American Thinker: Friends and relatives of the Jonestown dead will be meeting next Sunday in Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery to memorialize victims on the 40th anniversary of the mass poisoning. While Peoples Temple held services in their buildings in San Francisco and Los Angeles, it established no such tie to Oakland, making the final resting place for nearly half of Jim Jones’s victims a peculiar postscript to the most peculiar story in American history.
The logistical problems inherent in transporting 918 bodies from Guyana for interment in the United States served as one issue complicating the proper burial of the dead. The poverty of so many of the deceased’s relatives, the advanced decomposition preventing identification, and the shame that many families felt over the manner of their kin’s deaths all combined to create a nightmare following the nightmare. The discovery of the cremated remains of nine Jonestown victims in a shuttered Delaware funeral home in 2014 illustrates how convoluted and chaotic the process was.
The answer to the question, why Oakland? stems from the refusal of more natural resting places for the dead to accept them. Guyana, despite the expanse of Jonestown, refused to allow the burial of the bodies in its ground. Delaware, site of Dover Air Force Base where the human remains landed from Guyana, wanted the bodies far away as well. “Public officials in Delaware were present for the send-off,” Rebecca Moore notes in Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple regarding the trucking away of corpses, “relieved to see the bodies depart because they feared a mass grave in their state.” San Francisco, which contains few cemeteries after many relocations, similarly balked.
“Oakland, to my knowledge, the reason everyone was put there is because other places refused,” Thomas Beikman, who stumbled upon the aftermath of a Jim Jones devotee slashing her kids throats in a Georgetown, Guyana, bathroom forty years ago, explains. When asked what the Peoples Temple connection to Oakland is, Beikman exclaims: “Absolutely none.”
And in Oakland, the Jonestown dead did not receive a proper memorial until 2011. Even then, the inclusion of “Jim Jones” on the memorial’s list of names pitted survivors against one another. A place of healing instead rubs old sores. more here
People are still drinking the socialist koolaid.
The fate of the People’s Temple is a stark example of what can happen to a hermetic cult led by a charismatic lunatic.
Don’t forget that Jerry Brown and Feinstein supported him.
https://thefederalist.com/2018/11/09/revisiting-harvey-milk-jim-jones-and-san-franciscos-ten-days-of-violence/
Harvey Milk wrote a letter to the DoJ imploring them to leave him alone.
The audio from the day is on Youtube.
The leftwing cult is as strong today as then.
About 4am the night after they all died, I heard a news program where the announcer was telling people to be aware: Jim Jones had sent assassins to the USA to knock off a lot of politicians and they were on the loose up here, with government urgently trying to hunt them down.
If that were true, it makes sense to me to wipe out the command center to disrupt the killers. The dead people didn’t willingly drink poisoned cool-aid. Get real. Who would??????????
The bodies were brought to Dover Air Force Base under very strange and hush-hush circumstances. I was not military, but I lived in that town and knew a lot of Air Force officers.
No conspiracy, those people were idiots. When a handful of them got second thoughts, it was too late. It was actually too late when they showed up in Guyana. But, whatever. Jones ordered those people killed because he knew he wasn’t going to get away with what he was doing and ‘his people’ would start talking to the feds. All of them. Some, hell, A LOT, killed themselves willingly. So let’s not go into conspiracy theories about this. Conspiracies let the stupid people and criminals off the hook. Except for the poor children and the mentally handicapped among them, they were stupid and criminal people.
MJA: I remember it well. It was one of the first big stories that CNN carried 24/7. I recall being absolutely mesmerized by the horrible scenes coming from Guyana, and wondering how this could have happened. These poor, stupid people were not smart enough to be part of any conspiracy other than a few of the devoted ones ambushing Congressman Ryan and some of his staff at the landing strip. I also wondered why the U.S. Airforce was forced to clean up this gruesome mess, rather than burying the bodies down there in Jonestown. The rest of it is no mystery. All those Liberal San Francisco Democrats running for cover after their connection to Jones and his captive black voters was revealed.
The natural end-state of communism. This is the Left. This is why we fight them.
I was working in the Travel Pay section at Norton AFB in San Bernardino at that time, processing travel vouchers for service members on TDY. I did some of the vouchers for both regular and reserve flight crews who were sent over there. Usually, they were talkative about their trips, but none of them talked about that trip. They were grim and silent.
To MJA………….ahh………oops………I forgot you were there when they passed out the cool-aid. What flavor was it?????
Marco and Merry Poppet……shhhh…….our cover has been blown. MJA was on site in Jones Town. He mixed the cool-aid.
We don’t hear much about ole Jimbo despite being perhaps the most famous democratic socialist(the People’s Temple doctrine was just socialism) – weird huh?
@Mark S. McGrew (at 4:41 pm):
“He”…?
Xhe … or is it zhr or zir or some shit.