The victims of this include not just the Panther leaders who were set up by infiltrators to be assassinated by police, or who were mysteriously dismembered during California's famous serial killer wave. They also include the hundreds of radicals, especially black radicals, who were massacred in Jonestown. As Michael Meiers writes in his book Was Jonestown a CIA Experiment, Jones and his CIA handlers carefully orchestrated a psyop to convince the world that he was a communist, and that the People's Temple was Marxist: "If Jim Jones had his way history would remember him as a psychopathic communist whose drug-induced paranoia triggered the mass suicide of his followers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who has studied Jones knows that he projected an image to the public that was almost exactly opposite reality and that unravelling the cloaks of illusion that surrounded him might well be compared to viewing the dance of the seven veils. As each veil is removed another is exposed; a veil on top of a veil, on top of a veil."
The Temple sought to associate itself with the Cuban government and the Russian embassy in order to sell this narrative about it being a communist organization. Behind the scenes, Jones was being backed by prominent right-wing figures and intelligence operatives, and was giving anti-communist speeches throughout Latin America.
His purpose was to lead communists into a situation where the feds could gather intelligence on them, and where they could be subjected to CIA mind-control drug experiments inside a South American concentration camp. We can absolutely expect such tragedies to occur again within the history of U.S. anti-communist infiltration, whether it takes the form of regular cult sexual abuse or develops to the same destructive scale that Jonestown did. This is because if there's a new Jim Jones in operation today, we don't know who they are. They could be the leader of any of the pseudo-Marxist organizations that now exist, and there could be multiple actors within multiple organizations who've taken on the role of Jones.
I've drawn parallels between the Jonestown story and a couple of Intelligence operations, those being COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS (the latter of which was about gathering information on the groups that supposedly host foreign infiltration projects on U.S. soil). But after learning about how the Phoenix Program used intrigue to pick off tens of thousands of communists in Vietnam alone, I now view Phoenix as the one that encompasses the violent types of counterrevolutionary schemes I've been studying. During the War on Terror, there have been increased efforts to apply Phoenix to the imperial center. And with the acceleration of imperial decline that Washington's failed Ukraine geopolitical gamble has brought, as well as the testing ground for violence that Ukrainian fascism has provided, this importing of Phoenix' tactics is accelerating.
We're facing a "turnkey" tyranny, where all our government has to do to import the worst aspects of imperialism's violence abroad is turn the key. As Douglas Valentine writes in The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World:
Fifty years later, the US government has expanded Phoenix worldwide, with all the missionary zeal of Jesuits. Only now its cadres are more highly indoctrinated. There is little resentment anymore among the rank and file... Phoenix fulfilled its destiny in the wake of 9/11 and became the template for policing the empire and fighting its eternal War on Terror. So successful were Phoenix operations in overthrowing the Ba'athist Party regime in Iraq that David Kilcullen, one of the US government's top terrorism advisors in 2004, called for a "global Phoenix Program." The threat of a global Phoenix Program is that it will become fully activated in the United States. If the CIA and military are successful at psychologically neutralizing suspected terrorists, what is to stop them applying the full systematic extent of Phoenix-style operations to include political dissidents, immigrants and despised minorities in America, just as they did in Vietnam?
Be careful whom you trust. Be careful which organizations you join. Look into the backgrounds of leaders or individuals who seek to place themselves as messiahs or as exceptional; they're the narcissistic-opportunist types who tend to quietly associate with fascists despite claiming to be Marxists, or who display signs of being crypto-fascists themselves during crucial moments.
When someone demonstrates the signs of being a wrecker, don't appease them by maintaining a relationship. Rip them out of your life like a tumor. Prepare yourself and your cadre to physically defend from them beforehand, because the USA's Phoenix Program loves to recruit genuinely unhinged con artists. Con artists who have the potential to turn violent, or to at least start stalking their targets, when rejected. Understand that you're not immune to propaganda or manipulation, and constantly critique yourself for any missteps you've made so you can avoid them in the future. There are true monsters out there, monsters that the highest levels of government have deliberately created to try to exterminate us. We must gain revolutionary intelligence knowledge, and use this knowledge to survive the point when Phoenix gets fully implemented where we are.
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