FireTag, I’d love to hear of a scholarly treatment of The Dark Knight. I thought it was a really amazing movie, and it did make you think.

Olive, it is in high stress situations where I am always concerned about whether I am getting Heavenly Father’s guidance, or am I listening to my own emotions and fears. That’s what makes prayer so hard to discern. As I understand it, Will Bagley disputes Juanita Brook’s contention that the Fanchers were making threats. I haven’t read Bagley’s book yet, but that is one point of dispute.

To me it seems like it was the perfect storm…if there hadn’t been threats from the US, if there had been more food to go around, if they hadn’t been already persecuted, if JS hadn’t been killed, etc…then perhaps MM never would’ve happened. In high stress situations even the best of men can make bad choices driven by emotions and fears.

I appreciate the Dark Knight analogy. I wanted to link to a scholarly treatment of some of the moral issues raised by the movie that you caught as relevant to this discussion, but I haven’t found the link yet. This is one of the deepest superhero myth movies ever made, and there are thousands of references burying the article I’m trying to find.

I thought that the movie had its strengths, though. The massacre itself was portrayed the way I understand it happened in the history books. As well, there was a brief scene from a temple ceremony — which caught me totally off-guard and made me really uncomfortable since I was watching it with my husband — and at the time I dismissed it as anti-Mormon rubbish because at the time I wasn’t aware of the washing and annointing in big vats of water, nor the blood oath, which the characters partially recited in full temple dress. It all happened so fast and was portrayed in a sort of hazy fashion, so it added to the eeriness of the whole thing. I was freaked out by it myself.

So I wouldn’t recommend SD to anyone and I hated the fictitious storyline. And like I said, the conclusions it makes about BY’s involvement are not historically accurate based on the evidence we have today. But I think it actually did a decent job of capturing the atmosphere that led up to the massacre and the massacre itself — the most troubling, perhaps, being the temple ceremony at the time.

I respect those who are truly conscientious objectors. I admit there is a part of me that wonders if some people claim conscientious objector status with less than honest intentions. I think some people join the military only wanting to reap the benefits (pay for education, extra money). Perhaps that is judgmental, but I think there are some who fit that description.

Yes, FireTag, I think it is immoral not to warn the settlers of the ruse. This is a combination of military orders and religious orders–a truly dangerous combination. If we take the religious implications away for a minute and view this as a military order (which it apparently was–Lee claims to have read a written order), then secrecy is paramount. In war, there are often terrible choices. Betraying your leaders can not only get yourself killed, but fellow soldiers.

I just watched Batman: The Dark Knight a week or two ago. There’s a line about a hero becoming a villain, and comparisons to the Emporer of Rome becoming a dictator when needed. Michael Caine talks about a madman robber in Burma that stole for fun (and the Joker seems to imitate as well.) Batman asks how they stopped the madman, and Caine replies that they burned down the whole forest.

Batman has opportunities to kill the Joker and end the suffering, but he keeps trying to show that laws are important, and we shouldn’t take matters into our own hands. I love the conflicts in the movie, because the good guys aren’t perfectly good, and have to make terrible choices. Joker’s social experiment to see if people will kill the people on the other ferry to save our own lives was a diabolical choice.

Anyway, my point is that people like Tom Pierce were faced with awful decisions: lose your own life to save unruly emigrants, or exact some revenge for all the sufferings your people have been through? We all know the answer, but I’d have a hard time keeping my composure if I heard people bragging about killing Mormons. Perhaps I wouldn’t want to kill them, but I wouldn’t want to save them either.

I decided FOR ME, refusing to fight would make it rational for others to kill the innocent (as happened when the US withdrew) and that I would then be complicit in those deaths. Therefore I could not call myself a conscientious objector. Others come out on the opposite side of the calculation and I can sincerely respect their beliefs. I’m glad we don’t have the draft anymore and hope we never go back to it, but I hope everyone who considers a military career or who votes for a national government considers issues of war and peace with deep prayer. There is so much that goes on hidden in the weeds that we are forced to trust leaders to some extent, so we’d better not mess up THAT decision.

I’d like to raise another point: if participation in MMM was immoral, wouldn’t it also be immoral to fail to warn the settlers of the ruse while they still had weapons and were not exposed?

It raises a whole lot of questions for me, but this is the part that is most worrisome:

“The Mormon teaching of unquestioning obedience to authority, added to the strict military law then in force in the territory, would, in the eyes of their neighbors, relieve the men in the ranks of responsibility.”

My friend mormongandhi brought something interesting to my attention, which I will paste here:

“While looking through old bookmarked links, I came across BKP’s famous conference address “Military Service in Vietnam, Not a Conscientious Objector”. There is significance to this address, as it exhorts LDS to not oppose a war draft, should there ever be one. In addition, it was given on 05 April 1968, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. MLK was an avid critic of the Vietnam War. Here is the quote in question from BKPs address:

“Though all the issues of the conflict are anything but clear, the matter of citizenship responsibility is perfectly clear. Our brethren, we know something of what you face and sense, something of what you feel. I have worn the uniform of my native land in the time of total conflict. I have smelled the stench of human dead and wept tears for slaughtered comrades. I have climbed amid the rubble of ravaged cities and contemplated in horror the ashes of a civilization sacrificed to Moloch; yet knowing this, with the issues as they are, were I called again to military service, I could not conscientiously object!”

I don’t think we can underestimate the pressure that these men (who felt conflicted about MMM but participated anyways) felt, but at the same time it just doesn’t feel right to me to use religious cohercion in matters of something so serious as taking innocent lives — whether it be MMM or Vietnam, or wherever else. Unfortunately, Mormon culture doesn’t seem to have much regard for conscientious objectors.

Also, the story of Tom Pierce reminds me of the fictional family in September Dawn, which I felt was waaaaay over the top when I saw the movie. But there are perhaps some similarities that we’d rather weren’t true.