Comments Elsewhere

namaroopa,

For what it’s worth, the reason that I refer to Jonestown as a “massacre” isn’t because of any particular theory about “brainwashing” or the agency of the people who committed suicide. It’s because the hundreds of children and senior citizens at Jonestown, who made up about 2/3 of the population, were unquestionably murdered. They didn’t commit suicide; they were poisoned without their knowledge by other people. So calling what happened a “mass suicide” (as often happens in press and reference sources) is misleading in the extreme.

Actually, THAT’s the point. The koolaid joke is one way of raising the topic of cults, only to point out what one could never be a part of.

I think you’re exactly right about that. Something I didn’t mention in my original post, but which is important, is how the identification of the people at Jonestown as “cultists” is used to avoid thinking of them as actual human beings with real lives like yours and mine. People who make “Kool-Aid” cracks would usually never consider making similar jokes about, say, the massacre at Srebrenica or the Zealots’ mass suicide at Masada, or whatever. But when it comes to Jonestown, such horrible suffering is treated as perfectly good fodder for making snide little wisecracks about your partisan opponents, because of the rhetorical distance that you get from dismissing the dead as a bunch of basically alien crazies.