Jim Jones Warns Against Running Away (Oct,1978) Side A

This tape consists of numerous segments, but they seem to center around two dates: a meeting, a series of announcements and the news of the day around October 13, 1978; and a Temple service in Los Angeles of an unknown date. As was often the case with the tapes in this collection, the people of Jonestown used previously-recorded tape that they no longer considered important.

In the older tape – which picks up for a few minutes after the first recorded conversation in Jonestown, and which returns intermittently throughout in brief snatches – Marceline Jones leads a Temple service in Los Angeles. Following the path of her husband, Marceline discloses personal information about several parishioners to prove that she speaks with the authority and spirit of Jim Jones, and offers prayer cloths to prevent heart attacks and dangerous accidents. After revealing that one older woman owns a green pantsuit, Marceline warns the woman not to wear it again until after a certain date to preclude a tragedy that would otherwise occur. Marceline also joins an unknown man in singing the hymn “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” but they change the words of “God” and “Jesus” to “Father,” i.e., Jim Jones.

The balance of the tape was recorded in mid-October, 1978.

In Part 1, in a short conversation before a crowd of unknown size in Jonestown, Jim Jones confronts a young man who has apparently made a half-hearted attempt at suicide, and warns him about the generational consequences of such an act. “When you commit suicide, you’re in the worst kind of hell you ever were in…” he warns. “It don’t stop in no damn casket.”

Parts 3-5 consist of a series of announcements and warnings, most focusing on the problem caused by recent attempts to run away from Jonestown. Jones describes what awaits people who slip into the jungle – tigers, snakes, insects, and of course, the jungle itself – then adds that if they make it through to civilization, they are still not in the clear. The Jonestown leadership has made arrangements with the local police, the Guyana Defense Force, and even the U.S. Embassy to return anyone from Jonestown whom they find.

Jones is perplexed why anyone would want to return to the US – which he refers to as Babylon – but says he will grant passage to anyone who wishes to go home. The caveat is that they have to wait until everyone in the States who wishes to emigrate to Jonestown has arrived.

Part 6 takes up the entire second half of the tape. Jones begins by reading a long news analysis about the resurgence of racism in US education, as reflected in increasingly racially-segregated schools and growing disparities in funding between white and minority schools. The article then offers other proof of the “de facto apartheid” in the United States, including the substandard housing and rising crime in American ghettos. This leads into a discussion of labor and class struggle. The source of the article is unknown, but its rhetoric suggests that it came from a Soviet-bloc wire service or magazine, rather than from either Jones or his staff.

The specter of nuclear war is one which Jones himself raises twice near the end of the tape. The size of the NATO war games – described in his final news item – reflects the danger of imminent nuclear war. Then, as he signs off for the day, he reminds his people that they need to liberate everyone they can from the States because otherwise, “they’re doomed to nuclear annihilation,” since there’s no chance of survival in a country that will look “like a wasteland and a desert from East Coast to the West Coast.”