[Zakeet]

Excellent general summary of some of the major events in the Missouri Mormon War. Of course, the Saints have seriously manipulated accounts of the actual events -- with the RLDS (now renamed Community of Christ) being guilty of stretching things more than their Utah based cousins. With that in mind, I might venture to clarify a few points in your response.

There's usually only two periods designated as including hostilities in Missouri

You omitted the Zion's Camp Expedition in 1836 ... something the Saints also do because it is a major embarrassment. Joseph marched off to Missouri to administer divine justice by slaughtering gentiles in revenge for their burning of the LDS printing press in Independence. The Saints made it as far as a point in Central Missouri near where the Salt River flows into the Missouri River when they were stricken with cholera. Despite Joseph's prophesies of guaranteed success, the foray was a dismal failure and is therefore conveniently ignored by the Saints.

You're talking about just three Missouri counties (NOT the entire state).

Additionally, the Danites attacked and killed apostates in what the historian Hubert Bancroft has deemed the First Mormon Civil War. In other words, it was a situation of Mormons killing Mormons. It is my understanding that much of that action, especially Porter Rockwell's raids, took place in Clinton, County, west of Far West, where the terrified settlers had fled. Nevertheless, your point about the fighting being confined to a relatively small area is well taken.

Mormons overdramatize how long these hostilities lasted in Missouri ... maybe 40-45 days in Sept/Oct 1838 -- violence all occurring in Oct.

The Mormon on Mormon killing started in early April after word of Joseph's and Sidney's whereabouts reached Kirtland and the Danite Army was able to make its way to Far West. The Mormon terror campaign in Gallatin began in early August, and the Saints were burning Gentile farms and stealing consecrated goods in Daviess County in early September.

If the people [of Missouri] come on us to molest us, we will establish our religion by the sword. We will trample down our enemies and make it one gore of blood from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. I will be to this generation a second Mohammed, whose motto in treating for peace was ‘the Quran or the Sword.’ So shall it eventually be with us – Joseph Smith or the Sword – History of the Church, Vol. 3, p. 167.

You omitted Joseph's October 14, 1838 speech declaring Jihad on the Gentiles in your summary of facts.

On October 25, 1838, the Battle of Crooked River: Mormon forces attacked (unknowingly?) the Missouri state militia under the command of Samuel Bogart ... result[ing] in the death of three militia and the LDS leader, David Patten.

This action was actually a knowingly ambush. Bogart was a Methodist preacher and Missouri national guardsman in charge of about two dozen soldiers. The Saints drove the solders back with withering gunfire and when the troops returned to claim their fallen comrades, they discovered the corpses had been mutilated -- body parts had been sliced off. Patten had legally changed his name to "Captain Fear-Not" a few weeks prior to the battle, and was killed when, apparently believing his new name, made an exposed solo charge and caught a round in the chest.

But Jacob Hawn was never a Mormon...

True, and the Haun's Mill Massacre on October 30, 1836 was never a massacre in the true sense of the word. Modern accounts aside, the Guard conducted an investigation of the incident and according to the accounts of nearly 400 soldiers: the troops were suddenly attacked by Mormons as the troops marched in from the east; they returned fire on Hawn's barn (where the Mormon's fire was concentrated); they stopped firing when the Mormons stopped; approximately 20 or the approximately two dozen Mormon casualties (accounts vary) were men (the Saints contend an almost opposite number of 20 of the 24 were women and children).

[Elsie]

...the Saints have seriously manipulated accounts of the actual events ...

 

 

Eerily familiar...

 

 

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

 

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.