Disturbing movie that made me think,

I watched September Dawn because the the title made me think it was about the felling of the Twin Towers and found it was about a 9/11 massacre that happened 144 years earlier. As I watched I saw parallels between the Mormons and other religious factions that had deep seated fear and mistrust for minority groups that were gaining power like *beep* and Sunnis, Bosnian Christians and Muslims, Irish Protestents and Catholics, Nazis and Jews. I saw how hate speech cloaked in religious retoric can enflame even rightous men to murderous deeds. And these were murderous deeds.

I would like to think that such a thing never happened in America but this was not an isolated incident. After the Civil War, everyone was tramatized by what they had experienced or witnessed, some more than others. Fear and hatred lead to massacres of blacks and whites in New Orleans and other places. The movie touches on massacres and persecution of Mormons in Arkansas, but in other areas Mennonites, Annabaptists, and Jews were also persecuted. It was a violent time for minorities, not to mention the attempted genocide of indiginous Americans.

The Utah Mormons were afraid that the violence they escaped had followed them and they believed (wrongly) that they needed to make a first strike against these gentiles to protect their homeland. They wanted to kill those men who had killed their leader and all it took was some falsified intelligence to convince them of their right and duty to kill them, even if it also meant killing the women and children.

I was deeply disturbed as I saw the parallels to the events in Iraq. The movie was written in 2004, released in 2006, so it is obvious that Cain meant for us to see the resemblence. He was also making the point that if it is wrong for the Mormons to take the lives of gentiles on such flimsy evidence, it was also wrong for America to attach Iraq, killing tens of thousands of innocents to get one despot.

But Cain, in an effort to drive home his point, made the Mormons so unsympathetic--having Voight kill our heroine in front of his son, her fiance--that the film became another form of hate speech against Mormons. I found my self enflamed and realized that if I had been--in the least inclined--to blame all my misfortune on Mormons, this movie would have sealed my hatered. That is how hate turns curious crowds into murderous mobs.

That is why I was so disturbed by this movie. It left me blaming the Mormons instead of looking into the sins of my generation. It left me feeling like I should demand an apology and reparations from the Utah Mormons instead of looking at what kind of an apology my country owes the rest of the world. I felt like cursing them for unquestioningly following leaders that told them to act in such a depraved manner instead of questioning how blind patriotism is as bad a blind faith.

So I have to give the movie a 4 for trying, but failing miserably, to make us a little bit better humans for having watched.