September 11, 1857

"You guys do know what that movie is about, don't you?" inquired the friendly young lady in the admissions booth as Korrin and I bought tickets to see September Dawn.

"Yes, of course," I replied, a twinge of puzzlement creasing my care-worn brow. "Are you required to offer a disclaimer of some sort for some reason?"

"No," she answered. "It's just that some people have been offended by the subject matter."

As we entered the theater in Nampa, I commented to Korrin that it seemed oddly fastidious of the management to express concerns about the content of that particular film, when elsewhere in the multiplex patrons -- by their own informed choice, one assumes -- were enduring an onslaught of adolescent sex humor (Superbad), reveling in hyper-violent revenge fantasies (War), or otherwise spending a couple of hours immersed in Hollywood-issue degeneracy.

I suspect that the reason September Dawn was singled out in this fashion was because it has been quietly but effectively branded an offense against "tolerance."

This is unfortunate: Of the films presently on offer, September Dawn is the only one representing a serious and commendable attempt to dramatize actual history -- in this case, the systematic, premeditated murder in southern Utah of 120 members of a California-bound wagon train.

The definitive (thus far) treatment of the Mountain Meadows Massacre is Will Bagley's award-winning book Blood of the Prophets. The following clip offers a concise summary of the episode:




The victims were Arkansans led by Alexander Fancher, whose Hugenot ancestors had fled France following the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. The perpetrators were militiamen and Paiute Indians whose efforts were organized and directed by local Mormon leaders. The atrocity was a calculated act of terrorism carried out in the context of the Mormon leadership's asymmetrical war with the federal government, which was becoming acute at the time the ill-fated wagon train arrived in Utah: President James Buchanan, believing (with some reason) that Mormon Prophet and territorial governor Brigham Young was bent on establishing a hostile theocracy, had dispatched a military force ("Johnson's Army") to remove Young and install a territorial government more to Washington's liking.

Critics have ruthlessly panned the film, many of them complaining that its depiction of fanatical Mormon murders and winsome Protestant victims is childishly one-sided. This criticism is sound, and the film -- as a work of entertainment -- would have benefited greatly had the director not been a stranger to subtlety.

But the problem here is with the story itself, which isn't fraught with ambiguities and complexities. The matter really was quite simple: Mormon priesthood leaders (the church has a lay priesthood), acting on oaths to avenge the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith and in accordance with the doctrine of "blood atonement," conspired to annihilate an entire wagon train of innocent, inoffensive people. They did so in the belief that they were doing God's will, and that the killings had been ordered by their religious leaders, who were for all intents and purposes infallible.

In recent months, the Mormon leadership has finally admitted that local church leaders were involved in the massacre; this concession comes after 150 years of stolid stonewalling on the subject, beginning with Brigham Young's cover-up campaign in which he acted as an accessory after the fact to mass murder. Roughly two decades after the event, John D. Lee, an adopted son of Brigham Young who had a hands-on role in the killing was the only one to be convicted and executed for the crime.

A tribute to a mass murderer: A statue of John D. Lee, the only individual convicted and punished for the killings at Mountain Meadows, can be found in downtown Washington, Utah.


Bagley contends -- convincingly, in my view -- that the crime itself was ordered by Brigham Young. September Dawn embraces that perspective, and in one of the few instances the film embraces nuance, the order from Brigham is portrayed more along the lines of "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?" rather than as a blunt directive from a standard-issue cinematic villain.

Given the vilification of the Arkansans in Mormon folk mythology, there is some irony in current protests from Mormon media figures that September Dawn demonizes the Mormon assailants and beatifies the victims.

Folk accounts of the wagon train depict it as a cross between a pack of Hell's Angels in Conestoga Wagons and a traveling brothel: The women were slatternly, the men uniformly violent and abusive, the children little more than curs. Included in the company (once again, according to myth) were Missourians who had helped drive out the Mormons during the so-called Mormon War of 1838 -- and one of them boasted of having the very gun that killed Joseph Smith. By this account, the wagon train arrived in Utah and immediately began heaping abuse on the Mormon settlers and poisoning livestock in order to rile up the Indians.

To their credit, contemporary Mormon historians reject this depiction of the victims, even though they still try to compartmentalize blame for the massacre by laying it exclusively at the feet of local Mormon leaders. As September Dawn tells it, Brigham was "in the loop," but left it to his followers to handle the details. This strikes me as a very plausible depiction.

Writer-Director Jonathan Cain does a suitable job establishing his setting, in which he presents a personalized drama involving four key fictional characters: Bishop John Samuelson (Jon Voight), his sons Jonathan (Trent Ford) and Micah (Taylor Handley), and Emily Hudson (Tamara Hope), an Arkansan who falls in love with Jonathan.

Bishop Samuelson is a polygamous husband to eighteen women. His younger son Micah has already started a seraglio of his own, but Jonathan -- who believes that marriage should be the product of genuine love, not dutiful compliance to doctrine -- has no interest in marrying anyone, at least until he sees Emily. Tasked by his father to spy on the emigrants, Jonathan finds himself spending time with Emily, with predictable results: They quickly fall in love, despite the cultural chasm separating them.

Emily is a Pastor's daughter, which puts her in a position analogous to Jonathan. They have a brief but illuminating conversation in which the stark differences between their faiths are quickly sketched out: To Jonathan, the emigrants, like all non-Mormons, are "gentiles," and it puzzles him that Emily's father doesn't seek to control those under his pastoral care. Emily, apparently believing Mormonism to be simply another variant of conventional Christianity, is just as puzzled by Jonathan's casual acceptance of authoritarian notions and his unfamiliarity with the Beatitudes.

This scene, although somewhat overbroad and anachronistic in tone (Emily sounds a bit too much like a 21st Century Megachurch Evangelical, rather than a mid-19th century Protestant pioneer), does offer a useful illustration of the distance that separates Mormonism from mainline Christianity in terms of doctrine and practice. This is particularly true of the high-octane, theocratic version of Mormonism taught and lived in Brigham's Caliphate.

When in the film Jonathan casually tells Emily that his father considers the beliefs of the emigrants to be "abominations," the character is accurately giving voice to the Mormon perspective on mainline Christianity. When the film's version of Brigham Young (Terrance Stamp, whose experience in playing the Kryptonian megalomaniac Zod offered valuable training for this role) speaks of blood atonement -- shedding the blood of those whose sins supposedly aren't covered by the blood of Christ, so as to give them an opportunity for exaltation among the "Gods" -- his dialogue is taken directly from documented sermons and writings.

And when Bishop Samuelson insists that his Mormon priesthood leaders are immune to error, he is preaching sound and unassailable doctrine -- from the Mormon perspective, then and now.

The atrocity at Mountain Meadows was the predictable product of a familiar set of ingredients: A power-obsessed, authoritarian leadership that cultivated a siege mentality among its followers; a murderously perverted form of altruism in which lethal violence directed at the targeted victims was depicted as a form of compassion (it would expunge their sins, after all, and give them a chance for salvation); and a doctrine of obedience that relieved followers of moral responsibility for carrying out the orders of their leaders.

Every time, and any time, those ingredients are combined, people will die in large numbers. This was true of the wars of revolution and empire following the Jacobin revolution in France; it was emphatically true of the quasi-genocidal campaign to "civilize" the American Indians (somebody really should make a film about the Sand Creek Massacre); and it was true at Mountain Meadows.

But it is also true of the ongoing war in Iraq, as well. There is no moral or material difference between Brigham Young infecting his followers with war fever and then turning them loose on helpless Arkansans, on the one hand, and the cynical exploitation of terrorism by Bush and Cheney to manipulate our nation into invading Iraq, on the other.

After all, we're told, the president knows so much more than we do, and those who carry out his orders -- whether to destroy a city or sexually torture a child -- partake of the president's moral immunity. And the Iraqis should be grateful to us for the humanitarian violence we've inflicted on them: Don't they know this is their only chance to embrace the gospel of democracy?

Double Video Bonus

Gratuitous as it might seem, I'm offering clips of two incendiary performances by the incomparable Thin Lizzy. The songs selected are on-topic: They deal with the bloody consequences of fanatical self-righteousness.

"Massacre"

"If God is in heaven, how can this happen here? In God's name they used weapons for the massacre...."



"Holy War"

"We are chosen; we are one; we are frightened of no one ... and no one will win this war -- this is the way, this is the law."



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Confronting the Latter-Day Reich: When Insubordination is a Moral Duty

This was a man: Helmuth Hubner was executed on October 27, 1942, at the age of 16, by the Hitler regime. His "crime" -- for which he was excommunicated from the Mormon Church -- was circulating anti-Reich leaflets with the help of two young friends.

One of the noblest moral examples I was taught as youngster was that of an insubordinate officer in the Missouri Militia.

Principled insubordination: Alexander William "Will" Doniphan, seen in this primitive portrait, refused to carry out the execution of a civilian convicted of being an "unlawful enemy combatant" by a military tribunal in Missouri.

Alexander William Doniphan served under Maj. Gen. Samuel D. Lucas during Missouri's “Mormon War” of 1838. The conflict was a grace note (perhaps “graceless” note would be a better description) to decades of bloodshed. (By the end of the War Between the States," "Missouri" was a proverb alluding to the bestial violence of unrestricted guerrilla warfare.) The Missouri civil war grew out of an irreconcilable cultural dissonance between the Mormon settlers – who arrived in Jackson County in 1831 and announced that God had given them the land to build “Zion” -- and the state's established settlers.

(The most comprehensive, even-handed, and nuanced treatment of this conflict, in my view, is Stephen LeSeur's book The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri.)

By 1838, following numerous incidents of mob violence and persecution, some Mormon leaders organized a covert force commonly called the “Danites,” an oath-bound proto-terrorist group intended to plunder the church's enemies and intimidate its internal dissenters. This followed a July 4 oration (.pdf) by Sidney Rigdon, the Mormon Church's second-in-command, in which he spoke of a “war of extermination” between the Mormons and their enemies (including internal dissenters).

Over the next several months the conflict waxed bloody, with the Mormons getting the worst of it -- particularly in the abominable mass murder committed at Haun's Mill. That atrocity followed the Mormon attack on Missouri militiamen at Crooked River, which prompted Governor Lilburn Boggs to issue an executive order designating the Mormon population en toto as (in effect) unlawful enemy combatants to be “exterminated or driven from the state.”

After the massacre at Haun's Mill, which demonstrated that literal extermination of the Mormons was an acute possibility, Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith and his top associates were forced to surrender to the state militia at the town of Far West. They were arrested, run through a burlesque of a trial under Maj. Gen Gen. Lucas, and sentenced to be shot at dawn.

Lucas issued a written order to Colonel Doniphan commanding him to carry out the execution:

"Sir: You will take Joseph Smith and the other prisoners into the public square at Far West, and shoot them at 9 o'clock tomorrow morning."

Doniphan, to his eternal credit, refused the order and more or less gave Lucas anatomically explicit instructions regarding its proper disposal.

"It is cold-blooded murder,” Doniphan wrote to Lucas. “I will not obey your order. My brigade shall march for Liberty [Missouri] tomorrow morning, at 8 o'clock; and if you execute these men, I will hold you responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me God!"

Consider how this situation – additional relevant details of which I'll share – appears today, in the sixth year of an open-ended “war on terrorism”:

Joseph Smith, as the civilian leader of an armed insurgency, had been arrested and tried by a military commission in the midst of a literal war. His closest aide had threatened to “exterminate” those who didn't belong to his sect; his movement included an oath-bound, violent secret society, some members of which had killed state militiamen. And defectors from Smith's movement had testified, under oath, that Smith had promised “he would yet tread down his enemies, and walk over their dead bodies; and if he was not let alone, he would be a second Mohammed to this generation, and that he would make it one gore of blood from the Rocky mountains to the Atlantic ocean; that, like Mohammed, [his] motto in treating for peace was `the [Koran] or the Sword.'”

Alexander Doniphan, by contemporary conservative sensibilities, would have to be considered a traitor for insisting that the sectarian extremist named Joseph Smith was entitled to due process of law, rather than being summarily executed after a perfunctory trial before a military commission.

As a youngster raised in a Mormon home, I was taught to revere Doniphan as a man of principle – not just because he had saved Joseph Smith's life (or at least deferred his death for nearly six years), but because he defended the rule of law at considerable risk to himself. I hold that view now as an adult who has left Mormonism and – much more importantly – come to trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation.

My opinion of Doniphan has been shared by others outside the Mormon faith, among them the producers of the television serial based on Profiles in Courage, adapted from the book of the same title ghost-written for John F. Kennedy by Theodore Sorenson.

I have no reason to doubt that Doniphan's story was well known to Jay Bybee, Timothy C. Flanigan, and Kyle Sampson – all of whom are Mormon attorneys who served in key positions under George W. Bush, and all of whom played critical roles in the creation of a Leader State in which the rule of law is subordinate to the will of The Decider.

Jay Bybee, as I've pointed out elsewhere, signed the notorious 2002 torture brief commonly called the “Yoo Memorandum” after its chief author, John C. Yoo – proponent of totalitarian presidential power and defender of the president's supposed right to order the sexual mutilation of innocent children ( children as innocent as those murdered and mutilated at Haun's Mill, Mr. Bybee). After putting his imprimatur on a memo claiming broad discretionary power on the part of the president, and his designated agents, to commit acts of torture and even homicide, Bybee was rewarded with a post as a federal appellate judge.

Timothy E. Flanigan, who served both Bushes, was one of the Republican litigators deployed to Florida just hours after the Bush-Gore deadlock was announced in November 2000. Appointed as a deputy to Alberto Gonzalez when the latter was Chief White House Counsel, Flanigan was reportedly the first to propose the creation of “military commissions” for accused terrorists (military commissions like the one that ordered Joseph Smith's execution, Mr. Flanigan).

“Military commissions, [Flanigan] thought, would give the government wide latitude to hold, interrogate, and prosecute the sort of suspects who might be silenced by lawyers in criminal courts,” reported the New York Times on October 24, 2004. More importantly: “[The commissions] would put the control over prosecutions squarely in the hands of the president. To act pre-emptively against al-Qaeda, the authorities would need information that defense lawyers and due-process rules would discourage suspects from giving up. Flanigan framed the choice starkly: `Are we going to go with a system that is really guaranteed to prevent us from getting information in every case or are we going to go another route?'”

In defiance of his oath to uphold the Constitution – which, as a Mormon, he was taught was a divinely inspired document – Flanigan helped the Bush regime find “another route,” albeit one well-trod by its predecessors in Moscow, Baghdad, and Berlin.

(Flanigan, incidentally, would likely be Alberto Gonzalez's deputy AG today were it not for his connections to Jack Abramoff.)

A bespectacled young man of unexceptional stature, Kyle Sampson is saddled with an ironic surname. But his unprepossessing appearance belies his ambition and cynicism he revealed by facilitating the White House scheme to purge from the ranks of federal prosecutors those US Attorneys deemed inadequately loyal to The Decider and insufficiently submissive to his will. This plan would exploit a provision in the updated version of the so-called Patriot Act permitting the Attorney General to replace US Attorneys without Senate approval.

Prior to his resignation two days ago, Sampson was chief of staff for Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. Last December 7, as recently revealed e-mails document, Sampson composed a “Plan for Replacing Certain United States Attorneys,” which instructed Justice Department officials in how to evaluate prosecutors and how to justify the firing of those deemed unsatisfactory.

The criteria outlined by Sampson (or by Bush and Gonzalez by way of Sampson) included a positive answer to the question of whether a given prosecutor had “exhibited loyalty to the president and attorney general.” That “loyalty,” it is now clear, would be displayed by using prosecutorial power in the service of Republican partisan interests by pursuing politically useful investigations of Democratic politicians (or by refraining from pursuing Republicans – the supposed offense that led to the termination of Carol C. Lam).

In a section entitled “Prepare to Withstand Political Upheaval,” Sampson provided talking points to placate elected representatives and others who would be angered by the summary and unjust termination of the federal prosecutors.

As Paul Craig Roberts and others have pointed out, federal prosecutors have become a besetting plague to our nation. Had the Bush White House implemented its original plan and fired the entire lot of them, our nation would be better off – provided that they were not replaced. But the objective was to make the entire prosecutor corp an instrument of The Decider's will and a partisan asset of the Republican Party – and Sampson eagerly abetted that criminal undertaking.

Bybee, Flanigan, and Sampson each had opportunities to emulate Alexander Doniphan's admirable example: They could have refused to participate in the Bush Regime's assault on the rule of law, due process, and separation of powers; they could have acted as whistleblowers; they should have been true to their constitutional oath.

Because the leader they served was destroying the rule of law, insubordination was a moral duty. Instead, they consecrated their time and talents to the building up of the Leader State and the establishment of a latter-day Reich.

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