Deadly anniversary and cautionary tale

While in Zagreb a little while ago, my wife Danielle and I visited the Croatian Gallery of Naïve Art. There I came across painters I didn’t know but many of whose paintings took my breath away. There were some extraordinary scenes, perhaps above all a string of magnificent landscapes, though there were also intriguing depictions of quite different scenes.

Ivan Lacković, Long Winter: a curious, haunting impact

What struck me most was a surprising painting entitled ‘Guyana 78’ by one of the leading painters in this Naïve movement, Josip Generalić.

Bodies litter the ground, a cross in among them symbolising that they died in the name of a distorted Christianity. There are children among them. In the background, two apes look on, displaying a truer Christian spirit as they apparently share a banana, uncomprehending of the weird human spectacle below them.

Josip Generalić, Guyana 78

The reference is to the mass suicide – or, more properly, the massacre – at the People's Temple Agricultural Project, usually called Jonestown after its founder, Jim Jones, leader of a cult that professed both Socialistic and Christian thinking. The killings took place on 18 November 1978, forty years ago today.

Danielle pointed me to the story of a survivor published by the BBC this morning. It made harrowing reading. The cult members practised mass suicide, taking supposedly poison-laced drinks, only to be told that it was innocuous. Until, one day, it wasn't.

That was after a visit to Jonestown by an inspection delegation led by a US Congressman, Leo Ryan. As it was leaving, members of the cult attacked the delegation, killing five including the Congressman. Jim Jones issued a new  command for mass suicide, but this time for real. He warned that following the murders, Guyanese authorities would attack the cult and take the children. Some 300 children were among the 900 who died.

It was the worst deliberate killing of US civilians before 9/11. An extraordinary, horrific event, worthy of the artistic talent of a Generalić.

Bodies strewn across the ground at Jamestown

It isn’t, however, just the coincidence of seeing the painting so soon before the anniversary that prompted me to write about it here. It’s more because the kind of mindset that drove the Jamestown massacre seems to be growing once more. It’s cult thinking, where a single person is identified as a Messiah, the source of all authority, whose views are not to be questioned however contrary they may be to all evidence. He, and he alone, is to be the source of truth.

These leaders demanding total, unquestioning loyalty, are growing in numbers in nation after nation. Look around yourself and see whether you can’t see some of them emerging near you – or already in power.

They don’t necessarily take their demands for unqualified obedience quite as far as Jim Jones did. But their demand for total commitment is often destructive. And there are many ways people can be persuaded to commit collective suicide.

Some just take longer than at Jamestown.