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The Jonestown Tragedy

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Jonestown was supposed to be a paradise and a perfect miniature society for Reverend Jim Jones and his loyal followers, but after only one year of a working civilization, horror would strike, ending the lives of nearly one thousand of Jones’s hopeful followers. Jonestown was an independent society located deep in the jungles of Guyana in South America. This perfected society was created for people who did not like how the United States was governed. The Jonestown tragedy has been compared to Adolf Hitler’s inhumane Holocaust and even the gruesome massacres of Charles Manson because all three of these catastrophes were due to one person’s need for dominance.
Jim Jones opened his first People’s Temple in Indianapolis, and then Jones later moved …show more content…

After a few years, a group of over one thousand people, including Jones, finally moved into Jonestown with high hopes of the utopia and the seemingly great leader. Although citizens were forced to do hard labor for long hours every day, they did not mind sharing the work load equally. There were harsh punishments issued if Jones’s authority was questioned. Eventually Jones took everyone’s passports, making it challenging for anyone to leave. He also ordered a handful of trusted men to patrol the compounds, armed with guns, to keep citizens inside. There were also “White Night” drills. During these drills a loud siren sounded in the middle of the night, waking all of the people. The drills were enacted in case an enemy came near and was about to …show more content…

Everyone had to take the poison either by free will, or if they refused, the poison was injected with a needle. Children were forced to drink it first with adults telling them that it was just kool aid. Jim Jones was shot in the head, but it is not known for a fact if he killed himself or if someone else pulled the trigger. There only survivor in Jonestown at the time of the mass genocide was Catherine Hyacinth Edwards Thrash. She hid under her bed until the town was completely silent. A total of nine hundred and thirteen people died in the horrific Jonestown

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While the guards drove off to fulfill the order, Jim Jones began giving a speech. He told all parents to give their children a cyanide-laced poisoning that was also mixed with grape-flavored Kool-Aid. Jim Jones gave a speech the whole time this was happening. The next people to drink the poisoning was the adults. After everyone in Jonestown had died and the people at the airstrip had been killed, Jim Jones took his own life by a gunshot wound to the head.

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Mass suicide was the horrific finale of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown. Jim Jones always made a type of dress rehearsal for whenever the time came to produce the mass suicide. No one ever knew whether, it was the real-deal, or if it was just another rehearsal directed by Jim Jones. “ ‘This punch is going to be passed out to everyone here,’ we all drank our punch and then he said, ‘You just drank poison and we’re all going to die in this church right here, as one’ the women were just screaming and others just sat there.” “And all the sudden Jim says, ‘That wasn’t poison you drank’.”

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