To the Perplexed (w/audio)

Well, that was interesting. I say “was,” even though it’s still ongoing, because I figure that being officially denounced by the White House must be the peak of an experience like this, but who knows… I’ve been surprised more than once this week. I have been very gratified that all of you have chosen to stick with me through this time, and that many of you have joined us since it happened. Martyr Made has been the #1 ranked podcast in all categories for several days now. We live in a new world. No official White House denunciation, or hit piece in a national newspapers, or rabid Twitter mob, can change the fact that I work for you guys, and only you guys. Today, more than most days, I am very grateful for that. Most of the invective lobbed my way this week has been either uninformed or simply in bad faith, but there are good faith people I respect, including some of you, who have questions, and this message is to you. This will be my final word on the matter until the first episode of my upcoming series, Enemy: The Germans’ War. When I was nearing the end of the Jonestown series, I asked a friend who is a private investigator to help me get my hands on some police reports about a certain kind of incident. I don’t know if he was allowed to do that, but he came through more than I’d hoped, and I was able to read about dozens of incidents involving someone - usually a husband or father - holding his family hostage in a standoff with police. Most of the incidents involved drugs, and the overwhelming majority of those involved methamphetamines (which is what I had asked my friend to help me find). For each incident I read about in the police reports, I found what I could in newspapers and other media reports, and for the federal cases I read whatever I could find on the PACER website. Some of the incidents ended peacefully, others ended with the death of the hostage-taking husband/father at the hands of police. But nearly half ended when the man murdered his family and killed himself. Jim Jones, as those of you who listened to God’s Socialist know, was hopped up on amphetamines pretty much every day for about ten years leading up to the murder-suicide in Guyana. I had read enough about the delusional, and often violent, paranoia caused by long-term amphetamine use, that I expected to learn something about what happened in Jonestown in 1978. And I did. I decided to tell the final episode of the Jonestown story from a different angle, because trying to tell it as an amphetamine-fueled murder-suicide of the kind I spent a month poring over in police reports was just taking too much out of me. Sometimes I still regret not pushing through and doing it that way, because I do believe that’s what happened. Anyway, there was something else that I began to see, both in Jonestown and in the various hostage reports I’d been reading. The behavior of the police during the incidents was not the same in every case. Some clearly understood the explosive and unpredictable nature of the circumstances, and did their job by trying, at every point, to de-escalate. Others were clumsy and out of their depth. But in some cases there was simply no getting around the fact that, in a standoff with a psychotic man threatening to murder his family, the police acted in ways that made the situation worse. They used threats, pressure tactics, and some even insulted or made fun of the man inside the house with a gun - maybe hoping to shake him up and get him to expose himself, or maybe just because cops are human beings, and were tired, frustrated, and angry themselves. Whatever the reason, they clearly acted in ways that made the situation worse, often with catastrophic consequences. As I worked my way toward the end of the Jonestown story, I found myself feeling a lot of bitterness and outrage at the forces aligned against Peoples’ Temple. Here was a paranoid, delusional man with his “family,” out of his mind on amphetamines and sleep deprivation, ranting about “revolutionary suicide,” and political and law enforcement officials, egged on by an often vindictive group of former members with an axe to grind, chose a maximum pressure approach that escalated the cult members’ sense of isolation and persecution, their feeling that there was no way to relieve the pressure, and no way out. In all of the books and documentaries about Jonestown, the former members who escaped before the end are held up as victims and heroes, but I do not view most of them that way. In my opinion, many of them were not victims at all, but in fact were perpetrators. They enabled, encouraged, and egged on Jim Jones, taking the reins of Peoples’ Temple themselves as Jones’ health and capabilities deteriorated. They administered the organization, they led late-night struggle sessions, they ordered the break-ins and harassment campaigns, they recruited and deceived the people who would eventually die with Jones in the jungle, and then they jumped out of the car after it was already on fire and headed toward a cliff. Some of them left for personal reasons, and many left simply because it turned out that farming in an off-grid settlement in the South American jungle was harder than they expected. Many of those who joined the group known as The Concerned Relatives were bitter toward Jim Jones and the remaining leadership group personally, and any desire to avert disaster for the hundreds of innocents stuck in Jonestown was quite secondary to their desire to take down Jim Jones. I don’t say they were all like this, but some of them were, and they were often the most energetic of the activist former members. It was at their behest that US authorities took notice of Jonestown, and it was their initiative and information that set the tone of the official response. Are they responsible for the deaths of the people at Jonestown? Obviously they did not force the Kool-Aid down the throats of anyone, so in that sense, no, of course they were not responsible. We don’t know what would have happened if the outside forces would have taken a more de-escalatory approach - it is certainly possible that Jonestown would have ended the same way. Yet whenever I think about the story, I can’t help but come away with the feeling that these people were real villains in it. Sure, Jim Jones started the ball rolling and pushed it forward at critical moments, and there is no reason to speculate about his role in the disaster - without Jim Jones, those people would not have died out there. But Jim Jones was drugged-up, out-of-his-mind, delusional, paranoid, a speed-freak father holding a gun on his wife and kids, so when I criticize the outside forces for being more interested in hanging his head on their wall than in saving the people of Jonestown, I don’t find it necessary to repeatedly add the caveat “but Jim Jones was worse.” If I criticize the escalatory actions of police during a stand-off that led to a murder-suicide, I don’t need to follow up my accusation with a ritual denunciation of the murderer inside the house. These are two different classes of offense, and only one is worth arguing about or even discussing - what is the point of criticizing someone who murders his family and kills himself? I often run into this same misunderstanding when talking about the Israel-Palestine situation. Any criticism of the behavior of the Israeli military in Gaza is met with the inevitable question: “Well, what about Hamas? How come you’re not criticizing Hamas? Why are you letting Hamas off the hook but only focus on Israel?” What is there to say about Hamas? Hamas sends suicide bombers onto buses full of women and children in the middle of the day. We know what Hamas is, and it is a waste of my breath to criticize them. The same thing happens when I criticize the role NATO and the United States played in creating the conditions that led to war in Ukraine. “Why are you a Putin apologist?” Imagine if, after the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal broke in 20… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit subscribe.martyrmade.com/subscribe