End times
Oct 29, 2018
4 minutes
by Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore
If Jonestown has a lasting legacy, it is in an expression we throw around casually today: to drink the Kool-Aid.
“They killed the babies first.” So wrote Tim Cahill in his seminal Rolling Stone essay, In the Valley of the Shadow of Death, which described the aftermath of the Jonestown massacre.
Leader Jim Jones founded the Peoples Temple on ideals of social justice and racial equality. But in 1978, Jones called a meeting at the remote settlement in Guyana, where the cult was based. There, vats of a grape-flavoured drink (similar to Kool-Aid) were laced with potassium cyanide. More than 900 people died in a mass murder-suicide. Dogs and the resident chimpanzee were shot in the head.
The killings saw a
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