Jim Jones was NOT a religious fanatic. Read the transcripts of his last recorded harangues as his people are drinking the Kool Aid. He begs them to die like good Socialists and to their screams remarks that such terror is not the way for communists to die. There was no time for religious talk while “Revolutionary Suicide” was taking place.
Let’s chalk up Jim Jones as one firmly in the camp of Marxism and not of any sort of church other than a front for politics and race mixing as a fetish.
Yeah, I noticed that ... and the author also put in abortion clinic bombers. While there may be the very rare case of such a nut ... given the extreme rarity of those people compared to Islam, I find it hard to make some kind of equivolency between them and Islamic suicide bombers.
As to the rest of the presentation ... it has alot of good stuff in it but ignores the most basic issue that will determine our success or failure ... and that is domestic American politics. This is a war of wills, ours versus our enemies. They cannot beat us in a show of force or even in a war of attrition all other things being equal. But, they can break our will to fight. That is the key thing right now ... and this presentation ignores that key part of the war equation. Have we lost ... NO, can we win ... YES, will we win .... given our political climate I’d say the odds are against us. We are our worst enemy in this fight.
I met Jim Jones once before he moved south of the border (some gathering of community “leaders”). I did not feel he was religious at all—he seemed more con-man than religious. This might not have been the best example for him to use.
A strong argument can be made that Socialism is a religion for people who don't believe in God.
Thanks for the interesting info about Jim Jones, I hadn't known that.
However, it doesn't really contradict the point about religious fanaticism. Is not Marxist socialism a type of religious fanaticism? I think it is.