Posted on 09/22/2019 4:04:02 PM PDT by robowombat
Affixing blame for the Mountain Meadows Massacre SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 BY DAN PETERSON
This is not a photo of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. We have none. So I went for a cheerier note. This is a photo (by James Jordan) of director Mark Goodman working just a few days ago with extras in Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts, for the “Witnesses” film project.
I note that I’m being accused by a small handful of people of blaming the Mountain Meadows Massacre on “anti-Mormons.”
First, two preliminary observations:
1) When I write anything for the public, at least some people will misread it in the most negative way that they possibly can.
2) The Mountain Meadows Massacre is, for quite manifest reasons, a controversial topic. And, accordingly, it’s one that some people are strongly inclined to exploit for ideological ends.
Of course, I don’t blame the Massacre on “anti-Mormons.” I blame it on the people who did it.
But the perpetrators interest me very particularly because, overwhelmingly, they do not seem to have been conventionally bad people – thugs, murderers, and the like – either before September 1857 or, for the most part, thereafter.
So the question that puzzles me (in this case as in more than a few others) is, What makes ordinary, decent people commit so extraordinarily horrific a crime?
Reading the Oxford book Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Ron Walker and Rick Turley and Glen Leonard, when it first came out many years ago, I felt as if I were seeing a Greek tragedy unfold. There was a certain inexorable logic to what ultimately happened – a horrible logic, obviously, but one in which it made a certain degree of sense, after one bad step had been taken, to take the next one. I found myself wanting to scream “No! Stop!” while knowing what the outcome was inevitably going to be.
To me, if we see the people who committed the Mountain Meadows Massacre as utterly unlike ourselves, we’re not only falsifying history (and not merely in the sense that they, like me and many of my readers, claimed membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) but refusing to see a lesson (or, more aptly, lessons) in what happened. If they were something of a different species, their cautionary tale can have little if anything to teach us.
In order to understand what they did, we need to understand what factors acted upon them. And, beyond any reasonable dispute, one of the most important of those factors was a prior history of persecution and forced migration.
That doesn’t mean that the Missouri mobs bear legal and moral responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre any more than an abusive father is responsible for the violent acts committed much later by a criminal son. But neither are the two unrelated. Human evils ramify. They do damage, among other things to human psyches.
The Mountain Meadows Massacre certainly isn’t the Restoration’s finest hour. It’s anything but faith-promoting. But it shouldn’t be exploited as a weapon against the Church or against religious belief, either. It’s too complex to be reducible to a self-serving slogan on a partisan bumper sticker.
Didnt this happen like two hundred years ago?
I am intrigued by Jacob Hamblin’s account who owned a ranch at Mountain Meadows at the time of the massacre.
When asked who was most to blame .... he stated that it was ‘Buchanon’s Blunder’ which sent the US army to ‘subdue’ the Mormons, causing a panic. These same Mormons had been run from NY to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois and then to Utah from religeous persecution and were unwilling to run again.
Without ‘Buchanon’s Blunder’ there would have been no ‘Mountain Meadows Massacre’.
1857
Close enough 162. 1857 Sept.
Here you go. From MASSACRES OF THE MOUNTAINS by Dunn Jr. Back when it was still hot news.
https://archive.org/details/massacresmounta01dunngoog/page/n293
Bumper Sticker; Antifa is against facism, Not
1857.
I “affix blame” to those who, at the time, killed other people for a reason other than immediate self defense. There’s some blame for anyone who told the actual killers to do it.
Nobody who was not a competent adult in 1857 is to blame.
1857 .... however, since Mormon’s were involved, the Anti-Mormons will never forget or try to understand it.
If this incident was somehow consistent with LDS teachings, as some claim .... how come it has never been repeated?
When they wanted to get Statehood for Utah, the US government took a dim view of their polygamy....lo and behold, their President had a "vision" that polygamy, once thought to be a sacrament, was now a mortal sin.
In 1978, BYU's football program was struggling. Why? Because they considered black people "subhuman". Guess what? ANOTHER vision!!! Instead of "White and delightsome", it became "pure and delightsome".
Fast forward to today...the Mormon church consists of nice, solid, patriotic citizens, kinda like living in "Leave It To Beaver" land, aka, plastic people. However, the Mormon church is one "revelation" away from becoming flag-burning, gun-grabbing, baby-killing, pro-homosexual leftists.
Mormons did it, yet the author implies they were not mormons.
There is discussion of this in the Civil War +150 series run by Homer_J_Simpson. Go back to 2017!
I agree that the people who did it were to blame, but they were not just some random group. They murdered innocent men women and children.
The fact that they were Mormons should not be swept under the rug.
‘The Mormon War’ was most to blame. The Mormons were on a war alert thanks to Anti-Mormons and President Buchanon! They were in the act of being invaded by the US Army for NOTHING!
If there had been no ‘War on the Mormons’ there would have been no ‘Mountain Meadows Massacre’
Their false religion has been killing people since its inception by those believers descending to H3LL
What's that got to do with anything? I want reparations and I want them now.
/sarc
Hmm...perhaps you missed your calling Teppe. You could have been an apologist for Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has received endless grief due to a similar dismissive comment:
“CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations] was founded after 9/11 because they RECOGNIZED that SOME PEOPLE DID SOMETHING and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties” @ annual CAIR banquet.
If the beyond 1857-Danites ever regroup as DAMT [Council on American-Mormon Ties] and start holding annual banquets, I'll recommend you as a speaker for consideration, as apparently you can vie for their reformation since you recognize that some Danite types WERE INVOLVED in the ORIGINAL 9.11 domestic terrorist act the USA..resulting in the executions of 120 children & their parents & others.
{Note: MMM began on Sept. 11, 1857}
Yep.
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