Cover of A New Look at Jonestown: Dimensions from a Guyanese Perspective
by Eusi Kwayana
November 18 marked the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. On that fatal Saturday in 1978, over nine hundred members of the Peoples Temple died from ingestion of cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid. Their leader, the Reverend Jim Jones, died from gunshot wounds. Seven miles away, American Congressman Leo Ryan and four members of his party lay dead on the Port Kaituma airstrip.
After all these years, several questions about the tragedy remain unanswered. The then Guyanese Prime Minister of the socialist cooperative ruling party, declared the Jonestown Massacre “an American problem.” No Guyanese investigation was ever conducted. To fill this void, A New Look at Jonestown: Dimensions from a Guyanese Perspective by Eusi Kwayana will soon be released (see below for details of ordering copies).
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Subject: Return to Jonestown | Survivors revisit site 40 years after the tragedy …
https://youtu.be/xNY2yGA1fNQ
In a world replete with social and economic injustices, many, particularly the poor and generally uninformed masses, invariably turn to religion to find comfort and meaning to their seemingly empty lives. In so doing, they inevitably expose themselves to a wide spectrum of exploitative, predatory con artists such as Jim Jones who take unfettered advantage of their ignorance, willingness, and malleability.
It was the German economist, intellectual and philosopher Karl Marx who labeled religion the “opium of the people.” Once a person has become intoxicated by this opium, it ultimately leads to addiction, an addiction that is virtually impossible to be extricated from. One of the most virulent and insidious side-effects of this opium is the victim’s inability to separate facts from fiction.
Religion’s practitioners tell tall tales that are seldom questioned by their willing, gullible congregants. The willing are often told about an earth that is merely a few thousand years old, about a mythical figure in the sky who magically snapped his fingers to create all matters, including us, and about a blissful, utopian, eternal abode in frigid space.
The reality is, the Earth and Universe at large are immeasurably and incomprehensibly old, billions of years old in fact. But the willing are prepared to accept the nonsense that humans and dinosaurs once cohabited the Earth during the past 6000 years. What a sad commentary!
Jim Jones saw an opportunity to exploit his naive, unsuspecting victims and to convince them to relocate to the pristine forests of Guyana (‘paradise’) and ultimately led them to their untimely deaths. This horror in the jungle, ignominiously, gave our beautiful homeland unwanted publicity.
Unfortunately, little has changed in the world in the past 40 years. Many kooks continue to invade pristine areas of the planet to spread the virus of religion. One such fool was John Chau, an American missionary from Washington State, who was greeted with spears to his chest on Sentinel Island last week. The tribesmen buried his body on the beach.
(Sentinel Island is located in an isolated, protected archipelago in the middle of the Bay of Bengal – Andaman-Nicobar Islands. They have little or no contact with the outside world and have lived there as hunter-gatherers between 50,000 to 100,000 years.) It is a glimpse into humans’ past.
In my view, one of the greatest favors humans everywhere can solemnly do themselves and their innocent offspring is to immediately unshackle themselves from the chains of religion and to walk away once and for all — and to begin in earnest to understand reality, to separate facts from fiction and to never again become a victim of fraud.
Ron Saywack.