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The Ideology of Anti-Heretical Crusade in the 1838 Mormon War

“Up, awake, ye defenders of Zion!
The foe’s at the door of your homes;
Let each heart be the heart of a lion,
Unyielding and proud as he roams.
Remember the trials of Missouri;
Forget not the courage of Nauvoo…
Tho, assisted by legions infernal,
The plundering foemen advance,
With a host from the regions eternal
We’ll scatter their troops at a glance
By His power is Zion surrounded;
Her warriors are noble and brave,
And their faith on Jehovah is founded,
Whose power is mighty to save.”

“Up, Awake, Ye Defenders of Zion,” Mormon hymn (c. 1848)

Framing

“Come, come, ye saints, no toil nor labor fear,” urges “perhaps the best-known and most beloved”[1] Mormon hymn, for “why should we think to earn a great reward / If we now shun the fight?”[2] Penned by LDS poet William Clayton, these compelling lines reflect the zeitgeist of the Mormon community in the wake of its violent expulsion from America and the harrowing pilgrimage across the plains to the new Zion in Utah (then within Mexico). The underlying ideology of the anthem is reminiscent of the crusade theology of Pope Innocent III as expressed in the quia maior, the call to the Fifth Crusade:

“So rouse yourselves, most beloved sons…gird yourselves for the service of the Crucified One, not hesitating to risk your possessions and your persons for him who laid down his life and shed his blood for you…sure that if you are truly penitent you will achieve eternal rest as a profit from this temporal labour.”[3]

Pope Innocent III, Quia Maior

The parallels between these two religious calls-to-action are clear. Both Innocent and Clayton implore listeners to plunge into a spiritual or literal fight, overcoming suffering for the sake of religious ideals. These texts are microcosms of broader patterns in crusades targeted against ‘heretical’ Christians.

My fundamental claim is that the rhetoric of both sides in the 1838 Mormon War exhibited the signature strategies of Innocent III’s ideology of anti-heretical crusade. In this context, ideology is the disparate set of “ideas, values, and accepted ‘truths’ of the culture that enabled – consciously and unconsciously – holy war.”[4] Ideology is the prism through which the culture views and interprets the world. Both the Albigensian Crusade and the 1838 Mormon War exhibit the same ideological elements despite being separated by six hundred years. I will demonstrate the resonance between these periods by uncovering common methods and worldviews in the primary sources, including: Innocent III’s quia maior and papal documents from the period of the Albigensian Crusade (1209 – 1229 AD), anti-Mormon rhetoric and Governor Bogg’s extermination order, sermons by key Mormon figure Sidney Rigdon and the founder Joseph Smith, and Mormon scripture in the Doctrine & Covenants.

These sources indicate common trends in the ways Christians portray and motivate action against rival movements within the faith. In other words, the significant actors in both periods wielded the same invisible weapons.[5] Using these weapons of ideas, Christians like Innocent III were able to manufacture consent for atrocity and bloodshed against fellow people of the faith. Together, these ideological tools compose an ideology of anti-heretical crusade: religious purification of the Christian community, the imitatio Christi, and the reclamation of the Christian inheritance – an actual Jerusalem or an imagined Zion.

Ideology of Innocent III

Innocent IIi, 1161-1216 Painting by Granger
A woodcut of Innocent III from the 12th century.

The central currents of the crusading ideology of Innocent III, arguably the most influential pope in history,[6] can be summarized in three words: purification, imitation, reclamation. Innocent unleashed a seismic ideological shift that turned the Crusades inward, against targets within Christendom. To accomplish this change, Innocent III forged an armory of rhetorical weapons and “progressively augmented the spiritual benefits to be gained by suppressing heresy.”[7] Papal documents of the early 13th century establish this trend.

Purification is rooting out toxic elements within the Christian community. The Albigensian Crusade and the Fourth Lateran Council were both components of Innocent’s endeavor to “purify Christian society at home.”[8] The zeal to eliminate the heathens partially arose from the same motivation for eradicating a virus: to prevent spread. Innocent warned a Provençal archbishop that the Cathars would “seduce the hearts of listeners” and lure them all into “pit of perdition together.”[9] In his letters he often used the imagery of infection, calling the enemy “pestilential,”[10] a disease that must be eliminated so that the “body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity.”[11] Thus, Innocent called a crusade against the perceived blasphemous virus, and gave an ultimatum to the Langedouc heretics: renounce or perish.[12] His ideology portrayed purifying crusades as necessary to keep the Christian body intact and uncontaminated.

Imitation is the call to mimic the Messiah. Innocent used the ideological potency of this imitatio christi to instill in Christians a desire to suffer the Passion as crusaders. In the quia maior, Innocent declares the Fifth Crusade “on behalf of him who when dying cried with a loud voice on the cross,”[13] showing that the figurehead of Catholicism himself would also seek to imitate Christ. He likened the sacrifices of the crucesignati to the way the Son of God gave his blood and his life. Innocent even proclaims that true crusaders can be “equally certain” as Christ himself in receiving the ultimate reward — eternal salvation.[14] The final line declares that crusaders are “acting in the office of Christ’s legation.”[15] Comparison to Christ, the imagery of Jesus’ afflictions on the cross, and supplications to emulate and fight for the Messiah proved to be potent pieces of ideological equipment in justifying crusades.

Finally, reclamation is the attempt to recapture the sacred Christian inheritance of the Holy Land and Jerusalem. As Innocent sermonized: “snatch the land that Your only begotten son consecrated with his own blood from the hands of the enemy of the cross and restore it to Christian worship.”[16] Innocent decreed that Psalm 79 should be sung across Europe, echoing the drive to rescue the holy “inheritance” from the “heathens” in the name of the “only-begotten son.”[17] In this view, the Levant was rightful Christian soil, and the crusades were a matter of recovery, not conquest. Jerusalem was seen as the “navel of the world” by medieval Christians, who portrayed the land of Christ’s ministry as “fruitful above others, like another paradise of delights.”[18] Crusade was essential to save the sacrosanct and precious lands of Christ from defilement.

Parallels

The remainder of the paper will reveal the symmetries between Innocent’s anti-heretical crusading ideology and the rhetoric of the 1838 conflict. These similarities are revealed by comparing Innocent’s key papal bulls with the critical documents surrounding the 1838 Mormon War. In casualties, this war was somewhat insignificant: less than thirty individuals perished directly because of the conflict.[19] However, almost 175 years later, it is clear “the trauma of the Missouri experience dramatically shaped the development of Mormon theology, community, family, and ideology.”[20] The violence has an outsized impact on the Mormon historical memory.

Reclamation of Zion

Above: the sharing of sacred land in the Abrahamic holy city Jerusalem and the Mormon site of Independence, MO.[21]

Both Catholic crusaders and Mormon pioneers sought to reclaim a lost promised land. The crusaders battled for the Holy Land in the Levant. The Mormons recognized the sanctity of the original Jerusalem, but they also struggled to find or build a New Jerusalem in America. In these efforts, Missouri is paramount as “the land which I [God] have appointed and consecrated for the gathering of the saints,” and because Independence is the “city of Zion.”[22] There is an entire sacred landscape based in Missouri. The state contains many of Mormonism’s hallowed sites, including Far West, “the spot where Cain killed Abel,”[23] the Kirtland Temple, the location of many of Joseph Smith’s prophetic visions and revelations,[24] and Adam-ondi-Ahman,[25] where Joseph believed Adam and Eve lived after their Fall from the Garden of Eden.[26] Just as the Abrahamic ‘people of the book’ try to share the holy sites of Jerusalem, three different Mormon denominations share the sacred land of Independence.[27] Thus, analogous to the recurring Catholic crusades to seize Jerusalem from the 11th to 15th centuries, the conflicts over Missouri in the 1830s held immense gravity for Mormons. The quest to control sacred soil was at the foreground of religious warfare both in Missouri and medieval Europe.

Preaching that “God would deliver Zion into the Saints’ hands by destroying the wicked,” some influential members of the LDS Church believed that a “Mormon takeover of Jackson County was preordained.”[28] Rumors of an impending conquest by an unfamiliar religious sect and “publicized declarations of divine entitlement to Missouri lands” spurred outrage and fear amongst the locals.[29] In response, anti-Mormon throngs brutally ejected the Mormons. Assembling an armed force called Zion’s Camp, some LDS leaders tried to retake the lost sacred land, but this expedition fizzled out without bloodshed.[30] Eventually, the church migrated to Far West.

However, the refugees faced similar problems in their new settlement. Some of their neighbors sent terrified letters to the governor claiming that the ‘fanatics’ were cooperating with “Indians of various tribes” to “work the general destruction of all that are not Mormons.”[31] Tensions soon surpassed a breaking point. Early Mormon authors wrote that a mob stormed into Far West in 1833 with a scarlet flag “in token of blood,” and announced that “the Mormons must leave the county en masse or that every man shall be put to death.”[32] The Mormons argued that their enemies used ideological weapons “to stir up the murky pool of popular prejudice to a crusade against a peaceable, prosperous, and law-abiding people.”[33] The reclamation rhetoric of the Mormons, and their imagination of a new Zion in Missouri, may have partially instigated a violent backlash. Ultimately, the Mormons were banished.

Joseph Young affidavit for Haun's Mill massacre | Special ...
Artwork based on the massacre at Haun’s Mill. Painting by C.C.A. Christensen

The tragedy of the loss of Zion is an immense legacy in the Mormon historical memory. Some contemporary Mormon sources referenced Psalm 79, the verses which served as the primary raw material in crafting Innocent’s crusade calls. One poet cited the Psalm in the first page of his poem lamenting the expulsion from Missouri: “Our eyes are dim, our hearts heavy / No place of refuge being left.”[34] This is also evocative of Innocent’s frequent references to Lamentations 5, which weeps that “our inheritance has been handed over to strangers…we have lost that land which the Lord consecrated.”[35] Many LDS hymns extol the effort to restore Zion or to establish a New Jerusalem.[36] As the verse on the front cover of this paper attests, Mormons cannot forget the trials of Missouri any more than medieval Christians could forget the 637 AD capture of Jerusalem.

The Mormons responded to the violence with a shift in ideology. The relentless reprisals against the faithful “spurred the radicalization of Mormon theology in the early 1840s.”[37] During the conflict, Joseph preached to troops assembled at Far West “that the kingdom of God should be set up, and should never fall,” declaring that “the Lord would send angels, who would fight for us; and that we should be victorious.”[38] After Rigdon argued that dissenting members of the Church should “be trodden under foot of men”[39] in his ‘Salt Sermon,’ some Mormons organized a vigilante militarist group called the Danites. The Danites believed they had a duty to take the land of Missouri, “that it was the will of God they should do so; and that the Lord would give them power to possess the kingdom.”[40] While they rarely engaged in actual conflict, this paramilitary group served as the ideological shock troops in the Mormon counter-crusade against the Missourians.

After all, according to doctrine, the Missourians were gentiles occupying territory divinely granted to “the remnant of Jacob” (e.g. Native Americans) and “heirs according to the covenant” (e.g. Mormons) as “the land of [their] inheritance.”[41] As official LDS scripture given by Joseph Smith in 1831 states: “ye shall assemble yourselves together to rejoice upon the land of Missouri, which is the land of your inheritance, which is now the land of your enemies.”[42] This is almost identical to the phraseology Innocent III repeatedly used to motivate crusading: from commanding Christians to “free…his inheritance from the hands of the Saracens”[43] in the post miserable of 1198 to his oft-cited Psalm 78: “the gentiles have invaded your inheritance.”[44] In both contexts, portraying the land as a religious heritage rather than mere conquerable territory was vital in motivating violent action to regain the venerated places.

Imitation

Rio De Janeiro Brazil

During the skirmishes of the 1830s, Mormon soldiers sometimes announced their arrival with the “trumpet tones [of] the old Jewish battle-cry, ‘The sword of the Lord and of Gideon.’”[45] This practice and many others underscore the ways the combatants of the Missouri conflict sought to imitate Christ, saints or historical Christians, and scriptural heroes. In this conflict, Smith unsheathed his rhetorical sword, and declared to his early disciples that “I will lead you to the battle.”[46] The imitatio Christi proved to be an essential element in encouraging the defense of Zion.

The language of crusade was quickly adopted in 1838 to instill a sense of the significance of the conflict and inspire analogies to Christ and the persecuted saints of history. W.W. Phelps, a writer of many key Mormon hymns, said at the time that “the crisis has come,” and that “nothing but the power of God can stop the mob in their Latter Day crusade against the church of Christ.”[47] After 1838, there was a “massive outpouring of writings and petitions describing the violence,” and Mormons argued that their oppressors were like “the tormentors of the ancient saints,” even “portraying Boggs as Nero.”[48] Sometimes, Mormon rhetoricians “used the memory of persecution to justify violence.”[49] These trends indicate the way Mormon figures drew continuities between their own situation and the situation of the Christlike saints and their enemies.

Crusader rhetoric was not just applied to vindicate Mormons, but to vilify their foes. In line with the Mormon belief, secular onlooker Thomas Kane sought to defend the Mormon’s image to counter the “‘Holy War’ waged against them by evangelical America.”[50] This rhetorical method proved invaluable. One LDS author satirized the anti-Mormon use of crusader rhetoric, saying that it was abundantly clear the Missouri militiamen were “worthy scions of the old [crusader] stock, and members of this honorable fraternity.”[51] The ironist describes how one Missourian “pursued them till the blood gushed from their feet,” “burning and destroying heretic’s houses,” and thus “redeemed himself in true evangelical style.”[52] This author’s use of ‘evangelical’ as an insult is remindful of the way Arab or Muslim sources use the term ‘crusader’ to impugn foreign invaders. Clearly, representations of holy warriors can be positive or negative, depending on if those depicted are allies to those doing the depicting.

Two Thousand Stripling Warriors by Arnold Friberg, a famous piece of LDS art.

Hymns are critical in ideological conflicts; a Mormon author wrote that a “hymnbook is as good an index to the brains and to the hearts of a people as the creed book.”[53] These invisible armaments often surpassed physical weapons in effectiveness. A medieval historian wrote that the enemies of the crusaders in the Languedoc “feared those who sang more than those who fought.”[54]  Expressing similar sentiments to the Mormon hymn cited on the front page, the Catholic hymn Veni creator spiritus was widely adopted by crusaders during the Albigensian Crusade:

Far from us drive our deadly foe;
true peace unto us bring;
and through all perils lead us safe
beneath thy sacred wing.[55]

The Mormon lyricist also extolled his LDS audience to remember they were by “his power in Zion surrounded,” even as “legions infernal” and “plundering foemen” advanced against them. This example shows that both groups used the same lyrical methods to glorify spiritual or physical crusades and place them into a context of religious symbols. Especially impactful in both periods were the ideas, language, and emblems of the imitation of Christ.

Purification

closeup photo of white petaled flower

Like the Catholicism of 13th-century Europe, the Protestantism of 19th-century America “required that communities be whole, an ideal that demanded the removal of social deviants.”[56] In the views of some, this merited the destruction of Mormonism and other aberrations. The drive to extinguish difference also reflects an underlying Christian persecuting society, which partly arose from the “fear of schism [that] had attended the church since its infancy.”[57] Like Innocent III, American preachers of the early 1800s also confronted an ever-splintering variety of divergent Christian movements. To contend effectively amongst religious discord, some revived the anti-heretical methods of the medieval enforcers of Christian orthodoxy.

Mormonism was not an isolated target of persecution. The attacks against Masons, Catholics, and Mormons, and Jews in the US at the dawn of the 19th century were manifestations of a “subsurface current of American thought” which at any time could “erupt in a geyser of hostility upon a tight-knit minority.”[58] These persecuting movements had a common base of support in “New England, the rural areas, and the Protestant ministers,” and “a great part of the propaganda against the Mormons was carried on through books and sermons of Protestant ministers.”[59] Anti-Mormonism was a wave in a larger tide.

These ministers also exploited the same rhetoric that Innocent III used so forcefully: the purification of the communal body. Their sermonizing expressed a “feeling that American purity was being contaminated by these alien groups,” especially with “such epithets as ‘stain’ or ‘cancer’ in the body politic, in reference to the Mormons,” in an attempt to persuade governments and individuals to “force Mormon conformity.”[60] The anti-Mormon ideological campaign proved successful in the end. In fall 1838, Missouri executive order #44 was issued. The orders from Governor Boggs stated “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.”[61] This constituted “no ordinary military directive, but a call for the eradication of a distinct people whose very existence could no longer be tolerated.”[62] Only rescinded in 1976,[63] the order reflects the intensity of the persecuting society on the American frontier and the vehemence of early anti-Mormonism.

The general of the Missouri state militia informed the Mormons that “you need not expect any mercy, but extermination, for I am determined the governor’s orders shall be executed.”[64] Furthermore, as the heretics were so frequently compared to an infectious virus, many officers involved in the expulsion thought the Mormons and all those close them to needed to be eradicated, root and stem. One Missouri cornel during the massacre of Haun’s Mill ordered his men to “kill and scalp all, little and big: nits make lice.”[65] This is a horrifying (but likely unintentional) emulation of papal legate Arnaud Amalric, who ordered during the sack of Béziers, “Kill them all. God will know his own.”[66] The ideology of purification is powerful and dangerous, encouraging atrocities during the anti-heretical crusades in both Languedoc and Missouri.

Conclusion

There is a fundamental similarity in the crusader rhetoric used during the expulsion of the Mormons from Missouri and during the inquisition against the Cathars in the Albigensian Crusade. The disparate threads of 1838 and 1213 are connected by a common tapestry of sectarian violence and persecution of heretics in Christianity, which is largely rooted in ideological shifts that took place in the early 13th century under the papacy of Innocent III. Ultimately, the rhetorical, ideological, and liturgical trends of anti-heretical crusade are visible in the historical moments of both 13th century crusading Catholicism and 19th century migrating Mormonism, and two distant historical moments use similar ideas and methods in their efforts to both promote and defend against anti-heretical crusade.

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Howlett, David J.  Kirtland temple: The biography of a shared Mormon sacred space. University of Illinois Press, 2014.

Largey, Zachary L. “The Rhetoric of Persecution: Mormon Crisis Rhetoric from 1838-1871.” (2006). Theses and Dissertations, Brigham Young University. Pg. 67.

Moore, John, ed.  Pope Innocent III and his world. Routledge, 2016.

Moore, Robert I. Moore, Robert I. The formation of a persecuting society: authority and deviance in Western Europe 950-1250. John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Pg.

“Mapping the Global Muslim Population.” 2009.  Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. https://www.pewforum.org/2009/10/07/mapping-the-global-muslim-population/.https://www.pewforum.org/2009/10/07/mapping-the-global-muslim-population/. Accessed 7 Mar 2020.

Nickerson, Hoffman. The Inquisition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923. Pg. 35.

Nunn, Alexis, “The Albigensian Crusade: The Intersection of Religious and Political Authority in Languedoc (1209-1218)” (2017). WWU Honors Program Senior Projects. 57. Pg. 1.

O’Carroll, Michael.  Veni Creator Spiritus: A Theological Encyclopedia of the Holy Spirit. Liturgical Press, 1990. Pg. 65.

Power, Daniel. “Who went on the Albigensian Crusade?.” The English Historical Review 128, no. The English Historical Review 128, no. 534 (2013): 1047-1085.

Reeve, W. Paul, and Ardis E. Parshall, eds. Reeve, W. Paul, and Ardis E. Parshall, eds. Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, 2010. Pg. 103.

Rist, Rebecca, “Salvation and the Albigensian Crusade: Pope Innocent III and the plenary indulgence,” Reading Medieval Studies, pg.  Reading Medieval Studies, pg. 95.

Rist, Rebecca. “Salvation and the Albigensian Crusade: Pope Innocent III and the plenary indulgence.” Reading Medieval Studies  Reading Medieval Studies 36 (2010): 95-112.

“Statistics and Church Facts | Total Church Membership.” 2020.  Newsroom.Churchofjesuschrist.Org. https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics.https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics. Accessed 3/7/20.

Shannon, Albert Clement. The Popes and Heresy in the Thirteenth Century. Villanova, Pennsylvania: Augustinian Press, 1949. Pg. 37.

Sibly, W.A.; Sibly, M.D. (2003). The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens: The Albigensian Crusade and Its Aftermath. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England, UK: The Boydell Press. pp. 127–128.

Simonis, Lorraine Marie Alice. “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: The Albigensian Crusade and the Subjugation of the Languedoc (thesis).” (2014). Pg. 14.

Smith, Thomas W. “How to craft a crusade call: Pope Innocent III and Quia maior (1213).” Historical Research 92, no. Historical Research 92, no. 255 (2019): 2-23. Pg. 6.

Spencer, Thomas M., ed.  The Missouri Mormon Experience. University of Missouri Press, 2010. Pg. 50-51.

Stegner, Wallace Earle.  The gathering of Zion: the story of the Mormon trail. University of Nebraska Press, 1964. Pg. vii.

Stephen C. LeSueur. The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Pg. 247. Citing Affidavit of David Frampton, in Mormon Redress Petitions, 209-210.

Uebel, Michael. “Unthinking the Monster: Twelfth-Century Responses to Saracen Alterity,” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. (1996): 264-91.

Walker, Jeffrey N. “Mormon Land Rights in Caldwell and Daviess Counties and the Mormon Conflict of 1838: New Findings and New Understandings.” BYU Studies Quarterly 47, no. BYU Studies Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2008).

Winston, Kimberly. “Contested Sacred Space USA: Conflict And Cooperation In The Heartland – Religion News Service.” 2017.  Religion News Service. https://religionnews.com/2017/08/11/contested-sacred-space-usa-conflict-and-cooperation-in-the-heartland/. Accessed 7 Mar 2020.

  1. Reeve, W. Paul, and Ardis E. Parshall, eds. Mormonism: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO, 2010. Pg. 103. ↑
  2. Clayton, William (1814-1879). “Come, Come Ye Saints.” Manchester Hymnal, English. Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 1840. 1912, 25th Edition (last known). 385 songs. The lyrics were written in 1846. ↑
  3. “Innocent III, Quia Maior, 1213.” As found in Bird, Jessalynn, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell, eds. Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Accessed March 7, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fh9x5. ↑
  4. Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia. “RESEARCH PROPOSAL: CRUSADE, LITURGY, IDEOLOGY, AND DEVOTION (1095-1400).” Neh.gov, Research Grant FB-56015-12. Pg. 1. ↑
  5. Gaposchkin, M. Cecilia. Invisible weapons: liturgy and the making of crusade ideology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. ↑
  6. Moore, John, ed. Pope Innocent III and his world. Routledge, 2016. Ch. 22, pg. 1. ↑
  7. Power, Daniel. “Who went on the Albigensian Crusade?.” The English Historical Review 128, no. 534 (2013): 1047-1085. Pg. 1076. ↑
  8. Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 203. ↑
  9. Shannon, Albert Clement. The Popes and Heresy in the Thirteenth Century. Villanova, Pennsylvania: Augustinian Press, 1949. Pg. 37. ↑
  10. Rist, Rebecca. “Salvation and the Albigensian Crusade: Pope Innocent III and the plenary indulgence.” Reading Medieval Studies 36 (2010): 95-112. ↑
  11. Ephesians 4:9, The Bible, New International Version (NIV). ↑
  12. Nickerson, Hoffman. The Inquisition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923. Pg. 35. ↑
  13. “Innocent III, Quia Maior, 1213.” In Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291, edited by Bird Jessalynn, Peters Edward, and Powell James M., 107-12. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. ↑
  14. “Innocent III, Quia Maior, 1213,” in Crusade and Christendom, ed. Jessalyn et al. ↑
  15. Ibid. ↑
  16. Pope Innocent III, “Quia Maior,” Patrologia Latina, ed. Migne, vol. 216, col. 821. ↑
  17. Ibid. ↑
  18. Uebel, Michael. “Unthinking the Monster: Twelfth-Century Responses to Saracen Alterity,” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. (1996): 264-91. Pg. 268. ↑
  19. Baugh, Alexander L. “A call to arms: the 1838 Mormon defense of Northern Missouri.” PhD diss., Brigham Young University, 1996. Pg. 26. ↑
  20. Bell, pg. 25. ↑
  21. Left: From Milton-Edwards, Beverley. “Jerusalem: Securing Spaces In Holy Places.” Brookings, 201.. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/jerusalem-securing-spaces-in-holy-places/. Right: Winston, Kimberly. “Contested Sacred Space USA: Conflict And Cooperation In The Heartland – Religion News Service.” 2017. Religion News Service. https://religionnews.com/2017/08/11/contested-sacred-space-usa-conflict-and-cooperation-in-the-heartland/. Accessed 3/7/20. ↑
  22. The Doctrine and Covenants of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981. Section 57:1-2. ↑
  23. Smith, Joseph Fielding. Life of Joseph F. Smith. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1938. Pg. 340. ↑
  24. Howlett, David J. Kirtland temple: The biography of a shared Mormon sacred space. University of Illinois Press, 2014. ↑
  25. “Valley of God” in the Adamic language — Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Vol. 1, which cites Journal of Discourses 18:343 (Orson Pratt). ↑
  26. “Adam-Ondi-Ahman.” Emp.Byui.Edu, 2020. http://emp.byui.edu/SATTERFIELDB/PDF/Quotes/Adam-ondi-Ahman.pdf. Accessed 6 Mar 2020. ↑
  27. Winston, Kimberly. “Contested Sacred Space USA: Conflict And Cooperation In The Heartland – Religion News Service.” 2017. Religion News Service. https://religionnews.com/2017/08/11/contested-sacred-space-usa-conflict-and-cooperation-in-the-heartland/. Accessed 3/7/20. ↑
  28. Bell, Angela. “Trouble in Zion: the radicalization of Mormon theology, 1831-1839.” PhD diss., University of Missouri–Columbia, 2017. Pg. 9. ↑
  29. Gordon S. Wood, “Evangelical America and Early Mormonism,” New York History 61 (October 1980). Pg. 380. ↑
  30. Crawley, Peter, and Richard L. Anderson. “The Political and Social Realities of Zion’s Camp.” Brigham Young University Studies 14, no. 4 (1974): 406-420. ↑
  31. Daniel Ashby, James Keyte, and Sterling Price (Brunswick, Missouri), “Letter to Governor Lilburn W. Boggs” (Jefferson City, Missouri), September 1, 1838, in Mormon War Papers 1837-41, Missouri State Archives. ↑
  32. “Petition to Congress,” The Latter-day Saint’s Millennial Star, No. 28, vol XVII. Saturday, July 14, 1855. Reprinted from the History of Joseph Smith, a copy of the ‘petition to Congress for redress of our Missouri difficulties.’ ↑
  33. “Polygamy and Utah,” The Latter-day Saint’s Millennial Star, No. 8, vol XVII. Saturday, February 24, 1855. ↑
  34. Brown, Samuel Morris. In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death. Oxford University Press, 2011. Pg. 289. ↑
  35. Bird, Jessalynn, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell, eds. Crusade and Christendom: annotated documents in translation from Innocent III to the fall of Acre, 1187-1291. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pg. 454. ↑
  36. Crandall, Marilyn J. “The Little and Gardner Hymnal, 1844: A Study of Its Origin and Contribution to the LDS Musical Canon.” Byu Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 2005, pp. 136–160. Pg. 138. ↑
  37. Bell, pg. 2. ↑
  38. Daviess County Circuit Court Records, C2690, p. 3. ↑
  39. Matthew 5:13, The Bible, King James Version (KJV). ↑
  40. Daviess County Circuit Court Records, C2690, p. 4 ↑

  41. Frampton, T. Ward. “’Some Savage Tribe’: Race, Legal Violence, and the Mormon War of 1838.” Journal of Mormon History 40, no. 1 (2014): 175-207. Pg. 194. ↑

  42. The Doctrine and Covenants of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1981. Section 52:42. ↑
  43. Bird, Jessalynn, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell, eds. Crusade and Christendom: annotated documents in translation from Innocent III to the fall of Acre, 1187-1291. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pg. 40. ↑
  44. Bird et al, pg. 5. ↑
  45. Frampton, pg. 195. ↑
  46. Largey, Zachary L. “The Rhetoric of Persecution: Mormon Crisis Rhetoric from 1838-1871.” (2006). Theses and Dissertations, Brigham Young University. Pg. 67. ↑
  47. “History, 1838–1856, volume A-1 [23 December 1805–30 August 1834],” p. 475, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed March 4, 2020. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-1838-1856-volume-a-1-23-december-1805-30-august-1834/481. ↑
  48. Grua, David W., “Memoirs of the Persecuted: Persecution, Memory, and the West as a Mormon Refuge” (2008). Theses and Dissertations, Brigham Young University. Pg. 17. ↑
  49. Grua, pg. 17. ↑
  50. Grow, Matthew J.. “The Suffering Saints: Thomas L. Kane, Democratic Reform, and the Mormon Question in Antebellum America.” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (2009): 681 – 710. Pg. 682. ↑
  51. Cordon, Alfred. “Times and Seasons, 16 May 1842, vol 3, no 14” p. 793, The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed March 4, 2020, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/times-and-seasons-16-may-1842/11 ↑
  52. Cordon, Alfred, “Times and Seasons,” p. 793, The Joseph Smith Papers. ↑
  53. Hicks, Michael. Mormonism and music: A history. Vol. 489. University of Illinois Press, 2003. Pg. 20, quoting Alexander Campbell. ↑
  54. Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay. The History of the Albigensian Crusade. Edited and translated by W. A. Sibly and M. D. Sibly. Woodbridge, UK: 1998. §226. Pg. 116. Continued quote: “…, those who recited the psalms more than those who attacked them, those who prayed more than those who sought to wound.” ↑
  55. O’Carroll, Michael. Veni Creator Spiritus: A Theological Encyclopedia of the Holy Spirit. Liturgical Press, 1990. Pg. 65. ↑
  56. Alexander, John Kimball. “Tarred and Feathered: Mormons, Memory, and Ritual Violence.” PhD diss., Department of History, University of Utah, 2012. Pg. 8. ↑
  57. Moore, Robert I. The formation of a persecuting society: authority and deviance in Western Europe 950-1250. John Wiley & Sons, 2008. Pg. ↑
  58. Cannon, Mark W. “The crusades against the Masons, Catholics, and Mormons: Separate waves of a common current.” Brigham Young University Studies 3, no. 2 (1961): 23-40. Pg. 23. ↑
  59. Cannon, pg. 26. ↑
  60. Cannon, pg. 36. ↑
  61. Hartley, William G. “Missouri’s 1838 Extermination Order and the Mormons’ Forced Removal to Illinois.” Mormon Historical Studies 2, no. 1 (2001): 5-27. Pg. 5. ↑
  62. Frampton, pg. 196. ↑
  63. Brandon G. Kinney. The Mormon War: Zion and the Missouri Extermination Order of 1838. Yardley, Penn.: Westholme Publishing, 2011. 236 pp. Notes, bibliography, index, photographs, maps. ↑
  64. Hartley, Pg. 5. ↑
  65. Frampton, pg. 197. ↑
  66. Sibly, W.A.; Sibly, M.D. (2003). The Chronicle of William of Puylaurens: The Albigensian Crusade and Its Aftermath. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England, UK: The Boydell Press. pp. 127–128. ↑
Categories
Book Reviews Essays Politics

To End All Wars?

About four years ago, I read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque on a Sunday in November, a lot like this one. It was painful. Paul (the “protagonist,” if there is one) is a brutal narrator. Reading most of the book in a day made his story more real, rushed, and urgent. I remember reading certain parts and shutting the book out of horror. Crying wasn’t rare.

During most of high school, I would say All Quiet was my favorite book. I’m not sure why. Not because I ‘enjoyed’ it. Only a sadist could. Maybe because it immersed me, and Paul’s voice had been inscribed on my mind. His story was more concrete and rattling than any history I’d learned before. While it is a novel and Paul did not exist in a literal sense, millions of people experienced his story. As shameful as it is to say, these millions had just never been real to me. As Camus, who lived through WWII in France, wrote:

“But what are a hundred million deaths? … Since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.” — Albert Camus, The Plague, pg. 4. 

Reading the book made these deaths more than just a puff of smoke; or at least, it made a few of these deaths real. Remarque turned them into ink on paper, which became thoughts and memories ingrained in neurons in my brain. Once-empty phrases gained powerful meaning: “Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world” (All Quiet on the Western Front, 46). If only the generals and political leaders of WWI were able to read this book during the war. Then again, most of them experienced the nightmarish inspiration for All Quiet firsthand, and most were still able to dissociate it from their actions and continue the war.

I feel intense anger at the generals who tossed away countless lives mindlessly. They had an attitude similar to Napoleon’s:

“You cannot stop me. I can spend 30,000 men a month.” — Napoleon Bonaparte, Letter to Klemens von Metternich

Human life is the currency of war. The WWI generals were spending it. They poured hundreds of thousands of human bodies into Verdun, the Somme, Ypres, the Marne, like they were depositing piles of cash into the morbid bank of war. The supreme commander of the Allied forces in 1918, known for being reckless with human life during the Flanders, First Marne, and Artois campaigns, said something reminiscent of Napoleon’s quote:

“It takes 15,000 casualties to train a major general.”  — Ferdinand Foch (source: Nine Divisions in Champagne by Patrick Takle)

Doesn’t it sound like he’s quoting a price: we could train this general, but it will cost us 15,000 lives? Is that all the Great War was to these generals? A storm of prices, budget allocations, necessary costs, spending decisions? But behind each number was not a dollar but an individual, usually a man around my age, torn away from life and drafted into the process of destroying it en masse.

“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.” — Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Ch. 10

I find it hard to imagine that these people were the same as we are. Were people just different back then? Their generation went through horrors we cannot imagine, and then went through them again in the Second World War. Could my generation survive the trenches? Could we slog through the mud of Passchendaele, our minds broken by the beating of artillery and the sight of death, and continue to fight? I think the answer is yes; but I hope we never get the opportunity to prove it.

No one would like to think they are capable of atrocity or extraordinary violence. But this belief disregards history. Many of the people who reported the Armenian genocide during WWI, who decried the Ottomans for their brutality and inhumanity, were German military officers operating in Turkey. They thought they were fundamentally different from the monsters they condemned. Twenty-one years later, some of the same people would be involved in committing Holocaust. We all have a capacity for barbarity. Only by recognizing its existence and working against it can we prevent repeating history.

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

We failed to make good on our ancestor’s promise that WWI would be the war to end all wars. It has been one hundred years, and this planet has been scarred by more atrocity, violence, and mass destruction. Perhaps more than even veterans of the Great War could imagine.

Now, we live in the most peaceful time in history by most metrics. There hasn’t been a direct confrontation between great powers since 1945. But our peace is almost as fragile as the “concert of Europe” before World War 1. Almost all of the world’s major powers could obliterate life on Earth with a nuclear war and subsequent nuclear winter. Global military spending (the combined defense spending of every country) is at an all-time high (source). Seemingly minor movements, like China’s expansion into the South China Sea and Russia’s invasion of Crimea, reveal the tension underlying the global geopolitical order.

Image result for graph of conflict over time

And nationalism is making a resurgence globally. About a week ago, Jair Bolsonaro came to power in Brazil. This is a self-proclaimed nationalist who has said things like “I’m in favor of the military regime,” “it’s all right if some innocent people die. Innocent people die in many wars,” and “The only mistake of the dictatorship was torturing and not killing” (source). Our president has said “I’m a nationalist. OK? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Use that word” (source). Far-right parties are gaining momentum in Europe. These trends should worry anyone who has read about the first half of the 20th century.

Image result for resurgence of nationalism graph

I remember hearing that the last WWI veteran had died, when I was 13. I didn’t understand this much, but I had listened to my grandpa’s stories about Vietnam. I was wistful and even heartbroken I would never have the chance to hear about WWI from someone who was actually there. Assuming I survive for a while longer, I will probably also live through the death of the last person who fought in WWII, and the last person who experienced the Holocaust. I have a friend who is an international student from Rwanda. His parents lived through the genocide. He told me that they constantly remind him to tell his children their stories, for when the generation who remembers an atrocity disappear, the atrocity once again becomes possible. Hopefully I can be one of the minds that remembers these horrors and helps prevent them.

There are twenty-seven years until the centennial of World War II. These years should be treated as a test for humanity, everyone alive today, and our global political system. Have we overcome global war and permanently ended it? Have we finally decided to prioritize peace, human well-being, and the survival of the human species over geopolitical power games, tribalism, and the relentless struggle for limited resources? Or over these two decades, will we simply repeat what happened in the last century?

Note: Over the past month, I’ve listened to Dan Carlin’s Blueprint for Armageddon podcast about WWI. It’s amazing. It has a perfect balance between historical fact, primary sources, background info, and his personal analysis. And it is free! People (including me) pay thousands for college lectures that are far worse than this podcast. Yes, all parts combined it’s about 15 hours long. But it is important and worth it, and strung out over a few weeks of listening while driving, running, walking, etc, that isn’t that much time. 

Categories
Politics

The Fetishization of Individuals: From Hitler to Ken Bone

Humans have a relentless tendency to treat individuals as microcosms for the world. If we can identify a certain individual who fits into a group, we generalize this individual and make him/her representative of the group or concept as a whole. When we speak about these concepts or groups, we are implicitly thinking of these fetishized individuals. Thus, the ‘philosopher’ becomes Plato; the ‘drug lord’ becomes Pablo Escobar; the ‘autocrat’ becomes Hitler. These people that stand as concrete symbols for entire ideas are what I call ‘fetishized individuals.’

There is a constant political battle for control over these fetishized individuals. If someone humanizes and normalizes Pablo Escobar, they successfully humanize and normalize the drug trade as a whole. They take control of the image of the drug trade – the vivid, personalized, and individual representation. Then, when someone thinks of the drug trade, they think of Pablo Escobar – the friend of the poor, the anti-corruption, anti-communist activist, the family man.

Pablo Escobar as a criminal – the negative fetishization of a drug lord.

Pablo Escobar with a child – the positive fetishization of a drug lord.

When another representation is introduced, it is considered in the context of the existing fetish. Thus, it is extremely difficult to argue that El Chapo is terrible to convince someone who has internalized a positive version of Pablo Escobar as the representation of drug lords. Any logical argument is subordinate to their personal ideology-based ‘experience’ of Escobar. Perhaps a poor man heard Escobar gave out money in the streets and built schools for the impoverished; this gives them an emotional attachment – a fetish in a non-sexual sense – to the narrative of Pablo Escobar.

Modern political conflicts have begun using fetishized individuals in more obvious ways than ever before. The most clear example of this is Hitler, for he is the most completely fetishized person in the world. For almost everyone with an elementary education, mentions of autocracy, fascism, dictatorship, and genocide generate immediate images of Hitler with arm raised. One cannot win the ideological battle of making autocracy acceptable until one has made Hitler acceptable.

The first ideological step of neo-Nazis, therefore, is making the fetish of Hitler positive. This can be done in a variety of ways. For example, the extreme right-wing and anti-semitic site Rense.com published a series of images of the ‘hidden’ Adolf Hitler. Using these images of him – holding children, walking in gardens, smiling – makes it much harder to imagine him other contexts. We find it conceptually difficult to unite the many disparate aspects of a person into a single unified identity. How could the same Hitler that ordered the Holocaust also kiss babies? Psychological research shows that cognitive dissonance like this causes tangible pain. The drive to eliminate the dissonance, then, leads some to fetishize Hitler in a wholly positive way.

A positive fetishization of Hitler

The Netflix original Narcos powerfully represents our difficulty in categorizing individuals. You see Escobar in a variety of contexts – at home with his family, in drug labs, on a farm working, and at war. It becomes difficult to remember his horrific crimes when he is watching clouds with his young children. We can’t really conceptualize a ‘whole’ person – only the person we are seeing at the time. Uniting all the different Escobars into one unified individual is almost impossible. Ideologies take advantage of this inability to unify, and summarize individuals by a single aspect. For some, the need to resolve cognitive dissonance means forgetting Escobar’s crimes to enable a positive fetishization of his figure.

In the most recent presidential elections made fetishization a key aspect of political strategy. In 2008, Samuel Wurzelbacher asked Obama a simple question about small business tax policy – almost instantly making him a key symbol of the presidential election. He mentioned something about wanting to buy a plumbing company, and the McCain campaign leaped at the chance to relate to an ‘ordinary American.’ They coined his new name – Joe the Plumber – and repeatedly used him as an example in campaign rhetoric. McCain used the symbol of Joe the Plumber to show that Obama was ‘out of touch with the average Joe.’ It didn’t matter that Samuel wasn’t really a plumber and his name wasn’t really Joe.  Throughout the campaign, writes Amarnath Amarasingam, “A fictional plumber’s false scenario dominated media discourse” (source). 

In the modern election, it seems that the myth of the ordinary Joe has taken hold even more firmly. America has a need to believe in the normal citizen, a 9-5er who wants only find his dreams, stick to his moral standards, and support his family. And yes, this citizen is a he – we seem unable or unwilling to use a female figure as a symbol of American life.

Why do we feel a drive for the ordinary? After all, we are obsessing over the nonexistent. There is no ‘ordinary Joe.’ Every citizen has quirks, mistakes, sins, hidden lies, and extravagant dreams that prevent them from being ordinary. Joe can only exist as an idealized symbol, not a concrete individual. And yet the idea of the ordinary citizen is permanently entrenched in our minds. In some way, many people aspire to be average. This aspect of the psyche creates political battles over the ability to protect the ordinary individual, who stands as a metaphor for the whole American citizenry.

Thus, Ken Bone was created. He was a symbol of an ordinary person – appropriately but not excessively involved in politics, working the day job, dreaming small dreams, providing for the family. He was 2016’s version of 2008’s Joe the Plumber. He represented simple authenticity, the everyman – as his Twitter profile proclaims, he is merely an “average midwestern guy.”

He did not decide to become a meme. The media did not make him a meme; they merely capitalized on the attention once Ken Bone had already gone viral. He was not mass-produced by campaign offices and political propagandists. In an act of near-randomness, he was dubbed a meme by the distributed irrational network of sensation-seeking individuals we call the Internet.  The random series of viral creations in 2016 revealed that memes are fundamentally uncontrollable. After Harambe, damn Daniel, Ted Cruz the zodiac killer, how could we be surprised that Ken Bone was crowned a meme? 

Ken Bone could not even control what he himself symbolized. He attempted to control his own signifier by consistently exhorting people to vote and make their voices heard. But all his efforts, for the most part, failed. Ken Bone does not symbolize democratic participation. After all, memes are inherently dehumanizing. To become a meme, an image must be dissociated from its reality and turned into something else. In linguistics terms, it’s a sign whose signifier is malleable — the image’s meaning, thus, is created by those who share it. The meme itself has no power over its meaning.

This is the danger of living memes – they are tossed around by the whims of the Internet. And when these whims turn sour, the person suffers. Ken’s slightly quirky reddit history was revealed, and he was painted as a monster. 

I expect this process to continue endlessly: an individual becomes a sign that stands as a placeholder for a piece of political ideology. The individual is the object of immense attention, and then is tossed out like discarded trash. We should be careful that our memes do not make us think this is what people truly are. And we should not be surprised when the myth of the ‘ordinary citizen’ is shattered by the reality of the individual’s life and being. 

 

Categories
Politics

The Gradual Causes and Long History of the ‘Fake News Crisis’

It seems undeniable that the specter of fake news has taken control of the media. It seems that we’ve now entered a dark age of journalism, where the fake is indistinguishable from the real. It seems that we have entered an unprecedented era of hoaxing and counterfeiting.

But journalism has never been free of fake news. The Columbia Journalism Review published a detailed history of fake news in the United States. In short: fake news isn’t new, and it has real impacts. For example, people fled the city in droves and marched into public parks with guns after the New York Herald published a fabricated report that dangerous animals had escaped the zoo.

And fake news existed even before Gutenberg invented the printing press. In 1475, an Italian preacher claimed that Jews had drunk the blood of an infant (source). This led a local Bishop to order the arrest of all local Jews, and fifteen Jews were burned alive. The fake story spawned even more hysteria about vampiric Jews, which spread across Europe despite declarations from the Pope to try and end the panic.

Fake news has unbelievable power. In Journalism: A Critical History, Martin Conboy demonstrated its dramatic role in history. In 1898, the USS Maine exploded off the coast of Havana, killing over 250 people. The cause was never explained. The Spanish government, which controlled Cuba, expressed sympathy for the disaster and denied any involvement. The captain of the Maine, one of the few survivors, urged Americans to withhold judgement to prevent conflict with the Spanish.

The headlines after the Maine explosion – based on fake news.

Regardless, Joseph Pulitzer, editor of the New York World, quickly condemned Spain, claiming that they sabotaged the Maine. The World published a cable showing that the Maine was not an accident – even though this cable was completely fake. Newspapers published imaginary drawings of the explosion – even though no one had seen it.  Sales of the World skyrocketed, and the public demanded revenge. Fake news helped start the Spanish-American War. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the namesake of the highest award in journalism, the Pulitzer prize, was a purveyor of fake news.

So is there anything new about the recent fake news? Yes – because Americans are far more dependent on news. News, both print and digital, takes far more forms than at any other point in history – videos, images, blogs, tweets, posts, articles. Almost all Americans can read basic English (source), 84% of Americans use the internet (source), and 79% of American internet users are on Facebook (source)

Never before the last decades has the vast majority of the population been simultaneously connected to a source of instant news. A meme, story, or fake event can spread across the public awareness in a few hours. The fundamental nature of fake news hasn’t changed. It has just become far more common and accessible – just as the modern transportation system allows viruses to spread far more quickly.

A map of global disease spread – not too far from the transmission of fake news.

Furthermore, perhaps the American public has become increasingly vulnerable to fake news. While this claim is hard to demonstrate and somewhat unverifiable, it’s possible that the average reading level has declined. In 1776, the relatively complex, sophisticated pamphlet Common Sense sold 500,000 copies, roughly 20% of the colonial population (source). Now, less than 13% of Americans are proficient in “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts” like Common Sense (source). It seems that the percent of Americans who can understand Common Sense is smaller than the proportion that owned Common Sense in 1776. Plus, the most recent studies show that American reading proficiency has declined over the last two decades (source). Even among college graduates, the proportion that can understand and reason about complex texts has decreased to less than 31% over the last decade (source).

It’s a viable theory that these two trends – increasing access to news and decreasing reading ability – have shaped a perfect storm for fake news. Americans aren’t as likely, or as able, to make nuanced, reasoned analyses about complex texts. They’re more likely to have access to the oversimplified and sensationalized world of internet news (and news in general). More people can be infected by the virus (fake news), and less people have the vaccine (critical thought). As a result, a single tweet can spawn a flurry of fake news that quickly becomes an accepted part of the American psyche.

However, the concept of fake news is also dangerous in other ways. It has already been used as a political weapon to shut down opposing journalism. The left has used it to deride right-wing sources, and the right has coopted it to attack left-wing news. Already, the LA Times and Washington Post have claimed that right-wing sites like the Ron Paul Institute and Breitbart.com are ‘fake news’ (source).

These sites could be derided as biased producers of dangerous propaganda, but this is not the type of fake news I’m interested in. Breitbart may be skewed, but it does base news loosely on actual events. Fake news is completely counterfeit – without referent in the real world. To avoid ‘fake news’ becoming a tool to eliminate enemy voices, we need to delineate the concept clearly and create solutions carefully.

This is an intro to some of my further research into fake news. This week, I’m going to write another article about the philosophy of fake news, and then one about the solutions to the problem. I’ll try to relate the issue to Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, examine the differences between Kantian and utilitarian journalistic ethics, and look back to Plato’s critique of postmodernism. Maybe I’ll even make up some ideas of my own.

Why am I so interested? I think that fake news is a microcosm into the larger issue of the ‘postmodern condition,’ which is what I’m focusing on for my three-week independent study. It relates to the need for classical education, which is what I’m studying in a directed readings class. And it’s a good area for philosophical research that hasn’t been fully delved into.