Rebecca Moore - Jonestown apologist
Tilman Hausherr
One would assume that such a person would "get" the information that
something was wrong there. Sadly the opposite is true - Rebecca Moore is
a jonestown apologist, believes the silly theories of the cult
apologists and wrote an article that sounds like written by
Catherine Wessinger. All makes me very sad.
http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/philrel/jonestown/cherrypie.html
Some parts make almost no sense at all. Consider this:
Evidence seems conclusive, however, that: 1) beatings and public
humiliation sessions regularly occurred as part of the Temple's means
of controlling its members; 2) individuals were privately threatened
or intimidated; 3) suicide drills were practiced as a way to test
loyalty, and to prepare members for the "real thing;" 4) some
individuals were controlled with drugs in Jonestown and an atmosphere
of repression grew there as Jim Jones' health deteriorated; and of
course 5) violence broke out against Congressman Ryan and against the
community itself. In 1985 I tried to contextualize these facts by
calling them "paradoxes," "double standards," or "ironies." There are
several reasons why I am no longer willing to do that.
And compare it to the next paragraph:
First, the credibility of the anti-cult movement (ACM) has been
demolished and I no longer need to try to balance their biased
accounts. The coercive tactics of deprogrammers have been exposed,
the threat to the free exercise of religion by the ACM has been
recognized, and perhaps most importantly, the crucial and negative
role anti-cultists played in shaping government action toward the
Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas has been documented (S. Wright 1995;
Tabor and Gallagher 1995). Second, books and articles by scholars of
religion have critically assessed the accounts given by apostates, or
"defectors" as they were called in 1985 (Hall and Schuyler 1998;
Shupe and Bromley 1994; Shupe, Bromley and Breschel 1989), and
similarly eliminated the need to put things in perspective.
So first there is conclusive evidence (she was even told that her own
sister was a member of a "hit squad"!), but then the "ACM" has lost
credibility. Later she blames Ryan, the former members, the "Concerned
Relatives", and even her own family member Deborah Layton for the
events. These apostates are blamed in her article for putting the
pressure on Jones. Of course this contradiction can also be attributed
to a lack of writing skills that has been observed elsewhere in the cult
apologist scene. (Prof. Jeffrey Hadden) She seems to really hate the
"Concerned relatives", especially the Stoen family. (Jim Jones stole
their son)
Her logic is:
Apostates --> Influence media --> Influences public --> Pressures cult
--> cult has no other solution than to become violent.
Here it is in her own language:
The injury Peoples Temple did to itself is obvious. The injury done
against Peoples Temple is equally obvious, but nowhere have I heard
any words of remorse from those involved in the actions against
Peoples Temple. In fact, members of the Concerned Relatives
criticized my parents in January 1979 for not joining them. As
recently as 1996 a Temple apostate, seeing my mother for the first
time in twenty years, said "You could have prevented it!"
She welcomes the approach of not considering "apostates":
A critical approach to apostates did not exist at the time of
Jonestown, however, and so a group calling itself the Concerned
Relatives, comprised of former Temple members and relatives of
current members, had virtually unchallenged access to the media and
to the government.
(Never mind that this "critical approach" (= apostates are unreliable)
never made it outside of the closed world of a few cult apologists and
their students)
The website of Rebecca Moore has other articles, also by her parents. It
shows that while other parents did quite a lot of activities, her own
parents declined to do so. That they lost two children because of it
does not seem to make them change their mind. Her parents have been
criticized often for this, both before and after the disaster.
For a more objective view, see the Jonestown source materials here:
http://www.icehouse.net/zodiac/
It has also flyers from the "Concerned Relatives". It is immediately
obvious that these were people who genuinly cared about the lives of
their relatives.
Tilman
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Eric Pement
Hausherr) wrote:
>Rebecca Moore lost two sisters and a nephew in the Jonestown tragedy.
>One would assume that such a person would "get" the information that
>something was wrong there. Sadly the opposite is true - Rebecca Moore is
>a jonestown apologist, believes the silly theories of the cult
>apologists and wrote an article that sounds like written by
>Catherine Wessinger. All makes me very sad.
So did you send her a copy of your message or ask her personally what
made her take the stance she has. Don't just tell us what she says: ask
her to give you some sort of explanation!
--
Eric Pement <epe...@jpusa.chi.il.us>
senior editor, Cornerstone magazine
http://www.cornerstonemag.com
939 W. Wilson Ave., Chicago, IL 60640-5706
tel: 773/561-2450, 1-(ext.)2084 fax: 773/989-2076
Tilman Hausherr
Pement) wrote:
> So did you send her a copy of your message or ask her personally what
>made her take the stance she has. Don't just tell us what she says: ask
>her to give you some sort of explanation!
I quoted from her own text, I pointed to her own website. It is doubtful
that I have misunderstood her (she even quotes people that think like me
in her text), or that she just forgot something. She wrote several very
long texts there - these *are* her explanation, and both she and her
parents think alike. (Never mind that her sisters died) I do normally
never send unsollicited criticizing e-mails to cult members or cult
apologists - too much risk that they later complain that I am
"harassing" them.
Tilman Hausherr
Death at Jonestown
The Irish Times
14.11.1998
Twenty years ago in Guyana, almost 1,000 members of an American
religious cult committed 'the worst mass suicide and murder of modern
times' at the urging of their leader, Jim Jones. Robert Templer looks at
current re-evaluations of the event
At the edge of Evergreen Cemetery overlooking a dusty suburb of Oakland
in California is a small granite gravestone. It is inscribed simply: "In
memory of the victims of the Jonestown tragedy." A few feet away is
another stone, set flat in the dry earth, that gives some small sense of
the scale of that tragedy. It was put there by a man whose wife, five
daughters, two sons and sister all died on November 18th, 1978, in the
worst mass suicide and murder of modern times when nearly 1,000 people
died in the South American jungle in the apocalyptic end to Jim Jones
and his People's Temple cult.
On November 18th this year, two groups will gather on each side of the
US to remember the victims of Jonestown and to continue their search for
answers to why they died. In Oakland, families will come together for an
annual memorial service at Evergreen Cemetery organised by Winona
Norwood, a preacher from Los Angeles. In Washington DC, a small group of
scholars will go to Capitol Hill to press Congress to release the
documents about Jonestown that are still classified by the government on
the grounds of national security.
J. Gordon Melton, a scholar at the Institute for the Study of American
Religion at Santa Barbara, has led the push to find out what the US
government knows about the lingering mysteries of Jonestown and why and
how so many people died there. Among this group will be Mary McCormick
Maaga, a Methodist pastor in New Jersey and a former academic at the
University of Sterling. Her new book, Hearing the Voices of Jonestown,
tries to debunk the idea of those who died as the passive victims of Jim
Jones and instead explain the forces that shaped their decisions.
Inspired by Maaga's friendship with the family of three people who died
in Jonestown, the book has challenged some of the most deeply held ideas
about Jim Jones and his followers. It has also evoked criticism that it
is too beholden to the current fashions of academia, and in its attempts
to understand the motives of those involved in the killings, too
forgiving of their actions.
Of the 911 Americans who died at their commune in Guyana after taking
grape Fla-Vor-Aid laced with cyanide, 234 are buried in a mass grave in
Evergreen Cemetery. They were mostly some of the 260 children who died
and who, lacking dental records, were never identified. It took six
months to find a cemetery that would accept the bodies, which had been
turned away by communities across northern California.
Even in Evergreen, there is nothing that mentions the number of children
buried there. Plans for a memorial wall fell apart over whether to
include Jim Jones's name among those who died. Twenty years after the
deaths at Jonestown, the People's Temple still grates on exposed nerves
of horror and incomprehension in California, once home to most of Jim
Jones's followers.
One month after the deaths at Jonestown, a Gallup poll showed that 98
per cent of Americans had heard about People's Temple. Only the attack
on Pearl Harbour and the dropping of the atomic bomb achieved greater
levels of awareness among the public.
The People's Temple has become the archetypal cult, its members seen as
the brainwashed victims of an unhinged man who believed himself to be
the reincarnation of both Jesus and Lenin and turned his charismatic
power into a force for destruction. After Jonestown, new religious
movements could no longer be benign. They were all seen through the same
prism of the Jonestown suicides.
"I'm going to tell you - without me, life has no meaning. I'm the best
thing you will ever have."
In 1955, Jim Jones founded the People's Temple Full Gospel Church in
Indianapolis. In the city that once housed the headquarters of the Ku
Klux Klan, Jones created a racially integrated church that focused not
just on prayer but on social activism. A decade later Jones, haunted by
a vision he had of a nuclear war, moved his congregation to Redwood
Valley in northern California, which Esquire magazine had listed as
among the safest places in the US in the event of an atomic attack.
That year the church had just 86 members but it grew exponentially,
attracting many African-Americans drawn in by its message of racial
equality. In the early 1970s Jones opened churches in San Francisco and
Los Angeles and began a period of political activity, increasing his
followers to several thousand. He was a skilled political operator,
sending out his followers to canvass voters, and was much courted by
California's Democratic elite, including then-governor Jerry Brown.
Rosalyn Carter tried to win his endorsement for her husband's
presidential campaign. People's Temple members campaigned vigorously for
the liberal George Moscone for mayor of San Francisco and after his
election, Jones was rewarded with the chairmanship of the city's
powerful housing authority. Among the many causes he adopted at that
time was a campaign to install a barrier on Golden Gate Bridge to
prevent suicides.
As Jones's public power grew, his church was becoming increasingly
authoritarian. Members were subjected to increasingly violent discipline
and demands that they prove their loyalty to Jones. Defectors began
telling stories of violent beatings and ritual humiliations of those who
violated Temple rules. The 16-year-old daughter of two long-time
members, Elmer and Deanna Mertle, was beaten on the buttocks 75 times in
front of a congregation of 600 for kissing another woman.
Always obsessed by the threat of nuclear war, Jones had sent some
members to the former British colony of Guyana in 1974 to begin work on
"Jonestown", a 3,800acre agricultural commune. In 1977, Jones's church
came under increased public scrutiny with news articles based on the
testimony of defectors accusing him of physical and sexual abuse. Jones
made the fateful decision to move his followers to Guyana, far from the
threats of the media and increasingly hostile Temple apostates.
At this time a group known as the Concerned Relatives began to push for
a government investigation into the People's Temple. The group enlisted
the help of the Bay Area congressman Leo Ryan who travelled to Jonestown
in November 1978 to investigate allegations that people were being held
there against their will. Along with a group of television and press
reporters, he spent a day at Jonestown, being shown around and
entertained with a show in the evening. Only some two dozen people chose
to leave with him but these defections of long-standing members pushed
the increasingly fractious Jones and his inner circle over the edge.
One man tried to stab Ryan, who was only superficially hurt but decided
to leave Jonestown immediately. A group of men followed Ryan back to an
airstrip and opened fire on the plane, killing the congressman, three
journalists and one of the Temple members who chose to leave.
"Where's the vat, the vat, the vat? Where's the vat with the green C on
it? The vat with the green C. Bring it so the adults can begin."
Shortly after Ryan was killed, at 6 p.m. on November 18th, the suicides
began. Jones told his followers Guyanese troops would soon arrive and
would kill their children. On the tape of the suicide he rants about the
betrayal of those who had left, suggesting that to prove their loyalty
to him his followers must now die. Their deaths, he assured them, would
be remembered as an act of "revolutionary suicide".
The children were killed first, followed by the adults, whose bodies
were found outside the open-sided hall where the drink was served out,
each dose measured out with a syringe. Two nurses marked each person who
had taken their dose with a cross from a marker pen. A calm female
voice, never identified, is heard on the tape reassuring parents their
children are not crying from pain but only because the grape drink and
cyanide potion is a little bitter. At least 911 people died from
swallowing or being injected with poison. Jim Jones and a nurse, Annie
Moore, were shot in the head.
Later, a Temple leader, Sharon Amos, who was in the Guyanese capital of
Georgetown, slit her throat and those of her three children. The final
suicide came a few months later when the Temple spokesman, Mike Prokes,
shot himself in a motel room in California. In all, 923 people died.
"There's nothing to death. It's just stepping over to another plain.
Don't be this way. Stop these hysterics. This is not the way for people
who are socialists or communists to die."
Some of the impetus to re-examine Jonestown has come from a surprising
source: the family of Carolyn Moore, Jones's long-standing mistress and
one of the inner core of leaders of the People's Temple. Carolyn, Kimo,
her son by Jones, and her sister Annie all died at Jonestown. Since then
their sister, Rebecca Moore, a professor at the University of North
Dakota, has written extensively about Jonestown, mostly defending the
images of those who died there in her books A Sympathetic History of
Jonestown and In Defense of the People's Temple.
Moore and her parents, a Methodist minister and a social activist who
live in California, have not shied away from the horrors of the event
but have tried to promote what they believe is a richer understanding of
those who died, whom they feel have been stripped of humanity by being
labelled as deranged cult members.
"My family's response was different from most of the families," said
Moore. "Most people felt this deep shame about it and refused to talk
about it but we did not. My sisters were guilty of planning this event
but I can still love them for their humanity."
The standard analysis, produced in dozens of books soon after the event,
portrayed Jones as an evil genius surrounded by a compliant harem of
women and a group of mostly African-American followers lured in by false
promises of an escape from poverty and racism. In her book, Maaga turns
that view on its head, asserting that by the time the group reached
Guyana, Jones's power was on the wane as he consumed increasing amounts
of prescription drugs and that he was surrounded by powerful and
competent women who were increasingly asserting their control. It is
these women, particularly Carolyn and Annie Moore, that Maaga focused
her attention on.
"What surprised me when I looked at the People's Temple members and what
they said about themselves, is that they didn't see themselves as
vulnerable but as empowered members of this community," Maaga said.
African Americans joined not because they were deprived but because
Jones offered them a vision of a society not available anywhere else.
Maaga writes admiringly of Jones's attempt to create a "an egalitarian
society in which hierarchies based upon race, class and gender would be
erased," evoking what one critic of the book dismissed as "the holy
trinity of multicultural academia". It is here that Maaga seems to be
shoe-horning facts together to fit the theory. She attempts to balance
scholarship that has focused on mostly discredited ideas about
brainwashing in cults by restoring "agency" - current academic jargon
for free will - to members of the People's Temple. But she also has to
admit that people faced increasing coercion and violence from the
mid-1970s onwards and that the beatings and the suicide rehearsals
increased.
Jones, who had been married to his wife Marceline since 1949, had
numerous mistresses among the senior women. His relationship was
particularly close with Carolyn Moore. They became lovers soon after she
joined the People's Temple in the late 1960s and in 1975 she had a son
by Jones. Several other women, including Grace Stoen, one of the leading
defectors, had long sexual relationships with Jones.
Maaga proposes that Jones was not simply a rapacious sexual predator but
engaged in sex with willing followers eager to enhance their power and
break down gender hierarchies. But Jones saw himself as so potent that
he attributed defections from the group to his refusal to sleep with
them. Jones may, as Maaga says, have offered women more power in the
group than they might have received outside, but it was still done by
linking the opportunities to controlling and sordid sexual demands. It
hardly seems like a step forward for feminism.
Likewise, Jones's professed racial egalitarianism hardly stands up to
scrutiny. About three-quarters of the residents of Jonestown were black.
Half were black women and yet there were very few blacks among the
Temple's leadership and Jones did not admit black women into his
powerful coterie of mistresses.
"Please for God's sake let's get on with it. We've lived - we've lived
as no other people lived and loved. We've had as much of this world as
you're gonna get. Let's just be done with it. Let's be done with the
agony of it."
More convincing than Maaga's defence of Jonestown against the views of
anti-cult critics is her attempt to trace the trajectory of the group as
it descended towards self-destruction. She maintains the suicides were
less the result of Jones's overwhelming charisma than the collapse of
his power. "What I wanted to find out was, at what point did passion
become blindness?" she said. "This happened at the point where their
focus shifted from worrying more about creating an egalitarian, diverse
community to worrying more about what the people who left were saying,
when they started to get into the self-righteous demonisation of anyone
who disagreed with them."
For five years before the suicides, Jones had been conducting rehearsals
for the suicides, known as "White Nights". These were mostly tests of
loyalty to him that built up a mindset that loyalty also meant
sacrificing one's life, while survival was tantamount to betrayal.
Long before Congressman Ryan started to investigate Jonestown, the
community was struggling. Two-thirds were young or old and so the heavy
burden of agricultural work fell to just one-third of the group. It was
never a success at growing its own food, relying on imports from
outside. In the heat and humidity of the jungle, people were getting
sick with fungal and parasitic diseases. And yet despite these
difficulties, Maaga argues, it was the community's faith not to Jones
but to the community they had built at Jonestown that they were not
willing to forsake.
Jones was increasingly crippled by what was referred to as his "blood
sugar problem" - in fact an addiction to tranquillisers. He was
increasingly out of touch with reality in Jonestown, spinning
apocalyptic tales of nuclear war between China and Russia and telling
people the United States had set up concentration camps for blacks.
While the Temple members were based in California, they had enough
contact with the outside world to balance Jones's more deranged views -
but in Jonestown there was less connection to reality. That isolation
helped to foster the increasingly intense suspicion of outsiders and
fears of defections from the group.
Pathologists performed only perfunctory autopsies on seven of the badly
decomposed bodies from Jonestown so there is no clear idea of how many
adults were injected or forced to drink the cyanide potion. Some
accounts of the deaths have suggested that maybe 70 people were killed
along with the 260 children who were murdered, mostly by their parents.
More than 600 willingly went to their deaths. The question of how those
people went from having such powerful hope that they could create a
utopian society to sinking into such despair may never be answered
adequately.
Melton and other academics are pushing the House of Representatives
Foreign Relations Committee to see the results of the government
investigation that was never released, possibly because of CIA
involvement in Guyana. "We know from some sources that there are a
considerable number of documents," said Melton. "There have been a
series of requests under the Freedom of Information Act but all but one
have been turned down on the grounds of national security. This is one
of the big questions - what security issues could be involved in
Jonestown 20 years after the event?"
Rebecca Moore said she had a mixed reaction to Maaga's book, which
explains more about her two sisters and their actions but also shows
them to be more powerful in the organisation than previously thought.
"What really hit me was the fact that my sisters were responsible for
the planning and implementing the deaths. He could not have done it
alone," she said. "It is also sad to see the despair that took over the
community in the last few days - the choice between surviving and
betrayal or dying and remaining loyal."
Robert Templer teaches journalism at Berkeley, California
Ron Newman
> Rebecca Moore lost two sisters and a nephew in the Jonestown tragedy.
> One would assume that such a person would "get" the information that
> something was wrong there. Sadly the opposite is true - Rebecca Moore is
> a jonestown apologist, believes the silly theories of the cult
> apologists and wrote an article that sounds like written by
> Catherine Wessinger.
[snip]
> Later she blames Ryan, the former members, the "Concerned
> Relatives", and even her own family member Deborah Layton for the
> events.
[snip]
> The website of Rebecca Moore has other articles, also by her parents. It
> shows that while other parents did quite a lot of activities, her own
> parents declined to do so. That they lost two children because of it
> does not seem to make them change their mind. Her parents have been
> criticized often for this, both before and after the disaster.
The website Tilman is referring to here is
http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/philrel/jonestown/
I think there has actually been reconciliation and understanding between the
Moores and the other parents, and that it's too simplistic to label
the Moores as "cult apologists".
See John Moore's essay on the same site,
"In Search of Truth and Understanding about Jonestown", at
http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/philrel/jonestown/truth.html , and especially
the section entitled "The Aftermath", which describes a meeting between
the Moores, Stephan Jones (Jim Jones's son), Grace Stoen (one of the
leading Concerned Relatives), and Patricia Ryan (Leo Ryan's daughter).
In Deborah Layton's new book "Seductive Poison", several of the photos
are courtesy of Rebecca Moore. Many others are courtesy of Stephan Jones.
On page 308, in the Acknowledgements section, Deborah Layton says:
I thank Stephan Jones for his bravery, friendship, support, and
willingness to share his thoughts, time, daughter, and family
photographs with me; Dr. John and Barbara Moore, who lost their
daughters Annie and Carolyn as well as their grandson Kimo;
Dr. Rebecca Moore, Annie and Carolyn's sister, and her husband
Fielding Mcgehee for their incredible strength, love, and passionate
belief that Larry [Layton] should be allowed to come home.
I agree with many others that the whole truth about Jonestown won't
be known until the US government and CIA are persuaded to declassify all of
their files on the subject.
--
Ron Newman rne...@thecia.net
http://www2.thecia.net/users/rnewman/
Tilman Hausherr
rne...@thecia.net (Ron Newman) wrote:
>I think there has actually been reconciliation and understanding between the
>Moores and the other parents, and that it's too simplistic to label
>the Moores as "cult apologists".
Indeed; this is why I never did so. I only labelled individually
Rebecca Moore a "jonestown apologist". See the post you responded to for
the argument explaining why. When I wrote it (I believe in November
1998) I went through the website of Rebecca Moore and what I saw was
sometimes disgusting (this was surpassed only by an article by Catherine
Wessinger). I believe she is a coward - obviously she didn't want to
throw her accusations against Debbie Layton when she met her. Or maybe
someone got her in touch with reality, so she stopped blaming Debbie
Layton, the concerned relatives, and Leo Ryan for what happened.
I have not read Layton's book, but from all I have heard it is probably
good. (Unlike the book by Rebecca Moore)