FThe week before our believers raised the cup to their lips, drinking from a pool of grape-flavored aid and cyanide, they gathered to listen to their prophet’s sermon. People’s Temple Agricultural Project, American preacher Jim Jones told his followers, was “the purest communist model that exists”. In the jungles of Guyana, a utopia had dissolved caste and class and ended the use of wealth – but the problem of production remained unresolved. True communism required hard work and philanthropic sacrifice.
“Eight hours of work, eight hours of study and then eight hours of rest: there is such unity and solidarity that they do not have a single prison in the country inhabited by over fifteen million people,” he said. “They exalt their leader, Kim Il-sung, as a savior, as a god.”
Last week, as warships from the United States and South Korea practiced their waters, North Korea threatened use nuclear weapons, following up on his words with missiles and hostile air force maneuvers. In September, the Kim Jong-un regime passed a new law authorizing pre-emptive nuclear strike If faced with an attack.
Since 1950, the shadow of nuclear weapons has loomed over Korea – but the barbaric logic of mutually-assured destruction has kept the peace. Nuclear threats held by North Korea, scholars Andrei Lankov argues, do not intend to enter the apocalypse. The US and its western allies cannot tolerate the crisis emanating in Asia as the war in Ukraine continues. Kim Jong-un hopes to take advantage of this to seek relief from sanctions on his regime.
People’s Temple ended in November 1978 with the mass suicide of 909 members, choosing to die rather than defeat. The story tells us how easily the conceptual mind can lose its grip on logic.
Kims. cult of
First Statue of North Korea’s Founding Grandfather, Historian Kim Il-sung Bruce Cummings RecordIt was unveiled on Christmas Day in 1949. The leader had to be the core of the new faith, Juche, as a kind of secular Christ. The birthday of “Father Marshal” will be celebrated as the “Day of the Sun”. Eun Hee Shin, a scholar of religions, has suggested that Juche Arirang Mas developed as an “indigenous national religion” through its own rites such as the gymnastic festival.
Like all millennium movements, the cult of the Kims emerged from social trauma—in this case, the brutal war that began in Korea in 1953. The war killed five million people, half of them civilians, and leveled entire cities.
From the initial stage of the conflict, Nathan Jennings RecordsUS military commanders repeatedly pressed for the right to use nuclear weapons. “The timely use of nuclear weapons against military targets should be considered,” argued the joint chiefs of staff.
Turning a barren land into a socialist utopia required philanthropic sacrifice—and it required faith.
By the early 1980s, Kim Il-sung’s successor, his son Kim Jong-il, had removed the reference to Marxism-Leninism from official doctrine. Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hasigo has observed that party literature has described Kim Il-sung as a father who commanded unconditional loyalty and the party as a mother who shunned “love and trust”.
the reluctance of the working class to embrace socialist philanthropy, written by mo taylor, gave currency to such views among some radical Third World leaders. Guyana’s ruler, Lyndon Burnham, also invited North Korean experts to inspire his people. The experiment failed after Guyana rice farmers refused to wake up in the morning and work for eight hours or more without a break. Ethiopian experts invited to Pyongyang fled home after experiencing heaven for the first time.
massive famineKnown as The March of Suffering, it killed millions between 1994 and 1998. food shortage and desperate poverty characteristic of life In socialist heaven.
The Gulag awaits the North Koreans who have angered their beloved parents by protesting. From satellite imaging and survivor testimony, it is now known, hundreds of thousands were pushed into concentration camps for mis-thinking, mis-knowledge and mis-class backgrounds. “Factionalists or class enemies, whoever they are, their lineage must be passed down through three generations,” Kim Il-sung announced,
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Islamabad Connection
Faced with internal strife, the leaders of the People’s Temple began to arm themselves. stress, Federal Bureau of Investigation Records show, Jones and his inner circle were inspired by the privileges they enjoyed. The leaders and their children enjoyed a better meal than the other members of the temple. While romantic intimacy between rank-and-file was discouraged, Jones had sex with the women and men of the temple. prophet, one members will rememberWas “a sexual hunter-addict”.
Temple leadership’s growing fascination with the North Korean model of social control, declassified government records show, resulted in a series of secret meetings with its diplomats in Guyana. The temple leadership formed armed squads and threatened to kill the dissidents.
In November 1978, Leo Ryan, a member of Congress who flew into Guyana to investigate these reports, was shot by Temple’s death squad along with four others.
Like the temple, the People’s Republic prepared an attack from the outside. After the 1950-1953 war, Kim Il-sung released four key guidelinesCalling for the modernization of weapons, the armament of the population, the country’s fortifications and giving the military a central role in the power structure. creation of north korea artillery and missile capability Which will allow it to level up cities and industrial infrastructure in the south in minutes.
As the North Korean economy began to stagnate in the 1970s, further modernizing its traditional forces became increasingly difficult. Kim Jong-il was now looking for a more reliable deterrent—the nuclear bomb. However, there was a problem: the Soviet Union had helped North Korea establish a nuclear research program in the 1950s, but the aid later ended.
The technology that the People’s Republic needed came from Pakistan. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto visited Pyongyang in 1993 acquire missile technology, Four years later, Islamabad provided the People’s Republic with centrifuges and uranium hexafluoride, which was needed to launch its nuclear-weapons program. Led by the third generation of the Kim dynasty, Kim Jong-un, the People’s Republic is now is expected to be Up to 55 nuclear weapons—and the ability to deliver them globally.
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Nuclear Suicide Agreement?
Excited in a methamphetamine-induced psychic incense, Jones addressed his followers for the last time on the night that Congressman Ryan was murdered by his death squad. “I have loved you,” she said, “I have tried to give you a good life.” But, he added, “A handful of people have made our lives impossible with their lies… If we cannot live in peace, let’s die in peace.” Young children were given deadly flavor aids by their parents with syringes before drinking. In the end, Jones shot himself.
cult, novelist Shiv Naipaulerves, “was obsessed with images of sin and apocalyptic destruction, authoritarian in its innermost impulses, instinctively thinking in terms of the saved and the damned”. The end it achieved was “neither racial justice nor socialism but a messianic parody of both”.
try to Co-opt North Korea The regional framework largely collapsed by 2008 as evidence of its nuclear and missile ambitions grew. even if a small elite rich As the North Korean economy opened up under the leadership of Kim Jong-un, they profited proved to be temporary,
Summit meetings between Kim Jong-un and former US President Donald Trump, despite their rosette optics, led anywhere Because North Korea will not commit to limiting its nuclear ambitions, whatever the economic stimulus.
The Gilded Life of the Kim Dynasty – Documenting Its Borgia-Like Excesses Journalist Anna Fifield– Make them impossible candidates to embrace mass suicide like a temple of people. Kim, after all, revels in wealth and power. The question to ask, however, is what would he do if faced with the prospect of losing.
thoughts are personal,
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