December 6, 1978

The "Why" Of Jonestown

The key to understanding why Jonestown happened is contained in Rev. Jim Jones last words:

"It is good to die.  It will beautify our struggle.  It is a fitting tribute to socialism."  Imminent disclosure of Jones' failure to establish a Utopian society was more than he, the consummate ego maniac, could bear.

He had boasted of achieving the long-sought perfect society.  In the end, his bizarre mixture of religion and socialism succumbed to the same frailties of human nature as hundreds of previous attempts.

The character deficiencies that enabled 912 "civilized" people to commit murder and mass suicide in a South American jungle certainly have psychiatric overtones.  People who surrender their will to self-proclaimed father figures perhaps are fleeing adult burdens.  A leader who demands the death of hundreds of trusting followers is a self-evident mad man.

Yet, we have to go back in history more than 1,900 years to find a similar example of human hysteria.

The closest parallel is that of the Zealots defending their mountain-top community Masada in the year 73.

The Jews rose up against their Roman overlords in the year 66, but within five years all had been re-conquered save the religious commune near the Dead Sea.

For two years 15,000 Roman legionnaires besieged Masada whose inhabitants, including women and children, numbered less than a thousand.  Giant battering rams brought up on a mammoth incline of earth finally breached Masada's walls.

As the Romans prepared for the final assault, the Zealot leader, Eleazar ben Jair, proclaimed mass suicide preferable to death, abuse and slavery at the hands of the hated Romans.

During the last night, the men of Masada strangled their wives and children.  Five of Jair's most trusted lieutenants then garroted the other men, and Jair next slew the five.  Finally Jair threw himself on his own sword to end the grisly deed.

When the Roman soldiers streamed through the wall the next morning they were awed by an eerie silence.  They counted 960 corpses.  Only seven mothers and children, who had hid in a water conduit, escaped to tell the story.

The comparison of Masada with the Jonestown debacle is so close that one wonders if Rev.  Jones consciously repeated the ancient pattern.

Communal cults have been organized many times in the past.  The perfect society was theorized by Plato and Socrates.  The persistent dream of idealists received impetus in more recent history from a book titled "Utopia" written in 1516 by Sir Thomas More.

More's message was that the ideal society is realizable if men really want it.  From this simple premise arose a vast number of attempts to make it come true.

The idea came to America with the first English colony at Jamestown.  Communal sharing of work and harvest failed miserably as the colonists discovered goldbricking paid off just as handsomely as toil.  Only a hard-boiled policy of no-work-no-eat by Captain John Smith saved the colony.

Since then, groups of Americans have tried pure socialism at least 138 times.

The first communitarian colony in America was established in 1663 by Dutch Mennonites at Lewes, Delaware.  The first commune in this country to outlive its founder was Ephrata, founded in 1732 by German Pietists in Pennsylvania.

Better known socialist communities were the Shakers in Ohio, New Harmony in Indiana, Amana Society in Iowa, Koreshan Unity in Florida and Brook Farm in Massachusetts.

The most influential of these early socialist experiments was the New Harmony Cooperative started in 1825 by Robert Owen, a British manufacturer.  It lasted only two years, but sponsored the first kindergarten, the first trade schools, the first free library and the first community -supported public school in America.

A few communal societies operate today, such as the Hutterites, Bruderhof Movement and Hare Krishna.  In Israel, the kibbutzim is a strong institution for farm expansion.  Religious fervor characterizes most present closed groups.

Religious fanaticism intensifies the shock of ultimate collapse.  The "family" of Charles Manson, for example, believed him to be the reincarnation of Jesus and was led to horrible murders as disenchanted members deserted.

The role of religion in socialism has always been a controversy.

John Noyes founded the Oneida Community in New York in 1848 believing socialism was impossible without religion.  He saw his social system as a continuation of Brook Farm "without its mistakes."  He abolished the traditional family.  All husbands and wives were "shared".  Children remained with their mothers until they could walk and then were placed in a common nursery.

"Complex marriage" and the resulting "extended family," Noyes believed, would dissolve selfishness and demonstrate the practicality of his way of life.

Though it didn't work, the Oneida approach was widely copied by the "hippies" of the 60's - and with as little lasting effect.

The same year that the Oneida Community was getting underway in America, Karl Marx and Frederich Engel in  England wrote their "Communist Manifesto." They discarded "Utopian socialism" for "scientific socialism" based on a materialistic concept of history and the class struggle.  "Religion," they declared, "is the opiate of the people."

Rev. Jones appears to have mixed elements of Marxist communism and Noyes religion into a frustrating blend of socialism.  Jones was negotiating with the atheist Soviet Union for moving his community there, yet he preached of God incarnate in himself.  The contradiction was fatal, literally and figuratively.

History has shown the futility of socialism.  Religion has not been able to save the ideal.  Only a police state has kept socialism viable in the Soviet Union.

In the end, Rev.  Jones adopted terror tactics to make his brand of socialism work.  And when that, too, failed to save his socialist dream, his reason for living was gone.

Author: Lindsey Williams