In None Left to Tell, Noelle W. Ihli argues that leaders can weaponize collective trauma, transforming legitimate historical grievances into a powerful justification for committing new atrocities. The novel demonstrates how Mormon leaders manipulate the memory of persecution in Missouri and Illinois to stoke fear and rage among their followers, recasting innocent emigrants as an existential threat. This rhetoric serves to consolidate power, command unquestioning obedience, and frame preemptive violence as a sacred duty of self-preservation and divine vengeance. By linking the emigrants to past tormentors, the leadership creates an environment where violence against a perceived enemy becomes both logical and righteous.

The foundation for this manipulation is laid through religious sermons that explicitly reframe current events through the lens of past suffering. After Proctor Robison’s accidental death, Apostle George A. Smith delivers a funeral sermon that is less a eulogy than a call to arms. He reminds the congregation how “gentiles have tarred and feathered our people. Beaten and exterminated us. Driven us from our homelands” (41). By invoking these traumas and quoting scripture about bringing a “sword” instead of peace, he masterfully channels the community’s grief into anger directed at the Arkansas emigrants, whom he implicitly blames for the