Four weeks before the faithful raised the chalice to their lips, drinking from a pool of grape Flavor Aid and cyanide, they assembled to hear their prophet’s sermon. The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, American preacher Jim Jones told his followers, was the “purest communist model that exists”. The utopia in the jungles of Guyana had dissolved race and class and ended the use of money—but the problem of production remained unresolved. True communism needed hard work and altruistic 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 one jail in the country inhabited by over fifteen million people,” he said. “They exalt their leader, Kim Il-sung, as a saviour, as a god.”
Last week, as warships from the United States and South Korea exercised off its waters, North Korea threatened to use nuclear weapons, following up its words with a barrage of missiles and hostile air force manoeuvres. In September, the Kim Jong-un regime passed a new law authorising pre-emptive nuclear strikes if it faced attack.
Ever since 1950, the shadow of nuclear weapons has hung over the Koreas—but the savage logic of mutually-assured destruction has kept the peace. The nuclear threats held out by North Korea, scholar Andrei Lankov argues, aren’t intended to usher in the apocalypse. The US and its Western allies cannot afford a crisis erupting in Asia as the war in Ukraine rages on. Kim Jong-un hopes to leverage this to secure relief from sanctions that have battered his regime.
The Peoples Temple ended in November 1978 with the mass suicide of 909 members choosing death over defeat. The story tells us just how easily the ideological mind can lose its hold on logic.
The cult of the Kims
The first statue of Kim Il-sung, founding patriarch of North Korea, historian Bruce Cumings records, was unveiled on Christmas Day in 1949. The leader was to form the core of the new faith, juche, as a kind of secular Christ. The birthday of “Father Marshal” would be celebrated as “The Day of the Sun”. Eun Hee Shin, a scholar of religions, has suggested that juche evolved into an “indigenous national religion” institutionalised through its own sacraments like the Arirang Mass Gymnastics festival.
Like all millenarian movements, the cult of the Kims emerged from social trauma—in this case, the savage war that erupted in the Koreas in 1953. The war killed five million people, half of them civilians, and levelled entire cities.
From an early stage in the conflict, Nathan Jennings records, US military commanders repeatedly pressed for authority to use nuclear weapons. “The timely use of atomic weapons should be considered against military targets,” the joint chiefs of staff argued back then.
Turning the wasteland into a socialist utopia needed altruistic sacrifice—and that needed faith.
From early in the 1980s, Kim Il-sung’s successor, his son Kim Jong-Il, had dropped references to Marxism-Leninism from official doctrine. Kongdan Oh and Ralph Hassig have observed that party literature described Kim Il-sung as a father who commanded unconditional loyalty and the party a mother who dispensed “love and trust”.
The reluctance of the working class to embrace socialist altruism, Moe Taylor has written, gave such ideas currency among some radical Third World leaders. Linden Burnham, Guyana’s ruler, even invited North Korean experts to inspire his own people. The experiment failed because of the stubborn refusal of Guyana rice farmers to wake up at dawn and work eight hours or more without a break. Ethiopian experts invited to Pyongyang fled home after experiencing paradise firsthand.
Large-scale famine, known as The March of Suffering, claimed millions of lives between 1994 and 1998. Food shortages and desperate poverty remain a feature of life in the socialist paradise.
The Gulag awaited North Koreans who angered their loving parents by protesting. From satellite imaging and survivor testimony, it is now known, hundreds of thousands were pushed into concentration camps for wrong-thinking, wrong-knowledge, and wrong-class backgrounds. “Factionalists or enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations,” Kim Il-sung proclaimed.
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The Islamabad connection
Faced with internal dissension, the leaders of the Peoples Temple began arming itself. Tensions, Federal Bureau of Investigation records show, had been fuelled by the privileges Jones and his inner circle enjoyed. The leaders and their children enjoyed better food than other Temple members. While romantic intimacy between the rank-and-file was discouraged, Jones had sex with Temple women and men. The prophet, one member would recall, was “a sexual predator-addict”.
The growing fascination in the Temple leadership with the North Korean model of social control, declassified government records show, resulted in a series of clandestine meetings with its diplomats in Guyana. The Temple leadership created armed squads and threatened dissidents with death.
Leo Ryan, a member of Congress who flew into Guyana to investigate these reports in November 1978, was shot dead by a Temple death squad along with four others.
Like the Temple, the Peoples Republic prepared for assault from the outside. Following the war of 1950-1953, Kim Il-sung issued four key guidelines, calling for the modernisation of weapons, the arming of the population, the fortification of the country, and giving the military a central role in the power structure. North Korea built up artillery and missile capabilities that would allow it to level cities and industrial infrastructure in the South within minutes.
As the North Korean economy began to stall in the 1970s, the further modernisation of its conventional forces became difficult. Kim Jong-Il now looked for a more reliable deterrent—the nuclear bomb. There was a problem, though: The Soviet Union had helped North Korea establish a nuclear research programme in the 1950s, but assistance had later dried up.
The technology that the Peoples Republic needed came from Pakistan. In 1993, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto visited Pyongyang to acquire missile technology. Four years later, Islamabad provided the Peoples Republic with the centrifuges and uranium hexafluoride it needed to kick-start its nuclear-weapons programme. Led by the third generation of the Kim dynasty, Kim Jong-un, the Peoples Republic is now estimated to have up to 55 nuclear warheads—and the capabilities to deliver them globally.
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A nuclear suicide pact?
Exulting in the mental sunshine induced by methamphetamine, Jones addressed his followers for the last time on the night his death squad murdered Congressman Ryan. “I have loved you,” he said, “I have tried to give you a good life.” But, he went on, “a handful of people with their lies have made our lives impossible…If we can’t live in peace, then let’s die in peace.” Little children were administered the lethal Flavor Aid with syringes before their parents drank it. Finally, Jones shot himself.
The cult, novelist Shiva Naipaul observes, was “obsessed with sin and images of 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”.
Efforts to co-opt North Korea into the regional framework largely collapsed by 2008 as evidence of its nuclear and missile ambitions increased. Even though a small elite prospered as the North Korean economy opened up under Kim Jong-un, those gains have proved ephemeral.
The summit meetings between Kim Jong-un and former US President Donald Trump, despite their roseate optics, also led nowhere because North Korea would not commit to limit its nuclear ambitions, no matter the economic incentives.
The gilded life of the Kim dynasty—its Borgia-like excesses documented by journalist Anna Fifield—make them improbable candidates to embrace a Peoples Temple-like mass suicide. Kim, after all, revels in wealth and power. The question to ask, however, is what he’ll do if he’s faced with the prospect of losing it.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)