Revolutionary suicide

An article inspired by the book 'Raven' by Tim Reiterman, and is not to be confused with the autobiography of Huey Newton that goes by the same title as my article.

I was struggling to decide whether the massacre in Jonestown was a mass suicide or mass murder.

While mass murder was most definitely involved, I believe some people did die willingly, including apparently two in Georgestown.

Early murders

People in Jonestown would eat pork and chicken.

In the later days there was very little chicken for people to eat, and pork was mostly for sale, but still, people expected to eat flesh, and sometimes did it.

People would travel to Jonestown with the intention of eating flesh there.

If people knew what they were signing up for (eating corpses of murdered animals), how could they expect anything other than violence?

I even regret than when people were murdered eventually, their corpses were just transported back home, in coffins, which took several millions of dollars to accomplish.

If people were so permaculture-oriented, their bodies could have just been fed to animals, or used for compost. This way Peoples Members would have been contributing to wildlife even after their death.

Any alternatives?

When Journalists came with Leo Ryan to, supposedly collect those member of the Peoples Temple, only a handful of them chose to.

To take the people only one small additional plane was required. To transport even 50% of the people who lived in Jonestown - if so many of them wanted to leave - Leo would have to book more than 20 larger planes.

The journalist were drinking alcohol on their way to Jonestown, and during the night when they were getting prepared for their second day of the visit.

People in Jonestown didn't really like alcohol. All they cared about was socialism. Why would they want to leave Jonestown - which was now their home - with some drunken journalists and a congressman? And to go where?

People would have to be transported all the way to Auroville to continue their chosen style of life in a resource-based economy (which they referred to as socialism), that probably would have been actually successful, but it wasn't offered to them.

In fact nowhere in the book I saw any references to Auroville, even though this city was already around (and still is) at the time of Jonestown, and operates on similar principles.

Seva

I haven't studied Auroville thoroughly enough to understand whether in would have satisfied the people who could potentially migrate there from Jonestown. Auroville has some fluffy spiritual principles that personally attracted me during the five weeks I spent there.

Auroville takes care of you, so that you only have to endure some amount of voluntary work, and then you can enjoy the sun.

I think that a move serious approach to voluntary work is seva. It works not only in tropical paradises, and you can keep a regular 9-5 job while you engage in seva only occasionally.

In other words, you are required to still take care of your life, while using some of your spare resources to contribute to your community, as opposed to expecting that the community will take care of everything for you.

Sikhism, the religion that promotes seva, has been around for hundreds of years, and I do not understand why this religion is seldom seriously considered by people who are into communal work.

Sikhism is not really anarchistic, but I guess the people in Jonestown didn't care about it so much anyway.

For somebody who has been to Occupy camps, Rainbow Gathering, or has entertained the thought of going to Beneficio there might be not enough freedom in Sikhism, but at least it is well-organized, vegetarian, and you can engage in it while living in a big city.

Did people 'Drink the Kool-Aid'?

In this section I will focus a little on the colloquial meaning of 'Drinking the Kool-Aid', as defined by Wikipedia:

"Drinking the Kool-Aid" is an expression commonly used in the United States that refers to a person who believes in a possibly doomed or dangerous idea because of perceived potential high rewards.

I don't think Jonestown residents expected any high rewards. A bunk bed, free bananas, some time off to watch some stuff in a communal movie theatre?

Another definition from the same source:

It can also be used ironically or humorously to refer to accepting an idea or changing a preference due to popularity, peer pressure, or persuasion.

This is actually irrelevant to Jonestown. Jim would actually stress how unpopular these ideas were, and how people were constantly being persecuted (which might have been purposefully exaggerated by Jim) in the Peoples Temple. Popularity was not what people expected when they wanted to join.

Another definition, the same source:

In recent years it has evolved further to mean extreme dedication to a cause or purpose, so extreme that one would "Drink the Kool-Aid" and die for the cause

Yes, this is what people did. They died for the cause.

They did not care about Jim Jones at all, as I will try to prove in the next section, but they did believe in communal living, and because they saw now alternative to Jonestown (even though successful alternatives already existed at that time), they either chose to die or were murdered.

Why did this definition, that is actually the only one that is relevant to Jonestown at all, only evolve in recent years? I don't know.

Revolutionary suicide

The 'revolutionary suicide' was not really about people caring so much about what Jim Jones said that they were willing to die for it.

People would just be afraid that Jim would be arrested over a case of custody John Stoen, and that they would have nowhere to go. (Read more about the John Victor Stoen case here.

What Jonestown did terribly wrong was that it didn't teach people how to become independent when Jim Jones would be arrested over some stupid case.

As I explained in the previous sections, Jonestown was not very anarchistic, so it would take care of people who weren't being encouraged to take care about themselves, instead of teaching them how to do so.

I guess that the idea behind the revolutionary suicide was those who found out about it were meant to hear the message.

Jim Jones intended to stay behind and tell the world what the message was.

(Even though throughout the Temple's earlier operation Jim wasn't very open, or very consistent, about its operations).

I think that I have heard the message, and I am conveying it to you thru this article.

The message is not conveyed thru the book, but I can more or less figure out what it was.

People inside the Temple craved communal living, but those who would come to visit them didn't really care.

Probably everything the families of the Temple members wanted was deprogramming, or shattering everything the devotees stood for, but without offering anything in return.

I think that Jim Jones should have really been arrested, yet the Temple's devotees should have been given an alternative to living inside the Peoples Temple.

Their families should have just told them that if they worked in the USA for a while, they could probably afford going to Auroville, which might have just worked out well for them, as Auroville is a commune operating by similar socialistic values, but to this day there have been no known mass shootings there.

Alternatively, they could have just settled in a city where a gurudwara was present, so that at least they would be able to work there voluntarily once a week. Apparently this is what 'Drinking the Kool-Aid' means these days.

(Gurudwaras do accept donations, but people in there are not encouraged to hand over their entire paycheck; devotees are still expected to take care of themselves, and only donate what they can afford).

Wikipedia says that there had been gurudwaras already available in the United States at that time.

My own role

I used to volunteer in gurudwaras; I even stayed for a week in Auroville, which is a modern spiritual commune, but without the 'Kool-Aid' stigma.

My research is pretty much done now, and I have returned to the Babylon, which Wikipedia explains:

Babylon, a term used in the Rastafari movement and the Rainbow Family in reference to any society of oppressive political and economic power structure

I care now more about software than I used to, and I find the Babylon more conducive to writing it than some permacultural voluntary labour camp.

(Even though contributing to open source, or running a technical blog, is effectively voluntary labour).

I do not want to end up in a situation in which some people commit a revolutionary suicide because they have nowhere to go, while at the some time nearby communities are readily available that would welcome them, but they don't know it.

I more or less described my intention to eventually create some communal software in my very first article on Steemit, although I've had some issues with being heavily downvoted since then.

I yearn to create software that allows people to promote their communities and projects, so that other people do not have to commit a revolutionary suicide because they cannot find anything for themselves.