New documentary explores Jonestown mass suicide

[Sequoia]

(Last night I was thinking of this as one of the worst things that ever happened in the last century. I was getting ready for work when this flashed on KNBC in Los Angeles. It was shocking to see the bodies everywhere and the stories that followed how it all came to be. So this morning I open up CNN and there's the story. Do any of you here remember that day?)
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Twenty-eight years later, what's left to say about Jonestown? Nine hundred members of a religious cult followed their fanatical leader to Guyana and willingly committed suicide by drinking a Kool-Aid-like mixture laced with cyanide.

What more could there be to the story? Plenty, it turns out.

I watched an advance copy of the new documentary, "Jonestown," by filmmaker Stanley Nelson on Sunday, and found myself drawn deeply into a macabre tale that I had little prior knowledge of.

Nelson interviewed more than two dozen former members of Jim Jones' controversial Peoples Temple, including some who survived the Jonestown mass suicide -- which, by the way, looks more like mass murder now. And Nelson has unearthed dramatic video and sound recordings -- never seen or heard before that shed new light on the establishment, development and downfall of the Peoples Temple, right up until the moment Jim Jones passes out the cups.

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/

[Catherine Vincent]

1. I saw some of that on CNN last night.

And it broke my heart when I heard the recording of that elderly gentlemen that was asking Jones to leave so he could visit his family. Jones scolded him for wanting to leave and then he asked him again if he still wanted to leave and the man said meekly "no". That was so sad I wanted to cry. :cry:

[soothsayer]

2. Kind of envy how they could wholeheartedly believe in something.

--albeit a goofy something that they died for. But imagine believing something---ANYTHING---like that. Amazing. I'm wayyyy too skeptical, untrusting, cautious. Makes me kind of jealous.

[tblue]

4. Oh, no, honey. You DON'T want to believe in anything that wholeheartedly. Keep one eye open.

It never pays to be a sheeple.

[MADem]

3. I was in the middle east when that happened. I saw NO television about it at all.

My best source of news was NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL and the International Herald Tribune. I heard some BBC World Service radio reports as well.

Even at that, with just those sources, I was appalled by the whole story.

I've not yet seen much TV footage about it.

But this bit sure as hell does NOT surprise me:

I also learned that Jim Jones didn't suddenly take a hard left onto the highway of darkness. He was deeply disturbed from childhood, and is even suspected of abusing animals, something many experts believe is a hallmark of an emerging psychopath.

[tblue]

5. * abused animals, too. Firecrackers in froggies' rumps. Once a psychopath, always a psychopath.

[no_hypocrisy]

6. I remember Leo Ryan from California getting shot at the airport

just as he was about to board a plane with members who chose to leave the People's Temple with him. And the children being forcefed the Kool Aid by their parents, some injected with it.

Horrific and Tragic on so many levels.

[johnnie]

7. Easily one of the saddest things to happen in recent history

I still get a bit agitated when people say "drink the Kool Aid". I think that phrase shouldn't be used, only because I feel sorrow for the families and friends of those who were murdered by Jim Jones.

[Catherine Vincent]

10. I don't think it should be used either.

That was a terrible tragedy that happened in Guyana.

[johnnie]

11. And really...

The people who died there were forced at gunpoint to drink that stuff, the people who "drink the Kool Aid" these days in America are just morans.

[CountAllVotes]

8. I remember it very well

in fact, I worked with a man who lost his entire family in Guyana. He had some how managed to escape.

He was not in the greatest state of mind, I do remember that much.

I hope Jim Jones is having fun rotting in hell for this! :grr:

:kick:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. As I recall, the story broke right after Saturday Night Live was over

My boyfriend and I didn't know whether to believe it for that reason. It was such a bizarre ending to the Jonestown story (which had been in the news on and off for weeks) that we wondered whether it was one of SNL's fake news stories.