Romney’s Death Squad Ties: Bain Launched With Millions From Oligarchs Behind Salvadoran Atrocities August 13, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in El Salvador, Human Rights, Latin America, Mitt Romney.Tags: amy goodman, arena, bain capital, bishop romero, death squads, El Salvador, mitt romney, oscar romero, robert white, roberto d'aubuisson, roger hollander, ryan grim, salaverria family
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US trained “death squad” victims in San Salvador, 1981
Monday, 13 August 2012, www.truthout.org
Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN:
We begin today with new scrutiny Republican candidate Mitt Romney is facing about his record at the private equity firm Bain Capital. The latest controversy surrounding Bain concerns how Romney helped found the company with investments from Central American elites linked to death squads in El Salvador. After initially struggling to find investors, Romney traveled to Miami in 1983 to win pledges of $9 million, 40% of Bain’s start up money. Some investors had extensive ties to the death squads responsible for the vast majority of the tens of thousands of deaths in El Salvador beginning during the 1980’s. The investors include the Salaverria family, whose former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, has previously accused of directly funding the Salvadorian paramilitaries. In his memoir, former Bain executive Harry Strachan writes, “Romney pushed aside his own misgivings about the investors to accept their backing.” Strachan writes, “These Latin American friends have loyally rolled over investments in succeeding funds, actively participated in Bain Capital’s May investor meetings and are still today one of the largest investor groups in Bain Capital.” For more, we’re joined by Ryan Grim, Bureau Chief for The Huffington Post . He’s connecting the dots in the latest story headlined, “Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads”. Ryan, welcome to Democracy Now! If you could carefully laid out the story, and set the stage in El Salvador in the early 1980’s, what was happening there, the carnage.
RYAN GRIM: Sure. In 1980, there was land reform instituted by the El Salvadoran government that started to parcel up some of the farms, some of the coffee plantations, and the other land holdings of the elite, and they also nationalized the international coffee trade, so they did not nationalize the industry, but just the foreign export of it. So, the oligarchs responded with a vicious and a brutal campaign that included death squads and in the first year or two, killed something like 35,000 people. Over a decade, killed about 70,000 people. The U.N. has since calculated about 85% of the killing was done by these right-wing death squads, so this is not one of those dirty wars where both sides were equally culpable. The leader of this movement, Roberto D’Aubuisson was very public about his support of death squads and that death squads were an important part of what they were doing. He would actually say that the purpose of the death squads was ultimately to diminish violence, because if you could go into a village and go into a couple houses and kill everyone in there, then it would send a message to the rest of the village that they shouldn’t join the village, and therefore there would be less of an uprising and the death squads would not have to kill everyone. That was the kind of macabre logic that lasted for slightly more than a decade in El Salvador.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the most well known victims of the death squads of the military of El Salvador is Archbishop Oscar Romero, known as the voice of the voiceless. He was a prominent advocate for the poor, a leading critic of U.S.-backed Salvadoran military government. He was killed by members of a U.S.-backed death squad while delivering mass at a hospital chapel. I want to play an excerpt from the film “Romero,” which stars Raúl Juliá who played Archbishop Romero.
RAUL JULIA: I would like to make an appeal in a special way to the men in the Army. Brothers, each one of you is one of us. We are the same people. The farmers and peasants that you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear the words of a man telling you to kill, think, instead, in the words of God, thou shalt not kill. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. In his name, and in the name of our tormented people who have suffered so much and whose limits cry out to heaven, I implore you, I beg you, I order you, stop the repression.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from the film “Romero” of Raúl Juliá who played Salvadoran Oscar Romero. Oscar Romero was gunned down March 24, 1980. Ryan Grim, talk about how he died and the connection to your story.
RYAN GRIM: He was assassinated the day after the clip you played, shot through the heart while delivering mass. We since know, conclusively, that his assassination was ordered by Roberto D’Aubuisson. D’Aubuisson, 18 months later would found the ARENA party which was, basically, at the time, a vehicle for these death squads. ARENA is still around. It has become more of a conventional Latin American right-wing party, but for its first several years, it was, quite simply, the political organization which was managing the death squads. So, Mitt Romney, in this context, knew very well what was happening in El Salvador. The U.S. Ambassador [Robert] White, who you mentioned —
AMY GOODMAN: Robert White.
RYAN GRIM: Robert White, had publicly accused six Salvadorans living in Miami of financing, two of them Salaverrias. When it was suggested to him by Harry Strachan that he go down to Miami to raise money from the exiles there, he actually said to Strachan, make sure that these people are not connected to right-wing death squads. It’s very clear he knew the context and he knew what was going on at the time, but he was having a seriously hard time raising capital for his new enterprise, Bain Capital, and his boss, Bill Bain, told him that he couldn’t use any of the investors or clients of Bain and Co., which was the very successful consulting firm, because if Bain Capital failed, he didn’t want it to take everything else down with it. It’s been reported in a number of places that he failed to raise capital from traditional sources in the U.S. So, given that, he flew to Miami and, in mid 1984, he went directly to a bank and met with a number of these families who were involved with death squads and accepted, what at the time, was a huge amount of money that amounted to 40% of the outside capital that he was able to raise for that initial fund. As Harry Strachan said, they continued to roll over their investments and certainly are worth tens of millions of dollars in Bain Capital now. Just reading from your piece, Ryan Grim, when Romney returned to Miami in 2007 to launch another venture that needed funding, his first presidential campaign, Romney said, “I owe a great deal to Americans of Latin American descent… When I was starting my business, I came to Miami to find partners that would believe in me and that would finance my enterprise. My partners were Ricardo Poma, Miguel Dueñas, Pancho Soler, Frank Kardonski, and Diego Ribadeneira.” Can you talk about these men, like Poma, and their relationship to the death squads in El Salvador?
RYAN GRIM: The Poma family was one of the top families in El Salvador. They were very tightly intertwined with ARENA. The Salaverrias, which we mentioned earlier, two of them were specifically named by White as specifically financing death squads. The De Solas are another family that originally invested in Bain. We know that at least four members of the De Sola family invested in Bain. We only know the names of two of them. There’s one man named Orlando de Sola who the Romney campaign, and nobody else, denies, was a leader of the death squad movement. There’s no question about that. What the Romney campaign has relied on is that they say that Orlando de Solo was a black sheep of the De Sola family. The fact that he was running death squads should not besmirch the four De Sola investors, even though they won’t tell us who two of those four were. However, what we found was that one of the two named De Sola investors — his name is Francisco de Sola — was connected in 1990 to the assassination of two left-wing activists.
There was a meeting held in Guatemala that Chris Dodd, the former senator from Connecticut, moderated. He was trying to strike a peace deal between ARENA and the FMLN. And shortly after that meeting two of the activists who had met with him were assassinated. The Guatemalan government, citing its intelligence sources, concluded that the assassinations were committed by Orlando de Sola, Roberto D’Aubuisson and Fransicso de Sola. Now, Francisco de Sola is still alive and his assistant confirmed to us that he was one of those three people who was accused of these murders. Now, he denied it at the time and denies it today, but just the fact that the Guatemalan intelligence services would lump him together with Orlando de Sola and Roberto D’Abuisson, just known as the basically two leaders of the death squad movement at the time, dramatically undermines the notion that the people involved with Bain are somehow deeply disconnected or that there’s some bright line between the people involved in Bain and the people who are funding and operating the death squads.
AMY GOODMAN: Ryan Grim, Mitt Romney’s response to your investigation and to these allegations?
RYAN GRIM: What they did is they sent me a paragraph of an article from the Salt Lake Tribune in 1999 that read, “As was Bain’s policy, they had the families checked out as diligently as possible. They uncovered no unsavory links to drugs or other criminal activity.” That is simply impossible to believe. These families were certainly connected to death squads. Now Romney told the Boston Globe in 1994, something along the lines of, we checked out the individual investors and made sure there were no “obvious signs of criminal activity,” we didn’t check out their in-laws and their cousins. Those are two inconsistent levels of diligence that Romney is claiming to two separate papers. But, if you take the one at the Tribune, which was sent to me by the Romney campaign, that’s simply unbelievable. There’s no possible way that anybody in 1984 could check out these families — which is the term they use, these families — and come away convinced that this money was clean.
AMY GOODMAN: You quote Robert White saying, “The Salaverria family was very well known.” Robert White was the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador. “The Salaverria family was very well known as backers of D’Abussion these guys big money contributors, they were total backers of D’Abuisson including death squads.” And I wanted to read an excerpt from Greg Grandin’s book, “Empire’s Workshop.” He is a professor of Latin American history at New York University. He writes, “The problem was that the military groups had very little popular support due in large part to the fact that they were ‘preternaturally violent.’ According to Reagan’s own ambassador, Robert White, their solution to the crisis ‘was apocalyptic: the country must be ‘destroyed totally, the economy must be wrecked, unemployment must be massive,’ and a ‘cleansing’ of some ‘3 or 4 or 500,000 people’ must be carried out,” he says. And he his quoting Robert White. Ryan Grim?
RYAN GRIM: I spoke also with the Sergio Bendixen who is a pollster who did a lot of work in the country in the 1980’s for Univision and is now, coincidentally, he became a pollster for Hillary Clinton and he’s now working with the Obama campaign now. He knew D’Abuisson and he knew lot of the people who were involved with these death squads, and he said that, and this is what I have heard from other people who are familiar with him in the exile community, that this is not something they would hide. Like you said, they were persuaded that they were freedom fighters, that they were on the side of justice, and that if it meant that you had to kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, those were evil people who were supported by Castro who wanted to bring about tyranny, etc., etc. So, everything that they were doing was justified by that. Mitt Romney even hinted at that in his 2007 talk to the Miami crowd when he came down to raise money for his campaign. He said, not only did these people invest in me, but they taught me a lot. And what they taught me is that these guerrillas were horrible and they kidnapped one of their brothers and killed him and they tortured Miguel Dueñas he mentions. They kidnapped and tortured Miguel Dueñas. There’s no question that atrocities were certainly committed by both sides, but you can see in that quote that Romney is partly buying into this notion that the violence was justified. And he would not be at all be alone in the Republican Party at that time or the Democratic Party. As you said, these death squads had the backing of the United States government.
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking about, as you said, tens of thousands of people in 1989, the government bestowed the Salvadoran government, bestowed — well, this was in 2009. But, remembering, 20 years ago, the killing of the six Jesuit priests in 1989, and then there was the killing of the four American nuns, all these part of the casualties of, as you said, the Salvadoran military and paramilitary, overwhelmingly doing the killing. Now, interestingly, we started with Oscar Romero’s death March 24, 1980. Killed by the right-wing death squads in Salvador. President Obama visited Honduras visited El Salvador and went to the grave of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
RYAN GRIM: And that was an acknowledgment that what the United States and its allies in El Salvador did in the 1980’s was wrong. It wasn’t exactly, but it was tantamount to an apology for all of the death and destruction that was brought about in the name of anti-communism. Archbishop Romero is now known as one of the great heroes and martyrs of the 20th-century. At the same time that we’re talking about Romney’s Association here, we ought to mention that the current occupant of the White House has — operates drones that kill people on a fairly regular basis. There is, unfortunately, still no shortage of killing around the globe.
AMY GOODMAN: And, interestingly, the question, will the Obama administration will make something of this initial Bain investment capital, and will the Romney administration — will the Romney campaign raise the issue of President Obama and his kill list and the operating of drones that are killing many in Yemen and Pakistan, etc.
RYAN GRIM: It will be interesting to see. If the Obama campaign does do anything with it, I would expect that it would be done in the Latino community to help drive support for Obama there, because as you said, there are thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of refugees who are here today because of the violence from there, and when they find out that the oligarchs that were funding that violence get also helped get Romney’s Bain Capital off the ground, that could influence the way they vote.
AMY GOODMAN: Are these families still donating to Romney’s current presidential campaign as they did to his first effort?
RYAN GRIM: I didn’t find any of them doing so. Romney had a strange use of the phrase we he went to Latin America; he called them Americans of Latin American descent. I don’t know if they have become Americans in the sense of the United States as America. If they haven’t gotten U.S. citizenship, then they can’t donate directly to U.S. presidential campaigns. I searched a few names that we do know, and they did not come up as donors to his presidential campaign. But, as Harry Strachan said, they have become — they continue to be significant investors in Bain Capital. Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, Bain Capital made just absolutely extraordinary returns, something like 88% annual return over two decades, which is just an absolutely astounding amount of money. If you apply that to $9 million initial investment, you get an absolute fortune.
AMY GOODMAN: Ryan Grim, I want to thank you for being with us, Washington Bureau Chief for The Huffington Post for his latest story, “Mitt Romney Started Bain Capital With Money From Families Tied To Death Squads”. We’ll link to it at Democracy Now! This is Democracy Now!. Next up, we’re going to the Syria-Turkish borders. Stay with us.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
How Mormon Doctrine Shapes Romney’s World View November 4, 2012
Posted by rogerhollander in Mitt Romney, Racism, Religion, Women.Tags: bigotry, kirk robinson, Latter Day Saints, mitt romney, Mormon, Mormon Church, religion, religious bigotry, roger hollander, salvation
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Roger’s note: I have studiously avoided posting articles about the current presidential election becuase both candidates leave much to be desired, and one gets tired of advocating for the lesser of evils. I will make this once exception at the last minute.
By Kirk Robinson
November 03, 2012 “Information Clearing House” – As Mormon missionaries in the 1960s, Mitt Romney and I were required to present six “discussions” to “investigators” before baptizing them – he in France and I in northern California. Central to those discussions was the “Plan of Salvation” (POS); and central to it, the “Doctrine of Eternal Progression.” These doctrines are also the essence of the Mormon temple “endowment ceremony” in which covenants of allegiance to God and the Church are made, accompanied by oaths of secrecy.
The doctrines are unique to Mormonism and absolutely central to it. There is no way that Mitt Romney’s view of the world cannot have been shaped by them, especially given the rather cloistered life he has lived. Together with passages of Mormon scripture, they imply several disturbingly retrograde political views that define the Republican-Tea Party:
The Plan of Salvation
This takes us back to before the creation of Earth, when we were spirit beings living in a “spirit world.” We were created out of “spirit matter” through a process of conception, gestation and birth involving a heavenly father (God) and mother. The firstborn spirit of our heavenly parents was Jesus, the second was Satan, and other notables included early Mormon leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. They were especially “righteous” beings who were “fore-ordained” to play important roles in the historical unfolding of Mormon eschatology.
God eventually decided there were enough spirit children and it was time to start sending them away to college (my metaphor). So He created Earth and its myriad creatures for the college campus and solicited plans for a curriculum, graduation requirements, and future career tracks. Jesus and Satan each submitted a plan.
Jesus’s Plan
According to Jesus’s plan, the spirits who would decide to go to Earth would receive a mortal body, suffer and die, then be resurrected in a perfect union of spirit and body that would never suffer or die. A “veil of ignorance” would be placed across their minds so that they would not remember their pre-existence, and God’s commandments would be revealed to them through prophets. Importantly, they would have “free agency” to choose to obey them or not and would be responsible for their choices and actions.
Eternal Progression
All spirits who agreed to go along with Jesus’s plan will eventually receive resurrection as a graduation diploma and will be exalted to a level of glory commensurate with their earthly grades. The most righteous ones will receive the highest degree of eternal glory: the Celestial Kingdom. Others will go to the Terrestrial (middle) Kingdom or to the Telestial (lower) Kingdom. Each of these kingdoms is better than mortal existence, which is better than the spirit pre-existence. The three estates and the three kingdoms of glory represent a continuum of moral and material progress: an increase in righteousness leads to an increase in mastery and dominion over creation.
Satan’s Plan
Satan had a different plan. He knew that many spirits would be unable to resist temptations. He empathized with them and thought a much more compassionate plan would be to “force” them to live God’s commandments, so they could go to the Celestial Kingdom. The catch here is that they would have to be deprived of their free agency through dictatorial force. And this would be very bad because then they would not earn, and would therefore not merit, their eternal rewards.
There was another important difference between the two plans. Jesus told God that even though he would suffer for the sins of the world, he would give all glory for the salvation of mankind to God; while Satan said that since he devised the plan and would be doing all the work to ensure salvation for mankind, he would accept the glory for himself – and he wouldn’t have to suffer for people’s sins either, because they wouldn’t be allowed to sin.
War in Heaven
A “Council in Heaven” was held in which Jesus and Satan each pitched his plan. God liked Jesus’s plan best and gave the spirits an ultimatum, which was essentially this: “Follow Jesus or follow Satan of your own free agency. But if you follow Satan, you will be barred from eternal progression.” This fomented a “War in Heaven” in which one third of the spirits took sides with Satan and rejected Jesus’s plan, apparently out of sheer orneriness for they had nothing to gain thereby; and so they, along with Satan, were banished from the divine presence for all eternity. The rest of us were eventually born into mortal bodies on Earth (with an untold number still waiting to be born), while Satan and his minions now occupy a kind of shadow Earth where they are constantly scheming and working to thwart Jesus’s plan.
The Status of Women
There was a rank order among all the spirits with respect to their degrees of righteousness. Jesus was the highest ranking spirit. Satan was second until his “fall.” The Biblical patriarchs and prophets were high achievers too, and so were “fore-ordained” to play a big role in the unfolding of the divine plan here on Earth. The rest of us were less stellar.
Because of the natural ranking of the spirits, there will be a roughly corresponding ranking among them as mortal beings too. Eternal progression can be compared to a foot race in which the starting points in the pre-existence were staggered according to the degrees of righteousness of the spirits, with the most righteous ones having a head start. Because of their superiority, they will tend to pull further ahead on Earth. The most righteous of all will naturally be great leaders and empire builders and the like. But for some inexplicable reason, the spiritual leaders will all be males. Women cannot hold the priesthood or become prophets in the Mormon Church, and they enjoy no ultimate decision-making authority. Their primary job is to serve men, which above all means homemaking, child bearing, and child rearing.
The Status of Blacks and American Indians
The more inferior spirits on Earth start at the back of the pack and tend to fall behind even while progressing. They are the descendants of Cain (Negroes) (here the race analogy tends to break down – pun intended) and the descendants of rebellious Laman and Lemuel in the Book of Mormon (Native Americans). God “marked” or “cursed” them with a dark skin to distinguish them. But because they have their free agency, through extra diligence they might eventually overcome their poor starts to join God’s elite. A 1978 “revelation” to then-Mormon prophet Spencer W. Kimball allowed blacks to hold the Mormon priesthood for the first time, presumably because they had then progressed sufficiently. There was once a passage in the Book of Mormon (it has been excised) that said the descendants of Laman and Lemuel would one day become “white and delightsome.”
Polygamy and the Status of Gays
The people who earn the best grades on Earth will get the best jobs upon graduation from Earth. They will be the most god-like beings and accordingly will receive Celestial glory. They will become gods, endlessly creating and ruling over their own cosmic empires. Also, despite the Mormon Church’s official repudiation of polygamy, which was a precondition for Utah statehood, it is still generally accepted that achieving godhood will require the institution of polygamy in the Hereafter, with husbands being “sealed” to multiple wives. Needless to say, gay people won’t participate in this, so they can’t become gods; which is to say that they will be damned in the sense of not continuing to progress for eternity.
Cosmic Pyramid Schemes
It is a kind of axiom of Mormon doctrine that to be righteous is to follow “correct principles” that tend to produce successful and happy lives, conceived in both spiritual and material terms. Achieving godhood status is believed to be the highest possible source of happiness and joy. And presumably this grand POS will be repeated over and over for eternity, with new gods creating new worlds ad infinitum in a cosmic pyramid scheme. (This may go some distance in explaining why Utah is plagued to an unusual degree with earthly pyramid schemes in which trusting Mormons are bilked out of their life savings by trusted Mormons.)
The Status of Earth
From the point of view of the POS, Earth and its myriad creatures exist primarily for the benefit of mankind, and thereby to glorify God. They are like a pair of shoes: It is prudent to take good care of your shoes, but their primary purpose is to help you get where you want to go, in the course of which wear and tear will be unavoidable. So don’t worry too much about global climate change or species extinctions. Yikes!
Free Agency vs. Compassion, Brotherly Love, and Cooperation
The POS illustrates the relative importance of two Mormon moral ideals: free agency, which entails taking responsibility for one’s choices and actions; and compassion, brotherly love, and cooperation, which require helping those in need. Each is in its own way commendable, but combining them in a way that is responsive to real circumstances can be challenging: Concerning people ostensibly in need, when is compassion the right response and when is demanding that they take responsibility for themselves the right response?
Of the two, free agency is in an important way more fundamental than compassion, as shown by the fact that God preferred a plan that emphasized the one over the other. It is more important than doing good deeds because only good that is done freely merits moral approbation and reward. Free agency is therefore a necessary condition for individual moral progress – and ultimately also for material progress as represented by gods creating worlds and exercising dominion over them. So far, so good, but . . .
The Right Form of Government and Economic System
The POS pretty clearly supports a libertarian political philosophy, including free market capitalism with minimal regulatory oversight of business and industry. Anything less would necessitate a sacrifice of free agency.
In this connection, it is interesting that in the early days of Mormons in Utah, Brigham Young attempted to establish a very pure socialistic system, the “United Order,” that would have made Karl Marx envious. In doing so, he was clearly giving precedence to compassion, brotherly love, and cooperation over competition. Why? One can presumably imagine a morally perfect being, such as Jesus, who always chooses and does what is right without being forced to; and Brigham Young thought the Saints ought to give it a try. Unfortunately, the experiment failed. Too many of the Saints gave in to avarice when they saw a chance to make money selling stuff to overland travelers. And they weren’t anxious to share their lucre either.
The Best of All Possible Worlds?
In Mormon terms, the best of all possible worlds will be one in which all people freely live God’s commandments. If compassion is called for, like the “good Samaritan” they will show compassion even at the expense of personal inconvenience. And they will share their talents and possessions freely to advance the greater good – as was supposed to happen with the United Order experiment. However, real people and the real world being what they are, an astonishing amount of human suffering goes unalleviated – suffering that might be prevented or relieved to a considerable extent through the institution of government programs designed to promote the general welfare, e.g., Social Security and universal health care. Yet paradoxically, given the ethical primacy of respect for free agency over the duty of compassion, from the point of view of the POS such a world must be reckoned morally inferior to one in which there is more human suffering, perhaps much more, but less state coercion. This fact doesn’t fit comfortably with Jesus’s message of love and compassion in the New Testament. Ouch!
Mormon Exceptionalism
A person who has been indoctrinated with Mormon dogma, especially if he is also a male born into a privileged social and economic position, is physically attractive, intelligent, and charismatic, might easily come to believe that he is one of the fore-ordained or “chosen ones” of God who will play a critical role in the events of the last days, including perhaps saving the United States Constitution when it is “hanging by a thread,” as predicted in the uncanonized “White Horse Prophecy” that was reputedly delivered by the Mormon Church’s founder Joseph Smith in 1843. It is known that Mitt Romney had such delusions of grandeur when he was younger. Does he still?
Sinning for the Lord
Because Mormon eschatology views human history, from the War in Heaven through Armageddon, as a continuing war between the two great forces of good and evil , sinning for the Lord” might at times be a moral necessity. Indeed, in the opening pages of the Book of Mormon, the most prominent hero of the book, a revered Mormon prophet named Nephi, murdered a man named Laban in order to steal a genealogical record of his people to take with his family to the Americas. This act was ethically justified as follows: “And it came to pass that the Spirit said unto me again: Slay him, for the Lord hath delivered him into thy hands; Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked to bring forth his righteous purposes. It is better that one man should perish than a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief.” (1 Nephi 4:12-13) (One can’t help but think of Romney’s shameless shape-shifting and etch-a-sketching.)
Armageddon
According to Mormon eschatology, we are now in the “last days” of our earthly estate, which explains the official name of the Mormon Church: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Surely Armageddon is not far off, when the forces of righteousness will permanently conquer and subdue the forces of evil. This will usher in a millennium of peace in which Jesus will return to Earth to rule, assisted by the most worthy of God’s children, a good many of whom will of course be Mormons. These elite will include men who are leaders of men and empire builders the likes of Mitt Romney. They will also be members of the “House of Israel,” which consists both of the descendants of the Biblical patriarch Jacob and people who are “adopted” into the House of Israel by being baptized Mormons. From the Mormon perspective, this implies a special affinity between Mormons and Jews that is reinforced by a common history of persecution. It’s an obvious step from this to the conclusion that ineluctable Armageddon will involve a war between the righteous nation of Israel and its supporters on the one side, and its enemies on the other. As things presently stand, we are talking here about a war to end all wars between Israel and Iran and their respective allies. Just what we don’t need!
Tipping point
Our nation has reached a point of extreme political and moral polarization, with the Republican-Tea Party on one side and the Democrat Party on the other, each vying for command of our future. One can say, accurately enough, that the one side fervently embraces the propositions listed at the beginning of this essay, while the other side vehemently rejects them. It is to be expected, therefore, that the views of the respective presidential nominees reflect this same stark opposition. While it is hardly likely that the upcoming election will resolve this clash of values for once and for all, all the indications are that it will mark a singular, momentous, and irreversible turning point in our nation’s history.
Kirk Robinson, Ph.D., is an attorney (and former Mormon, having left decisively over 40 years ago) living in Salt Lake City.
This article was originally posted at Counterpunch