People's Temple

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The Peoples Temple , also called Volkstempel in German , was a neo-religious group led by Jim Jones , which became internationally known in 1978 through the mass suicide in Jonestown , Guyana .

history

In 1956, Jim Jones founded the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis .

Mass death in Jonestown

After increasingly critical press reports about drug excesses and the sexual abuse of women and children in the Peoples Temple had been published since the mid-1960s, Jones and many of his supporters retired to Jonestown in northwest Guyana in 1974 - an estate of 16 square kilometers that he already owns Leased in 1974 by the Guyanese government, and where many of his followers had already settled. He declared Jonestown the Promised Land, in which, unlike in the USA, there was no racial discrimination and where a new, socialist society could emerge. The settlement was a hermetically sealed community. Following reports from Peoples Temple members who had fled Guyana, especially that of former leader Deborah Layton , US Congressman Leo J. Ryan decided to investigate the matter on the ground. He, three reporters and a Peoples Temple member were murdered on November 18, 1978 by Peoples Temple members in nearby Port Kaituma before they returned to the USA, twelve other people were injured, some seriously.

Immediately after the gunmen returned to the jungle settlement, a mass suicide was organized, and members of the People's Temple who were unwilling to commit suicide were murdered. The procedure had been rehearsed several times during so-called White Nights . The sect members were called to the central pavilion of the facility by loudspeaker announcements, where individual members were already made to drink grape juice allegedly mixed with potassium cyanide , but in fact no poison was contained in these exercises.

In the mass suicide on November 18, real poison cocktails were administered that led to death within five minutes. Unruly sect members were forced to drink under threat of gun violence, and some died of gunshot wounds. Jones himself was found in Jonestown with a bullet in the head. The information on the exact number of victims varies; however, there were at least 900 victims, including over 270 children. A Peoples Temple supporter who was in Guyana's capital, Georgetown , killed her three children and herself on news of the massacre.

Teaching

Jones saw himself as a representative of an “apostolic socialism ”, which he opposed to the, in his opinion, increasingly fascist system of the USA. His settlement Jonestown, built and organized on the North Korean model, viewed itself as an anti-racist and anti-capitalist "fraternal community".

Artistic processing

literature

  • The novel Earthly Powers (1980; Ger. The Prince of Phantoms ) by the British writer Anthony Burgess deals with mass suicide in Jonestown in a fictionalized form.
  • The writer Ralf Isau made the mass murder in Jonestown a central theme in his novel The Silver Sense .
  • A leftover disciple of Jim Jones is the starting point and partly the driving force in Henning Mankell's novel Before the Frost .
  • In the third volume of Armistead Maupin's "City Stories" cycle , a fictional survivor of the mass suicide in Jonestown plays a crucial role.

music

  • The Spanish conceptual artist Jordi Valls has released sound documents of mass suicide with sermons by Jim Jones on the album The last supper .
  • The piece Requiem by the metal band Lamb of God also contains a passage with an audio recording of one of Jones' speeches.
  • The band Psychic TV , which Valls re-released on their Temple Records label, has in turn released a single entitled White Nights .
  • The band Manowar processed the incidents in their song Guyana - The Cult of the Damned .
  • The American band The Brian Jonestown Massacre was named after former Rolling Stones member Brian Jones and the sect leader.
  • The song Sects on the album Repression by the French band Trust has the character Jim Jones and the Jonestown massacre as its content.
  • The American hardcore punk band Guyana Punch Line was named after the fateful events in Jonestown. One song is called Fairweather Jonestown .
  • The British neofolk band Death in June parodied Shatter on their album But, What Ends When the Symbols? four pieces by the Peoples Temple Choir . For example, “He's Able” became “He's Disabled”.
  • The American band NOFX mentions Jim Jones in the song Wolves in Wolves' Clothing on the album of the same name.
  • Likewise, the German metal core band The Mercury Arc processed the subject in their song Jonestown .
  • The band "Cults" uses original recordings from Peoples Temple and Jonestown in their music video for the song Go Outside .
  • The American singer Lana Del Rey was inspired by the sect in her music video for the song Freak .
  • A text stanza by the rapper NERD in his song Lemon deals with mass suicide.
  • In Alligatoah's My God Has Longest , the Jonestown Massacre is mentioned in the third stanza.
  • Post Malone's song Jonestown (Interlude) also refers to the Jonestown massacre.
  • In the song Spiritual but Not Religious by Oliver Koletzki , Jim Jones is quoted in 1973: "If there were no rich, no poor, if everyone were equal, religion would be soon to disappear. People only develop religion when they're unhappy with this world. "

Movie and TV

  • In 1979 the Mexican-Spanish-Panamanian co-production Guayana - Kult der Verdammten (Cult of the Damned) was created . Director Rene Cardona Jr. changed many of the names of people and places.
  • The exploitation film Lebendig gefressen , which was released in 1980, is set against the backdrop of a sect in the jungle, similar to the Peoples Temple. The leader there has the Jones-like name Jonas and in the end the sect also commits mass suicide.
  • The film Believers (2007) by Daniel Myrick , the director of the film Blair Witch Project , deals with the subject of mass suicide within a cult.
  • The multi-part US TV docudrama Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980) traces the life of Jim Jones.
  • In 2006, filmmaker Stanley Nelson made the documentary Jonestown - a sect's death craze .
  • An episode of the US series The A-Team is called Children of Jamestown .
  • The ninth episode of the seventh season “Cult” of the American series American Horror Story bears the name Drinks the Kool-Aid (the deadly poison in mass suicide was administered with the lemonade “Kool-Aid”). In addition, the mass suicide is re-enacted, with cult leader Jim Jones being portrayed by Evan Peters .

theatre

  • The play Endstation Jonestown by Nora Hertlein (director) and Veronika Maurer (dramaturgy), which premiered on October 29, 2009 in the vestibule of the Vienna Burgtheater , deals with the topic using original documents.

Video games

  • The cult "Project at Eden's Gate" from the video game Far Cry 5 is inspired by the Peoples Temple and other new religious groups.
  • The plot of the video game Outlast 2 is largely based on the Jonestown massacre .

swell

  1. ^ Iken, Katja: mass suicide from Jonestown 1978, horror in the garden of Eden In: SPIEGEL ONLINE of November 17, 2008
  2. ↑ M. Hazani: Sacrificial immortality: Towards a theory of suicidal terrorism and related phenomena. In: Psychoanalytic Study of Society 19, 1993, pp. 441f.
  3. ↑ Mass suicide in the jungle: The communist sect of Jim Jones. The press, November 17, 2008
  4. ↑ Horror in the Garden of Eden. Der Spiegel online
  5. ↑ Cults - Go Outside , official music video on www.youtube.com
  6. ↑ Q929 Transcript - Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Retrieved January 13, 2020 (American English).
  7. ↑ [1] , episode website on American Horror Story Wiki
  8. ↑ The Jonestown Massacre - The Real Story Behind Outlast 2 , accessed March 4, 2020

literature

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