bfp: “maybe i should speak spanish instead?”

No, no, you don’t understand! She’s not bigoted against Spanish-speaking immigrants. She’s actually objecting to the influx of undocumented immigrants in her neighborhood speaking Classical Nahuatl.

Now that that’s all been cleared up, I’m off to march openly and defiantly against the continents of North and South America.

namaroopa,

oh! Not black/brown people at Jonestown (mostly). That assumption is totally incorrect, which is why we’re sort of talking about the event in different languages here.

This isn’t my understanding of the demographics at Jonestown. It’s certainly true that press coverage after the November 18 focused disproportionately on Jim Jones, survivors from the mostly white church leadership, and the mainly white, affluent “Concerned Relatives.” But the sensationalist press coverage was wrong to treat their stories as representative of the People’s Temple or Jonestown as a whole. According to Paul VanDeCarr, 70 per cent of the people at Jonestown were Black. Browsing through the photos on this list of the dead, I’m pretty sure that’s accurate.

Rad Geek: the people at Jonestown very much knew they were drinking poison and had rehearsals for and debates about it, although a few members did resist and were coerced at various stages. People in totalist authoritarian cults don’t sit around wishing they could escape, especially not the kids – they’d get hurt way too easily in a totalist setting if they adopted forms of psychological resistance that are more tolerable in mainstream society.

Well. About 80 people did escape from Jonestown — 16 of them were trying to leave with Ryan when he was murdered, but weren’t killed in the attack, and the other 60-odd people escaped into the woods. That’s a small percentage — less than 1% of the population at Jonestown — but it is important that even amongst able-bodied adults the decision was far from unanimous.

In any case, though, I’m not sure I understand your argument. I agree that several hundred people at Jonestown chose to commit suicide. But a number of the seniors receiving medical care at Jonestown were apparently poisoned in their sleep, not at the “White Night” assembly with the poisoned Flavor-Aid. And I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim that infants or young children understood that the Flavor-Aid they were given by their parents was poisoned, or to make an informed decision about whether or not to commit “revolutionary suicide.” (The infants and toddlers had the poison squirted down their throats with syringes.) Since we’re already talking about several hundred people who were simply murdered by another person, the frequent use of the term “mass suicide” to describe Jonestown is seriously misleading.

Any discussion of physical/psychological agency HAS to be more complicated than what happened on the day they died.

I certainly agree with you about this. (In fact I pretty much detest the use of the term “brainwashing” to apply to anything other than the military torture cases it was invented to describe, and I think it papers over very complicated and important questions.) But my objections to the treatment of Jonestown as a “mass suicide” don’t have to do with any theory about the people who made a knowing choice to “drink the Kool-Aid,” as they say. They have to do with the way in which that description focuses on the conscious decisions of those adults who were in a position to make conscious decisions about whether to live or to commit suicide. It’s misleading because it blanks out what happened to several hundred people who were not in a position to have any agency in the decision, whether complicated or simple, either because their parents decided for them, or because they were killed in their sleep.

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.

Lauren,

Oh, don’t worry. They do that, too. Straw hats, prison stripes, and casual lynching jokes have all been popular with the burnt cork party crowd.

I actually use my blogging software to generate a separate “blog” consisting of my comments on other sites. The main upshot for me is that I can easily pull down a list of the places I’ve commented recently in order to check back in, but I’ve had a few people tell me that they like following it as a sort-of-blog of its own.

I don’t really know what my actual commenting style is. The commenting style I’d like to have would be short remarks that either help to clarify something conceptually, or else point to some relevant piece of information not mentioned. But I don’t feel like I’m very good at doing that right now, and I tend to post long responses that would often be better suited to a post on my own blog. That, or long responses that I spend an hour on and then abandon halfway through without posting, because I realize that I don’t really know where I want to go with all that.