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Comment by ru999gol | Hacker News Reader

I understood his point to be, to reject the notion that it was really a mass suicide, but instead he argues it was a mass murder with only a minority willingly committing suicide. Its obviously an understandable viewpoint, the idea that of course you can't possibly make hundreds of people kill themselves willingly, that this would be impossible, but to me it seems more like a denial of human nature that is actually unhelpful in preventing those types of atrocities in the future. Its much more beneficial to try to understand how far the human mind can be twisted by blind faith, for even good people to do incredibly horrific things.

(Of course its proven that there was murder involved, but I still think we should recognize it as the mass suicide it was).

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*Her point.

The problem with calling it a mass suicide - besides the fact that hundreds of people slaughtered were children (who had no idea what was happening), the elderly (threatened into submission) and people forcibly held down and injected with poison - is that it leaves room to think that the majority of these 900 people CHOSE to die, and Speier's account shows that they overwhelmingly absolutely did not, regardless of their previous allegiance to the church.

Subsequently, we can joke about people's stupidity instead of having a conversation about how to recognize demagogues like Jones and prevent their rise to power.

I believe Speier's implication is that calling it mass suicide assigns culpability to the victims and away from a murderer.

It isn't wishful thinking from Speier; there are a number of survivors who can attest that this is what happened. And how would many of them actually know that they were drinking poison, when there were several rehearsals beforehand that jones explained as tests of faith?

There's an audio recording of the incident from nearly start to finish[1]. If you listen to it, it's pretty clear people were aware of what was happening and only a minority were against it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Peoples_Temple_Cult_Death...

The author didn't say "most", she puts the number murdered at 300. Either way most people rightly describe the incident as a massacre.

just the quote I was commenting on:

> When people refer to the Jonestown massacre as a “mass suicide,” I am enraged. It was nothing of the kind. Although some of Jones’s most zealous followers may have consumed the poison voluntarily, the vast majority were murdered outright and against their will.

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