Jonestown wasn’t ONLY a “mass suicide event”
This post is shared here republished from Tumblr;
Content warning suicide, murder, child death
God what a great way to start a post right? 😳
Anyway, this is highly random but I just wanted to say it bothers me people call Jonestown a mass suicide only because it was ALSO a mass murder event. Lots of the people who died didn’t want to drink the flavor-aid (that’s right, NOT kool aid) and lots of Jones’ goons injected cyanide into people who weren’t willing to drink it. Plus tons of the people killed were children.
It was truly so horrific of an event either way; suicide or murder…over 900 people. God. But calling it a mass suicide event and thinking of it only as a mass suicide event is simply wrong and a half truth that implies something much less overtly VIOLENT than it was.
I watch (too much) cult documentary crap and so often Jonestown is the extreme example they bring up and it’s soooooo frequently called a mass suicide event and I don’t know it just makes me bristle, on behalf so many people present who did NOT kill themselves being erased.
Source: my book club tortured ourselves with this like 700 page book on the topic years ago, and as you can see I have read it/listened to the audiobook (I had to do both, alternating to make it though) in my kindle app 😅
Image is a poor quality picture of the book “The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the People’s Temple” by Jeff Gunn
The book really drove home what the massacre was like and massacre is the right term. And I learned WAY more than I ever wanted on this topic…and am always horrified that Jim Jones, like me, is originally from Indiana/Indianapolis and went to the university I graduated from. Back then, he was a very respected community leader, renowned fairly mainstream pastor of a HUGE church, recognized by the mayor for being a champion for integration and legit having a very diverse congregation. He was known as left leaning and socialist, which was boarder line controversial for that community but he was not at all the kind of leader he grew into later. When you deep dive into what he was preaching back then, it’s actually quite understandable why he amassed a huge following. My elderly aunt remembers his church well by reputation in Indy before he relocated the whole thing to California (and eventually Guyana.)
Anyway Jonestown was a massacre. There was a mass suicide event within that but not all the people killed themselves. MANY were murdered. MANY of them children.