Revision as of 23:35, 23 May 2010

1. REDIRECTTemplate:Test3

Questions

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• Historian Thomas Alexander is claimed to have held the position that "the Indians made them do it" (i.e., commit the Mountain Meadows Massacre).

Source(s) of the criticism

• Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 367.

Detailed Analysis

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Responded Alexander to this claim:

The massacre at Mountain Meadows remains one of the most heinous and least understood crimes in the history of the American West. How a militia unit of "God-fearing Christians" could have murdered more than 120 people in cold blood seems beyond comprehension. In a previous book, I attempted to understand the massacre by comparing it to "the massacres of Christian Armenians by Moslem Turks, of Jews by Christian Germans, and of Moslem Bosnians by Christian Serbs." I did not say, as Bagley flippantly claims I did, "the Indians made them do it" (367). On reflection, the massacre should reveal to each of us our vulnerability and our potential—however well hidden—for acts of unspeakable atrocity.^[1]

Answer

== The author is willing to distort the position of his historical colleague to score a rhetorical point, just as he selectively presents the evidence of the past to the same end.

== Notes ==

1. [note]  * Thomas G. Alexander, "Review of Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows," Brigham Young University Studies 31 no. 1 (January 2003), 167–. off-site

Further reading