Resist the Clones of Jones
By John Vinson
British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge called it “the great liberal death wish,” the tendency of Western liberal elites to steer their societies toward destruction—all in the name of creating a better world. A perfect example today is the establishmentarians’ mania for mass immigration to promote “multi-cultural diversity.”
It is obvious to anyone with the slightest common sense that this kind of diversity can only lead to endless conflict and the destruction of America as a united and free society. But to our self-professed intellectual and social superiors “diversity” is the pathway to the global kingdom of heaven, a utopia where all men will live in multicultural bliss.
Muggeridge observed such delusional posturing when he was a correspondent in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the 1930s. There he witnessed troops of Western intellectuals coming to pay homage to Comrade Stalin and the “success” of Soviet Communism, while ignoring abundant evidence of the system’s crushing oppression and mass murder.
This November, we have occasion to mark the 30th anniversary of a tragic event involving Americans, an event superbly illustrating the malevolent power of the great liberal death wish. This was the mass suicide of more than 900 Americans in Guyana under the direction of cult leader Jim Jones.
Jones gained fame as a preacher, while he admitted in private that he was an atheist and a communist. A multiculturalist before his time, he built up a multi-racial, multicultural congregation called the Peoples Temple. Espousing a social gospel, Jones drew great acclaim. As Wikipedia notes, “Jones enjoyed public support and contact with some of the highest level politicians in the United States.” Among the latter were San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale, and California Gov. Jerry Brown. Jones also met personally on several occasions with First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
In 1977, Jones moved his flock to Guyana in South America, where he established a settlement and named it Jonestown, after himself. He denounced America and proposed to establish a society of “pure communism.” But in short order his delusions ran out of control. Imagining plots against him, Jones on November 18, 1978, ordered his entire congregation to commit suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. A total of 909 people perished.
This is not to suggest that all our utopian intellectuals are as crazed as Jim Jones. In truth, few are. Nevertheless, the difference is often in degree rather than kind. Men lose common sense when they lose the common loyalties of life. These loyalties, specifically to God, country and family, are sources of life and meaning. Elites take great pride in “liberating” themselves from these supposedly backward attachments, as well as the mundane ties of reality itself. But the price of their pride is the nihilism of the death wish.
Muggeridge was not the only one who saw this elitist yen for self destruction. Another was American writer James Burnham who, like Muggeridge, abandoned radical liberalism when he saw its implications. Burnham described this kind of liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide.”
And indeed it is. In America and Europe, elites clamor for immigration that will destroy all semblance of their historic societies. The prospect of chaos and dissolution seems to enliven their otherwise dead souls, thus inclining them to prattle about the “vibrancy” and “energy” of the invasion. Liberated from traditional values, and any true reason to live, they—like Jones—want everyone to share their death wish. Thus they dispense their multi-cult Kool-Aid, a poisonous brew flavored with the tastes of tolerance, compassion and enlightenment. Patriots who love life and nation must see these deceivers, clones of Jim Jones, for the destroyers they truly are.