THERE IS ONLY ONE group of men whom the Nazis and the Fascists hate more than the Jews. They are the Freemasons. In Italy, indeed, the anti-Jewish feeling is of recent vintage and largely artificial, whereas the blackshirt hatred of Freemasonry is old and deep. In their own countries Hitler and Mussolini Inaugurated their respective reigns with outrages against Masons and Masonic institutions, and they have never relaxed the systematic persecution. Now Nazi conquests of other European nations — whether by invasion of forcible “persuasion” — are followed automatically by hostile measures against Freemasons. From Norway to the Balkans, the progress of the Swastika has brought outlawry, and often vandalism and death in its wake for all Masons. The anti-Semitic excesses have been widely reported, the anti-Catholic outrages have had considerable publicity, but the merciless totalitarian assaults on Freemasonry have not receive a tithe of the world-wide attention they richly merit. They are practically an unknown chapter.

Nazi and Fascist publications leave no doubt of their belief that all evil in the world, from the high mortality rate among the dinner guests of the Borgias down to the Versailles Treaty, has been the work of Freemasons, alone or with the help of Israel. In “Mein Kampf”, Hitler merges his twin phobias:

“The general pacifistic paralyzation of the national instinct of self-preservation, introduced into the circles of the so-called `intelligentsia’ by Freemasonry, is transmitted to the great masses, but above all to the bourgeoisie, by the activity of the great press, which today is always Jewish.”

And one of the first official statements made by Hermann Goering in his capacity as Prime Minister of Prussia, when the Nazis took over power in 1933, was that “in National Socialist Germany there is no place for Freemasonry.: That view was not news. It had run through all the Nazi propaganda and had been an intrinsic part of the Fascist attitude in Mussolini’s realm.

After the German debacle of 1918, the frustrated man who had been the virtual master of Germany’s destinies, General Erich Ludendorff, found an outlet for his bitterness in diatribes against Freemasonry. Right up to his death, Ludendorff devoted himself wholly to propaganda intended to prove that the war, the ensuing German revolution, and most other world ills had been the doing of the Masons. He published a pamphlet entitled “Annihilation of Freemasonry Through the Revelation of Its Secrets” wherein the so-called secrets of Freemasonry were “revealed” for the hundredth time since the foundation of the Order in 1717, without, however, annihilating Masonry. The senile general’s main thesis was that Freemasonry is a Jewish device intended to make “artificial Jews.” On one page the hand that had led Germany to disaster in 1918 wrote: “It is cheating the people to fight the Jew while allowing his auxiliary troop, Freemasonry … to function.”

The Nazis continued where Ludendorff left off. But others had preceded them in Mason-baiting. In 1917, as one of their acts, the Bolsheviks dissolved all lodges in Russia. In 1919, when Bela Kun proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat in Hungary, one of his first decrees ordered the dissolution of Masonic lodges. In 1925, Spain’s first dictator of this generation, General Primo de Rivera, ordered the abolition of Freemasonry in his country.

Benito Mussolini went about the same business more methodically. Having established his regime, Il Duce proceeded step by step to exterminate the lodges and the influence of Italian Freemasonry. Even the Nazi apostle, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, has admitted in his book “Masonic World Policies” that the Freemasons had been the creators of the united democratic Kingdom of Italy. But this did not win them any mitigation of horrors at the hands of ultra-patriotic Fascists. In 1924, Mussolini decreed that every member of his Fascist Party who was a Mason must abandon one or the other organization. Thereupon General Cappello, one of the most prominent Fascists, who had held the post of Deputy Grand Master of Grande Oriente, Italy’s leading Grand Lodge, gave up membership in Fascism rather than betray his Masonic ideals. He was to pay dearly for this loyalty. Less than a year later, he was charged with complicity in an attempt on Mussolini’s life. It was a palpable frame-up by an OVRA stoolpigeon name Quaglia, but General Cappello was sentenced to thirty years in prison, where he probably still lingers.

In the summer of 1925 Mussolini got around to dissolving Italian Freemasonry. In an open letter to Il Duce, the Grand Master of the Grande Oriente, Domizio Torrigiani, had the courage to stand up for democracy and freedom of thought. The price he paid was exile to the Lipari islands. After nearly going blind there, he died soon afterwards. Hundreds of other prominent Masons shared the harsh Lipari exile with him. At the peak of the anti-Mason agitation, in 1925-27, blackshirt strong-arm squads looted the homes of well-known Masons in Milan, Florence and other cities, and murdered at least 100 of them.

The Nazis acted more swiftly. Immediately on Hitler’s rise to power, the ten Grand Lodges of Germany were dissolved. Many among the prominent dignitaries and members of the Order were sent to concentration camps. The Gestapo seized the membership lists of the Grand Lodges and looted their libraries and collections of Masonic objects. Much of this loot was then exhibited in an “Anti-Masonic Exposition” inaugurated in 1937 by Herr Dr. Joseph Goebbels in Munich. The Exposition included completely furnished Masonic temples.

The persecution was carried over into Austria when the country was captured by the Nazis. The Masters of the various Vienna lodges were immediately confined in the most notorious concentration camps, including the horrible living hell at Dachau in Bavaria. The same procedure was repeated when Hitler took over Czechoslovakia, then Poland. Immediately after conquering Holland and Belgium, the Nazis ordered the dissolution of the lodges in those nations. It was also Point One on the agenda of Major Quisling in Norway. It may be taken as part of the same ugly picture that General Franco of Spain in 1940 sentenced all Freemasons in his realm automatically to ten years in prison. When France fell last June, the Vichy government caused the two Masonic bodies of France, the Grand Orient and the Grenade Loge to be dissolved, their property being seized and sold at auction.

The countries which are still ostensibly independent, but actually under the heel of Germany, must prove their conformity to the Nazi pattern by taking harsh measures against Masonry. In Hungary the dissolution of the lodges was unnecessary because they were never allowed to resume after Bela Kun was overthrown. Mason-baiting is one “principle” on which White Terrors and Red Terrors have always agreed. Rumania recently prohibited Freemasonry to prove its subservience to Germany. Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, inhabited by levelheaded and tolerant peasantry, were also obliged to enact the twin sets of laws — anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic — that demonstrate “friendship for Hitler”.

The summary does not begin to convey the full terror of the Calvary to which Freemasonry has been subjected wherever the totalitarians took power. Murder, imprisonment, economic looting, social outlawry have been the bitter lot of individual Masons. Rapine has been the fate of their organizations, their treasures, their institutions of charity.

II

Why does this implacable and fanatic hatred of the Order obsess the totalitarian mind? The answer is in the whole history and temper of Freemasonry. For more than two centuries its leaders have been consistently on the side of political freedom and human dignity, reaping a harvest of persecution at the hands of tyrants. Before going into that, however, we must distinguish clearly between two things: Freemasonry and Freemasons. The chief trick of mason-haters through the generations, a trick followed by the Nazis, is to direct their accusations not against Freemasons personally but against the whole Masonic Order.

Freemasonry is made up of Masonic bodies: lodges, Grand Lodges and other groupings. All of these scrupulously refrain from meddling in politics or any other subject not directly related to Masonic matters or charity. The Constitution of the Order stipulates that every member must be a loyal citizen of his country, and it professes adherence “to that religion in which all men agree” — that is, belief in a Divine power, in morality and in charity. In contrast to narrow nationalism, it believes in serving Humanity as a whole. That is all that the Masonic Order itself professes and is interested in. What individual Masons do as citizens of their respective countries to serve the ideals they personally believe is, is their own business.

This attitude is no subterfuge. On the contrary, the enlightened Freemason not only admits but prides himself in the fact that modern democracy and human progress owe so much to the heroism and idealism of individual Freemasons. Unless he is a very naive person he will also admit that the lodge is a place where congenial people meet to gather that moral strength which they need to stand up for the ideals of liberty and equality outside the lodge. At the same time, however, to true Masons the lodge is hallowed ground, and inside its gates politics and the other concerns of the market-place are taboo.

Some of the less critically-minded Masons like to trace the origins of the Order back to ancient Egypt. But in its present form, Freemasonry originated in England, probably in the Seventeenth Century, while the first Grand Lodge was founded in London in 1717 and the regulations, by-laws and constitutions of Masonry were laid down in what is known as Anderson’s Constitutions in 1722-23. The spiritual elements underlying these precepts were decidedly “advanced” for their time, emphasizing as they did tolerance for other men’s religions and the brotherhood of all human beings.

The intellectual and spiritual foundations of modern democracy, including the American Revolution and the American Constitution, are to be found in large part in the teachings of Jean Jacques Rousseau and in the ideas cemented into the great first Encyclopedia. And it is a fact that most of the authors of that epoch-making Encyclopedia — Diderot, D’Alembert, Condorcet, the famous Swiss philosopher Helvetius, etc. — were Freemasons. The envoy to France from the rebellious American colonies, Benjamin Franklin, also was an ardent Freemason. So were George Washington, sixty among his generals, John Hancock and a great many of his co-signers of the Declaration of Independence. Both Washington and Franklin long held the post of Grand Master.

The most distinguished among the Masonic lodges of Paris in the Eighteenth Century was the “Lodge of the Nine Sisters” — that is, the nine Muses — and its membership included the intellectual cream of France. When Voltaire paid a visit to Paris in the year of his death, at the age of 79, he was initiated into Freemasonry in this lodge. The climax of the ceremony came when Brother Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia handed to Voltaire the Masonic apron which the great Helvetius had worn before him. Voltaire raised the apron to his aged lips.

Six years before that memorable day, something even more memorable happened in Boston. It has come down in history as the Boston Tea Party. And it is no secret that the “Indians” who dumped the cargo on December 16, 1773, had emerged from the building which housed the St. Andrews Lodge, the leading Masonic body in Boston. Their job done, the “Indians” were seen to troop back to the lodge building — and no Indians ever again emerged from the lodge. Instead, a lot of prominent Bostonians, known to be Masons, did emerge. And in the book which used to contain the minutes of the lodge and which still exists, there is an almost blank page where the minutes of that memorable Thursday should be. Instead, the page bears but one letter — a large T. Can it have anything to do with Tea? It is perhaps the only instance in the History of Freemasonry were a lodge, as a body, has taken an active part in politics.

III

Practically everywhere, INDIVIDUAL Masons have thus been in the forefront in movements of liberation. Goethe, who considered himself a European more than a German and so often criticized his fellow-Germans, was a fervent Freemason, as was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute” is full of allusions and symbolism relating to Freemasonry. In fact, its theme is the search for truth and the victory of tolerance over the fanaticism that springs from ignorance, a theme which Mozart shared with his brother Masons. But few Masons today, listening to the delightful tunes of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro”, realize that they are enjoying a “revolutionary” play, set to music by a Mason who believed in the “revolutionary” principle of the equality of all men. Beaumarchais’ Figaro comedy was written and staged under Louis XV of France as an attack against the prevalent feudal social system. Mozart’s choice of this play, at a time when the success of the young American democracy was firing the imagination of the world, was not accidental.

Hebert, Andre Chenier, Camille Desmoulins and many other “Girondins” of the French Revolution were Freemasons. The Masonic ideal of freedom was strong in the heart of a Frenchman who became a Mason while in the youthful United States of America — the Marquis de Lafayette. He remained an enthusiastic Mason all his life, and was until his death in 1829 Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France.

And during the whole of the Nineteenth Century, to be a Freemason was tantamount to being a champion of democracy. Many of the leaders in the great year 1848, which saw so many uprising against feudal rule in Europe, were members of the Order; among them was the great Hungarian hero of democracy, Louis Kossuth, who found temporary refuge in America. Like Kossuth, another celebrated champion of democracy, Guiseppe Garibaldi, was a thirty-third degree Freemason and Grand Master of the Italian Freemasons. Most leaders of the Young Turkish Committee, which in 1908 forced Sultan Abdul Hamid “the Damned” to give his nation a parliamentary form of government, and who deposed the “Red Sultan” in the following year, were likewise Masons. In Latin America, too, the process of liberation from the Spanish yoke was the work of Freemasons, in large measure. Simon Bolivar was one of the most active of Masonry’s sons, and so were San Martin, Mitre, Alvear, Sarmiento, Benito Juarez — all hallowed names to Latin Americans.

Thus, while the Order as such kept out of politics, it attracted to itself the most democratically minded, the champions of human decencies — and won for itself the undying hatred of those who feared progress. Yet Masonry has never been a subversive movement. In countries where democracy is a reality, even Royalty belongs to the Order. Both King George VI and the Duke of Kent are Freemasons; so is the Duke of Windsor. His grandfather, Edward VII, was the chief of British Masonry, and he was succeeded in the post by the aged Duke of Connaught. King Gustav V heads the Freemasons of Sweden.

It is clear, consequently, why the Nazis and Fascist and Bolsheviks must hate an organization so steeped in humanitarian traditions. They know that Masons, as individuals, have founded a great number of modern democratic states, have drafted the Declaration of Independence and created liberal Constitutions the world over. But the totalitarian hatred for the Order is not merely emotional. It is clearly defined in the fundamental divergence between their creed and the Masonic ideal. In his book to which we have already referred, the Nazi Dr. Rosenberg writes:

“Without doubt the Masonic dogma of Humanity is a relapse into worlds of the most primitive conceptions; everywhere where it is put into practice it is accompanied by decadence, because it conflicts with the aristocratic laws of Nature”.

Thus in his own dogmatic terms he indicts Freemasonry for what is its greatest pride, its ideal of equality.

In 1938 Hitler’s own publishing house, which puts out both “Main Kampf” and the official “Volkischer Beobachter”, issed a volume on “Freemasonry, Its World View (Weltanschauung), Organization and Policies”. The preface is written by Herr Heydrich, second in command of the Gestapo, and hence an expert on oppression and violence, and hints openly at the seizure of libraries and property of German Freemasonry. The book itself, by one Dieter Schwarz, discloses that every new Nazi member must “confirm by his word of honor that he does not belong to a Masonic lodge.” In outlining the official Nazi on the subject, it says in part:

“Nordic is the Nazi conception of the world, Jewish-Oriental that of the Freemasons; in contrast to the anti-racial attitude of the lodges, the Nazi attitude is race conscious….”

“Masonic lodges are… associations of men who, closely bound together in a union employing symbolical usages, represent a supra-national spiritual movement, the idea of Humanity… a general association of mankind, without distinction of races, peoples, religions, social and political convictions.”

I have read several hundred books about Freemasonry and scores of original Masonic documents. But never have I seen masonry’s basic ideals expressed more clearly than by its mortal enemies in the passage above. Herr Heydrich and Herr Schwarz are right — the gulf between their “Weltanschauung” and the Masonic Ideals can never be bridged.

___________________

EDITOR’S NOTE: This 1941 Mercury article shows some signs of wartime passions, but is nonetheless quite educational. Masonry may indeed have been a necessary response to the “divine” tyranny of family dynasties, and many great men and movements were and are associated with it.

But it also shared the faults of the 18th century Enlightenment of which its rise was a part (though its earliest origins are, in my opinion, to be found in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Knights Templar):

1) a childlike faith in “democracy,” which is really just mob rule and can be just as tyrannical as any king or dictator; and

2) a belief in “equality” and universalism (that all human beings are essentially the same — an insane overreaction to the nonsense of hereditary aristocracy — and that there can be moral rules or governance for “all mankind”), concepts that tend to promote multiculturalism and world government, both of which are inimical to to self-determination and freedom.

It is easy to see why Masons were players (and sometimes pawns) in revolutions, both good and bad. They are men with noble instincts, but who use a flawed and confused pseudo-religious ideology to apply them.

— M.P. Shiel

April 13, 1945

THE BALTIMORE Sun editorial on Roosevelt this morning begins: “Franklin D. Roosevelt was a great man.” There are heavy black dashes above and below it. The argument, in brief, is that all his skullduggeries and imbecilities were wiped out when “he took an inert and profoundly isolationist people and brought them to support a necessary war on a scale never before imagined.” In other words, his greatest fraud was his greatest glory, and sufficient excuse for all his other frauds. It is astonishing how far the Sun has gone in this nonsense. When the English fetched Patterson and John Owens they certainly did an all-out job. I know of no paper in the United States, not even the New York Herald Tribune, that croons for them more assiduously.

Roosevelt’s unparallelled luck held out to the end. He died an easy death, and he did so just in time to escape burying his own dead horse. This business now falls to Truman, a third-rate Middle Western politician on the order of Harding. He is fundamentally against the New Deal wizards, and he will probably make an earnest effort to turn them out of power, but I have some doubt that he will succeed. They have dug in deeply and they may be expected to fight to the bitter end, for once they are out they will be nothing and they know it. The case of La Eleanor is not without its humors. Only yesterday she was the most influential female ever recorded in American history, but tomorrow she will begin to fade, and by this time next year she may be wholly out of the picture. I wonder how many newspapers will go on printing her “My Day.” Probably not many.

It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history — maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics. If the war drags on it is possible, of course, that there may be a reaction against him, and there may be another and worse after war is over at last, but the chances, I think, run the other way. He had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes. Thus a demigod seems to be in the making, and in a little while we may see a grandiose memorial under way in Washington, comparable to those to Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. In it, I suppose, Eleanor will have a niche, but probably not a conspicuous one. The majority of Americans, I believe, distrust and dislike her, and all her glories have been only reflections from Franklin.

The Baltimore Hearst paper, the News-Post, handled the great news with typical cynicism. Hearst is one of the most violent enemies of Roosevelt, and all his papers have been reviling the New Deal, and even propagating doubts about the war. But the whole first page of the News-Post is given over this afternoon to a large portrait of Roosevelt flanked by two flags in color and headed “Nation Mourns.” The editorial page is filled with an editorial saying, among other things, “The work and name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt will live on, not only today or tomorrow, but in all the annals of recorded time.” This, as I have noted, is probably a fact, but it is certainly not a fact that tickles Hearst. He is, however, an expert in mob psychology, and does not expect much. The Sun is in a far less rational position. It certifies to Roosevelt’s greatness in all seriousness.

April 15

All the saloons and major restaurants of Baltimore were closed last night as a mark of respect to the dead Roosevelt, whose body passed through the city at midnight. It was silly, but it gave a lot of Dogberries a chance to annoy their betters, and so it was ordained. As a result, the Saturday Night Club missed its usual post-music beer-party for the first time in forty years. All during Prohibition the club found accommodations in the homes of its members, but last night no member was prepared, so the usual programme had to be abandoned. August and I came home, had a couple of high-balls, and then went to bed.

Roosevelt, if he had lived, would probably have been unbeatable, despite the inevitable reaction against the war. He was so expert a demagogue that it would have been easy for him to divert the popular discontent to some other object. He could have been beaten only by a demagogue even worse than he was himself, and his opponents showed no sign of being able to flush out such a marvel. The best they could produce was such timorous compromisers as Willkie and Dewey, who were as impotent before Roosevelt as sheep before Behemoth. When the call was for a headlong attack they backed and filled. It thus became impossible, at the close of their campaigns, to distinguish them from mild New Dealers — in other words, inferior Roosevelts. He was always a mile ahead of them, finding new victims to loot and new followers to reward, flouting common sense and boldly denying its existence, demonstrating by his anti-logic that two and two made five, promising larger and larger slices of the moon. His career will greatly engage historians, if any good ones ever appear in America, but it will be of even more interest to psychologists. He was the first American to penetrate to the real depths of vulgar stupidity. He never made the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the American mob. He was its unparallelled professor.

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

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

In The American Mercury (27 August 1924) came this: “The aim of democracy is to break all … free spirits to the common harness. It tries to iron them out, to pump them dry of self-respect, to make docile John Does of them. The measure of its success is the extent to which such men are brought down, and made common. The measure of civilisation is the extent to which they resist and survive. Thus the only sort of liberty that is real under democracy is the liberty of the have-nots to destroy the liberty of the haves.” In Notes on Democracy (1926), Mencken elaborated this theme. “Democracy is based upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even half-wits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must thus be to penalise the free play of ideas … The average man doesn’t want to be free. He wants to be safe.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more at Quebecois Libre
republished with permission

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

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?