I have not come to this observation lightly or without experience. In the more than two decades since I was a young reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, sitting in the deathtrap called Jonestown interviewing a charismatic madman named Jim Jones, I’ve read a shelf of books and talked to many experts and eyewitnesses, none of whom could have predicted that 914 people would lie dead on the fetid jungle floor that November day in 1978.
What can we make of such insane tragedies? Journalists tend to assess cult behavior, an essentially psychological phenomenon, in political terms, the terms that they find most familiar and comfortable. In media reports Falun Gong is most often portrayed as a peaceful band of passive exercise and meditation enthusiasts with little or no political agenda. The Chinese government, meanwhile, is portrayed as a clutch of communist hard-liners, seeking to stamp out any deviation from pure party loyalty. But that misses the real point: whether capitalist or communist or some variant in between, when it comes to handling cults, the government never wins, not on the battlefront or on the public-opinion front, and often people die.
The great irony in comparing Jonestown of 1978 with Beijing of 2001 is that in ‘78 the cultists were the communists. Jim Jones was an avowed Marxist who had unsuccessfully petitioned the Soviet Union for asylum for his group to protect it from the “oppression” he felt in the United States. Tass, the Soviet news agency, reported approvingly in early 1978 that Jones, after failing to find “justice” in America or political asylum in Russia, had called on his members to “leave the Free World” to seek paradise in the then socialist Guyana. After a visit to that paradise the Tass reporter gushed, “The inhabitants of Jonestown are creative, they love work and they celebrate life. They demonstrate real care and concern for children and seniors alike.”
It was not reported whether they exercised and meditated as well. No matter. Just a few months later most of them would be dead, willingly drinking from Jones’s poisoned cup or having the death serum forcibly injected into them or squirted into their mouths, children and seniors alike.
Falun Gong may remain as harmless as it has been portrayed. But the experts tell us that violence-prone cults often go through a kind of metamorphosis, where once righteous do-goodism and positive thoughts are transformed into a world-weary disgust and, often enough, a collective death wish. This change is usually signaled by the leader. Though spokesmen for the group have disavowed the fiery suicide mission, earlier this month Li Hongzhi, Falun Gong’s exiled leader, called for a change of course. “Forbearance,” one of the virtues promulgated by the group, could now be abandoned by his followers all over the world. Calling the persecution of Falun Gong by the Chinese authorities an “evil,” the tech-savvy guru declared on his Web site that the evil be eradicated. Li’s rhetoric has been growing increasingly apocalyptic, proclaiming a great “Consummation” in which all his members will “leave” and “all bad people will be destroyed by gods.”
If Falun Gong’s apocalypse is now, political oppression will likely be blamed. And though political oppression is certainly a big part of Chinese society, personal confusion is perhaps a bigger part. In China, as in the former Soviet Union before it, the old ideology has crumbled and some rough new beast is waiting to be born. But China, for all its oppression, has no monopoly on this kind of social anomie. British football hooligans, German skinheads, American gun nuts, Israeli assassins and wide-eyed Palestinian kids with slingshots are all symptoms of humanity’s truculence in the face of change.
When I emerged from the Guyana jungle with the last interview of Jim Jones in my notebook and a bullet in my shoulder from the cult’s last desperate shoot-out, I was sure I had witnessed something that could not be described in conventional journalistic terms. Entire families–mothers, children, grandmothers–had laid down their lives or had them rudely taken for a twisted idea: transcendence. This was an enormous crime, and it had been perpetrated by no government. A monstrous evil had been planted in people’s minds by their leader, who asked them only to lay down their burdens at his door. The world was changing; they were largely poor and left behind. Life was hard to live alone. Only in the group, which became a cult, which became a world, could security be found. Security and surcease. The first they never found; the second Jim Jones provided them. The politics were incidental. This could happen again. As always, China bears watching. But so does Des Moines.
