Warfare
World War II Memories
[Mormon’s Deliberate, Authentic Account of the “Work of Death”]
[History of Nimrod and the Bow and Arrow]
[Killing Is Not the Solution
94 Why haven’t we made any progress at all since the Book of Mormon? Why are we as determined as ever to make war?” Well, it’s profitable. It’s enormously profitable. My business for all of 1944, which was the most active part, was battlefield intelligence. I had to find out immediately what the Germans were up to and report it to where it could do the most good. In the end it went right up to SHAEF [Supreme Headquarters of the Allied European Forces]. The stuff I got was considered invaluable, pure gold. There was only one team that did that, a three-man team. The first two were killed on D-Day, and that left me as a one-man team. So I had to snoop into everything, and I found out all sorts of things I shouldn’t have found out The whole thing was being run as a game for profits.
94 All the time I was finding out things I shouldn’t be finding out, I suppose. I tell you from the beginning the whole thing was operated, controlled, and orchestrated by the same interests on both sides. If you want to get enlightenment on that, read a book by the chief judge at Nuremberg, Joseph Borkin. It’s called The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben. That’s why we are going to continue to have wars, and it’s bigger business now than ever, as you know.
94 The whole point of Alma’s (or rather Mormon’s) studies in the “work of death,” as he calls it, is that they are supposed to be revolting—they are meant to be painful. It is Mormon and Moroni, the tragic survivors of a nation destroyed by senseless war, who are editing this book.
94,95 Remember, there’s always this theme of destruction. Why can’t you leave that alone? The Book of Mormon is about as negative as you get, isn’t it? Well, there must be some reason for that. Don’t you get the hint? Why do you think people don’t like to read the Book of Mormon? Why do you think we rush through it? We take speed reading courses so it won’t slow us down, or else we pick our way through it daintily as through a mine field, avoiding all the unpleasant passages of which there are plenty. That will get you through the Book of Mormon in no time if you leave out all the unpleasant passages you don’t like.
95 They [Mormon and Moroni] are editing this book, and they have put into it whatever they think might be useful as warning to us. It’s not their purpose to tell an entertaining or reassuring tale. War is anything but glamorous in the Book of Mormon. The campaigns and battles are described not as a writer of fiction would depict ancient warfare with all its excitement and color. (Like somebody writing in early New England. That would be popular. Mark Twain or somebody would write about it.) No, it is not what an author in America in the 1820s would imagine as the gaudy trappings of heroic derring-do. That’s all missing. It is real war that we see here, a tedious, sordid, plodding, joyless routine of see-saw successes and losses—brutally expensive, destructive, exhausting, and boring, with constant marches and countermarches that end sometimes in fiasco and sometimes in intensely unpleasant engagements. The author writes as one would write—as only one could write—who had gone through a long war as a front-line observer with his eyes wide open. Everything is strictly authentic, with the proper emphasis in the proper place. Strategy and tactics are treated with the knowledge of an expert: logistics and supply; armaments and fortifications; recruiting and training; problems of morale and support from the home front; military intelligence from cloak and dagger to scouting and patrolling; interrogation, guarding, feeding, and exchange of war prisoners; propaganda and psychological warfare; rehabilitation and resettlement; (all these things are there and treated deftly and explicitly); feelers for peace and negotiations at various levels; treason; profiteering; and the exploitation of the war economy by individuals and groups—it is all there.
95 In the part we are coming to later, Mormon and his son are summing up the situation after spending most of their lives in the field—and they hate it. For them war is nasty, brutalizing, wasteful, dirty, degrading, fatiguing, foolish, immoral, and above all unnecessary. It is also inevitable, as long as men are running things, and as long as it is very profitable. So we have this Book of Mormon war business that we’re going to be bothered with. If this were all behind us now [we could relax], but alas how much more is before us.
95 Alma 48 But first the relevant D&C 1:35: “The hour is not yet, but is nigh at hand, when peace shall be taken from the earth, and the devil shall have power over his own dominion.” That is war, of course. Peace is going to be taken away.
95,96 Alma 48:1 We start out with public relations, and Amalickiah was a public relations genius. He knew how to get people behind him. You have to get them behind you in a war, and he is going to do it. Notice how he does it very cleverly. Notice how far the Book of Mormon is ahead of the times here. Amalickiah had obtained the kingdom. He’s got what he wants. Thou hast it all now. What are you going to do? What is your next step? You have to get the Nephites under your thumb too. Why would you want to do that? Why would you want to bring people into bondage? This is another very interesting thing, isn’t it? It’s going to tell why here. We’ll get to that in just a second here, but first of all “he began to inspire the hearts of the Lamanites against the people of Nephi.” You have to get them angry. Remember, they had been very reluctant. They didn’t want to do this. He has formed his army without any fighting at all. He got the loyalists together with the opposition on Mount Antipas there. They surrounded them and [the loyalists decided] let’s get together here. They were following Amalickiah, and he got himself made king by treason. Then he had it all. Now he’s got to make real war. The first thing is to put the people in mind for it, give them the fighting spirit and make them want it. The only reason he had been able to get what he wanted so far was that they didn’t want to fight. They would do anything rather than that. Now he’s got them where he wanted. Now his big problem is how to make the next step. “He began to inspire the hearts of the Lamanites against the people of Nephi; yea, he did appoint men to speak unto the Lamanites from their towers, against the Nephites.”
96 Alma 48: 2 Notice, how often the Book of Mormon talks about these towers. When you go to Central America or the Mississippi Valley, wherever the old Indian cultures are, [you find these], and also among the Hopis. What is a hogan but a reduced step pyramid. The big one at Hotevilla, for example, has the steps going up to it. Some of them are quite high and have a ladder. So they had their towers. What did they use them for? Some of them are absurd. They just stand there with these high, steep steps. They can be climbed all right, but why wear yourself out going up 150 steps? There’s nothing on the top. Were they all Rameumptoms? Some of them certainly were. They were for announcements, and they were always at ceremonial places. Remember that Alma and Amulek preached at such a place. They were for public assemblies, announcements, preaching, and all the rest. But he had this systematically done from towers. As it were, we would say he had time on the air. He had all these stations that saturated the air with this. They were used as sort of a modern technique. Instead of broadcasting stations he had these towers spread throughout the whole country. They are the same thing as if you had broadcast stations. And he appointed speakers with their set talks. This is exactly what you do in public relations. You take a sample and find out what will sell. Then your people give that spiel. You hear the same program over and over again. You’d think people would get wise after a while but the funny thing is they don’t. I’m going to give you a talk on rhetoric one of these days, because it plays a very important part in the Book of Mormon. [Rhetoric] may be a lie, might be absurd, it may be unthinkable, but if you just keep saying it, they will go for it. They’ve found that out. We’ve had the same slogans going for years and years. It got to them. After all, if you have the guy shouting through the megaphone all day long and you hear the same message over and over again, you give in to it. “And thus he did inspire their hearts against the Nephites, insomuch that in the latter end of the nineteenth year .. having been made king over the Lamanites, he sought also to reign over all the land, the Nephites as well as the Lamanites.” That was the idea.
97 There is no satisfaction until you rule everything. Then you weep like Alexander because there are no more worlds to conquer. And this was Nimrod. He wanted to be a cosmocrator. There’s an interesting phenomenon that is very important in the books of Abraham and Moses in the Pearl of Great Price. A cosmocrator is somebody who has conquered the world. There have been ten cosmocrators, we are told. The three great ones include Alexander, and Nimrod. You have your pick of the others, but they are men who aspired to rule over everything. Caesar wanted to be that.
97 Amalickiah had accomplished his design. The first part was to harden the hearts of the Lamanites so they would be willing. In order to do that he had to tell them lies and blind their minds. Then you stir them up to anger. This is the process, isn’t it? Win, win, win. Why do people act this way? As the Book of Mormon says, why do we? We are guilty of the same thing. First you harden their hearts. Then they don’t want to listen to the facts. You blind their minds and they get emotional about it. We get all wrought up and we are ready for war. It’s the silliest thing in the world, but we do it. Hitler was very skillful at that. He was working for the corporations, but he knew how to pull it off doing that very thing. Of course, he used the radio as we use the TV today, and [Amalickiah] used the towers. There’s a very good book by Richard Nixon on that subject called The Real War. It shows how that’s done.
97 Alma 48:4: “For he was determined, because of the greatness of the number of his people [it turned his head to see his power and glory], to overpower the Nephites and to bring them into bondage.” Why would he want to bring them into bondage? Well, submission is the only form of obedience that a person like that can understand. They wouldn’t obey willingly. That’s what Islam means, submission, but submission to God. Submission to anybody else is wrong. That’s what is called “bondage.” If you submit to God, that’s dandy, but not if you submit to anybody else.
97,98 That’s the story of Nimrod. Remember, there was Noah, Ham, and Cush. Gush’s son was Nimrod. He was a righteous young man until he was 25 years old. He became the king, and he had received the garment of Adam, which had been stolen by Ham when they were leaving the ark. It belonged to Adam, and Noah had it. We mentioned that garment before, but there is great literature about this garment. Nimrod lost the garment later on, but when he wore it all people and animals assumed that he was a holy man and priest acting for God, and they submitted to him willingly. That was right. But then it turned his head, and he decided to become the great conqueror. Meanwhile, God gave him the bow to protect the human race against the depredations of the giant creatures that roamed the earth in those days—cave bears, mastodons, and things like that—which man was not able to cope with at all in his helpless state until God gave Nimrod the secret of the bow and arrow. It’s a very sophisticated and efficient weapon, more efficient than any rifle. Read a book by Saxton Pope called Hunting with the Bow and Arrow. He wrote it at Berkeley years ago. It’s an excellent book showing that the bow and arrow is the most efficient of all weapons in hunting or anything else. It’s not only silent, but a stone arrowhead makes abrasions of the wound. It starts hemorrhages which don’t stop. Even if you hit an animal not in a vital place at all, in the end it has a fatal effect. There are so many advantages to hunting with a bow and arrow. The experiments were made at Berkeley. They shot with high powered rifles into hanging hams, sides of beef, etc. to see which would penetrate. The arrow penetrated more effectively than most high powered bullets. Also it’s silent, cheap, and all sorts of things.
98 Anyway God gave the bow and arrow to Nimrod to defend the human race, for protection against their enemies. It didn’t take Nimrod long to discover that he could use these arrows to put the human race at his disposal. It was put at his disposal to defend the human race. Now he discovered that if he turned it against human beings they were at his disposal. He was the boss. This is the famous bow of Nimrod. In the end he went crazy and turned it against God. He challenged God to a fight because he was ruler of the empire. He said, “I’m the creator; I’m the god.” He built the Tower of Babel and went up to the top of it so he could shoot arrows into the sky and kill God. The Angel Gabriel, playing a trick on him, held up a fish. The arrow hit the fish and came back to earth with blood. Then Nimrod went stark raving mad. He said, “See, I’ve killed God; there’s blood on the arrow.” There are various versions of the story. It is very old and circulates everywhere. So he went nuts. To get rid of him and show his utter contempt, God finally dispatched him with the weakest and smallest of creatures. He sent a little, tiny gnat. It crawled up the nose of Nimrod and started tickling his brain. Well, of course, it drove him absolutely crazy. He had two servants stand on each side of him with hammers and hit him on the head alternately so he wouldn’t be tickled to death by it. If they hit him on the head, he went bong, so that was better than putting up with this gnat. In the end that did away with Nimrod. He is supposed to have founded the first army and the first city. He got civilization going, This is class number two, Babylon. Nimrod was the founder of Babylon. All the old sources will tell you, wherever you get them, that Nimrod founded Babylon. He was the archenemy of Abraham, etc. This is type number two. He had to bring people into bondage; nothing else would do
98 Alma 48:5 Look what [Amalickiah] does, that clever man. He appoints chief captains of the Zoramites. You remember from last semester who the Zoramites were, the people who went off by themselves. Very suddenly they had a new religion and everything else. They had adopted some of the prevailing, more ancient customs and religions that were in the country already. That’s rather clear. Remember, Alma tells them they are just model people. They are smart and well dressed; they have dress standards. They’re very pious. Every Sunday they all bear their testimonies. They go up in the Rameumptom and say, “We thank God that we are a blessed people and not like other people.” Then he said they forgot about it the rest of the week. But he said they were the wickedest people he ever knew, because they cry unto thee, O God, and yet their hearts are upon their riches. [Alma 7:6]
99 Alma 48:6: “And it came to pass that they took their camp, and moved forth toward the land of Zarahemla in the wilderness.” Now here’s the contrast in verse 7: “While Amalickiah had thus been obtaining power by fraud and deceit...” Notice, the Book of Mormon puts a thumb right on the thing. They know what it is. The whole darn thing is just fraud and deceit—all this patriotic rhetoric they have been having, all this fervor against the wicked Nephites. We’re going to see what the argument was. They’ve robbed us of our birthright, They cheated—Laman and Lemuel were denied their rights. The people really believed it, and they had been working on that. But it was fraud and deceit. “Moroni, on the other hand, had been preparing the minds of the people [their minds had to be prepared too. To go against the Lamanites? No] to be faithful unto the Lord their God.” That would take care of it. What a contrast! No hate campaigns here.
99,100 Amalickiah was going to blitz [krieg] them [with an overwhelming encircling movement, like the Germans in WW II]. Well, how do you slow down a blitz? You do it by defense in depth. You just put in a lot of little forts along here. You [the enemy] might get through here all right and surround them, but you haven’t taken them. You cannot proceed unless you have subdued them, because otherwise you will have them in your rear. Then they will cut off your supplies and everything else. You can’t do a thing. These must be subdued one by one. That always slows down the blitzkrieg. It has never failed to work because you have these little forts. You cannot feel safe and have this at your back. You have to wipe it up. Or you send the main force to do that. But meanwhile you have to go up here and wait for them. Then you are exposed, because you all have to be together. It’s blitz. That means lightning. It has to move as fast as possible, and you have to be in there. You’ll notice the Lamanites do that again and again. Their attacks, it’s going to tell us, are by surprise. Suddenly one morning they found the Lamanite armies were upon them, just like that. In some of these jungles you can get away with that too.
100 Alma 48:8 Here [Moroni] had his defense in depth, and notice how nicely it’s described here. Verse 8: “Yea, he had been strengthening the armies of the Nephites, and erecting small forts, or places of resort [places to fall back on, you see]; throwing up banks of earth round about to enclose his armies. They didn’t have the money or the time to build expensive places.
100 Alma 48:9 Notice, all round about their cities and in all the borders of their lands he scattered these little forts everywhere so that the Lamanite forces couldn’t do anything. They had to move with caution. It took all the steam out of the charge. They couldn’t bull through any more. “And in their weakest fortification he did place the greater number of men,” which made them pretty equal. You want to knock over a weak one quickly. All right, we’ll give it special support. “And thus he did fortify and strengthen the land which was possessed by the Nephites.” It was their own country. And you will notice throughout the Book of Mormon, the battles are always fought on Nephite territory; they never invade outside. Mormon tells us later exactly why that is.
100,101 Alma 48:10 Verse 10: “And thus he was preparing to support their liberty, their lands, their wives,] and their children, and their peace . . . their God . . . [and] the cause of Christians.’ You’ll notice the thing about this: it’s the intimate things they are supporting. They are not supporting their resources, their minds, their businesses, their vacations, and things like that. They are supporting the things that are closest to them, the things that are intimate.! Those are the things that are worth supporting. So many wars have been fought to gain a good harbor or to open a passage. They are fighting for their lands, their wives, their children, their peace, and their God.
102 As I said, [almost] every war in the Book of Mormon is fought on Nephite territory. As Mormon said in Mormon 4:4-5 when they finally changed that it was the fatal mistake. Then they were finished; they didn’t have a chance. He saw, against all that the Lord had commanded, that they would go against them. Then he said, “But behold, the judgments of God will overtake the wicked; and it is by the wicked that the wicked are punished.” Don’t you try to punish anybody, he says. God wants the wicked to be punished, and he will punish them. But he will punish them by the wicked.
102 Alma 48:14,15 So don’t think it’s the good guys against the bad guys at all. Whenever Nephites and Lamanites fight they are equally bad. After that personal duel between Amlici and [Alma] they fought face to face with the sword and ended that other war, you might say, “This is right out of Star Wars, the good guys fighting the bad guys. [Alma] appealed to God, and he was the victor. Then immediately after it says the people realized that all these troubles had come upon them because of their own sins, not because of the Lamanites. Even in what you would call a clear-cut case like that in which it [appeared to be] good guys against bad guys. “... even to the shedding of blood if it were necessary ... never to give an offense, yea, and never to raise the sword except it were against an enemy, except it were to preserve their lives.”
102 Joseph Smith said, “The man who carries a gun or a pistol will someday regret it. I have never carried anything larger than a penknife [to sharpen a quill pen] with me, even when I faced the mobs.”
103 This was their faith. Well, how can you do that? How can we expose ourselves, being a lot of wimps on the defensive like this—never to raise the sword, never to stand tall, except to preserve their lives. It was their faith in God. If they did that God would preserve them. They put their faith in him. What if he didn’t? That’s the point: he would if they were faithful in keeping the commandments. That’s the promise that had been given way back in the beginning. It was given in the second chapter when the Lord told Nephi that his people would always have the others breathing down their necks. This is fulfilling the promise that the Lord made to Lehi and his sons: “And inasmuch as thou shall keep my commandments, thou shall be made a ruler and a teacher over they brethren. For behold, in that day that they shall rebel against me, I will curse them even with a sore curse, and they shall have no power over thy seed except they shall rebel against me also. And if it so be that they rebel against me, they shall be a scourge unto thy seed, to stir them up in the ways of remembrance” (1 Nephi 1:21-24). Don’t think you can ever solve the problem by getting rid of the Lamanites. They insisted it was the Lamanite problem. If we can just go out there and knock them out, we will have it all made [they thought]. They came up against that again and again; they couldn’t resist that. It’s the John Wayne solution. The big man with the gun is the solution to the problem. They had to trust the Lord in that. Were they going to do it? Well, do we do it? No, we don’t.
103 Alma 48:15 “... if they were faithful in keeping the commandments of God that he would prosper them in the land; yea, warn them to flee [fleeing is not a disgrace; they fled], or to prepare for war, according to their danger.”
103 Alma 48:16 “And also, that God would make it known unto them whither they should go to defend themselves against their enemies, and by so doing the Lord would deliver them.” The Lord will tell you.. He’s your line of defense. “... and by so doing the Lord would deliver them; and this was the faith of Moroni [he was a most unusual general, to say the least], and his heart did glory in it; not in the shedding of blood but in doing good, in preserving his people, yea, in keeping the commandments of God.” It keeps repeating that he did not like to shed blood.
103,104 Fire power is not the solution, strange as it may seem.. That’s what strategy and tactics are for. Strategy is to save lives, not to take them. What were we reduced to in Vietnam? A completely bankrupt strategy, body count. The whole purpose of strategy is not to have body count, not to lose anybody if you can possibly help it on either side. As Clausewitz said, the whole purpose of your fighting is to have the enemy submit to your will. Once he has the war is over. It’s not to kill him necessarily. There’s no such thing as unconditional surrender. He’ll surrender only on condition of his life being saved. It’s got to happen. Sooner or later you’ve got to come to an agreement.
104 I was a poor interrogator. I could never intimidate anyone. You had to be intimidating to be a proper interrogator. They would just laugh at me. I couldn’t get anything out of anybody They had their passbooks, and those passbooks were very instructive. They told where they had been, what the unit was and everything. It was the passbook you wanted, and you could always get that from them.
104 As Lincoln said, “With malice toward none and charity toward all.” That’s the way you have to do it. Well, if you’re going to end that way, why bother killing everybody in the meantime then? Why not decide right at the beginning what you are going to do? I repeat, because it [war] is very, very profitable. There I could a tale unfold, but I’m not going to. It wouldn’t be healthy, actually.