by Peter Goodchild

THE CORROSION of Western civilization can be seen in a group of interrelated political events, as exemplified in Canada, my own country: multiculturalism, globalism, “open borders,” the dissolution of nations, my concerns especially since the period of 2008 to 2011, when I was in the Middle East and saw these things from a perspective not possible for the average Canadian.

Most Westerners live in a world of illusion. They might spend their time “catching the news” on a TV set or a computer, but they are unaware that the main news-media are owned by gigantic corporations, which have a hidden globalist agenda. Yet most people nowadays do not often read serious books, and so they have little access to genuine in-depth information. If you push them far enough, they will only say, “Well, I believe. . . .”

What do Canadians think they are learning by having their eyes glued to a TV set? They believe that since Canada has 10 million km2 of land, it can keep bringing in more immigrants for eternity, even though most of the land is uninhabitable, and that with sufficient goodwill one can have infinite growth on a finite planet.

They believe that people of European descent, who composed more than 80 percent of Canada until recent times, are guilty of centuries of rather uncertain crimes, perhaps including the alphabet, education, democracy, modern medicine, and science. They believe the world should be controlled by a benevolent dictatorship, with all history, nationality, parenthood, and even gender scrubbed out of people’s brains.

The most important question, though, is not some vague issue of “ethnicity” but rather that of the political motive for these developments. “Multiculturalism” really means no culture at all, no values, no past, no goals, no hopes, no future. The ultimate message is that Earth should become a terribly crowded but profitable slave planet, and that resistance is useless.

Globalism and Western Decline

Around 4000 B.C. there arose a people, probably living north of the Black Sea, to whom we now refer as the early Indo-Europeans. They were the first people to use iron (versus bronze) weapons, and also the first to use horse-drawn chariots — perhaps indeed the first to domesticate horses for any purpose. After about 1000 B.C. there arose a division between the eastern (Persian) and western Indo-Europeans (Greeks), or, in other words, between the Asians and the Europeans. The Indo-Europeans in Persia were a minority in a sea of Asians and as a result ended up assimilating Asian customs. But the Indo-Europeans in Greece were a majority and thus managed to impose their aristocratic libertarian culture, the idea that the leader cannot be a despot but is first among aristocratic equals. This the world of the Iliad. Herodotus indicates the split in his frequent distinctions between the Persians and the Greeks. He claims that the Persian world was characterized by despotism, while the Westerners, the Greeks, were a people of relative freedom, aristocratic equality, and eventually democracy for all free men, including property-owning farmers.

The people who have that Western legacy, however, are now disappearing from much of Europe and North America. Instead, we have “multiculturalism,” which really means the dismantling of “culture,” the decline of the West. In our schools, young people are now taught to be ashamed of their legacy, and any courses in the social sciences are perverted to show the “guilt” of those who spent thousands of years developing Western civilization. How did these regrettable changes come about?

To answer this question, one must first note that in most Western countries there is no longer a real democracy, but rather a barely disguised one-party system. The elite of the supposed left and right spend their time together — the same restaurants, the same marriages, the same golf courses. For a change of pace they switch to journalism — and so much for freedom of the press. During an election, it would be possible to make a list of all the slogans, mix up those items, and then ask someone to match the slogans with the parties. But it would turn out that the matching could not be done.

Actually there is only one slogan: “Bodies are good for business.” So the population must be kept expanding forever. The price we pay for overpopulation and over-immigration, however, is high unemployment, environmental degradation, inadequate housing, traffic congestion, overloaded social services, high crime-rates, losses of water and farmland, and declining natural resources of all kinds. Overcrowding also leads to mental illness: in an urban environment, our nerves are often like wires that have been tightened to a point where their molecules will no longer hold.

The stage for decline was set by the lowering of intellectual capacity. Most people, unfortunately, don’t react to much of anything anymore. One of the main reasons for this decline is that people don’t really become adults. We have created a world of cultural neoteny — prolonged childish behavior, a milieu of “dumbing down” that stretches from birth to death. “Neoteny” is a biological term referring to remaining juvenile for a long period after birth. Obviously humans do this anyway — it takes years for an infant to turn into an adult. But a great deal of modern political sloganeering has the effect, consciously or otherwise, of keeping people silly and childish for life. Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House was an early look into that, at least in terms of women. Predictions of cultural neoteny can also be seen in Huxley’s Brave New World and in a somewhat grimmer form in Orwell’s 1984. This neoteny is pervasive, but it can be seen in such forms as the decline in literacy and the decline in education.

It’s curious to note, however, that there is a definite substratum of the public that disagrees with official policies. On-line news articles that allow comments from viewers get deluged with people expressing heretical views. Then the comments are shut off, and it’s back to Business as Usual — literally. These dissident members of the general public have rarely been brought together, and each person is largely unaware that there are many others holding the same views. The politically orthodox may be enforcing the rules for most daily conversation, but the disquiet never entirely disappears.

If civilization is defined by the presence of writing, then the decline of Western civilization might be defined by the disappearance of interest in serious texts — from the Iliad onward. People don’t read books as much as they used to. No one seems to feel guilty for the fact that instead of reading a book called X they have merely watched a movie called X, based on the book. Yes, it’s true that a movie sometimes has advantages over print, but in general to make a movie out of a book one has to reduce it to action and dialogue, and all the exposition and analysis has to be removed. The time frame of a movie also means that a great deal of detail will be cut out. Not much meaningful discussion can take place when the person to whom one is speaking is convinced that books and movies are simply different “media” providing the same educational service.

A similar decline can be found in formal education. There was a time when the purpose of a university education was to allow young people to explore the outer regions of space and time. Now it’s just training in how to use a cash register. The lowest clerk in the huge building labeled “administration” has a more pleasant job, and much greater job security, than the average instructor. It’s money that keeps the university churning, apparently, not some vague and pretentious search for wisdom. Teachers are day-laborers, easily replaced, and it takes no great skill to deal with the reading materials supplied by the corporations for their future slaves.

“Education” of the new sort is more form than substance: teachers are so afraid of being accused of heresy that the students are given little real information. The average young person in the modern world spends about twenty thousand hours doing school work, yet nearly all of that is a waste of time, because a job at the end of that road does not require the ability to think in any Platonic or Aristotelian sense. Modern education involves little real learning, and far more time is spent on mere indoctrination.

Any form of “nationalism,” any statement of pride in one’s country, was discredited. Furthermore, any specific form of ethnicity or religion was downplayed. Western culture in general was denigrated, and Westerners were largely associated with colonialism. Reversing colonialism meant celebrating non-Western cultures. The new attitude was that “all cultures are equal.”

By propagating an “underdog” mentality among Westerners, globalists have encouraged the nanny state, with people living in perpetual imbecility and irresponsibility. There is now a strong sense of “wrong,” but especially when these victims look at themselves. They hate their own culture and their own heritage. They live with a sense of guilt and shame, they suffer from self-loathing. They feel a need for self-abasement. They have low self-confidence, low self-assurance, low self-esteem.

Confirmed underdogs have self-destructive attitudes about sexuality, marriage, and the family. To them, a stable marriage, heterosexual and monogamous, is anathema. What better way to prevent the growth of what used to be called a “real man” than to suggest to a young boy that, deep down, he might not be a boy but a girl? (The same in reverse would apply to girls.) And so we create (or imagine) multiple “genders,” “bi-” this and “poly-” that, psychologically disturbed mutations who have no chance of standing up against the totalitarian state. (How odd that no other species of mammal has more than two genders!)

But above all, to be accepted in modern society one must now proclaim that Western culture is guilty of some nameless crime, making it necessary to give preferential treatment to any and all other cultures. Of course, that is a belief with which those “other cultures” are always happy to agree. And once that “guilt” has become established as “fact,” every piece of writing that appears in public must emphasize “multiculturalism” at all costs.

All “respectable” political or religious groups shuffling for power now try to portray themselves as holier, more pious, than the others, but really they all have the same goal: to establish a world government, and to turn the masses into obedient slaves.

The Growth of Cultural Marxism

The moral and intellectual fabric of Western society has been disintegrating for some time. To a large extent the destruction can be blamed on a form of Marxism, socialism, left-wing thinking, “underdog” mentality, which has encouraged the nanny state, with people living in perpetual imbecility and irresponsibility. In the middle of the last century, Marxism never had much luck in intellectual contests among Westerners, so it had to burrow underground, eroding the foundations of modern society and leaving people in a state of perpetual self-doubt and abnegation. This is what is called “cultural Marxism.” Not much of the reality of cultural Marxism is clearly evident: most of it is experienced as a mere premonition, like that of a coming change in the weather.

Cultural Marxism began in the early twentieth century, when Marxism in the usual sense (i.e. economic Marxism) was a failure in Western Europe; in the First World War, for example, most people were far more interested in defending their country than in overthrowing their government. Cultural Marxism arose because, in order to win in the West, Marxists realized they would have to go underground, working on the “culture” rather than openly advocating revolution. The movement began roughly with Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, who claimed that in order for Marxism to succeed in the West, it was vital to destroy the existing culture by sowing the seeds of doubt regarding all traditional Western moral values.

Hence the formation of the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University Frankfurt, and its offspring, some of whom (at various times) were Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Erich Fromm. Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Institute left Germany, finally moving to New York City, where it was affiliated with Columbia University.

In “The Origins of Political Correctness” (version of 2000), William S. Lind breaks cultural Marxism down into five parts:

“Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about . . . the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it — where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say. . . . .

“We call it “Political Correctness”. . . .

“Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. . . . If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious. . . .

“First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses. . . .

“Indeed, all ideologies are totalitarian because the essence of an ideology . . . is to take some philosophy and say . . . certain things must be true. . . . That is why ideology invariably creates a totalitarian state.

“Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Cultural Marxism . . . says that all history is determined by . . . which groups . . . have power over which other groups. . . .

“Third, certain groups . . . are a priori good, and other groups . . . are evil . . . regardless of what any of them do. . . .

“Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. . . . When the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions. . . .

“And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. . . . . For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. . . .

“The members of the Frankfurt School are Marxist, they are also, to a man, Jewish.”

It is commonly assumed that the term “cultural Marxism” is a right-wing invention. As such, it could be described as a form of “paranoid global conspiracy theory,” along with so many other right-wing concepts that are casually dismissed in similar ways. But the term isn’t a right-wing invention at all. The use of the term “cultural Marxism” by leftist academics themselves (with the same definitions as are used by the right wing) is indicated by such authors and book titles as Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain; Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture; Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome, Cultural Marxism; and Richard R. Weiner, Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology.

So “cultural Marxism” isn’t a form of “paranoid global conspiracy theory,” since it isn’t paranoid and it isn’t just a theory. But the daily news is so heavy with anti-right-wing judgments that a viewer could could easily give up on trying to find the truth. It’s not surprising that people just accept the claim that cultural Marxism is a figment of the deranged right-wing imagination.

Cultural Marxism is in fact the engine that keeps the whole “multicultural” ship moving along. But even fairly knowledgeable people don’t really think much about that engine, except maybe when they’re lying in their bunks at night and they hear a distant chugging sound.

The attack — by Westerners — on Western beliefs and values never slows down. The “Hippie Revolution,” damaging the lives of so many Baby Boomers, was largely due to the machinations of Benjamin Spock, Noam Chomsky, and Timothy Leary. The Church has reduced itself to infantilism. Ph.D.’s are handed out to students who can only be described as illiterate. Electronic devices destroy our attention span, reduce direct contact among humans, and turn everything into “virtual reality.” Illicit drugs and inadequate diets further reduce our mental capacities.

Sorry — maybe some of this can’t be laid at the feet of poor Karl Marx. Perhaps some of this is just a matter of “lifestyle choice,” to use modern jargon. But is there really a difference?

A related problem that makes cultural Marxism so hard to analyze is that to some extent it’s a group of overlapping activities, not just one, and that’s especially true nowadays. Multiculturalism, sexual deviancy, mass immigration, “sanctuary cities,” aggressive religions, dumbing down, “liberalism” that is not at all liberal, and so on — the modern world has become somewhat shapeless and formless. The trail of Marxism is so long, and goes cold so often.

At times the trail becomes quite ludicrous, with “multiculturalism” itself as an example of that absurdity. The early cultural Marxists hoped to destroy traditional Western culture by flooding it with other cultures. Yet nowadays the photographs in advertising largely portray non-White (non-European, non-Western) people, in spite of the fact that the West is demographically still mostly White. Yet every major bank advertises its services very largely with photographs of happy non-White or multi-racial couples.

But the inclusion of non-Whites is good for business, since such people compose a new and possibly lucrative customer base — “diversity is our strength” is the new chant. So what began in the 1930s as a Marxist tactic has become, many decades later, a marketing ploy by capitalist bankers who would rather die than be regarded as Marxists!

What does the term “left wing” itself really mean? In France long ago, the terms “left” and “right” had precise meanings, based on where one was actually sitting in the Estates General, indicating one’s attitude toward the Revolution. Now perhaps “left wing” means big government, and big spending by that government, but above all it means supporting the “poor” rather than the “rich.” By the “poor” I mean the voters, of course, not the people leading such flocks.

As soon as “guilt” has become established as “fact,” every relevant piece of paper that appears in public must emphasize “multiculturalism” at all costs. Although the terms are used misleadingly, everything must also stress “fairness,” “democracy,” and “equal rights.” The punishment for breaches of “multiculturalism” is swift and merciless, unless one is attacking Christians; Easter seems always ready to disappear from the free calendars handed out by politicians.

There are corollaries to all the above. Leftists must believe in prohibiting the ownership of guns, for example. If people believe they are underdogs, they must also believe they have no right to defend themselves. Only grown-ups should have guns, and leftists know they are not grown-ups.

Most leftists believe all cultures are, in some inexplicable way, equal. In their naiveté, they cannot believe that many cultures are cruel and intolerant, locked in the pre-literate mentality of a thousand years ago. Westerners today cannot understand that there can be such vast differences between the mentality of one culture and another. The mainstream news-media foster this misunderstanding by failing to report the shocking statistics of rape, mutilation, murder, and other barbarisms that go on in this world.

Most people have little sense of history, yet cruelty has long been a part of that history. Beginning about 5,000 years ago in the Near East, various civilizations arose in Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and so on. After a war between city-states, it was customary for all the male inhabitants of the losing city to be put to death, and impalement was one of the most common forms of killing. That ancient mentality has not entirely passed away. Yet Westerners like to fool themselves into believing that the entire world consists of people who read glossy magazines and keep up with all the intellectual trends. The reality is that, even in modern times, the counterpart to an act of “tolerance” in one country would just as surely result in a death sentence in another.

Above all, cultural Marxism is an effective means of rationalizing the quest for “the ethnic vote.” The cultural-Marxist dogma plays into an alleged economic need: to increase immigration and thereby sustain a “growing economy.” Yet massive immigration really has little or no benefit to the country, and in fact leads to overcrowding, unemployment, and other social ills. For the rich, on the other hand, massive immigration means more buyers, more workers, and more investors. For politicians, more people means more votes. For religious groups, larger numbers of the “faithful” means a greater chance of pushing out competitors. Yet none of these groups has the good of the country in mind.

In a world of otherwise horrendous overpopulation, we are told that the West itself is headed for demographic collapse, and that we must find out why this is happening. Yet no answer is offered, other than the circular response that the problem is caused by low fertility. At the same time, one gets the feeling that the Westerners in these shrinking countries are being punished for some unnamed sin. Left-wingers are always trying to find ways to justify mass migration and multiculturalism, in the hope that they can dominate a planet of rootless wanderers, people with no culture at all.

But if we choose to have a serious look at the real issues of demographic decline, we can see some important variations. In Europe, it is the eastern countries that are facing the worst decline in population. And it is eastern Europe that is the poorest. In McMafia, Misha Glenny tells us that international “human trafficking” is supplied mostly by women from eastern Europe. This fact is surely connected to another, that women in these countries are choosing not to have children — or rather, they are faced with the near-impossibility of doing so. As I was once told by a white woman, “This isn’t a good world in which to be bringing up children.”

It was eastern Europe that was dominated by Communism. It was eastern Europe that was destroyed by Communism. All of this is the legacy of Karl Marx. Demographic collapse is not a punishment of Westerners for some unnamed sin. The dots are obvious, the connections among them less so. But the more one looks at the picture, the more it comes together.

One Ring to Bind Them All

Muslims repeatedly kill and wound large numbers of people. Basically quite simple. But then I find a large number of questions floating around. For one thing, the politicians and the mainstream news-media are all saying that such attacks are perpetrated by “terrorists,” not specifically by “Muslims.” So this raises the large issue of disinformation (versus misinformation). The KGB, during the Cold War, were quite instrumental in developing this. One of the main tricks is not to tell a lie exactly, because it’s possible to get caught, but simply to tweak the facts a tiny bit, even if the final effect is not so tiny. Now politicians do it all the time. By saying “terrorists” rather than “Muslims,” the average television-viewer can wipe the sweat from his forehead and say, “Oh, thank God. Terrorists. I was afraid it was Muslims.” Then he can go to bed, sleep like a baby, and snore all night long.

Somebody once asked me: Why would people deliberately blow themselves up? To a modern Westerner this seems incomprehensible. The answer is that these people think they’ll go straight to heaven if they perform these acts of martyrdom. And how could people believe such a thing? Because they have such faith in their God. Islam was created fourteen centuries ago, and it has hardly changed since then. In order to understand Islam one can study the history of Europe at that same time, the early Middle Ages. Consider the fact that even the Christian monks spent centuries burning other monks at the stake over minor issues of theological doctrine. And for Muslims nowadays, violence on that level is all part of the grand tradition.

In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington notes that “wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peacefully with their neighbors.” A few decades ago, Charles de Gaulle had the bright idea of importing Muslims from his defunct North African empire, in order to form a union of Europeans and Muslims (called Eurabia by Bat Ye’or) that might even compete with the US as a world power. And now France, among many other countries, is paying the price, but the politicians deny all responsibility.

For Westerners, part of the disturbing news these days is that Muslim attacks are often right in the heart of Europe. So the unspoken fear is that jihad (religious warfare) is moving even further west. What will happen next in Germany, for example?

Then there’s the great stumbling block of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel. After all that we know of the Muslim assault on the West, why would she have allowed a vast crowd of Muslim invaders from three different continents — sorry, “Syrian refugees” — to swarm into Germany and destroy whatever was left of German self-esteem?

The goal is always the same: to wipe out all the independence-loving particular countries that are now in place. That is why the news media always hammer out the message that one must never use the words “white,” “race,” “ethnic,” or “nationalist” in any positive sense. When those “rebels” (us) have been crushed, it will be possible for the One Worlders to set up their massive government that will have its fingers on all the buttons.

The European Union is not much different from the Soviet Union, and no better. The goal is to establish a world government, and to turn the masses into obedient slaves. All such ideologies have always been quite opposed to democracy. The biggest step, though, is to crush any sense of pride in one’s own country, and to do that the opposite to nationalism must be instituted: “multiculturalism.” And what better way to make a country “multicultural” than to bring in a few million families from places where people don’t even believe in birth control? If a few suicide bombers get a little out of hand, then — well, it’s a small price to pay. And, yes, it’s true that too many massacres could put a dent in the One Worlders’ plans. Never mind. As Tolkien said: “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, / One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. . . .”

Canada Is Not Vacant Land

It is a common misconception that Canada has vast amounts of land that could support large numbers of immigrants. Much of this belief is due to a failure to understand Canada’s unique but rather daunting geography. About half of the country is bare (or, at best, spruce-covered), uninhabitable rock, namely the famous Canadian Shield. But bare rock is never “underpopulated.”

It is the border strip, 150 km wide, which is demographically the most significant part of the country: 80 percent of the population lives in this area. In contrast, Canada’s largely uninhabited 5 million square kilometers of bare rock, the enormous area north of that border strip, has winters of unearthly cold stretching out over the better part of the year, with snow reaching to the rooftops, and the remainder of the year is characterized by dense clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies. The general impression is that Canada is an “empty” land, just waiting to get filled up. In reality, at 38 million the population is now nearly three times greater than in 1950.

Because only a certain amount of the country is livable, Canada is already well populated. There is simply no need to continue our mad rush to fill the country. Thanks to dishonest politicians over the years, Canada has roughly the highest immigration rate of all major industrialized countries. Canada also has many economic problems and is unable to provide adequate employment or other support for the people who already live here. A large increase in population is not a solution. In fact, in a world that now has a total population of about 8 billion, an increase in population is never a solution to anything. Yet, unlike many other countries, Canada has no political party that will take a firm stand against excessive immigration.

Canadian multiculturalism is a policy announced to Parliament by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau on October 8, 1971, leading in 1988 to the Canadian Multiculturalism Act. The policy is harmful, partly because it fails to include strategies for integration, such as a requirement of proficiency in an official language before citizenship is granted. Multiculturalism as we see it today — measured in terms of the quantity of bodies — simply results in enclaves, ghettos, gang warfare. Each culture fights every other one. About 85 percent of recent immigrants have neither English nor French as their first language.

Multiculturalism also leads to cultural relativism. Canadians of European extraction are now taught to believe that there is no such thing as barbarism, only “cultural differences.” We forget that there was actually a point to the long centuries of struggle in the West that fostered democracy, civil liberties, and human rights. Yet we bow to medieval mentality on the assumption that we are otherwise “racists.”

Immigrants displace Canadian citizens in the job market, even though unemployment these days is already very high. They also add greatly to the costs of “free” medicine, education, legal advice, and all the other perquisites of the welfare state. In part this is because the immigrants of modern times often lack both language and education.

Pierre Trudeau’s invention is destroying the country, and to speak against it is regarded as sheer heresy. The Chinese are by far the biggest immigrant group, and Vancouver is now an Asian city. But it is not only numbers of people that matter, because there are other ways of changing the country. Money from Saudi Arabia has insidious effects, and Muslim obsessions with sharia (Muslim law) corrode basic Canadian values. According to the highly respected journalist Robert Fisk (“The Crimewave That Shames the World”), about twenty thousand Muslim women every year are the victims of “honor killings” by their own families, but when Canadians hear such accounts they fail to believe them: if such a story did not appear on last night’s television it cannot be true. Yet I spent three years living in the Middle East, and I know that much of the world is far uglier than is imagined by most Westerners.

As an English teacher back in Canada, I would sometimes have to advise immigrant students against infractions of Canadian laws, including those regarding assault, but my students’ rationale for any moral or legal infractions was always the phrase “in my culture” (or “in my country”). Who, specifically, is teaching newcomers such expressions? Politicians are quite aware that “culture” is not a valid catch-all term, but they don’t seem to care. After all, a higher rate of immigration means more votes, and more customers, and more sweatshops.

Until the creation of multiculturalism, freedom of speech and the press was an age-old right. Now, however, it is a crime to say anything that offends any group of people, because one is said to be attacking “human rights.” A charge of this sort is a circular argument: what is offensive is defined in terms of the claim of the other party to feel offended. It’s like a charge of witchcraft: whatever you say, your statement can be turned around to “prove” you are guilty. The similarity between the twisted logic of Trudeauism and that of Stalinism (not to mention the Patriot Act and subsequent American legislation) is curious, but Orwell described such “thought crimes” long ago in 1984.

It’s easy to understand why the inhabitants of the less-pleasant parts of the world have their eyes on Canada. The most significant result of Communist policy in China was famine, and the worst famine in all of world history was that of Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward,” 1958-61, when about 30 million people died. Now hunger is again looming in that country. China’s arable land is in decline, and about 600 km2 of land in China turns to desert each year. China has once more outgrown its food supply: the ratio of people to arable land in China is more than twice that of the world average, which is already too high to prevent hunger.

China is the world’s leader in the mining or processing of quite a number of natural resources: aluminum, coal, gold, iron, magnesium, phosphate, zinc, and rare-earth minerals, for example. Yet basic energy reserves are in short supply. Although China has about 20 percent of the world’s population, it produces only about 5 percent of the world’s oil, it uses up coal so quickly that its reserves will not last beyond 2030, and the country’s pollution problems are terrible. And China’s “booming economy” is based on devalued currency, counterfeiting, and what is virtually slave labor.

The “fossil” (deep) aquifer of the North China Plain is being depleted, although fossil aquifers cannot be renewed. Yet this aquifer maintains half of China’s wheat production and a third of its corn. As a result of the depletion of water, annual grain production has been in decline since 1998.

China now imports most of its soybeans, and conversely most of the world’s soybean exports go to China. But China may soon need to import most of its grain as well. How will that amount compare with their soybean imports? No one knows for sure, but if China were to import only 20 percent of its grain it would be about the same amount that the US now exports to all countries.

Immigrants from Muslim countries are another large group entering Canada, and according to the Pew Research Center the Muslim population of Canada is expected to rise much faster than the general population. Saudi Arabia pours money into the West for the purpose of “education,” and many Western academic institutions receive grants from Saudi Arabia, or programs are set up with Saudi funding. At the same time, the numerous mosques in the West serve as training grounds for young Muslims who live in those countries. Mosques are springing up everywhere in the West, yet in Saudi Arabia the building of a Christian church incurs an automatic death sentence. Contrary to popular opinion, there is no such thing as “moderate Islam” versus “radical Islam”: Islam comes in only one form, the one that was invented in the seventh century.

The misunderstanding of the vast difference between Muslims and Christians might be due to the fact that the debate is assumed merely to involve the respective merits of two religions. Yet this assumption is wrong on two counts. In the first place, Muslims regard it as self-evident that Allah spoke first to Moses, then to Jesus, and finally and most clearly to Mohammed: for Muslims, therefore, there is no possibility of a “dialog” among various religions. The second and more important reason why it may not be entirely logical to compare Islam and Christianity is that the former is, in some ways, more like a political movement than a religion. Every major religion has at times done some proselytizing “at the point of a sword,” but that has always been more true of Islam. The term jihad is not a metaphor.

The general public in Canada has become accustomed to submission and therefore remains mute. Unlike other people, most Canadians are never satisfied until they are feeling guilty about something. There is a constant undertone of “moral inferiority” being applied in Canada to people of a Western heritage. One must never mention Christmas, although one must portray a false joy toward the festivities of any other culture. One must constantly mumble and fumble in an attempt to find correct terms for various ethnic groups. Even the terms “B.C.” and “A.D.” must be rewritten as “BCE” and “CE.” All of this is absolute nonsense. To be convinced of one’s own inferiority is nothing more than to accept that some other person is superior — which is exactly what manipulative politicians are planning. It is time to wake up. Those who do not respect themselves will not be respected by others.

CANADIAN Paul Fromm, a former schoolteacher who is either 1) a brave advocate for self-determination and free speech or 2) an evil neo-nazi bigot, depending on whether you’re talking to the man on the street or a spokesman for the immigrant lobby — has begun a campaign for mayor of Mississauga, Ontario, a sizable city which has seen a huge demographic change in recent years. Fromm is the fourteenth announced candidate in the race, which takes place next month. (ILLUSTRATION: Paul Fromm with Lady Michele Renouf on a recent speaking tour.)

Mr. Fromm is well known as a former Peel District School Board teacher who was fired in the late 1990s for refusing to curtail his political speech outside the classroom.

“Immigration is the issue,” Fromm said in the announcement of his candidacy. “It’s the two-ton elephant in the room that the municipal politicians don’t want to discuss. They just want to babble about the supposed benefits of ‘diversity.'”

Fromm lost his position teaching English at Applewood Heights Secondary School in 1997 after B’Nai Brith Canada and allied groups said that his opposition to enforced multiracialism and multiculturalism — which he expressed off of school grounds only — was “hate.”

The school board responded by removing Fromm from the classroom after 19 years on the job. The alleged “final straw” was when Mr. Fromm attended a memorial service for controversial writer and classics professor Revilo P. Oliver.

“He was terminated from his life’s work of teaching — just because he attended the funeral of a friend, who was someone the open-borders lobby didn’t like, and for peacefully opposing immigration,” according to Gideon Dene, editor of The American Mercury. “He even lost his teaching license. That’s outrageous,” Dene added.

Paul Fromm could still be considered a teacher: He spends his time speaking at venues all over the U.S. and Canada, doing a weekly radio show, and serving as a director of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Immigration is the central issue that motivates him. Fromm says “Immigration impacts almost every major problem in Mississauga – overcrowded roads, dwindling farm land, the environment, welfare costs. If I’m elected, I’ll camp out on the Minister of Immigration’s front lawn and demand action,” he said. According to Fromm, immigration feeds overpopulation: “Will the roads be any less congested? Will welfare costs be lower? Will the environment be safer with nearly another 300,000 in Peel? Not likely. Mississauga is full. It’s more than doubled in size since I moved here in 1980.”

Fromm also heads the Canadian Association for Free Expression, a group which fights censorship, both public and private.

Paul Fromm’s Canada First Web site

Metapedia encyclopedia article on Paul Fromm

Radical Press weighs in on Paul Fromm

by Kourosh Ziabari, Foreign Policy Journal

ERNST ZUNDEL is a German author and historian who has spent seven years of his life behind bars as a result of expressing his controversial viewpoints and opinions. He is a revisionist who has denied the Holocaust as described by most historians. He has been one of the most prominent political prisoners in Europe and has been jailed in three countries on two continents.

After his arrest in the U.S. in 2003, he was deported to Canada, where he was kept in prison as “a threat to the national security” for two years. After deportation to Germany in March 2005, he was convicted and sentenced in 2007 to five additional years of imprisonment on charges of holocaust denial.  He was finally released on March 1, 2010.

This is the first interview Ernst Zundel has given since his release.

Firstly, I would like to extend my congratulations on your recent release. Were you ever mistreated or subject to any type of mental or physical punishment in breach of international conventions?

(ILLUSTRATION: Ernst Zundel in a courtroom in Mannheim, Germany on November 8, 2005; Michael Probst/AP)

My entire treatment these past seven years by those arresting me, trying and convicting me, and keeping me in prison has been in brutal breach of international conventions.  I was arrested in broad daylight on American soil by officials of the U.S. government who acted as hit squads for a nefarious lobby. There was no arrest warrant. I was not read my rights. I was whisked away in handcuffs without being allowed to get my wallet, to call my attorney, to be allowed to make my case before an American Immigration Judge or even hug my wife goodbye.

I was incarcerated in six different prisons on two continents in three countries–the USA, Canada, and Germany–without relief of any kind. In effect, I have had 10 percent of my life stolen from me — and for what “crime”? For having “overstayed my U.S. visa”?

Throughout my imprisonment, basic human rights principles were trampled underfoot repeatedly and with impunity. The worst prisons were the Canadian detention centers at Thorold, Ontario and at Toronto West, where I was held for two long years in isolation cells, ice-cold in the winter, no shoes or socks allowed. The electric light in these cells, bright enough to be able to read, was kept on 24 hours a day. Through a glass slot in the door I was checked every 20 minutes, and my activities were meticulously noted by the guards: one sheet for every day.  No dignity, no privacy. My toothbrush was kept in a plastic bin in a hall. I was not allowed to speak to other prisoners. Bed sheets were changed only after three months. No pillows. No chairs. When I wrote to my wife or to my attorneys, I had to sit on a makeshift pile of my court transcripts. No radio, no television, not even an electrical outlet to sharpen my pencils. No ball point pens, only pencil stubs, cut in half with a saw. No spoons, forks, or knives were permitted; only a white plastic spoon with a fork called a “spork” that had to be returned every time at the end of the meal. With very few exceptions when furtive guards showed me some kindness away from the surveillance cameras, I was treated as though I was the worst of criminals. That’s Canada for you, where I have lived and worked without a criminal record for more than 40 years.

It was somewhat better, but not much, in the United States. In Germany, it was quite a bit better in terms of the basic necessities, but personal mail was routinely withheld — 1,700 letters for up to five years — even after I forced a court to order that it be given to me. My so-called trial in Mannheim was a political show trial in the Stalinist mode in that my guilt was a foregone conclusion. I requested that exculpatory exhibits be allowed as validation for what I believed and had written and said. No meaningful defense was allowed. I could not put on record any forensic evidence, any historical documents, or even expert witnesses, That very request to be allowed to offer evidence was held to be a new offense of criminal behavior and could have resulted in new criminal charges — as were, in fact, lodged against my lawyers during that very trial who tried to overcome these restrictions.

Along with the rest of EU members, Germany regularly criticizes other countries for violations of free speech and human rights. However, your case demonstrated the emptiness of such claims within Europe. What’s your take on that? Is Europe really a utopia of liberty and freedom of speech?

Most European countries have only selected free speech for officially approved and sanctioned views on history. Almost all EU countries have laws in place that restrict freedom of speech under the guise of one fig leaf or other, such as the prevention of racist or neo-Nazi activities. The state decides selectively who is and what is racist.  These laws are hypocritical, in Germany’s case superseding even their own Basic Law.

Dissidents are allowed very little opportunity to be read or heard in the mainstream corporate media channels of the West. The control mechanisms of the press are many, often subtle but widely understood and obeyed — fear of loss of jobs, diminished circulation, the withholding of government advertisements etc. There is no longer unrestricted freedom in any Western country, not even in the U.S. with its wonderful Constitution and Amendments such as the Bill of Rights.

Allow me here to point out to your readers the outline of a censorship practice known by its neutral term “rendition”, but more honestly defined as political kidnappings to force the silencing of dissident speech or alternate thoughts.  Renditions in the West are ever more frequently practiced not only against alleged “terrorist suspects” but against ordinary political activists and writers whose viewpoints are frowned upon by such outfits as AIPAC and similar Zionist lobby and interest groups, B’nai Brith, the Canadian Jewish Congress etc.

In order to spell out what I can only describe to you in broad strokes, I’d like to briefly shed light on the period preceding my arrest in the U.S. and Canada, the conniving and the similarity in other cases like mine, where an innocuous or alleged infraction is used as a fig leaf to silence a political opponent.

Viet Dinh, a Georgetown University law professor and director of their Asian Law and Policy Studies Program who helped craft the Patriot Act, put it succinctly, as reported in an American publication called Wired that deals with freedom of speech on the net. That interview reads:

Wired News: An estimated 5,000 people have been subjected to detention since 9/11. Of those, only five – three noncitizens and two citizens – were charged with terrorism-related crimes and one was convicted. How do we justify such broad-sweeping legislation that has resulted in very few terrorist-related convictions?

Dinh: I’ve heard the 5,000 number. The official numbers released from the Department of Justice indicate approximately 500 persons have been charged with immigration violations and have been deported who have been of interest to the 9/11 investigation.

It may well be that a number of citizens were not charged with terrorism-related crimes, but they need not be. Where the department has suspected people of terrorism, it will prosecute those persons for other violations of law, rather than wait for a terrorist conspiracy to fully develop and risk the potential that that conspiracy will be missed and thereby sacrificing innocent American lives in the process.

This is exactly what happened to me. The initial reason given was an alleged immigration infraction — namely a “visa overstay”. I was no terrorist; I was a dissident writer. My political detractors knew perfectly well that I was in America legally, awaiting adjustment of status due to my marriage to an American citizen. I was in Immigration Adjustment of Status proceedings, meticulously following all the prerequisite steps. I was living openly in a rural area in Tennessee and was listed by address in the local telephone book. The U.S. government had given me a Social Security number, a work permit, a document that allowed me to leave the country and return unmolested. I had undergone and passed an FBI check and a health clearance.  The only last step missing was a personal interview by an immigration official to ascertain a valid marriage to my American citizen wife.

We had been notified in writing that this interview could take as long as three years, and that no status report would be given. We were patiently waiting for that last step, a routine interview with an immigration official. Our immigration attorney had requested such an interview in writing — twice!  Under oath, he testified that he had written those letters.  These letters have mysteriously disappeared from our immigration file.  When I was arrested, it was claimed that I had negligently “missed a hearing” which gave them grounds for an arrest due to a visa overstay. In other words, a simple bureaucratic loophole was found or fabricated that has cost me seven years of my life.

What happened to me in the context of a deliberate state policy of deception has also happened to others.  Similar ruses via false accusations were used in cases like Germar Rudolf, likefwise married to an American citizen, El Masri of Germany, Maher Arar of Canada, Gerd Honsik of Spain, Siegfried Verbeke of Belgium, David Irving, and now Bishop Williamson of England, to name only a few individuals who were caught between the grind stones of a criminal policy possible only under the Patriot Act in the U.S. and similar legal instruments in other countries. Embedded in that background of a widespread covert policy and practice to force political conformity, my case makes eminent sense. We are no longer dealing with an aberration. These extrajudicial renditions give 9/11 and the Patriot Act a new light as a global policy instrument of brutal censorship of unpopular thinkers and writers.

The thrust of a prestigious publication such as yours would normally deal with the policies of foreign governments, renditions, kidnappings, and incarcerations not only of foreign enemies but, as in the case of Vanunu, an Israeli-born- and-raised atomic scientist. He was no neo-Nazi, no racist, no Holocaust Denier, yet he was relentlessly pursued by the Mossad and ultimately kidnapped and jailed for 18 years.

The patterns of the breaking of international law and conventions, the use of false identities, and the brazen practice of breaking and entering by spy and intelligence agencies, etc. — these criminal activities are daily in the news. This sets the stage and makes my case a logical progression of an old, established policy, with this one difference: we are no longer talking about hunting and kidnapping alleged “Nazi war criminals” like Eichmann or stone-throwing Palestinians or even “Arab terrorists”, but instead the targeting of writers and other political dissidents in Western countries calling themselves “democracies”.

My story does not even end there. In my case, my “Holocaust Denier” profile was convenient, but passé. It was not even, as is so commonly and falsely claimed, “Denial of the Holocaust” or even more bizarre, my “visa overstay”!  I was told what actually happened by a friend of ours with high-level UN connections. In his own words: “It was the Blue Booklet that did it! That’s when it was decided at the very highest level to take you out for good!”

Here is what happened, briefly: In the early months post-9/11 my wife, an avid Internetter, discovered a compelling research document entitled Stranger than Fiction: An Independent Investigation of 9/11 and the War on Terrorism by Anonymous, 11-11-2. She gave it to me over breakfast. I read it, found it interesting, and ran a few copies off on my printer for people on my mailing list. I did not write that lavishly footnoted paper. I did not research it. I merely copied it.  Somebody must have concluded that I, with my background of thorough forensic investigations in other areas, showed more than ordinary interest in 9/11 as a potential political false flag common in intelligence agency operations!

During my trial in Mannheim, ostensibly for “Holocaust Denial”, portions of my monthly newsletter, where I mentioned this booklet and the 9/11 topic, were referenced by the prosecution as criminal offenses. Only after it became clear that I welcomed the opportunity to have my attorneys present forensic evidence of a potential 9/11 cover-up were those portions of the accusation against me hastily dropped, and my trial became a “Holocaust Denial” show trial in the traditional Stalinist mode, “… accuse wildly but don’t allow a defense!”

As we later found out through various freedom of information requests in various countries, there was in place for years a deliberate, convoluted plan to arrest and detain me under false pretenses so as to take me out and put me behind bars.

I mention this only as an overarching, logical example as to how diabolically clever my political opponents are in using the accusation of “Holocaust Denial” and persecution of Holocaust Revisionists as arrows in their arsenal of weaponry to shore up, consolidate, and protect their deceptively acquired power and influence.

What’s the reality behind Holocaust? Didn’t it happen at all? What about people such as Elie Wiesel, Thomas Blatt, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and Leopold Engleitner who are Holocaust survivors and describe their own accounts of those painful days, when they personally witnessed the heart-rending demise of their parents in concentration camps and bone-crushing machines. How should we resolve these contradictions?

I will not answer this question.  I would risk five more years in jail if I answered these questions honestly and truthfully. However, in the age of the Internet, others less known than I am find ways to simplify a painful, multifaceted problem, as the cartoon below makes plain:

(ILLUSTRAATION: “Prevent Holocaust: BOMB IRAN” by Carlos Latuff)

Many people of other countries have come to the categorical conclusion that the Western world is a beacon of liberty and unrestricted freedom of speech. But it sometimes seems that the reality is something else, and that people can be easily prosecuted merely for publishing views that are disliked. The booklet you published, Did Six Million Really Die?, is an example. What do you think?

Here is just one more example of what I already outlined above: We have faxes and other documents that prove on official embassy letterhead that the much vaunted and propagandized U.S. Judiciary has run interference for these kidnappers and renditioners via behind-the-scenes ex parte communication, thus engaging in a cover-up and whitewash worse than the ones practiced by those the U.S. government always blames for human rights violations in their hypocritical press campaigns, like against China in Tibet, Lukashenko in Belarus, Putin in Moscow and, of course, Iran during the recent so-called Green Revolution.

Many Zionist websites have introduced you as a white supremacist. Is that a fair characterization?

This claim is a convenient character assassination technique. I have never been a white supremacist and have stated so for decades, publicly, in countless interviews, newsletters, speeches, broadcasts, etc. It is my opponents’ modus operandi to broad-brush complex issues by politically expedient demonization.

You’re opposed to the regime of Israel because of its discriminatory and atrocious approach against the nation of Palestine. You consider yourself a pacifist who advocates stability and peace; aren’t these beliefs incompatible with your viewpoint regarding Hitler, who is internationally considered to be a notorious dictator and relentless killer? How can your peace-seeking stance come together with your approval of Hitler?

I cannot answer this question due to legal restraints.  An honest and complete answer would land me in jail as a re-offender very quickly. Implicit in your question is the toxic image of me that my detractors would like you to have.  To be called a Nazi is worse than being called a leper. For decades I have been on the receiving end of just such a targeted character assassination campaign. I have been jailed many times not for advocating an ideology but for expressing a dissident, alternative viewpoint on many topics, including Adolf Hitler’s role in history.  Revisionism is not an ideology.  It is merely a scientific method of re-examining historical events and of trying to understand the movers and shakers who made history a footnote to their personalities.

Let me answer your question this way:  I have always abhorred any kind of violence in the pursuit of political goals.  By anyone! Politically, I was and am a pacifist, much in the Gandhi style. I advocate a sober, neutral look at history, including the period known as the Third Reich. The peoples of the world, regardless of what system of government they live under, owe it to themselves to emancipate themselves of the simplistic images of propaganda and deceit posing as history.

On May 1995, your Toronto residence was the target of an arson attack which resulted in $400,000 worth of damage. A few days later, some of your extremist opponents were caught trying to break into your property. Again a few days later, you received a parcel bomb which the Toronto police detonated. Have you ever tried to lodge a complaint against them? Have they ever been lawfully sentenced?

This is the flip side of some of the questions above. While I have never advocated or engaged in violence, egregious acts of violence have been repeatedly practiced on me, of which the political kidnapping in 2003 was merely the latest. As to the fire and the bomb, no, nothing was ever resolved. The police apprehended the bomb builders and senders, but the charges laid were stayed. There seems to have been no political will at the highest levels of the Canadian government. There was no political coin to be garnered by prosecuting Jewish arsonists, who even confessed to the deed.

Do you differentiate between the Zionists  and Jews as the followers of a divine, monotheistic religion?

Yes, the two are totally different. Some Orthodox Jews who are united against Zionism, such as the Neturei Karta, believe that also. They know the godfathers of Communism and Zionism followed identical policies. The guiding spirit behind the two systems is the same. Neturei Karta rabbis attended the 2006 Teheran Conference sponsored by your President in an attempt to distance themselves from what they consider to be a dangerous atheist clique in the pursuit of illegal politics of conquest of which they want no part.

The mainstream corporate media, while having already vilified you, remained silent about your release. What do you think about this? Are you going to continue your ideological path or would you prefer to keep a low profile and forget about the intellectual activities?

Ironically, that was exactly what I intended to do when I moved to Tennessee and married Ingrid; keeping a low profile and turning to private endeavors such as my love for art and music.  I felt that my revisionist outreach was finished, concluded to my inner satisfaction. Let others read both sides and then judge for themselves. All the arguments, all the information needed on the Holocaust is out there, on the Internet, in tens of thousands of websites, all for the taking. How often do you have to dig up an archeological site to find yet one more bone, yet one more implicating shard? My wife likes to say that you don’t have to eat a camel to know what a cutlet tastes like. I was quite ready to retire and satisfy my creative needs and desires. I could leave the political mopping-up activities for others to complete. But could my political opponents bring themselves, as rational people might have, to likewise call it quits? No; that is simply not in their nature.

As you point out so cogently, a powerful vilification campaign is still going full blast. It keeps my name in the media for people to decide for themselves who I am. Upon my release, my wife has collected thousands and thousands of letters from readers, only three of which were negative! Not a bad record, of the millions of dollars spent and millions of words dispersed in an attempt to paint me as as a devil with horns.

Let me ask you — would your prestigious publication have cared to interview me if you thought that I deserved the label of Evil Incarnate?

Read the full article at Foreign Policy Journal

THE VOLUMINOUS writings (nineteen books and thousands of essays, articles and reviews) of H. L. Mencken, one of America’s finest writers and perhaps its greatest journalist and chronicler of American English, are a virtually-forgotten treasure trove of sparkling wit and deep wisdom. Like knowledge of their own history and respect for their own Constitution, decades ago most Americans consigned him to the dustbin. To peruse his pearls about government, democracy, politicians and elections, as well as socialism and capitalism, is to perceive something of what America once was and now merely claims to be. “Government is a broker in pillage,” Mencken said in Prejudices: First Series (1919), “and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.” In that book he added “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule,” and defined the socialist as “a man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.”

“Democracy is a form of worship,” he observed in The American Credo: A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind (1920). “It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.” Further, “Socialism is simply the degenerate capitalism of bankrupt capitalists. Its one genuine object is to get more money for its professors.” In The American Mercury (24 April 1924) he wrote about the state’s indoctrination of the young: “[The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardised citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.”

In The American Mercury (27 August 1924) came this: “The aim of democracy is to break all … 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. The measure of its success is the extent to which such men are brought down, and made common. The measure of civilisation 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.” In Notes on Democracy (1926), Mencken elaborated this theme. “Democracy is based upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalise the free play of ideas … The average man doesn’t want to be free. He wants to be safe.”

And in his Chrestomathy (1949), a summary compilation of his writings, Mencken identified the “inner nature” of government:

‘All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man; its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organisation, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are …

‘What lies behind all this, I believe, is a deep sense of the fundamental antagonism between the government and the people it governs. It is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members … When a private citizen is robbed a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before. The notion that they have earned that money is never entertained; to most sensible men it would seem ludicrous. They are simply rascals who, by accidents of law, have a somewhat dubious right to a share in the earnings of their fellow men.

This gang is well-nigh immune to punishment. Its worst extortions, even when they are baldly for private profit, carry no certain penalties under our laws. Since the first days of the Republic, less than a dozen of its members have been impeached, and only a few obscure understrappers have ever been put into prison. The number of men sitting at Atlanta and Leavenworth for revolting against the extortions of government is always ten times as great as the number of government officials condemned for oppressing the taxpayers to their own gain … There are no longer any citizens in the world; there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters; they are bound to die for their masters at call … On some bright tomorrow, a geological epoch or two hence, they will come to the end of their endurance …’

Mencken saw clearly the great danger of blithely assuming that the public weal motivates politicians:

‘These men, in point of fact, are seldom if ever moved by anything rationally describable as public spirit; there is actually no more public spirit among them than among so many burglars or street-walkers. Their purpose, first, last and all the time, is to promote their private advantage, and to that end, and that end alone, they exercise all the vast powers that are in their hands … Whatever it is they seek, whether security, greater ease, more money or more power, it has to come out of the common stock, and so it diminishes the shares of all other men. Putting a new job-holder to work decreases the wages of every wage-earner in the land … Giving a job-holder more power takes something away from the liberty of all of us …’

One of the major reasons that the words “government” and “tyranny” are virtually synonyms, Mencken showed, was the gullibility of the ruled: “The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.” Is government sometimes useful? You must be joking! “So is a doctor. But suppose the dear fellow claimed the right, every time he was called in to prescribe for a bellyache or a ringing in the ears, to raid the family silver, use the family tooth-brushes, and execute the droit de seigneur upon the housemaid?”

Finally, Mencken did not reserve any greater affection for the “military caste” than he did for the civilian bureaucracy:

‘The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits. The primeval bandit chiefs eventually became kings. Something of the bandit character still attaches to the military professional. He may fight bravely and unselfishly, but so do gamecocks. He may seek no material rewards, but neither do hunting dogs. His general attitude of mind is stupid and anti-social. It was a sound instinct in the Founding Fathers that made them subordinate the military establishment to the civil power. To be sure, the civil power consists largely of political scoundrels, but they at least differ in outlook and purpose from the military …’

Mencken denounced the conjoined twins, socialism and democracy; he ridiculed the pretensions and idiocies of politicians (civilian and military); and he mourned the death of the American Republic. He therefore opposed America’s entry into both the First and Second World Wars, and reserved special contempt for the execrable Franklin Roosevelt and his catastrophic New Deal.

Mencken has been buried, it seems, because the principles he (and many others) defended in the 1920s are the ones he (virtually alone) continued to extol until he died in 1956. Evil Franklin, on the other hand, has been lionised precisely because the promises he made in 1932 — namely to uphold the gold standard, balance the budget and reduce the government’s payrolls — were abandoned in 1933; and his repeated vow in 1940 (“your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars”) was swiftly repudiated in 1941. Today, most Americans would dismiss Mencken’s principles as “radical,” “extreme” and even “heretical.” Not a few would denounce them as “un-American,” and neoconservatives would revile him as a “defeatist” and a “traitor.” How might Mencken answer these epithets? In a letter to Upton Sinclair (14 October 1917) he fired this fusillade:

‘The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.’

Read more at Quebecois Libre
republished with permission

Chris Leithner grew up in Canada. He is director of Leithner & Co. Pty. Ltd., a private investment company based in Brisbane, Australia.