OpEds: Flim Flam Substitutes for Debate

By Stephen Lendman

The slickest and most powerful snake oil salesman in the world today.

So-called presidential debates are well-rehearsed, prescripted theater. Theater of the absurd best describes them. Election outcomes aren’t influenced. They don’t edify. They insult. Wednesday night was no exception.  Even some media scoundrels were underwhelmed. At least one was honest as far as his editors let him. London Guardian contributor Charles Ferguson headlined “America’s duopoly of money in politics and manipulation of public opinion,” saying:

“Behind the divisiveness lies a deeper bipartisan consensus in which donors own democracy and there are no votes (for) reform.”

“Presidential campaigns aren’t where you look for honest, serious” policy discussions. Candidates prefer “slogans.” They steer clear of controversy.

“(S)ometimes, as with George W. Bush, we also get a moron.” This election is different. We’re “explicitly seeing the effects of America’s new political duopoly” up close and personal.

It’s not new. At most it’s repackaged to look that way, but not to observers who know how things in America work.

Obama and Romney “completely (avoided or remained) dishonest about (key) economic issues.” The bizarre was also evident. A Republican attacked a Democrat on unemployment. He, in turn, said give us more time. We’ll fix things. Obama’s first term was spent wrecking them. Neither candidate plans undoing decades of damage.

Both know the score but won’t say so. They also claim they’ll “reform Washington.” Neither means it.

They avoided serious issues begging for discussion. They include “causes of the financial crisis; the lack of prosecution of banks and bankers; sharply rising inequality in educational opportunity, income and wealth (disparity)….the impact of industrialized food on” health and skyrocketing food and healthcare costs; budget deficits and national debt; disappearing jobs not being replaced, and war and peace.

How can what’s most important be omitted? How can either candidate claim he debated? Politics and honesty are mirror opposites. Both candidates ignore what most needs addressing.  Obama “can win because he’s somewhat less bad, somewhat less utterly bankrupt, than the other guy. Welcome to America’s new and improved two-party system.” It’s the same one, just more corrupt.

Salon editor at large Joan Walsh [a regular liberal, ignoring the lies] said Obama was “subdued, deferential, (and) over-prepared.” Romney shook his “(E)tch-a-Sketch and lied his way through the entire debate with no challenge from moderator Jim Lehrer” or Obama.

The New York Times headlined “An Unhelpful Debate,” saying:

Wednesday night “sunk into an unenlightening recitation of tired talking points and mendacity.” Voters perhaps walked away saying a pox on both candidates.

Romney avoided discussing anti-populist policies he endorses. Obama failed to challenge the worst about him. He’s got plenty of his own crosses to bear.

Viewers weren’t helped by moderator Jim Lehrer’s pathetic performance. He never challenged either candidate on vital truths. Expect debates two and three to be painful repetitions of Wednesday night. [The lack of challenge from Lehrer —an establishmentarian to the hilt—fails to impress us, as he’s as much a media scoundrel as the rest, only perhaps more convinced of his nonexistent superiority.—Eds]

Why anyone bothers to watch shows the deplorable state of the US electorate. Most are uninformed, out of touch, and indifferent.

A Chicago Tribune editorial said Obama “skipped this debate. (He) slumped his shoulders, smiled mostly to himself, and for some reason kept staring mostly down.” Hope and change were gone. They never were there in the first place.

USA Today said both candidates “avoid(ed) reality in debate.” Key issues were unexamined.

The Washington Post said they “evaded the hard truths.” Canned talking points substituted. It didn’t surprise. It’s always that way.

Both candidates “studiously maintained the evasions and omissions at the heart of their policies. The debate was wonky (but not) honest.” Issues most important weren’t discussed.

Obama and Romney “were strikingly complicit in failing to confront the magnitude of the fiscal challenge the winner will face immediately. The overriding feature of the debate was a tacit conspiracy of avoidance.”

Russia Today (RT) called the evening “tepid.” Arguments and accusations heard before were repeated. Same old, same old doesn’t wash.

Domestic issues were stressed. Slogans and one-liners substituted for solutions. “(M)any Americans may well be confused as to what exactly the differences are between the two candidates.”

They’re in lockstep on issues mattering most. Overall, barely a dime’s worth of difference separates them. Duopoly power allows little wiggle room. What it says goes.

Alternative parties are excluded. RT quoted Ralph Nader telling Time magazine:

America’s “duopoly has every conceivable way to exclude and depress and harass a third party. Whether it’s ballot access. Whether it’s harassing petitioners on the street. Whether it’s excluding them from debates. Whether it’s not polling them.”

“And with a two-party, winner-take-all electoral system, it’s easy to enforce all those. Unlike multi-party Western countries where you have proportional representation, the voters (in America) know that if you get 10 per cent of the vote, you don’t get anything. Whereas in Germany, you get 10 per cent of the parliament.”

So voters say, ‘Let’s just vote for the least worst.” Half the electorate disses both sides and opts out.

Historian Gerald Horne told RT US voters lack alternatives. Party platforms and debates “exclude the critiques of the present dilemmas and problems that (American) people face, for example rising poverty, rising unemployment et cetera.”

Whether in office, campaigning or debating, rhetoric substitutes for commitment. The best from Obama was saying vote for me and I’ll try harder.

Press TV called his Wednesday night performance “weak.” Despite getting super-rich as a corporate predator, Romney ate his lunch. He dissed Obama’s economic policies.

They’re “not working. The proof of that is 23 million people out of work. The proof of that is 1 out of 6 people in poverty. (Wrong: one in two are or bordering on it according to Census data.) The proof of that is we’ve gone from 32 million on food stamps to 47 million on food stamps. The proof of that is that 50 percent of college graduates this year can’t find work.”

It’s hard arguing with truths. Too bad most others were excluded. Not a word on imperial lawlessness, permanent wars, $1.5 trillion spent annually on defense, everything related to it, homeland security, intelligence, and black budgets as far as the eye can see with estimates only on what’s in them.

What about banker bailouts, tens of billions in other corporate handouts, out-of-control corruption, a sham electoral process, and growing poverty at Great Depression levels!

What about past and planned domestic spending cuts when stimulus is urgently needed! What about tax cuts for corporations and rich elites when vital people needs go begging! What about bipartisan governance making America no fit place to live in and a threat to world peace!

What about holding politicians accountable when they lie and betray constituents that elected them! What about addressing issues mattering most and changing things! What about doing the right thing instead of same old, same old!

Priorities not discussed include ending imperial wars, downsizing America’s military, stimulating economic growth and creating jobs, holding criminal bankers and other corporate crooks accountable, addressing Depression level unemployment, homelessness, hunger, poverty, and overall human need no free society should tolerate.

What about fixing America’s broken infrastructure instead of waging wars and destroying it in one country after another! What about prioritizing populism instead of slash and burn budget cuts affecting ordinary people most!

What about giving government of, by, and for the people real meaning! What about doing what never was done before! What about making America beautiful instead of being hated for threatening humanity!

Don’t expect any of the above from Republicans and Democrats. Blackguards, scoundrels, scalawags, and menaces best describe them. Expect more of the same or worse post-election.

It doesn’t matter who wins. It’s the American way. It’s up to ordinary people to change things. They have to do it on their own. It won’t happen any other way.

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour   

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Yes, audiences applaud us. But do you?If yes, then buy us a beer. The wingnuts are falling over each other to make donations…to their causes. We, on the other hand, take our left media—the only media that speak for us— for granted. Don’t join that parade, and give today. Every dollar counts.
Use the DONATE button below or on the sidebar. And do the right thing. Even once a year.

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

 

//



Jay-Z’s “We Need Less Government” Quip Proves Harry Belafonte Right: He’s A Selfish Loon

A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Belafonte: an exemplary life.

Back in August, [3] actor, singer and longtime humanitarian activist Harry Belafonte took Jay-Z, Beyonce and current black celebrities to task, declaring that they were selfish, lacking the vision of a better world or the will to help make it happen.

Beyonce’s staff of publicists were quick to reply with a list of tax deductible and officially approved charities that she funds. But to tell the truth, that kind of giving, the kind that often combines public charity, public relations and big tax advantages in roughly equal parts is pretty much an accounting and PR requirement for celebrity actors and athletes. It works like this — they’re going to pay taxes anyhow, at much higher rates than with so-called “investment income.” Divert that tax money into deductible charities, and it’s cash they would have paid out anyhow, but now it’s combined with photo opportunities and human interest stories showcasing their personal struggles and bolstering their brand, making them more money. That’s why her answer was no answer at all, it really proved what Belafonte said.

Beyonce and hubby Jay-Z are frequent guests at the White House. But Belafonte, and before him Paul Robeson went walking and talking among those organizing and demonstrating outside the White House, against big business, against the kind of established authority and privilege the Jay-Z’s and Beyonce’s of this generation are so delighted to be seen with. Dr. Martin Luther King was almost an outlaw, universally reviled and denounced throughout the corporate media the final year of his life, after he denounced the Vietnam war and linked the struggles against empire and economic injustice to that against racism. Harry Belafonte’s work with him, and Paul Robeson’s association with labor organizers and activists him didn’t carry tax advantages for either of them. They walked picket lines outside the courthouses and jails where activists were tried and imprisoned. They solicited their peers to fund strategy meetings, legal expenses for movement activists. Almost none of that was tax deductible, and much of it wasn’t public knowledge for years afterward.

That meant they did it out of selfless vision and love, and out of their own pockets, not to build their brands, lower their taxes or bolster their bank accounts. It cost Belafonte lots of money. It cost Muhammad Ali a year in prison. It cost Paul Robeson [4] his career. Look it up.

Back in the nineties somebody publicly told Michael Jordan that Nike paid him more than all its Vietnamese shoe factory workers put together. Michael said he’d “see about that” sometime soon but he and his publicists never mentioned it again. That was a long long decline from the unselfish humanitarian spirit of the Belefonte generation.

And the decline continues. Last week Jay-Z was asked at the opening of Barclays in New York about his own political aspirations. “I don’t even like the word politics, [5]” the rapper said. “It implies something underhanded. I think we need less government.”

This is a new low, perhaps two new lows.

First, Jay-Z cannot possibly be that stupid. The word politics does not imply anything. Politics are the processes fair and unfair, just and unjust that we humans use to conduct our collective affairs for the good or otherwise. When poor people mystify “politics” as something inscrutable and irrelevant to those who hunger and thirst for justice they indulge in escapism. When rich people do it they engage in misdirection.

Secondly, Jay-Z’s “we need less government” quip has long been a right wing staple, a codespeak slogan of the very rich and privileged who have in fact captured the government, but only object to “big government” when it benefits little people.

It’s proof positive that Harry Belafonte was right about Jay-Z and Beyonce. It’s time to look somewhere else for selfless visionaries among this generation’s celebrities.

For Black Agenda Radio I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com [6].

http://traffic.libsyn.com/blackagendareport/20121003_bd_jay-z_we_need_less_govt.mp3
[7]
ba radio commentary
Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/jay-zs-%E2%80%9Cwe-need-less-government%E2%80%9D-quip-proves-harry-belafonte-right-hes-selfish-loon

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Yes, audiences applaud us. But do you?If yes, then buy us a beer. The wingnuts are falling over each other to make donations…to their causes. We, on the other hand, take our left media—the only media that speak for us— for granted. Don’t join that parade, and give today. Every dollar counts.
Use the DONATE button below or on the sidebar. And do the right thing. Even once a year.

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

 

//



Apostasy Annals: Left to Right & Wrong Both Ways

ANTECHAMBER

Mr. Genovese in 1995.

As the New York Times put it:

Eugene D. Genovese (1930-1982), a prizewinning historian who challenged conventional thinking on slavery in the American South by stressing its paternalism as he traveled a personal intellectual journey from Marxism to conservative Catholicism, died on Wednesday at his home in Atlanta. He was 82. His friend William J. Hungeling confirmed the death without giving a cause.  Mr. Genovese enthusiastically melded politics and academia even as his politics changed. A member of the Communist Party at 15, he had remained firmly on the left when, in 1965, speaking to students, he inflamed politicians by saying he would welcome a Vietcong victory in the Vietnam War.  By the 1980s, however, he had rejected Communism and liberal politics. In 1998 he helped form the Historical Society to combat what he saw as the “totalitarian assault” of political correctness and ideologically tinged research. He also came to support conservative Republicans like Pat Buchanan.

Intellectual Affairs
Left to Right & Wrong Both Ways
By Scott McLemee

An ancient and corny joke of the American left tells of a comrade who was surprised to learn that the German radical theorist Kautsky’s first name was Karl and not, in fact, “Renegade.” He’d seen Lenin’s polemical booklet The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky but only just gotten around to reading it.

Eavesdropping on some young Marxist academics via Facebook in the week following the historian Eugene Genovese’s death on September 26, I’ve come to suspect that there is a pamphlet out there somewhere about the Renegade Genovese. Lots of people have made the trek from the left to the right over the past couple of centuries, of course, but no major American intellectual of as much substance has, in recent memory, apart from Genovese. People may throw out a couple of names to challenge this statement, but the operative term here is “substance.” Genovese published landmark studies like Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) and – with the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, his wife — Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism, not score-settling memoirs and suchlike.

As for the term “renegade,” well… The author of the most influential body of Marxist historiography in the United States from the past half-century turned into one more curmudgeon denouncing “the race, class, gender swindle.” And at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee, no less. The scholar who did path-breaking work on the political culture of the antebellum South — developing a Gramscian analysis of how slaves and masters understood one another, at a time when Gramsci himself was little more than an intriguing rumor within the American left – ended up referring to the events of 1861-65 as “the War of Southern Independence.”

Harsher words might apply, but “renegade” will do.

He is listed as “Genovese, Gene” in the index to the great British historian’s Eric Hobsbawm’s autobiography Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (2002). Actually, now I have to change that to “the late, great British historian” Hobsbawm, rather: he died on October 1.

The two of them belonged to an extremely small and now virtually extinct species: the cohort of left-wing intellectuals who pledged their allegiance to the Soviet Union and other so-called “socialist” countries, right up to that system’s very end. How they managed to exhibit such critical intelligence in their scholarship and so little in their politics is an enigma defying rational explanation. But they did: Hobsbawm remained a dues-paying member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until it closed up shop in 1991.

The case of Genovese is a little more complicated. He was expelled from the American CP in 1950, at the age of 20, but remained close to its politics long after that. In the mid-1960s, as a professor of history at Rutgers University, he declared his enthusiasm for a Vietcong victory. It angered Richard Nixon at the time, and I recall it being mentioned with horror by conservatives well into the 1980s. What really took the cake was that he’d become the president of the Organization of American Historians in 1978-79. Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover had to be spinning in their graves.

When such a sinner repents, the angels do a dance. With Eric Hobsbawm, they didn’t have much occasion to celebrate. Though he wrote off the Russian Revolution and all that followed in its wake as more or less regrettable when not utterly disastrous, he didn’t treat the movement he’d supported as a God that failed. He could accept the mixture of noble spirits and outright thugs, of democratic impulses and dictatorial consequences, that made up the history he’d played a small part in; he exhibited no need to make either excuses or accusations.

Genovese followed a different course, as shown in  in the landmark statement of his change in political outlook, an article called  “The Question” that appeared in the social-democratic journal Dissent in 1994. The title referred to the challenge of one disillusioned communist to another: “What did you know and when did you know it?” Genovese never got around to answering that question about himself, oddly enough. But he was anything but reluctant  He was much less reluctant about accusing more or less everybody who’d ever identified as a leftist or a progressive of systematically avoiding criticism of the Soviets. He kept saying that “we” had condoned this or that atrocity, or were complicit with one bloodbath or another, but in his hands “we” was a very strange pronoun, for some reason meaning chiefly meaning “you.”

What made it all even odder was that Genovese mentioned, almost in passing, that he’d clung to his support for Communism “to the bitter end.” If decades of fellow-traveling showed a failure of political judgment, “The Question” was no sign of improvement. His ferocious condemnation seemed to indicate that everyone from really aggressive vegans to Pol Pot belonged to one big network of knowing and premeditated evil. You hear that on talk radio all the time, but never from a winner of the Bancroft Prize for American history. Or almost never.

Recognizing that Genovese’s “open letter to the left [was] intended to provoke,” Dissent’s editors “circulated it to people likely to be provoked” and published their responses, and Genovese’s reply, in later issues. The whole exchange is available in PDF here.

Unfortunately it did not occur to the editors to solicit a response from either Phyllis or Julius Jacobson, the founders of New Politics, a small journal of the anti-Stalinist left, which has somehow managed to stay afloat since their deaths in recent years. (Full disclosure: I’m on its editorial board.) They read “The Question” as soon as it came out. If my memory can be trusted, one or the other of them (possibly both: they finished each other’s sentences) called it “blockheaded.” Coming as it did from septuagenarian Trotskyists, “blockheaded” was a temperate remark.

But Julius, at least, had more to say. He’d served as campus organizer for the Young Socialist League at Brooklyn College in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, when Genovese was there. They crossed paths – how could they not? – and Julius remembered him as a worthy opponent. Genovese could defend the twists and turns in Stalin’s policies with far more skill than most CP members and supporters, whose grasp of their movement’s history and doctrine boiled down to the sentiment that the Soviet Union was, gosh, just swell.

Julius was not prone to losing debates, but it’s clear that these ideological boxing matches went into overtime. Picturing the young Genovese in battle, I find the expression “more Stalinist than Stalin” comes to mind. But that’s only part of it. He was also — what’s much rarer, and virtually paradoxical — an independent Stalinist. He brought intelligent cynicism, rather than muddled faith, to making his arguments. An article by the American historian Christopher Phelps demonstrates that Genovese “knew full well and openly acknowledged the undemocratic nature and barbaric atrocities of the Communist states” but refused to “condemn their crimes unequivocally in his writings” and denounced anyone who did. “It serves no purpose,” Genovese wrote, “to pretend that `innocent’ — personally inoffensive and politically neutral — people should be spared” from revolutionary violence. (Phelps was a graduate student when he published the commentary in 1994. Today he teaches in the American and Canadian Studies program at the University of Nottingham.)

Genovese wasn’t a political hack; his opinions had the veneer of serious thought, thanks in no small part to the fact that he also became an extremely cogent analyst of the history of American slavery.  When he no longer had a tyranny to support, he “discovered” how complicit others had been, and began warning the world about the incipient totalitarianism of multiculturalism. His studies of the intellectual life of the slaveholding class began to show ever more evident sympathy for them – a point discussed some years ago in “Right Church, Wrong Pew: Eugene Genovese & Southern Conservatism,” an article by Alex Lichtenstein, an associate professor of history at Indiana University, which I highly recommend. Genovese’s scholarship has been influential for generations, and it will survive, but anyone in search of political wisdom or a moral compass should probably look elsewhere.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/10/03/essay-death-eugene-genovese#ixzz28Ii79n55
Inside Higher Ed

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Yes, audiences applaud us. But do you?If yes, then buy us a beer. The wingnuts are falling over each other to make donations…to their causes. We, on the other hand, take our left media—the only media that speak for us— for granted. Don’t join that parade, and give today. Every dollar counts.
Use the DONATE button below or on the sidebar. And do the right thing. Even once a year.

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

 

//



Are American workers ready? Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky In Zurich (1886)

•

Do or did American workers have the necessary political preparation to support class struggles?
That remains the question.

Engels was not only a great radical activist and intellectual. He was the father of radical sociology.

Abstract



Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000.
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, December 28, 1886

My preface will of course turn entirely on the immense stride made by the American working man in the last ten months, and naturally also touch H.G. [Henry George] and his land scheme. But it cannot pretend to deal exhaustively with it. Nor do I think the time has come for that. It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat, than that it should start and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than “durch Schaden klug werden” [to learn by one’s own mistakes]. And for a whole large class, there is no other road, especially for a nation so eminently practical as the Americans.

The great thing is to get the working class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will soon find the right direction, and all who resist, H.G. or Powderly, will be left out in the cold with small sects of their own. Therefore I think also the K[nights] of L[abour] a most important factor in the movement which ought not to be pooh-poohed from without but to be revolutionised from within, and I consider that many of the Germans there have made a grievous mistake when they tried, in face of a mighty and glorious movement not of their creation, to make of their imported and not always understood theory a kind of alleinseligmachendes dogma and to keep aloof from any movement which did not accept that dogma. Our theory is not a dogma but the exposition of a process of evolution, and that process involves successive phases.

To expect that the Americans will start with the full consciousness of the theory worked out in older industrial countries is to expect the impossible. What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory –if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848–to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the original programme; they ought, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, to represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present. But above all give the movement time to consolidate, do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people’s throats things which at present they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn.

A million or two of workingmen’s votes next November for a bona fide workingmen’s party is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand votes for a doctrinally perfect platform. The very first attempt–soon to be made if the movement progresses–to consolidate the moving masses on a national basis will bring them all face to face, Georgites, K. of L., Trade Unionists, and all; and if our German friends by that time have learnt enough of the language of the country to go in for a discussion, then will be the time for them to criticise the views of the others and thus, by showing up the inconsistencies of the various standpoints, to bring them gradually to understand their own actual position, the position made for them by the correlation of capital and wage labour. But anything that might delay or prevent that national consolidation of the workingmen’s party–no matter what platform–I should consider a great mistake, and therefore I do not think the time has arrived to speak out fully and exhaustively either with regard to H.G. or the K. of L.

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Yes, audiences applaud us. But do you?If yes, then buy us a beer. The wingnuts are falling over each other to make donations…to their causes. We, on the other hand, take our left media—the only media that speak for us— for granted. Don’t join that parade, and give today. Every dollar counts.
Use the DONATE button below or on the sidebar. And do the right thing. Even once a year.

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

 

//



Mark Twain on the Mormons

Mark Twain says what he thinks of Joseph Smith

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the “elect” have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle—keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone, in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.

The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James’s translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel—half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern—which was about every sentence or two—he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as “exceeding sore,” “and it came to pass,” etc., and made things satisfactory again. “And it came to pass” was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.

The title-page reads as follows:

THE BOOK OF MORMON: AN ACCOUNT WRITTEN BY THE HAND OF MORMON, UPON PLATES TAKEN FROM THE PLATES OF NEPHI.

Wherefore it is an abridgment of the record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites; written to the Lamanites, who are a remnant of the House of Israel; and also to Jew and Gentile; written by way of commandment, and also by the spirit of prophecy and of revelation. Written and sealed up, and hid up unto the Lord, that they might not be destroyed; to come forth by the gift and power of God unto the interpretation thereof; sealed by the hand of Moroni, and hid up unto the Lord, to come forth in due time by the way of Gentile; the interpretation thereof by the gift of God. An abridgment taken from the Book of Ether also; which is a record of the people of Jared; who were scattered at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people when they were building a tower to get to Heaven.

“Hid up” is good. And so is “wherefore”—though why “wherefore”? Any other word would have answered as well—though—in truth it would not have sounded so Scriptural.

Next comes:

Some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything; but for me, when a man tells me that he has “seen the engravings which are upon the plates,” and not only that, but an angel was there at the time, and saw him see them, and probably took his receipt for it, I am very far on the road to conviction, no matter whether I ever heard of that man before or not, and even if I do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either.

Next is this:

The Mormon Bible consists of fifteen “books”—being the books of Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, Mosiah, Zeniff, Alma, Helaman, Ether, Moroni, two “books” of Mormon, and three of Nephi.

In the first book of Nephi is a plagiarism of the Old Testament, which gives an account of the exodus from Jerusalem of the “children of Lehi”; and it goes on to tell of their wanderings in the wilderness, during eight years, and their supernatural protection by one of their number, a party by the name of Nephi. They finally reached the land of “Bountiful,” and camped by the sea. After they had remained there “for the space of many days”—which is more Scriptural than definite—Nephi was commanded from on high to build a ship wherein to “carry the people across the waters.” He travestied Noah’s ark—but he obeyed orders in the matter of the plan. He finished the ship in a single day, while his brethren stood by and made fun of it—and of him, too—”saying, our brother is a fool, for he thinketh that he can build a ship.” They did not wait for the timbers to dry, but the whole tribe or nation sailed the next day. Then a bit of genuine nature cropped out, and is revealed by outspoken Nephi with Scriptural frankness—they all got on a spree! They, “and also their wives, began to make themselves merry, insomuch that they began to dance, and to sing, and to speak with much rudeness; yea, they were lifted up unto exceeding rudeness.”

Nephi tried to stop these scandalous proceedings; but they tied him neck and heels, and went on with their lark. But observe how Nephi the prophet circumvented them by the aid of the invisible powers:

And it came to pass that after they had bound me, insomuch that I could not move, the compass, which had been prepared of the Lord, did cease to work; wherefore, they knew not whither they should steer the ship, insomuch that there arose a great storm, yea, a great and terrible tempest, and we were driven back upon the waters for the space of three days; and they began to be frightened exceedingly, lest they should be drowned in the sea; nevertheless they did not loose me. And on the fourth day, which we had been driven back, the tempest began to be exceeding sore. And it came to pass that we were about to be swallowed up in the depths of the sea.

Then they untied him.

And it came to pass after they had loosed me, behold, I took the compass, and it did work whither I desired it. And it came to pass that I prayed unto the Lord; and after I had prayed, the winds did cease, and the storm did cease, and there was a great calm.

Equipped with their compass, these ancients appear to have had the advantage of Noah. Their voyage was toward a “promised land”—the only name they give it. They reached it in safety. Polygamy is a recent feature in the Mormon religion, and was added by Brigham Young after Joseph Smith’s death. Before that, it was regarded as an “abomination.” This verse from the Mormon Bible occurs in Chapter II. of the book of Jacob:

For behold, thus saith the Lord, this people begin to wax in iniquity; they understand not the Scriptures; for they seek to excuse themselves in committing whoredoms, because of the things which were written concerning David, and Solomon his son. Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord; wherefore, thus saith the Lord, I have led this people forth out of the land of Jerusalem, by the power of mine arm, that I might raise up unto me a righteous branch from the fruit of the loins of Joseph. Wherefore, I the Lord God, will no suffer that this people shall do like unto them of old.

However, the project failed—or at least the modern Mormon end of it—for Brigham “suffers” it. This verse is from the same chapter:

Behold, the Lamanites your brethren, whom ye hate, because of their filthiness and the cursings which hath come upon their skins, are more righteous than you; for they have not forgotten the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto our fathers, that they should have, save it were one wife; and concubines they should have none.

The following verse (from Chapter IX. of the Book of Nephi) appears to contain information not familiar to everybody:
And now it came to pass that when Jesus had ascended into heaven, the multitude did disperse, and every man did take his wife and his children, and did return to his own home.

And it came to pass that on the morrow, when the multitude was gathered together, behold, Nephi and his brother whom he had raised from the dead, whose name was Timothy, and also his son, whose name was Jonas, and also Mathoni, and Mathonihah, his brother, and Kumen, and Kumenenhi, and Jeremiah, and Shemnon, and Jonas, and Zedekiah, and Isaiah; now these were the names of the disciples whom Jesus had chosen.

In order that the reader may observe how much more grandeur and picturesqueness (as seen by these Mormon twelve) accompanied on of the tenderest episodes in the life of our Saviour than other eyes seem to have been aware of, I quote the following from the same “book”—Nephi:

And it came to pass that Jesus spake unto them, and bade them arise. And they arose from the earth, and He said unto them, Blessed are ye because of your faith. And now behold, My joy is full. And when He had said these words, He wept, and the multitude bear record of it, and He took their little children, one by one, and blessed them, and prayed unto the Father for them. And when He had done this He wept again, and He spake unto the multitude, and saith unto them, Behold your little ones. And as they looked to behold, they cast their eyes toward heaven, and they saw the heavens open, and they saw angels descending out of heaven as it were, in the midst of fire; and they came down and encircled those little ones about, and they were encircled about with fire; and the angels did minister unto them, and the multitude did see and hear and bear record; and they know that their record is true, for they all of them did see and hear, every man for himself; and they were in number about two thousand and five hundred souls; and they did consist of men, women, and children.

And what else would they be likely to consist of?

The Book of Ether is an incomprehensible medley of if “history,” much of it relating to battles and sieges among peoples whom the reader has possibly never heard of; and who inhabited a country which is not set down in the geography. These was a King with the remarkable name of Coriantumr,^^ and he warred with Shared, and Lib, and Shiz, and others, in the “plains of Heshlon”; and the “valley of Gilgal”; and the “wilderness of Akish”; and the “land of Moran”; and the “plains of Agosh”; and “Ogath,” and “Ramah,” and the “land of Corihor,” and the “hill Comnor,” by “the waters of Ripliancum,” etc., etc., etc. “And it came to pass,” after a deal of fighting, that Coriantumr, upon making calculation of his losses, found that “there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and their children”—say 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 in all—”and he began to sorrow in his heart.” Unquestionably it was time. So he wrote to Shiz, asking a cessation of hostilities, and offering to give up his kingdom to save his people. Shiz declined, except upon condition that Coriantumr would come and let him cut his head off first—a thing which Coriantumr would not do. Then there was more fighting for a season; then four years were devoted to gathering the forces for a final struggle—after which ensued a battle, which, I take it, is the most remarkable set forth in history,—except, perhaps, that of the Kilkenny cats, which it resembles in some respects. This is the account of the gathering and the battle:

7. And it came to pass that they did gather together all the people, upon all the face of the land, who had not been slain, save it was Ether. And it came to pass that Ether did behold all the doings of the people; and he beheld that the people who were for Coriantumr, were gathered together to the army of Coriantumr; and the people who were for Shiz, were gathered together to the army of Shiz; wherefore they were for the space of four years gathering together the people, that they might get all who were upon the face of the land, and that they might receive all the strength which it was possible that they could receive. And it came to pass that when they were all gathered together, every one to the army which he would, with their wives and their children; both men, women, and children being armed with weapons of war, having shields, and breast-plates, and head-plates, and being clothed after the manner of war, they did march forth one against another, to battle; and they fought all that day, and conquered not. And it came to pass that when it was night they were weary, and retired to their camps; and after they had retired to their camps, they took up a howling and a lamentation for the loss of the slain of their people; and so great were their cries, their howlings and lamentations, that it did rend the air exceedingly. And it came to pass that on the morrow they did go again to battle, and great and terrible was that day; nevertheless they conquered not, and when the night came again, they did rend the air with their cries, and their howlings, and their mournings, for the loss of the slain of their people.

8. And it came to pass that Coriantumr wrote again an epistle unto Shiz, desiring that he would not come again to battle, but that he would take the kingdom, and spare the lives of the people. But behold, the Spirit of the Lord had ceased striving with them, and Satan had full power over the hearts of the people, for they were given up unto the hardness of their hearts, and the blindness of their minds that they might be destroyed; wherefore they went again to battle. And it came to pass that they fought all that day, and when the night came they slept upon their swords; and on the morrow they fought even until the night came; and when the night came they were drunken with anger, even as a man who is drunken with wine; and they slept again upon their swords; and on the morrow they fought again; and when the night came they had all fallen by the sword save it were fifty and two of the people of Coriantumr, and sixty and nine of the people of Shiz. And it came to pass that they slept upon their swords that night, and on the morrow they fought again, and they contended in their mights with their swords, and with their shields, all that day; and when the night came there were thirty and two of the people of Shiz, and twenty and seven of the people of Coriantumr.

9. And it came to pass that they ate and slept, and prepared for death on the morrow. And they were large and mighty men, as to the strength of men. And it came to pass that they fought for the space of three hours, and they fainted with the loss of blood. And it came to pass that when the men of Coriantumr had received sufficient strength, that they could walk, they were about to flee for their lives, but behold, Shiz arose, and also his men, and he swore in his wrath that he would slay Coriantumr, or he would perish by the sword: wherefore he did pursue them, and on the morrow he did overtake them; and they fought again with the sword. And it came to pass that when they had all fallen by the sword, save it were Coriantumr and Shiz, behold Shiz had fainted with loss of blood. And it came to pass that when Coriantumr had leaned upon his sword, that he rested a little, he smote off the head of Shiz. And it came to pass that after he had smote off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised upon his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died. And it came to pass that Coriantumr fell to the earth, and became as if he had no life. And the Lord spake unto Ether, and said unto him, go forth. And he went forth, and beheld that the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled; and he finished his record; and the hundredth part I have not written.

It seems a pity he did not finish, for after all his dreary former chapters of commonplace, he stopped just as he was in danger of becoming interesting.

The Mormon Bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of morals is unobjectionable- -it is “smouched” [Milton] from the New Testament and no credit given.

Let’s keep this award-winning site going!

Yes, audiences applaud us. But do you?If yes, then buy us a beer. The wingnuts are falling over each other to make donations…to their causes. We, on the other hand, take our left media—the only media that speak for us— for granted. Don’t join that parade, and give today. Every dollar counts.
Use the DONATE button below or on the sidebar. And do the right thing. Even once a year.

Use PayPal via the button below.

THANK YOU.

 

//