Posted on 10/15/2018 12:43:12 PM PDT by C19fan
Next month marks the 40th anniversary of two landmark events of American popular culture: the assassination of pioneering gay politician Harvey Milk, and the mass suicide of 900 members of the Peoples Temple cult.
If you remember anything about the mass suicide, it’s probably that cult leader Jim Jones was a fundamentalist Christian demon whose Bible-thumping berated brainwashed followers into drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Harvey Milk, by contrast, is a folk hero. The San Francisco supervisor became a gay-rights saint because he was martyred by a right-wing fanatic.
That’s the received history in both cases. But according to author Daniel Flynn, it’s scarcely truth at all, but rather propaganda. And the way history remembers these men and the time and place that made them offers a dire warning to us today.
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanconservative.com ...
Ah - that part I knew (except maybe for hunting the people down afterwards) although my understanding is that a great many did it voluntarily.
One thing I’m fuzzy on is why he did it. I believe he was being investigated but if he was a socialist operative you’d think he’d send his people to war first before ritual suicide.
This is the other half of the minus Moscone, minus Milk = + Feinstein story...
“I was just mentioning to a woman in a meeting I was just in about people who stop reading when they see something they don’t like”
Nah, I prefer not to be suckered into reading an article with a false headline in order to get my attention.
If they’d have put the lie in quotes, I would likely have read further.
Any decade that allowed leisure suits to be called fashionable cannot be trusted.
.
The Left tried holding out hope for decades that Jones was really a CIA plot to try to besmirch the Socialist movements in America.
Bkmrk.
Good post!
As well as Gov. Moonbeam and Mrs. Jimma Carter.
Jim Jones was NOT a Fundamentalist Christian. He was a leftist wacko from San Fran who used the system to control people and their money.
I missed something about both incidents. Can you point me in the right direction?
Many thanks.
Bump for later references Diane Fineslime.
Jim Jones could not have killed 918 people without politicians, journalists, and activists running interference for him. They mistook ideology for ethics, a mistake common to fanatics of all stripes.Rather than learn from this mistake, they compounded it by portraying Jones posthumously as someone he was not to protect their ideology, shield their political skullduggery, and absolve themselves from the journalistic sin of performing PR instead of real reporting.
He had his men Kill congressman, Leo Ryan, so he knew it was coming down.
Grape.
I don’t remember enough about Milk, would have to look him up from scratch.
As bad as wikipedia is, it’s worth a start:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones
Don’t worry about it. You were definitive, and as such I figured you had something at the ready and authoritative.
I will do some looking.
The facts revealed in this article (from the book) are nothing new to anyone who bothered to do some basic research on the cult or Jones and Milk. But it is good to see it going mainstream.
My husband and I had just moved to SF before the murders. The big news was not Harvey Milk, a sort of minor player in SF politics, but George Moscone, the beloved SF mayor.
We had to drive past The People’s Temple on our way home from work, gave us the chills even before they moved to Guyana.
We liked to have lunch at an Italian restaurant North Beach where they gave us the best table in the house, right next to the window. We wondered why the preferential treatment for newcomers in this cliquish town. Then someone told us it had been Mayor Moscone’s table and no San Francisco native wanted to sit there...
The day of the shooting, City Councilwoman Diane Feinstein, spattered in blood and badly shaken, pulled herself together and announced to the world that Mayor Moscone was dead. I always give her props for that one moment, and she easily became mayor.
Harvey Milk? Sort of a bit player in the actual drama. But the gays made it a cause. The large Italian population in SF could just as easily have made prejudice against Italians an issue too....Some of them had been interred as “enemy aliens” just as the Japanese had at the beginning of
WW2, but they were too busy having lives and making money.
The whole Jim Jones thing happened at the same time my brother bought the album, ‘Welcome’ by Santana. It came out much earlier but he happened to purchase it at that time.
I can never forget the whole Jim Jones/Guyana news without thinking of that album, so eerily did the music reflect those scenarios down in the jungle of Guyana. This was only our thoughts as I said the album came out years before.
The song, Love, devotion and surrender at the beginning of the album sounded like the tripe those followers were brainwashed with and the song towards the end of the album, Flame sky sounded so much like the nightmare they went through after they surrendered even their ability to ever get free again and the terrible scene as they were forced to drink the cyanide laced Koolaid.
If you want to hear those songs to see what I am talking about, here is Love, devotion and surrender https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp3jDl2t1kw
and here is Flame sky https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BcNy3oe1QU
For later,
Thanks.
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