Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People

"One of the points that I’ve picked up from reading about conspiracy theory over the years is that despite what some people think, it is not a harmless parlor game. It’s a very dangerous form of belief that can have terrible consequences in the real world. We saw that when we were talking about Jim Garrison in New Orleans. He put Kennedy conspiracy theory into practice and the life of an innocent man was destroyed. Clay Shaw was outed as a gay man, which in the late 1960s was very problematic for him. His career as a businessman was destroyed. He was smeared forever as a possible conspirator against President Kennedy, which was absolutely not the case. And so he took to drinking and he died a broken man only a few years after the trial. Jonestown is a far more terrible, large-scale tragedy. One of the beauties of Tim Reiterman’s book is that he demonstrates how conspiracy theory contributed to Jim Jones’s decline. To begin with, Jones was more or less a garden variety con man. He used to do simple confidence tricks to impress his followers. He used to pretend to have psychic powers and he used to have accomplices. He’d say, I’m gonna make that disabled woman stand up, and his accomplice would stand up and his flock would be duly impressed. And he used to do simple sort of faith-healing routines using chicken guts and pretend that he was pulling out people’s diseased organs. Reiterman explains how Jones degenerated over the years from a man who was perfectly well aware of the cons that he was pulling to a man who started to believe in his own hype and who became a very paranoid individual. Jones kept moving his church because he believed that the government authorities were persecuting him. He moved from Indianapolis to San Francisco to Guyana in South America and established the settlement that we know as Jonestown. It was partially true that the United States government was interested in Jones’s activities because some of his parishioners, or it’s probably more accurate to say members of his cult, left the church and formed a group called the Concerned Relatives. They took up their case with a congressman from San Francisco called Leo Ryan who decided that he was going to go down to Guyana and see what was going on and see if anybody wanted to leave Jonestown. And if they did, he was going to take them back to the United States with him. “It’s a very dangerous form of belief” By this time, Jim Jones was becoming increasingly paranoid. He was addicted to amphetamines. He was an insomniac. He was becoming an increasingly sick man. As Reiterman explains, Jones had hired an attorney named Mark Lane to act on behalf of the People’s Temple and to uncover real documentary evidence of the conspiracy that Jones believed was occurring against him. Lane had a long history in American conspiracy theory. He features in Bugliosi’s book as one of the godfathers of the original JFK conspiracy theories. He helped Jim Garrison prosecute Clay Shaw. Subsequent to that, Lane became more or less an attorney for hire for anyone who was interested in finding so-called “proof” of conspiracy theories against them. After the Clay Shaw case, Lane co-wrote the screenplay for a movie called Executive Action, which was one of those paranoid thrillers that came out in the early 70s. It showed a fictional conspiracy on the part of rogue government agents against the President of the United States to murder him. It became one of the Reverend Jim Jones’s favorite films and he used to screen it fairly regularly for his flock. When he invited Mark Lane down to Jonestown to be his guest he asked Lane if he would want to write a similar film about Jonestown and the conspiracy against Jones and Lane said: Well I’ve got a better idea, why don’t you hire me as your attorney and I will find documentary proof of this vast government conspiracy against you? Of course there was no documentary proof of the vast government conspiracy against Jones because there was no conspiracy. But Lane told Jones what he wanted to hear because he knew that this was the best way of continuing on in his role as Jones’ attorney. So Mark Lane was feeding Jones these conspiracy theories, but this was far from harmless. This was deepening Jones’ very dangerous paranoia, and this paranoia culminated in an orgy of violence in Jonestown – what we call the Jonestown Massacre. Some people think of it as a mass suicide and, you know, the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” has become famous ever since because Jones’ followers supposedly queued up and voluntarily drank. (It was actually Flavor Aid, the drink that he prepared in vats, and he poisoned it with potassium cyanide.) As Reiterman shows, it was actually a mass homicide. Jones forced his followers to drink that poison. If they didn’t voluntarily drink it, he forced them at gunpoint. Some he injected with cyanide. When the 900 dead of Jonestown were discovered, some had injection marks, which proved that they’d been forcibly injected. And of course, many of the victims were children and babies, and they had no choice in the matter. When Congressman Ryan flew down to Jonestown to investigate what was going on, there were several journalists who accompanied him there, and one of them was Tim Reiterman. He was also accompanied by an NBC News crew, which took some footage down there. The Jonestown massacre began because Jones had sent gunmen out to the airstrip to shoot Congressman Ryan dead before he could leave. They fatally wounded Ryan and they also shot Reiterman. They wounded him, and he and others escaped into the jungle. Partly Reiterman’s book is an eyewitness account of what happened on the airstrip, but it’s also an account of how that event triggered the mass homicide of Jones’ followers that occurred later that night in the Jonestown pavilion. And it’s in a sense Reiterman’s attempt to explain by going back in Jones’s personal history and talking about his younger years and how he degenerated into this paranoid lunatic who was capable of doing this. One of the things that strikes me in Reiterman’s book is how conspiracy theory not only gets the world upside down in a factual sense, but also as a consequence of that, it gets the world upside down morally. Jones was apparently honestly convinced that the government was actually on their way to Jonestown to kill Jones and his followers – this is the story that Jones told his followers during his final sermon, which was taped like all of his sermons so we can listen to the actual massacre occurring as it happens with Jones’ sort of running commentary on why it’s necessary. The way Jones is framing it is that these government forces from Guyana are on their way here to torture our seniors and kill our children, so we must preempt that by committing this act of what he calls “revolutionary suicide.” You can hear him on the tapes saying to parents: Any parent who wants to die with their child, you can line up here and you can die together, because that’s humane. He keeps using this word “humane” and he says that we’re committing suicide to protest the conditions of an inhumane world. In reality, of course, the only danger that was posed to Jones’ followers and the only inhumanity that was being inflicted on them was by Jones, the cult leader himself. But in Jones’ sort of twisted, upside-down view, it was “humane” to preempt the authorities by conducting this act of revolutionary suicide. I just think it’s very interesting how when you take this incorrect, upside-down view of the world, then very atrocious, immoral acts can be framed as moral, decent acts."