Mormons, Nazis, and Anti-Semitism

[_Corpsegrinder]

From Nevo:

When you first showed up on this board, you started another thread on Clark' s anti-Semitism brandishing a vandalized Wikipedia entry that claimed that Clark "was an avid anti-Semite, even going so far as to defend Hitler's extermination of the Jews." I see you haven' t changed your tune.

Brandishing? On the contrary, I posted the Wiki quote as the basis of very reasonable question: Has the Church ever taken the trouble to officially disavow Clark's "avid" anti-Semitism?

So...has it?

You claim to be reading Quinn' s biography of Clark...

No, I do not. You need to pay more attention. My comment in regards to Quinn's book is as follows:

Yes, thank you, Dan, for the suggestions on books regarding Helmuth Hubener. I look forward to reading them, after I’m done with Quinn’s book on J. Reuben Clark.

Clark's book is in the mail, and after I've read it I will go on to the books suggested by Dan.

...you cut- and-pasted your quote from Jeff Needle's review posted on the Signature Books site. If you had actually read Quinn' s book, you would know that Quinn provides no evidence—none— that Clark ever "endorsed Kristallnacht" or thought that "mass murder of the Jews... was a swell idea."

Uh, no. It's not my quote that I cut-and-pasted, and it’s not Jeff Needles' quote either. It's Quinn's quote, pertaining to Reuben's defence of Hitler in regards to the mass killing of Jews. Are you saying the quote is a fabrication?

So, which one of you is lying? Jeff? Quinn? Or you?

FYI--It was Jeff's highly detailed review that persuaded me to purchase the book in the first place.

...a vandalized Wikipedia entry...

Yeah, right.

From Herr DCP:

Odd that you didn't quote the actual words in which Brother Clark endorsed Kristallnacht.

Actually, you asked for "evidence to suggest that J. Reuben Clark endorsed Kristallnacht, or any of that sort of thing."

Would the murder of several hundred thousand Jews fit into the category of “that sort of thing”?

Striking that you don't actually quote the specific words in which Brother Clark endorses the mass murder of Jews.

Let me ask you a variation on the question I posed to Nevo--does Quinn’s book contain the following quote (offered in defense of Hitler’s actions regarding the Jews):

In his June reply to Nelson’s manuscript, Reuben defended Hitler and added, “There is nothing in their history which indicates that the Jewish race have [sic] either free-agency or liberty. ‘Law and order’ are not facts for the Jews” (p. 335).

Does it?

Or are you going to tell me the Wiki-vandal has defaced Jeff’s review of Quinn’s book?

And don't you think that an Apostle of the Lord should be expected to hew to a higher moral standard than that represented in the 1938 edition of Who's Who in America and Europe?

[_The Nehor]

Is any of this true? Did Mormonism play a part in the formation of Hitler’s racial ideology? I want to say no; I want to assume that Adolf Hitler was utterly disinterested in the beliefs of this tiny enclave of German Saints but I can’t.

The false reluctance is what makes this line so cute.

[_Corpsegrinder]

The false reluctance is what makes this line so cute.

No, not at all! In fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to bear my testimony that I know in my heart that this is true reluctance. Amen.

Hey, Nehor, shouldn't your avatar look like this...

[_The Nehor]

The false reluctance is what makes this line so cute.

No, not at all! In fact, I’d like to take this opportunity to bear my testimony that I know in my heart that this is true reluctance. Amen.

I testify that you are wrong.

Hey, Nehor, shouldn't your avatar look like this...

No, my current avatar more accurately represents my demonic soul.

[_Corpsegrinder]

I testify that you are wrong.

I testify that I am right. Times infinity.

[_moksha]

Regarding J. Reuben Clark, I am wondering if he was not just part of a more wide spread anti-jewish feeling prior to WWII. I remember seeing a movie many years ago called A Gentleman's Agreement, which discussed the prevalent anti-jewish attitudes and practices at that time. One can buy into such common-thought and still not be full of any malevolent intent. Instead these people were the products of a less enlightened time.






This Being could be both prophetic and and a product of his planet of origin.

.

[_Corpsegrinder]

Hi, Moksha

I think you’re right in saying there was an undercurrent of mild anti-Semitism that permeated society, in Europe as well as the US. For lack of a better term, let’s call it Garden Variety Anti-Semitism. This would be the anti-Semitism of people like Joe Kennedy, or William Dodd, the US ambassador to Germany right before the war.

On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got what I’ll call Malignant Anti-Semitism. This would be the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler.

Kennedy, Dodd, Hitler, and Clark are all products of roughly the same era, but they occupy radically different points on the anti-Semitism spectrum.

So what about Clark? Should we place him near the Garden Variety side or the Malignant side? I think there’s good reason to place him on the malignant side. I’ll be learning more when I get my copy of Elder Statesman by Quinn, and I’ll post what I find out. But until then, there’s the Jeff Needles review on the Signature Books site. Jeff does a chapter-by-chapter review, and the portion that deals with Clark’s anti-Semitism is as follows…

Chapter ten, “All Nations, and Kindreds, and People, and Tongues,” was perhaps the most difficult for me to read. Here we find what might be called the seamier side of J. Reuben Clark. I shall focus on just two groups, the Jews and the blacks. Here his views are most pointed. As a Jew, I found his views utterly contemptible: “There was one group … for whom Reuben expressed lifelong dislike and distrust–the Jewish people. In a 1942 letter to Herbert Hoover, he said the Jews ‘are brilliant, they are able, they are unscrupulous, and they are cruel.’ Part of this explanation for his anti-Semitism was personal and part political. He expressed contempt for ‘the foul sewage of Europe’ in his 1898 valedictory, yet Mormons had traditionally gotten along very well with the small population of Jews in Utah” (p. 325). He never passed up an opportunity to express his contempt for Jews. After serving more than ten years in the First Presidency, he wrote, “I long ago ceased reading his [Walter Lippmann's] stuff, because he veers like a weather-vane, but I am sure always true when the wind blows from Jew-ward” (p. 328).

In February 1941, the New York Times reported that Berlin’s Nazi Party newspaper referred to the necessity of “eliminating all Jews.” This was an echo of the LDS newspaper’s headline in 1938, “Death for 700,000 Jews Threatened: Semites Must Get Out or Die, Nazis Declare.” Even this stark Utah report gave less than one-tenth of Adolf Hitler’s goal of killing every Jew in Europe. During the balance of 1941 and increasingly thereafter, newspapers in every major American city reported specific examples of the mass execution of Jews throughout Nazi-controlled Europe. In apparent response to such reports, LDS author N. L. Nelson wrote a book against Hitler in the early months of 1941 and referred to the Nazi “butchery” of the Jews.

In his June reply to Nelson’s manuscript, Reuben defended Hitler and added, “There is nothing in their history which indicates that the Jewish race have [sic] either free-agency or liberty. ‘Law and order’ are not facts for the Jews” (p. 335).

Clark’s attitudes toward blacks was equally reprehensible. Along with others of his time, he opposed intermarriage and supported the common practice of segregating blood supplies in hospitals to ensure that no white person would be infused with blood from a black person, and thus either invalidate his priesthood or disqualify him from future priesthood. But as time progressed, so did his attitude toward blacks. As the church extended its missionary efforts into South America and determining blood lines became more difficult, he came to something of an accommodation in the case of some Brazilians, even “wondering whether we could not work out a plan, while not conferring the priesthood as such upon them, we could give them opportunity to participate in the work certainly of the Aaronic Priesthood grades (p. 354).”

His vision of an enlarged priesthood exceeded that of Brigham Young’s. He saw a time when blacks would hold full priesthood privileges (and not necessarily subject to Young’s prediction that this would not happen until every worthy white male received the priesthood). No such growth is seen in his attitude toward Jews. He remained a steadfast anti-semite until his death. And in the case of blacks and other racial minorities, Clark argued for the civil rights of such folk, without also arguing their spiritual equality. Quinn ends this chapter in much the same way he ends other chapters. But in this case, I was disturbed: “J. Reuben Clark was clearly a product of the nineteenth century. He alternately accepted and resisted the twentieth century’s changing views of race and ethnicity. But supreme to him were the majesty of the law, the principle of justice for all humanity, and the expansiveness of the latter-day gospel” (p. 360). Given Clark’s refusal to condemn the attempted extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany, it seems that his view of “justice for all humanity” was somewhat constricted. I would have appreciated this exception being noted in Quinn’s too-broad, in my view, statement.

[_The Nehor]

I testify that you are wrong.

I testify that I am right. Times infinity.

Only a fool would argue that stupidly. Fools are rarely right.

Conclusion: I am right and I win.

[_Corpsegrinder]

I testify that I am right. Times infinity.

This not an argument. It is a taunt.

Hint: the dictionary is your friend.

And in any case, you are not the Nehor, but an impostor.

THIS is the real Nehor...



Nehor is an alien from the Planet Kolob, and she is the 27th wife of Brigham Young.

Beware the secret of the bees!

[_Nevo]

Given Clark’s refusal to condemn the attempted extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany, it seems that his view of “justice for all humanity” was somewhat constricted. I would have appreciated this exception being noted in Quinn’s too-broad, in my view, statement.

Although I think D. Michael Quinn's biography of Clark is generally quite good, his handling of JRC's anti-Semitism is heavy-handed and frankly misleading. Even though Quinn recognizes that Clark didn't believe most of the reports regarding Nazi persecutions of Jews (considering them war propaganda), Quinn nevertheless intersperses foreboding newspaper headlines to suggest to the reader that Clark should have known what was going on—and what lay ahead.

Thus, Jeff Needle came away from the book believing that Clark "refus[ed] to condemn the attempted extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany." This is preposterous. When Clark wrote his June 1941 response to N.L. Nelson there had been no "attempted extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany." The plan up until then was to deport the Jews to the East, not to kill them en masse.

Here's a quick refresher on the timeline of the Holocaust, from a recent review in the NYRB:

"In late 1939 the plan was to send the Jews of Central Europe (including the Warthegau) to a reservation in the General Government. But the Nazi leadership there resisted this idea, and Hitler himself came to see the General Government as the staging ground for a later invasion of the Soviet Union. In early 1940, the German leadership tried to persuade its Soviet ally to take two million Jews from Polish territory; Stalin refused. After the fall of France in June 1940, the Nazis made plans for the mass deportations of Jews to Madagascar, a French possession. British control of sea lanes made this impossible. Thus when Greiser confined the Jews of Łódź to a ghetto in February 1940, his assumption was that these people would be shortly dispatched to some other territory. As the successive deportation schemes proved impossible, Greiser began treating the ghetto as a work camp. By 1941, the initial project of turning the Warthegau into a German land had devolved into a mixture of forced population movements, apartheid, and ghettos."

The first organized mass killings of Jews took place after the invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1941. The "Final Solution" as we know it wasn't implemented in earnest until the summer of 1942.

The "Final Solution" was not a foregone conclusion in 1941 even among the Nazi leadership, so it is absurd to castigate Clark for "refusing" to condemn it.

What Clark didn't condemn (apparently—we have only Quinn's word for it) was the "forced population movements, apartheid, and ghettos." But, as we have seen, Clark didn't take these reports at face value, so it is difficult to assess how much blame he deserves. For myself, I am content to let God judge the matter.