'Jonestown'
On
November 18, 1978, in a cleared-out patch
of Guyanese jungle, the Reverend Jim Jones
ordered the 911 members of his flock to kill
themselves by drinking a cyanide potion, and
they did.
The
cultists were brainwashed by the megalomaniac
Jones, who had named their jungle village after
himself and held them as virtual slaves, if not living
zombies. Jones himself was found dead. He'd shot
himself in the head, or someone else had shot him.
Square-jaw, jet black hair and sunglasses, looking
like a secret service agent on antipsychotic drugs,
Jones takes his place alongside Charles Manson
in America's iconography of evil.
But
was Jones really a lone madman as Americans
are so often advised about their villains? Is it
plausible that more than nine hundred people took
their own lives willingly, simply because he told them
to? Or is there another explanation?
Not
long after the slaughter in Jonestown, whispers
began--strange hints of human experiments in mind
control, even genocide, and the lurking presence of
the CIA. At the very least. these stories maintained,
the U.S. government could have prevented the
Jonestown massacre, but instead it did nothing. At
worst, Jonestown was a CIA-run concentration camp
set up as a dry run for the secret government's att-
empt to reprogram the American psyche. There are
suggestions of parallel "Jonestowns" and that
the
conspiracy did not end with the deaths in Guyana.
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