By Comrade Yuri, The Black Hammer Organization
The church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has often painted itself as a family-based religion, but underneath, is really a master at fooling its followers.
The weekly church meetings, hierarchy and general organization has been calculated to manipulate members, guilt and trigger them into having emotional responses.
The Mormon church is incredibly skilled in creating a sense of community and fraternity; as a former member, it was tough coming to terms with this reality.
But it was soon brought to my attention, the vast history of settler colonial, reactionary violence committed by the Mormon church.
The state and local governments are openly influenced and run by members of the church. At most, the general consensus is to accept this influence as status quo and joke about it occasionally.
Mormons have historically been in conflict with the federal amerikkkan government of the East coast. Ever since Joseph Smith found gold plates and started the perfect grift, amerikkka began persecuting Mormons much like they would persecute the poor Irish immigrant or eastern European Jew.
Of course, when the lower crust of the white settler class is persecuted by the white ruling class, he runs to steal indigenous land and put himself at the top again.
In 1847,the Mormons came to the Wasatch front, Uintah basin, and the Uinta mountains, and like all white settlers: lied, stole, betrayed and outright killed indigenous people.
They took advantage of the thriving, kind Timpanogos people, and through many violent acts, beat them into submission.
Brigham Young ordered the murder of the Timpanogos, the truenatives of the Wasatch front. He sent them bags of flour laced with glass and rushed through treaties to trick the Timpanogos into handing over land.
The Black Hawk war–more like a series of massacres than a war–and the following Spanish Fork treaty would work to remove the history and roots of the Timpanogos people from this land.
The LDS church has all but erased the Timpanogos people, mistakenly recorded as “Ute,” even after the Timpanogos helped the Mormon pioneers survive their first bitter winter in Utah.
They reside on the Uintah valley reservation alongside the Northern Ute nation. The Mormons of Deseret integrated into the greater imperial fascist republic of amerikkka in 1896, about 50 years after their first arrival.
At that time, the method of indigenous removal became very amerikkkan. The indigenous agencies ran the reservations, and eventually the federal government mandated each rez be split into plots for every individual.
Any extra land was sold to white settlers. The boarding schools were used to “americanize” the youth and remove their culture from their hearts and minds.
Even on the reservation, the Ute and Timpanogos people have had to take drastic measures to survive capitalist expansion.
One of the many problematic beliefs of the church is the idea of being the chosen people, that church members baptized into the church are somehow more worthy of God’s mercy.
This direct delineation between members and non-members stems from typical white power.
The white Mormons have convinced themselves that the native people of the Americas are descendants of an ancient Hebrew tribe, the remnants of two warring civilizations which originally landed in the Americas by the hand of god.
None of this is true. The book of Mormon, of course, is nothing but an attempt to excuse the true nature of Mormon settler colonialism.
The book is no better than the doctrine of Manifest Destiny used to justify westward expansion by the amerikkkans–a holy book that attempts to paint the indigenous people of America as savages who were forgotten by god for their evil nature.
The book does not shy from the common “Christian” belief that god curses those who disobey him with dark skin.
The book of Mormon reads, “Because of their unbelief, the Lamanites are cursed, receive a skin of blackness, and become a scourge unto the Nephites,” 2 Nephi 5.
LDS members are no strangers to the amerikkkan staple “blacks bear the mark of Cain.”
The Bible and the Book of Mormon are two white scriptures used to justify white supremacy and white liberal mentality.
Mormon theology believes in leaving everything to God. Members of the church are stuck inside a bubble, easily convinced that they have no control over their own destiny.
An idealist worldview, which eliminates dialectical materialism, is useful to the colonizers, as it is meant to obfuscate systems of oppression.
The first world comfort provided by imperialism-capitalism only exaggerates this cognitive dissonance for colonizer-Mormons.
The church often preys on poor, brown people in nations around the world using tactics of manipulation and charity to get families to sign up for tithing that will never benefit them or their community.
Colonized people that have been tricked and brainwashed into following white leaders, often migrate to Utah, after being converted by missionaries in their home country.
They are forced to stay in the church by constant bombardment of emotional manipulation and “charitable” assistance to members only.
The church has billions of dollars in stock and real estate, but through this pandemic has only been able to co-opt grassroots programs started by some of their members into a loose network of charity programs for members only.
This is all without mentioning the church’s complete devotion to this violent fascist amerikkkan empire.The Timpanogos nation learned firsthand that Mormons do not intend to share the land, but control it.
All religions who spout neighborly love and charity are never true advocates of the people–rather, as often noted by Marxists, an opium of the suffering masses.
In the case of Mormonism, much like Catholicism, the church also has deep ties to settler colonialism and the violence needed to establish a settler colonial state.
While not all religions are reactionary and serve the interests of the ruling class, the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is most definitely a lapdog of the white amerikkkan imperialists.
