Dear Editor,

A LITTLE background to this letter – recently, a local tourism company, Wanderlust Adventures, came up with the long-overdue idea of a tour to the site of Jonestown.

Not only did the initiative spark local debate but it gained, and is still gaining, massive international attention.

In response to a letter by an attorney, Neville Bissember, vehemently shutting down the idea, I wrote a letter to Stabroek News, in which Bissember’s letter was written, which was published.

In response, Bissember responded claiming, among other things, that I misinterpreted what he said, and that Stabroek News facilitated that misinterpretation. I responded quoting not only the relevant paragraph of his letter, but also a letter by Hamilton Green that had the same interpretation I did of that paragraph.

I also provided further evidence using actual Jonestown records, showing the culpability of the Burnham government as well as rebutting a claim made by Green in his letter. Now, not only was there no publication of my letter in response to Bissember, but an editorial appears today in Stabroek News arguing against the tour in extremely self-contradictory terms, supporting the genius idea from Bissember maybe a memorial marker be placed at the site (a marker already exists), and concluding essentially with the nonsense that:

”The factors which led to Jonestown are part of US history, particularly that of California, and are best told in that setting. How the settlement functioned here is part of Guyanese history, but that is a topic for research, not a tour.”

It is clear that someone at Stabroek News is uncomfortable with the contemporary sociopolitical consequences of any revisiting of Jonestown here would raise. For example, in the editorial’s summary of how Jonestown got here, the cult’s entry in Guyana is reduced to “Jim Jones made his application to come to create a settlement in this country in 1973 through the agency of Claude Worrell, the honorary Guyanese consul in California.

According to the New York Times of December 24, 1978, he came here with four members of his Temple to argue his case.”

This is in stark contrast to my presentation of evidence that the actual entry into Jonestown was via the firm Hughes, Fields and Stoby with a partner of that firm, Clarence Hughes, working with a PNC backbencher EHA Fowler to pass the legislation in a PNC parliament legally establishing the People’s Temple here. Also, no mention, as presented in my second letter, of the sort of arrangement wherein Jonestown religious propaganda was inextricably intertwined in PNC party and government propaganda.

The text of my second letter:

Mr. Neville Bissember (“I never said that the gov’t of the day was critical to the facilitation of the Jonestown tragedy” – SN – Friday, December 13) says that my paraphrasis of part of his original letter to be interpreted to mean that the Burnham government of the 1970s played a central enabling role in what took place was erroneous and a “literary feat of no mean order”.

I perhaps misunderstood the meaning of Mr. Bissember when he said the following in that original letter:

“If anything, Jonestown represented the frailty of the government of the day and the ease with which Jim Jones and his crew were able to manipulate key players in the administration to comply with their wishes, bend the rules and turn a blind eye to their shenanigans.”

In all fairness to my perhaps poor comprehension skills, that shortcoming seems to be shared by the venerable Hamilton Green, who cites, and disagrees with, that exact quotation from Bissember in his own letter, “The government’s decision on Jim Jones and followers was informed by the Cold War and US First Lady’s letter of recommendation” (SN – Thursday, December 12) calling that statement an ‘unfortunate’ remark and salvo.

With regard to what the learned attorney and legal academic refers to as the “defamatory implications” against the government of the day and the text of his letter, I must confess a further lack of comprehension, particularly when it comes to such high legal concepts as the “distinction between the causa causans of an occurrence and the causa sine qua non.”

I failed law in high school, and I dropped out of the University of Guyana after like three months, but I have – and I in no way present this as some sort of equivalency – researched Jonestown fairly extensively and in my letter I merely quoted what actual academics refer to as source material, and drew a perhaps erroneous conclusion that the apparent deep integration between the PNC as a party and government, and the Peoples’ Temple resulted in a situation in which Jones was able to establish an essentially semi-autonomous colony situated within Guyana’s territorial space leading to disastrous consequences.

I maintain that the available historical record – particularly the information available via the 2008 declassification of FBI information on Jonestown – shows that any assertion that what happened there was an overwhelmingly American tragedy divorced from Guyana and Guyanese is wrong.

For example, as evidenced in a letter Jones wrote to Forbes Burnham himself, on October 19, 1977, the extent of the functional cooperation between cult, party and government is clear:
“Staff members of our agricultural project met with Regional Minister [Fitz] Carmichael in Matthews Ridge on Monday, October 17th. Many things went well with Minister Carmichael and Mr. [W.D.] Wyatt. They praised the discipline and success of our agricultural project… We made many other overtures, including monetary donations to the PNC… One person referred to us as being “isolationists.” This shows absolutely no knowledge of us or a willingness to learn. We have Guyanese living on our project, and only regret that under the conditions of our present development, we cannot have more so that our project could be fully co-operative… Please know that our loyalty to Guyana is complete. (I’m almost tempted to quote the old adage that “if you’ve got something working for you… leave it alone!”). We can and will produce for Guyana. This is our aim – to serve. You will not be disappointed by the faith you have shown us in the past, and we pledge to make good that faith in coming days and months.”

However, the relationship did not end at mere functional cooperation. In one transcript of a recording made circa September 1978, of a public meeting in which Jones is addressing the people of Jonestown, it is clear that partisan political indoctrination in favour of the PNC was as critical to the operations of Jonestown as was ‘religious’ indoctrination. As Jones is delivering his main address, an unnamed man complementing that address tells the gathering:

“…one of these questions throwed at you and sooner or later you will get all of these questions. You’ll have to get the right answer. If you don’t, then you’ll go to the back of the food line. This will continue till you can answer the question before you can get your plate. One of the questions is: What does PPP stand for? That’s the party of the opposition, and it stands for People’s Progressive Party. What does PNC stand por– for? That is our party, it’s People’s National Congress. Why are we against the PPP? It’s because of apanjhat, which means vote your own kind. Dr. [Cheddi] Jagan is the head person– is the person in charge or the head of the PPP, and Dr. Forbes Burnham is the Prime Minister and he is also in charge or head of the P– PNC. People’s National Congress.”

In addition to further explaining his “frailty of the government of the day” comment for the benefit of both myself and Mr. Green, Mr. Bissember might wish to take up his defamatory implications charge with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as the Jonestown Institute, the source of the original tapes and other primary source information that establish, in my humble opinion, a prima facie connection between the operations of the PNC, both as a government and a party, and the impunity with which the abuses of Jonestown were allowed to take place, leading up to and including the massacre.

Speaking of which, I would also like to thank Mr. Green for his own intervention, particularly his revelation that:

“Reverend Jim Jones presented to us a letter from Roselyn Carter, wife of US President Jimmy Carter, recommending Reverend Jones and his followers who actually preached at one of our prominent churches in Georgetown.”

Again, I am by no means a credentialed historian in any way, but my recollection of the Carter Presidency was that it was from January of 1977 to January of 1981, with Carter becoming President-elect in November of 1976.

The process for the establishment of Jonestown, as initiated by Clarence A.F. Hughes of Hughes, Fields and Stoby – not known [publicly] to be a PNC government official at the time – was started in April of 1974, when Richard Nixon was still President. When Nixon resigned in August of 1974, the private member’s bill that was to legally establish the Peoples Temple was already in its first draft and assigned to the PNC parliamentarian E.H.A. Fowler. With Nixon’s resignation, Gerald Ford would assume the Presidency, until losing the election to Carter two years later. When the Act establishing Jonestown was passed in the PNC-controlled Parliament on February 26th, 1975, it would be another year to the day before a relatively unknown Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, would win the inaugural Democratic Primary in Iowa.

Rosalynn Carter’s first association with Jim Jones began two years after the PNC government and Hughes had first initiated the legal establishment of the cult in Guyana, a year after that Act establishing it was passed and assented to, and less than a year before her husband was elected to and subsequently assumed office making her First Lady.

American investigative journalist, David Conn, whose stories on the People’s Temple preceded the Jonestown tragedy, wrote of Rosalynn Carter’s association with Jones in a 2014 article:

“She became enthralled with Jim Jones when she visited San Francisco with then-vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale during the 1976 campaign. She spoke from Jones’s pulpit, and also had a private dinner with him at a posh San Francisco restaurant. They continued to correspond by letter after that.”

In brief, it would have been impossible for Rosalynn Carter’s influence via letter as First Lady to be an establishing factor – I guess what Mr. Bissember might refer to as a causa sine qua non – in the Burnham government’s decision to accommodate the People’s Temple, something that had been, to use another fancy legal Latin phrase, a fait accompli a full two years prior to her becoming First Lady.

As can be said of so many chapters in our murky history, it is time that the Jonestown Tragedy be examined in the full light of newly available information, whatever the potentially ‘defamatory’ allegations against a long-gone dictatorship (a curious legal concept in itself) and the discomfort of those who might be negatively impacted by any new revelation.

Yours truly,
Ruel Johnson