30 years ago this week, on November 18th, 1978, roughly a year and three months before I was born, 909 people in total – including infants who would have been among my generation – committed suicide together by drinking the Kool-Aid provided by Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana.

This is a crazy, unbelievable story, the details of which are incredible, and should be familiar to most readers in general if not in specifics. The Jonestown massacre was the subject of an MSNBC Films documentary which premiered earlier this evening, telling a story which sucked me in completely and left my wife Melissa in tears.

But something fundamental – absolutely fundamental – was missing from the MSNBC account of the Jonestown story. Jim Jones was portrayed for his drug use, his manipulative personality and unbalanced thinking. But the heart of his operation, his own personal driving force, the ideological foundation of all that he did, was the advancement of socialism. Communism. Marxism. Yet socialism barely got mentioned as the narrative unfolded.

As a child, Jones studied the teachings of Karl Marx and became sympathetic to socialist ideas. At 21 years old he began attending Communist meetings and rallies. From there he married Pentecostalism with socialism:

Why I became my own brand of Marxist. …. Not only my brand of Marxism, but in Pentecostal tradition, I saw that when the early believers came together, they sold their possessions and had all things common. So I tried very hard to live up to that concept throughout my years. [Tape Q134.]

The makings of a perfect storm!

On the MSNBC documentary, we heard some of the famous death tape (Q42), the original of which runs for 44 minutes, on which we could hear Jones exhorting the members of the cult to take the medicine and lay down their lives (as they were already doing in the background as Jones talked them through it). But left out were the following excerpts:

This is a revolutionary suicide. …. [Authorities would have let our kids] grow up and be dummies like they want them to be. And not grow up to be a socialist like the one and only Jim Jones. …. Stop this hysterics. This is not the way for people who are Socialists or Communists to die. No way for us to die. We must die with some dignity. …. I call on you to quit exciting your children, when all they’re doing is going to a quiet rest. I call on you to stop this now, if you have any respect at all. Are we black, proud, and Socialist, or what are we? Now stop this nonsense. …. No other way I would rather go to give my life for socialism, communism…. We got tired. (Tape edit) We didn’t commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.

This was an act of protest and paranoia and counter-culture ideology, a kick back against capitalism. The members of the People’s Temple cult believed in the promise that socialism would produce a better world so wholeheartedly that, earlier on the same tape, the group were having a conversation about whether they could be airlifted to the socialist state of the USSR instead of committing suicide. They believed it so fully that they left $7.3 million in assets to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!

Yet the creators of the MSNBC Films piece didn’t think it was worthwhile mentioning, virtually all throughout the documentary. Perhaps this is because the creators themselves are part of an American Left that likes to believe some form or mix of socialism still holds some promise for western society, and they don’t want to tarnish the word by associating it with Jim Jones and Jonestown. (For the record, producer Stephen Stept has said that National Socialism and Communism “always seem to leave mass misery in their wake,” which seems to indicate he at least doesn’t believe that.) The election of Barack Obama, who some have called ‘socialist’, may also provoke a sense that the word (and concept) is being redeemed in America right now, which may also explain the reluctance of the creators to sully the term by Jonesifying it. Just a thought.

I think the fact that the Jonestown Brainwashed were socialists is very interesting. Of course I could never argue that the socialism of Jim Jones is an indictment by itself of socialism any more than corporate corruption is an indictment of capitalism (although it must be said that all the fraudulence in Enron, WorldCom and anywhere else added together never did a human massacre produce). But it does say something about the kinds of people who are attracted to left-wing ideas and the inherent surrendering of the mind, rationality and will that is involved in forfeiting the individual thus.

At one revealing moment on the tape, an unidentified woman tells Jones emotionally, “We’re doing this for you.” Yes they were. They sure as hell weren’t doing it for themselves, or even for the ideology they say they believed in. But it was easy to see what that ideology bred in them: a willingness to forego the individual, their sense of personal desire and enterprise in favor of advancing another man’s idea of a community. It was socialism. “We’re doing this for you.” Something Ayn Rand wrote easily springs to mind:

I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Or die for him.

One woman was there that evening who didn’t want to die, and said it. Perhaps she began to realize that what Rand said was true: she couldn’t do the opposite of what her individualist spirit was screaming at her to do; she needed to fight this mass hysteria, this communal sacrificing of the self, this socialism that she’d become wrapped up in. Her name was Christine Miller.

Christine was an enterprising individual before joining the cult. According to Michael Bellefountaine, she said, “I pulled myself up by the bootstraps,” and, working hard, found her way to Los Angeles where she “…earned enough to buy a home and car, and still have money for jewelry, furs and travel. She probably enjoyed these things more than most because of the hard work it took to get herself there.” Hardly the definition of socialist. When she joined the commune, she was one of the few who was allowed to keep many of her material possessions and bring them with her. “It could be that Christine Miller was one of the few people who simply refused to give up the things for which she had worked so hard.” Either way, she was not one of them.

Christine started off by asking about the possibility of going to Russia instead. When Jones shot it down, she repeated her suggestion, saying, “That’s what I say. I don’t think nothing is impossible if you believe it.” She and Jones argued back and forth for a few minutes, during which time it’s obvious that Christine was becoming desperate to find an alternative to giving up her life:

Christine: I said I’m not ready to die. But I know… (unintelligible)

Jones: I don’t think you are. I don’t think you are.

Christine: But, ah, I look about at the babies and I think they deserve to live, you know?

Jones: I — I agree. But they — But don’t they also they deserve much more, they deserve peace.

Crowd: Right.

Christine: We all came here for peace.

Jones: And we’ve — have we had it?

Christine: No!

Damn right she didn’t have it. How can any socialist society lead to peace? Only the freedom of the human being at the individual level gives any prospect of peace. Christine goes on: “When … we destroy ourselves, we’re defeated.” But that’s exactly what Jones’ socialist ideology does: it destroys the self in order to advance the community. They were defeated already.

This incredible conversation, in these lucid moments before their impending deaths, went to the heart of ideology, the heart of the debate between socialism and capitalism, communism and individualism, Left and Right, tyranny and liberty.

Jones: I cannot separate myself from the pain of my people. You can’t either, Christine, if you stop to think about it. You can’t separate yourself. We’ve walked too long together.

Christine: I well know that. But I still think, as an individual, I have a right to —

Jones: You do, and I’m listening.

Christine: — to say what I think, what I feel. And I think we all have a right to our own destiny as individuals.

Jones: Right.

Christine: And I think I have a right to choose mine, and everybody else has a right to choose theirs.

Jones: Mmm-hmm.

Christine: You know?

Jones: Mmm-hmm. I’m not criticizing…

Was she kidding? An individual? In a socialist commune? There is no room for the individual within socialism. Everything is done collectively. Of course there was the illusion of individuality. But Christine was doomed – literally – to the hell of the choice she made to accept a group which chose communism over capitalism. Jones was never going to listen. It was a community decision. There’s no dissent.

Finally, a third party steps in:

“McElvane: Christine, you’re only standing here because he was here in the first place. So I don’t know what you’re talking about, having an individual life. Your life has been extended to the day that you’re standing there, because of him. “

Precisely. From there, the crowd gets loud and Christine is essentially resigned to her fate. She was found among the rows of dead, on the second row.

In this situation (which happened 13 months before I was even born) Christine Miller was my hero. She represented reason, rationality, bravery, dissent, individualism, liberty, the good of capitalism and so much more.

So that is Jonestown. And the story is not complete (take heed MSNBC) without acknowledging the ideological premise, the beating heart, of Jonestown: socialism.