Why 900 Died in Guyana, by Carey Winfrey,

Then, [after the babies were dead or dying] Clayton said, Jones stepped into the crowd and began guiding people toward the vat of fruit drink and cyanide. Jones wife, Marceline, also walked among the followers, embracing them and saying, "I'll see you in the next life."

Jones himself did not believe in reincarnation, but he knew that many of his followers did. "We'll all fall tonight," one communard said, stepping forward for his cup of poison, "but he'll raise us tomorrow."

I don't know how the New York Times fiction writer, Carey Winfrey, could botch her very lengthy piece so early into it. "Jones himself did not believe in reincarnation?" What about his famous quotation saying he was the reincarnation of Lenin and Jesus? Did he believe only in celebrity rebirths, or just a past-tense participation, but nothing forward looking? You can hear the strain in writers like this as they struggle to sell a story when their hearts are  not have been in it. What is it about our cultural homogenization and economic enslavement that every contemporary writer with a job back then was working toward just this same end--with only sporadic bursts of honest skepticism being forced out  like farts on a elevator?

Why couldn't she just have written an article titled "Why 900 Didn't Die in Guyana?"

Anyone who falls into the category of Jonestown survivor held by definition an elite memberships in the Peoples Temple organizational pool, and this applies to those who might not appear to hold the rank, like senior-citizen Hyacinth Thrash, who at first displayed a becoming modesty in her media appearances, unlike the voracious whores for the spotlight making up her fellow former communards. She seemed a simple, retiring old lady, but not without an education. As the years went by however, the details of her various story versions changed, and even her name, or its spelling, changed, which is a classic sign of identity manipulation and media obfuscation. Eventually her preference for Ebonics took over, although she was supposed to have been employed in a department store and not been a field hand,

The Peoples Temple was never a religious gathering place or entity for doing good. It was more akin to a mafia family, who had settled on the scam of abusing altruism. This applies from the Stanford-educated king-makers and king-layers, like Tim Stoen, to the hard-scrabble white crackers Indiana who stuck it out for decades, even after Jim had his mojo pulled on express orders of higher ups.

All of the journalists who were embedded into the narrative are obvious co-conspirators to the undertaking. Many, like Charles A. Krause, had only been recently hired by their organizations. Krause was on his first assignment at the foreign service desk of the Washington Post, The most famous example of this kind of professional reshuffling taken in the year or months leading up to a momentous undertaking were Aaron Brown and Paula Zahn, who both began their on-air jobs at CNN on the very day of September 11th, 2001.


[See: June 13, 2005, Publishers Weekly, Talking Back: ... to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels, 356 words...she was hired by NBC and headed to Washington. Shortly after, she flew to Guyana for her first major story: the 1978 Jonestown massacre. She has covered all the presidents from Carter through George W. Bush, done exclusives with Castro, sat in on...

Talking Back: ... to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels ANDREA MITCHELL. Viking, $25.95 (412p) ISBN 0-670-03403-7

Millions of TV viewers may feel they already know Mitchell--she has reported on politics for NBC for some 30 years and is married to the Fed's Alan Greenspan--but there's lots to learn about her in this engrossing memoir. Mitchell began as a "copyboy" at radio station KYW in Philadelphia in the 1970s. After covering the major political conventions for them, she was hired by NBC and headed to Washington. Shortly after, she flew to Guyana for her first major story: the 1978 Jonestown massacre. She has covered all the presidents from Carter through George W. Bush, done exclusives with Castro, sat in on high-level negotiations in the Middle East and North Korea, and much more. Mitchell's tales are fascinating, but her evolution as a journalist is even more intriguing. She was a gender pioneer, for example, but her gender rapidly became a nonissue. Yet her original insistence on a clear separation of work and social life seems progressively undercut by her own account. She mentions many dinners with dear friends like the Cheneys, and parties with the Bushes, Rice and Rumsfeld, and then wonders why the media got the Iraq WMD question so wrong. Still, this is a treat for political junkies. Agent, Robert Barnett at Williams & Connolly. (On sale Sept. 12)

February 15, 2006, Library Journal, Mitchell, Andrea. Talking Back ... to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels, by Beth Farrell, 371 words

* Mitchell, Andrea. Talking Back ... to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels. 5 CDs. abridged. 6 hrs. Penguin Audio. 2005. ISBN 0-14-305753-7. $34.95.

* Mitchell, Andrea. Talking Back ... to Presidents, Dictators, and Assorted Scoundrels. 10 cassettes, unabridged. 14 hrs. Books on Tape. 2005. ISBN 1-4159-2104-0. $99. COMM

Political and news junkies are in for a treat with Mitchell's revealing memoir of her 30 years as a journalist. While she embarked on her career at a time when it was uncommon for women to report hard news, she certainly didn't ease into the business. For one of her first major stories, Mitchell flew to Guyana to cover the 1978 Jonestown massacre--after the previous NBC correspondent had been murdered by Jim Jones's assassins. As a White House correspondent, the author covered Presidents Carter through George W. Bush. In addition to offering a behind-the-scenes view of presidential politics, her recollections give listeners a glimpse at the human sides of the Presidents and their families. She also discusses her marriage to Alan Greenspan and how it is sometimes difficult to balance her life as a "Washington insider" with her journalistic career. Mitchell's reading of the abridged edition is engrossing, but many listeners will want all the details included in the unabridged version, capably read by Melissa Edris. Both programs are highly recommended.--Beth Farrell, Portage Cty. Dist. Lib., OH]


The story as told in its various manifestations has absolutely no basis in fact, which is why it is so filled with guesswork and contradiction It's not as if even in its broad outline the story adheres to any structural components which were actually lived experiences---with just certain details, or stresses, or omissions being the agreed upon plan for a deception that would progress toward a shared strategic goal. Apparently the working style is quite the opposite--making it a necessary aspect of telling the big lie that it should be made as difficult as possible.

This must be some negative galactic entity which feeds on our gullibility, real or feigned. Here's a for instance from Winfrey's opening:

after constructing a sequence in which the storytellers think it more plausible that a group who might be experiencing some hesitancy in raising a fatal dose of poison to their own lips through the mechanism of bending their elbows, would instead have an easier time of it if first feeding poison to their children and babies; then, after that had taken effect, with the cyanide riktus shaking and deforming bodily form, the shy would see the cast of the die was doom, and would settle more easily into the inevitability of their own follow-up course of action. This is wrong in so many fundamental ways that I've begun to move beyond suspicion the operative players in this scenario are not truly human beings---are instead some kind of soulless organic portals who try to anticipate, or reason their way through what well-brought-up human beings feel is a natural dictate. That is a terrible thing to say to somebody---you're not human, and you lack a soul---but I'm there and not afraid to shout it out.

For instance, while not a mother myself, I could see an argument whereby a promise that the children would be spared if the adults cooperated might work, for the only thing worse than facing your own death would be to watch your children die first, but if a mother were unable to fight to save her child's life, would she gladly lay down hers on top of it?.

It seems to me that the objective of this terminal experiment had nothing to do with the Peoples Temple members themselves and a system of mind control that could make them to do the unthinkable. The minds under control belong to the society at large who could even pretend to believe bullshit like this.

A significant example of a flaw in plausibility in structuring this undertaking reveals the sloppy imagination that guides the actor's movements; their blocking; the positioning of props, then their repositioning for photographs, throughout a scene of activity that started under the roofed picnic shed, an area otherwise  defined for us by knowledge of its encirclement with security guards who mostly carry bows and arrows. Does anybody outside of cowboy movies shoot other people with a high-powered bow and arrow?

Using as her source Stanley Clayton, one of two survivors who claim to have witnessed some portion of the potion downing, (while two other survivors, there on site as events transpired claim to have not seen or heard a thing,) after first "squirting" the poison into the babies' mouths (and I'd have to ask a mother on this, but I'd think the rapid injection of liquids into a baby's mouth would cause them to gag, or inhale the fluids, and vastly increase their discomfort and set off general panic. Pre-verbal infants would be reacting to the sense of fear picked up off their mother's bodies anyway, and no amount of shushing at Jim Jones' directive could counter that. A workable solution would have been to introduce the poison liquid "the baby way" by inject it up the babies' rectums (which, apart from sublingual application, is also the fastest way to introduce liquid medicine into the bloodstream. But the creators of this scenario did not think of this as a solution, even though the public realities of breast-feeding and diaper changing would be everyday commonplaces to anyone in the community. This was a community that relied on foul and noxious privies for relief, lacking even the benefit of toilet paper, (after the Gideon Bibles had been torn up and used) but the elite planners and originators of this as-told-to Charles Krause and Tim Reiterman movie-of-the-week apparently had little contact with the reality of this mass of residents

Speaking of assholes, Carey Winfrey, uses her grammatical ability to depict a state of "subsequent" knowledge she is sharing with her readers 90 days after (or should I say "into"?)  the death ritual" As Winfrey says

We know now through firsthand witness that once Jim Jones learned of the Port Kaituma killings of a Congressman, three journalists and a "defector," events moved quickly. Jones called his followers to the main pavilion.

Firstly, did the attackers stay and dally at the air strip, maybe taking a pulse or two, even a scalp as trophy of the dead, as distinct from the merely wounded? Jackie Speiers claims that despite being so gravely wounded that she  had to spend two months in the safe confines of a military hospital, that she was able to lift herself up off the dirt tarmac where she'd been successfully playing dead, and climb through the open door of the Twin Otter's luggage hatch. She did this, she tells us, to escape further gunfire, although I think she did it to escape being called absent during roll call in any of Tim Reiterman's one-handed camera shots taken of the "scene of carnage" surrounding the plane, which show four or five corpses lying about, but no one wounded, and no bystanders.

Tim morphed his story later in response to nitpicking logic, claiming he took the seminal shots with the first light of the following day, Sunday morning, but this is a sad direction for him to go.  If not the survivors, would not the local authorities on hand be so callous and unfeeling as to leave bodies absolutely untouched in the positions in which they fell? Would no one roll someone over, check for vital signs, steal a Rolex? Wouldn't anyone at least cover the bodies with improvised shrouds, to keep the vampire bats and nocturnal flesh-eaters from having an overnight feast?

Secondly, what Winfrey came to learn was something she later had to unlearn. One of the few semi-official findings released to the public concerning this, the single occasion in history of death by assassination of a United States Representative while acting in an official capacity, was a nonbinding, quasi-private Congressional "staff investigation," which in lieu of a legal mandate, gave itself the narrow mission of constructing a rational timeline and explanatory narrative for at least some of the events at the air strip. A minor conclusion they reached was that Jackie Speiers was not traveling at government expense, but had paid her own way, meaning she was there as the personal companion of the Congressman, and not entitled to two months free medical care in a military hospital.

The other conclusion the study reached is quite startling, coming as it does out of a work that specifically states it is not seeking to apportion blame or responsibility. This study concluded that the death ritual at Jonestown was begun by the residents and Jim Jones in advance of any actual attack at the air strip, let alone after reports of an attack could make their way back to the community, and any sort of analysis of consequences could have been thought through. But that is the glory of having "pre-rehearsed" just such an action. Skipping over issues of responsibility, this finding strikes straight at the heart of logic, or any reason or rationality that could explain such extremely aberrant human behavior.

All except for maybe one: The world, and especially America, was being treated here  to a show of human sacrifice of indeterminate volition, performed in conditions of controlled isolation, with poor, manipulated or unconscious protagonists, in the thrall of some covert political or economic force, who collectively were either lying to themselves or to us. Ultimately, their message is so banal it is unknowable.

Compare that to the volitional act of a single man, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc, who self immolated in Saigon in 1963. Thich was protesting the persecution of Buddhists by a corrupt Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, who was an ally of American interests until he was toppled in an Army coup later that year.



President Kennedy said in reference to this photograph of Duc on fire, "No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one."^*

Kennedy acted upon his emotions, and his withdrawal of American support for Diem led to the South Vietnamese President's ouster and assassination on November 2, 1963. Only twenty days later President Kennedy was himself assassinated.

^* John F. Kennedy quoted by Henry Cabot Lodge, Oral history interview with Henry Cabot Lodge, August 4, 1965, FRUS, 1961-1963, Volume III, Vietnam, January-August 1963, Cited in ZI JUN TOONG. "Overthrown by the Press: The US Media's Role in the Fall of Diem" [56-72] Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol.27, No.1, July 2008

(The abstract of the article the link leads to, says: "This article examines how media coverage of the 1963 Buddhist Crisis in South Vietnam contributed to the Kennedy administration's decision to support a coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem. The article's focus on the media’s role brings new perspectives to this crucial moment in US Cold War policy formation—it reveals the media's immense influence on the Vietnam War in its early stages, and shows the Buddhist Crisis as the turning point in the interaction between public policy and opinion during the war. Employing the use of memoirs, State department papers and American news media, this article sheds light on the complex relationships between media, public opinion and government policy." 

The "immense influence," the power of a sacred trust once held by the media, has been squandered to become this century's false-flag fiction writers, and C.I.A.-trained implants. With flat industry ad-revenues to show for it, any influence remaining after journalists like Judith Miller got her hands on it, will, along with a buck, get you a cup of coffee.

Then, Clayton said, Jones stepped into the crowd and began guiding people toward the vat of fruit drink and cyanide. Jones's wife, Marceline, also walked among the followers, embracing them and saying, "I'll see you in the next life."

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February 25, 1979, The New York Times Magazine, Page SM10, Why 900 Died in Guyana, by Carey Winfrey,


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Grand jury Is Asking How Papers of F.B.I. Made Way to Guyana, 

Mass suicides in past: Jonestown largest of its kind since 73 A.D. when 960 died, by Bill Drummond, (L.A. Times News Service)





November 27, 1978, New York Times, A Second Guyana Cult Is Focus of Dispute, by Carey Winfrey,
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