MARCH 1844 PLOT TO KILL JOSEPH SMITH

 24 March 1844 • Sunday

899

900

<​24.​> Sunday 24. At 10 a. m. met at the

stand

near the [HC 6:271]

Temple

. The following very brief outline of the speeches is from the Journal of

W[ilford] Woodruff

901

“President Joseph Smith addressed the people; the following is the substance of what I heard him say:—

I have been informed by two gentlemen that a conspiracy is [p. 1936]

<​March 24.​> got up in this place for the purpose of taking the life of President Joseph Smith, his family, and all the Smith family, and the heads of the church, one of the gentlemen will give his name to the public, and the other wishes it to be hid for the present, they will both testify to it on oath and make an affidavit upon it. the names of the persons revealed at the head of the conspiracy are as follows

Chauncey L. Higbee

, Dr.

Robert D. Foster

, Mr.

Joseph H. Jackson

,

William [Law]

and

Wilson Law

. And the lies that

C. L. Higbee

has hatched up as a foundation to work upon are, he says that I had men’s heads cut off in

Missouri

, and that I had a sword run through the hearts of the people that I wanted to kill and put out of the way. I won’t swear out a warrant against <​them​> for I don’t fear any of them, they would not scare off an old sitting hen. I intend to publish all the iniquity that I know of them. If I am guilty I am ready to bear it. There is sometimes honor among enemies. I am willing to do anything for the good of the people. I will give the name of one of the gentlemen who have divulged the plot, his name is

M[erinus] G. Eaton

, he will swear to it, he is a bold fellow.

Joseph H Jackson

said a Smith should not be alive <​in​> two weeks, not over two months anyhow. Concerning the character of these men, I will say nothing about it now, but if I hear anything more from them on this subject, I will tell what I know about them.

Elder

Orson Spencer

addressed the people as follows:—

While listening to Prest. Smith’s remarks, I thought of a figure i.e. If a Physician was going to dissect a body, he would not be likely to begin at the limbs, but cut the head off first. So the Adversary of the Saints has laid a plan to cut off the head of the church with the intention of scattering and destroying the whole body. It was so in the days of Jesus christ; the enemies of truth sought to kill him, that the body might be destroyed; which was also the case in the days of Elijah, Daniel, and many of the ancients. I once heard a man say who was opposed to this work “that it might be true, but it gave Joseph Smith power.’ True, said I, but if his power be subordinate to the power of God, it is right. If a man set up a kingdom by the power of God, then let others seek power from the same source. God sets up kingdoms and pulls down kingdoms; [HC 6:272] this makes men mad who will not submit to the kingdom of God. We all know the result of the power of Moses, who was the representative of God. Judging from what is past, how will it be when God sets up his kingdom in the last days? Whether there is a conspiracy now or not I don’t know; but no doubt there will be, if not now; for it has always been so. In the days of the Nephites, they had their Gadianton robbers. I have not any doubt but that the Apostates will join with the other wicked powers to try to put down the power of God and I am glad to have the power of the kingdom of God tested; and when it is fully tried, it will stand. I care not what sacrifice I am called to make for such a kingdom; if it is friends, wealth, or even life at the purchase of such a kingdom it is cheap. Did the ancient Apostles, Prophets, [p. 1937]

<​March 24.​> or Saints who died, pay too much for that kingdom? They did not. It is necessary that men be put in possession of the knowledge and mysteries of the kingdom of God in order to sin as far as they wish— that they may go to the highest pitch. How often men lay down their lives for their country, and other purposes, how much better then to die for the cause of Zion. Good and righteous men will administer justice and rebuke evil. The Church should be cleansed from bad men; and the Lord will take his own way to cleanse the church. We should lift up our voice against wickedness of all kinds. But will the rulers of our land do it? No, they will not; they will be cowards until there is no man to fight, and then be brave; when Government will not do it. Some man should take the helm of Government that will do it. Will it be called treason, if the God of Heaven should set up a kingdom? May the Lord give you more and more of his Spirit, light, and intelligence, until you are cemented together in union and love, Amen.

Elder

Sidney Rigdon

addressed the meeting.

Prest. Joseph Smith again arose and said: In relation to the power over the minds of mankind which I hold, I would say it is in consequence of the power of truth in the doctrines which I have been an instrument in the hands of God of presenting unto them, and not because of any compulsion on my part. I wish to ask if ever I got any of it unfairly? If I have not reproved you in the gate? I ask did I ever exercise any compulsion over any man? Did I not give him the liberty of disbelieving any doctrine I have preached if he saw fit? Why do not my enemies strike a blow at the doctrine? They cannot do it, it is truth and I defy all men to upset it. I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness ‘repent ye of your sins and prepare the way for the coming of the son of man, for the kingdom of God has come unto you [HC 6:273] and henceforth the axe is laid unto the root of the tree, and every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit. God Almighty (and not Joe Smith) shall hew it down and cast it into the fire’.”

902

After meeting I rode out with

Emma

. The trees begin to bud forth.

In <​the​> evening— held a conversation with a large company of friends at my door.

903

Elder R. H. Kinnamon writes, that during the last 22 months he has baptized over 100 persons while on a Mission in

Virginia

and N. Carolina— organized two branches in

Virginia

, and calls are continually made for preaching in every direction.

I copy a letter written by Dr.

W[illard] Richards

to Gen.

James Arlington Bennett [Bennet]

.

904

“

Nauvoo

March 24. 1844. Dear

General

. I wrote you on the 4th. inst. in reply to yours of the 1st. Ultimo, also, to inform you of the decision of your friends in

Nauvoo

, in nominating you for the Vice Presidency of the

United States

.

Since that date it has occurred to me that you are not a native of the

Union

, consequently we might expect objections [p. 1938]

<​March 24​> would be made to your election on Constitutional principles; which we shall be obliged to submit to, unless there be some method of avoiding it which we are unacquainted with, and that constitutionally as our Magna charta must be supported.

I suggested the idea to the Council and it was decided that I should write you and state the case requesting a communication from you on this subject.

905

You are the man of our choice, as facts have already proved to you, but if we cannot be gratified we must look elsewhere though as yet we are quite undecided as to the man.

Your friends here expect you will not alter your course, in relation to this matter; though you may not get the title of Vice President, yet, there are other stations, where you may render as important service to the country, and as valuable to yourself.

and I am further authorized by Gen. Smith to say to

Gen. Bennett

, Go-a-head and make all the wake you can. Get Gen. Smith elected President and name your office; only permit him Pharaoh-like to be greatest in the throne, as all former Prophets have been.

Gen.

will you go it?—

Circumstances of a peculiarly interesting character are in progress, relative to

Texas

which if carried out, may open a field capacious enough for your contemplation and operations for the time being should your inclinations lead you towards that delightful climate for a little season:— The full development of which I am not at liberty to write at this time.

Suffice it to say if by your exertion you can help save the nation by electing Gen. Smith— You will find business to your satisfaction afterwards.

In the mean time let me hear from you often— while I remain

Yours truly

Willard Richards

.

25 March 1844 • Monday

906

theatlantic.com

The Lessons of the Afghanistan Papers

Tamara Cofman Wittes, Kevin Huggard

9-11 minutes

---

Americans need leaders who can tell them how and when they will decide to pull the plug.

Bay Ismoyo / AFP / Getty

About the authors: Tamara Cofman Wittes is a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Kevin Huggard is a senior research assistant in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

The Afghanistan Papers, published a week ago by The Washington Post, offer vivid details and sometimes shocking assessments, but few surprising insights. The hundreds of interviews collected by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR) and obtained by the Post show clearly that the United States has been fighting a long, costly war that remains far from success and offers no clear path for getting there. That this miserable impasse could sustain itself for 18 years represents a failure of political leadership, and also a lack of honest public conversation. But if our only response is cynicism, we risk learning the wrong lessons from the Afghanistan Papers.

The degree of misrepresentation by military and civilian leaders of that effort in claiming success, and the specific details of those misrepresentations, should drive accountability as well as lessons for the future. But even extensive oversight mechanisms cannot guarantee the reversal of failing policy, if no one in a position of responsibility is willing to bite the bullet.

As the Post notes, SIGAR was created by Congress precisely to make independent assessments of the nearly trillion-dollar effort by successive U.S. administrations to transform Afghanistan. SIGAR has published nine reports so far in its “Lessons Learned” series, including an unsparingly critical report on stabilization and reconstruction that we launched in May 2018 at the Brookings Institution, where we work. The Post sued to obtain the interviews and other documents underlying the project through the Freedom of Information Act.

The interviews published by the Post provide a starker version of SIGAR’s previous analysis, but in many ways, they tell the same story. In its reports and testimony before Congress, SIGAR has revealed waste, abuse, and questionable judgment in a host of Afghanistan programs and projects. The interviews are stripped of the dry inspector-general verbiage and also of the strategic context within which judgments were made; senior officials frankly assess their failures to produce security, stability, or transparent and effective governance in Afghanistan. Those failures are documented in SIGAR’s reports.

But the extensive oversight mechanisms created for this massive project were not enough to force a rethink in the face of inertia, sunk costs, and short-term political calculations. SIGAR’s extant analysis of failures and missteps should have prompted a greater reckoning some time ago—if not within the executive branch, then within Congress, which regularly authorized and appropriated funds for the ongoing campaign.

This attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan was embarked on by one president and embraced, at least for a time, by two more. Each one, when faced with the decision, chose to continue down this doomed road, believing it less risky and more palatable than his available alternatives. What the Post reporting reveals is that, while this path may have been easier, it was a road that would never reach its stated destination.

The U.S. effort in Afghanistan was an undertaking of breathtaking ambition: to oust a Taliban regime that gave haven to international terrorists; to defeat those terrorists and their allies and supporters in a counterinsurgency campaign; to set up and sustain a democratic government in a society riven by years of factional war; and to promote human development, human security, and basic human rights in a country where religious extremists, drug lords, and tribal chiefs had long ruled over (and fought for control of) a beleaguered populace. The overarching result seems to be a sort of D-minus—some degree of visible achievement, but still a failing grade.

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The Post’s reporting is unsparing in its depiction of “second-guessing and back-biting” among U.S. government officials about their work in Afghanistan. Field staff argued that higher-ups didn’t understand the realities they faced on the ground, didn’t give them enough leeway to be effective, or cut off resources at the wrong time. Senior staff questioned strategies chosen by their superiors or determined in internal debates in which they participated. These concerns, voiced mostly in confidential interviews with SIGAR, were no doubt honestly felt, and had real foundations.

The existence of such doubts and concerns, however, does not necessarily reveal the roots of the Afghanistan failure. This kind of second-guessing is endemic in any large organization undertaking a long-term, complex project. Field staff close to on-the-ground implementation often question how their work is valued or prioritized by central decision makers, or question how their contribution fits into the wider strategy; central decision makers often fail to see the reality of implementation on the ground, and focus their energies on the policy battles they’ve won and lost around the interagency table.

Most successful projects would reveal such concerns and complaints along the way, if they were also investigated. But successful projects don’t usually get this kind of attention, nor do those who achieve that success usually focus on their own complaints about the project in post hoc interviews. Conversely, a decision not to attempt reconstruction in Afghanistan, but merely to oust the Taliban and leave, would likewise have been accompanied by internal recriminations and warnings, some of which might well have proved correct.

Rebuilding a country after 30 years of civil war is an enormously complex challenge, in which failure is possible even when everyone involved agrees on the goals and means and when their execution is flawless. So we must ask whether there was some earlier fork in the road that we should have seen and taken but missed. Should we find ourselves on such a road again, we must learn to recognize signs of trouble more quickly, so we can call a halt before we’ve gone so far.

The insights produced by SIGAR’s work, and made vivid by the Afghanistan Papers, should produce a much-needed national reckoning. Was a better grade than a D-minus ever realistic? If not, was the D-minus worth the price? This is an essential question for the military and civilian agencies involved in Afghanistan, for Congress and for the American public—and most especially for those now aspiring to the role of commander in chief.

In the current cynical environment, with public trust in institutions at an all-time low and political polarization high, we fear for the way in which Afghanistan will feature in the upcoming presidential campaign. The politically easy responses to the “Lessons Learned” project are to say “This shows why we need to bring all our troops home now,” or “This shows why we should never use force abroad,” or even “This shows why we should never attempt to promote democracy or women’s rights or good-governance policies in countries that aren’t already like us.”

But such simplistic conclusions sidestep both the reasons the United States embarked on the Afghan War, and the reasons three American presidents kept us there. To make those easy answers the lessons we learn would be to repeat the failure of responsibility that we’ve seen over the past 18 years, and to overcorrect in ways that could leave us asking a different “Why?” a few years or decades from now.

In some ways, the cynicism of these responses is understandable. The bitter experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has undercut public faith in those entrusted with making and implementing American foreign policy. That’s a legacy Washington’s senior officials and foreign-policy hands must work to overcome, whether or not they or their favored political party were on the “right” side of these projects. No one should expect public applause for having only a minority stake in a national catastrophe.

Part of regaining lost trust must involve a greater willingness to recognize, own, and correct mistakes, something the Post’s report makes clear American policy makers have not done in Afghanistan. SIGAR’s reports were not enough to get the ball rolling. Even if they had, it’s far from clear that more active follow-through from Congress could have forced policy changes that would have delivered anything like success in Afghanistan.

It’s always foolish for an American president to launch an ambitious foreign-policy project on the assumption of success. That was George W. Bush’s mistake in Iraq. In Afghanistan, success was not assumed. But when failure became inevitable, U.S. leaders didn’t look for an acceptable off-ramp, and the public didn’t pressure them to do so. No doubt a future president will confront the question of whether to launch an ambitious project abroad with uncertain hopes of success. By then, Americans need leaders who can tell them how and when they will decide to pull the plug.

 

 

beforeitsnews.com

Naomi Wolf: We’ve Reached ‘Step Ten’ of the 10 Steps to Fascism | Alternative | Before It's News

Waking Times

10-13 minutes

---

Naomi Wolf , Children’s Health Defense
Waking Times

In 2008, I wrote a book, “The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.” In it I warned, based on my study of closing democracies in 20th century history, that America needed to beware of an all-too-possible slide into totalitarianism.

I warned that would-be tyrants, whether they are on the left or the right, always use a map to close down democracies, and that they always take the same ten steps.

Whether they “Invoke an External and Internal Threat” or “Develop a Paramilitary Force” or “Restrict the Press” or the final step, “Subvert the Rule of Law, these steps are always recognizable — and they always work to crush democracies and establish tyrannies. At the time that I wrote the book, the “global threat” of terrorism was the specter that powers invoked in order to attack our freedoms.

The book was widely read and discussed, both at the time of its publication and over the last 12 years. Periodically over the last decade, people would ask me when and if we had reached “Step Ten.”

We — my brave publisher, Chelsea Green, and I — are releasing videos of me reading the first and last chapters (see videos below) of “The End of America” now, in 2021, for free. And I am calling the sequel to this book, which I am now writing, “Step Ten” — because as of March of last year, we have indeed, I am so sad to say, arrived at and begun to inhabit “Step Ten” of the 10 steps to fascism.

Though in 2008, I did not explicitly foresee that a medical pandemic would be the vehicle for moving the entire globe into “Step Ten,” I have at various points warned of the dangers of medical crises as vehicles that tyranny can exploit to justify suppressions of civil rights.

Today, a much-hyped medical crisis has taken on the role of being used as a pretext to strip us all of core freedoms, that fears of terrorism did not, despite 20 years of effort, ultimately achieve.

In 2015, I was widely mocked in mainstream news outlets for warning about the hysteria that accompanied Ebola reporting, and I cautioned then that infectious diseases could be used as a justification for ushering in the suppression of liberties, always under the guise of emergency measures.

In 2020, I showed in my book, “Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love,” how infectious disease epidemics, such as cholera and typhus, had been exploited in the 19th century by the British state in order to crush freedoms and invade people’s privacy. I wrote about how the first anti-vaccination movements arose among British parents in the Victorian period.

That book was initially cancelled, and its message of warning continues to be assailed. But that book, too, was prescient: In early March of 2020, of course, a global pandemic was announced — COVID-19.

In the immediate wake of the announcement and narrativization of that pandemic, most of the elements of a locked-in, 360-degree totalitarianism have been put into place in most of the countries of the West, including in what had been robust democracies. It all happened very quickly and comprehensively.

In the U.S. we now have:

1. Emergency measures in many states, which suspend due process of law. This is the hallmark of a police state. COVID-19 is invoked as the reason for the introduction of emergency law — but there is no endpoint for lifting these emergency laws.
2. The closures of schools, which break the social contract with the next generation.
3. Bills being passed for “vaccine passports,” which bypass the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution by allowing the government and Big Tech companies to intrude on medical privacy, and to create a comprehensive digital surveillance state. (Indeed, the fact that tech stocks rose by 27% each quarter of the pandemic shows one driver of this war against the human: Every minute human beings spend in a classroom, at the pub or restaurant or in a church or synagogue, is time that tech companies lose money by being unable to harvest that data. COVID-19 policies driven by “COVID-19 Response” — actually, by Big Tech companies — ensure that humans are not allowed to connect except via digital platforms. The reason is profit as well as social control).
4. Forced closures of businesses. By intervening directly in the economy and allowing certain businesses to flourish (Amazon, Walmart, Target) at the expense of small businesses, Main Street shops, restaurants and sole proprietor businesses in general, the State has merged government and corporations in a way that is characteristic of Italian fascism and modern Chinese communism.
5. Restrictions on assembly. Some states such as California are fining people for seeing their friends in their homes, and making it unlawful for kids to have playdates with their friends. Massachusetts restricted gatherings of more than 10 people at a time, forcing synagogues and churches to stay closed, in spite of a Supreme Court ruling against states forcing churches to close. Parks and playgrounds and beaches have been closed. In countries such as Britain, people are fined for leaving their homes for more than an hour’s exercise a day.
6. Forced face coverings. In Massachusetts, people are fined if they are not wearing masks outdoors — even children as young as 5 are forced to do so by law. Again, this mandate has not been undergirded by peer-reviewed studies showing medical necessity. And there is no endpoint proffered for these extraordinary violations of personal freedom.
7. Suppression of free speech. Big Tech companies are censoring critics of COVID-19 policy and vaccine policy, as well as censoring views that are on the right hand of the political spectrum. Incitement, a word that has a long history in the 20th century for closing down free speech, has been weaponized by the left to shut down First Amendment freedoms of expression. In other forms of censorship and management of speech and public debate, tycoons such as Bill Gates have been funding major news outlets, with millions of dollars directed to “COVID-19 education.” As a result, dissenting voices are marginalized and shamed, or even threatened with legal action or job losses.
8. Science being hijacked in the interests of “biofascism.” By heavily funding scientific commentators such as Dr. Fauci in the United States, Imperial College and SAGE in the U.K. and Dr. Christian Drosten in Germany, a dominant set of policies and pronouncements about COVID-19 that benefit a small group of bad actors — notably tech and pharmaceutical interests, acting in concert with governments — have built an army of secured, credentialled supporters. But when other scientists or institutions seek debate or transparency, they are threatened with job loss or are reputationally attacked, as in the case of Dr. Simon Goddeke of the Netherlands, who was told to keep quiet by his university when he challenge the flawed COVID-19 PCR test protocols.
9. Data being hijacked to serve the interests of this biofascism. This manipulation of truth, which I foreshadowed in “The End of America,” is typical of the Soviet censors. COVID-19 platforms such as the COVID Tracking Project and Johns Hopkins University, funded by technocrats such as Michael Bloomberg, serve unverifiable COVID-19 data that directly affect the stock markets. Again, while this un-American merger of corporate interests and public policy is reminiscent of Italian fascism, the twist provided by digital data presentation and its relationship to the stock market is very much of the 21st century.
10. Attacks on religious minorities. The orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn and Christian churches in California have been singled out for punishment if they do not follow COVID-19 rules — a targeting of religion that is characteristic of communist policies on the left, especially in China.
11. Policies that weaken bonds between human beings and weaken the family being introduced and policed. This is the most serious development of all.

The new biofascism, very much driven by Big Tech leaders, is a war against human beings and the qualities that make us human.

Masks break human beings’ ability to bond face to face and enjoy human contact, smiles and jokes. Masks turn down the effectiveness of human “technology,” essentially, by making it hard for us to “read” each other and to pick up social cues.

Forbidding assembly keeps us from forming human alliances against these monstrous interests. Forbidding human assembly also prevents new cultures, new heroes and new business models from arising. We are all stuck with the Rolodex and the ideas we had in March of 2019.

Forcing kids to distance at school and wear masks ensures a generation of Americans who don’t know how to form human alliances, and who don’t trust their own human instincts. Those are counterrevolutionary training techniques.

Driving all learning onto (already prepared) distance-learning platforms ensures that kids do not know how to behave in human space, space not mediated by technology.

Many COVID-19 policies seem designed to ensure that humans will have no “analog” space or “analog” culture left — no way to feel comfortable simply gathering in a room, touching one another as friends or allies, or joining together.

Lastly, driving all human interaction onto Zoom (which is a window for the Communist China Party, as China owns the platform) is not only a way to harvest all of our tech, business secrets and IP, it is a way to ensure that intimacy and connection in the future will be done online and that human face-to-face contact will be killed off.

Why is this? Why develop policies that punish, encumber and restrict human contact in analog (un-surveilled, unmediated) spaces?

Because human contact is the great revolutionary force when it comes to human freedom and resistance to this form of comprehensive biofascism — the biofascism represented by the New Normal — the medico-fascist “Step Ten.”

Now let me recap from the year 2008, and read you my intro to “The End of America”, as well as the warning at the close of that book. Its message has never, sadly, been more timely. This time, the threats to freedom that were then justified by terrorism, have re-clothed themselves in the trappings of a medical pandemic.

But this time we do not just face a war on freedom. This time we face a war on human beings, and on all that makes us human.

Watch Naomi Wolf read the introduction to “The End of America

Watch Chapter 1

Watch Chapter 11

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense.

About the Author

Naomi Wolf was born in San Francisco in 1962. She was an undergraduate at Yale University and did her graduate work at New College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

Like Waking Times on Facebook. Follow Waking Times on Twitter.

Source: https://www.wakingtimes.com/naomi-wolf-weve-reached-step-ten-of-the-10-steps-to-fascism/

The Lost Book of Abraham