I Guess Ill Drink the Kool Aid Once Again
If I e'er use the phrase "Potable the Kool-Aid" again, please practice me a favor and kick me in the teeth
Despite the fact that Jones can be heard referring to their deaths as acts of "revolutionary suicide," on audio recorded that night, the truth is, very few of the 909 Peoples Temple members who died that evening took their lives willingly. As we'd learn in the months following their deaths, they were forced to ingest the cyanide at gunpoint, and those that refused were either held down and forced to beverage it or injected with the drug.
My friend Robert Helms, the editor of the zine Guinea Pig Zero, reminded me of this fact today, when he forwarded a link to an interview with Julia Scheeres, writer of the book A K Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown
…I was writing a satirical novel about a charismatic preacher who takes over a small Indiana town when I remembered Jim Jones was from Indiana and Googled him for inspiration. I then learned that the FBI had recently released its files on Jonestown. These included 50,000 pieces of paper that agents had collected from Jonestown after the massacre and virtually a chiliad audio tapes. Once I started browsing the materials, I couldn't tear myself abroad. This story seemed more urgent to tell than a religious farce.
The more I understood what actually transpired in Jonestown, the more offended I became by the notion that Jones' victims "drank the Kool-Aid." I felt a duty to defend them, to tell the true story of what happened in Jonestown. The central argument of A Thousand Lives is that Jim Jones murdered his congregants — it was mass murder, not mass suicide. He fantasized about killing them for years before they moved to Guyana and lured them at that place by making them believe they could return to California whenever they wanted. In one case he had them sequestered in the heart of the South American jungle, he refused to allow anyone go. "If you desire to go home, yous can swim," he told disgruntled residents. "We won't pay your fucking way dwelling house." I found many heartbreaking notes from residents begging Jones to let them go home, offer to send down paychecks for the rest of their lives, etc. The hardest to read were from parents who, in one case they realized Jones was intent on killing everyone, were at a loss for ways to insulate their children from Jones' madness. A third of the 918 people who died in the Jonestown massacre were minors. They didn't "potable the Kool-Aid;" they had information technology forced downwardly their throats….
A 12-year-old girl named Julie Ann Runnels kept spitting the poison out, so two of Jones' lieutenants forced her to consume by it by pulling her hair and clamping their hands over her nose and oral cavity. She did non "Drinkable the Kool-Aid." She was murdered—as were all the 303 children who died that night. We need to cease disrespecting Jones' victims with this odious and wildly inaccurate phrase…
I'm not sure if information technology's a phrase I've ever used hither, but, if it is, I'chiliad sorry. Scheeres is absolutely right. And I promise non to ever do it again.
[The image above is from Fourth dimension Mag. It shows one of the tubs full of cyanide-spiked Flavor-Aid surrounded by dead bodies. When I was a kid, I have a vivid recollection of finding this issue of Fourth dimension Magazine in my parents' bathroom and reading the article about the Jonestown massacre, which, until that bespeak, I call up had been kept from me. I recall the images of the dead bodies, and a annotate near how it was even worse than it looked, as, in many areas, the bodies we stacked 3 deep. I recollect the fact that over 300 of the dead were children. It fabricated a huge bear on on me as a child. And, when I think of Jonestown, it'south ever the showtime thing to come to my mind.]
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Source: http://markmaynard.com/2014/11/if-i-ever-use-the-phrase-drink-the-kool-aid-again-please-do-me-a-favor-and-kick-me-in-the-teeth/
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