Sunday, November 30, 2008
CAVEAT: Some of the particulars in this article are false due not to
authorial oversights, but media misreporting. Larry Layton led a death squad at
the airstrip in Guyana - but he wasn't a "scapegoat" as the author believes.
Layton was a member of the military family that actually controlled Jones and
the People's Temple. He was in a glassy-eyed state and completely disoriented at
the airstrip, and it's likely that Larry was -
LIKE DAN WHITE BACK IN SAN FRANCISCO - mind controlled. The People's Temple
parishioners did NOT commit "suicide," despite widespread belief to the
contrary. Most took forced injections under the shoulderblade, and some 30
percent were shot. There wasn't enough cyanide in a glassful of the punch to
kill an adult. It killed children. The adults had to be murdered at the People's
Concentration Camp by Jones's death squads.
Jones was a Nazi with a KKK father. At the age of five, little Jimmy combed his
hair in Hitler's style, and he delivered "funeral orations" over the dead pets
of his friends - animals he'd murdered. Jones was Nazi,
not "left-wing" (the charade is an echo of the National "Socialist" front
used by the far-right Nazis to co-opt and kill off Germany's communist agitators
in the wake of WW I).
And it was not Jones's corpse found at Jonestown, but a
double - CIA agents and Nazis do that
(look into Heinrich Mueller's "death" at the close of WW II for the classic
example. CIA recruit Joseph Mengele kept getting found in South America and had
to "die" five times).
Jones survived the carnage. (If the world believes otherwise, it should have a
good talk with the CIA/military media. ... )
- AC
Also see:
"Jim Jones, the Guyana "Suicides" & Harvey Milk's Premonitions of Death,"
and
"Jonestown, the CIA & Mind Control"
http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/
... One of the most discussed modern mass suicides occurred in the unique
setting of Jonestown, Guyana.
Jonestown in the early 1970s was little more than a nine‑hundred acre island cut
out of the thick South American rainforest. It was there that the Reverend James
Warren “Jim” Jones relocated his People's Temple from the San Francisco area.
Allegations were first published in the Guyana Daily Mirror that Jonestown was a
“concentration camp” in which Jones’s flock were given psychotropic drugs,
sexually abused, sleep deprived, and forced to work 18 hour days. Former members
told of drills, called “white nights,” in which middle-of-the-night sirens
called members to a line up where they were told they were going to have to take
a poison.
Jonestown residents became pre-conditioned into expecting a coming invasion of
the camp by Russians, the CIA, or other imagined “enemies” by the delusional
Jones. In the wake of these claims, the pressure mounted for San Francisco
officials to look into the Jonestown “cult.”
On July 26, 1977, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone announced that he would not
hold an investigation of Jones. In a letter to President Jimmy Carter, San
Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk defended Jones as a friend to minority
communities. But soon, San Francisco family members asked their congressional
representative to fly to Jonestown to look into the situation (and hopefully
rescue their relatives). This finally occurred with a one-day delegation headed
by Congressman Leo Ryan.
On November 18, 1978, supposedly frightened by the investigative visit of Ryan,
cult leader Jim Jones ordered Larry Schact, a medical school graduate and
designated camp doctor, to prepare a huge cyanide‑laced vat of grape Flavor‑aide.
At the Guyanese airstrip near Jonestown, Jones sent gunmen to ambush Ryan and
about 30 newsmen, government aides, and relatives of People's Temple members
before they could board their plane for a return to the United States. Ryan,
three reporters, and a Jonestown defector were killed, and among the wounded
were the area’s alleged CIA's Chief of Station Richard Dwyer, and Ryan aide,
Jackie Speier. Later Jones, with armed guards at his side, had his followers
drink the potion and kill themselves. Those that refused to take the poison were
machine-gunned to death by guards who apparently escaped. Thus some of the
Jonestown deaths were indeed murders.
By most counts, the death toll was 913. Initially, the general public could not
believe that the news accounts were true, despite widespread press and broadcast
attention bringing the details into American living rooms. Media reports about
the People’s Temple suicides would drag on for years. (It was not until 1986
that one of Jim Jones's assistants, Larry Layton, the only person prosecuted for
any of the events in and around Jonestown, was convicted for his involvement in
the Jonestown incidents and Ryan’s death. Layton was released from custody in
April 2002, on parole, after 18 years in prison. Many believed he was an
innocent scapegoat.)
As often happens after well-publicized suicides and mass suicides, the copycat
effect took the form of follow-up murders. This happened quickly and in
spectacular fashion in San Francisco.
Nine days after the Jonestown events, on November 27, 1978, San Francisco Bay
Area residents would learn of the assassinations of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor
Milk. Law enforcement officials repeated the local rumors that some Bay Area
residents believed that Moscone and Milk were murdered by the hauntingly named
"White Night" hit squads said to have been sent by the Peoples Temple to avenge
Jim Jones. As San Francisco Chronicle reporter Richard Rapaport observed, “When
authorities went through the personal effects left behind in San Francisco by
Jones, they found a hit list with the names of erstwhile political friends and
allies like George Moscone and Willie Brown.”
The Moscone-Milk murders were carried out by a recently resigned former
supervisor, Dan White, and were not directly linked to Jim Jones. White had
impulsively retired from his position one year after his election and a mere two
days after the Jonestown event. A former Vietnam vet, former police officer, and
former firefighter, White would often go into trances during supervisors’
meetings and then impulsively goose-step around the room. His past was filled
with mystery, including an enigmatic “missing year” of 1972. White’s murderous
instability appeared to have been set off by the Jonestown murder-suicides and
their link to San Francisco. The Chronicle’s Rapaport noted in 2003: “Part of
the connection between the events came through media coverage. Each day between
Saturday, Nov. 18, and Monday, Nov. 27, new and terrible video, photos and
revelations emanated from the jungle retreat where many former San Franciscans
had chosen, been coerced or programmed to join the man they called ‘Father.’”
In 1979 Dan White was found guilty of “manslaughter by diminished capacity,”
despite opening arguments by attorney Doug Schmidt that linked Jonestown to the
assassinations. Many still believe that the reason White was not convicted of
first degree murder was because of what most of the media reported as the
“Twinkie defense” – a phrase coined by well-known satirist Paul Krassner - that
junk food had made White do it. While it was in reality HoHos and Ding Dongs,
White’s defense claimed that his love of junk food was the result of his
depression, not the cause of it.
The night the verdict was handed down, on May 21, 1979, the streets around San
Francisco, especially near City Hall, erupted in violent protests. They became
known, ironically, as the “White Night Riots.” Dan White would only serve five
of his seven-year sentence. He was paroled in January 1984, tried exile in
Ireland, and then returned to San Francisco despite requests from Mayor Dianne
Feinstein (who had succeeded Moscone) not to do so.
On the morning of October 21, 1985, Dan White attached a garden hose to the
exhaust pipe of his car, a yellow 1970 Buick Le Sabre, and died by suicide at
his San Francisco home. Tom, his brother, discovered the body just before 2 p.m.
White had died as an Irish ballad, “The Town I Loved So Well,” played from a
cassette player inside the car as it filled with deadly carbon monoxide.
Milk’s less than a month old will requested that his body be cremated, and by
his direction, the ashes were enshrined with a mixture of bubble bath (to denote
his gay lifestyle) and Kool Aid (to signify the People’s Temple victims). On the
25th anniversary of the assassinations, Milk was remembered as the world’s first
openly gay politician to hold office, the subject of the Oscar-winning film, The
Life and Times of Harvey Milk, and the focus of operas, plays, and museum
exhibits. An elementary school, a civic plaza, a restaurant, a gay cultural
institute and a library in San Francisco bear his name, as does a one-of-a-kind
high school in New York for gay students who were tormented in mainstream
schools.
Milk and Moscone were not the only persons killed in the wake of the People’s
Temple suicides and murder-suicides.
In 1980, news accounts told of an alleged People Temple “hit squad,” which were
suspected of killing, on February 26, a family of three who had defected in 1975
and testified against the cult. Elmer Mertle (identified in early news accounts
under the alias Al Mills), was found shot in the head, lying face down in his
bedroom in the family's Berkeley home. The body of his 40-year-old wife Deanna
Mertle (also known as Jeannie Mills, author of Six Years with God), also shot in
the head with a small-caliber weapon, was discovered on her back in an adjacent
bathroom. The couple's 15-year-old daughter, Daphene, was taken to Alta Bates
Hospital with two gunshots in the head, and died there later. The Mertles were
the founders of Concerned Relatives, and the principal organizers of Ryan's
attempt to intervene in the Jonestown cult. Jones called them “white devils.”
Less than a month later, the ripples from the San Francisco murders reached
civil rights worker Dennis Sweeney. On March 14, 1980, Sweeney shot seven
bullets point-blank into his former friend, Congressman Allard K. Lowenstein, at
Lowenstein’s New York City law offices. Activist Lowenstein had marched in the
1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi, campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy, authored
the "Dump Johnson" movement, and ran the National Student Association, which was
later revealed to be CIA-subsidized. After the shooting, Sweeney sat down,
smoked a cigarette, seemed to be in a trance state, and calmly waited for the
police to arrive.
During his trial, Sweeny testified that the CIA (with Lowenstein's help) had
implanted a chip in his head 15 years earlier, and he could hear voices
transmitted through his dental work. Sweeny blamed CIA “controllers” for his
uncle's heart attack and the assassination of San Francisco mayor George Moscone.
Sweeney was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and in 2000, was released
from a mental hospital in upstate New York. (The media loved the
Sweeney-Lowenstein story. Teresa Carpenter even won a Pultizer Prize for her
Village Voice exclusive, quoting Sweeney saying that the shooting was a gay
lovers’ quarrel. The only trouble was that Carpenter never interviewed Sweeney;
she had made the whole thing up.)
Other deaths followed. Joe Mazor, the private detective hired by the Concerned
Relatives to persuade people to leave Jonestown, was shot dead a few years after
the Mertles/Mills deaths. Walter Rodney, an intellectual and renowned Caribbean
scholar born and raised in Guyana, was assassinated there on December 13, 1980,
via a bomb-implanted walkie-talkie. Paula Neustel Adams, Jim Jones's top liaison
in the upper echelons of the Guyanese government, was murdered in suburban
Bethesda, Maryland in October 1983. Her longtime companion, Laurence Mann,
Guyana's ambassador to the United States from 1975-81, apparently killed her,
their child and then himself, in a murder-suicide. Members of the Jonestown
Institute and author Garrett Lambrev have written that many questions remain
unanswered about the true extent of all the copycat suicides, murder-suicides,
and murders that occurred since the Jonestown massacre.
The specter of Jonestown filled the newspapers for years and produced a
made‑for‑television movie called Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980),
starring the then-new and unknown actor Powers Boothe in a highly acclaimed
performance as Jones. The Jonestown event had other broad cultural outcomes
besides creating a model for mass suicides. For example, despite the actual use
of Flavor-aide, the media had quickly mislabeled what was used as “Kool Aid,”
and worldwide sales of Kool Aid crashed. Another lasting linguistic legacy of
the People’s Temple tragedy is the expression, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” This
has come to mean, “Don’t trust any group you find to be a little on the
fanatical side.”
© Loren Coleman 2004 ~ from The Copycat Effect (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004).