Whenever someone has achieved pre-eminence in a field, people look for a successor. Boxing awaits the next Muhammad Ali, acting wants the next Laurence Olivier, car makers want the next Henry Ford, etc.
But this also works the other way. No one wants to believe there will be a next Charles Manson, or Adolf Hitler, or Judas Iscariot. It is therefore very disturbing that in these most troubled times, when we desperately need a new genius; we are presented with an evil genius who is a worthy successor to one of history’s most notorious figures.
On November 18, 1978, at the Peoples Temple compound in Jonestown, Guyana a total of 900 members of the cult committed mass suicide.
Those who remember those events do not want to be reminded of them. These include a lot of important people, who were once held spellbound by the charisma of this man and the high ideals he expounded, and endorsed what he was doing for the sake of the fantasy he was offering.
We are discovering more clearly by the day that we are in the presence of the next Reverend Jim Jones – the man who founded Jonestown in Guyana, the idealistic religious community which ended when the cult committed “revolutionary suicide” at Jones’s urging. The man who promised a new life, and rescue from a sick and corrupt world, until a few of his victims and their relatives realised he was the sickest and most corrupt person they were ever likely to meet.
Haven’t you seen him? He isn’t American any more, for which that benighted land should be eternally grateful. Nowadays he calls himself Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, and he pretends to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, until he has to do anything useful instead of making a noise.
Like Jones, he has been anointed by Satan to lead a cult which a lot of people, important or otherwise, have joined seeking the same escape from a sick and corrupt world. Like Jones, he has imprisoned his followers in a grotesque colony called Brexit Britain, and is determined to destroy everything and everybody in it rather than be exposed for what he is. And also like Jones, his acolytes, having dug themselves in too deep, are equally determined to see the massacre through to the bitter end.
Exaggeration? Read on. The parallels are so strong that it is difficult to decide whether he is indeed the second Jim Jones, or whether Jones was the first Boris Johnson.
BoJo’s followers will argue with outrage that Boris has not murdered or assisted the suicide of anyone. But by the time he’s finished, the consequences will amount to the same thing, achieved in the same way.
Your Value is My Value
The victims of Jonestown were not wild eyed fanatics. They were ordinary people who had found a home they had never known.
Jim Jones was the one man who spoke their language, a situation they rightly blamed others for. Only when it was too late did they realise that Jones had never wanted to relieve their pain but use them to relieve his.
Jim Jones was a Communist in America during the McCarthy era. His mother was one of those harassed for defending the freedom of speech and belief guaranteed in the US Constitution. Whatever the rights and wrongs of his politics, he had the right to expect he would be allowed to hold and express his views, as he was a citizen of a country whose governing document said so.
British citizens likewise live in a free country. They can theoretically say and think what they like. But for at least a generation McCarthyism has also been alive and well there, but in reverse.
No one seems to know who invented “political correctness, “or decides what it should be, but in practice it has permeated everyone’s life. Like many another well-meaning concept, it is no longer about treating all people fairly and with respect. It is about dividing people into the correct and the incorrect, and punishing those who are on the wrong side of the argument.
No longer can most UK residents dream of owning their own home. Yet for too long they have seen both public housing and private rented property going to people who aren’t British citizens, at the apparent expense of locals. Britons also don’t have guaranteed jobs any more, but see foreigners working in their place, without them being consulted.
There are many reasons why this happens, and no evidence that non-nationals are “jumping the queue” and gaining preferential treatment in either housing or jobs. But if someone questions why so many foreigners are housed and employed while locals are still waiting, this is a “politically incorrect” question. If you ask it, you are bigoted and have no right to an opinion, and are therefore left without a means of influencing your democratic country or granted the basic dignity belonging to other citizens.
Jim Jones gathered all those dispossessed by American “political correctness” – the poor, the black, the red, the idealistic – into his bible-bashing churches, integrating these as few other preachers were doing at the time. He said in effect that everything America said was bad had divine sanction, and therefore gave greater moral value to those their country had left behind.
As long as they followed him, they would no longer be degraded for no reason by those who sat above. Jones involved himself in many social and community projects, and was often on the side of manifest justice, advocating human rights for all and protecting tenants under threat of unjust eviction. But it all had one aim – to ensure that everyone followed him, so that he could accomplish his personal goals through them.
Boris Johnson likewise leads an army of people who feel themselves unjustly excluded, for widely differing reasons. This is why he owes his large majority to gaining seats in traditional Labour territory – the Labour Party didn’t look after these people either, whether materially or ideologically, and Johnson is a funny guy who doesn’t care what he says, offering to destroy the whole failed political system if everyone just follows him.
Foreigners are the manifestation of that failed system. Why should people who have been disadvantaged, despite doing nothing wrong, now be told they have to embrace other peoples and cultures who haven’t paid their dues?
These foreigners must be being “imposed” on the country by a foreign institution, or they wouldn’t get in. As the EU is not run from London, or led by the UK like the old Empire was, the EU is a foreign institution imposing bad things on the UK.
As a member of the EU, the UK was a major part of making all the rules the Brexiteers are objecting to. But Boris and his band of tax avoiding con artists don’t care.
Taking the UK back from foreign control, and giving it back to the “right people,” was the way to make the politically incorrect respectable. Where Jim Jones preached Marxism as the fulfilment of Christ, and then of himself, Boris preaches Brexit as the fulfilment of the Union Jack.
Jim Jones cared so much about his flock that he led them to backbreaking labour, dehumanisation and murder in his ideal community, established to help him run from the law. Boris is similarly determined to kill people, trash the economy and avoid laws to keep his followers in line, because he doesn’t care about them or his ideals, only remaining the centre of attention because he has nothing left.
Dying for No Cause
Everyone has their own idea of what the UK’s famous National Health Service should look like, and what it should do and not do. But whatever their views, they expect the available health facilities to do their job, and have the resources to do so, as good health is a fundamental of existence, not a privilege to be earned.
People need ventilators. The EU has offered the UK the opportunity to take part in its ventilator distribution scheme so it can obtain more.
The UK claims it was not offered these ventilators in time, but it knew all about the scheme. It has refused to help keep people alive with these essential supplies because anything and everyone is to be martyred for the cause of Brexit, because martyrdom for its ideals is the only way the cult can justify itself. It has to be worth dying for to have validity, as all the arguments it once used to use to claim it was The Way evaporated long ago.
People are being locked down, unable to go out of their houses for more than an hour or gather in groups. All this is being done to protect people from Covid-19, rightly or wrongly. It doesn’t matter if people lose their jobs, can’t pay the rent or kill themselves due to the conditions of isolation, keeping safe is all that matters.
Yet the UK insists that the one thing that cannot be stopped is the Brexit talks. Who knows what the world will be like when this crisis is over, or what there will be to negotiate about?
But the UK is determined to press on with the Brexit timetable despite the fact there is nothing which can be sensibly discussed. When all else is gone, the cult will continue its charismatic prayer meetings, repeating its self-proclaimed truths while the enemy comes to the door.
No one knows the true number of UK death leagues because only those who die in hospital are properly recorded. Not those in care homes, or at home. Either the cult is artificially depressing the figures to continue to present itself as salvation, or it doesn’t care enough to find a way of knowing them.
This is the same Brexit cult which said on the side of a bus that the UK gave 350 million pounds a week to the EU and it could be spent on the NHS instead. Is the NHS a vanity project, or is it there to save lives?
There should be enough ventilators, enough staff, enough equipment now the UK has formally left the EU. They aren’t there, but the cult blames it all on everyone except itself, as all its own members must be free from all blame.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has explained the shortages. First it was the nasty public using all the masks, as he told them to, and thus preventing health service staff using them, But many of those public are Brexiteers themselves, so that argument didn’t work.
Instead, it is now about greedy hospital staff using protective equipment they don’t need, though their clinical leads disagree Hospitals are full of foreigners, both medical staff and patients, so the cult members are both immune and under attack once again.
When nothing else can function normally, nothing can get in the way of Brexit and the assumptions behind it. The ideal was always false, now it is increasingly turning as sour as it did at Jonestown. Brexit has to be the default position, the answer to everything, precisely because there are so many problems the government can’t deal with, and Brexit is the main reason it can’t deal with them.
All About Me
No one has ever explained how Brexit will actually create more jobs and homes, improve living standards or achieve anything else of value. On paper, it could do that. But on paper bumble bees are too heavy to fly, and you can’t walk from one place to another because you will never get there.
Boris Johnson knew this before he joined the Brexit cult at the last minute. But he also knew that enough members of his Conservative Party would want him as a future leader if he flew their flag. Leading the cult was more important than the consequences to those in it, and he knows exactly which buttons to press in which people to turn them into acolytes.
The more Brexit is shown to be a destructive con, built on fundamental lies, the more BoJo presents it as the only way to rescue everyone from the effects it is itself creating. If you don’t agree, you are part of the foreign conspiracy which persecuted the cult members, and wants to continue persecuting them. Only Boris can save them, because only Boris, with his unique and highly flexible teaching, has the answer and is anointed to deliver it.
If Boris wanted to operate differently he couldn’t. Things like facts would get in the way. Maybe Jim Jones genuinely had high ideals when he began his ministry. But the way he went about it destroyed those ideals, until all he had left was maintaining control of the cult.
Only the most depraved individuals ever wanted to see another Jim Jones, or be associated with one. UK electors have voted him into office. Jim Jones didn’t drink the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid (actually Flavor Aid) with his followers; he was either shot or shot himself. Boris will also find another way out, but by that time Brexit Britain will have drunk too much of his Kool Aid to go back to a civilised existence.
Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
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