JONESTOWN 25TH
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James Joyner | Tuesday, November 18, 2003 |
Jeff Jarvis reminds us that today is the 25th anniversary of one of the bizarre preventable tragedies of my lifetime:
Twenty-five years ago today, more than 900 people were led to their deaths by an insane preacher named Jim Jones, who also ordered an attack that killed a congressman and a friend of mine, a photographer on the San Francisco Examiner named Greg Robinson. I was the Sunday news editor of the paper then; I edited the stories by reporter Tim Reiterman that led to that fact-finding trip to Guyana and the senseless tragedy that followed.Jonestown has become the subject of Kool-Aid (though it was an off-brand) jokes and that’s understandable. But on this day, leave the jokes behind and remember the horror of that day: Hundreds of innocent, decent people, even children, lured into a sick cult where they were induced to leave everything behind to follow their leader’s paranoia even into death.
A quarter century later, that kind of fanaticism still boggles the mind.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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Still boggles mine, for sure.
I remember like yesterday looking at Time magazine and the page after page of photos of dead bodies in the weeks after the event. I was only 10 at the time, but the thought of those people going to their death that day (especially the children) saddened me immensely.
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