http://www.elyrics.net/read/f/frankie-goes-to-hollywood-lyrics/the-world-is-my-oyster-lyrics.html
MEMORY, LOVE & THE PEOPLE’S TEMPLE
According to most German- and American memories, Jim Jones was simply a leader of a Doomsday Cult, which eventually carried out its plan to move on to a better universe or heaven.
Both the documentary I saw on German TV and have read on various websites claim : “The Peoples Temple was initially structured as an inter-racial mission for the sick, homeless and jobless. He assembled a large following of over 900 members in Indianapolis IN during the 1950s. ‘He preached a 'social gospel' of human freedom, equality, and love, which required helping the least and the lowliest of society's members. Later on, however, this gospel became explicitly socialistic, or communistic in Jones' own view, and the hypocrisy of white Christianity was ridiculed while 'apostolic socialism' was preached.’”
http://www.religioustolerance.org/dc_jones.htm
However, websites also typically note of the People’s Temple, “It was an interracial congregation -- almost unheard of in Indiana at the time. When a government investigation began into his cures for cancer, heart disease and arthritis, he decided to move the group to Ukiah in Northern California. He preached the imminent end of the world in a nuclear war; Esquire magazine listed Ukiah as one of nine cities in the U.S. that cold survive a nuclear attack. They later moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles.”
Actually, the interracial congregation throughout most of the 20th century remained, in most corners of the United States, unheard of.
That is, Sunday mornings remained the most segregated time of each week in America, a supposedly free and open country.
One documentary reviewer noted, “Many of the cult followers were struggling with the social injustice and racial discrimination in the 60s and 70s. Jim Jones offered them equality and sense of belonging that the society didn't offer. So Peoples Temple becomes their utopia where they could be so happy and united. Only the sad part is that later some of them realize they were betrayed and they had no way out.”BETRAYED AND HAD NO WAY OUTAt times, many Americans (and of course others around the globe) feel they are “betrayed and they had no way out”. I understand that the Americans who supported America’s war on terrorism and other idealists who have gone to war over the past 8 years have certainly felt at some point that they were betrayed but that they had had no way out.These Americans (and America’s allies) may have gotten into the army, air force, marines, or National Guard with good intentions or ideals, but at times they have felt misspent and betrayed. They feel they are victims.Meanwhile, many of these same American victims of the Cult of the War of terrorism call themselves Christians but, in turn, cannot fathom how Christians, like those who had ideals like those in the People’s Temple (which was originally a spin-off from the Disciples of Christ in Indiana), ever found themselves moving to equality and then mass-suicide in Guyana.Nor can they imagine why there are suicide bombers all over the Middle East--and sometimes in the USA, Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere.The fact is that most of us learn all our concepts about suicide, war, fraternity, God and memory by what our immediate elders, schools, topography, or society are teaching us. (By topography, I mean our physical landscape, including schools, statues, theaters, etc.) That is one reason why Jim Jones fled with his tribe from the USA to build a community in Guyana anew. In this way, Jonestown in Guyana could be built up from one side to look like a very idyllic community here on Earth, where race and gender didn’t matter and where other artifacts of America’s racial, political-economic and social messes and injustices were banned.On the other hand, as one watched the film (in German) about the Jonestown camp, one realized immediately that what was being narrated was the story of a concentration camp. Jonestown, like some military and concentration camps around the globe, was a camp where American radio and other news were not to be heard in 1977-1978. The only news reports allowed in the camp were made-up news reports by Jim Jones and his immediate followers. In this context, Jones could drum into the inmate’s heads that America was killing itself in a horrible class war and that nuclear annihilation was coming on any day now.Moreover, the inmates of Jonestown were told that the world hated them and that any day invaders from America might come to take away their dreamsREMEMBER: The USA government had been drumming this idea of a nuclear annihilation into the American children’s heads since World War II. Many of those adults in Jamestown Guyana had experiences as children the now-infamous duck-and-cover training at U.S. taxpayer expense in American schools growing up.
Similarly, many Americans who had stood by and allowed America in 2003 to be marched into a war in Iraq were in some ways victims of the same sort of control of media and mass propaganda of the Bush administration (acquired during the Reagan era)—carried out in the most systematic and efficient way from media-manipulation masters and charismatic leaders.
I believe that if counselors, churches and educators do not deal better with the past and memory, we will continue to repeat the debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam.
What is required is that physical monuments (1) to the stupidity of war and (2) the crimes that have been done to Americans in the name of ideals or in the name of a faith—whether it is a faith in country or faith in a church—need to be immortalized in stone much more often than has been the case in U.S. developmental history to date.
The need for physical monuments and memorials in the American landscape becomes more important as the U.S. wages wars far from the continental USA (and bomb other nations remotely by their drone robot flights.)
America is already a place where people move away from their villages and towns quite regularly. Americans thus need to have constant physical reminders as to where they (and their people) have been and who they are.
Without the visual- and physical places of memory and commemoration, our children will never wrestle with their pasts as the Germans have been forced to.
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