From: intraphase@gmail.com

The Trap & Poisoned Cheese



[] Slider Commits Perjury []

### - already told ya that my 'real' daddy was part of the team that
helped deprogram the jim jones cult survivors, didn't i? well then,
methinks i might just know something about how cults operate, which afaic
is exactly the same as how society works too - or where ELSE did ya think
they gots it all from in the first place if not from how society itself operates?? duh! (you're a little slow sometime ain'tcha huh)

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.dreams.castaneda/c/2lC2YtqV9AU/m/DvFXAgxJAgAJ

[] Slider Commits Perjury []


Facts 85 Survivors : 913 Perished

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/11/18/archives/jonestown-the-survivors-story-jonestown.html

"913 men, women and children would die
after drinking a concoction made of Kool‐Aid
and cyanide. Banks was one of only 85 members
of the temple who survived."

[]

Possible Citations: From Included Article Below

Those who Assisted the 85 Survivors: No listed deprogrammers.

Attorney Mark Lane - Social Theorist
Attorney Charles Garry - Jones's Attorney

Jeannie Mills and her husband, Al - Survivors Shelter Owner

Dr. Hardat Sukhdeo, a Guyana‐born, American‐trained psychiatrist.
deputy chairman for clinical services and chief of psychiatry at
the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey,
New Jersey School of Medicine

Dr. Hatcher, chairman of the Mayor's Committee on the Family,
was asked by Mayor Dianne Feinstein to head the city's efforts
to deal with the Jonestown survivors.

N.I.M.H. came up with a $26,000 grant, which is being used
primarily to hire three survivors, part time, to help the
few survivors who seek welfare and disability aid and to
assist senior members in getting to and from medical appointments.


[]

By Nora Gallagher

Nov. 18, 1979

Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
November 18, 1979, Section SM, Page 19


Russell Banks keeps the snapshots in a small brown paper bag. In one picture, his wife is smiling, a blue bandana around her short Afro. She holds their baby in one arm. Her other arm is around Banks's brother. Behind them, in a green dashiki, holding
their 2‐yearold daughter, stands Banks himself. In the background is the jungle.

He remembers his daughter waving goodbye to him at the airstrip at Port Kaituma, five miles from the settlement in Guyana called Jonestown. It was Nov. 17, 1978. “ ‘Bye, Daddy,” she called. The scene appears to him in his dreams, he says — his
daughter, “at a distance, waving.”

As the plane carrying Banks the 115 miles to Georgetown took off, another plane bearing Congressman Leo Ryan was coming in. The California Democrat was investigating the People's Temple of Disciples of Christ because of complaints by relatives of some of
its members. The temple, established by the Rev. Jim Jones as a model of brotherly love, had prospered in San Francisco where it nourished the poor, body and soul. But now there were charges that it had become, in its new locale, a cult complete with
beatings for the disobedient. A day later, the Congressman and four other men with him would be slain, and 913 men, women and children would die after drinking a concoction made of Kool‐Aid and cyanide. Banks was one of only 85 members of the temple
who survived.

Today is the first anniversary of that massacre, a day that Russell Banks and the other surviving members of the Rev. Jim Jones's jungle community have dreaded. Banks, for example, lost his wife, his mother, his two brothers and his two daughters. He
lost hundreds of friends and colleagues, the leader he chose to follow and the cause he believed in. He lost all his money, all his belongings — and, he lost a dream about paradise, where the toucan birds would float in the shadows and all people would
be created equal. It is an anniversary of agony.

Beyond that, however, the survivors have new, painful memories and new kinds of fears. They remember the physical hardships they suffered upon their return to this country, for example — the lack of food and housing and financial support. And they
remember the emotional trauma that led one member to (Continued on Page 129) commit suicide and so many others to consider it.

Moreover, the survivors feared the approach of the anniversary as an occasion when they would be pursued by the news media and their identities as Jonestown members made public. In the past, that has led to ugly incidents and the loss of jobs. For that
reason, a pseudonym has been used to guard the real identity of “RussellBanks.”

Many of the survivors have refused to speak with reporters. They convey the sense that the tragedy was so extreme that to speak of it would be not cathartic but simply destructive. “Even the thought of talking to you has brought it all back,” said
one woman over the telephone. “My husband is having flashbacks of the children. We had five. They are all dead.” Those who do agree to be interviewed say they are willing to discuss the last year, but not Jonestown—until the interview actually
takes place, that is. Then, they seem unable to stop talking about the events of that Saturday night in Guyana, the events that have become the real focus of their lives.

No one at the hospital where Russell Banks works knows of his Jonestown connection; the new friends he has made think he was in San Francisco last year. He is 24 years old, and he lives in a large city in a black neighborhood. Taxi drivers call it “The
Jungle.”

Banks was the medical technician in that other jungle occupied by the community called Jonestown. He was assigned by Jim Jones to accompany four injured members to Georgetown for medical treatment. The People's Temple owned a large cement house there
that served as a permanent residence for a handful of members and as a kind of hotel for visitors from Jonestown having business in the country's capital. Russell speaks of Georgetown as “an old country town with no fog and the smell of the sea.”
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On the night of Nov. 18, Banks walked to the local movie house with two friends, Paul McCann and Guy Mitchell, and returned to the house at about 11. P.M. It was surrounded by police and soldiers.

“We were totally, totally amazed,” Banks recalls. The guards had submachine guns, automatic rifles, every manner of weapon. “A lot of our people were standing outside in the cold, in their bathrobes, like they were being searched. The radio was cut
off to Jonestown. We weren't told what was happening for hours, hours, hours.”

But Banks and the others had a premonition. They remembered the drills that Jim Jones had put temple members through, practice sessions in mass suicide looking toward what he called the “white night.” Banks says that “the first look at the house
sent chills through us because of the fantasy about what might have happened.” He asked those standing outside to explain. “They said, ‘Shhh, shhh,’ and they were crying, and they had such long faces it looked like the end of the world. … Then
someone told me that Sharon and Martin and Crystal and Lee Anne were upstairs with their throats slit.”

Charles Beikman, a temple member who is being held in a Georgetown jail, has been charged with the murder of Sharon Amos and her three children. However, Banks says he heard a different version from other survivors. They told of seeing Sharon Amos take a
butcher knife out of the kitchen and call her children to follow her into the bathroom; and they said that this occurred shortly after she had spoken to Jim Jones on the short‐wave radio. “I was just hoping,” Banks says, “that maybe she went
insane”—anything would be better than what he feared, that she was responding to word of a white night in Jonestown.

“When I found out, when I first found out, it was the end of the world for me. Everybody I had known my whole life, my whole career, everything that had meaning, all of a sudden, gone.” But Banks wasn't to know the full extent of his loss at first.
Tim Jones, an adopted son of Jim Jones, and Johnny Cobb, a member of the basketball team, flew into Jonestown Sunday with a group of Guyanese soldiers to identify bodies; when they returned, they told Banks they'd seen no sign of his family. The early
reports indicated a death toll of about 300.

“I had been waiting a whole day for them to get back. You know, I felt a kind of sigh of relief. I thought, ‘Hey, I know my wife.’ She had talked about trying to get away all the time. I figured she took the opportunity and left with the children.�
� But it was a cruel illusion. The body count rose hourly, reaching 900, “and from then on all we did was cry until we couldn't cry anymore.”

The survivors were kept in Georgetown for about a month, in the temple's house or in a hotel called the Park.

“They told us that they weren't letting us out of Guyana, that they were going to send the women first and then they were going to send the men a week later. We figured what they were going to do was send us on this plane and then blow it up…. The C.
I.A., the F.B.I., the police — if the people back here [in Guyana] didn't take care of us, then they would.”

When the group of survivors boarded the plane, they were accompanied by armed guards. Banks remembers it angrily: “We were … we were … we were the victims. We weren't the criminals. We had relatives who died, who died over there. We were being
treated like a bunch of common criminals, like we were going to take over the plane and kill somebody.” After landing in New York, he says, the group was led to a hanger where members were each assigned two Federal agents, taken into individual
Winnebago vans and questioned (Banks says “grinded”) for hours.

Banks says that his passport was confiscated by the State Department. Several State Department staffers said that this was not standard procedure, though they said that they didn't know whether it had happened in this case. They added that the passports
of the survivors had been stamped to indicate that they were valid only for the return trip to the United States and thus, in effect, already“canceled.” Why the stamp? Because citizens being repatriated are not allowed to leave the country again
without paying the cost of their repatriation — in Banks's case, the $349 for the plane flight from Guyana to New York.

When he returned to the West Coast, Banks lived in a one‐bedroom apartment with his alcoholic father, his sister and her three children. He went on welfare for a while (after forcing himself to fill out “12 pages of forms”) but eventually found a
hospital willing to hire a trained medical technician, without asking too many questions. He makes $900 a month, which enables him to help support his father, who works as a waiter, and his sister, who is on welfare. He is taking night courses at a local
community college to meet the enrollment requirements for a training program that will prepared him for the job of physician's assistant.

“In my psychology class,” Banks says, “my instructor was talking about how the Jonestown people were a bunch of kooks … brainwashed … people looking for someone to identify with or had something missing out of their lives. A lot of people had
something missing out of their lives, that was true, but because of that we wanted to help other people … to come together and put all those missing parts together and make one big piece of happiness.” Banks doesn't think that adds up to being “
kooky,” and he says the instructor “made me want to stand up and say, ‘Hey, look. I just came from there, and I knew those people.’ “

Most of the 85 persons who survived the massacre had been in Georgetown the night of the poisoning. The basketball team, for example, was in the capital to play a game. Its members, some of whom were adopted sons of Jim Jones, served him as a kind of
security force and were accorded special stature in the community. There were some 15 persons, who called themselves “concerned relatives,” who traveled to Guyana with Ryan. They, too, are counted as survivors, though most of them remained in
Georgetown and never got to Jonestown. The only child to survive was Stephanie Jones, 9 years of age, who was very nearly slain by whoever killed Sharon Amos's children. Stephanie's throat bears a scar that goes from ear to ear. Sixteen defectors from
Jonestown were on the airstrip with Congressman Ryan when his party was attacked, and all but one surSome few members survived who had actually been in Jonestown on the night of Nov. 18. One was an elderly woman who slept through it all. Another, a
schoolteacher, was sent to get a stethoscope by the Jonestown doctor during the actual mass suicide but chose instead to escape into the jungle.

A year after the fabric of their lives was destroyed, most of the 85 survivors are working or going to school. A man who escaped through the jungle during the white night works in a travel agency in Idaho. A defector who was caught on the airstrip with
Congressman Ryan makes a living driving a truck in the state of Washington; his wife works in a hospital caring for terminally ill patients.

Most of the survivors stayed in San Francisco, home of the original dream. It was here that they had run the free soup kitchen and the day‐care center and the carpentry shop, here they had filled the buses that Jim Jones could mobilize for a rally in
behalf of Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter or a demonstration in sup. port of jailed newsmen. “We were powerful when we stepped out of those buses,” says Jeannie Mills, who wrote “Six Years with God” after her defection from the temple in 1977.
“We couldn't do anything wrong.”

The survivors work in the booming electronics plants south of the city or in nursing homes or as janitors. Those few on welfare are physically or emotionally disabled or are elderly — and there seems to be a special kind of pride in this group. One
senior citizen speaks of having taken “a leadership role” in his nursing home.


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