Book Review
Journey To Nowhere
4/5 stars
"The author spots African atavism in Guyana"
*******
The purpose of this book was to do a postmortem of the Jonestown massacre.

A lot of his book is Naipaul trying to disentangle manufactured reality from actual reality. (True Believers are not the best source of accurate information.)

It was written in two parts over 314 pages:

-First, the conditions in Guyana that impelled the possibility of Jonestown.

-Second, about the conditions in the States that led up to those events--specifically, Naipaul takes us to Land-Of-Fruits-and-Nuts California and details (with Bob Newhart-like incredulity) a bunch of Loopy White People.

It seems that those two factors together are enough to explain the inanity of Jonestown.

It's not a comfortable book.

I wonder: "If a cult leader wanted to rustle up some idiots to exploit /convince to commit suicide, why would he have to choose black people for this? Couldn't he have made a colony of Chinese people?"

Was that *really* his largest source of available idiots?

Even worse: When Jim Jones knew that he was dying of brain cancer, he just convinced everybody else to commit suicide to come with him. (They really thought that this guy was the Messiah.)
*******
Based on the frequency with which things like this happen (Black Hebrew Israelites, Nation of Islam, etc), I would guess that some people really are genetically more easily duped than others. (Yes, Dear Readers, that really was his largest source of available idiots.)

Probably about 30 years ago my parents and I were watching a news clip, and there were some Nigerians rioting for some reason or another after the government was turned over to civilian rule.

My mother exclaimed: "Damn! Is it something about nickas that's just innately BAD?"

It's not what I came to this book expecting to recall, but this Trinidad Indian author seems to say just that-- in a nice way. (p.33-The word that he uses to describe it is "atavistic.")

(Background: Indians are the largest ethnic group currently in Guyana, Trinidad, and Surinapme--and they have been there for centuries. In all of these places as well as parts of Africa, they've had some difficulties living with black people, and have built up a corresponding dislike--and it seems like that that is where this author is coming from.)

As I look at the events in places where there are enough black people to do damage--like Detroit, Baltimore, and East St Louis (first hand) and Countless Other Places (second hand), much of what this author writes is old wine in new bottles.

These ridiculous events *in Guyana* have a LOT of uncomfortable resonances:

1. Derelection of duty / corruption/ incompetence (18 out of 20 of the lowest HDI countries are in sub-Saharan Africa. None of the top 50 are African or black. The highest black country is St Kitts and Nevis at position 51.)

2. Escapism ("We need to find our true heritage that has been stolen from us. As Muslims. Let's change our names to Abdul Malik Aziz, and then every good thing will follow. No, wait! We are really Africans, and we should change that names to Mwatabu Okantah and mattress all the problem. No, wait! We were really Israelites. Let's change our names to Yahawada Israel, And that should do the trick." Here, the author quotes [p.27] that "It was Africa which is given the world law, philosophy, medicine, religion, astronomy, music, magic, and science; it was Africa which had civilized Europe, and not the other way around...")

3. Messianism ("The Talented Tenth will save us! No, it is MLK! No, it's Malcolm X! No, it is the first black president!")

4. Criminal influence in government (Coleman Young. Ray Nagin. Mobutu. Jacob Zuma. In fact: Can you think of any city/country that has been run by black people that has NOT degenerated into a racketeering operation?)

5. Looting, rioting and destruction (Black Lives Matters riots. Rodney King riots. Detroit riots. Watts riots )

6. Social collapse (South Africa. Detroit. Sudan.) Author says as much on page 17.

7. Driving productive people from out of their midst. (Indians in Uganda and Kenya. White people out of places like Detroit/St Louis/E St Louis, etc.)

8. Making the false connection between political power and prosperity ("If we can just vote, we can vote prosperity into existence.") ignoring the fact that sovereign African countries are the lowest per capita income and the lowest human development indices in the world.

9. Aided and abetted by "liberals who fethisise black radicalism, whilst leading affluent lives." (Janet Rosenberg, Angela Davis, to name but a couple in this book.)

*******
The bad part about it is that even as roughly a as Naipaul portrays Guyana, there are other places even worse. (Currently, their HDI is 95 out of 193. Range between 0.627 and 0.739. GDP per capita is $18,200.)

Guyana in the author's words:

1. "The first Guyanese to arrive on the scene had plundered the encampment."

2. " The toilets were waterless. A carefully painted sign apologize for the inconvenience. It had clearly been there a long time calling the paint was yellowed with age and stained."

3. "These people won't think twice about choke and rob."

4. "Consciously, brutally, we have set about remaking ourselves in the third world image."

5. "Only 10% have passed English at Ordinary Level. Fewer still had passed the mathematics examination. None had passed Spanish. None had managed to scrape together five passes..... The machines were a standing invitation to theft. They had hired a security staff to deal with the problem, but it was becoming clear that the security people themselves have been involved in some of the thefts."

6. "In Guyana, the atavistic ideal of the Big Black Chief--the archetype so superbly realized by Idi Amin--has, despite the socialist gloss, been almost fully achieved."

7. "After he had committed murder on his Trinidad commune, it was to Guyana that Michael X had fled."

8. " But the most notorious of Burnham's criminal courtiers is a black preacher from Tennessee calling himself Rabbi Washington. Back home, where he is known as David Hill, he is wanted by the police on charges of blackmail and violence. But in Guyana, where he resurfaced in 1972, he is a figure of consequence. He has created around himself a religious sect - - the House of Israel."

9. "By February 1978, as a result of overwork and semi starvation, conditions have become so bad that half of the commune was stricken with diarrhea and high fevers.... Jones with preaching them over the public address system for an average of 6 hours a day, sometimes much longer."

10. "In California, children had been subjected to increasingly heavy beatings. After a while was out of the refinement of placing a microphone close to the mouth of a beating child so that his screams would resound all the better."

11. " Jones had cleverly managed to insinuate himself into the San Francisco political scene. He was a masterful social worker and a great self publicist. In Guyana he had compromised local officials by providing them with the sexual services of Temple women."

12. "..... the process by which followers signed over all their assets to The Temple in expectation that they would be taken care of for the rest of their lives."

California ferment, in the author's words:

1. " Watts, the ghetto that had been the scene of some of the most violent black rioting in the 1960s. Traces of that violence could still be seen in the many empty lots once occupied by businesses that had never been rebuilt." (Wow! Just like Detroit!)

2. "Young blacks, as ever, stood on street corners, looking with apathetic intensity of nothing in particular."

3. 'I can't help thinking we black people can be very gullible'

4. "... more than half of adult blacks had not made it to the 8th grade..... one in three blacks was a functional illiterate..... of $13,600 blacks between the ages of 6 and 19, half were not in school.... 80% of crimes were committed by blacks."

5. "There was a tendency in the '60s to run on ahead. When nothing happened, many of us became bitter toward the people and turned away from them to God or whatever."

6. "[fascism and genocide] were bargain basement political terms, and nearly everyone with pretensions to a radical outlook would make use of them. Long before Jim Jones started to terrorize his following, the blacks, with the assistance of their best white friends, had been terrorizing one another with the rhetoric of mass extermination."

7. "Eldridge Cleaver, a metaphysician of rape, had returned from Algerian exile and declared himself a born again Christian."

8. "The junk people, the human waste left behind by American History, are no less negative, no less dangerous a quantity."

Verdict: This is worth the reading. Naipaul died a couple of years after the publication of this book, but had he lived he would have had a great career ahead of him. (Incidentally: he is the brother of VS Naipaul.)

If you don't want to damage/take away any remaining hope of black vertical mobility, don't read this book.

Vocabulary:

warp
fusty
tarbush
helots
Kerista Consciousness Church
Church of Hakeem

This book was an interesting philosophical journey primarily focused on the social and political conditions of the 1960's and 70's that allowed Jim Jones and the People's Temple (as well as other fringe organizations of the times such as the Black Panthers) to flourish, and the queues that were ignored that would have alerted people to the dangers of Jones's cult of personality and movement. Naipaul, a British journalist of Trinidadian birth, travels to Guyana to research the massacre at Jonestown a month after the suicides, then moves on to California where he attends the auction of the Temple's assets, which takes place inside the San Francisco Temple. He ruminates on what makes California different from the rest of the country - even the rest of the world - and how those differences allowed Jones to gain so much power over his followers - power that was in no short supply if the hundred or so people that followed him to California from Indiana are any indication.

I enjoyed the book for several different reasons, not the least of which had to do with the fact that the subject matter was entirely fresh to me. All I had previously known about Jonestown came to me mostly through my mother's view of a bunch of crazy cultists throwing the world away in order to reinvent it in their own image. While Naipaul doesn't go into great detail following every chronological step of the church, he does an excellent job of showcasing Jones's personality, several times using the leader's own words to demonstrate ideas, which are often self-contradictory and highly idealistic. Naipaul's background in journalism shines through with balanced reporting of both the good and the bad of the organization and those that lived within it; equally obvious throughout are Naipaul's opinions. I also liked this book because there were actually a few words I had to look up. This happens so rarely that I had to take note of it, but I attribute it to the fact that the author attended college in an era when academia was still devoted to rampant intellectualism.

While I did enjoy this book, I rushed to finish it to get to the next book. It didn't grip me or hold me rapt, I didn't pick the book up and have trouble putting it down, and I felt the writing itself was perhaps a little dry and mired in Naipaul's own mental meanderings at times. It was good, I'm glad I read it, but I probably won't read it again.

A very poetic journal, plenty of sarcasm and acuity in the late Shiva's notes on the trends which fed and enabled the massacre

Of course I remembered the mass suicides in Guyana at the Peoples Temple led by Jim Jones in 1978. However, I was busy at the time with three small children and didn't keep up with the news and analyses. I just happened upon this book used and picked it up. This is an analysis of what this author believes to be the causes of the event. Naipaul assumes that the reader knows what happened, when and where and begins with the interviews and analysis. I had to actually resort to wiki to catch up.

Naipaul was born in Trinidad and educated both there and at University College, Oxford. This background of course influenced his perceptions and judgements about what happened, especially his experience as a person of Indian descent. He begins to tell the story of The People's Temple with historical background of Guyana. Naipaul is attempting to find out how this tragedy was allowed to happen in Guyana. He presents some interesting ideas, e.g. that the idea of third world countries is actually a concept put upon these countries by first world countries. He talks about the stereotype of the angry Black militant leaders (his term) who appear in these countries and makes reference to what he believes is influence on them by American Blacks who traveled to Africa. This power dynamic resulted in much discrimination in Guyana against non-Blacks and, I would argue Naipaul's own discrimination against Blacks both African and American. Jim Jones was a self-proclaimed Socialist who was indeed welcomed by the government of Guyana, who eventually turned away from American relationships and embraced the govt. of Cuba, the U.S.S.R. and other communist countries. A lot more information and background are given here, but this first section is basically setting the scene for the Temple's welcome to Guyana and the lack of oversight of the group by their host country, and the influence of Jones on the government of Guyana, as well as their coverup of the background of the horrific events that occurred there.

Naipaul describes visits and interviews with many people, witnesses, experts, etc. He presents multiple sides of stories of events from many varied perspectives. There are no notes in the book, which I found to be more than a disappointment, only a bibliography. Although, he does seem to show lots of different perspectives and states that there is no explanation for how so many people who were part of this had different experiences and saw very different things. For example, there were many stories of abuse of Temple members, starvation, overwork and beatings. There were others who never witnessed any of that and described it all as a wonderful experience. Naipaul states that there are too many people who saw no abuse to be explained away by being kept from seeing it e.g. by not being allowed in certain areas. However, there are recordings of Jones preaching and rehearsals of mass suicide. The point is also made that many, many Temple members previously lived in terrible poverty and received no medical care, many were mentally ill, poorly educated although there were also some well educated and more knowledgeable members. In other words, for some, circumstances in Guyana that would be judged a nightmare to many would actually be a better experience than most of them had at home in the U.S.

Naipaul extensively describes life in the U.S. and particularly California in the 60s and 70s as being receptive to and welcoming of a great variety of social experiments. He specifically talks about support for Jones from Black Panthers, American politicians such as Willy Brown, and many others. I found Naipaul's description and judgements to be a little harsh of California, although I often find California amusing myself, having lived there most of my life.

Naipaul also claims that as the U.S. government realized the Socialistic threats made by the Temple, government agents began harassing the Temple, disrupting them, and discrediting them much as they did the Black Panthers in the same period. Some say they were threatened by what could have been public perception of a successful socialistic lifestyle.

Revolutionary suicide is defined and described by Naipaul and attributed to this event at least as an explanation of how people were convinced to participate. I found this to be an interesting section and something I had not heard about in this regard. Naipaul describes how it almost becomes inevitable, or the only way out and as a powerful political statement, giving meaning and purpose to both the lives and deaths of people who perceive themselves to be powerless. Naipaul actually claims revolutionary suicide begins when the oppressed rises up and says no to his oppressor. It is seen as a positive action of resistance, comparable to self-immolation. He states that Che Guevara says that revolutionary death is the reality, not victory, which is the dream. All revolutionaries are doomed. Naipaul interviews Huey Newton and other Black Panthers and draws connections in this excerpt:

"A linking of the Revolution with personal doom, forged in the twisted passions of Sergei Nechayev...touched up and romanticized by Che Guevara against the mountain scenery of Cuba and Bolivia, picked up by a former Oakland street boy Newton and given another little twist, ends up on the lips of Jim Jones in the Guyanese wilderness."

There are many interviews and visits to Oakland and Guyana among other places, that make me listen to Naipaul and I do find his thesis fascinating. I do find this last description to be a bit of a stretch, especially considering that Jim Jones, whose mother believed she had given birth to a messiah was already killing small animals and acting out in other ways before he ever left Indiana to move his congregation to California.

I was visiting Amish country in Illinois while finishing this book up, and kept making comparisons. I would also perceive Amish as revolutionary when compared to their surroundings and their removal of themselves from the main society of U.S. AND, they have been long-lasting. Wonder why.

I am fascinated, ambiguous, and don't care much for Naipaul, as you could perhaps tell. Nevertheless, four stars for this ambitious work.

Out of 10 I'd give it a 5. The story behind Jonestown (which occurred on my birthday), has so much more to it than a guru leading blind followers to their deaths. To finally learn some of that story was what made this book enjoyable, but otherwise I found the author to be judgmental and close-minded, and the writing to be sort of scattershot and disjointed. I often couldn't tell whether the author was being neutral or facetious. From V.S. Naipaul's late brother.

The first part about Jonestown is interesting, but when the narrative moves to California Naipaul's condescension and ignorance becomes unbearable. Much of his analysis now seems very dated. He does not observe, he judges, so in turn the reader judges the author. The results are not pretty and the book gets worse and worse as one struggles through it.

This is a book about Jonestown, but also about Third Worldism and the New Age, the madness of crowds and how radical ideas behave in societies. Naipaul is like a more restrained Tom Wolfe, with a great eye for detail and human behavior as well as a knack for universals. To explain Jonestown and position it in the broader landscape of the 60s counterculture, he combines travelogue, social critique, journalism, and philosophy. His tone is acerbic, darkly humorous, with a justifiably pessimistic outlook on human nature. It's not surprising that this writer died young. Judging from this, it was our loss.

Naipaul approaches Jonestown as a case study in how ideas work. "We blithely enunciate ideas but we cannot control them, we cannot chain them up... An idea, once loosed into the world, is anybody's plaything." He traces the murder-suicide of almost a thousand people in Guyana back to Sergei Nechayev's "Revolutionary Catechism", an idea of revolutionary suicide which Jim Jones digested through the Black Panthers by way of Che Guevara. Ideas have legs.

But ideas, even absurd and murderous ones, also have enablers. Naipaul explores how Third Worldism in Guyana welcomed the Jonestown commune with open arms. Guyana was in many ways as deranged and unreal as Jonestown. "[Third Worldism] is a mode of being, a state of mind. That state of mind spreads like an infection and begins to create its own realities, stimulated by a vocabulary of resentment and racial self-assertion." But Guyana itself was made possible by Western idealists. "Madness finds support and confirmation abroad among the self-avowed, metropolitan friends of the oppressed. Those who ought to know better nourish our crazy dreams of resurrection and redemption... [They] underwrite our lunacies."

He doesn't spare the United States any more than he does Guyana. Especially California and the "21st century thinking" of the New Age in the 1970s, and the middle-class kids who played revolutionaries in the 1960s only to retreat into the safety of "consciousness-raising" as soon as the stakes got high. He notes how Jones preyed on America's black urban underclass. Naipaul points out how useless this underclass was to America's technologically advanced society - so much waste product, what to do with it? We can extend Naipaul's observation to much of the Rust Belt and white rural America in 2020.

And he condemns most of the contemporary attempts to label and file away Jonestown: "It would be exhaustively indexed and forgotten. When the next aberration occurred it would be briefly resurrected for the purposes of comparison." And this is done because America had become overrun by taxonomists, "supplying tiny printouts that would explain any event", confident in their explanations and predictions because humans are mere chemistry and biology.

This is a fairly obscure book by an author overshadowed in life and death by his more famous brother, but it's well worth reading. It's the most helpful piece I've read on the Third World and the chaos of the 60s and 70s in the United States, not to mention Jonestown. There's lots to think over here. I'll definitely pick up Naipaul's North of South at some point.

Shiva Naipaul’s account of the Jonestown tragedy is well researched and very readable. It was first published in 1980 in the United Kingdom under the title Black and White. Naipaul takes a look at the origins of Peoples Temple and why Guyana was chosen as their “Promised Land.” He interviews Huey Newton, among other Jonestown sympathizers. Naipaul does what few others have; he does not lay the blame for Jonestown solely at the feet of Jim Jones. Naipaul sees what happened in Jonestown as a result of the fantasy of the Third World revolution, the fantasy of personal redemption that created the liberation movement of the late Sixties and the mindless pursuit of social change and liberal politics present in California. This book contains a bibliography and an index.

Journeying with Naipaul (even if it is "to Nowhere") is always worth the trip. Naipaul weaves poetic prose with acerbic social commentary to produce a book that spans across genres and topics - Part I is part travelogue of visiting Guyana and Jonestown (after the mass suicide) and part history of Third World Caribbean/South American countries and their politics; Part 2 is more philosophical, covering topics such as communism/socialism, the New Age movement, feminism, the 1960s/1970s college movements, hippie culture, the Black Panthers, est, and more.

The main topic is the Jonestown Massacre/Mass Suicide of 1978, but more largely Naipaul looks at the events and ideas in America and around the world that contributed to the rise of Jim Jones and Jonestown. Naipaul's tone is critical, cynical, and misanthropic. Naipaul was politically incorrect, even for his time, and says it how he saw it - his writings are refreshingly honest and direct. He had an eye for what really WAS, almost like someone living in the future writing on the past instead of like a contemporary writing on current events. Chapter 8 in particular, where Naipaul visits a New Age expo, is worth reading even as a stand alone chapter.

a random choice.

I'm honestly only likely to read at most one book about Jonestown, but this one was recommended by a very smart guy.

To the few who have read this book, it is truly beautiful.