I watched a documentary on the Jonestown suicides the other night. Horrible, horrible thing. I have a vague memory of it happening when I was a kid.
What struck me was that Jim Jones had such a hold over people that parents willingly gave their kids the cyanide kool aid and made them drink it.
Has there been any other instances in history where so many people willingly not only killed themselves, but their children as well? Logic says this can’t have been an only occurrence, but I can’t think of any others.
Parents killing children is a reasonably common category among murders. It’s not as common as husbands/ex-husbands/boyfriends/ex-boyfriends killing women and not quite as common as wives/ex-wives/girlfriends/ex-girlfriends killing men, but it’s certainly reasonably common. Most murders are people killing people they know. There have been lots of cases of parents killing children and then themselves. Just recently, for instance, there’s Chris Benoit killing his wife, his son, and then himself.
I wasn’t looking for single instances - as you point out, this is common. The disturbing thing about Jonestown was that it was so many people (909 died) died. It seems to me that it’s one thing to convince people to go into some sort of brainwashed religious passion where they commit suicide; it’s quite another to convince them to kill their kids. I think that many parents would willingly die so their children could live - so what would make them do such a flip and feed their children cyanide?
A combination of reasons: fear of Jim Jones; armed guards standing by who wouldn’t let anyone leave; knowing they’d likely be killed unless they did themselves in after killing their kids; the brainwashing you already mentioned; a belief that they really would go to heaven afterwards; collective paranoia.
It’s terrifying to think that such things would override a parent’s natural desire to save kids at all costs.
Whatever you do, don’t listen to the audio file of the last several minutes of the massacre. Trust me. You don’t want to hear it.
Masada. Again, children were killed along the adults in a mass suicide (actually, a mass murder I suppose - some accounts claim they drew lots for who would kill everybody because of injunctions against suicide).
The events during the siege are disputed, and it’s not known that the Branch Davidians deliberately killed themselves and their children. The fires may have been accidentally or deliberately set by the Branch Davidians, or the result of pyrotechnic grenades used by the FBI. It doesn’t seem likely that it was actually a suicide pact.