The Friends Of Rosalynn Carter

What must late 1978 have been like for the recently deceased former U.S. First Lady Rosalynn Carter? She is almost certainly the only person to have been friends with both Jim Jones and John Wayne Gacy. 

In November Jim Jones and his Jonestown was in the news for the death of over 900 people. It was the majority of what was on the news day after day. The following month John Wayne Gacy was arrested as what might have been, at the time, the greatest murderer in the country's history.

She is certainly remembered well as First Lady. The only negative was this choice of friends. If someone was making friends they couldn't do much worse than this.

Crime is an area where history definitely repeats itself. The death of over 900 people by willful suicidal at Jonestown was a repetition of a very similar event at Masada, in ancient Israel. Masada was, in terms of physical geography, a mesa that was very difficult to access. A strict religious community took refuge from Roman rule there. By the time the Romans finally managed to get to the top they found that nearly a thousand people had chosen to die of suicide rather than live under their rule.

There are some who believe that the story of Masada never actually happened. Whether it did or not makes it immaterial to the repetition of history because it is widely believed that it did happen.

The story of John Wayne Gacy is deeply rooted in the Chicago area to the story of H.H. Holmes. In the late Nineteenth Century, H.H. Holmes would become known as "America's First Serial Killer". Just as Gacy murdered his victims in his house, and buried their bodies in the crawl space, H.H. Holmes had constructed a "Murder Castle" with trap doors and hidden rooms. It was supposedly constructed especially for holding people captive.

I recall reading one account of the Murder Castle that described H. H. Holmes using several different contractors to build the Murder Castle so that no one contractor would know about the features such as trap doors and secret rooms. Some of what was reported about H. H. Holmes might have been media sensationalism but, as with Masada, that is immaterial to the repetition of history because it is widely believed.

Ironically, with the death of Rosalynn Carter, a reason for the establishment of Jonestown, in the jungle of Guyana not far from the border with Venezuela, is back in the news. Venezuela held a referendum this week about the seizure of disputed territory in Guyana. A reason for allowing Jonestown to be built is that a settlement of Americans near the border would probably make Venezuela less likely to launch a military operation.

Aside from the repetition of history another factor that affects what happens is physical resemblance. I have written here before about the resemblance between Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mahatma Gandhi, who spent a long time in South Africa, even though Tutu was black and Gandhi was Indian. Sergei Lavrov, the current Russian Foreign Minister, very much resembles the Soviet era foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko. Silvio Berlusconi resembled Benito Mussolini. The posture of Boris Johnson is just like that of Winston Churchill. He might have been Churchill's grandson.

With that in mind why does the west so dislike Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro? Could it be that he resembles Saddam Hussein, who once visited Venezuela?

This week we saw an amazing example of how history repeats itself. Iraq and Venezuela are on opposite siders of the world, but that doesn't prevent the repetition of history. In 2000 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez visited Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Chavez's successor as president, Nicolas Maduro, not only looks like Saddam Hussein but the announcement of seizing the oil-rich neighboring region of Guyana is a mirror-image repetition of Saddam Hussein doing the same to neighboring Kuwait in 1990.