You are drawing a false & cynical comparison trying to say that People’s Temple is like the far-right Golden Dawn in Greece.
It's an analogy. Doing charity doesn't make you good. I think it's way more offensive to compare them to the BPP and other radical leftist orgs who actually (mostly) had their shit together.
You can downplay & disregard that as simply “charity”, but it’s so much more than that when offered with a radically progressive political underpinning
...as well as a creepy doomsday cult underpinning, which is my point.
But that doesn’t mean the hundreds & thousands of organizers & community activists deserve to be called mindless cultists.
No, but the literal cultists of Jonestown were... Literal cultists.
I didn’t say that People’s Temple was a “good leftist organization”, but the extreme backlash and media distaste for economic/social alternatives is the prism we are viewing this history through.
Are you saying the backlash is only because they presented an alternative and not because of the whole mass suicide thing? Because I think the mass suicide thing is a lot more important here. No one even really remembers the rest now.
H. Newton and Angela Davis both supported People’s Temple enthusiastically
So we're supposed to repeat their mistake despite they made while having much less knowledge about their inner workings than we do now?
The rest of your post I don't understand because I can't figure out what is a quote, what isn't, what the stuff quoted refers to, or any of that. But I really don't understand trying to portray People's Temple as a positive leftist movement or whatever. It was clearly disastrous and horrible from its inception, if not a CIA honey pot. The alliances they managed to build with leftist movements shouldn't elevate them, they should serve as a warning to future leftist movements to be wary of that kind of shit. Yes, many members were well intentioned, but manipulated, and any organization is judged structurally, not from the character of its members, who were really just victims driven to this by desperation.
Like, it's literally a cult. A textbook definition of a cult. Their leader pretended he had spiritual healing powers. He sold them pieces of his robe. He took them to some remote settlement in Guyana and 5 years later he convinced them to kill themselves and their children en masse. It is blatantly a cult. I don't understand why there is an argument about it.
I didn't say doing charity made them "good" or "bad". It's your insistence on creating boogiemen out of history that does this. But equating a leftist religious organization to literal Nazis in Greece is cynical and underhanded.
You again are deflecting and trying to regurgitate anti-leftist sensationalism to make the organization's members out to be unthinking or malevolent beasts incapable of making their own decisions. I put quotes within quotation marks, so that they are easy to discern as quotes.
If you want to imbibe propaganda and disconnect the context of the People's Temple from the rest of the era, then you are doing the same thing that most liberal & establishment historiographies do with the BPP & Nation of Islam and others. They call them cults & extremists too
I didn't say anything about "honey pot", because the CIA blatantly had its hands all over this, and in the larger context of Operation Condor & other anti-leftist meddling, they definitely forced them into this box and gave them little recourse. Maybe the "cult" members would've been able to see how going back to existing within capitalism & racist imperialist US culture was a better option if only they had you there to show them the better way
"It's literally a cult" is what is said about Maoism & Stalin era and BPP & so many other leftist political situations in recent history. You want to make People's Temple out as this politically inert or dastardly or completely disconnected fringe group, when it was a misleading & misled & historically misrepresented product of the larger radicalization & dissent of the 1960s and 70s.
"Textbook definition of a cult" applies to literally any affinity group that attempts to chart its own course in society & revolves around a leader in any way. It's not really an adequate term for large and diverse groups that all have their own motivations and are created within real adverse circumstances and flourish on many political & social & productive levels.
But sure, BPP's unfortunate dissolution & disintegration isn't in any way similar to how the media & bourgeois histories treat People's Temple. Anti-communism and the need to tie historical tragedies to any future attempt to practice radical dissent isn't counter-revolution.
It's an analogy. Doing charity doesn't make you good. I think it's way more offensive to compare them to the BPP and other radical leftist orgs who actually (mostly) had their shit together.
...as well as a creepy doomsday cult underpinning, which is my point.
No, but the literal cultists of Jonestown were... Literal cultists.
Are you saying the backlash is only because they presented an alternative and not because of the whole mass suicide thing? Because I think the mass suicide thing is a lot more important here. No one even really remembers the rest now.
So we're supposed to repeat their mistake despite they made while having much less knowledge about their inner workings than we do now?
The rest of your post I don't understand because I can't figure out what is a quote, what isn't, what the stuff quoted refers to, or any of that. But I really don't understand trying to portray People's Temple as a positive leftist movement or whatever. It was clearly disastrous and horrible from its inception, if not a CIA honey pot. The alliances they managed to build with leftist movements shouldn't elevate them, they should serve as a warning to future leftist movements to be wary of that kind of shit. Yes, many members were well intentioned, but manipulated, and any organization is judged structurally, not from the character of its members, who were really just victims driven to this by desperation.
Like, it's literally a cult. A textbook definition of a cult. Their leader pretended he had spiritual healing powers. He sold them pieces of his robe. He took them to some remote settlement in Guyana and 5 years later he convinced them to kill themselves and their children en masse. It is blatantly a cult. I don't understand why there is an argument about it.
I didn't say doing charity made them "good" or "bad". It's your insistence on creating boogiemen out of history that does this. But equating a leftist religious organization to literal Nazis in Greece is cynical and underhanded.
You again are deflecting and trying to regurgitate anti-leftist sensationalism to make the organization's members out to be unthinking or malevolent beasts incapable of making their own decisions. I put quotes within quotation marks, so that they are easy to discern as quotes.
If you want to imbibe propaganda and disconnect the context of the People's Temple from the rest of the era, then you are doing the same thing that most liberal & establishment historiographies do with the BPP & Nation of Islam and others. They call them cults & extremists too
I didn't say anything about "honey pot", because the CIA blatantly had its hands all over this, and in the larger context of Operation Condor & other anti-leftist meddling, they definitely forced them into this box and gave them little recourse. Maybe the "cult" members would've been able to see how going back to existing within capitalism & racist imperialist US culture was a better option if only they had you there to show them the better way
"It's literally a cult" is what is said about Maoism & Stalin era and BPP & so many other leftist political situations in recent history. You want to make People's Temple out as this politically inert or dastardly or completely disconnected fringe group, when it was a misleading & misled & historically misrepresented product of the larger radicalization & dissent of the 1960s and 70s.
"Textbook definition of a cult" applies to literally any affinity group that attempts to chart its own course in society & revolves around a leader in any way. It's not really an adequate term for large and diverse groups that all have their own motivations and are created within real adverse circumstances and flourish on many political & social & productive levels.
But sure, BPP's unfortunate dissolution & disintegration isn't in any way similar to how the media & bourgeois histories treat People's Temple. Anti-communism and the need to tie historical tragedies to any future attempt to practice radical dissent isn't counter-revolution.