permanently resident there from July 1977. About seventy per cent of those who followed Jones to Guyana were black; about two-thirds were female. As Eileen Barker has pointed out, the membership of the People’s Temple was unlike the typical membership of most contemporary cults. Jonestown was originally called an agricultural commune, and the People’s Temple was not classified as a new religious movement until after the mass death of its members.3
The settlement which Jones established was publicized as utopian; a place from which disease had all but vanished because of Jones’s efforts as a divinely-gifted healer: a paradise of racial equality, economic equality and communal bliss. In fact, as some reported it, it was more like a concentration camp presided over by a cruel and ruthless commandant. Jones’s need to bring everything and everyone under his own control came near to fulfilment in this remote place.
According to Deborah Blakey, a former financial secretary of the Temple, who managed to get out in April 1978, the commune lived under a reign of terror. She told Shiva Naipaul that most people were required to work in the fields for eleven hours a day on grossly inadequate rations.4 As a result, extreme loss of weight, chronic diarrhoea, and recurrent fever affected half the inhabitants. Medical treatment was practically non-existent. One middle-aged ex-merchant seaman was forced to work until his shoulder was raw from humping lumber and he broke down sobbing. He was beaten up and forced to crawl in front of Jones to beg forgiveness. The settlement was constantly patrolled by armed guards. Jones threatened that anyone who tried to escape would be killed, forbade telephone calls to the outside world, ensured that mail was censored, and confiscated passports and money. He also told them that the settlement was surrounded by mercenaries or by the Guyanese Army, who would capture and torture any defectors and castrate any males who attempted escape.
Jones himself, together with some favourites, enjoyed a varied and more than adequate diet from foods stored in his personal refrigerator. He considered himself entitled to have sexual relations with anyone of either sex, although it was noted by his son Stephan that nearly all his father’s partners were white. Some were undoubtedly given drugs to make them more amenable. Jones affirmed that he was the only truly heterosexual male in the settlement, and alleged that many of the other males had not come to terms with their homosexual feelings. To demonstrate this, he found it advisable to bugger some of them. One such victim is reported as saying: ‘Your fucking me in the ass, was, as I see it now, necessary to get me to deal with my deep-seated repression against my homosexuality’.5 This man seems to have had no realization of being exploited, no consciousness that Jones might be exercising power over him and, at the same time, gaining personal sexual satisfaction. ‘Father’ could do no wrong, and sex with Father was generally reported as an incomparable experience.
Punishments were generally carried out in public on the stage of the church. Beatings were inflicted with a three-foot paddle, and some beatings lasted half-an-hour. Grace Stoen saw her son John Victor beaten in public, but when she finally escaped from the settlement in July 1976, she had to leave the child behind. Victims of beatings had their cries amplified by microphones held to their lips. A child who soiled his pants was forced to wear them on his head, forbidden food, and made to watch others eating. Children were sometimes tossed into a well near Jones’s bungalow and pulled down into the water by aides who were already swimming there. Their screams of fear could be heard all over the settlement. Another punishment was a boxing match in which the offender was made to fight with a much stronger adversary who beat him semi-conscious. Other offenders were forced to eat hot peppers, or had a hot pepper stuffed up the rectum. Jones’s son Stephan recalled that his sixteen-year-old friend, Vincent Lopez, was forced to chew a pepper. To save him from being compelled to chew another, Stephan caught his friend’s vomit in his hand so that he could swallow it again. Another punishment was to be confined in a crate too small to permit standing for days at a time. Some offenders were given electric shocks from a machine known as Big Foot. As Jones himself deteriorated, both mentally and physically, Jonestown appears to have come close to resembling Belsen.
Yet, as Shiva Naipaul indicates in his book Journey to Nowhere, there was another side to Jonestown. Some reported that their lives had been radically changed for the better; that Jonestown, because of its insistence on racial integration, had removed the stigma of being black, and had given them a new dignity. Others who had previously been alcoholic or drug addicts claimed to have been ‘saved’ by the Temple or by Jones himself. Dr. James S. Gordon, a psychiatrist who interviewed a number of survivors over a period of ten years, was impressed with the fact that none regretted their stay in Jonestown. It is evident that some people who had been alienated from conventional society felt themselves part of a new community in which they were for the first time accepted and valued. Naipaul writes that some experienced Jonestown as a paradise, while others found it a nightmare.
Jim Jones’s confidence in himself was not based, as it is with most of us, on feeling loved and appreciated by friends and family, but on his ability to impress others with his fluent oratory. I have no doubt that this isolated youth early convinced himself, as he convinced others, that he was endowed with special powers and spiritual insight. Like the dwarf Alberich in Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Jones abandoned the search for love in favour of the acquisition of power. The savage punishments described earlier are a demonstration of his misuse of power. It is hardly credible that mothers could have tolerated such physical abuse of their children, or that adults would submit to such public pain and humiliation; but, as we shall see, Jones was not unique in his punitive methods. His sexual behaviour indicates that he used sex as a way to dominate others rather than as an expression of love. His corrupt sexual behaviour went hand in hand with his elitist conviction of his own superiority. Jones felt entitled to be well fed when his followers were half-starving, and was better housed than they were; but, although the People’s Temple accumulated considerable funds, he does not seem to have been attracted by conventional trappings of wealth in the shape of Rolls-Royces, yachts, or gold trinkets. What fascinated him was the exercise of power over other people.
Jones perfectly illustrates the difficulty in defining the borderlines between conviction, delusion, confidence trickery, and psychosis. Perhaps more overtly than any guru with whom I am concerned except Gurdjieff, Jones was a confidence trickster. He had no scruples about faking cures of illness, or himself pretending to collapse when it appeared desirable, or in inventing attacks from imagined enemies. He once broke a window and claimed that a brick on the floor had been thrown at him. Unfortunately for him, the absence of broken glass within the room demonstrated that the window had been broken from inside. In Jonestown, he claimed that enemies had fired at him, and produced bullets in evidence. In fact, his adopted son Jimmy had fired the shots, and was seen to do so by Vincent Lopez, whose punishment by forced eating of a hot pepper was referred to earlier. Jones was always inclined to suspect that he was being persecuted by agents of the United States Government including the Internal Revenue and the CIA, no doubt because he was in reality guilty of financial misdemeanours, and also because he outspokenly condemned the administration as fascist and racist. However, as he got older, his suspicions took on more and more the colouring of paranoid delusions, until, in Jonestown, his tediously long broadcast harangues amounted to the ramblings of a psychotic. This mental deterioration was undoubtedly promoted by the large quantities of drugs, including both amphetamines and anti-depressants, which he took for a variety of ailments, both real and imagined. During the 1970s, Jones drove home his paranoid message with increasing force. He alleged that the San Francisco authorities were preparing concentration camps for ethnic minorities and, by the mid-1970s, he had accumulated at least two hundred guns. In Jonestown, he added to this armoury by smuggling more weapons in crates containing machinery. These were generally obtained from the San Francisco Gun Exchange (or ‘Bible Exchange’ as it was known in Jonestown).
Jones began to announce himself as God around 1974. Before this, he had generally claimed to be a messenger from God with a divine gift of healing: later, he said, ‘I come as God socialist’. Drugs made him more inclined to claim divine status but how far he believed in his own divinity is an open question. According to the New Yorker of 22 November 1993, his wife Marceline tried to persuade their son Stephan to talk his father into giving up
