Learned that was a thing in some circles.
Anyone wanna have a struggle session?
I’m drunk around CHUDs and trying to ignore them.
Damn I just posted the same comment with a link to it before I read your comment
Haven't heard one of his songs since since freshman year of high school. Not my thing.
Edit: wait the cult leader? Who stans the koolaid man???There was some guy on some Reddit left forum who was on a big trip about it like a month ago. He even managed to “pill” a few people on it, but most people just dunked on him. Cant find any archives now.
I’ve read a few books, listened to several podcasts, and probably watched every documentary about Jim Jones. Studying serial killers and cults is kind of a hobby for me, and Jim Jones has always stuck out to me as such an interesting figure.
What's your thoughts on Jones' suspected CIA connections?
I have heard some rumors about his time in mid-60's Brazil, that locals thought he was connected with the US military. Also, that the investment firm he worked for also hired a lot of German and Swiss fascists post-WWII.
I think it’s possible one of the US ambassadors at Jonestown was CIA, but I haven’t heard of evidence that would suggest Jones was an agent or tool.
I think Jones’ life and the conditions at Jonestown have been too well documented for him to be CIA or for the village to be some brainwashing experiment. Jones had feelings of superiority and visions of grandeur & power his entire life from childhood. Mix in his charisma, ability to bullshit and manipulate, followers that live on his every word, and a nasty amphetamine habit and what happened at Jonestown makes perfect sense.
Edit: You’re saying Jones worked for an investment firm? I don’t think I’ve heard that before, do you have any info on that? Googling “Jim Jones investment firm” was way too generic of a search term lmao
I read about it in Jim Hougan's notes on Jim Jones. The source he references are English-language Brazilian news articles from 1978, which are not easy to find:
- "To Brazilians, Jim Jones was a CIA Agent" by O Globo
- Brazil Herald, "The little-known story: Jim Jones' early days in Rio de Janeiro" by Harold Emert
Jim Hougan is a solid private investigator. He has the best account of the Watergate scandal, and covered some pretty big union struggles in the 90's. I doubt he would just make up sources for no gain. The only question is the veracity of the sources.
The article is an interesting take on the Jonestown massacre. Basically, US Gladio:
What follows is a work in progress about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. In so far as it has a central thesis, it is that Jones initiated the 1978 massacre at Jonestown, Guyana because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan's investigation would disgrace him. Specifically, Jones was afraid that Ryan and the press would uncover evidence that the leftist founder of the Peoples Temple was for many years an asset of the FBI and the CIA. This fear was, I believe, mirrored in various precincts of the U.S. intelligence community, which worried that Ryan's investigation would embarrass the CIA by linking Jones to some of the Agency's most volatile programs---including "mind-control studies" and operations such as MK-ULTRA.
This is, I believe, why Jones's 201-file was purged by the CIA immediately after Jones's case-officer, Dan Mitrione, was murdered in Montevideo, Uruguay. [1] What I believe and what I can prove are, in some instances, two different things. There is no smoking gun in the pages that follow. But I think the reader will agree that there are certainly a great many empty cartridges lying around---enough, perhaps, to stimulate further investigation by others.
Having said that, it should be added that I am hardly the first to suggest that the Jonestown massacre was the outcome of someone's secret machinations. The affair is inherently mysterious, and conspiracy theories abound---the most prominent among them that "Jonestown" was a CIA mind-control experiment.
This is a view that has been put forward in a number of venues. Congressman Ryan's close friend and chief-of-staff, Joe Holsinger, is persuaded of it. The respectable Edwin Mellen Press has gone so far as to publish a book on the subject.[2] And professional conspiracists such as John Judge have embraced the thesis wholeheartedly.
In my view, they're probably mistaken. The truth is darker, the evil more banal.
Might've been a socialist, but cults and mass murder suicides are still fucked up
He’s was a big commie. Committing mass suicide was actually plan B. His cult wanted to go to the USSR initially. He spoke candidly sometimes about how his Christianity stuff was a side wind to get people into communism.
FYI he also would fuck members of his congregation on stage in front of the whole church. And apparently in Jonestown he’d just grab random people and rape them in the open.
Enough people have testified to this that I doubt it was an Op. also he may himself have been an Op, I think some declassified CIA docs say he was in contact with their agents.
His message clearly resonated with actual marginalized people because his congregation was mostly black.
He almost seems like a guy who was genuinely motivated by social justice but was also a narcissist who was really good at manipulating people, so he did awful shit buy internally justified it as being in the name of “the cause”.
Last time I was digging around the wikipedia entry for Jonestown , I came across something interesting/ironic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Ryan
Ryan was shot and killed at an airstrip in Guyana on November 18, 1978, as he and his party were attempting to leave. He had traveled to Guyana to investigate claims that people were being held against their will at the Peoples Temple Jonestown settlement.
Shannon Jo Ryan, Ryan's eldest daughter, joined the Rajneesh movement. After the Bhagwan moved to Oregon in 1981, she joined his commune, which became known as Rajneeshpuram.[29][56][57] Taking the name Ma Amrita Pritam, by December 1982 she had married another member, who also lived at the commune.[58]
I think joining a cult was just a thing you did in your 20s back then
It’s something that (oddly) a lot of Biographies of him gloss over. But yeah Jim Jones was a pretty vocal leftist, he literally described what they did at Jonestown as a “revolutionary suicide”, he was in communications with the Soviet Consulate in Guyana too.
However I think there’s also evidence he may have been a CIA pysop. Plus he was a violent narcissist and by many accounts a rapist.
critical support for his life story up until when the CIA got to him
if you have a tumbler full of flavor-aid and there are fascists outside, it’s probably best to chug it, do a little dance, smash the glass on the floor, and two step into Eternity
My paternal grandfather's family was full of weird Pentecostals living in Indianapolis, so I have relatives that knew Jones before he moved to California. i don't know if it's hindsight, but they say he was unsettling to be around. Apparently my great-grandfather confronted him for being a heretic 🤷
I worked with a dude who was in a self help cult based in PA for like two years. Him and his GF got out around the same time.
One thing I learned from them, apparently most cults have a high turnover rate. They were in an online community of ex-members that was “around 50 people”, and the cult apparently never went over 200 active members. If you watch/read about cults there’s a lot of accounts from people who left right before the cult went super crazy. Seems like most humans have some ability to gauge when shits about to go REALLY bad.
That's good to hear. I tend to think of cults as being very hard to leave, and that it's unlikely that people would even want to leave in the first place. I'd certainly prefer to think that they're easier to escape.
No, definitely don’t stan him but this song is pretty dope https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=FcWyXPVCc2g&feature=share
