The events leading to the Peoples Temple massacre on November 18th, 1978 describe the anatomy of a paranoid leadership who had garnered awesome power over his congregation. The Peoples Temple emerged in Indiana, USA as an anti-racist religious sect which preached thinly veiled communist ideology. The movement was heavily political with a diverse congregation of a spectrum of ethnic diversity from African, Fillipino, and Caucasian Americans. His church seems to have targeted people who lacked much independent thinking skills. The church’s underlying popularity in the San Francisco area was influenced by the charisma of Jim Jones who from his childhood was obsessed with religion and death. Jim Jones grew up in abject poverty and realized that the cooption of a religious movement would allow him to exercise authority over and accrue – through targeted brainwashing- a large congregational base of support.
With the move to Guyanne in South America, the Peoples Temple established at Jonestown, an egalitarian lifestyle with Jim Jones as the communities “Dad”. Jones used the criminal murder of a US Congressman Leo Ryan to justify the final act of self-destruction in what he referred to as a Revolutionary Suicide. The mass suicide of 909 American citizens was ostensibly to protest the racial injustices in the United States of America.

The British imposed an embargo in response to the 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence of Rhodesia led by the white minority. The British efforts to curb white dominance failed. The UN also opposed Ian Smith’s refusal to reform the system which led to a violent internal war. The British did not support Mugabe despite the fact that he mobilized to remove the UDI revolt. Possible reasons being that the ZUNA was a violent communist movement. Alternatively, 290,00 adult whites dominating/oppressing 6 million blacks is morally reprehensible but the British calculated that on balance, intervention imprudent. If the roles were reversed, however, Britain would have intervened with military clout in the name of liberty, democracy, and justice for a hypothetical white majority. As this was not the case, Britain simply implemented an embargo approach which has unintended consequences: see Iraq Trade Sanctions. A new embargo has now been placed against Mugabe’s powersharing government….

De-pegging the Yeun from the US dollar may ease the trade deficit burden of the United States but China stands to gain advantages of foreign investment from their undervalued currency.