22 The Demagoguery of Jim Jones’s “Revolutionary Suicide”

There is an eerie phenomenon on the Jonestown “death tape”—the tape recording the deaths of 909 people in Guyana on November 18, 1978. Amidst the occasional screams, crying babies, and Jim Jones’s garbled diatribe, ghostly organ music and hopeful church hymns literally haunt the audio. There was no music playing when the Jonestown faithful ingested flavor-aid in what Jones called “revolutionary suicide.” Instead, the music is left over from a previous recording as it was common practice in the Peoples Temple to record everything and to record over earlier tapes if necessary. This strange phenomenon creates an underlying sense of peace throughout the tape, but much like Jim Jones’s belief in revolutionary suicide, the peace is just an illusion.

It is easy to listen to Jones speak on the tape and dismiss him as a raving lunatic. He sounds hopeful, yet full of dread; defeated, yet resilient; perhaps a little drugged up, yet clearly rhetorically charismatic. But it is also apparent just how convincing he must have been to his followers. His coercion is subtle, at least on the tape (there were also men with guns forcing many to drink, and some were injected with the poison). But his message is clear and consistent with the message he had been preaching for some time before and after the Peoples Temple moved from California to Guyana. The message is summed up by Jones early on the tape: “We’ve been so betrayed. We have been so terribly betrayed.” In Jones’s mind, he had been betrayed by America, Russia, the Guyanese, his former followers, and by the world at large.

His solution to this betrayal was to die. According to the recording:

I saved them, but I made my example. I made my expression. I made my manifestation, and the world was ready — not ready for me. Paul said, ‘I was a man born out of due season.’ I’ve been born out of due season, just like all we are, and the best testimony we can make is to leave this goddamn world.

This argument is consistent with a few principles of demagoguery. Jones presents his people as the persecuted righteous, awoken to truth and unendingly harassed by those who do not understand. According to Patricia Roberts-Miller in Demogogeury and Democracy, Jones “presents the situation of the in-group … as so dire that [they] are justified in any actions”, including suicide (34) . He constantly argues that they “are faced with extermination” (Roberts-Miller 35). Jones does this in a number of ways, including using fearmongering by exaggerating the threat to his people’s children and the elders of the group, saying, “Because if they come after our children … we give them our children, then our children will suffer forever,” and “They’ll — they’ll torture some of our children here. They’ll torture our people. They’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this.”

Part of what makes his fearmongering so successful is the lack of dissent from his people. Marc Galanter argues that limiting dissent was a purposeful decision by Jones when he moved the congregation to Guyana. This was done under the guise of keeping his people safe in the jungle:

Feedback from the outside world can also be helpful in moderating a leader’s deviant views. In the Peoples Temple, however, there was very little … The physical isolation … denied members access to reactions of outsiders who might have raised questions about their bizarre beliefs and behavior … access to negative feedback is essential to the continuing viability of an open system since it enables the system to assess its own effectiveness and change so as to eliminate maladaptive behavior. (123-4)

Jones’s strategy for eliminating nuance and dissent was to literally separate his people from opposing opinions so there would be no ability to question him as the authoritarian leader. Christine Miller is the only person on the tape to dissent, but when she asks Jones if nothing else can be done, Jones uses binaries and false dilemma to establish the hopelessness of the situation:

… what those people are gonna get done, once they get through, will make our lives worse than hell … we are done-in as far as any other alternative … But to me, death is not … a fearful thing. It’s living that’s [sic] cuts ya … I’ve never seen people take the law … in their own hands and provoke us and try to purposely agitate murder of children … it’s just not worth living like this … I wish I could tell you were right, but I’m right.

On the tape, Miller counters, saying, “Well, I don’t see it like that. I mean, I feel like that — as long as there’s life, there’s hope. That’s my faith,” to which Jones says, “Well — someday everybody dies. Some place that hope runs out, because everybody dies. I haven’t seen anybody yet didn’t die. And I’d like to choose my own kind of death for a change. I’m tired of being tormented to hell, that’s what I’m tired of.” Jones’s response elicits raucous applause.

The exchange sees Jones use the binary and false dilemma of life or death to exaggerate the situation and fearmongering to suggest the out-group will kill the in-group’s children. The argument is an either/or fallacy that fails to comprehend the nuance of the situation. Jones suggests that everyone in Jonestown will be murdered for the death of Congressman Leo Ryan, and nobody questions it because the only voice they had been fed for their entire time in Guyana was Jones’s own. He had established his position in California, then in Guyana he bombarded the people with all-night sermons and daily reminders that he was their savior and everyone was out to get them. He even censored their mail and kept them away from their families, not allowing any outside voices the ability to challenge him.

Part of the reason this works is because Jones had already established an authoritarian, charismatic hold on his people. Richard Barrett Ulman and D. Wilfrid Abse compare this to “the condition existing between a hypnotist and subject” (641). Roberts-Miller describes this as charismatic authority, quoting Ann Ruth Willner. At play are Willner’s second and third characteristics of the charismatic leadership relationship: “The followers blindly believe the leader’s statements,” and “The followers unconditionally comply with the leader’s directives for action” (Roberts-Miller 58). Jones had established a cult of personality through his many years of staged healings firebrand sermons, and through his stated mission in the Peoples Temple. Roberts-Miller says a charismatic authoritarian leader often inspires because people think the leader has supernatural powers (57).

Part of this mission (and part of what made him so relatable to his people) was his championing of racial justice and his identification with African Americans. The Peoples Temple was known for courting minorities, and Jones—from his early days—had been a crusader against segregation and racism. Many of his followers grew attached to him because of his crusading. In fact, on the “death tape,” he establishes another in-group/out-group dynamic between the people who stayed in Jonestown and those who left with Congressman Ryan:

[I]t’s the will of Sovereign Being that this happen to us. That we lay down our lives to protest in what’s being done. The criminality of people. The cruelty of people. Who walked out of here today? Did you notice who walked out? Mostly White people.

By playing to the group’s experiences with prejudice and racism, Jones attempts to unite them further through identification. The argument has its intended effect as just a few moments later, an unidentified woman says, “It broke my heart to think that all of this year the White people had been with us, and they’re not a part of us. So we might as well end it now …”

Jones built his reputation on being a champion for minorities, but as John Hall wrote in 1979, “[Jones] supported various progressive causes, but he did not put much stake in their success” (54). There is a question of Jones’s own dedication to the African American cause; there is also a question about Jones’s own motives and feelings about leading his people to their deaths. It is difficult to fully grasp Jones’s motivations and psychology at the time, but it is possible that his final invocation of racial conflict could be an example of cunning projection. In the tape, he says, “They can take me and do what they want — whatever they want to do. I want to see you go. I don’t want to see you go through this hell no more.” Jones states his desire to keep his people safe from those wishing to inflict harm, but he had been stockpiling cyanide for months before the suicide and had a trained group of guards to force unwilling participants to ingest the poison, showing he was prepared and perhaps planning to ultimately kill his people. So there is a question of motivation – why warn his people about others wishing them dead while, all along, he planned on killing them himself? It is possible it is “cunning” projection because his use of fearmongering is done to create acquiescence among the people when he ultimately tells them to kill themselves.

Another problematic issue in Jones’s rhetoric is Jones’s solution to the in-group/out-group dilemma, specifically in regard to the threat posed by the out-group. Demagogues typically preach how the dangerous out-group can lead to the destruction of the in-group, so it may become necessary to use violence against the out-group. Jones’s reaction to the out-group is completely counter-intuitive. He repeatedly stresses the coming suicide as a “revolutionary act” in defiance of the world. He argues that revolutionary suicide is a form of protest and protection. He warns that failure to die will lead to his people’s destruction. Of course this is illogical, yet his resignation to the end seems to have worked on a number of his people. An anonymous voice on the tape praises the idea, saying:

I’d just like — to thank Dad [Jones] for giving us life and also death. And I appreciate the fact of the way our children are going. Because, like Dad said, when they come in … they’re gonna massacre our children. And also the ones that they take captured, they’re gonna just let them grow up and be dummies like they want them to be. And not grow up to be a socialist like the one and only Jim Jones. So I’d like … to thank Dad for the opportunity for letting Jonestown be, not what it could be … but what Jonestown is. Thank you, Dad.

This is a strange perversion of the typical strategy demagogues employ. It is the idea that death is preferable to acquiescence and death at one’s own hands is triumph. It is also an example of what Roberts-Miller describes as “[managing] fear while not looking fearful” (63)—i.e., we are afraid of being destroyed, so let’s show we are not afraid by destroying ourselves.
Jones’s demagoguery is multifaceted, but at its core is his charisma. At the beginning of the “death tape,” he says, “How very much I’ve tried my best to give you the good life.” Indeed, for many this was true as Jones was looked at as a savior. His rhetoric was effective enough to lead over nine hundred people to the South American jungles, to convince them to cease all contact with their families and friends, to give up their possessions and everything they knew, and eventually to give up their lives. Jones’s last words on the tape stay true to the idea that he is a prophet and savior with his people’s best interests at heart. He says, “We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.”

The transcript ends with the word ‘Music.’

Works Cited

Galanter, Marc. Cults: Faith, Healing, and Coercion. Oxford UP, 1989.

Guinn, Jeff. The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Hall, John R. “Apocalypse at Jonestown.” Society, col. 16, no. 6, Sept. 1979, pp. 52-61.

Jones, Jim. “The Death Tape.” Transcribed by Fielding McGehee III. Recorded 18 Nov. 1978, Jonestown, Guyana. Published by Alternative Consideration of Jonestown and Peoples Temple, SDSU, jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=29084

Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Demagoguery and Democracy. The Experiment, 2017.

Ulman, Richard Barrett, and D. Wilfred Abse. “The Group Psychology of Mass Madness: Jonestown.” Political Psychology, vol. 4, no. 4, Dec. 1983, pp. 637-61.