{"id":21728,"date":"2025-06-25T08:17:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-25T12:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=21728"},"modified":"2025-06-26T09:51:37","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T13:51:37","slug":"menckens-forgotten-wisdom-on-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/25\/menckens-forgotten-wisdom-on-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Mencken\u2019s Forgotten Wisdom on War"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mencken\u2019s Forgotten Wisdom on War<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

by James Bovard, June 25, 2025\u00a0 Libertarian Institute<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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As a stampede of weasels just sought to con America into supporting another Mideast war, it is time remember America\u2019s most underrated critic of bellicose folly. H.L. Mencken is famous for his smackdowns of politicians and ridicule of government and of much of American culture. But he also offered sage advice for citizens judging officialdom itching for carnage.<\/strong><\/p>\n

On May 9, 1939, The Baltimore Sun<\/em> published Mencken\u2019s essay on \u201cThe Art of Selling War.\u201d This piece, included in the Second Mencken Chrestomathy<\/em> published in 1995, deserves a far higher position in the Mencken and antiwar pantheon.<\/p>\n

In words that are painfully relevant for today\u2019s news, Mencken warned, \u201cThe fact that all the polls run heavily against American participation in the threatening European war is not to be taken seriously.\u201d Mencken continued:<\/p>\n

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\u201cWars are not made by common folks, scratching for livings in the heat of the day, they are made by demagogues infesting palaces\u2026The very unpopularity of war makes people ready to believe, when they suddenly confront it, that it has been thrust upon them\u2026because their own demagogues have been pretending, all the while, to be trying to prevent it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Seven years later, the same points were echoed in an interview by Nazi kingpin Hermann Goering, who was on trial for war crimes in 1946 at Nuremberg:<\/p>\n

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\u201cOf course, the people don\u2019t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he\u00a0 <\/span>can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece\u2026But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Goering explained why self-government was a mirage when rulers chose war:<\/p>\n

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\u201cVoice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Goering committed suicide before he could be triumphally hanged.<\/p>\n

Back in 1939, Mencken wrote in his same article, \u201cThe main reason why it is easy to sell war to peaceful people is that the demagogues who act as salesmen quickly acquire a monopoly of both public information and public instruction.\u201d Looking at the peril of another world war, Mencken warned, \u201cOn the day war is declared, the Espionage Act will come into effect, and all free discussion will cease\u2026 Any argument against the war itself, and any criticism of the persons appointed to carry it on, will become aid and comfort to the enemy.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mencken predicted, \u201cA few weeks of [pro-war] razzle-dazzle will suffice to convert most people to the war an to intimidate and silence the stray recalcitrant who holds out.\u201d Thanks to massive pressure to confirm and submit, \u201cThe dissenter is not only suspected by all his neighbors; he also begins to suspect himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Okay, maybe not dissenters who follow the Libertarian Institute, but most of the rest of them.)<\/p>\n

Mencken\u2019s perspicacity was shaped by bitter experience during World War I. In 1915, the most popular song in America was \u201cI Didn\u2019t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.\u201d Two years later, President Woodrow Wilson and his propagandists easily ignited war fever. Mencken chronicled the lies used to justify intervention until his views on the war were silenced. He watched as his fellow German-Americans were vilified and hounded as if they were all seeking to detonate the U.S. Capitol. He watched Wilson endlessly invoke the ideal of liberty as the government seized nearly absolute power, including the power to conscript millions of Americans to fight wherever Wilson chose (including Siberia) and to send more than a hundred thousand American troops to their death in Europe. Mencken was targeted by the Justice Department for surveillance. His 1917 essay, \u201cWhy Free Speech is Impossible During War,\u201d was suppressed.<\/p>\n

Mencken helped re-define the war after Armistice Day. In 1920, he ridiculed \u201cthe posse of \u2018two thousand American Historians\u2019<\/span><\/a> assembled by Mr. Creel [chief of the U.S. Committee on Public Information] to instruct the plain people in the new theory of American history, whereby the [1776] Revolution was represented as a lamentable row in an otherwise happy family, deliberately instigated by German intrigue.\u201d Hyperbole? No. Robert Goldstein, the producer of the patriotic film The Spirit of \u201976<\/em>, was convicted under the Espionage Act in 1917 for\u00a0 <\/span>denigrating British soldiers during the Revolution and thereby endangering support for Allies.<\/p>\n

On the eve of the 1920 presidential election, Mencken wrote that Americans were tired \u201cof a steady diet of white protestations and black acts; they are weary of hearing highfalutin and meaningless words; they sicken of an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.\u201d Mencken explained why a typical voter would support Warren Harding: \u201cTired to death of intellectual charlatanry, he turns despairingly to honest imbecility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe some Donald Trump voters last year had the same sense of resignation. But the push for war with Iran is bringing out every charlatan in the land. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) may have offered the most shameless defense for launching a U.S. bombing campaign: \u201cThis is not warmongering. This is peace mongering<\/span><\/a>.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mencken mostly silenced himself during the Second World War. FBI agents repeatedly investigated him, even interrogating his physician. But, as biographer Fred Hobson noted, Mencken\u2019s \u201cearlier acquaintance with J. Edgar Hoover may have helped forestall any further investigations.\u201d After the war, he bitterly lamented in his dairy, \u201cThe course of the United States in World War II was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the [Baltimore] Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt\u2019s foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.<\/span><\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

H.L. Mencken was recently labeled \u201cThe Greatest American Critic of the Great War\u201d by the Roads to the Great War<\/span><\/a> website. Mencken wasn\u2019t perfect; he had some boneheaded pro-war utterances, perhaps due to his youthful infatuation with philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. But Mencken offers an antidote to the frenzied laptop bombardiers who increasingly dominate social media and political discourse.\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mencken\u2019s Forgotten Wisdom on War by James Bovard, June 25, 2025\u00a0 Libertarian Institute As a stampede of weasels just sought to con America into supporting another Mideast war, it is time remember America\u2019s most underrated critic of bellicose folly. H.L. Mencken is famous for his smackdowns of politicians and ridicule of government and of much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21729,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4591,4590,648,75,1044,479],"class_list":["post-21728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-creel","tag-goering","tag-mencken","tag-war","tag-wilson","tag-world-war-one"],"yoast_head":"\nMencken\u2019s Forgotten Wisdom on War - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"H.L. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21728"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21733,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21728\/revisions\/21733"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}