First published at 16:44 UTC on June 11th, 2021.
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary". - H. L. Mencken
James Warren Jones (May 13, 1931 –…
MORE
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary". - H. L. Mencken
James Warren Jones (May 13, 1931 – November 18, 1978) was an American communist, cult leader, political activist, preacher and faith healer who led the Peoples Temple, a new religious organization which existed between 1955 and 1978. Jones and his inner circle orchestrated a mass murder–suicide in his remote jungle commune at Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978.
Jones founded the organization that would become the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis, in 1955. Jones distinguished himself with his civil rights activism, founding the Temple as a fully integrated congregation. In 1965, he moved the Temple to California, where the group established its headquarters in San Francisco and became heavily involved in left-wing politics through the 1970s.
Jones then ordered and coerced a mass murder-suicide that claimed the lives of 918 commune members, 304 of them children, almost all by drinking Kool Aid laced with cyanide.
LESS