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People's Temple / Jonestown


/dev/null

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Finished watching a documentary on Jonestown / People's Temple and that s**t just freaks me out.  How people can blindly obey that crap into mass suicide, I just don't understand it.

I do have to give Jim Jones credit tho.  He did manage to marry religion and Socialism, two belief systems that require blind faith, obedience, and subservience

 

But how do people fall for that nonsense.  !@#$ing creepy

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If I remember right, he really focused on people who were on the fringes of society to follow him.  Whether it was mental health issues, or financial difficulties, or disaffected people.  I think he really played up the "us vs. them" aspect of it all.  These people probably thought things were going great with Jones because they had a purpose and attention inside the cult. I suppose for some, any attention and acceptance is a good thing, no matter how weird things get, especially if society had already spat them out.  Jones' followers weren't going back to a society that failed them. 

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29 minutes ago, row_33 said:

The city and state politicians were big supporters right to the end of it all to facilitate it

I just read that thatSupervisor  Harvey Milk  had sent a letter to Jimmy Carter  asking that  one of the people in the SF  area that was pushing for an investigation into the temple  be arrested. Milk was shot by Dan White 10 days later.

Edited by Wacka
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39 minutes ago, Wacka said:

I just read that thatSupervisor  Harvey Milk  had sent a letter to Jimmy Carter  asking that  one of the people in the SF  area that was pushing for an investigation into the temple  be arrested. Milk was shot by Dan White 10 days later.

 

Damn Twinkies. 

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On 2/9/2018 at 10:56 PM, /dev/null said:

Finished watching a documentary on Jonestown / People's Temple and that s**t just freaks me out.  How people can blindly obey that crap into mass suicide, I just don't understand it.

I do have to give Jim Jones credit tho.  He did manage to marry religion and Socialism, two belief systems that require blind faith, obedience, and subservience

 

But how do people fall for that nonsense.  !@#$ing creepy

 

Some people are simply more easily susceptible to demagogues than most of the population.   They need to have something/someone believe in, so they seek it out.

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