Fatal Terrain in The Book of Mormon

What follows is a portion of some unpublished research that I wrote a year ago. It dives into some of the interesting elements revealed by Alma 56:28. I would try to write more original posts but I am currently facing a very difficult time in my life. Not only do my classes keep getting canceled, but I have additional family burdens weighing upon me. If you would like to read the whole paper you can either email me or go to site operated by Mormon Heretic and look for a thread titled "My Second Scoop".

Alma 56:28- And also there were sent two thousand men unto us from the land of Zarahemla. And thus we were prepared with ten thousand men, and provisions for them, and also for their wives and their children.

Likely explanations of Alma 56:28 also include a psychological motivation for the inclusion of women and children on a border city. Classic Chinese military theorists such as Sun-Tzu wrote that when a commander “[throws] his soldiers into a place from which there is nowhere to go, they will die rather than flee. When they are facing death, how can one not obtain the utmost strength from the officers and men?”[1] Historian David Graff called this a “psychological trigger” that commanders would employ in order to “stimulate” a soldier that would otherwise act indifferently.[2] In this case, the deployment of both soldiers and family could be viewed as a governmental policy designed to help conscripts fight with greater élan. Moroni could have thought that having the family of fighting soldiers live in the threatened city would spur the Nephite armies more than leaving the family safely at the capital. In support of this argument, Moroni hinted at the apathy associated with staying in the capital when he condemns the civil government for lack of effort.[3] Plus, previous events in the Book of Mormon contribute to the deadly combination of family and military service. The soldiers of King Noah burned him at the stake for his order to abandon their families and his refusal to allow them to return.[4] This event could be an abnormal exception, or it could be the logical and expected sequence of events for soldiers that are forced to abandon their families by order of the government. The Nephites abnormal behavior of burning their king could be considered a psychologically motivated event based on familial concern.

The foregoing explanation assumes that the average Nephite soldier needed this boost, and that the government and Moroni would be harsh enough to place families in a dangerous situation simply to incite greater effort. This would also seem to counter the ideological imperative stated in the Title of Liberty- that the rights of their family trump the right of the Nephite leadership to use them as psychological props. A compromise position could consist of Moroni including the wives and children of soldiers in the field armies for their pragmatic benefits of increased morale, more efficient use of combat power and ideological purity; with the unstated or even unintentional benefit of a psychological trigger as well.

Thanks for reading. What do you think? Can you think of other examples that display this kind of military thinking? Are there any contradictory examples in The Book of Mormon?

***Sources***
1. Ralph Sawyer trans. The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China (New York: Basic Books, 1993.)179, also see footnote 162.
2. David Graff Medieval Chinese Warfare 300-900 (London and New York: Routledge Press, 2002) 169.
3. Alma 60:21-22.
4. Mosiah 19: 16-20.

"Millions" in The Book of Mormon

Many critiques of The Book of Mormon often result from several common errors. The attack against the "millions" number from the book of Ether is a perfect example of arguments that result from shallow reading of the text and a lack of historical context.

1. Shallow Reading: The "millions" that some site is actually "nearly" that number. This equivocation is not something that I made up, it’s in the text. So critics take a figure explicitly inexact and turn it into a precise number. There is internal evidence for doubting BoM numbers elsewhere as well. At one point Mormon says that the Nephites “numbered as it were, the sands of the sea”. Yet this innumerable nation only mustered 30,000 soldiers for their war of survival against the Lamanites. (Mormon 1:7; 2:25)

But back to the chapter at hand, this number (of millions) is assumed to be from one battle in one area. This is demonstrably false. First, Ether 15:2 states that these casualties are in the past tense. So you have to look at chapter 14:
v 1-2 social order breaks down
v 3 civil war faction "gave battle" unto Coriantumur
v 4 more battles, travel
v 5 a long siege more deaths
v 6-10 more civil war and intrigue
v 11 two factions "give battle" across the land
v 13 another battle
v 14 army "smited"
v 16 a series of battles across the land
v 17 "many" cities overthrown and inhabitants killed
v 18-26 "swift" and "speedy" destruction across the land
v 27 more battle

So Chapter 15:2 is the result of the previous sanguine conflicts that ranged across the land. Not one “skirmish” in front of Ramah.

2. Historical Context: The possibly exaggerated numbers within The Book of Mormon fits many other historical accounts. Many scholars have already done a great job of pointing out the flaws in the Exodus numbers.[1] But I'm reminded of Edward Dryer's account of the "War of the Eight Princes" that decimated the Western Jin Dynasty in Ancient China. Some scholars argue the Jin army had 700,000 soldiers, and their capital at Luoyang boasted a population in the hundreds of thousands but was deserted by the end of the civil war. The battles from this civil war ranged across Northern China for only about 7 years, one contemporary observer said that the “bones had been picked” from the dynasty and one ancient historian suggests that one province had only 1% of its population survive the conflict.[2] Even earlier in Chinese history, Ralph Sawyer has pointed out that Warring States Period Kingdoms could possibly field up to half a million men for one campaign.[3] In every case these numbers are taken with a grain of salt, but that doesn’t condemn the texts that state them as a fraud.

Despite the evidence that pre modern societies could create and kill incredibly large armies over a short space of time, lets assume that the people here are right, and that other scholars who cite demographic impossibility of “millions” are right: does that destroy the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

The answer is a resounding no. In fact, having number problems would put The Book of Mormon in good company. Herodotus said the Persian army numbered in the millions. According to one scholar an army that big would have the beginning of the column in Greece before the end of the column even started![4] Kelly DeVries has discussed the imprecise nature of Medieval European military chronicles and cites the same problems.[5] As stated above, Edward Dryer doubts the numbers contained in the Imperial history of the “War of the Eight Princes” but still studies the primary sources for the conflict.

Scribal error, deliberate exaggeration, and a use of numbers as a colloquium (I told you a million times) explain the "wrong" numbers in the Book of Mormon far better than other theories and places it on a firm foundation with other ancient texts. Critics will cry foul, and argue that I just said that mistakes in the Book of Mormon prove its true, that's exactly what I did because historians  know the limitations of their sources and often accept their historicity even with those limits. To cite another example Greek historians, much like Mormon, had an ethnocentric view of their world. If all you read was Herodotus and Thucydides you would conclude that Westerners were the center of the world. But when study the Greeks with their proper historical context, you would know that there was a much bigger and arguably more influential power in Persia.[6]

So in short, there is a great deal of precedent for large numbers of soldiers being killed in battle. A careful reading of the text within The Book of Mormon suggests that an inexact number of people were killed over the course of numerous battles and locations. But The Book of Mormon is not false for possibly presenting exaggerated numbers, instead those wild numbers suggest that Mormon had the same editorial proclivities as other ancient historians. Thanks for reading, I look forward to your comments.

***Sources***
1. See The Church of Jesus Christ's Old Testament manual for one example.
2. Edward Dreyer, “The War of the Eight Princes”, Nicola Cosmo Ed. Military Culture in Imperial China Harvard University Press, 2009.
3. Ralph Sawyer Trans. The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China West View Press, 1993.
4. N. Whatley. "On the Possibility of Reconstructing the Battle of Marathon" N. Whatley, Journal of Hellenistic Studies 84.1 (1964):119-139.
5. Kelly DeVries. "The Use of Chronicles in Recreating Medieval Military History, Journal of Medieval Military History, 2.1 (2004): 1-30.
6. Victor David Hanson Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western PowerAnchor Books, 2001, Chapter 1.

Monkey Business and the Problems with Comparisons

The title of this post is drawn from a line that one of my graduate school advisers used to say. Dr. John Grenier told us that any monkey can make a comparison. Its the differences that can really make or break a point. He also cautioned us to be very specific and narrow in making comparisons.

I used this advice when confronted with a post about evil Chinese invading Texas for oil. In the comments section I explained why that analogy fails on so many points. Basically, its the differences between Chinese and American foreign policy over the past 100 years, and differences in justification between the fictional Chinese invasion and the American attack on the Taliban. But you should also go there for my full explanation and context.

But there is a more widely used analogy that fails as well. This is the myth of Afghanistan as the "Graveyard of Empires". This analogy fails due to the same advice I learned in graduate school: shallow comparisons do not work when you begin to notice the differences in details. What follows is an article from the military historian Victor David Hanson that describes the important differences, and sometimes historical inaccuracies that make the grave yard of Empires comment a myth. Normally I prefer to offer a link and focus on my own analysis, synthesis and argument. However this article was so completely spot on and made me shout "exactly" or "that's what I said" into my computer screen so many times that I thought it was worth re posting large chunks of it here.

The topic of Afghanistan in itself is tangential to warfare in The Book of Mormon. But the monkey business I described here is directly related to it. As I described before, your chance in making faulty comparisons increases a great deal with an ancient (or plagiarized) book and both sides of The Book of Mormon historicity debate have faced this problem. On this site I've striven to avoid shallow comparisons and to offer the important differences when I do see a problem.

Without further ado, here is Victor David Hanson: Afghan Mythologies

As President Obama decides whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, we should remember that most of the conventional pessimism about Afghanistan is only half-truth.

Remember the mantra that the region is the “graveyard of empires,” where Alexander the Great, the British in the 19th century, and the Soviets only three decades ago inevitably met their doom?

In fact, Alexander conquered most of Bactria and its environs (which included present-day Afghanistan). After his death, the area that is now Afghanistan became part of the Seleucid Empire.

Centuries later, outnumbered British-led troops and civilians were initially ambushed, and suffered many casualties, in the first Afghan war. But the British were not defeated in their subsequent two Afghan wars between 1878 and 1919.

The Soviets did give up in 1989 their nine-year effort to create out of Afghanistan a Communist buffer state — but only because the Arab world, the United States, Pakistan, and China combined to provide the Afghan mujahideen resistance with billions of dollars in aid, not to mention state-of-the-art anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons.

While Afghans have been traditionally fierce resistance fighters and made occupations difficult, they have rarely for long defeated invaders — and never without outside assistance.

Other myths about Afghanistan abound.

Is the country ungovernable? No more so than any of the region’s other rough countries. After the founding of the modern state in 1919, Afghanistan enjoyed a relatively stable succession of constitutional monarchs until 1973. The country was once considered generally secure, tolerant, and hospitable to foreigners.

Did we really take our eye off the “good” war in Afghanistan to fight the optional bad one in Iraq? Not quite. After our brilliant campaign to remove the Taliban in 2001, the relatively stable Karzai government saw little violence until 2007. Between 2001 and 2006, no more than 100 American soldiers were killed in any given year.

In fact, American casualties increased after Iraq became quiet — as Islamists, defeated in Iraq’s Anbar province, refocused their efforts on the dominant Afghan theater.

Is Afghanistan the new Vietnam? Hardly. In the three bloodiest years, 2007 through 2009 so far, the United States has suffered a total of 553 fatalities — tragic, but less than 1 percent of the 58,159 Americans killed in Vietnam. What is astounding is the ability of the U.S. military to inflict damage on the enemy, protect the constitutional government, and keep our losses to a minimum.

Our military is the most experienced in both counterterrorism and counterinsurgency warfare in the world. The maverick savior of Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, now oversees operations in the Mideast and Central Asia. His experienced lieutenant, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is a successful veteran of the worst fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Unlike past foreign interventions, our U.N.-approved aim is not to create a puppet state, but a consensual government able to defend itself against the Taliban and al-Qaeda — while preventing more strikes against the United States.

With Iraq relatively stabilized, jihadists have no choice but to commit their resources to prevent a second defeat. Meanwhile, Pakistan at last is cracking down on terrorist enclaves...

Thanks for reading.

With "Support" like this, Who Needs an Enemy?

I read a recent column from a blogger that discussed how he "supports" the troops. I explained my reasoning in the comments section of that blog, but his support is hardly such. You can click the link for my full explanation and context, but as a veteran of 9 years who even participated in these wars I questioned his support. He wished for me to fail in the current unjust wars, but still claimed he cared about me. Other commenters suggested that I was a Nazi, war criminal, brainwashed, pathetic, anti Christ, and stupid. And there is the title of this post.

Thanks for the support, but no thank you. I would rather you wish me success in prosecuting the war, not simply give me a courtesy that everybody but the criminally insane gives by supporting my desire not to be killed. The position of supporting the troops while opposing the war is also logically untenable. I am a willing participant in executing the policy of this country (since we know from Clausewitz that war is a continuation of policy by other means). I explicitly endorsed these wars when I re enlisted (twice) during them. So its incongruent to say you support me but don't support the policy I endorse, and that you wish for me to fail in my efforts.

In future posts I will discuss some of the mistakes that current anti war advocates make in applying The Book of Mormon and other scripture to their position. This includes the difficulties of a purely defensive strategy brought upon by modern technology. I will also discuss some common historical and scriptural misconceptions that are apparent in the linked thread and others I've seen. These include the myth of Afghanistan being the "graveyard of Empires" and the superficial use in citing Christ as "The Prince of Peace".