The Jonestown Style of Politics
Revulsion over an infamous 1978 massacre obscures the event’s continuing relevance.
In January 1977, San Francisco honored Reverend Jim Jones with the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award, unaware of the horrific path his Peoples Temple would soon take. By November 18, 1978, at his commune in Guyana, 908 members—most poor Black Americans, including over 300 children—perished after ingesting cyanide-laced punch or being forced to drink it.
Jones himself died from a gunshot wound, having earlier ordered the murder of three journalists and a defector at a nearby airstrip. This premeditated mass killing remains the largest American civilian massacre until 9/11.
Author Shiva Naipaul's 1980 book, "Journey to Nowhere," examines how ideologies from the American counterculture contributed to the tragedy, suggesting it was a product of a morally corrupted environment, not just one man. Jones, though a megalomaniac, led people who were merely poor and vulnerable, not crazy. The people who followed him were not mentally unsound, but the enablers who overlooked or rationalized Jones' abusive behavior were partly to blame.
Naipaul's book, now reissued by Doubleday under the Outsider Editions imprint, arrives at a crucial time. It argues that totalizing ideologies like communism, fascism, and Islamism, as well as demagogues manipulating for nefarious ends, are ever-present concerns. Naipaul's insights about the transformation of religious language into political language, first observed in his native Trinidad, resonate with today's struggles against ideologies that prioritize salvation over solutions.
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