Capitol Ideas/What the Press Doesn't Say About Jonestown
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell What the Press Doesn't Say About Jonestown "He was trying to build a whole new kind of man in the jungle-the pure socialist man." - Odell Rhodes "There were people...
...Before reading about Jonestown, one should take a look at Arnold Beichman's book, Nine Lies About America...
...the contrast between egalitarian rhetoric and the privileged living conditions of a few at the top (this has been described by one or two loyal Jonestown survivors as "the necessity for structure...
...No failure of utopianism has ever been nearly as well documented or as swiftly promulgated before a worldwide audience...
...Let us repeat some of the details, and let us note how familiar they will sound to refugees from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Cuba: The refusal to allow people to leave...
...Fidel Castro, who doesn't take kindly to foreign correspondents as a rule, might very well be willing to make an exception in Krause's case...
...an appendix, but also an eloquent rebuke...
...For example, both Jones' diagnosis of American society and his socialist prescription for its remedy, decked out in vaguely "religious" trimmings, have much in common with the outpourings of Colman McCarthy in the Washington Post...
...seem no less inviting as a result, nor will the number of candidates for such communal experiments in the eradication of individuality diminish...
...And this of course is the great moral of Jonestown that the New York Times would not and could not see: Jones embraced Marxism and he proceeded to set up a Marxist "state" which resembled in every particular Marxist states around the world...
...the lengthy meetings during which ideological "error" (i.e., the capacity for individual opinion) is eliminated...
...and then later, on film, dead...
...How he knew this is not clear, because wherever he went at Jonestown, a "reason was given why I really shouldn't wander around on my own....Someone would always come along and be friendly...
...Weeks later, on December 17, Krause found out what had been going on ("Cult Leader Earmarked $7 Million for Soviets"), emphasizing his own (and the Post's) ignorance to date by noting that this "adds a curious new wrinkle to the Jonestown tragedy...
...but we may remain confident, nonetheless, that future proposals for harmonious, collectivized, multiracial agrarian living will Tom Bethell is Washington editor of Harper's and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...
...Even after being shot at and wounded in the hip, and even after writing on the front page of the Post (Nov...
...Jonestown was and still could be beautiful.'" (Presumably Krause asked the question, although the context is unclear...
...The reader is then left to assume that both stories are equally absurd, because he knows that Jones has been definitely identified among the dead...
...Jones' observations...
...Chapter 14 of the book begins as follows: "The myths, mysteries and primitive fears that surrounded the People's Temple in life, surrounded it in death...
...It is worth mentioning even though others, including Michael Novak and Reed Irvine in the AIM Report, have drawn attention to it: "Asked if Jonestowa had not been an experiment in fascism-with its armed guard and other means of preventing people from leaving- rather than an experiment in socialism, Jones [Jr.] replied: 'My father was the fascist...
...In his reporting Charles Krause is for some reason at great pains to establish his gullible nature, although it is not clear why this is a suitable attribute of a Washington Post reporter...
...Not even "profound explanations of deviant behavior'' could offer any guidance in this particular case, McCarthy felt...
...The truth was," he writes, "I had rather admired Jim Jones's goals...
...This bland statement leaves the reader uncertain whether Jonestown exemplified Christianity or Leninism...
...The delusion is that the "socialist" doctrines of the "revolutionary" leaders that Jones quite explicitly admired (Lenin, Mao) are somehow inherently noble, and if in practice they result in totalitarianism, why then something has gone wrong and one must call it fascism...
...Certainly it has his authentic flavor...
...Did I ignore evidence that Jonestown was closer to what the Concerned Relatives said it was-a concentration camp run by a mad man-than the tropical paradise Jones and the others claimed...
...the censoring of mail...
...This affidavit is printed as an appendix to the Post book...
...Jones did not invent these lies exactly...
...The Washington Post had a man on the spot, Charles Krause, but the paper quickly recalled him so that he could contribute to a team-written quickie book, Guyana Massacre...
...We conquered Hitler, but we have come to embrace Hitlerism.'' One wonders if any of the 700-odd blacks who followed Jones to their deaths heard that lie from the lips of a leading black educator before hearing it in essence repeated by Jones...
...And so on...
...This book offered almost nothing in the way of guidance as to Jones' ideology beyond noting that "he professed at times to be the spiritual heir of Christ and/or Lenin...
...the presence of informers, leading to a breakdown of mutual trust...
...Terri Buford The death by cyanide poisoning of over 900 American citizens in the Guyana jungle was surely the most dramatic and devastating collapse of a Utopian experiment ever recorded in history...
...Finally, let us be clear that Jonestown resembled other totalitarian states in that religious observance was not part of it, veneration having been transferred (as a result of the destruction of individuality) from God to the head of state: Lenin in Russia, Mao in China, Castro in Cuba, Jones in Jonestown...
...Jim Jones deluded his flock into following him into the jungle by telling them some very familiar lies about America: Ours is a "racist society" which held no future for them...
...and one to which it would be equally pointless to return, because such deserters would be captured by the CIA or the FBI in no time...
...In its "Week in Review" section (Nov...
...the use of signed "confessions" to control "deviant" behavior...
...26), the Times characterized Jones as having "preached a blend of fundamentalist Christianity and social activism," a lie surely pleasing to those who worried that in "explaining" Jonestown, it was desirable to shift the blame from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ...
...As is typical of our media age, it was recorded, "live," on tape...
...One may read there, for example, that Dr...
...But in fact the latter story was perfectly true (if one omits the "gold and diamonds"), and the Washington Post editors had every reason to know it was true when they wrote it...
...Although he only saw what he was allowed to see, Krause was eager to give Jonestown a favorable write-up in the Post...
...In response to Jonestown, most media pundits have remained conspicuously silent, perhaps only too painfully aware that Jones' advice to his disciples had a distinctly familiar ring to it, and must in some cases have led them to wonder if Jones had been reading, clipping, and filing their columns...
...It is not surprising, then, to find McCarthy nonplussed at the outcome of just the kind of collectivism he professes to admire...
...Documents unearthed in Jones' house contained lavish praise of Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, a detailed description of how Jones came to understand that religious trappings would serve to lure people toward his totalitarian ideal, and the observation that a "tight clique of militant Marxists" surrounded Jones...
...but further reading of the book would tend to resolve the reader's doubts in favor of the former, because nothing more is said about Jones' Communism while much is said about his "religion...
...Jonestown was the totalitarian regime in microcosm...
...The New York Times editorially had nothing to say, beyond cautioning that "there can be no moral," a dubious assertion from a quarter that has at times moralized about America in ways that must have seemed very congenial to Rev...
...From the New Yorker we got our familiar little silver spoonful of genteel anti-Americanism, this being about the only political attitude that that magazine now considers safe...
...One only had to turn to another page of that day's Times to read that the paper had in its files a 1977 interview with Jones' wife, in which she said that Jones "had not been lured to the ministry by deep religious faith, but because it served his goal of achieving social change through Marx...at 21, she said, he decided that the way to achieve social change was to mobilize people through religion...
...Somehow one gets the impression from this that the Washington Post is edited above all else in the Spirit of Detente, i.e., knock America all you like, but please don't embarrass the Russians...
...But that question is still not settled in my mind.'' Krause had been so ''impressed" during his visit to Jonestown with Congressman Ryan that he was even prepared to dismiss the attempt to stab Ryan as an "aberration...
...The Times' reporting of the Jonestown massacre, incidentally, was voluminous and gave no impression of trying to camouflage Jones' true ideology...
...In William Pfaff's piffle, Jonestown was all a reflection "of the larger society...
...His delusions, legitimized by his divine calling, had nothing to check them when he secluded his mission in the Guyana rain forest...
...Jim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion,' she said, adding that he had once slammed a Bible on a table and said, 'I've got to destroy this paper idol!' " There were no religious services at Jonestown and subsequent reporting in the New York Times confirmed Mrs...
...But the truth is-and really one despairs that left-wingers educated beyond high school will ever see this-when Marxist doctrine is put into practice it always turns out to be totalitarian...
...Larry Lay ton, who participated in the attack on Congressman Leo Ryan's party at the Port Kaituma airstrip, later explained his action by saying that "I felt that these people were working in conjunction with CIA to smear the People's Temple...
...But this AP story was omitted from the Post the following day, thus laying the groundwork for ridiculing it in the Post book...
...It is useless to rail against this familiar ignorance, because what we have in the case of Jonestown is just one more display of the great, and utterly mysterious, intellectual delusion of the twentieth century, which has been repeated over and over again...
...One other comment in a story by Krause was extremely revealing...
...The Washington Post book reaches a deplorably low journalistic level in dealing with Jones' attitudes toward the Soviet Union...
...We have always lived with a good deal of violence in the United States...
...By one account, Jim Jones, the cult's father, had escaped the holocaust at Jonestown and was headed for the United States with a squad of assassins to take revenge on his critics...
...There is much that can be said about the collective death in Jonestown, but one of the most striking features is that the Rev...
...at which point life would no longer be worth living...
...the readiness with which "guards" can always be found among any group of people-emerging commissars who are willing to betray their professed ideals in exchange for power over more docile and credulous recruits...
...Several of these points, but particularly the last, are made with clarity and force in the remarkable "Affidavit of Deborah Layton Blakey," a girl in her twenties...
...23) that Jonestown was a "nightmarish concentration camp...its 800 to 1000 residents were kept prisoners by heavily armed guards and threats of death," Krause could later on write in the book: "As a reporter, I wonder now if I was terribly naive at Jonestown...
...And, most poignantly in this instance, there is the complaint by survivors that when visiting deputations arrived and were taken on a "conducted tour," it never did any good because everyone knew they were coming and everything was carefully rehearsed...
...Another story had lieutenants of Jones making their way out of the jungle with strongboxes of gold and diamonds and suitcases of money destined for the Soviet Embassy in Georgetown...
...James Cheek, the president of Howard University, said in 1971: "In 26 years since waging a world war against the forces of tyranny and fascism and genocide in Europe, we have become a nation more tyrannical, more fascistic and more capable of genocide than was ever conceived or thought possible two decades ago...
...Odell Rhodes "There were people in that organization who gave up everything they had to follow a socialist dream...
...He merely found them lying around, picked them up, and adapted them to his purpose, which was to persuade people to abandon their everyday lives and submit to his will inside a concentration camp in the jungle...
...It is not entirely surprising that Jones' semi-literate flock believed such lies as these because they must have heard echoes of them a thousand times from their television sets and radios, and seen them in newspaper headlines: a steady drumbeat of hostility toward the CIA, for example, and constant talk of "racism" from poverticians and columnists such as Carl Rowan who make a good living for themselves by portraying our society in the worst possible light...
...Then Jones' aides shot at him at the airstrip, and he still hasn't made up his mind about the1 place...
...And so, in the last hour, a pathetic follower was reduced to writing: "Dad-I see no way out...I fear only that without you the world may not make it to Communism...
...the repeated harangues over loudspeakers...
...Considerable information about the Soviet connection was published in an Associated Press story printed (with a banner headline on the front page) in the Washington Star on November 27-well before the Post book was written...
...It is opinion that has so clearly gone haywire at the Times...
Vol. 12 • February 1979 • No. 2
