Continuing from the last post, which ended with that
last, great battle Moroni mentions, and about how many died in the
process, and the unknown number that survived.
However, we can suggest that for an incensed army to wipe out more than
230,000 men-at-arms in a final series of battles (Mormon 6:12-15), including,
perhaps, as many as half a million or more non-combatants (wives, children, widows
and old men), and still hunger for bloodshed, that the results of the civil war
which followed would have been both devastating and unending between the
remnant of Lehi’s seed.
Mormon, himself, in the final
two decades of the war said that “it was
impossible for the tongue to describe, or for man to write a perfect
description of the horrible scene of the blood and carnage which was among the
people, both of the Nephites and of the Lamanites; and every heart was
hardened, so that they delighted in the shedding of blood continually” (Mormon
4:11), adding that there “never had been
so great wickedness among all the children of Lehi, nor ever among all the
house of Israel, according to the words of the Lord, as was among this people”
(Mormon 4:12).
When a huge army delights in the
shedding of blood continually, and then turns against itself in a civil war
between factions, it should be understood that the constant shedding of blood
would continue for some time. And, too, since this crazed, blood-thirsty army
sacrificed women and children in their lust for more killing (Mormon 4:14),
that no one would be spared from the conflict.
While Lamanite women and children are never mentioned in connection with
wars and battles, it might be assumed that the blood-thirsty civil war included
everyone.
Certainly, the power and
influence of the surviving Lamanites, both waned and waxed within tribal
groups, with one faction in an area achieving supremacy and authority for a
time, only to be replaced by another controlling band. This evidently went on
for a thousand years until the final culture of the Inca rose to power around
1400 A.D. and began to build an empire through conquest and subjugation of
other tribes. In this case, the Inca did
not build or create, though they have been given much credit for doing so.
Instead, the Inca occupied the
towns and villages, the buildings and cities, the Nephites left behind, reinforming where necessary, but with far less ability than what had preceded them. Even
when the Inca tried to build upon those old structures, their inferior workmanship
is quite noticeable.
Later Inca workmanship shown on the left of stacked rocks; Early
Nephite workmanship shown on the right of cutting and dressing stones for an earthquake
proof, solid wall with angles so tight a razor blade could not slip between the
mortarless stones
Still, through power and might, and
administrative insight, they conquered the Andes from Ecuador to northern
Chile, close to encompassing the entire extent of the original Land of Promise.
Some have asked why the
Lamanites were allowed to destroy the Nephites?
After all, the Nephites had been the chosen people, carrying the
priesthood lineage, and such a delightsome people for hundreds of years,
achieving the epitome of righteousness in their Golden Age during the 200 years after Christ’s
appearance among them. However, as Mormon saw in his day that the day of grace was passed with them, both temporally and
spiritually (Mormon 2:15), the Nephites were beyond redemption, having
fallen into extreme wickedness, rebelling against their God, being led about by
Satan, even as chaff is driven before the wind (Mormon 5:18). In such a state of open rebellion, God
visited his long-promised destruction upon them, because the judgments of God will overtake the wicked; and it is by the
wicked that the wicked are punished (Mormon 4:5).
Thus ended the one-thousand-year-old
Nephite nation, and the annihilation of all its people, spurring on the
Lamanite civil war that lasted evidently, for the next thousand years. Obviously, by the time the Inca rose to
power, the land was filled with separate, independent tribes, few of which were
willing to unite against the common threat.
However, the Inca, for all their reported magnificence, lasted just
under 100 years, and were ultimately destroyed as were the Aztecs and the Maya,
by ridiculously small numbers of Gentile forces as Nephi had seen in his vision two thousand years earlier.
The 54-year-old Francisco Pizarro
led but 167 soldiers against hundreds of thousands of Inca warriors, not only
wiping out the Inca as a nation, but literally destroying the Inca people, and
all the natives of the Andes, the remnant of Lehi’s seed. In the 15th Century, some thousand
years after their annihilation of the Nephites, God’s judgment on the Lamanites
was about to be fulfilled. And this
judgment has no parallel in human history for the total and complete subjugation
and ruination of a people that has lasted for nearly the past 500 years.
“I beheld many multitudes of the Gentiles upon the land of
promise; and I beheld the wrath of God, that it was upon the seed of my
brethren; and they were scattered before the Gentiles and were smitten”
(1 Nephi 13:14)
The discovery of America was the
occasion of the greatest outburst of reckless cruelty and greed known in
history. Spain has the unenviable credit
of having destroyed two great civilizations, that of Mexico and Guatemala and
that of the Andes, making their conquest the most inglorious in all human
history. The ignoble defeat of a native people, whose achievements and society
were far superior to that of Spain, not only ruined a people for all time, but
drowned and destroyed all the past of their culture, heritage, and
history. History has written of this: "The Spaniards made
accursed the name of man and thrice-accursed the name of God.”
This people of the Western
Hemisphere, which had accomplished so much in their thousands of years of
history, were first discovered, then exterminated by a newer and upstart race
arrogating to themselves the right to do so. Tens of thousands were starved to
death, outright murdered, or in other ways killed, their royalty and nobles
reduced to beggary and slavery.
Once the Spanish conquest was
accomplished, the Indians’ future was behind them. Many were captured and burned to death,
becoming withered leaves clinging to a dead tree. As has been written of their fate—time for
them only reaches backward. There never was such a state of moral degradation
as existed in South America after the conquest. Nor could any such conquest
ever be made again—no such destruction of a race is today conceivable unless in
some future age aliens from space were to swoop down upon our then effete
civilization and wipe it out.
Before 1492, Lehi’s seed enjoyed
the separation from other nations, as the Lord promised that eminent
prophet. However, following Columbus’
discovery of the New World, this
mysterious race of beings who were born apart and lived apart in a world of their
own, their land their own undisputed possession, as by divine gift, were
unknown to the world. But since the conquest, the Lamanite has been a slave,
yet unlike the African, he made a poor one.
Too deeply had the iron of independence entered his soul.
By the 20th century,
the remnant of Lehi’s seed had become a byword and a curse to all those
societies around them. In the American
West a century earlier, they were considered much like animals, hunted down and
butchered.
Today, they mostly live on
reservations in hovels with little or no hope.
Most while away their days in servitude or extreme poverty. In the Andes, the natives have few rights and
absolutely no ambition to change their horrible plight. Even today, they are little more than slaves
in their own countries.
However, there is a bright
side. The Lord has promised the remnant
of Lehi’s seed that He would not forget them.
Today, these natives by the thousands are finding new lives in a modern
world, achieving greatness among themselves and among the countries of the
world—especially in the U.S. The
promised Day of the Lamanite is
apparently upon us, and thousands are flooding into the United States to
eventually gain citizenship and share in the American Dream. Others are beginning to emerge in the Andean
area, forming or becoming part of governments, their voices finally beginning
to emerge and be heard. The near
ruination of an entire people numbering in the millions, by an entire nation
bent on world domination (or that part of it they could eventually control) for
the purpose of wealth, power and dominion, is beginning to be rectified. With the good graces of the Lord and within
his own time frame, the remnant of Lehi’s seed is and will continue to flower,
perhaps to regain some of the prominence and status they once held in the Land
of Promise.
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