questioned former members of the People's Temple and their relatives and found evidence of serious human-rights violations against a number of individuals. Time and again, the name 'Jonestown' cropped up. It was alleged that many were being held against their will at the commune in the Guyanese jungle. After months of research, Ryan was granted permission by the White House to visit the commune accompanied by an official delegation of politicians, press representatives and relatives of sect members. He planned to question the leader of the sect, a man named Jim Jones, about the allegations that had been made.

Jim Jones (source)

The People's Temple sect was founded by the Reverend James ('Jim') Warren Jones in the mid-western state of Indiana in the mid-1950s. His motives were initially honourable and even visionary. He aimed to create an ideal society in which all people were equal, everyone had enough to eat and no-one was discriminated against because of the colour of their skin. Although he was white, Jones attracted a large number of African-Americans to his sect. The numbers of his followers grew rapidly, and the People's Temple became known for finding jobs for the unemployed and helping people to kick drug dependency.

To his followers, Jones, barely 30 at the time, was a charismatic father figure. But, over the years, he began to reveal a darker side to his character. He was unfaithful to his wife, took drugs and flew into fits of rage - he once shot at his best friend after a disagreement. Jones came to regard himself as a miracle faith healer and offered his services to cancer patients, often with apparently successful results. In 1965 he prophesied a 'nuclear holocaust' and from then on was constantly in search of a place where he thought he and his followers could survive the impending nuclear catastrophe. Jones first found such a haven in California; later he moved to Hawaii, then Brazil and finally to Guyana, where in 1974, the People's Temple acquired an estate of 120 hectares. At the end of 1977 Jones moved into the eponymous 'Jonestown' with several hundred of his followers.

HELL ON EARTH

The phrase "drink the Kool-Aid" originates from the 1978 Jonestown massacre, where over 900 members of the Peoples Temple movement died after consuming a poisoned drink, mistakenly believed to be Kool-Aid, laced with cyanide and other drugs. The actual drink mix used was Flavor Aid, a less expensive product. The phrase has since evolved to metaphorically describe someone who blindly follows a leader, ideology, or movement, often with negative connotations
The remote spot in the jungle was ideally suited to Jones' purpose. Here, in complete isolation, he could fully exploit techniques of indoctrination that he had developed over the previous decades. An excellent student of human nature, Jones was expert at bending people to his will without using physical violence and making them psychologically dependent. One of h principal methods was to exploit people's fears. Members of the People's Temple would sign over to the sect all their worldly possessions, including their pension entitlements. Accordingly, anyone who left the sect could face financial oblivion. Yet an even stronger compulsion was the fear of failure. Jones encouraged the view that anyone who quit the People's Temple would be regarded as a traitor. On returning to bourgeois society, they would believe themselves to be a failure twice over.

Jones' regime of psychological terror also came to include physical violence. Even the children, 276 of whom were on the roll-call of the dead, were not spared. They were expected to work like slaves and might be punished with electric shocks for indulging in ordinary childish behaviour. It was not unknown for children to be savagely beaten in front of their parents or to be thrown into a well after first being told that there were poisonous snakes waiting for them.

Adults were prevented from making a bid for freedom by armed guards posted around the perimeter of the commune.

According to Jones' teachings, the guards were there for the protection of the inhabitants of 'Jonestown', since enemies lurked everywhere. One day they would strike, and then the only way out for the People's Temple would be that which the garrison of the fortress at Masada in Israel had opted for almost 2000 years before: communal suicide.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

Bodies strewn around the central compound in Jonestown. 

Key questions about the event have never been satisfactorily answered. Was it a mass suicide, a mass murder, or possibly even both? And there have been frequent rumours of CIA involvement.

Several pieces of circumstantial evidence point to the murder theory. Many corpses had puncture marks on parts of the body that could not have been reached by people injecting themselves, for instance between the shoulder blades.

Many victims including Jones himself had gunshot or crossbow-bolt wounds. There was a huge difference between the number of dead originally reported and the final tally: 408 as opposed to 913. Did more than 500 people manage to flee into the jungle, before being hunted down and shot, their bodies dragged back to the compound? There was a discrepancy in the number of victims and the estimated number of residents of 'Jonestown': up to 1200. Did some of the cult members murder their fellows and escape into the jungle?

A later series of mysterious deaths were associated with the massacre. All the victims had a connection to the People's Temple. Nine days after 'Jonestown', San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated. Both had received financial support from Jones while he was in San Francisco and were involved in an investigation into their involvement in the disappearance of People's Temple funds. Jeanne and Alan Mills, cult members who had defected before the move to Guyana, were found murdered almost a year after the 'Jonestown' massacre. They had written a book about the People's Temple and believed that they would be killed.

The US Federal archives alone hold more than 8000 documents on the massacre at 'Jonestown', most of which are still classified. They probably hold the key to what really happened in the isolated jungle compound.

Text source: Readers Digest 'Amazing Tales'