Jungle Rot: Jonestown, an American Holocaust

Jonestown.Maybe there will be a time when the future forgets the narcissistic money-making machine that was the ‘Peoples Temple,’ founded in Indiana by the Reverend Jim Jones, nurtured in Ukiah, triumphant in San Francisco, and finally destroyed in the violent, poisonous bloodbath of nearly a thousand people – over a third of them children – on November 18th, 1978, in Jonestown, Guyana, after it had long begun to resemble systematized slavery overseen by the drug-bathed megalomania of the same Reverend Jim Jones and his brutal inner circle.But that time has not yet come. The Reverend Jynona Norwood and some determined survivors of Jonestown keep the ugly memory of the Peoples Temple alive every year in a memorial service held at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, on the anniversary of the Jonestown atrocity.‘Jungle Jonestown, an American Holocaust’ seeks to do much the same thing in print, telling the story of the final days of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown, where the black residents toiled long hours amid unforgiving jungle conditions, to be rewarded with ever-worsening food and ever more cruel torture, brainwashing and harassment imposed on them at gunpoint by the Reverend Jim Jones and his almost exclusively white inner circle.As the sign prominently displayed in Jonestown so correctly “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”