American Police State

American Police State

Thomas Allen

[Editor’s note: This article was written in 2002, shortly after the enactment of the so-call PATRIOT Act]

    In defending his newly imposed restrictions on legal rights, President Bush said that “the Constitution is sacred” and that it will not be undermined in his war against terrorism. His actions contradict his words.
    He has had American citizens arrested and imprisoned without charges, hearings, or convictions and without access to an attorney or anyone else. Apparently, he can have anyone arrested and imprisoned indefinitely merely by labeling that person as “an enemy combatant.” The victim is not allowed to appeal this charge. This action violates the Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial, to be informed of the charges, to confront witnesses, and to have a lawyer.
    The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) is building several large detention (prison) camps across the country. These centers may be used to imprison people who refuse an untested toxic vaccination, dissenters, segments of the population declared “enemy combatants,” terrorists like constitutionalists and Christians who believe that these are the last days, and others whom Bush deems undesirable.
    Bush endorsed and rapidly pushed through a scared, cowardly Congress his Anti-Patriot bill. This bill was not even available for Congressmen to read until after they had passed it.
    Under this law, federal agents can monitor conversations between a prisoner and his attorney. Such monitoring violates the Sixth Amendment.
    Court hearings can be, and are being, held in secret The Sixth Amendment requires trials to be public.
    The Anti-Patriot Act also makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment. Now almost no restrictions are placed on searches and seizures. Probable cause is no longer needed for search warrants. (When Congress asked the Justice Department how many subpoenas had been issued under the Anti-Patriot Act, the Justice Department told Congress that the information was classified and could not be released. Nearly every time that the Bush Administration does is classified and cannot be released. Why all the secrecy? What is Bush trying to hide? The police state that he has given America.)
    Legal barriers to the police searching library records have been greatly reduced. These searches include removing hard drives of computers from libraries. Not only can the police view the Internet usage of a suspect, but they can also view the usage of everyone else who has recently used that computer. Until now, what one read was protected under the First Amendment. The Anti-Patriot Act has voided this First Amendment Protection.
    The only things that remain sacred are that racial profiling will not be used and the borders will not be closed to immigrants. Racial profiling and closing the borders to immigrants are not unconstitutional.
    Bush is knowingly, or possibly unknowingly, falling into an old standard Communist trap. A common Communist tactic is to commit terrorist acts to cause the government to react with oppression. The typical government reaction to terrorism is to clamp down on the freedom of the people. More terrorist acts are followed by more freedom-restricting reactions by the government. Soon the people are living in a police state that is nearly as oppressive as what the Communist would have imposed. Discontent and rebellion are often the results.
    If Bush were really serious about defeating terrorism, he would bring all the U.S. troops scattered across the globe home and use them to seal the borders to all immigrants. (He would also respect the posse comitatus law and refuse to allow troops to participate in law enforcement or to patrol American streets.) He would reduce immigration to zero. (The Mexican invasion is far more detrimental to American welfare than anything that Iraq, Hussein, bin Laden, al-Qaeda, or any other Arabic terrorist group could inflict.) He would institute a vigorous program to round up and deport all illegal immigrants. When an immigrant’s visa expired, he would have to return home.
    Instead of violating the Constitution to fight terrorism, Bush should use it. Anyone who is suspected of terrorism or collaborating with terrorists should be tried quickly in open court. If convicted, he should be sentenced to the fullest extent of the law. Any high-ranking governmental official who knew about the 9-11 attack, aided the terrorists in the attack, concealed information that could have prevented it, or otherwise aided the terrorists should be publicly executed.
    Instead of seeking to curb private ownership of firearms, Bush should be openly and vigorously encouraging it. He would push to repeal federal laws that impede private ownership of firearms. A highly armed citizenry is not only the best defense against terrorism, but it is also the best defense against a despotic police state.
    Bush would replace our Zionist Middle East foreign policy with a more even-handed one that did not favor either side. He would withdraw the United States from the United Nation and all those entangling alliances created under the authority of the United Nations including NAFTA and GATT. He would embargo trade with China, North Korea, Syria, Saudi-Arabia, and other countries whose governments support terrorists or whose governments allow private citizens to support terrorists.
    Instead of administering the government in secrecy, Bush would open the government up to public inspection. With the possible exceptions of weapons technology, manufacturing trade secrets, the identity of undercover agents, activities related to criminal investigations, and the like, he should declassify and unseal all governmental records and make them available to the public. If we have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, then the people need to know what the government is doing. Bush would make public all records concerning the 9-11 attack. He would release everything that could reveal who knew what when.
    If Bush’s goal is to turn the United States into a despotic police state with troops on the street where citizens fear both the government and terrorists, he is traveling the right road. If his goal is to defeat terrorism, protect the Constitution, and restore American freedom, he needs drastically change course.

Copyright © 2002 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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January 6

January 6

Thomas Allen

The so-called January 6 insurrectionists stormed the Capitol Building because they knew that the Democrats had stolen the 2020 presidential election and almost no Republican was objecting to the theft. Consequently, Nancy Pelosi established a committee to prove that President Trump organized, incited, and supported this so-call insurrection. Following are some observations on the 2020 presidential election and the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection.

– If the Democrats did not steal the 2020 presidential election, then that means that 81 million Americans hate America so much that they voted for its destruction by electing the great destroyer, who has done an excellent job of destroying America.

– I do not understand why many of the 81 million people who voted for Biden disapprove of him. He promised to implement policies to destroy America. Eighty-one million people voted for him to carry out his promises. So far, he has been highly effective in fulfilling his promises. Yet, many people who voted for him to do what he promised to do and is doing disapprove of him. The only thing that I can figure out is that he is not destroying America fast enough to satisfy them. Perhaps, if he can provoke Russia into a nuclear war, which he is working eagerly to do, they will be satisfied.

– As braindead as Biden is, he still has more functioning brain cells than most Democrats and many Republicans. He knows that he is not the real president and admits it. Most Democrats and many Republicans refuse to admit that Biden is not the real president.

– If Trump were planning a coup, why did he authorize 20,000 national guard troops to protect the Capitol? Certainly, they would have thwarted his coup. Why did the Democratic mayor of Washington fail to order the deployment of these troops? Surely, if the Democrats suspected that Trump was planning a coup, they would have ordered the deployment of troops that Trump had authorized. Did the Democrats want to blame Trump for attempting a coup, which he never attempted or planned to attempt? Since the Democrats refused Trump’s offer of troops to protect the Capitol, they knew that he was not planning a coup. They wanted to give the appearance of a coup to use as propaganda against Trump and if possible to imprison him. However, if they knew of a planned coup and rejected the offer of troops, then they are accomplices in the coup.

– Democrats are notorious for accusing others of doing what they (the Democrats) are guilty of doing. The Democrats stole the election from Trump. Thus, to deflect attention from their theft, they accuse Trump of trying to steal the election from Biden.

– If our Representatives and Senators thought that a disorganized unarmed mob was trying to overthrow the federal government, why did they flee? Since they heavily outgunned the insurrectionists, why did they not stand and fight to save the government?  Were they cowards? Did they believe that the federal government was not worth defending? Or, did they know that this was no instruction and, therefore, lied about it being one? At least one of these three choices has to be true. If they are cowards, they should not be in Congress. If they believe that the government is not worth defending, they should not be in Congress. If they have lied, they should not be in Congress. Consequently, none of these Representatives or Senators should be in Congress.

– If anyone wants to see a Soviet show trial kangaroo court in action, he can watch the January 6 hearings. The conclusion of the committee holding the hearings was determined before the hearings started. Like the Kennedy assassination commission and the 9-11 commission, the purpose of these January 6 committee hearings is to conceal the truth and to keep the truth from being revealed.

– The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, incident reveals America’s two-standard, two-tier justice system, which is no justice system at all. On January 6, 2021, guards at the Capitol Building opened the doors and let the people inside. Some vandalized and should be punished. Yet, many of those who entered the Capitol Building who did no damage and even people who did not enter have been arrested. They have been imprisoned without due process. Many are held in solitary confinement, and some have not even been charged with a crime. Most are denied bail. Some have spent more time in jail than the length of their sentence if found guilty, and for many, their punishment far exceeds their crime. Moreover, many of those arrested committed no crime on January 6.

On the other hand, BLM and Antifa rioted, burned buildings, destroyed property, and injured numerous people. However, almost none of these rioters were arrested. Most of the few who were arrested had their charges dropped or were released with no charges. Almost none were fined or served a prison sentence. Yet, the BLM and Antifa rioters did much more damage and were a much greater threat to the country than the so-called insurrectionists on January 6.

– One purpose of the  House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, incident is to provide cover for a stolen election. It is an attempt to convince people that the Democrats did not steal the 2020 presidential election by persuading people that Trump was the one trying to steal the election. Another purpose is to provide anti-Trumpers propaganda for the upcoming 2022 and 2024 elections. Also, the Democrats and other anti-Trumpers are using the January 6 investigation to justify lynching Trump. (If they could literally lynch Trump, they would. They know that they can get away with it because the US Department of [In]justices would do nothing but protect them from local law enforcement. They need only do the lynching in a Blue State.)

– Nancy Pelosi’s closing remarks to the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection:

This Committee has proven beyond any doubt what it set out to prove. We have shown that Donald Trump while dressed in a military battle uniform led a heavily armed million-man army to the Capitol Building with the intent to overthrow the government. If it were not for the courageous Democratic members of the House and Senate, who, although unarmed and standing alone, fearlessly fought Trump’s army for hours in hand-to-hand combat and finally drove Trump and his army away from the Capitol Building, the government would have fallen, and Trump would be a dictator. These brave Democrats saved democracy. We have proven this with bias, prejudicial, and at times fabricated testimony while suppressing all testimony that refutes the guilt of Trump and the goals of this inquiry.

Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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A Credibility Test

A Credibility Test

Thomas Allen

The following is a test to decide if a person is credible and has a rudimentary knowledge of recent American political history. It is especially useful for politicians and political commentators. (This article is an expansion of the credibility test given in “More Political Thoughts.”)

Does the person believe or act as though he believes:

1. The official story of the Kennedy assassination. (Along with the many other flaws and anomalies of the official story, the person believes that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin who killed President Kennedy by firing three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. He believes that Oswald could fire three shots in six seconds and hit two men 200 feet away with a cheap, low-quality, defective rifle. Further, he believes that a single high-powered rifle bullet penetrated both Kennedy and Governor Connally causing seven wounds, shattering a rib and wrist bone, and emerging in almost pristine condition. Also, he must believe that all the eyewitnesses whose accounts contradict the official story deliberately lied. Moreover, he believes that the statements in the Warren Report that have subsequently been shown to be inaccurate or untrue are still true and accurate. On the other hand, he must ignore (1) evidence that more than three shots were fired, (2) the overwhelming evidence that shots were fired from the Grassy Knoll, (3) evidence of more than one rifle being used and more than one shooter, (4) the lack of evidence that places Oswald on the sixth floor of the Depository at the time of the shooting and the evidence that he was not on the sixth floor at that time, (5) no evidence that Oswald ever had possession of the rifle used in the assassination (moreover, the scope on the rifle was adjusted for a left-handed shooter; Oswald was right-handed), (6) a tree branch prevented a clear line of sight from the window of the sixth floor of the Depository, (7) Oswald never achieving marksmanship standard when he was in the Marines, (8) the paraffin test made on Oswald on the day of the assassination suggesting that he had not fired a rifle that day, (9) evidence that the FBI put Oswald’s finger prints on the murder weapon after he died, (10) the scientific evidence that different bullets struck Kennedy and Connally, (11) Connally’s claim that different bullets hit him and Kennedy, (12) the poor quality superficial autopsy, (13) the Dallas doctors claiming that Kennedy had a large hole in the right rear of his head while the Bethesda doctors claimed that the wound stretched from the upper side of the rear to the right front, (14) Kennedy’s body being wrapped in a white sheet and placed in an expensive bronze casket in Dallas for transport to Bethesda and arriving at Bethesda in a black zipper body bag inside a cheap military shipping casket, (15) changing the location of the entry wound between Kennedy’s shoulder blade that exited through his throat, which required the bullet to travel in an upward direction, by raising the entry wound to fit the official story, (16) the throat wound being smaller than the back wound, which suggests that the bullet entered the throat and exited the back. (17) evidence that three bullets hit Kennedy instead of two, and (18) the Commission not being allowed to see the autopsy photographs and X-rays. Moreover, he must ignore the Commission, FBI, and other federal agencies suppressing evidence that conflicted with the official story, changing evidence to support the official story, and harassing and intimidating witnesses whose testimony conflicted with the official story. Also, he must disagree with members of the Warren Commission who later questioned the conclusions of the Warren Report. Above all, he must believe that the Kennedy assassination involved no conspiracy.

2. The official governmental conspiracy theory of 9-11. (A gang of Muslims, who could hardly fly trainer aircraft, hijacked four passenger airplanes. They flew two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, which caused the two buildings to collapse at near free-fall speed into their footprints. Somehow, they also caused Building 7 to collapse at near free-fall speed into its footprint. Moreover, they made an impossible turning maneuver to fly an airplane into the Pentagon so that they could avoid hitting the side of the building, which required no turn, where Rumsfeld’s office was. Instead, they made an impossible turn and hit the side of the building where an audit of the Department of Defense’s expenditures was occurring. Remarkably, they managed to do this by causing a hole in the building much smaller than their hijacked airplane and causing no damage to the adjacent lawn. If such miracles were not enough, they managed to create a fire hot enough to vaporize aluminum, greater than 4400̊F, yet cool enough not to incinerate human bodies, less than 1400̊F. Further, the hijackers caused several simulations of hijacked aircraft to occur while they carried out their dastardly deed. Moreover, they changed the standard operating procedures for intercepting hijacked airplanes. Additionally, the hijackers sent intercepting jets from airfields far enough away and at slow enough speeds so that they could not intercept the hijacked aircraft before they crashed into the buildings. Moreover, the United States have the most incompetent intelligence agencies that have ever existed throughout history [If this notion is rejected, then the other two choices are {1} high-ranking governmental officials knew that the attack was going to happen and let it happen or {2} high-ranking governmental officials collaborated in the attack.])

3. That the Democrats did not steal the 2020 presidential election but won it fairly. (Thus, the person believes that 81 million people hate America so much that they voted for its destruction by putting the great destroyer in office, who has done an excellent job in destroying the country.)

4. That White replacement is a hoax. (No program exists to replace Whites [Aryans, Homo albus] in Europe, the United States, and the White Anglophone countries with people of color: Negro [H. niger], Melanochroi [H. brunus], Turanian [H. luridus], Indo-Australian [H. australis], and  Khoisan [H. khoisanii]. [Being racial nihilists, most conservatives and libertarians, or albusphobes, most liberals and progressives, they refuse to acknowledge the facts that prove that White replacement is true.])

If a person answers “yes” to any of these statements, his credibility is questionable. If he answers “yes” to two or three, he has no credibility. If he answers “yes” to all four, he is ignorant beyond repair and is irredeemably stupid.

Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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The Threat to America

The Threat to America

Thomas Allen

The following identifies several threats to the United States. The threats are listed in order of importance.

1. America’s leaders. American leaders, which include political, business, religious, and academic leaders, are the greatest threat to the United States. They are destroying the country with wokeism, political correctness, multiculturalism, and multiracialism and with a growing police state and welfare states. Further, they are deliberately destroying the economy. Also, America’s leaders promote policies that genocide the White race.

2. China. Second is China. America is rapidly becoming an economic colony of China. With America’s leaders destroying the country from within, China will soon become the world’s sole superpower. Then, following the US post-cold-war example, China will impose its will on the United States and establish Chinese hegemony. 

3. Latin Americans. Third are the nonwhite Latin American immigrants. Nonwhite Latin American immigrants, both legal and illegal, are flooding the country. These nonwhite Latin Americans, people of color, cannot be assimilated, and many do not want to assimilate. These nonwhite immigrants cannot truly and fully assimilate without destroying themselves biologically. (White Latin Americans can assimilate and most want to assimilate.) These nonwhite immigrants are changing the demographics and culture of the United States.

4. Zionist Jews. Fourth are Jews, especially Zionist Jews. Their control of and influence on politics, the economy, academia, entertainment, and the media far exceed their numbers. Moreover, Jews have captured and control most of the Christian Churches in the United States. Consequently, America has an Israel-first foreign policy. Thus, America’s leaders willingly destroy America for the benefit of Israel. (Although they lack the power and influence of Zionist Jews, Christian Zionists are almost as destructive as Zionist Jews. If they had the power and influence of the Zionist Jews, Christian Zionists would be as destructive as the Zionist Jews.)

5. Asian Indians. Fifth are Asian Indians, nearly all of whom are people of color, Melanochroi. Their numbers and influence are growing rapidly, and they are given advantages not available to most White immigrants and even White Americans. Like most Latin Americans, Asian Indians cannot truly and fully assimilate without destroying themselves biologically. Moreover, next to the Jewish Cabala, India is the source of most of the cults in the United States. Because it is the most subtle threat, it is one of the most dangerous.

6. Muslims. Sixth are the Muslims. They are a threat because American leaders have made them a threat and in the process enriched the military-industrial and security-industrial complexes, which control America’s leaders. With no navy worthy of the name and an air force that cannot cross the Atlantic, they cannot attack the United States from without. Muslims can only threaten America when they are allowed into the country. (Muslims did not plan, organize, orchestrate, or carry out 9-11. They were just the patsies. The primary purpose of 9-11 was to establish a police state, protect Israeli imperialism by destroying its enemies, and, most important, transfer more power and wealth to the rich and powerful.)

7. Russia. Seventh is Russia. The only real threat that Russia offers is its nuclear arsenal. If America does not threaten Russia, Russia is no threat to the United States. If America makes Russia believe that its only choice is to surrender to the United States and die, it may strike with its nuclear weapons. Such an attack would utterly destroy the United States, which many of America’s leaders seem to want.

The second through the seventh threats depend on the first threat. America’s leaders have built up China’s economy while dismantling America’s. American leaders have allowed massive immigration of nonwhites from Latin America, India, and other nonwhite countries. They have even imported these people to replace White American workers. Moreover, American leaders have surrendered to the Zionist lobby. Further, American leaders continue to threaten Russia. Worst of all, American leaders have brainwashed many Americans to promote and even demand their own annihilation.

Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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More Political Thoughts

More Political Thoughts

Thomas Allen

Discussed below are official papers, socialism and democracy, the wrong question, and a credibility test.

Official Papers

Our ancestors who fought the National Socialists (Nazis) and the Fascists in World War II would be proud of what has happened to the United States. They fought the National Socialists and Fascists to rid the world of their despotism and tyranny. Thus, they would be overwhelmed with the joy of knowing that people need officially governmentally issued papers called Read ID to travel within the United States — as the National Socialists and Fascists required official papers to travel. So, why did our ancestors fight the National Socialists and Fascists?

In other words, propagandists inculcate us with the notion that their ancestors fought the National Socialists and Fascists to keep us free. They did such a great job of keeping us free that we are now free to be required to have governmentally issued papers, Real Id, to travel — just as the people in National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy needed official papers to travel. So much for freedom.

President Bush said that the terrorists attacked the United States because they hated our freedom. Then, he proceeded to suppress the few remaining freedoms that Americans had. President Obama extended Bush’s police state of suppressing freedom, and President Trump did nothing to end and reverse this police state. Since Americans have lost their freedoms, the terrorists have won. So, why are the United States still fighting a war that has been lost? Why not admit defeat and bring the troops home and repeal all the police state and antiterrorist laws?

Socialism and Democracy

Socialism is economic democracy. Democracy is political socialism. Under democracy, each person, in theory, has an equal say in society’s political affairs.  Under socialism, each person, in theory, has an equal say in society’s economic affairs. In both socialism and democracy, each person has an equal say.

Wrong Question

Paul Harvey said, “They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?” This is a good question, but it is the wrong question.

The question should be: Why are not progressives, liberals, and socialists moving to Cuba? Cuba is already offering what they want: gun control, universal healthcare, and much more. Certainly, Cuba would welcome them with open arms — especially if they bring their wealth with them.

The reason that progressives, liberals, and socialists do not move to Cuba is that they are Puritans. They have seen the light and are compelled to force their utopia on everyone — especially on those who know that their utopia is really a dystopia.

Credibility Test

A three-step test can be given to find out if a person has credibility. (1) Does he believe or claim to believe the official governmental conspiracy theory of 9-11? (2) Does he believe or claim to believe that the Democrats and their supporters, promoters, and owners did not steal the 2020-presidential election? (3) Does he believe or claim to believe the official explanation of the Kennedy assassination? If he answers one or more of these questions “yes,” then he has no credibility.

Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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A Letter: Al Qaeda and 9/11

A Letter: Al Qaeda and 9/11

Thomas Allen

[Editor’s note: The following is a letter written in 2005 responding to an article in the Middle American News.]

    In your May 2005 issue, you state on page 9, “Kreis is parroting the nutty theories of the lunatic fringe about 9/11, denying al Qaeda was behind the attacks.” If al Qaeda were behind 9/11, then it had control of the U.S. government.
    Was it al Qaeda that prevented the FBI agents from investigating Moslems training to fly? Was it al Qaeda that gave suspected and known Moslem terrorists visas to come to the United States? How did al Qaeda get the CIA to train Moslems in terrorism? How did al Qaeda manage to switch the Boeing 747 that left Boston to a Boeing 737 that hit the south tower of the World Trade Center? Was al Qaeda the one who planted explosives in the twin towers and building number seven so that these buildings could be brought down?  How was al Qaeda able to bring down a steel structure where the steel was coated with fireproof material with a fire that probably did not exceed 800°F? Was it al Qaeda that got the EPA to tell New Yorkers that the air was safe to breathe when it was filled with tons of fine particulate and toxic and radioactive material? Why would al Qaeda want to bring down building number seven, which apparently contained evidence that pointed away from al Qaeda? Was it al Qaeda that ordered the quick destruction of the crime scene to prevent independent investigators from finding evidence that would conflict with the Bush administration’s and your conspiracy theory? What hold does al Qaeda have over the U.S. government to prevent it from releasing videotapes, aircraft parts, and other evidence that would support the government’s theory that al Qaeda did it? Did al Qaeda control the CIA so that it could get CIA funding and training?
    How could an al Qaeda pilot, who could not even fly a single engine training aircraft, fly a jet airliner, put that airliner in a rapidly spiraling descent, and then level the aircraft to fly just above the ground into the first floor of the Pentagon — a maneuver that would be difficult for an experienced pilot? The airliner that hit Pentagon was coming from the east and could have avoided this difficult maneuver if it were flown into the east side. Why did not al Qaeda fly the aircraft into the east side where Rumsfeld was instead of undertaking a very difficult maneuver to avoid killing Rumsfeld? (If al Qaeda had as much control over the U.S. government as you insinuate, then it would have certainly known where Rumsfeld’s office was and that he was in his office on 9/11.) Furthermore, how could the airliner flown by al Qaeda have left a hole in the Pentagon smaller than the fuselage, and much smaller than the wingspan, of the airliner that supposedly hit the Pentagon?
    Does al Qaeda operate under different laws of chemistry and physics than other people? How could they create a fire at the Pentagon to burn hot enough to vaporize aluminum (more than 4000°F) yet cool enough not to cremate human bodies (less than 1200°F)?
    Was it al Qaeda that sent most of the fighters stationed in the East to a training exercise in the West on September 11? Was it al Qaeda that created the CIA exercise on September 11 simulating a hijacked airliner flying into a building in Washington? Was it al Qaeda that created the other hijack training exercises that occurred on September 11 to confuse the FAA, NORAD, and others?
    How did six or more of the al Qaeda hijackers manage to survive crashing airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? With the country on high alert, how did they evade capture and flee the country?
    Kreis and many others claim that al Qaeda did not control the U.S. government and, therefore, could not and did not do these things. Conversely, you claim that al Qaeda did these things and, therefore, must have controlled the U.S. government.
    Cui bono! Who benefitted from 9/11? Was it the Moslems? So far, they have had two of their countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, destroyed, turned into radioactive waste dumps, and victimized by U.S. imperialism.
    The principal beneficiaries have been Israel, the rapture cult, the imperialists, the oil industry, the military-industrial complex, and the statists.  They all wanted war with the Moslem world. 9/11 gave Bush the excuse to give them that war.
    Israel got one of its staunchest enemies destroyed and now has a large U.S. army stationed indefinitely in the Middle East to protect Israeli interests.
    The rapture cult believes that a world war must start in the Middle East to bring Christ back to Earth. (Of course, most of the rapture cultists do not believe that they will be around to enjoy the fruits of their labor as they will have been raptured away before things get too bad.)
    The imperialists (like the abolitionists of the antebellum South era) get to remake someone else’s country in their own image. They get to remake the Middle East into a liberal, democratic, humanistic society without having to endure the destruction and devastation that they bring to these people to achieve their dream. At least their idea is noble [in their own minds], and that is all that really matters.
    The oil industry has gained control of Iraqi oil and the rights to the pipeline to be built through Afghanistan.
    The military-industrial complex has made a fortune from destroying Iraq and will make a fortune in rebuilding it — nearly all will be paid for by the U.S. taxpayers.
    The statists have turned the United States into a police state with the “PATRIOT” act, Homeland Security, and similar laws that have gutted what little remained of the Bill of Rights in the name of protecting us from Moslem terrorists. (If Bush were correct in asserting that the terrorists attacked us because they hated our freedom, then we should now be living in peace. In the name of protecting us from terrorism, Bush has destroyed our freedoms. Actually, Bush was correct if you realize that the terrorists to whom he refers are not in the Middle East, but are in Washington.)
    Everyone of importance in the Bush administration, or connected with it, belongs to one or more of these aforementioned groups.
    Al Qaeda had little to gain from 9/11 while these aforementioned groups have gained enormous wealth and power from 9/11. To believe that al Qaeda was the mastermind of 9/11 is the really nutty lunatic theory. This theory has nothing to support it but assertions by the open-borders, unlimited immigration, globalist, “diversity is strength,” outsourcing Bush administration.

    [Editor’s note: Joyce Reilly, may she forever be remembered, former air force captain and hostess of The Power Hour, which is still an excellent radio program, had the ultimate litmus test of a person’s credibility: If the person believes the official US government’s conspiracy theory about 9/11 or even pretends to believe it, then that person has no credibility. Another curiosity of 9/11 is that people who are convinced that the government always lies have made one exception to this belief: the government has told the truth about 9/11. This proves Hitler correct when he said, “The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one — especially if it is repeated over and over.” Concurring, Joseph Goebbels said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”]

Copyright © 2005, 2019 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on the Failure of Puritanism

Mencken on the Failure of Puritanism

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes the failure of Puritanism, pages 177-186. Below is an overview of his discussion on the failure of Puritanism; my comments are in brackets.
    Mencken describes the action of Puritanism as follows: “Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.” [For example, ever more things said by a White, especially a White male, and even more so by a White Southern male, that might possibly hurt the feelings of a supersensitive person who is searching for someone to hurt his/her/its feelings is proscribed. If such words do not result in a jail sentence, as often happens in Europe, they certainly lead to expulsion from school and a loss of employment.] As a result, “it is almost a literal fact that the citizen has no rights that the police are bound to respect.” [One can hardly imagine Mencken’s disgust of the power that the police now have in America’s emerging police state where the police can often arrest a person for resisting arrest when the police have not charged the person with any crime.] Mencken continues, “These awful powers, of course, are not exercised against all citizens. The man of influence with the reigning politicians, the supporter of the prevailing delusions, and the adept hypocrite — these are seldom molested.” [Hillary Clinton is an excellent example of one who is not molested; she is shielded.] “But the man who finds himself in an unpopular minority is at the mercy of the Polizei [police], and the easiest way to get into such a minority is to speak out boldly for the Bill of Rights.” [One needs only to listen to talk radio, especially on shortwave and the Internet, to discover many people whom the government has victimized for speaking for the Bill of Rights. Also, many judges deny the defense appealing to the Bill of Rights.]
    The procedure operates as follows: “First an unpopular man is singled out for persecution, and then a diligent search is made, with the police and prosecuting officers and even the courts co-operating, for a law that he can be accused of breaking. The enormous multiplicity of sumptuary and inquisitorial statutes makes this quest easy. The prisoner begins his progress through the mill of justice under a vague accusation of disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace; he ends charged with crimes that carry staggering penalties.” [One cynical commentator claims that between the time the average person gets out of bed and eats breakfast, he has already committed five felonies. During the day, the average person probably commits several felonies and dozens of misdemeanors and even more civil infractions without knowing that he has committed a crime. The government has made a criminal of everyone, which makes imprisoning everyone who becomes a nuisance legally easy. To increase the likelihood of people violating a law, laws are often written to contradict other laws. Thus, by obey one law, the person has to disobey another law.] Making criminals of people “for merely thinking unpopular thoughts,” as many Puritans[, Yankees,] want to do today, is not new. Mencken comments on laws that outlawed unpopular thoughts. He writes, “Once he is accused of such heresy, the subsequent proceedings take on the character of a lynching. His constitutional rights are swept away as of no validity, and all the ancient rules of the Common Law — for example, those against double jeopardy and hearsay are suspended in order to fetch him. Many of the newer statutes actually suspend these safeguards formally, and though they are to that extent plainly unconstitutional, the higher courts have not interfered with their execution.” [This situation that Mencken abhors has gotten infinitely worse since he wrote. For example, double jeopardy appears in the application of many civil rights laws. If a White person is found not guilty of a crime against a Black person, then the U.S. government may file charges against the White person for violating the Black person’s civil rights. The White person is being charged with committing a crime of which he has been found innocent by merely changing the name of the crime.] He cites the Volstead Act as an example of a law that “destroys the constitutional right to a jury trial, and in its administration the constitutional prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures and the rule against double jeopardy.” [The Volstead Act was the law that enforced the Eighteenth Amendment, the Prohibition Amendment. Much of the legislation enacted by Congress since 9-11 voids the Bill of Rights.] He continues, “The mob is always in favour of the prosecution, for the prosecution is giving the show. In the face of its applause, very few American judges have the courage to enforce the constitutional guarantees — and still fewer prosecuting attorneys.” [This explains the lack of popular support for the people who are persecuted and prosecuted for standing up for liberty and the inalienable rights guaranteed by the Constitution.]
    Furthermore, “a prosecuting attorney’s success depends very largely upon his ferocity. American practice permits him an extravagance of attack that would land him in jail, and perhaps even in a lunatic asylum, in any other country, and the more passionately he indulges in it the more certain becomes his promotion to higher office, including the judicial.” Judges who had previously been prosecuting attorneys “seem to be generally convinced that any man accused of crime is ipso facto guilty, and that if he is known to harbour political heresies he is guilty of a sort of blasphemy when he mentions his constitutional rights.” [An early television judge showed such bias and prejudice. Whenever someone appeared before him whom he thought was a “racist,” that person lost his case even if the evidence overwhelmingly supported his cause.]
    Mencken notes, “This doctrine that a man who stands in contempt of the prevailing idealogy has no rights under the law is so thoroughly democratic that in the United States it is seldom questioned, save by romantic fanatics, robbed of their wits by an uncritical reading of the Fathers.” [Mencken’s observation may be true of a true lover of liberty, a libertist, but it is not true of others. However, courts have gone out of their way to ensure that the rights of Communists and their allies who want to abolish all real liberties and convert the United States to totalitarianism are protected.]
    Next, Mencken remarks, “It is difficult, indeed, for democracy to reconcile itself to what may be called common decency. By this common decency I mean the habit, in the individual, of viewing with tolerance and charity the acts and ideas of other individuals — the habit which makes a man a reliable friend, a generous opponent, and a good citizen.” [One of the most amusing ironies in America today is that the people who preach tolerance and yell the loudest that we must all be tolerant are the most intolerant people in the country. What would one expect from a Puritan Yankee, to use a tautology?] Then Mencken adds, “The democrat, despite his strong opinion to the contrary, is seldom a good citizen. . . .His eagerness to bring all his fellow-citizens, and especially all those who are superior to him, into accord with his own dull and docile way of thinking, and to force it upon them when they resist, leads him inevitably into acts of unfairness, oppression and dishonour which, if all men were alike guilty of them, would quickly break down that mutual trust and confidence upon which the very structure of civilized society rests. Where democratic man is so firmly in possession of his theoretical rights that resistance to him is hopeless, as it is in large areas of the United States, he actually produces this disaster.” [Can one say “California?”] For “any well-informed and self-respecting man” living in such a community is almost impossible. Not accepting “the democratic epistemology and the Puritan ethic” of such communities, he is harassed until he flees.
    Continuing, Mencken explains the uneasiness in American life: “This irreconcilable antagonism between democratic Puritanism and common decency is probably responsible for the uneasiness and unhappiness that are so marked in American life, despite the great material prosperity of the United States. Theoretically, the American people should be happier than any other; actually, they are probably the least happy in Christendom. The trouble with them is that they do not trust one another — and without mutual trust there can be no ease, and no genuine happiness.” [Multiculturalism and multiracialism, both of which the Yankee has forced on the country, cause much of this distrust and the resulting unhappiness. As European countries have become more multicultural and multiracial, they too are suffering from distrust and the resulting unhappiness and uneasiness. People in monoracial and monocultural countries are more trusting of one another and, therefore, happier.] Mencken concludes, “The thing that makes life charming is not money, but the society of our fellow-men, and the thing that draws us toward our fellow-men is not admiration for their inner virtues, their hard striving to live according to the light that is in them, but admiration for their outer graces and decencies — in brief, confidence that they will always act generously and understandingly in their intercourse with us. We must trust men before we may enjoy them.” Then he remarks that “it is impossible to put any such trust in a Puritan. With the best intentions in the world he cannot rid himself of the delusion that his duty to save us from our sins — i.e., from the non-Puritanical acts that we delight in — is paramount to his duty to let us be happy in our own way. Thus he is unable to be tolerant, and with tolerance goes magnanimity. A Puritan cannot be magnanimous. He is constitutionally unable to grasp the notion that it is better to be decent than to be steadfast, or even than to be just.” Furthermore, the democrat “is simply a Puritan doubly damned.” [Mencken seems not to realize that “Puritan” and “Yankee” are synonymous. That is, a Puritan is a Yankee and a Yankee is a Puritan. Hillary Clinton is an excellent contemporary example of a Puritan Yankee.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on Liberty in a Democracy

Mencken on Liberty in a Democracy

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes liberty in a democracy, pages 157-162. Below is an overview of his discussion on liberty in a democracy; my comments are in brackets.
    Whenever the liberties of the people “are invaded and made a mock of in a gross and contemptuous manner,” as occurred “in the United States during the reign of Wilson,” some observers always marvel that people bear such “outrage with so little murmuring.” About such observation, Mencken remarks, “Such observers only display their unfamiliarity with the elements of democratic science. The truth is that the common man’s love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary.” [The response of most people to 9-11 supports Mencken. Their quick surrender of liberty to the ruling elite shows their lack of love of liberty.] Unfortunately, for the lovers of liberty, the common man, of whom the masses comprise, is not “happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd, and is willing to take the herdsman with it.” Thus, “[l]iberty is not a thing for such as he. He cannot enjoy it rationally himself, and he can think of it in others only as something to be taken away from them.”
    When liberty is a reality, it is the “exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority of men, like knowledge, courage and honour. A special sort of man is needed to understand it, nay, to stand it — and he is inevitably an outlaw in democratic societies.” Mencken continues, “The average man doesn’t want to be free. He simply wants to be safe.” [Hence, the response of the average person to 9-11: throw away liberty for safety — and end up with neither. The common man, the inferior man, the democratic man, fails to realize that without liberty, real safety cannot exist.]
    Mencken cites Nietzsche as saying that liberty “was something that, to the general, was too cold to be borne.” However, Nietzsche “believed that there was an unnatural, drug-store sort of yearning for it in all men, and so he changed Schopenhauer’s will-to-live into a will-to-power, i.e., a will-to-free-function.” [Friedrich Nietzsche {1844 –1900} was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, and philologist. Arthur Schopenhauer {1788 –1860} was a German philosopher.] Mencken believes that Nietzsche “went too far, and in the wrong direction: he should have made it, on the lower levels, a will-to-peace.” Mencken remarks, “What the common man longs for in this world, before and above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty.” [As statists promise such peace, statists always have an advantage over lovers of liberty, libertists, in a democracy.]
    The common man loves peace and safety far more than he loves liberty. This may “explains his veneration for policemen, in all the forms they take — his belief that there is a mysterious sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact.” Mencken adds, “A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him [the common man] (a) from his superiors, (b) from his equals, and (c) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all.” [In reality, the ultimate job of the police is to protect the ruling elite, the real powers behind the political leaders, from the masses, i.e., the common man.] “In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls.” [To Mencken, the primary job of the police is to prevent personal vice.]
    Although the common man is deceived about liberty, “he starts from a sound premise: to wit, that liberty is something too hot for his hands — or, as Nietzsche put it, too cold for his spine. Worse, he sees in it something that is a weapon against him in the hands of his enemy.”
    Mencken adds, “The history of democracy is a history of efforts to force successive minorities to be untrue to their nature. Democracy, in fact, stands in greater peril of the free spirit than any sort of despotism ever heard of.” He continues, “The despot, at least, is always safe in one respect: his own belief in himself cannot be shaken. But democracies may be demoralized and run amok, and so they are in vast dread of heresy, as a Sunday-school superintendent is in dread of scarlet women, light wines and beer, and the unreadable works of Charles Darwin.” Then he remarks, “It would be unimaginable for a democracy to submit serenely to such gross dissents as Frederick the Great not only permitted, but even encouraged.” He notes, “Once the mob is on the loose, there is no holding it. So the subversive minority must be reduced to impotence; the heretic must be put down.”
    If a primary purpose “of all civilized government is to preserve and augment the liberty of the individual, then surely democracy accomplishes it less efficiently than any other form.” [The dictatorship of the proletariat does a much worse job. But, then, Mencken considers the dictatorship of the proletariat to be a form of democracy.] If the individual is worth thinking about, then “the superior individual is worth more thought than his inferiors.” Yet, “the superior individual  . . . is the chief victim of the democratic process. It not only tries to regulate his acts; it also tries to delimit his thoughts. . . . The aim of democracy is to break all such free spirits to the common harness. It tries to iron them out, to pump them dry of self-respect, to make docile John Does of them.” [Nearly all laws coming out of Congress and the statehouses seem to have as their primary objective the breaking of all free spirits to a common harness.]
    Democracy measures its success by the extent that it brings down superior men and makes them common. “The measure of civilization is the extent to which they resist and survive. Thus the only sort of liberty that is real under democracy is the liberty of the have-nots to destroy the liberty of the haves.” [Thus, the inferior man is a strong supporter of the welfare state because it brings down the superior man and destroys the liberties of the haves.] Mencken adds, “This liberty is supposed, in some occult way, to enhance human dignity.” In one aspect, perhaps, it does: “The have-not gains something valuable when he acquires the delusion that he is the equal of his betters. It may not be true but even a delusion, if it augments the dignity of man, is something.” Under this apparent reality, “the peasant no longer pulls his forelock when he meets the baron, he is free to sue and be sued, he may denounce Huxley as a quack.” [Thomas Huxley {1825–1895} was an English biologist and a prominent proponent of evolution, in which Mencken ardently believed.] Unfortunately, as the inferior is raised, the superior is lowered. Mencken notes, “If democracy really loves the dignity of man, then it kills the thing it loves.” It reduces all to a common level.

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on Disproportional Representation

Mencken on Disproportional Representation

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes disproportional representation, pages 97-107. Below is an overview of his discussion on disproportional representation; my comments are in brackets.
    Disproportional representation “is intimately bound up with this question of disfranchised classes, for it must be plain that a community whose votes, man for man, count for only half as much as the votes of another community is one in which half of the citizens are, to every practical intent, unable to vote at all.” An example is the U.S. Senate. Regardless of population, each State has two Senators and no more. Moreover, the votes of Senators from States with small populations are the same as States with large populations. [Some democrats have proposed proportioning Senators among the States based on population. With no Constitutional authority, the U.S. Supreme Court imposed its democratic desires on the States by requiring them to proportion the legislative districts of both houses based on population. Before that ukase, most States proportioned at least one house of their legislature based on nonpopulation considerations. Also, before the Supreme Court ruling, rural areas and urban areas had approximate equality in State legislatures. After the ruling, rural areas lost their equality as urban areas gain control of both houses in most State legislatures.] Mencken comments on this issue of disproportional representation in State legislatures.
    To overcome disproportional representation, “certain romantic fuglemen of so-called pure democracy . . . [came] forward with complicated remedies, all of which have been tried somewhere or other and failed miserably.” Mencken notes “that disproportional representation is not a device to nullify democracy, but simply a device to make it more workable.” Thus, in the United States, “the sovereign people have voluntarily sacrificed a moiety of the democratic theory in order to attain to a safer and more efficient practice.” [In a true republic, the majority lacks the power that Mencken describes. In a true republic, absolute political power resides in no individual or body — not even the largest majority. Checks and vetoes always exist to everyone’s and every group’s power.] If they so desire, they could get rid of all disproportional representation. [Lacking the patience to allow the people to change their disproportional representation systems in the States, the U.S. Supreme Court usurped their power and did it for them. Obviously, the Supreme Court did not trust the people with this decision for fear that the people would not abolish disproportional representation.]
    Most people prefer disproportional representation because of a “wish to counterbalance an advantage lying in the very nature of things.” It “is not a wish to give one voter an advantage over another.” [Apparently, the U.S. Supreme Court believed otherwise. Based on its philosophy of “one man, one vote,” it swept away disproportional representation of the State legislatures.] Mencken explains that urban areas have a natural advantage over rural areas. The proximity of people in urban areas enables them to form opinions more quickly and uniformly and to maintain a solid front than people in rural areas, who are spread out more. Thus, people in urban areas “show all of the characters of men in a compact mob, and the voters of the rural regions, dispersed and largely inarticulate, cannot hope to prevail against them by ordinary means. So the yokels are given disproportionally heavy representation by way of make-weight: it enables them to withstand the city stampede.” In spite of disproportional representation, “the majority under democracy remains the majority, whatever laws and constitutions may say to the contrary, and when its blood is up it can get anything it wants.”
    Mencken remarks, “Most of the so-called constitutional checks, in fact, have yielded, at one time or other, to its pressure. No one familiar with the history of the Supreme Court, for example, need be told that its vast and singular power to curb legislation has always been exercised with one eye on the election returns.” Early Supreme Court decisions have been “completely reversed afterwards, as the second thought of the plain people has differed from their first thought. This responsiveness to the shifts of popular opinion and passion is not alone due to the fact that the personnel of the court, owing to the high incidence of senile deterioration among its members, is constantly changing, and that the President and the Senators, in filling vacancies, are bound as practical politicians to consider the doctrines that happen to be fashionable in the cross-roads grocery stores and barbers’ shops. It is also due, and in no small measure, to the fact that the learned and puissant justices are, in the main, practical politicians themselves, and hence used to keeping their ears close to the grass roots.” [Thus, the United States have the “rule of men” and not the “rule of law,” which exists independent of even the largest majority.]
    Mencken writes, “In boom times, indeed, democracy is always very impatient of what used to be called natural rights. The typical democrat is quite willing to exchange any of the theoretical boons of freedom for something that he can use.” Continuing, Mencken adds, “In most cases, perhaps, he is averse to selling his vote for cash in hand, but that is mainly because the price offered is usually too low. He will sell it very willingly for a good job or for some advantage in his business. Offering him such bribes, in fact, is the chief occupation of all political parties under democracy, and of all professional politicians.” [The welfare state has given the politician another avenue of offering legal bribes at the taxpayers’ expense.]
    Whether ideal or not, democracy “works, and the people are actually sovereign.” The system works: “Any conceivable change in the laws could be effected without tampering with the fundamental scheme.” Therefore, the “inferior American [is hostile] to the thing called direct action — the darling of his equals in most other countries. He is against it, not merely because he is a coward and distrusts liberty, but also, and maybe mainly, because he believes that revolution, in the United States, is unnecessary — that any reform advocated by a respectable majority, or even by a determined minority, may be achieved peacefully and by constitutional means. In this belief he is right. The American people, keeping strictly within the Constitution, could do anything that the most soaring fancy suggested. They could, by a simple amendment of that hoary scripture, expropriate all the private property in the land, or they could expropriate parts of it and leave the rest in private hands; they have already, in fact, by tariff juggling, by Prohibition and by other devices, destroyed billions of dollars of property without compensation, and even without common politeness, and the Constitution still survives.” Mencken identifies many other things that the American people can do if they so willed. He provides a list of the horrendous actions that the sovereign people can lawfully do: “They could enfranchise aliens if they so desired, or children not taxed, or idiots, or the kine in the byres. They could disfranchise whole classes, e.g., metaphysicians or adulterers, or the entire population of given regions. [They disfranchised Southerners following the War for Southern Independence.] They have done such things. . . . Finally, they could, if they would, abandon the republican form of government altogether and set up a monarchy in place of it: during the late war [World War I] they actually did so in fact, though refraining from saying so frankly. They could do all of these things freely, and even legally, without departing in the slightest from the principles of their fundamental compact, and no exterior agency could make them do any of them unwillingly.” [Thus, they can make the likes of Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and Pol Pot look like saints.]
    Mencken adds, “The people, if they are actually sovereign, have a clear right to be wanton when the spirit moves them, and indifference to an issue is an expression of opinion about it. Thus . . . the masses are that part of the state which doesn’t know what it wants.” Next Mencken discusses what the people want: “What they want principally are safety and security. They want to be delivered from the bugaboos that ride them. They want to be soothed with mellifluous words. They want heroes to worship. They want the rough entertainment suitable to their simple minds. All of these things they want so badly that they are willing to sacrifice everything else in order to get them. . . .    The science of politics under democracy consists in trading with them, i.e., in hoodwinking and swindling them. In return for what they want, or for the mere appearance of what they want, they yield up what the politician wants, and what the enterprising minorities behind him want.” [Since 9-11, most people have wanted security. The powers behind the politicians, i.e., big money, the military-industrial complex, and the security complex, want ever-expanding wars and ever-expanding police state. In the name of security, the American people have received more wars and a growing police state. Thus, liberty dies under democracy.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on Liberty and the Inferior Man

Mencken on Liberty and the Inferior Man

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes liberty and the inferior man, pages 51-58. Below is an overview of his discussion on the liberty and the inferior man; my comments are in brackets.
    “All the revolutions in history have been started by hungry city mobs.” From this fact, some historians deduce “the doctrine that city life breeds a love of liberty.” To this notion, Mencken replies, “It may be so, but certainly that love is not visible in the lower orders. I can think of no city revolution that actually had liberty for its object, in any rational sense.” For example, freedom of speech “was actually given its first support in law by the most absolute monarch of modern times, to wit, Frederick the Great.” Mencken adds, “When it [the city] wins, its first act is to destroy every form of freedom that is not directed wholly to [satisfying hunger].” Its next objective “is to butcher all professional libertarians.”
    Mencken notes “that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind. He can imagine, and even esteem, in his way, certain false forms of liberty — for example, the right to choose between two political mountebanks, and to yell for the more obviously dishonest — but the reality is incomprehensible to him.” “[G]enuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he [the inferior man] lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. More, he must be able to endure it — an even more arduous business.” [Perhaps this explains the great clamor for the welfare state by people with a lower-class mentality.] Mencken continues, “Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means enterprise, it means the capacity for doing without.” [Sacrifices the inferior man is not willing to make — especially those in the Democratic party and many in the Republican party.]
    “The free man is one who has won a small and precarious territory from the great mob of his inferiors, and is prepared and ready to defend it and make it support him.” Having no friends, the free man “can hope for little help from other men of his own kind, for they have battles of their own to fight.”
    The inferior man has no talent for self-reliance. Furthermore, he cannot even “understanding that such a talent exists. Liberty is unfathomable to him.” Moreover, “[h]e can no more comprehend it than he can comprehend honour.” To the inferior man, liberty “is simply the banal right to empty hallelujahs upon his oppressors. He is an ox whose last proud, defiant gesture is to lick the butcher behind the ear.” He shrinks from the responsibility of standing and acting alone.
    Mencken explains that until the latter part of the eighteenth century, 80 percent “of the people of the world, white and black alike, were slaves, in reality if not in name.” Liberty to most people is a recent occurrence. “Thus the lower orders of men, however grandiloquently they may talk of liberty to-day, have actually had but a short and highly deceptive experience of it. It is not in their blood.” He adds, “The heritage of freedom belongs to a small minority of men, descended, whether legitimately or by adultery, from the old lords of the soil or from the patricians of the free towns.” Mencken contends “that such a heritage is necessary in order that the concept of liberty, with all its disturbing and unnatural implications, may be so much as grasped — that such ideas cannot be implanted in the mind of man at will, but must be bred in as all other basic ideas are bred in.” Consequently, most men are “still incapable of bearing the pangs of liberty.” Liberty makes them uncomfortable, alarms them, and fills them with great loneliness. Not only does the common man not long for liberty, “he is quite unable to stand it. What he longs for is something wholly different, to wit, security. He needs protection. He is afraid of getting hurt.” [The type of person whom Mencken is describing can be seen in the masses of people who were ready to abandon all liberties for security following 9-11. They all but shouted from the rooftops, “I will be your slave if you will protect me from the bogeyman.” And many did shout it. Of course, the elite who controlled President Bush was willing to oblige, and they brought forth the police state.]
    As a result, “[t]he great masses of men, though theoretically free, are seen to submit supinely to oppression and exploitation of a hundred abhorrent sorts.” Obviously, they can resist but do not. “The worst tyrant, even under democratic plutocracy, has but one throat to slit. The moment the majority decided to overthrow him he would be overthrown. But the majority lacks the resolution; it cannot imagine taking the risk. So it looks for leaders with the necessary courage, and when they appear it follows them slavishly, even after their courage is discovered to be mere bunkum and their altruism only a cloak for more and worse oppressions.” Consequently, “[p]olitics become the trade of playing upon its [the majority’s] natural poltroonery — of scaring it half to death, and then proposing to save it. There is in it no other quality of which a practical politician, taking one day with another, may be sure. Every theoretically free people wonders at the slavishness of all the others. But there is no actual difference between them.” [Democratic and Republican politicians have become highly skilled at making half the population fear the other half. Only Democrats can save the masses from the evil Republicans, and only the Republicans can save the masses from the evil Democrats. And that is why the country has one party with two names.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on Politics under Democracy

Mencken on Politics under Democracy

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes politics under democracy, pages 29-35. Below is an overview of his discussion on politics under democracy; my comments are in brackets.
    Since fear controls politics under democracy, politicians use it to manipulate the mob. “The demagogues, i.e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact and puissant science.” Thus, “[P]olitics under democracy consists almost wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analysis, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper.” The whole history of the United States “has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, the Hessians, the monocrats, again the red-coats, the Bank, the Catholics, Simon Legree, the Slave Power, Jeff Davis, Mormonism, Wall Street, the rum demon, John Bull, the hell-hounds of plutocracy, the trusts, General Weyler, Pancho Villa, German spies, hyphenates, the Kaiser, Bolshevism.” [Many of these threats were real; however, politicians exaggerated them to terrorize the mob. Politicians used this tactic of fear to get the American people to beg for the police state following 9-11. Fear has been used to terrorize the people to demand just about every enslaving program that the US government have ever adopted.]
    Under democracy, the plain people “never vote for anything, but always against something.” Consequently, the democratic state tends “to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favour of colourless mediocrities. The former are shining marks, and so it is easy for demagogues to bring them down; the latter are preferred because it is impossible to fear them.” [The demagogue is a democratic man and is, therefore, part of the mob. Thus, being one of them, the plain people understand him and do not fear him. Does this explain the rabid fear that the common Democrat and many Republicans have of President Trump and especially his supporters and their embracement of Hillary Clinton?] Mencken continues, “The demagogue himself, when he grows ambitious and tries to posture as a statesman, usually comes ignominiously to grief, as the cases of Bryan, [Theodore] Roosevelt, and Wilson dramatically demonstrate.”
    Using Bryan as an example, Mencken shows the rise and fall of a demagogue. “If Bryan had confined himself, in 1896, to the chase of the bugaboo of plutocracy, it is very probable that he would have been elected. But he committed the incredible folly of throwing most of his energies into advocating a so-called constructive programme, and it was thus easy for his opponents to alarm the mob against him. That programme had the capital defect of being highly technical, and hence almost wholly unintelligible to all save a small minority; so it took on a sinister look, and caused a shiver to go down the democratic spine.” [Consequently, most political campaigns consist almost entirely of slogans and mudslinging with little or no details about what the candidate plans to do if he wins.] Continuing, Mencken writes, “It was his cross-of-gold speech that nominated him; it was his cow State political economy that ruined him.”
    According to Mencken, “[g]overnment under democracy is thus government by orgy, almost by orgasm. Its processes are most beautifully displayed at times when they stand most naked — for example, in war days.” He uses World War I, which was then known as World War, to illustrate the use of fear to manipulate mob psychology. “[T]he World War is simply a record of conflicting fears, more than once amounting to frenzies. The mob, at the start of the uproar, showed a classical reaction: it was eager only to keep out of danger. . . . In 1916, on his fraudulent promise to preserve that boy from harm, Wilson was re-elected.” Then came the task of the demagogue to convert the people to warmongers. “The problem was to substitute a new and worse fear for the one that prevailed — a new fear so powerful that it would reconcile the mob to the thought of entering the war.” Right after the election, all agencies of the US government began clamoring for war. “No ship went down to a submarine’s torpedo anywhere on the seven seas that the State Department did not report that American citizens — nay, American infants in their mothers’ arms — were aboard. Diplomatic note followed diplomatic note, each new one surpassing all its predecessors in moral indignation. The Department of Justice ascribed all fires, floods and industrial accidents to German agents. The newspapers were filled with dreadful surmises, many of them officially inspired, about the probable effects upon the United States of the prospective German victory.” As a result, the mob became convinced “that a victorious Germany would unquestionably demand an accounting for the United States’ gross violations of neutrality.” Thus, the demagogue gave the mob a choice of fears. “The first was a fear of a Germany heavily beset, but making alarming progress against her foes. The second was a fear of a Germany delivered from them, and thirsting for revenge on a false and venal friend.” The second fear won. Soon the mob “was reconciled to entering the war — reconciled, but surely not eager.” Now the demagogues had the task “of converting reluctant acquiescence into enthusiasm.” A new fear was the solution. Thus, the government strove to throw “the plain people into a panic. All sense was heaved overboard, and there ensued a chase of bugaboos on a truly epic scale. Nothing like it had ever been seen in the world before, for no democratic state as populous as the United States had ever gone to war before.” By the end of 1917, the American people “were in such terror that they lived in what was substantially a state of siege, though the foe was 3,000 miles away and obviously unable to do them any damage.” Only the draft “gave them sufficient courage to attempt actual hostilities. That ingenious device, by relieving the overwhelming majority of them of any obligation to take up arms, made them bold.” Mencken continues, “Before it was adopted they were heavily in favour of contributing only munitions and money to the cause of democracy, with perhaps a few divisions of Regulars added for the moral effect. But once it became apparent that a given individual, John Doe, would not have to serve, he, John Doe, developed an altruistic eagerness for a frontal attack in force. For every Richard Roe in the conscript camps there were a dozen John Does thus safely at home, with wages high and the show growing enjoyable.” Mencken concludes, “So an heroic mood came upon the people, and their fear was concealed by a truculent front. But not from students of mob psychology.” [Today, the same use of fear is being used to manipulate psychology in the War on Terrorism with all agencies of the government and their collaborators in the media inciting war. President Bush’s inane remark that “if we do not fight them over there, we will have to fight them here” was an insult of the highest magnitude of the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy. How could anyone with no air force and no navy attack the United States, unless the Bush regime let them into the country?]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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