The village where a thousand people were forced to suicide by a fake socialist priest opens to the tours. The story of Jim Jones is a warning that is also worth today against the guru of every ream.
British, after all, has always been a matter of money for the government of the British Guyana. In the mid -seventies he was a small state worried by the expansionist aims of nearby Venezuela, and he was looking forward to welcoming a nice group of US citizens. Especially since those strange Americans intended to settle in the jungle, nothing less. They would have created a sort of missionary settlement: a large village in a clearing surrounded by the thicker and leathery vegetation, and then the fields to be grown, laboriously torn from the tangle of the forest. In one fell swoop, those Yankee would have guaranteed the Guyana two successes: repopulate the hinterland of the country and shielding against potential neighboring aggressors. After all, nobody, much less Venezuela, wanted to drag the US into a conflict.
What Guyana’s politicians did not know, when they welcomed those curious foreigners with unusual rapidity, is that the attention of Uncle Sam would tease them anyway, and for the most unexpected and frightening of the reasons: The settlement in the jungle turned into a field of extermination, the scene of a monstrous murder-suicide in which 909 people, including many children, died after having endured atrocious suffering, almost all poisoned by cyanide. The event went down in history as Jonestown massacre: on November 18, 1978 hundreds of bodies were found on the ground without life.
Some witnesses who flocked the area aboard a helicopter said that from above seemed to see coriander scattered in the forest: in reality they observe the multicolored clothes of the corpses.
It was in the hope of concluding new and good affairs that Guyana allowed the US colonists to settle in Jonestown. And with the same ambition for a few weeks the government of the South American country has allowed the company Wanderlust Adventures to organize the Jonestown Memorial Tour, a guided tour of the horror places. Tourists will arrive by plane in the capital of Guyana, Georgetown, and after an hour of bus travel will arrive in what remains of the city of the massacre.
Obviously it is easy to scandalize for the cynicism with which you think it is profit from the suffering of hundreds of families and the violent death of almost a thousand people. But we allow ourselves to believe that the guided tours of Jonestown even perform a positive function. Not only have they allowed newspapers from all over the world to return to the matter, but offer visitors an in -depth look at a human abyss that it is good to know. Also because it is an abyss from whose edge, in recent years, humanity has decided to lean frequently.
Jonestown’s tragedy reveals the horrors to which political and religious messianism can lead, the idea that exist leader or guru in possession of the map that leads to Paradise on the ground. Yes, of course, the history of this town on the edge of the jungle whose roads have filled with blood is undoubtedly extreme, but not so exceptional. In that place he set in motion – in a certainly more diabolical way – the same mechanism that in recent years has given birth to the so -called Woke culture.
To reconstruct what happened in those parts, the reading of La Strada towards Jonestown, Librone True Crime by the journalist James Guinn, was very useful, released in Italy not long ago for the Nua editions. Or you can look at the rich documentary on the massacre released a few months ago on National Geographic. At the center of both is the figure of Jim Jones, a problematic son of the state of the Indiana, where he was born in 1931, which became the first preacher and then massacre of mass.
Jones had always cultivated great ambitions, since he was a boy he wanted to emerge and had the other for the fanatic attention with which he compulsive the sacred texts was noticed. In reality it was never really Christian: he exploited the circuits of the many US Protestant churches to create his congregation from the 1950s. He leaned on this or that religious reality to consolidate his prestige, and as a skilled successful seeker he clung to the institutions that could give him credit, fame and money. Nothing new: thousands of preachers from Strapazzo throughout history have acted like this. But Jones was different.
He was deeply progressive, he wanted to basically a religion that allowed to achieve socialism on the ground, and to play the role of man of faith was easier for him than wearing those of the revolutionary. In 1955 he founded a small religious movement that leaning on various organizations of faith to grow, but the turning point came in the mid -sixties. The civil rights movement was changing American society in depth, counterculture and protest groups were emerging, and Jones’ cult was perfect for the period. He was a hero of anti -racism, insisted on the parity between whites and blacks and led to battles also of great success (and meritorious) to abolish discrimination, he was responsible for the human rights commission of the city of Indianapolis and frantic activist. He proposed a mixture of social predictions and a typical attitude from southern revivalist: miraculous healings, effect declarations, show rather than devotion. The fact is that he took. He involved the blacks and together the white proletariat. He made himself loved by politicians, intellectuals and activists. The famous black militant Angela Davis was his welcome guest as well as the LGTB Harvey Milk activist. In short, Jones was a Woke Ante Litteram, a Christian socialist enemy of private property and the system. He preached renunciations and service for the community, for a certain period even abstention from sex.
But soon he turned out to be for what he was (and who are these small social messiahs each time): A narcissist with controlling delusions, willing to do anything to push his faithful to submission, often even sexual. He began to call himself Father, then he began to claim to be Christ reincarnate and God on earth. He manipulated and impreted women and men of his church, even if his wife was always close to him and faithful, contributing to his success, he surrounded himself with lovers/factotums. He was also arrested for obscene acts, but he managed to cover up the matter.
“After the arrest,” says Jeff Guinn, “Jones began to underline in his sermons and in the meetings of the planning commission a very specific theme: everyone is homosexual. Previously, the statement had been made from time to time, but now it had become a constant. Those who engage in heterosexual relationships are compensating for their real carnal desires. If Jones wanted to lower the ridge to someone, he forced him to get up and admit his homosexuality. Those who initially refused, were beaten until they gave in. Stephan Jones (one of the children, editor’s note) thought that his father “he was alone trying to feel in place with himself (…) to face his bisexuality, every other boy had to experience the same sexual feelings” ».
I don’t pay to control its followers spiritually and sometimes sexually, Jones in the mid -seventies began to conceived his new Jerusalem: Jonestown, the city in which to establish its theocratic/socialist regime. Not even too incredibly, he found hundreds of people willing to follow him in Guyana and lend himself to what in a couple of years became a scary regime in the Cambodia style of Pol Pot. Jonestown was a gulag managed in South America by an American who proclaimed God and resasted until an American deputy, Leo Ryan, decided to go to the place to verify how they were treated. his compatriots present there. He was not welcomed with joy.
Arrived almost surprisingly with a delegation of relatives of the faithful and journalists, Ryan before was accompanied in a sort of guided tour that defineing partial is an understatementthen – at the time of starting again – was attacked by Jones’ personal guards, who killed him and five others. Shortly thereafter, aware of having reached the end of his tragic parable, the reverend Jones pushed his acolytes to drink a drink based on cyanide and then committed suicide. Thus ended Jonestown, a messianic utopia that brought death promising paradise.
