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Basebf555 posted:Totally speculation on my part based on the fact that basically every single one of them took the poison, and there were in fact guards there with guns. It seems very very unlikely that at least some of the people didn't disagree with the plan but the alternative was clearly still death, just slightly different. That said, this wasn't the first time Jones had told them all to drink some poison. I think the Wikipedia article mentions that they knew that mass suicide was a possibility, and they had even had drills where everyone drank something they thought was poison, but wasn't.
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May 29, 2014 17:04
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Lumberjack Bonanza posted:Jim Jones had such a crazy cult of personality surrounding him. He studied everyone from Hitler to Ghandi as a kid, and it shows in his ability to get people willing to follow him to hell and back. What's most interesting about Jones is that he honestly seemed to believe in total equality, being a huge proponent of racial integration and socialism. However, he had no qualms with manipulating the hell out of people to turn them to his way of thinking, and got incredibly petty and selfish whenever things didn't go his way. You can't help but wonder if he could have been an agent change instead of the instigator of tragedy. This is the most interesting part of the People's Temple to me. Like someone said above, it was in many ways really progressive for the time, and Jim Jones could have been a hero had he not been an evil lunatic murdering scumfuck.
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May 30, 2014 19:14
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JD-Smith posted:This was my favorite thread to read.. now it's dead. poo poo I was going to find a good article.. but I can't think under pressure. Got you covered. Donald Crowhurst and the Teignmouth Electron were discussed briefly in the last thread, which is where I first heard of him, and I've been fascinated by his story ever since. Basically, in the 60s, a British newspaper sponsored a solo nonstop circumnavigation sailing race, and this guy signed up with next to no sailing experience, mortgaging his house to finance it and basically putting his entire livelihood on the line. It quickly became clear that he wasn't going to make it, so instead of heading home, he hung around in the South Atlantic alone for a few months, doing celestial navigation backwards in order to falsify his journey. The stress, combined with the oppressive loneliness, eventually caused him to go cuckoo bananapants insane and kill himself. The other contestants in the race are no less fascinating, and there's a documentary on Netlfix called Deep Water that goes into the race far better than I ever could. I can't recommend it enough.
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Jul 3, 2014 22:56
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