Every time November rolls around, I can’t help but recall the most traumatic news story for American kids coming of age in the late ’70s and early ’80s. We witnessed major plane crashes in San Diego, Chicago, and Washington. We watched assassination attempts on President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. But nothing is emblazoned more deeply on our psyche than the images of lifeless bodies scattered around the central pavilion in Jonestown. Newsweek and Time ran exclusive stories in early December 1978 under the same banner: “The Cult of Death.”

Of the nearly one thousand people who died in the tragedy, more than 900 were drugged and/or shot in the Guyanese-jungle compound.

The events leading up to the disaster are well-documented. Concerned family members begged the U.S. State Department to look into complaints that their loved ones were being detained by Jim Jones, a crazed, charismatic, communist leader who convinced his followers to move to Guyana and build a socialist commune.

Bay Area congressman Leo Ryan flew with a delegation of journalists, family members, and congressional staffers to the South American country to investigate. Three days of negotiations with local governmental, embassy, and Jonestown officials in the nation’s capital, Georgetown, culminated in the party receiving permission to visit the compound, where they were greeted by Jones and his followers. 

Though everything in the compound seemed blissful on the surface, the commune instantly crumbled as several residents informed visiting delegation members that they wanted to leave. After returning to the airfield, Congressman Ryan, NBC correspondent Don Harris, photographer Greg Robinson, and two defectors were shot dead while others scrambled into the jungle.  After returning to the airfield, Congressman Ryan, NBC correspondent Don Harris, photographer Greg Robinson, and two defectors were shot dead while others scrambled into the jungle. Tweet This

Back at the compound, Jones ordered parents to poison their children before consuming a concoction of cyanide and fruit punch themselves. Only a handful of people managed to escape. The carnage—which included a family of four in a separate incident at the Georgetown headquarters—extended until at least March of 1979 when survivor Michael Prokes committed suicide following a press conference in which he made a rambling attempt to apply Patrick Henry’s dictum to the Jonestown community: “Let us have our freedom, or we will die.”

Remnants of the Jonestown melee—America’s second-deadliest disaster from nonnatural causes (9/11 being first, of course)—will always remain with us. It is we who must choose what to do with them.

Opening the former compound to tourism—a particularly lucrative opportunity for the socialist-oriented Guyanese government—is a macabre undertaking, to say the least. Yet since last January, you can join an expedition for just under $700. An endless stream of documentaries and books presenting reinterpretations of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple are also available. Most disturbing, however, is a renewed willingness to take Temple leaders and members of Jones’ inner circle at their word, despite their intricate web of lies, denial, and calculated deceit.

The abundance of testimony from survivors needs to be complemented by those of former Temple members and family members of victims, who are unanimous in attesting to Jones’ sick manipulation of vulnerable individuals—spanning from white, middle-class kids strung out on drugs to elderly black people trying to escape the ghetto. You won’t hear those voices if you troll websites peddling conspiracy theories and sympathetic narratives to Jones’ socialist cause. 

An example of an extremely naïve acceptance of an alternative narrative can be found in a piece by feminist Jan M. Flynn, who takes seriously the claim of Maria Katsaris (who served as Temple treasurer) that she was abused by her father, chief organizer of the Concerned Relatives network and a Greek Orthodox priest.

Katsaris’ statement, made in response to a series of questions posed by Temple attorney Charles Garry (who spent a good portion of his career defending the Black Panthers and the Oakland Seven), is “too detailed, too specific, and too couched in pain and shame” for Flynn to think it is “sheer invention.” “You can almost hear the words being pulled from her core,” she writes.

Yet it is much more likely that those words were being implanted in her by Jones himself. You can hear Katsaris mechanically rattling off the allegations beginning at 19:40 in this radio transmission from the Jonestown compound. 

After Katsaris collaborated in the mass killing by chillingly assuring parents that the dying children were “not crying from pain…it’s just a little bitter tasting,” she consumed the deadly potion herself and collapsed in Jones’ cabin.

We will never know if Katsaris was telling the truth in her statement to Garry, but we cannot allow Flynn’s belief that “her account rings true” to obfuscate the overwhelming evidence that Jones coerced followers to disown their families by making them lie about their past relationships. We have a mound of oral testimony to that effect, not to mention audio recordings of Jones’ hair-raising laughter as cult members spew profanities at family members back home. While still in San Francisco, Jones made Temple members sign blank sheets of paper, many of which were later filled in with statements to malign spouses, parents, children, grandparents, and anyone else presenting a threat to his new socialist “family.”

The Jonestown legacy, first and foremost, is about honoring the victims of that horrible tragedy deep in the Guyanese jungle on November 18, 1978, including Maria Katsaris. But no less important is keeping the tragedy in front of our eyes as a reminder of the intimidation, fear, lies, and stifling of human freedom that are needed to keep a communist dictatorship alive, no matter how small. Jonestown was a repressive regime on a microcosmic scale, no matter how hard naysayers try to make Jim Jones the victim. Most importantly, as if we needed a reminder, Jonestown demonstrates once again that such regimes feed off the destruction of the family, the foundation of a free and peaceful political community.