The biggest news story about the murder-suicide tragedy at Jonestown, Guyana, is that it was a Communist colony. The tactics were characteristically Communist and the objective was the Soviet Union. Even the letter found on the Rev. Jim Jones’ dead body included the pathetic lament of one of his followers’ foreboding: “Without you, the world may not make it to Communism. ”
It is a travesty to refer to Jones’ colony as a religious cult entitled to First Amendment protection and privileges. Religious services hadn’t been held in months, but the study of Russian was compulsory. On Jones’ orders, grace before meals had been replaced with the recitation of a Russian phrase by every member.
Jones’ top henchmen had conferred at least twice with Feodor Timofeyev, the press attache of the Soviet Embassy in Georgetown, Guyana. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the removal of the entire group to the U.S.S.R. The Russian official did not discourage this hope.
The Jones’ assistants who participated in this assignment could not have been neophytes about worldwide Soviet-Communist operations. In order to persuade the Russians to accept the immigration of all the Jonesville inhabitants, they argued that the mass exodus would follow the historic precedent set during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s when the Communists took 5,000 Spanish children to the U.S.S.R.
Shortly after the murder-suicide ritual began on the fateful day of death, Jones’ treasurer and reported mistress, Maria Katsaris, sent three aides to the Soviet Embassy with a suitcase containing a letter to the Russians and $500,000. The messengers did not carry out their assignment.
The conditions of slave labor, brainwashing, and total mind-and-body control in Jonesville sound like a cross between Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag and a POW camp in North Korea or North Vietnam. Long days were filled with forced labor in the broiling sun that reached 120°. Long evenings were filled with Communist indoctrination sessions and sleep-destroying harangues.
The below-subsistence diet consisted of nothing but rice and gravy. The living facilities were dormitories lined with bunk beds where there was no such thing as privacy. Mark Lane, Jones’ lawyer, admitted that it looked “like a slave ship.”
Like a typical Communist economy, even such grueling, long hours of work did not produce enough food to feed the people. A combination of exterior force, threats, and internal hunger discouraged escape or rebellion.
Jim Jones issued and enforced strict rules. Deviations resulted in public confessions and public beatings. When the children misbehaved, they were dropped into the water in a well until they begged forgiveness, or tied up and left in the jungle at night.
Those who went to the Jones colony were required to surrender all their money, property, and pensions and Social Security checks. Letters in and out of Jonesville were usually not delivered. Very few members were ever allowed to leave, and most of those were forced to leave their children or relatives behind as hostages.
Jones even regulated the sexual habits of his followers. Anyone who wanted to marry had to get approval from the Relationships Committee.
All rules applied only to the proletariat and not to the commissars. Like a typical Communist state, the boss and his elite ruling group enjoyed an entirely different standard of living, including meat, coffee, comfortable living quarters, and unlimited sex with both men and women.
Enterprising reporters have recovered some 200 letters written by members of the Jonesville colony. They reveal the extent of the Communist brainwashing. They speak of “the real enemy, U.S. capitalism.” They praise the Cuban Communist Che Guevara and the Chilean Communist Salvador Allende. They are pro-Communism and pro-Marxism and anti-God.
Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, showed similar brainwashing. He was active in a Communist front called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and visited the Cuban Embassy in Mexico shortly before he shot President Kennedy. Truth is, indeed, stranger than any fiction.
