It is interesting that the twentieth anniversary of the Rev. Jim Jones's Jonestown holocaust has come and gone, unremarked by such liberal thought leaders as Professor Alan Dershowitz and the Hon. Barney Frank. Located in the steamy jungles of Guyana, Jonestown was the site of the People's Temple, "an interracial sharing community" that originated in San Francisco. Over 900 of the Rev. Jones's followers died there late in 1978. At his orders they drank poison or had it imposed on them.

The Rev. Jones had risen from being director of the Indianapolis Housing Authority in 1963 to being chairman of San Francisco's Housing Authority a few years later. Conjuring with race relations was a trendy con game in those days. From his positions in various race relations bureaucracies, the Rev. Jones boasted of his knack for solving civil rights problems, adopting left-wing radical programs for the very poor, and bringing the destitute of all races together. The Rev. Jones was white and he brought them all together in an open grave.

Race and 1960's radicals became his snake oils. When the corpses were discovered in Guyana the Rev. Jones was palmed off as just another religious zealot, but there was very little religion in his song and dance, at least not religion as conventionally understood. Christ and his colleagues were wholly missing from his galaxy of heroes. He had come to disdain the Bible and to extol only a very restricted collection of luminaries: Lenin, Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada, Fidel Castro, even Adolf Hitler. He particularly admired the Soviet Union--not Mao's China, but for some reason Papa Brezhnev's Soviet Union. This is one of the perils of being an autodidact; orderly thought is sacrificed. At the time of the poisoning the Rev. Jones was longing to take his followers to Moscow's workers' paradise.

Letters found in the vast killing field that had been the People's Temple, "dedicated against the evils of racism, hunger, and injustice," maundered on about his followers' dread of "the capitalist U.S." and their affection for "the beauty of Communism." None of the thousands of letters found among their paltry possessions betrayed any interest in Christianity or any other organized religion but in "Communism." Yet when their corpses were found I cannot recall any major news report calling them "Communists." As I say, the notion spread that they were some sort of Christian believers run amok.

Actually, the Rev. Jones abounded with 1960's moonshine right down to the reason he took his flock from San Francisco to Guyana. He left in 1977 to escape nuclear calamity, capitalism, the CIA, the FBI, and a series of concentration camps that he was convinced the government was building for him and his faithful flock, composed of a mixture of the very poor and aging flower children from that summer of love way back when.

Perhaps one of the reasons we heard so little about the twentieth anniversary of Jonestown's ghastly climax was that it revealed some of the dangerous aspects of the 1960's: the nihilism at the heart of radicalism, the exploitation of trendy radical notions by establishment figures, their imprudence in cultivating obvious lunatics.

The Rev. Jones had gotten much of his power and wealth through government aid programs supposedly targeted for the very poor. He had courted establishment figures and they had exploited him. Two years before the Jonestown holocaust Vice President Walter Mondale met with the Rev. Jones on the Mondale campaign plane, after which he wrote to this great visionary: "Knowing of your congregation's deep involvement in the major social and constitutional issues of our country is a great inspiration to me." Brutal corporal punishment was often meted out to the faithful at Jonestown, especially to its children, which makes a letter to the Rev. Jones from another member of the Carter cabinet so arresting. Wrote Joseph Califano: "Knowing your commitment and compassion, your interest in protecting individual liberty and freedom have made an outstanding contribution to furthering the cause of human dignity." Midst the corpses other laudatory letters were found, from California's Governor Jerry Brown, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Senator Mike Gravel, and from Mrs. Jimmy Carter, who wrote from the White House that "your comments about Cuba are helpful."

Yet given the foul ending of the People's Temple in faraway Guyana, an admiring editorial from Washington Post is the most memorable. "The hands-down winners," the editorialist sang, "of anybody's tourists-of-the-year award have got to be the 660 members of the People's Temple...who bend over backwards to leave every place they visit more attractive than when they arrived." Perhaps it is not so surprising that the liberal thought leaders of our time let the anniversary of the Jonestown holocaust pass unremarked. Twenty years from now rereading what they have said about this impeachment trial will not be pleasant either.

Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.
Source: American Spectator, Apr99, Vol. 32 Issue 4, p18, 3/4p.