by Philip St. Raymond

WE ARE very pleased to present here a new American Mercury video based on the widely reprinted 2013 Mercury article by Bradford L. Huie, 100 Reasons Leo Frank Is Guilty, and using the audio book read by Miss Vanessa Neubauer as its basis. The article was written for our centenary retrospective of Mary Phagan’s 1913 murder. It provides in cinematic form an assessment of the Leo Frank case — perhaps the most amazing and intriguing murder mystery in American history — that simply cannot be found in the controlled media.

This ultra-high-resolution video is freely available to download so that you may keep it on your personal hard drive and re-upload to video sharing platforms.

Today, the noose of censorship is being pulled ever-tighter by a media/government complex that is desperate to keep its lies and its crimes hidden from the public. Thus this video — exposing one of the first major operations on American soil of that complex — is very timely and important today. The American Mercury is proud to, once again in our 97-year history, bear witness to the truth.

* * *

Source: Author

by H.L. Mencken (1926)

AMERICANISM, a term first used by John Witherspoon, president of Princeton University, in 1781, designates (a) any word or combination of words which taken into the English language in the United States, has not gained acceptance in England, or, if accepted, has retained its sense of foreignness; and (b) any word or combination of words which, becoming archaic in England, has continued in good usage in the United States. The first class is the larger and has the longer history. The earliest settlers in Virginia and New England, confronted by plants and animals that were unfamiliar to them, either borrowed the Indian names or invented names of their own.

Examples are afforded by raccoon (1608), chinkapin (1608), opossum (1610) and squash (1642) among Indian words and by bull-frog, canvas-back, cat-bird and live-oak among inventions. The former tended to take anglicised forms. Thus the Indian isquontersquash (at least, that is how the early chroniclers recorded it) became squantersquash and was then reduced to squash, and otchock became woodchuck. Many other words came in as the pioneers gained familiarity with the Indian life. Such words as hominy, moccasin, pone, tapioca and succotash remain everyday Americanisms.

The archaisms, of course, showed themselves more slowly. They had to go out of use in England before their survival in America was noticeable. But by the beginning of the 18th century there was already a considerable body of them, and all through that century they increased. The English language in Great Britain, chiefly under the influence of pedantry in the age of Anne, was changing rapidly, but in America it was holding to its old forms. There was very little fresh emigration to the colonies, and their own people seldom visited England. Thus by the end of the century “I guess” was already an Americanism, though it had been in almost universal use in England in Shakespeare’s day. So, too, with many other verbs: to wilt, to whittle, to fellowship and to approbate. And with not a few adjectives: burly, catty-cornered, likely and clever (in the sense of amiable). And with multitudes of nouns: cesspool, greenhorn, cordwood, jeans, flap-jack, bay-window, swingle-tree, muss (in the sense of a row), stock (for cattle) and fall (for autumn).

Meanwhile, American English had begun to borrow words, chiefly nouns, from the non-English settlers, and to develop many new words of its own. To the former class the Dutch contributed cruller, cold-slaw, cockey, scow, boss, smearcase and Santa Claus, and the French contributed gopher, prairie, chowder, carry-all and bureau (a chest of drawers). Other contributions came from the Germans of Pennsylvania, the Spaniards of the southwest, and negro slaves. The native coinages were large in number, and full of boldness and novelty. To this period belong, for example, backwoods, hoe-cake, pop-corn, land-slide, shell-road, half-breed, hired-girl, spelling-bee, moss-back, crazy-quilt, stamping-ground and cat-boat. These words were all made of the common materials of English, but there was something in them that was redolent of a pioneer people and a new world. In their coinage the elegances were disdained; the thing aimed at was simply vividness. At the same time, verbs were made out of nouns, nouns out of verbs and adjectives out of both.

In 1789 Benjamin Franklin, who had lived in England, denounced to advocate, to progress and to oppose as barbarisms, but all of them are good American to-day, and even good English. Noah Webster, the lexicographer, gave his imprimatur to to appreciate (in value); to eventuate was popularised by Gouverneur Morris; and no less a hero than Washington is said to have launched to derange. Many inventions of that daring era have succumbed to pedagogical criticism, e.g., to happify, to compromit and to homologise. But others equally harsh have gradually gained acceptance, e.g., to placate and to deputise. And with them have come in a vast number of characteristic American nouns, e.g., breadstuffs, mileage, balance (in the sense of remainder) and elevator (a place for storing grain).

Divergent meanings of words

It was during the same period that a number of important words, in daily use, began to show different meanings in England and America. Some familiar examples are store, rock, lumber and corn. What Englishmen call a shop was called a store by Americans as early as 1770, and long before that time corn, in American, had come to signify, not grains in general, but only maize. The use of rock to designate any stone, however small, goes back still further, and so does the use of lumber for timber. Many of these differences were produced by changes in English usage. Thus cracker, in England, once meant precisely what it now means in the United States. When the English abandoned it for biscuit the Americans stuck to cracker, and used biscuit to designate something else. How shoe came to be substituted in America for the English boot has yet to be determined. There is indeed much that remains obscure in the early history of such Americanisms. Until very lately, American philologians kept aloof from the subject, which they apparently regarded as low. Until George P. Krapp, of Columbia University, took it up, there was not even any serious investigation of the history of American pronunciation.

Thus the American dialect of English was firmly established by the time the Republic was well started, and in the half-century following it departed more and more from standard English. The settlement of the West, by taking large numbers of young men beyond the pale of urbane society, made for grotesque looseness in speech. Neologisms of the most extravagant sorts arose by the thousand, and many of them worked their way back to the East. During the two decades before the Civil War everyday American became almost unintelligible to an Englishman; every English visitor marked and denounced its vagaries. It was bold and lawless in its vocabulary, careless of grammatical niceties, and further disfigured by a drawling manner of speech. The congressional debates of the time were full of its phrases; soon they were to show themselves in the national literature.

Policing the language

After the Civil War there was an increase of national self-consciousness, and efforts were made to police the language. Free schools multiplied in the land, and the schoolmarm revealed all her immemorial preciosity. A clan of professional grammarians arose, led by Richard Grant White; it got help from certain of the literati, including Lowell. The campaign went to great lengths. “It is me” was banned as barbarous, though it is perfectly sound historically; eye-ther was substituted in polite usage for ee-ther, though the latter is correct and the former is on the part of an American an absurd affectation.

But the spirit of the language, and of the American people no less, was against such reforms. They were attacked on philological grounds by such iconoclasts as Thomas R. Lounsbury; they were reduced to vanity by the unconquerable speech habits of the folk. Under the very noses of the purists a new and vigorous American slang came into being, and simultaneously the common speech began to run amok. That common speech is to-day almost lawless. As Ring Lardner reports it–and he reports it very accurately–it seems destined in a few generations to dispose altogether of the few inflections that remain in English. “Me and her woulda went” will never, perhaps, force its way into the grammar-books, but it is used daily, or something like it, by a large part of the people of the United States, and the rest know precisely what it means.

On higher levels the language of the Americans is more decorous, but even there it is a genuinely living speech, taking in loan-words with vast hospitality and incessantly manufacturing neologisms of its own. The argot of sport enriches it almost daily. It runs to brilliantly vivid tropes. It is disdainful of grammatical pruderies. In the face of a new situation the American shows a far greater linguistic resourcefulness and daring than the Englishman. Movie is obviously better than cinema, just as cow-catcher is better than plough and job-holder is better than public-servant. The English seldom devise anything as pungent as rubber-neck, ticket-scalper, lame-duck, pork-barrel, boot-legger or steam-roller (in its political sense). Such exhilarating novelties are produced in the United States every day, and large numbers of them come into universal use, and gradually take on literary dignity. They are opposed violently, but they prevail. The visiting Englishman finds them very difficult. They puzzle him even more than do American peculiarities of pronunciation.

Of late the increase of travel and other inter-communication between England and America has tended to halt the differentiation of the two dialects. It was more marked, perhaps, before the World War than since. But if it ever vanishes altogether the fact will mark a victory for American. The American cinema floods England (and the rest of the English-speaking world) with American neologisms, but there is very little movement in the other direction. Thus the tail begins to wag the dog. How far the change has gone may be observed in Australia. There a cockneyfied pronunciation holds out, but the American vocabulary is increasingly triumphant. In Canada it long ago overcame the last vestiges of opposition.

Bibliography

There is no satisfactory dictionary of Americanisms. The best is Richard H. Thornton’s American Glossary (1912), but it is based wholly on written records and is thus incomplete. George Philip Krapp’s The English Language in America (1925) is valuable to the student of American pronunciation, and contains much miscellaneous matter of interest, but there are gaps in it, and the author opposes his own evidence by arguing that English and American show few important differences. An extensive bibliography is in H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, 3rd ed. (1923). In 1925 Dr. Louise Pound, of the University of Nebraska, began the publication of a monthly, American Speech (Baltimore).

by H.L. Mencken

THIS preposterous quackery flourishes lushIy in the back reaches of the Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities. As the old-time family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six months, often by correspondence. In Los Angeles the Damned, there are probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more generally esteemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs; there are even chiropractic “hospitals.” The Mormons who pour in from the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these “hospitals” copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers. That pathology is grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by pressure of misplaced vertebrae upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord — in other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This, plainly enough, is buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic pummeling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly damned.

Both doctrines were launched upon the world by an old quack named Andrew T. Still, the father of osteopathy. For years the osteopaths merchanted them, and made money at the trade. But as they grew opulent they grew ambitious, i.e., they began to study anatomy and physiology. The result was a gradual abandonment of Papa Still’s ideas. The high-toned osteopath of today is a sort of eclectic. He tries anything that promises to work, from tonsillectomy to the x-rays. With four years’ training behind him, he probably knows more anatomy than the average graduate of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, or at all events, more osteology. Thus enlightened, he seldom has much to say about pinched nerves in the back. But as he abandoned the Still revelation it was seized by the chiropractors, led by another quack, one Palmer. This Palmer grabbed the pinched nerve nonsense and began teaching it to ambitious farm-hands and out-at-elbow Baptist preachers in a few easy lessons. Today the backwoods swarm with chiropractors, and in most States they have been able to exert enough pressure on the rural politicians to get themselves licensed. (It is not altogether a matter of pressure. Large numbers of rustic legislators are themselves believers in chiropractic. So are many members of Congress.) Any lout with strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits — retired baseball players, work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious preachers, cashiered school superintendents. Now and then a quack of some other school — say homeopathy — plunges into it. Hundreds of promising students come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.

Such quackeries suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal. When these botched fall into the hands of competent medical men they are very likely to be patched up and turned loose upon the world, to beget their kind. But massaged along the backbone to cure their lues (syphylis), they quickly pass into the last stages, and so their pathogenic heritage perishes with them. What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers. That the labors of quacks tend to propagate epidemics and so menace the lives of all of us, as is alleged by their medical opponents — this I doubt. The fact is that most infectious diseases of any seriousness throw out such alarming symptoms and so quickly that no sane chiropractor is likely to monkey with them. Seeing his patient breaking out in pustules, or choking, or falling into a stupor, he takes to the woods at once, and leaves the business to the nearest medical man. His trade is mainly with ambulant patients; they must come to his studio for treatment. Most of them have lingering diseases; they tour all the neighborhood doctors before they reach him. His treatment, being nonsensical, is in accord with the divine plan. It is seldom, perhaps, that he actually kills a patient, but at all events he keeps many a worthy soul from getting well.

The osteopaths, I fear, are finding this new competition serious and unpleasant. As I have said, it was their Hippocrates, the late Dr. Still, who invented all of the thrusts, lunges, yanks, hooks and bounces that the lowly chiropractors now employ with such vast effect, and for years the osteopaths had a monopoly of them. But when they began to grow scientific and ambitious their course of training was lengthened until it took in all sorts of tricks and dodges borrowed from the regular doctors, or resurrection men, including the plucking of tonsils, adenoids, and appendices, the use of the stomach-pump, and even some of the legerdemain of psychiatry. They now harry their students furiously, and turn them out ready for anything from growing hair on a bald head to frying a patient with the x-rays. All this new striving, of course, quickly brought its inevitable penalties. The osteopathic graduate, having sweated so long, was no longer willing to take a case of delirium tremens for $2, and in consequence he lost patients. Worse, very few aspirants could make the long grade. The essence of osteopathy itself could be grasped by any lively farmhand or night watchman in a few weeks, but the borrowed magic baffled him. Confronted by the phenomenon of gastrulation, or by the curious behavior of heart muscles, or by any of the current theories of immunity, he commonly took refuge, like his brother of the orthodox faculty, in a gulp of laboratory alcohol, or fled the premises altogether. Thus he was lost to osteopathic science, and the chiropractors took him in; nay, they welcomed him. He was their meat. Borrowing that primitive part of osteopathy which was comprehensible to the meanest understanding, they threw the rest overboard, at the same time denouncing it as a sorcery invented by the Medical Trust. Thus they gathered in the garage mechanics, ash-men, and decayed welterweights, and the land began to fill with their graduates. Now there is a chiropractor at every crossroads.

I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygiene, which now seeks to make imbeciles immortal. If a man, being ill of a pus appendix, resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney’s spot and playing on his vertebrae as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven. And if that same man, having achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its diphtheria by pulling its neck, then I do not resist the divine will that there shall be one less radio fan later on. In such matters, I am convinced, the laws of nature are far better guides than the fiats and machinations of medical busybodies. If the latter gentlemen had their way, death, save at the hands of hangmen, policemen, and other such legalized assassins, would be abolished altogether, and the present differential in favor of the enlightened would disappear. I can’t convince myself that would work any good to the world. On the contrary, it seems to me that the current coddling of the half-witted should be stopped before it goes too far if, indeed, it has not gone too far already. To that end nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the prosperity of quacks. Every time a bottle of cancer oil goes through the mails Homo americanus is improved to that extent. And every time a chiropractor spits on his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone the same high end is achieved.

But chiropractic, of course, is not perfect. It has superb potentialities, but only too often they are not converted into concrete cadavers. The hygienists rescue many of its foreordained customers, and, turning them over to agents of the Medical Trust, maintained at the public expense, get them cured. Moreover, chiropractic itself is not certainly fatal: even an Iowan with diabetes may survive its embraces. Yet worse, I have a suspicion that it sometimes actually cures. For all I know (or any orthodox pathologist seems to know) it may be true that certain malaises are caused by the pressure of vagrant vertebra upon the spinal nerves. And it may be true that a hearty ex-boilermaker, by a vigorous yanking and kneading, may be able to relieve that pressure. What is needed is a scientific inquiry into the matter, under rigid test conditions, by a committee of men learned in the architecture and plumbing of the body, and of a high and incorruptible sagacity. Let a thousand patients be selected, let a gang of selected chiropractors examine their backbones and determine what is the matter with them, and then let these diagnoses be checked up by the exact methods of scientific medicine. Then let the same chiropractors essay to cure the patients whose maladies have been determined. My guess is that the chiropractors’ errors in diagnosis will run to at least 95% and that their failures in treatment will push 99%. But I am willing to be convinced.

Where is there is such a committee to be found? I undertake to nominate it at ten minutes’ notice. The land swarms with men competent in anatomy and pathology, and yet not engaged as doctors. There are thousands of hospitals, with endless clinical material. I offer to supply the committee with cigars and music during the test. I offer, further, to supply both the committee and the chiropractors with sound wet goods. I offer, finally, to give a bawdy banquet to the whole Medical Trust at the conclusion of the proceedings.

* * *

Source: Author

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.

CHAPTER 20 of Robert Griffin’s The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds — read this week by Vanessa Neubauer in our continuing series — deals with Dr. William Luther Pierce and his publication of Which Way Western Man? by philosopher William Gayley Simpson (pictured).

Click here for all the chapters of this book that we’ve published so far.

Why did William Simpson strongly identify, during the first phase of his career, with St. Francis of Assisi? What was the significance of Friedrich Nietzsche in Simpson’s life? Why did both Pierce and Simpson conclude that Christianity was a religion unfit for White people? Did Simpson and Pierce then inevitably turn to atheism or hedonism? You’re about to find out.

Today we rejoin Vanessa Neubauer in her reading of this week’s installment, chapter 20, of Professor Robert S. Griffin’s masterful biography of Dr. William Luther Pierce, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds.

How did Dr. Pierce, an American scientist and academic, come to found the most influential racial-nationalist organization in America? What were his goals? To what extent did he succeed? Listen in to this fascinating intellectual journey by pressing the play button above (or at the end of this article).

This audio book will be published in weekly chapter installments on The American Mercury and will be available from the Mercury as a full-length audio book when the series is completed.

One of the most original — and controversial — thinkers of the 20th century was White nationalist, novelist, and founder of a new European religion, Cosmotheism, Dr. William L. Pierce.

The only real biography of Dr. Pierce is Professor Robert S. Griffin’s The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds, which was published in 2001. This week we continue with the 20th chapter — “William Gayley Simpson” — of the book. Experience William Pierce, the writer, the philosopher, the radical — and the builder of an intentional White community in the mountains of West Virginia — just as Robert Griffin experienced him, by pressing the play button now.

Even more than 100 years later, we are still feeling the repercussions of this case — which led to the founding of the prominent Jewish pressure group, the ADL, and which profoundly influenced the course of Jewish-Gentile relations in the United States.

This new audio book series encompasses the American Mercury’s extensive coverage of the 1913 Frank trial. We are presenting the extensive arguments, both for the defense and the prosecution, in order and in full — a monumental, book-length project. Today’s presentation is the sixth and last section of Hugh Dorsey’s final statement.

Click on the “play” button to listen to the audio book, read by Vanessa Neubauer.

Mr. Dorsey powerfully recounts all the evidence in the case that sustains Jim Conley’s version of events (the Frank forces were, by this time, attempting to frame Conley for the crime):

But yet you say Conley is impeached? You went thoroughly into this man Conley ‘s previous life. You found out every person for whom he had worked, and yet this lousy, disreputable negro is unimpeached by any man except somebody that’s got a hand in the till of the National Pencil Company, unimpeached as to general bad character, except by the hirelings of the National Pencil Company. And yet you would have this jury, in order to turn this man loose, over-ride the facts of this case and say that Conley committed this murder, when all you have ever been able to dig up against him is disorderly conduct in the Police Court.

Is Conley sustained? Abundantly. Our proof of general bad character, the existence of such character as can reasonably be supposed to cause one to commit an act like we charge, our proof of general bad character, I say, sustains Jim Conley. Our proof of general bad character as to lasciviousness not even denied by a single witness, sustains Jim Conley. Your failure to cross-examine and develop the source of information of these girls put upon the stand by the State,–these “hare-brained fanatics,” as Mr. Arnold called them, without rhyme or reason, sustains Jim Conley. Your failure to cross-examine our character witnesses with reference to this man’s character for lasciviousness sustains Jim Conley. His relations with Miss Rebecca Carson, the lady on the fourth floor, going into the ladies’ dressing room even in broad daylight and during working hours, as sustained by Miss Kitchens. His relations with Miss Rebecca Carson, who is shown to have gone into the ladies’ dressing room, even in broad daylight and during work hours, by witnesses whose names I can’t call right now, sustains Jim Conley. Your own witness, Miss Jackson, who says that this libertine and rake came, when these girls were in there reclining and lounging after they had finished their piece work, and tells of the sardonic grin that lit his countenance, sustains Jim Conley. Miss Kitchens, the lady from the fourth floor, that, in spite of the repeated assertion made by Mr. Arnold, you didn’t produce, and her account of this man’s conduct when he came in there on these girls, whom he should have protected and when he should have been the last man to go in that room, sustains Jim Conley; and Miss Jackson’s assertion that she heard of three or four other instances and that complaint was made to the foreladies in charge, sustains Jim Conley. Darley and Mattie Smith, as to what they did even on the morning of Saturday, April 26th, even going into the minutest details, sustain Jim Conley. McCrary, the old negro that you praised so highly, the man that keeps his till filled by money paid by the National Pencil Company, as to where he put his stack of hay and the time of day he drew his pay, sustains Jim Conley. Monteen Stover, as to the easy-walking shoes she wore when she went up into this man’s Frank’s room, at the very minute he was back there in the metal department with this poor little unfortunate girl, sustains Jim Conley. Monteen Stover, when she tells you that she found nobody in that office, sustains Jim Conley, when he says that he heard little Mary Phagan go into the office, heard the footsteps of the two as they went to the rear, he heard the scream and he saw the dead body because Monteen says there was nobody in the office, and Jim says she went up immediately after Mary had gone to the rear. Lemmie Quinn, your own dear Lemmie,– as to the time he went up and went down into the streets with the evidence of Mrs. Freeman and Hall, sustains Jim Conley. Frank’s statement that he would consult his attorneys about Quinn’s statement that he had visited him in his office sustains Jim Conley. Dalton, sustained as to his life for the last ten years, here in this community and in DeKalb, when he stated that he had seen Jim watching before on Saturdays and holidays, sustains Jim Conley. Daisy Hopkins’ awful reputation and the statement of Jim, that he had seen her go into that factory with Dalton, and down that scuttle hole to the place where that cot is shown to have been, sustains Jim Conley. The blood on the second floor, testified to by numerous witnesses, sustains Jim Conley. The appearance of the blood, the physical conditions of the floor when the blood was found Monday morning, sustains Jim Conley. The testimony of Holloway, which he gave in the affidavit before he appreciated the importance, coupled with the statement of Boots Rogers that that elevator box was unlocked, sustains Jim Conley. Ivey Jones, the man who says he met him in close proximity to the pencil factory on the day this murder was committed, the time he says he left that place, sustains Jim Conley. Albert McKnight, who testified as to the length of time that this man Frank remained at home, and the fact that he hurried back to the factory, sustains Jim Conley. The repudiated affidavit, made to the police, in the presence of Craven and Pickett, of Minola McKnight, the affidavit which George Gordon, the lawyer, with the knowledge that he could get a habeas corpus and take her within thirty minutes out of the custody of the police, but which he sat there and allowed her to make,. sustains Jim Conley. The use of that cord, found in abundance, to choke this girl to death, sustains Jim Conley. The existence of the notes alone sustains Jim Conley, because no negro ever in the history of the race, after having perpetrated rape or robbery, ever wrote a note to cover up the crime. The note paper on which it is written, paper found in abundance on the office floor and near the office of this man Frank, sustains Jim Conley.

You can follow along with the original text here.

Mr. Dorsey also sums up the case against Frank dramatically:

Gentlemen, every act of that defendant proclaims him guilty. Gentlemen, every word of that defendant proclaims him responsible for the death of this little factory girl. Gentlemen, every circumstances in this case proves him guilty of this crime. Extraordinary? Yes, but nevertheless true, just as true as Mary Phagan is dead.

She died a noble death, not a blot on her name. She died because she wouldn’t yield her virtue to the demands of her Superintendent. I have no purpose and have never had from the beginning in this case that you oughtn’t to have, as an honest, upright citizen of this community. In the language of Daniel Webster, I desire to remind you “that when a jury, through whimsical and unfounded scruples, suffers the guilty to escape, they make themselves answerable for the augmented danger to the innocent.”

Your Honor, I have done my duty. I have no apology to make. Your Honor, so far as the State is concerned, may now charge this jury,–this jury who have sworn that they were impartial and unbiased, this jury who, in this presence, have taken the oath that they would well and truly try the issue formed on this bill of indictment between the State of Georgia and Leo M. Frank, charged with the murder of Mary Phagan; and I predict, may it please Your Honor, that under the law that you give in charge and under the honest opinion of the jury of the evidence produced, there can be but one verdict, and that is: We the jury find the defendant, Leo M. Frank, guilty! guilty! guilty!

Click here for a list of all the chapters we’ve published in audio form so far — keep checking back, they will be updated regularly!

Here is a description of the full series which will be posted as audio in future weeks; once all segments have been released, the Mercury will be offering for sale a complete, downloadable audio book of the full series.

1. Introduction

100 Years Ago Today: The Trial of Leo Frank Begins

2. WEEK 1

The Leo Frank Trial: Week One

3. WEEK 2

The Leo Frank Trial: Week Two

4. WEEK 3

The Leo Frank Trial: Week Three

5. Leo Frank mounts the witness stand by Ann Hendon

100 Years Ago Today: Leo Frank Takes the Stand

6. Week 4

The Leo Frank Trial: Week Four

7. Closing arguments of Rosser, Arnold and Hooper

The Leo Frank Trial: Closing Arguments of Hooper, Arnold, and Rosser

8. Closing arguments of Hugh Dorsey

The Leo Frank Trial: Closing Arguments, Solicitor Dorsey

Be sure to look for next week’s installment here at The American Mercury as we continue to follow the trial that changed the South – changed America – and changed the world.

THE National Longitudinal Study indicates that the impact of Affirmative Action laws and diversity-enhancing public policy is far different from that imagined by most Americans. Instead of being over-represented (which equality advocates often view as something in need of “correction”), European-Americans of both sexes and all IQ groups are increasingly under-represented in the economy and are discriminated against in terms of income and higher education. Jewish-Americans are dramatically over-represented.

Most white Americans believe that the vast array of race preferences only effect those whites in lower socioeconomic levels — those in the bottom 20% by IQ and income. Most Whites at the highest socioeconomic levels believe that only the proverbial six or seven Whites denied admission to the University of Michigan Law School because of their race — or others whose stories make it into the media — are adversely affected.

We are going to test those typical thoughts and attitudes against data maintained by the United States Department of Labor, which maintains an elaborate census based on statistical sampling called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY ’79). Over 155,000 youths were surveyed by telephone and 12,686 were finally selected as representative samples to be given an IQ test and then interviewed annually or bi-annually for the rest of their lives to track their progress.

Comparing outcomes for the entire population is misleading because of significant differences in average age (income increases with age) and significant differences in average IQ or ability. Only by comparing racial groups at the same age and ability level can you determine whether race preferences created by the “Civil Rights” laws produce distributive justice, or whether they produce subordination and exploitation.

All of the NLSY’79 interviewees grew up after the racial preferences were put in place by the Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, and after implementation of massive school redistricting, school bussing, and massive Federal expenditure on Operation Head Start designed to eliminate racially unequal educational outcomes. Thus, we have the ability to test the relative education and incomes of the races at the same age and IQ level after massive Federal intervention and remediation for the supposed purpose of reducing the inequality of the races. So let us compare our attitudes and assumptions with the data.

Median Income – Males

Above we see the income results for the top 2% of the population by IQ for males. The top 2% includes all those who have an IQ of 130 or above. As you can see, white males do significantly worse than their competitors. Jews are the only ethnic group which has benefited from or escaped the consequences of the racial preference schemes enacted by our Federal Government. All other white ethnic origins are grouped together in a very narrow range with outcomes very similar to the overall white average. So where are the undeserved privileges we hear so much about ??

Above we see the same pattern (in incomes for the 90-97% IQ range) but with somewhat less dramatic differences between races. Once again, whites are at the bottom.

Above we see very dramatic differences in median income for the remainder of the top quarter of the population by IQ. Where are the undeserved privileges we hear so much about?

Below the top 25%, the pattern for males shifts, with white males doing better than blacks but not as well as Hispanics or Jews. Contrary to popular opinion, race preferences have the greatest impact on white males in the top quarter of the population IQ range — at the highest socioeconomic levels.

Here we see the same pattern, with Hispanic males (the largest minority group) doing significantly better than white males, but with black males doing marginally worse. We are beginning to see “small sample” effects here as there are only a few Jews in the sample (and relatively few in the Jewish population at large) below the population median IQ.

Same pattern for the bottom quartile of the population by IQ. But note that Hispanic males earn substantially more income at every IQ level than do white males of the same IQ.

Median Income – Females

Here we see a familiar pattern for females in the top 2% by IQ. The income differences between racial groups for females are much larger than for males, with white women at the top of the IQ spectrum earning only 30% of what Hispanic females earn at the same IQ level. In a very large sample of over 3000 blacks, there were no black females who scored in the top 2% of the population.

Here we see the same dramatic occupational and pay discrimination against white females in the top 10% of the IQ spectrum. Is the statutory inclusion of “women” as a protected class under “civil rights” laws just eyewash and a diversion intended to focus white female anger at white males rather than upon real threats to their economic well being?

We get the same pattern for the remainder of the top quarter, but with a “small sample” effect for the Jewish females in that IQ group.

Here, the experience for white females begins to deviate dramatically from those of white males, as white females in the lower IQ groups earn significantly less than their racial competitors at the same IQ levels.

While white men in this IQ category do reasonably well compared with their racial counterparts at the same IQ level, white females do dramatically worse. Ironically, opinion polls show that white females generally support the race preference schemes called “Affirmative Action,” perhaps because white females are entirely unaware of these data.

Again, the same pattern (but with only one Jewish woman in the sample with an IQ in the bottom 24% of the population). If we were to deduce the purpose of the race preference system in the United States based on outcomes — as opposed to wishful thinking and proclaimed intentions — it would be to exploit white females from top to bottom. A secondary purpose of the race preference system in the United States would be to disadvantage and displace white males at the top of the ability and IQ spectrum.

Those of you who are awake and alert may have noticed in the above series of income slides that median income for white women is less than for white men at the same age and IQ level. However, most of the white females in the NLSY ’79 sample marry, and as you will note from this chart, when the husband and wife’s incomes are added together (R+S), white females do better than white males at all IQ levels except the top 2%. A comparison of the black with violet bars gives you a comparison of male and female only income, while a comparison of the yellow bars with the red bars gives you a comparison of male and female family income. This chart shows that a prudent marriage is just as important in the 21st century as it was back in 1815 when Jane Austen wrote her famous novels such as Pride and Prejudice. “R” stands for “respondent” or survey participant, while R+S stands for respondent and spouse. The median income for R+S includes those who never married and those now divorced, thus lowering the difference between single and family incomes in the slide.

Education – A mind is a terrible thing to waste

A complex society needs high IQ people to administer its activities and to solve its problems. Thus, everyone in the top 2% IQ group should go college and receive at least a four-year degree, and the overwhelming majority should receive graduate and professional degrees. As you can see, in contrast to their racial competitors, nearly 15% of whites in this top IQ group fail to get a four-year degree. Again, whites in this top IQ group do worse than those in competing racial groups. So much for white over-representation on campuses.

Drilling down into the nearly 15% of whites in the top 2% IQ group who do not get four-year degrees, we see that nearly 9% of whites at that IQ get a high school diploma only, with no college. A bright mind is indeed a terrible thing to waste, and the study indicates it is the bright white gentile minds that are being denied educational opportunities, at significant costs to our country. This chart, and the preceding one, suggest that there would be no need for the H-1b visas for foreign engineers, programmers, and doctors if the abilities of so many talented, high IQ whites were not being overlooked or excluded from appropriate educational opportunities. Indeed, it is only the existence of the H-1b visas that limits the horrific costs of this waste of high IQ talent and permits its continuance. H-1b visas are necessary to the scheme which you so clearly see in these charts to displace and subordinate high IQ white males.

With the exception of the above chart, all charts in this section on four-year degrees include all those who go on and receive graduate and professional degrees.

Here we begin to see evidence of genuine undeserved privilege in terms of admissions and grading that lead to four-year degrees for those in the 75th to 89th percentile IQ group. Notice how much better Jews do than those groups entitled to explicit racial preference.

Still more evidence of genuine undeserved privilege is seen here, despite it being the opposite of “conventional wisdom” on the subject.

In this chart we see compelling evidence of actual undeserved privilege as opposed to the propaganda version that is so widely preached in our Universities. We also see compelling evidence of a “back door” to college admission which must be operating for those who, while not entitled to explicit preferences, nevertheless seem to do much better at these lower IQs than the racial groups that are entitled to explicit preferences. There is, at best, only marginal utility for society in having people from this IQ group receive a college education. However, there may be significant individual benefit if a degree is required for a job in government or the non-profit sector of the economy — but only if the individuals know in advance that they will have connections in those bureaucracies willing to prefer them for such jobs.

Graduate and Professional

No surprises in this top IQ group. The chart merely continues a pattern seen in the charts for undergraduate degrees.

Again, no surprises in this IQ group that rounds out the top 10%.

As expected, the greatest preferences are going to show up in the IQ group which can only provide marginal candidates for PhD degrees. The surprise is the percentage of Jews in what, for them, is a lower IQ group — more than double the percentage of white gentiles.

We switch now to professional degrees — doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc. — and, as you can see, Jews receive more than double the percentage of professional degrees awarded to Hispanics and whites.

In the remainder of the top 10% of our population by IQ a lower percentage of whites attain professional degrees than do Hispanics, blacks and Jews — a clear consequence of race preferences — explicit preferences in the case of Blacks and Hispanics and possibly preferences by administrators exercising their administrative discretion in the case of Jews, who do not fall under explicit preferential laws or policies.

It is in the remainder of the top quartile below the top ten percent mark that we see dramatic evidence of discrimination in favor of the constituent groups within the “Affirmative Action” coalition and against white gentiles.

And once again, the big surprise is that Jews in this IQ range attain three times the percentage of professional degrees as white gentiles in the same IQ range.

In the previous slides in this section on education no distinction has been made as to the quality of the degrees or credentials received. We shift gears now and examine an “Ivy League” school, Harvard University. As you can see, the chart excludes a very large group of Asians, Arabs, North Africans, and North American Indians. The table sets forth data from reliable sources published prior the first Internet exposure of this under-representation. Since that time, Harvard’s racial and ethnic reports have fallen victim to a variant of the Heisenberg principle, namely that reports of politically sensitive demographic data seem to change rapidly once the data are observed. Harvard is now reporting much higher percentages of “whites” but steadfastly refuses to define precisely what that term means — and why their definition has changed recently. Does Harvard’s notion of who is “white” include students from India, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, for example? For purposes of this slide we took Harvard’s 1996 report of whites and subtracted Hillel’s report of Jews in attendance to determine the number of European-descended students.

It is clear that Jewish birth rates are so low that the numbers of Jews admitted to Harvard must be in decline in the 21st Century. However, until Harvard stops hiding the ball, their new data can only be greeted with continuing suspicion.

We see a similar pattern of under-representation in the top 15 universities as ranked by U.S. News and World Report using data from Hillel and Princeton Review.

Finally we see that the NLSY ’79 made the mistake of asking about financial aid received in 1984. The results were so embarrassing that they never asked that survey question again. The chart shows scholarship grants or tuition reductions only, and does not include loans or work study (which really is no aid at all). The chart includes only those in the top 10% IQ group — where the case for financial aid is most compelling. As you can see, on average American colleges are lying when they say that they provide more aid to students in poverty than to those from middle and upper income families. It is only Hispanics and Blacks in poverty status who get more than middle class students of the same race. The discrepancy for Jews may be attributable to the level of support available from the very well funded Jewish charities.

Regarding the above chart on financial aid, high IQ among the poor is overwhelmingly a white gentile phenomenon, and it is these students who get less financial aid than middle class white gentiles. It is a huge and highly destructive waste of talent. Percents on the Y axis are expressed as decimal fractions of the number one.

Wealth Accumulation

The slide above shows the average net worth of survey participants in each racial group in the top 2% by IQ. There is a data field in which survey participants report their net worth, and a data field for each type of asset — stocks, bonds, houses, rental real estate, business interests, etc., as well as a field for each type of debt — mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, margin, and business debts. An overwhelming number of participants seriously under-report their net worth, and so the slides in this section were prepared by summing the individual asset data fields and then summing and subtracting the debt data fields for each participant for each interview year, and then taking the highest year’s net worth for each individual. Note that the data ends with the 1996 interview year in which the oldest participants were 41 years old, before the effects of inheritance would become significant and before the stock market boom of the late nineties made it easy for those in the right place at the right time to become wealthy. Thus, the income and wealth charts reflect early career rewards for individual effort and “connections,” the latter possibly being very important among members of highly ethnocentric and wealthy groups.

It is in the remainder of this top 10% that we see the real potential power of the previously-mentioned “connections” — and also a source of significant political power, and power to influence admission to private universities. Members of the wealthiest ethnic group are far more likely to become important, prosperous alumni and contribute generously to the university endowment. Note that Hispanics have a higher net worth than whites in this IQ category.

Outside of the top 10% by IQ, the difference between Jews and other racial groups — while still substantial — decreases. Note in particular the relatively low wealth accumulation by blacks at this IQ level, a level at which the most strenuous effects of preferences in their favor are seen in the charts above. Could this lack of savings be caused by a sense that saving is unnecessary because of the safety net that preferences provide?

At this second quartile IQ level, wealth most probably consists mostly of housing rather than savings. But we may also be witnessing lower wealth levels as a measure of “present-orientation” rather than future orientation. You will notice that the average net worth for whites is remarkably similar from the top down to the 50th percentile by IQ.  High IQ does not seem to confer the same wealth accumulation advantage to whites as it does to Jews. When contrasted with the advantage that high IQ confers upon white median income, this suggests that whites are motivated by visible status markers and only to a much lesser degree by the power of savings and wealth — which is largely invisible to their neighbors and co-workers. If you look carefully, you will notice that high IQ does confer a significant advantage in wealth accumulation on Hispanics.

The Big Picture

Above is a chart showing the distribution of the Jewish, Black, Hispanic and White survey populations arrayed by percentage of that population in each 5% IQ decrement beginning with the top 5% at the front left of the slide and the bottom 5% at the right rear. Looking at this chart, is is obvious that only one group within the racial preferences coalition has the capacity to strategize, finance, lead and administer that system. However, such a conclusion would not be obvious absent the preceding slides which show how well that group has prospered under the system they created. In addition you can see reasons that racial harmony and assimilation might be well-nigh impossible to achieve in the United States, as the black and Hispanic populations are overwhelmingly concentrated in the bottom half of the IQ spectrum.

In this slide, the Y axis is the average number of children, and as you can see from the completed black fertility rates, blacks in the top half of the IQ spectrum are way below replacement averaging around 1.3 children per woman. It is only in the bottom quartile, those with IQs below 85 that the black population is slightly above replacement. Thus, the black population in the U.S. is facing demographic catastrophe as differential birth rates by IQ render that population less and less competent with every generation. This fertility pattern guarantees ever escalating demands for more preferences and more wealth transfers from the white population. Racial harmony may be doomed.

Above is a chart which shows that white gentiles who are unaware of their European ethnic origins have lower median incomes than do all whites in the IQ category. NLSY ’79 does not poll participants for their views on race, but this data suggests that caring enough about ones ethnic origins to be aware of them is a marker of high status relative to atomized individuals who do not care enough to know about their roots. The chart strongly suggests that racial awareness is a marker of high status — another indicator that current public policies of enforcing preferences and insisting on “racial harmony” are doomed.

Here we see that white fertility in all IQ groups is below replacement and that birthrates of white women in the top half of the IQ spectrum are at catastrophic levels. With far fewer high IQ whites available in future generations, the slide of the U.S., into Third World status will be rapid by historical standards, but slow and painful for the individuals involved. An increasing danger will be the prospect of high IQ white youth leaving the U.S. and emigrating to those countries in Europe with the highest birthrates at the upper end of the IQ spectrum, the lowest support costs for low-IQ minorities, and a governing elite that shares racial kinship (and hence empathy) with its native population.

Even if one tried, it would be hard to design a more socially and politically unstable society than the one illustrated in the above slide and in this study generally. The elites who control the media and what Rasmussen calls the “political class” are well aware of the potential for volatility and conflict within this unfortunate racial and ethnic construct. That is why the elite enforces its semi-cryptic system of censorship on racial matters so vigorously in the U.S., and desperately pounds into our heads the “moral imperative” of tolerance toward this volatile and ultimately doomed mix.

Thus far, the founding population of the United States has been willing to concede substantial economic and educational advantages to minorities in order to buy temporary peace, while remaining largely oblivious to the costs and the escalating burdens as they themselves fall into minority status. Is the nascent Tea Party movement partly a consequence of the rising discontent of this population group? Is the gradual shift in attitude of minority populations from one of desiring assimilation (the “melting pot”) to one of demanding recognition of unique cultures (bilingualism, Afrocentrism, etc.) a sign of the ultimate breakup of America into its component peoples? Only time will tell.

The National Longitudinal Studies

(photo by simmbarb)

GIVING MORE power to the regime in Washington is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing to bring America back to economic health. Here’s the proposal I’m bringing to the table at Tea Party rallies across the country this week.

1. Reducing regulations is primary, since regulation is what stifles commerce: the more regulations, the more it costs our economy. Most regulations are used by big international corporations to reduce competition, and competition would help us get out of this depression.

2. End the “war on drugs.” Make them legal (increase competition, drive out organized crime) and sold at any drug store. Allow people to decide what to take in — or not take in — to their bodies. Those who make bad decisions will eventually be weeded from the gene pool, just as they should be. We don’t need a police state and a prison on every corner to solve this problem.

3. Eliminate the intrusive and privacy-destroying income tax; have the states ratify an amendment withdrawing the 16th Amendment. We could replace it with something similar to the http://fairtax.org proposal (a federal sales tax) with the same amendment that removes the income tax and abolishes the IRS (preferably a sales tax only on new items).

This will reduce the number of “tax crimes” that good, honest people are in jail for. The tax code is tens of thousands of pages and no human being alive has even read all of it, much less knows for sure if he has “obeyed” every jot and tittle. This is why politically-motivated prosecutors can put almost anyone in jail if they want to: they can always find some violation of some obscure provision in anyone’s 1040 confession sheet. Eliminating the income tax will take away that illegitimate power.

It will also promote green living because people will save more and waste less by buying second hand. They will repair and reuse and wear things out — rather than just discard and buy new.

This new tax policy will financially assault the drug dealers and pimps and other organized criminals by forcing them to have to pay taxes when they spend their money, which will further reduce the benefit of dealing in illegal trade. Right now we are taking money from people’s pay checks before they get them and at the same time we don’t tax drug dealers or pimps or illegals or other economic criminals at all. We are penalizing working Americans. A sales tax will also encourage saving money rather than encouraging the leveraging of every dime you can get, like the income tax does.

This will encourage people in the underground economy to become part of the real economy. It will stop most of the turf killings. It will ease our immigration problems, since illegals will suddenly find themselves paying the federal taxes they were evading before by hiding behind stolen or fictitious identities. Offer illegals less welfare and charge them tax — and they won’t be so eager to come here.

4. Then cut every single expenditure of the government by 10%, and begin to draw down troops immediately from around the world. Relocate half of our hundreds of foreign military bases to our southern border to help the Border Patrol do its job.

5. We don’t need the Washington regime to run our insurance or our pension plan. Make sure workers get back every dime they paid in (how about not one cent of foreign aid until every American worker gets his money back), but grandfather Social Security and Medicare out of existence.

6. Pass an amendment to the Constitution that makes all laws and treaties have a four year sunset clause, with each law or treaty needing to be approved by a separate roll call vote every four years — or cease to exist. As I stated above, our income tax code alone is so complex that no one actually knows what the law even is. That goes double for federal laws in general.

When we have so many laws, they end up being enforced arbitrarily and selectively (in addition to stifling freedom). When laws are so numerous and complex that they can — or must — be selectively enforced or ignored, we no longer have a government of laws. We have reverted to a government of men — exactly what the Founding Fathers were trying to avoid.

7. We need to give up our role as the policeman of the world. Let other nations fight their own fights, as they have for thousands of years. The very idea of forcing “regime change” on “bad” governments is ludicrous. Ninety per cent. of governments are “bad” by our standards, and the regime in Washington isn’t so hot either, come to think of it. But other peoples have other standards. Let them work out their revolutions, if they want them, for themselves.

8. There should be no welfare to banks or other corporations. And the fractional reserve banking system — wherein we allow bankers, including but not limited to the Fed, to create our money out of thin air and then charge us interest on it — needs to be replaced by a more honest and failure-proof system.

I don’t expect the system politicians in Washington to listen. The Republicans are just as much in bed with the financial predators as are the Democrats. And Fox News and its little pet teapots like Sarah Palin are owned by predator-in-chief Rupert Murdoch, for God’s sake. That’s why we need to build the Tea Party movement into a truly independent force. No compromise. We need our freedom and our country back.

I HAVE ALLUDED somewhat vaguely to the merits of democracy. One of them is quite obvious: it is, perhaps, the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. The latter, which is democracy, gives it an even higher credit and authority than the former, which is Christianity. More, democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world – that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power–which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters – which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.

All these forms of happiness, of course, are illusory. They don’t last. The democrat, leaping into the air to flap his wings and praise God, is for ever coming down with a thump. The seeds of his disaster, as I have shown, lie in his own stupidity: he can never get rid of the naive delusion – so beautifully Christian – that happiness is something to be got by taking it away from the other fellow. But there are seeds, too, in the very nature of things: a promise, after all, is only a promise, even when it is supported by divine revelation, and the chances against its fulfillment may be put into a depressing mathematical formula. Here the irony that lies under all human aspiration shows itself: the quest for happiness, as always, brings only unhappiness in the end. But saying that is merely saying that the true charm of democracy is not for the democrat but for the spectator. That spectator, it seems to me, is favoured with a show of the first cut and calibre. Try to imagine anything more heroically absurd! What grotesque false pretenses! What a parade of obvious imbecilities! What a welter of fraud! But is fraud unamusing? Then I retire forthwith as a psychologist. The fraud of democracy, I contend, is more amusing than any other, more amusing even, and by miles, than the fraud of religion. Go into your praying-chamber and give sober thought to any of the more characteristic democratic inventions: say, Law Enforcement. Or to any of the typical democratic prophets: say, the late Archangel Bryan. If you don’t come out paled and palsied by mirth then you will not laugh on the Last Day itself, when Presbyterians step out of the grave like chicks from the egg, and wings blossom from their scapulae, and they leap into interstellar space with roars of joy.

I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself–its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic. It not only wars upon the thing itself; it even wars upon mere academic advocacy of it. I offer the spectacle of Americans jailed for reading the Bill of Rights as perhaps the most gaudily humorous ever witnessed in the modern world. Try to imagine monarchy jailing subjects for maintaining the divine right of Kings! Or Christianity damning a believer for arguing that Jesus Christ was the Son of God! This last, perhaps, has been done: anything is possible in that direction. But under democracy the remotest and most fantastic possibility is a common-place of every day. All the axioms resolve themselves into thundering paradoxes, many amounting to downright contradictions in terms. The mob is competent to rule the rest of us–but it must be rigorously policed itself. There is a government, not of men, but of laws – but men are set upon benches to decide finally what the law is and may be. The highest function of the citizen is to serve the state – but the first assumption that meets him, when he essays to discharge it, is an assumption of his disingenuousness and dishonour. Is that assumption commonly sound? Then the farce only grows the more glorious.

I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself – that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?