[2 articles] Boisean who survived Jonestown recalls the massacre
http://www.idahostatesman.com/102/story/574690.html Clifford Gieg, who lost his brother at the cult's Guyana compound, talks about it publicly for the first time. BY KATHLEEN KRELLER - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Edition Date: 11/18/08 For 30 years, the world has watched the last images of Stanley Gieg. A newsman's blurry footage shows the blond 19-year-old behind the wheel of a tractor that carried Jim Jones' gunmen to a Guyanese airstrip on Nov. 18, 1978. The attack that soon followed killed a congressman and several others and marked the bloody start of a massacre that left more than 900 people dead in Jonestown. But Stanley's brother, Clifford Gieg, believes - he knows - there is more to Stanley's story. Clifford Gieg last saw his brother alive just hours before the shootings. Clifford would live through the day. Stanley would not. Now, in a bid to honor his brother, the Boise cabinet-maker is talking publicly about his experiences for the first time. "He died. He was murdered," Gieg said. "I know he was murdered. He was shot. And he was a victim. And I want him recognized as a victim and not as part of it." Gieg calls himself a true believer who was duped by Jones until the end. His life and loss in Jonestown aren't so much a secret as something he just doesn't discuss. He doesn't need to talk about it, Gieg says, because he lives it every day, especially in his nightmares. Gieg's wife of four years, Norma, learned many details for the first time as she listened to his interview with the Statesman. Gieg couldn't come right out and talk about Stanley, or what happened. He started with a photo, taken just feet away from where Jones' mother was buried in the Guyanese jungle. Clifford is 18, Stanley 19. Stanley has a shock of almost white-blonde hair. Clifford is darker. There is no clue in the photo of what is to come. "It was what it was," Gieg said. And then he launched into the tale. CHILDREN OF THE TEMPLE Gieg's mother joined the People's Temple Disciple of Christ in California in 1968, when he was 8 and Stanley 9. She's still living - she never went to Jonestown - and he won't share her name. She was attracted by the church's cathartic therapy-like sessions and by Jones' teachings of racial and class equality. "It was all about the people," Gieg said. "He would welcome anybody. People on drugs - help them get off drugs. Losers all over the place." Gieg's parents divorced when he was 11, about the time he started playing drums in the People's Temple band. "My mother basically could not take care us. So the church took my brother and myself in, and we were put in a foster home I think my mother was forced to give us up because we were living in poor conditions," Gieg said. "Financially my mother couldn't handle it, and emotionally ... and the church basically took in the two youngest ones." To be a member of the People's Temple meant being "very involved," Gieg said. At first, it was fun and loving, Gieg said. There were the sleepovers with Jones' children, and long bus trips crisscrossing the country from Niagara Falls to Philadelphia, to Indianapolis, to San Francisco. "We would call him Uncle Jim," Gieg said. "I remember sitting on his lap at Easter and getting a chocolate Easter egg from him. That's a true story ... He was definitely a father figure to me. He became a monster." FROM FAVOR TO EXILE Jones' charisma attracted more people to the People's Temple and garnered him powerful political allies. Gieg recalls meeting Rosalynn Carter and hearing from revolutionary speakers like the Black Panther-connected Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Gieg remembers Jones' political connections and quasi-celebrity after the church moved to San Francisco in 1971. Eventually, Jones and the People's Temple came under fire, and talk turned to building an egalitarian, socialist society in Guyana. A year after the first Jonestown settlers left for South America, Gieg followed. Stanley, now 17, was already there. Their cousin would come as well. "I was a kid. I was 16 at the time and it just sounded like an adventure. We are going to build a community, a town in the middle of the jungle. And it's a promised land," Gieg said. "There will be no monetary system ... it will be heaven on Earth. That was the big promotion. It was like heaven on Earth." But the thick Guyanese jungle was anything but heaven, Gieg said. He and other church members worked 12-hour days, six days a week. Gieg, a talented carpenter, worked "like a slave" to build 12-by-24-foot houses for church members. "At first there was plenty of food, chicken and regular meals. But as soon as more and more people started showing up, it was like things were getting rationed. There were no more pops. No more Pepsi. No more goodies," Gieg said. "I constructed a template, or a jig, to build the houses - 52 houses that were built there to house this thousand people. That was fulfilling. Of course, it was a lot of work." A FUN JOB AND FREEDOM When the pilot of the church's boat got it stuck in the mud in Venezuela - for which he was beaten - Gieg got a new assignment. He was the new, 18-year-old pilot of the Temple's 80-foot, wooden-hulled vessel, the "Cudjo." Gieg would ferry people and cargo to and from the boat launch at Port Kaituma and other sites in Georgetown and Morowana. It was an assignment he relished. Like most teen-age boys, Gieg thought with his stomach. The residents in Jonestown ate "rice and gravy" for three meals a day. For breakfast, they'd get brown sugar with their rice. The river gave Gieg more freedom, more adventure and a more varied diet. He'd eat curried fish and crab cooked on the boat with the Guyanese people he would ferry for $1 a ride. As he talked about these happier days, Gieg grabbed a pen and mapped out that area of Guyana, drawing the ocean and interconnecting rivers and the location of ports. He once took a speedboat across the border into Venezuela to buy Vienna sausage and Irish potatoes, he recalled. He once sold a calculator at a store for a package of cookies. For that infraction, "I got a slap on the wrist," he said. He'd fish with the local children; he fondly remembers a boy named Rennie. He'd catch piranhas. He'd swim in the "root beer"-colored river. "I was on the boat; I was out, kind of free," Gieg said. "That was kind of fun." But while Gieg was a true believer, quietly obedient, Stanley was "always in trouble," he said. Stanley worked as a mechanic and drove the church's World War II-era Army truck. Stanley didn't like it, and for him life was far from ideal. CRACKS IN THE VENEER "To be honest with you, my brother and I didn't really see eye to eye on much," Gieg said. "We were kind of 'discommunicated.' In fact, we were put in separate foster homes. And that's probably where it started the most. Stanley was always rebellious." Stanley was part of the "hard hat brigade," forced to wear yellow hats and run everywhere inside Jonestown after committing minor infractions like stealing food or cursing. With his golden good looks, Stanley was "popular with the ladies," Gieg said. Gieg's father wanted his boys home, and Gieg was still under age. Gieg remembers a short-wave radio conversation with his father, who had come to the temple in San Francisco. "We talked to him. Said, 'Yeah, everything is great. We fish. We're great,'" Gieg said before a sarcastic chuckle. "Yeah." To keep Gieg in Guyana, Jones found him a wife named Joan. He didn't spend time with the woman. She survived Jonestown, but Gieg later had the marriage annulled when he came back to the States. As Gieg delivered more residents to Jonestown, they quickly learned the truth; it was no utopia, Gieg said. Everyone, including ailing senior citizens, worked like "slaves," after surrendering all their money and possessions to Jones, Gieg said. Jones would sell the possessions at a store in a nearby town. "There is such a fine line between socialism and fascism. It can go either way at any time," Gieg said. "Yes, it was ideal. We have no worries, no responsibilities. We don't have to worry about paying bills. We can look at the monkeys in the jungle. But as more and more people got there and more and more pressure got on Jones, it became he was on the loud speaker all the time, telling people, reading stories about all this terrible stuff that's going on in the world ... It was a total brainwashing operation, and he was an expert at it. And it worked." But no one could leave. People who tried were rounded up, brought back and beaten, Gieg said. The rest stayed through brainwashing and threats, he said. "We had a lot of meetings in the pavilion where, hell, everything was going on. Beatings ... Fisticuffs. Someone would come up and just beat them as a discipline for disrespecting. One guy come up, a guy named Tom Grubbs. He was a teacher, and he complained to Jones that there was not enough nourishment in rice and gravy to educate - he was a teacher - to educate children. And he got beat for complaining. "There was dunkings, where they had this huge well, an open pit well, where they had like the old witch days. They would take someone and just dunk them in, whoosh, and pull them up. Dunk them in, whoosh, and pull them up. And you never hear about that on TV, but it's true." Jones became paranoid that people who left the church had hired mercenaries to kidnap family members and attack Jonestown. He held "White Nights," or practice drills for ritualistic suicide and taking poison, Gieg said. "It started to hit me, like, what's going on here," Gieg said. "This is falling apart here. And then you'd never see him either. All you did is hear him." AN ESCAPE ROUTE, CUT OFF In November 1978, after hearing rumors of abuse and theft, U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan of California arrived in Guyana with an entourage of media and relatives of People's Temple members. At first, Jones blocked the road to Jonestown. But Ryan and the media were eventually allowed into the settlement. The last night the community existed, Gieg played drums in the Jonestown band for the visitors. "In fact, before Leo Ryan was murdered, I actually leaned over my drum set and shook his hand that night because we had been playing and everything was great on the surface," Gieg said. "He was a good man. He was trying to help the people. And I knew it in his tone when he talked to the congregation that evening." But some church members wanted out, and Jones' paranoia got the best of him. At about 5:30 a.m. on Nov. 18, Jones' security guards told Gieg and his boat-mate to take the Cudjo 50 miles downriver. Now, Gieg suspects Jones was cutting off all means of escape. "My brother, Stanley, drove us to the boat in Kamaka and there were some senior citizens on there, sleeping on the boat, watching the boat," Gieg said. "So he dropped us off at the boat, myself and Herbert Newell, who is on the list (of survivors)." Early the next morning, at about 1:30 a.m., the heavily armed Guyanese Defense Force descended on the Cudjo. Gieg and Newell were arrested, interrogated and put in a small "shack" that served as a jail. "When we first got interrogated by the constable, they said there has been a mass suicide at Jonestown. We were just crying and carrying on," Gieg said. "After he told us 'everybody is dead in Jonestown,' he put us back into the cell and we were bawling like kids, you know. There were probably 10 people consoling us outside of this jail." STANLEY'S FATE IS SEALED With few exceptions, everyone in Jonestown was dead by poison or bullets - including Gieg's cousin, his wife and their 3-year-old baby. Leo Ryan and three journalists had been murdered by Jonestown gunmen at the Port Kaituma airstrip while attempting to leave with disenchanted church members. Stanley Gieg had driven a tractor towing the gunmen to the airstrip. He was among the dead at Jonestown. He'd been shot, Gieg said. Stanley wouldn't have had a choice, he said, and wouldn't have liked what happened. Gieg has run through the scenario a thousand times in his mind. "I've lived it so many times and in so many different ways. I wasn't there. I can only imagine, but knowing my brother forever, I bet you he was bawling like a school girl. I know he had a sensitive side, but he always had a hard shell. He was something else," Gieg said. "After that happened, I'm sure he was crying. After he got back to Jonestown, he was murdered. He probably tried to run or something. He had some morals. I bet you he was bawling after realizing what was going on. Yeah, he was hard-assed, his exoskeleton. But he was like breaking an egg." THE AFTERMATH After a couple of days, Gieg and Newell were escorted to a church compound in Georgetown and kept under house arrest with other survivors. Weeks later, they were allowed to go to a local hotel, where Gieg's father had sent money for a ticket home. He came back to the States on a plane filled with police. An army of television and newspaper cameras blinded him from inside the airport terminal. He and other survivors were escorted into waiting Winnebagos for strip searches and interrogations with federal officials. They asked about the guns and about Jones. "Just about the whole involvement. Everything," Gieg said. "I was just an innocent kid. I was duped. I believed Jones could raise the dead, heal the sick, you know, make the blind see. Yeah, that he could see the future. He would say, 'I am the I am,' you know, that he was God." Gieg rejoined his father in Reno, wearing only a South American warm-weather shirt. He remembers a woman loaned him a coat. He was adrift. His father gave him a job and served as a crutch. For years, he was afraid that People's Temple members would come to kill him. The "family" he had known was all but gone. "It was all we had," Gieg said. "It was everybody I ever knew. Everybody I had ever communicated with suddenly died." Stanley's body was brought back to the States, where he was cremated and buried at sea. The family never held a memorial. "He's not buried at the mass grave in Oakland," Gieg said. "I've been hounded to come over there, but I'm not interested. There's a lot of people I don't want to see. They should be dead, instead of some of the kids. They deserved a future. Even me at 18, I lived a partial life." LIFE AFTER DEATH Gieg came to Boise 19 years ago. He won't discuss the circumstances. He's worked as a cabinet-maker for years. He's been married twice more. He lives in a humble, orderly home in Southeast Boise. He drinks beer. He's in physical and emotional pain, saying he "destroyed" his body with hard physical labor in Jonestown. The feds took his passport, and he never got another one. He still likes rice. Until now, he's kept his past mostly to himself, in part to appease his mother, who feels guilty about Gieg's suffering and Stanley's death. He cringes when he hears people joke about "drinking the Kool-Aid." He's tried, unsuccessfully, to put his past behind him. "It seems like yesterday. Thirty years is a long time, I know. But some of the things I see in my mind," Gieg said. "It will never change. My memory is not going to deteriorate. It's like it happened yesterday. The good times and the bad times, the people. Oh yeah, I remember. I was there." -- Kathleen Kreller: 377-6418 -------- Don't Drink the Kool-Aid on Jonestown http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=2E353173-1A75-4783-99DC-7A8AB5F82B7E By Daniel J. Flynn flynnfiles.com | Wednesday, November 19, 2008 Thirty years ago today more than 900 followers of Jim Jones committed "revolutionary suicide" by drinking cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid. "I just want to say something to everyone that I see that is standing around and are crying. This is nothing to cry about. This is something we should all rejoice about. We can be happy about this. They always told us that we should cry when you're coming into this world, but when we're leaving and we're leaving it peaceful ... I tell you, you should be happy about this. I was just thinking about Jim Jones. He just has suffered and suffered and suffered. He is the only god and he don't even have a chance to enjoy his death here. (clapping and voices in background)... I wanted to say one more thing. This is one thing I want to say. That you that've gone and there's many more here. He's still--the way, that's not all of us, that's not all yet. There's just a few that have died. A chance to get ... to the one that they could tell ... their lies to. So and I say I'm looking at so many people crying, I wish you would not cry, and just thank Father, just thank him. I tell you about ... (clapping and shouting) ... I've been here, uh, one year and nine months and I never felt better in my life. Not in San Francisco, but until I came to Jonestown. I enjoy this life. I had a beautiful life. I don't see nothing that I should be crying about. We should be happy. At least I am. Let's all be the same." This comes from an unidentified woman on the FBI death recording from Jonestown, Guyana. Within minutes, she would be dead. For anyone familiar with the National Socialists' "night of the long knives" or the Soviet Socialists' show trials, replete as they were with a socialist dictator's victims professing their love and allegiance for that dictator in the moment of death, the pathetic hosannas to Jim Jones by the people of Peoples Temple plays as a disturbing socialist deja vu. On November 17, 1978, Jim Jones was a hero to American leftists. On November 18, 1978, Jones orchestrated the killings of 918 people and strangely morphed in the eyes of American leftists into an evangelical Christian fanatic. An unfortunately well-worn narrative, playing out contemporaneously in Pol Pot's Cambodia, of socialist dreams ending in ghoulish nightmares, then, conveniently shifted to one about the dangers of organized religion. But as The Nation magazine reported at the time, "The temple was as much a left-wing political crusade as a church. In the course of the 1970s, its social program grew steadily more disaffiliated from what Jim Jones came to regard as 'Fascist America' and drifted rapidly toward outspoken Communist sympathies." So much so that the last will and testament of the Peoples Temple, and its individual members who left notes, bequeathed millions of dollars in assets to the Soviet Union. As Jones expressed to a Soviet diplomat upon upon his visit to Jonestown the month before the smiling suicides took place, "For many years, we have let our sympathies be quite publicly known, that the United States government was not our mother, but that the Soviet Union was our spiritual motherland." Jim Jones was an evangelical communist who became a minister to infiltrate the church with the gospel according to Marx and Lenin. He was an atheist missionary bringing his message of socialist redemption to the Christian heathen. "I decided, how can I demonstrate my Marxism?," remembered Jones of his days in 1950s Indiana. "The thought was, infiltrate the church." So in the forms of Pentecostal ritual, Jones smuggled socialism into the minds of true believers--who gradually became true believers of a different sort. Unless one counts his drug-induced bouts with self-messianism, Jones didn't believe in God. Get it--a Peoples Temple. He shocked his parishioners, many of whom certainly did believe in God, by dramatically tossing the Bible onto the ground during a sermon. "Nobody's going to come out of the sky!," an excited Jones had once informed his flock. "There's no heaven up there! We'll have to have heaven down here!" Like so many efforts to usher in the millenium before it, Jones's Guyanese road to heaven on earth detoured to a hotter afterlife destination. The horrific scene in a Guyanese jungle clearing could have been avoided. Thousands of miles north, for years leading up to Jonestown, San Francisco officials and journalists had looked the other way while Jones acted as a law unto himself. So what if he abused children, sodomized a follower, tortured and held temple members at gun point, and defrauded the government and people of welfare and social security checks? He believes in socialism and so do we. That was the ends-justifies-the-means attitude that enabled Jim Jones to commit criminal acts in San Francisco with impunity. The people who should have stopped him instead encouraged him. Mayor George Moscone, who would be assassinated days after the Jonestown tragedy, appointed Jones to the city's Housing Authority in 1975. Jones quickly became chairman, which proved beneficial to the enlargement of the pastor's flock--and his coffers, as Jones seized welfare checks from new members. One of the Peoples Temple's top officials becoming an assistant district attorney, a man so thoroughly indoctrinated in the cult that he falsely signed an affidavit (ultimately his child's death warrant) disavowing paternity to his own son and ascribed paternity to Jones, similarly enhanced the cult's power base within the city. How, one wonders, did victimized Peoples Temple members feel about going to the law in a city where Jones's henchman was the law? Going to the Fourth Estate was also a fruitless endeavor, as San Francisco media institutions, such as columnist Herb Caen, were boosters of Jones and his Peoples Temple. When veteran journalist Les Kinsolving penned an eight-part investigative report on Peoples Temple for the San Francisco Examiner in 1972, his editors buckled under pressure from Jones and killed the report halfway through. Kinsolving quipped that the Peoples Temple was the "the best-armed house of God in the land," detailed the kidnapping and possible murder of disgruntled members, exposed Jones's phony faith healing, highlighted Jones's vile school-sanctioned sex talk with children, and directed attention toward the Peoples Temple's massive welfare fraud that funded its operations. "But in the Mendocino County Welfare Dept. there is the key to Prophet Jones' plans to expand the already massive influx of his followers--and have it supported by tax money," Kinsolving wrote more than six years before the tragedy in the Guyanese jungle. "The Examiner has learned that at least five of the disciples of The Ukiah Messiah are employees of this Welfare Department, and are therefore of invaluable assistance in implementing his primary manner of influx: the adoption of large numbers of children of minority races." Unfortunately, four of the series' eight articles were jettisoned after Jones unleashed hundreds of protestors to the San Francisco Examiner, a programmed letter-writing campaign, and a threatened lawsuit against the paper. The Examiner promptly issued a laudatory article on Jones. A few years later, after Jones had moved operations from Ukiah to San Francisco, California, a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle penned an expose on the Peoples Temple. A Chronicle editor sympathetic to Jones spiked that piece, which ultimately made its way to New West magazine and so alarmed Jones that he hastily departed San Francisco for his agricultural experiment in Guyana. By virtue of producing rent-free rent-a-rallies for liberal politicians and causes, Jim Jones engendered enormous amounts of good will from Democratic politicians and activists. They allowed their political ambitions to derail their governing responsibilities. Frisco pols like Harvey Milk never seemed to care how Jones could, at the snap of his fingers, direct hundreds of people to stack a public meeting or volunteer for a campaign. City Councilman Milk just knew that he benefitted from that control, and therefore never bothered to do anything to inhibit the dangerous cult operating in his city. Instead, he actively aided and abetted a homicidal maniac. It wasn't just local hacks Jones commanded respect from. He held court with future First Lady Rosalyn Carter, vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale, and California Governor Jerry Brown. A man who killed more African Americans than the Ku Klux Klan was awarded a local Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award and won the plaudits of California lieutenant governor Mervyn Dymally, state assemblyman Willie Brown, radical academic Angela Davis, preacher/politician Jesse Jackson, Black Panther leader Huey Newton, and other African American activists. From Newton, whom Jones had visited in Cuban exhile in 1977, Jones got his lawyer and received support, such as a phone-to-megaphone address to Jonestown during a "white night" dry run of mass suicide. This was appropriate, as it was from Newton whom Jones appropriated the phrase "revolutionary suicide"--the title of a 1973 Newton book--that he used as a moniker for the murder-suicides of more than 900 people on November 18, 1978. "We didn't commit suicide," Jones announced during the administering of cyanide-laced Flavoraid to his flock, "we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world." Newton's comically idiotic slogan boomeranged on him, as several of his relatives perished in the Kool-Aid carnage. It's worth remembering that before the people of Peoples Temple drank Jim Jones's Kool-Aid, the leftist political establishment of San Francisco gulped it down. And without the latter, the former would have never happened. -- Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas and A Conservative History of the American Left. He is also the editor of www.flynnfiles.com. . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to sixties-l@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
