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.

More political articles.

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.

More political articles.

Why I am not a Republican

 Why I am not a Republican

Thomas Allen

I am not a Republican for many of the same reasons that I am not a Democrat. Both promote destructive policies — only the Democrats generally promote them with more alacrity and vigor and are more successful.

The comments that follow are directed at the Republican and Democratic leaders and their spokesmen and apologists in the media. Although they are not directed at the rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats, most of the rank-and-file do adhere to and follow their leaders in the matters discussed below.

Republicans and Democrats are proponents of “American Exceptionalism.” This exceptionalism is the creed of equality, democracy, and universal natural rights, which both promote. This creed is the defining principle that makes America America. However, they disagree somewhat about what constitutes “natural rights” and especially what equality means.

Both Republicans and Democrats prefer the constitution that Lincoln (as furthered developed by Presidents Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and carried to fruition by the Warren Court and especially Justice William Brennan), which is the current constitution, to the constitution that the founding fathers gave the country.

While Democrats only give constitutional government lip service, Republicans claim to believe in constitutional government. Yet they have done nothing to reduce the size of the federal government. As under Democrats, the federal government continues to grow under Republicans — perhaps, not as fast, but it still grows.

An example of the hypocrisy of the Republican support of constitutional government is the unconstitutional Department of Education. When Republicans controlled the federal government, it did nothing to abolish the Department of Education despite their promise to abolish it. Instead of abolishing the Department of Education, they have used it to consolidate federal control of education in the United States, which is why the Democrats established it. Thus, the Republicans have collaborated with the Democrats to give the federal government control of education in the United States.

Republicans and Democrats both revere Father Abraham (Lincoln) and St. Martin Luther King the Divine — only Republicans more so than Democrats. Republicans have even elevated them to Deity.

Like Democrats, Republicans are racial nihilists and promote a multiracial and multicultural country and society. Both are globalists. Neither have any objections to miscegenation, and both promote other policies that eventually genocide the American Negro.

Both Republicans and Democrats promote diversity as a strength and great virtue. Therefore, both ignore Madison’s warning about too much diversity, which plutocrats use to transfer ever more wealth and power to themselves. Thus, plutocrats control both parties.

Although Democrats ardently support abortion, Republicans do not oppose abortion — their rhetoric to the contrary. In spite (or because) of abortion being a highly successful weapon in the genocide of the American Negro, Democrats have ardently promoted abortion for more than a half-century. Except for their rhetoric, Republicans stopped seriously opposing abortion decades ago.

Both are Lincolnian-Hamiltonians. Nonetheless, Democrats prefer much more governmental intervention in the economy than do Republicans. Thus, Democrats are much more fascistic than are Republicans. Whereas Democrats are proponents of a command-and-control economy, Republicans favor a market economy — at least in rhetoric. (Republicans claim that they support a free-market economy, which they do not. Otherwise, they would move to abolish all the regulatory agencies, which are unconstitutional anyway, of the federal government.)

Contrary to their assertion otherwise, Republicans support the welfare state. Democrats strongly promote the welfare state for the same reason that Bismark, the archconservative German chancellor, did. (Bismark instituted the welfare state in Germany: The welfare state makes governmental control of the people easier because people who receive benefits from a welfare program are less likely to object to other governmental programs.) The primary difference between the Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans want to make controlling people more cost-effective.

Like the Democrats, Republicans like to create problems and then like the Democrats express outrage at the consequences. Many of the problems that both Republicans and Democrats rail against result from the welfare state, which both endorse and support.

Despite their rhetoric during political campaigns, both support the warfare state. They prefer war to peace. Neither object to using the United States military to bully other countries and to interfere with their internal affairs. After all, war is necessary to impose the American creed of equality, democracy, and universal natural rights on everyone. More important, war transfers ever more wealth and power to the rich and powerful, who control the federal government.

Both the Republicans and Democrats support the police state. Moreover, with the Transportation Security Administration, secret warrants and arrests, indefinite detention, and torture centers, Republicans have led the charge. All this has been done in the name of the war on terrorism, which is really a war on the American people. (Terrorism results from the foreign intervention and meddling policies of the Republicans and Democrats.)

Just as the Democrats accept the thief of the 2020 presidential election, so do the Republicans. Without Republican succor, Democrats could not have stolen the election. Even the Republican-controlled Supreme Court abandoned its constitutional duty to rectify the illegalities of the election — and so did Republican-controlled State legislatures.

Both Republicans and Democrats reject intergenerational duty to ancestors and posterity. If they cared about their posterity, governmental debt would not be exploding. If they cared about their ancestry, they would not promote conditions that lead to racial and cultural genocide, yet they promote programs and policies that lead to racial and cultural genocide. 

Neither Democrats nor Republicans want to dismantle the leviathan federal government and return to the constitutional government of the original Constitution. Both want to use it to advance their agendas. They consider the Constitution to be so elastic that they make it a worthless scrap of paper.

Neither supports the doctrine of States’ rights except when they can use the States to oppose a policy that the other party advances with which they disagree. 

Republicans and Democrats are hostile to traditional conservatives, who are the true conservatives. In marginalizing traditional Southern conservatives, both parties have been highly effective.

Nevertheless, Republicans and Democrats do differ in some aspects. Democrats are more vindictive and spiteful than Republicans. On the other hand, Republicans are recreants. While Democrats are bold, Republicans are timid.

Democrats are Dixiephobic, Confederaphobic, and albusphobic. Except for neoconservatives and establishment conservatives, Republicans are generally not Dixiephobes or Confederaphobes. Moreover, not all Republicans are albusphobes.

While Democrats are fervent supporters of gun control even to the point of disarming the American people, Republicans are hesitant in imposing more gun control. Nevertheless, Republicans are always ready to comprise and support more gun control. Furthermore, Republicans have not removed any restrictions on gun ownership when they controlled the presidency and Congress.

While Democrats favor restricting energy production and usage, Republicans favor cheap and abandon energy. However, as with its other principles, Republicans are always willing to compromise away cheap and abandon energy.

As for COVID-19, the Republican approach has been much less authoritarian than has been the Democratic approach. Moreover, Republicans who did take an authoritarian approach to COVID-19 have been much more eager to relinquish their control than have been Democrats.

Most Republicans favor lower taxes, and Democrats favor higher taxes. Nevertheless, both favor exploding federal budgets.

Republicans are eager to compromise and abandon their principles (if they have any). Perhaps, Republicans compromise their apparent principles so easily and quickly is because their real principles differ little from those of Democrats. Contrastingly, Democrats resist compromise and abandoning their principles as evil as they may be. 

Democrats are on the left and so are the Republicans. Both are socialists (mostly of the democratic fascist variety) at heart; only the Democrats are more open and honest about being socialists.

Another major difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats are about a decade ahead of Republicans. (The homosexual agenda evidences this conclusion. For years, Democrats have promoted homosexual marriages and finally succeeded in legalizing them over the objections of Republicans. Now most Republicans accept homosexual marriages.)

Most of the time, arguments and disagreements between Republicans and Democrats are about details and strategies and not about principles. 

The above description of Republicans explains why most establishment conservatives and neoconservatives loath President Trump. Trump deviated from too many of these Republican standards. Yet, many people supported Trump because he did deviate from some of these positions that Republicans had stolen from Democrats.

For the most part, Republicans are imitation Democrats; they just lack the courage to become full-fledged Democrats. The reason that I am not a Republican or a Democrat is that Republicans are too much like Democrats and Democrats are too much like Republicans.

Governor George Wallace once said that there was not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrats and Republicans. That is still true, and a dime is worth only a fraction of what it was when he made this remark.

Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Coley Allen.

More political articles.

Some Thoughts About Terrorism

Some Thoughts About Terrorism

Thomas Allen

The war on terrorism is being used to enslave the American people. This is illustrated below with the discussions on terrorism, fighting terrorism, and the Transportation Security Administration.

Terrorism
Congress has shredded the Bill of Rights in the name of protecting Americans from terrorists. Yet, it allows the greatest terrorist organization in the United States, if not the world, to continue to operate with impunity. If Congress really wanted to protect Americans from terrorists, it would abolish the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which exists at the pleasure of Congress. Since Congress continues to allow the IRS to operate, obviously it is not concerned with protecting the American people from terrorism. The purpose of the antiterrorist programs and agencies that Congress and the President have created is to enslave the American people and not to protect them.

Fighting Terrorism
A favorite slogan of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism was that we need to kill the terrorists over there so that they cannot kill us over here. How are they going to kill us over here unless the US government lets them in? The terrorists have no navy or air force. Surely, the greatest navy and air force in the world can stop any rickety vessels or air crafts that the terrorists might commandeer. Therefore, terrorists were and are no real threat to the American people unless the US government invites them in. Inviting them, the Bush and especially the Obama administrations did with their open borders and unlimited immigration policies.

Transportation Security Administration
People should be suspicions of alt-right, conservative, and libertarian leaders who do not openly protest the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and urge people to boycott flying on commercial airliners until the TSA is abolished. Moreover, these conservative leaders should lead by example and refuse to fly on commercial airliners until Congress abolishes the TSA. Their failure to do so shows that they prefer slavery and convenience to liberty.
The TSA is a highly visible apparatus of America’s police state. Its primary job is not to protect passengers from terrorists, but to teach them to be obedient slaves to ridiculous and humiliating requirements — just as Mussolini required his lieutenants to perform ridiculous and humiliating activities. If such a young, visible, and irritating agency of the police state can be abolished, then recovery of America is hopeful. If not, America is doomed to despotic tyranny.
Moreover, the TSA violates at least five of the amendments of the Bill of Rights: the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Tenth. An argument for ignoring the violations of these inalienable rights is that flying is voluntary. Thus, by the mere act of flying on an airplane, a person voluntarily exchanges his inalienable rights for slavery, which is a violation of the Thirteenth Amendment. Voting is also voluntary. Following the reasoning for violating the rights of airline passengers, Congress could require everyone registered voter to sign away all his inalienable rights guaranteed by the US Constitution.
If the spokesmen for the alt-right, conservatives, libertarians, and other preachers of liberty want to strike a blow for liberty, they need to refuse to fly on commercial airliners until the TSA is abolished and is replaced with nothing. Moreover, they need to urge their followers to imitate their example and refuse to fly on commercial airliners until Congress abolishes the TSA. Likewise, their followers need to persuade their friends and relatives to boycott commercial airlines. If enough people refuse to fly until Congress abolishes the TSA and replaces it with nothing, the airlines will eventually force Congress to abolish the TSA.
If people refuse to give up the short-term convenience of flying, they deserve enslavement. Unfortunately, they will also drag people who value freedom over slavery further down into slavery.
Nevertheless, the TSA does offer a great opportunity for pedophiles. Where else can a pedophile get paid to grope children all day long?

Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Coley Allen.

More political articles.

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.

More political articles.

Mencken on the Inferior Man and Progress

Mencken on the Inferior Man and Progress

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 inferior man and progress, pages 58-73. Below is an overview of his discussion on the inferior man and progress; my comments are in brackets.
    The inferior man is the natural enemy of progress, liberty, and justice. “[B]eing a natural slave himself, [the inferior man] is quite unable to understand the desire for liberty in his superiors. If he apprehends that desire at all, it is only as an appetite for a good of which he is himself incapable. He thus envies those who harbour it, and is eager to put them down.”
    For the inferior man, justice “is always unpopular and in difficulties under democracy, save perhaps that false form of so-called social justice which is designed solely to get the labourer more than his fair hire.” Moreover, “[t]he wars of extermination that are waged against heretical minorities never meet with any opposition on the lower levels. The proletarian is always ready to help destroy the rights of his fellow proletarian.” Mencken illustrates this with the use of the American Legion and the America Federation of Labor in the program against the Reds just after World War I. Another illustration is that “[t]he city workman, oppressed by Prohibition, mourns the loss of his beer, not the loss of his liberty.” [If the war on drugs is substituted for prohibition, the same is true today. How many are really concerned about the loss of liberties that the war on drugs has brought?] The inferior man, the proletarian, “is ever willing to support similar raids upon the liberty of the other fellow, and he is not outraged when they are carried on in gross violation of the most elemental principles of justice and common decency.” [As happens in the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on cancer, war on Confederate monuments, and all the other wars that the elite who controls the U.S. government creates.]
    The “few genuine believers in liberty and justice survive, huddled upon a burning deck. Is it to be marvelled at that most of them, on inspection, turn out to be the grandsons of similar heretics of earlier times?” Mencken thinks not because it “takes quite as long to breed a libertarian as it takes to breed a racehorse. Neither may be expected to issue from a farm mare.”
    According to Mencken, the inferior man, the masses, opposes progress. He writes, “The whole progress of the world, even in the direction of ameliorating the lot of the masses, is always opposed by the masses. The notion that their clamour brought about all the governmental and social reforms of the last century, and that those reforms were delayed by the superior minority, is sheer nonsense.” He cites several examples of these reforms — most of which extends the government’s control over the masses and which the masses initially opposed. In Germany, the elite enacted various types of social legislation, such as workman’s insurance, minimum wage, and child labor restriction laws. The United States and other countries followed Germany’s example. However, the masses tended to oppose these acts. [Libertarians naturally oppose such laws as they reduce liberty by forcing people to do what they would not naturally do. Socialists naturally support such laws as they provide for the security of workers, which socialists consider liberty. Since these laws reduce liberty by giving the government more control over the masses and, therefore, less real liberty, the masses were standing for liberty against the elites, their betters as Mencken called them, who were extending their control of the masses via the government. Here Mencken seems to contradict his arguments about liberty and the masses. That Mencken would consider these laws as progress is amazing since he claims to be a libertarian. If he does consider these laws as progress and an extension of liberty, he needs to congratulate the superiors, the elites, for educating the uneducable. Now, the inferior man would strongly resist their repeal.]
    Mencken writes, “Public policies are determined and laws are made by small minorities playing upon the fears and imbecilities of the mob — sometimes minorities of intelligent and honest men, but usually minorities of rogues.” In agreement with Maine, Mencken notes that universal suffrage would have prohibited the use of industrial inventions and machines, such as the spinning-jenny, power looms, and threshing-machines. [Sir Henry Maine {1822-1888} was a British comparative jurist and historian.] Moreover, universal suffrage “‘would have prevented the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar; it would have restored the Stuarts. It would have proscribed the Roman Catholics, with the mob which burned Lord Mansfield’s house and library in 1780; and it would have proscribed the Dissenters, with the mob which burned Dr. Priestley’s house and library in 1791.’” [As suffrage has been extended, the quality of political leaders has declined. First, the vote was given to Black males {1870}, next to women {1920}, and then to eighteen-year olds {1971}; along the way, the requirement to pay taxes was removed {1964}. Each time the quality of political leaders declined. The last Jeffersonian president was Cleveland {1885-1889 and 1893-1897}. Has not the time come to require voters to understand the U.S. Constitution and the Constitution of their State and to pay a minimum but more than token direct tax? When voters had to meet these requirements, the country had much higher quality of political leaders.]
    In the United States, Mencken identifies democracy as leading to anti-vivisection and anti-contraception statutes, the licensing of osteopaths (which he considers a fraud), and restrictions on free assembly and free speech. [The police state laws enacted during the War on Terrorism has restricted assembly and speech, and the controllers of various internet sites, such as search engines and social media sites, have also restricted free speech. Also, Mencken’s attitude toward osteopathy appears like that of an inferior man. He does not understand it, and, therefore, fears it. Fearing it, he wants to suppress it as quackery. He has the same attitude toward chiropractic.]
    Mencken agrees with Lecky: “‘Nothing in ancient alchemy was more irrational than the notion that increased ignorance in the elective body will be converted into increased capacity for good government in the representative body; that the best way to improve the world and secure rational progress is to place government more and more under the control of the least enlightened classes.’” [William Lecky {1838- 1903} was an Irish historian, essayist, and political theorist.]
    Mencken explains the inferior man’s opposition to things that benefit him: “He is against it because it is complex, and, to his dark mind, occult — because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meagre capacity for taking in ideas, and thus propels him into the realm of the unknowable and alarming. His search is always for short cuts, simple formulae, revelation.” Continuing, Mencken adds “that all political platitudes and shibboleths [have] . . . one aim [and that] is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious.”
    Also, Mencken condemns Fundamentalism, creationism, chiropractic, “osteopathy, Christian Science, spiritualism and all the other half rational and half supernatural quackeries with it” as food for the ignorant, uneducable masses. [Mencken was an evolutionist and believed that creationism was a myth and a superstition — and so was much of Christianity. Being uneducable, the inferior man believed in creationism. Now, most inferior men believe in evolution, and even more theologians are evolutionists. Moreover, Christianity is waning. Would Mencken congratulate the superior man for doing the impossible of educating the uneducable inferior man? As science learns more about paleontology and genetics, evolution becomes more untenable. Would this new information cause him to change his mind about evolution? Would he recognize that today evolution has become a religion based on a set of beliefs?]
    Mencken laments, “It is a tragic but inescapable fact that most of the finest fruits of human progress, like all of the nobler virtues of man, are the exclusive possession of small minorities, chiefly unpopular and disreputable. Of the sciences, as of the fine arts, the average human being, even in the most literate and civilized of modern States, is as ignorant as the horned cattle in the fields. What he knows of histology, say, or protozoology, or philology, or paleontology, is precisely nothing. Such things lie beyond his capacity for learning, and he has no curiosity about them. The man who has any acquaintance with them seems to him to be a ridiculous figure, with a touch of the sinister. Even those applied sciences which enter intimately into his everyday existence remain outside his comprehension and interest.” [Unfortunately, he is close to the truth. For this reason, the nefarious elite finds the common man easy to manipulate.]
    About learning, Mencken writes, “Learning survives among us largely because the mob has not got news of it. If the notions it turns loose descended to the lowest levels, there would be an uprising against them, and efforts would be made to put them down by law.” He warns against putting the fine arts into the common school curriculum because once the ignorant uneducable masses discover them, they will seek to suppress them. [Instead of suppressing the fine arts overtly, they supplant them with trash that is promoted as art, with the elite doing most of the promotion.]
    Mencken adds that “there is a great deal less of yearning for moral perfection than there is of mere hatred of beauty.” Continuing he writes, “Beauty fevers and enrages him [the inferior man] for another and quite different reason. He cannot comprehend it, and yet it somehow challenges and disturbs him. If he could snore through good music he would not object to it; the trouble with it is that it keeps him awake. So he believes that it ought to be put down, just as he believes that political and economic ideas which disturb him and yet elude him ought to be put down. The finest art is safe from him simply because he has no contact with it, and is thus unaware of it.”
    Moreover, “[t]he common man, as a matter of fact, has no yearning for moral perfection. What ails him in that department is simply fear of punishment, which is to say, fear of his neighbours. He has, in safe privacy, the morals of a variety actor.”
    In summary, human progress passes the inferior man. “Its aims are unintelligible to him and its finest fruits are beyond his reach: what reaches him is what falls from the tree, and is shared with his four-footed brothers. He has changed but little since the earliest recorded time, and that change is for the worse quite as often as it is for the better. . . . He is still a slave to priests, and trembles before their preposterous magic. He is lazy, improvident and unclean. All the durable values of the world, though his labour has entered into them, have been created against his opposition. He can imagine nothing beautiful and he can grasp nothing true. Whenever he is confronted by a choice between two ideas, the one sound and the other not, he chooses almost infallibly, and by a sort of pathological compulsion, the one that is not. Behind all the great tyrants and butchers of history he has marched with loud hosannas, but his hand is eternally against those who seek to liberate the spirit of the race.” “Such is the pet and glory of democratic states.”
    [Mencken seems not to recognize that of the betters, the upper class, the superior man, the elite, only a few love liberty. Most superiors love power more than liberty and use their intellect to feed their lust for it.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

More political articles.

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.

More political articles.

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.

More political articles.