Now that the thousands of words written about Jim Jones and the murders in Guyana have faded into the past, the impression generally left with the American public is that he was some kind of religious nut or something, and that the tragic events should make us leery of other religious fanatics and cults.
Accuracy in Media, the Washington-based organization which keeps track of the inaccuracies and omissions of the media, recently published the text of what can best be described as Jim Jones’ life confession. It reveals that Jones was not a religious man of any kind of description. He did not believe in God; he was a Communist and a compete faker.
The confession is actually a transcript of a taped monologue that Jones gave on his life and philosophy, which was found among his effects after his death and was published, profanity and all, in the Georgetown Guyana Chronicle of December 6, 1978. At that time, public interest in the whole subject was high and newspapers were filled with gory details about the whole sordid affair, but very few U.S. newspapers printed the authentic Jones’ confession.
The first thing that comes through loud and clear is Jones’ foul language and his contempt for religion of all kinds. Among his comments in the rambling discourse were: “You giving me a church? I don’t believe in anything. I’ma revolutionary. … Here I am raving against the church, knocking the church, ridi- culing God, all this …” and continuing with profanities.
Jones recites how he met a man in a used car lot who subsequently gave him a church. Whereupon Jones said, “I take this —- church as a Communist who believed in nothing. … And that is how the —- religious career got rolling. I was preaching integration, against war, throwing in some Communist philosophy.”
With total cynicism, Jones then described how he took up faith healing as a racket. He was a faker who exploited the gullible and used religion to snare them for his Communist political purposes.
Jones’ dedication to Communism was thorough and slavish. He admired Mao and Castro, and especially Stalin. Listen to Jones’ own Words: “I idolized him [Mao ] for what he did in the Long March. … I loved Stalin. … I broke all my connections and went with the Maoists, because of loyalties, again — deep-seated loyalty. That loyalty is still deep down in me today. Stalin did great things for the Soviet Union.”
Jones devotion to Communism was intense and evident in every part of the confession, which was _ recorded sometime in 1977 in Jonestown. “Life is a gamble,” he said, “and I’d —- well rather gamble on the side of Communism. … I look at what Castro has done, and I think he has done tremendous things.”
Accuracy in Media implies that the national media would have served us better if they had broadcast less about the smell of the dead bodies and more about what made Jones tick. It would have been better journalism if the public had been given more authentic first-hand statements of Jones, and less of what other people said about Jones.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that there are many parts of the media that were trying to avoid facing up to the fact that Jones was a Communist, just as five years ago, much of the media tried to downplay the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist. Two decades ago, Castro was held out to us as merely an “agrarian reformer,” a sort of “Robin Hood of Cuba.” Three decades ago, Mao Tse-tung was sold to us as a “Jeffersonian Democrat’ an agrarian reformer.” Four decades ago we were told that the Spanish Communists were merely “Loyalists.”
To realize the validity of Accuracy in Media’s point, just ask yourself the question: What kind of coverage to you think would have been given if Jim Jones had been aight winger?
