LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Jonestown: Jonestown Tragedy
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[T]hat is EXACTLY what the Jonestown research looks like. The lack of any meaningful comprehension of the deaths at Jonestown pervades the scholarly field every bit as much as it dominated the pre-tragedy press. POLLUTED. The original sources (from which every scholarly work out there has drawn) portrayed themselves as blameless plaintiffs, when the reality was not only brutally one-sided, but a reality of PERSECUTION, and a frightful, virtually absolute IMBALANCE OF POWER.
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The Jonestown, Guyana Tragedy: Primary Source Materials from the U.S. Department of State, the contents of US Government archives on the subject obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. (web-archived copy of the original website, no longer extant; unfortunately the scanned pages are missing)
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It was twenty years ago last week that news of the events at Jonestown was broadcast to an incredulous public. To this day, Guyanese hardly regard the mass suicide/murder as being a part of their own local history, and in a sense they are right. While the Jonestown residents occupied a portion of Guyana's land space, they were not incorporated into its body politic. For the most part United States citizens, they acted out a tragedy which was peculiarly American in its origins as well as its character.
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Tim Stoen, who had promised not to ever try and remove John, or to destroy Jonestown, had proceeded to do both, lobbying against the church in Washington. It was he who persuaded Congressman Leo Ryan to come to Jonestown to "retrieve Tim Stoen's son, based upon Stoen's false paternity claim, maliciously pursued to try and drive the leader over the edge. In fact, Ryan was already on Stoen's side at least a year before the tragedy, petitioning the justice Department to intervene and force the child's return. He was turned down.
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The most puzzling question, which has arisen out of the tragedy at "Jonestown", is how one man could achieve such control over a large group of people to the point that they would willingly die at his command. It would be easy to assume that “Jonestown” was a unique situation that could only have occurred because of Jim Jones’s dynamic and charismatic personality, combined with the weakness and vulnerability of his victims. Such an analysis may bring some peace that such a thing could never happen again, but it falls a long way short of providing true understanding of the situation, thereby leaving us all vulnerable to the danger of further tragedies such as “Jonestown” occurring.
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More than a quarter of a century after the fall of Peoples Temple, in which the world witnessed the devastating loss of over nine hundred lives—including those of Congressman Leo J. Ryan and several journalists—the tragedy of Jonestown continues to mystify. In a sensitive account that traces the rise and fall of the idealistic community movement that preceded the deaths at Jonestown, Denice Stephenson uses letters, oral histories, journal entries, and other original documents—many published here for the first time—to bring this inexplicable event into a very personal and human perspective.
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Jonestown Tragedy