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Interesting post-war conference talk (1946). Thought it might be useful for any of you living among the ‘Jar heads’ Quote:
…As the crowning savagery of the (Second world) war, we Americans wiped out hundreds of thousands of civilian population with the atom bomb in Japan, few if any of the ordinary civilians being any more responsible for the war than were we… Military men are now saying that the atom bomb was a mistake. It was more than that: it was a world tragedy… And the worst of this atomic bomb tragedy is not that not only did the people of the United States not rise up in protest against this savagery, not only did it not shock us to read of this wholesale destruction of men, women, and children, and cripples, but that it actually drew from the nation at large a general approval of this fiendish butchery.…
Thus we in America are now deliberately searching out and developing the most savage, murderous means of exterminating peoples that Satan can plant in our minds. We do it not only shamelessly, but with a boast. God will not forgive us for this.
If we are to avoid extermination, if the world is not to be wiped out, we must find some way to curb the fiendish ingenuity of men who have apparently no fear of God, man, or the devil, and who are willing to plot and plan and invent instrumentalities that will wipe out all the flesh of the earth. And, as one American citizen of one hundred thirty millions, as one in one billion population of the world, I protest with all of the energy I possess against this fiendish activity, and as an American citizen, I call upon our government and its agencies to see that these unholy experimentations are stopped, and that somehow we get into the minds of our war-minded general staff and its satellites, and into the general staffs of all the world, a proper respect for human life.
May God give us the strength to stand in these times of stress and trial and crisis. May he give us the wisdom and the inspiration to put hate out of our hearts, a hate that is consuming us. May he give us the power as a people so to bring our influence to bear that men, mankind, may be saved.
President J. Reuben Clark, Jr.
First Counselor in the First Presidency, Conference Report, October 1946, pp. 84-89
wayfarer wrote:SamBee wrote:That 1946 quote is incredible.
I am somewhat ambivalent about the quote. My father worked on the Manhattan Project, and while the bomb certainly was beyond all imagination in terms of its power for evil, I am not sure that I share J Reuben Clark’s sentiment that it was a mistake or a tragedy, or that satan planted it in the minds of the Americans who created it. It was certainly uniquely destructive, and the result of the fear of its use has been a ‘cold peace’ where mutually assured destruction contained many conflicts in the past sixty years.I find it interesting that when the MX project was targeted for deployment in Utah, SWK voiced opposition and the project was halted. The church thus has had a very strange relationship with the bomb, imo.
Comments so far.
I’m currently archiving and organising the quotes thread so a little caught up with that. I’ll get back to you on this one later.
The whole talk is actually not simply anti-war. It’s anti barbaric war. At times it sounds like he’s calling for a return to the good old days of “playing war” by the “rules” were men lined up and shot at each other/hacked bits off each other with swords, rather than all the “cheating” with bio/nuke weapons.
I went to Iraq in 2006-7 with the best of intentions and thinking what we were doing was a good thing. I don’t think that it was the case. I don’t know how we can stop evil but war isn’t always the answer. I do think that dropping the atom bomb on Japan did save a lot of lives, both allies as well as Japanese and there hasn’t been any world wars sense because of the fear of nukes but I agree that if there is a Satan, he would love war and the misery that it causes both short and long term. The Iraq War got rid of Saddam (hooray) but now we have urban warfare which is ongoing. Some wars are worth fighting (WWII), some justifiable (Iraq in 91, Bosnia, Cold War), some dubious (Afghanistan, Chechnya, WWI) and some disgusting (Tibet, East Timor)
But should we support all of them? No way.
Morgan Deane just did a very interesting rebuttal on J. Reuben Clark at Wheat and Tares: http://www.wheatandtares.org/12350/j-reuben-clark-pacifist-or-pro-nazi/ Want to slake some of the blood lust (if you believe there is any) among the American people for wars in far-off places, there’s one simple solution: make them put some skin in the game. Bring back the non-volunteer draft. No exceptions for university, missions or marital status. I’ve been in the service, and we definitely wouldn’t want conscripts, but if three out of every one hundred 18-year-old boys and girls were drafted into the Army to spend two years in national service, with no waivers for missions or university, you’d have many, many fewer idiots screaming for intervention in Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iran or anywhere else. Maybe military service should be mandatory…like they have in Israel? Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2
I do support an all volunteer military because I do believe that it makes for a better military. Some war are justifiable but all are ugly. As soon as you have a compulsory military, you get human rights questions, and also more scrutiny of the reasons for going to war… and some of the recent wars that the west has been involved in are dubious.
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