MANY readers will be familiar with the quotes of Henry Louis Mencken. The writer was born in Baltimore in 1880 and died there in 1956. He was a noted iconoclast who wrote provocative and often unpalatable articles about race and organised religion. His views about the failings of the American democracy have never been so pertinent and can be applied to every nation in lockstep with policies of the World Economic Forum and the United Nations Agenda 2030.
We are familiar with the corrupt, unscrupulous, feeble-minded lickspittles who sully the Palace of Westminster. Mencken regarded every politician as ‘a demagogue, who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots . . . who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself’. He believed all of them were ‘men who have sold their honour for their jobs’.
Global cooling, global warming, pandemics, nuclear war, famine, terrorism, droughts, floods, vicious sharks, angry wasps, killer spider crabs are all devices to allow our rulers to exercise their control. In Mencken’s words: ‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’ And ‘The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.’
Mencken predicted the presidency of Joe Biden and others. ‘On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.’
As for the middle-class XR clowns and their celebrity fellow travellers (in their private jets), who want to ban cars, meat, overseas holidays and just about everything that their despised social inferiors enjoy, his view on puritanism applies: ‘The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.’
Mencken would no doubt have had sympathy with TCW Defending Freedom’s readers. ‘The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.’ And ‘The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.’ And ‘Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.’
The politicised educational curriculum was evident to Mencken many years ago. ‘The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make “good” citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.’
Mencken would have had no time for those who believe that ‘boosting’ themselves with ineffective and experimental gene therapies was a sensible way to behave. ‘A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to do so, for his death is a benefit to the race in general.’
As has become increasingly clear in recent years, the author was well aware of the futility of voting for ‘established’ political parties. ‘The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this by buying votes with other people’s money.’
