Mencken’s Forgotten Wisdom on War
by Jim Bovard | Jun 25, 2025
As a stampede of weasels just sought to con America into supporting another Mideast war, it is time remember America’s 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.
On May 9, 1939, The Baltimore Sun published Mencken’s essay on “The Art of Selling War.” This piece, included in the Second Mencken Chrestomathy published in 1995, deserves a far higher position in the Mencken and antiwar pantheon.
In words that are painfully relevant for today’s news, Mencken warned, “The fact that all the polls run heavily against American participation in the threatening European war is not to be taken seriously.” Mencken continued:
“Wars are not made by common folks, scratching for livings in the heat of the day, they are made by demagogues infesting palaces…The very unpopularity of war makes people ready to believe, when they suddenly confront it, that it has been thrust upon them…because their own demagogues have been pretending, all the while, to be trying to prevent it.”
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/menckens-forgotten-wisdom-on-war/
“Bondi Hero” Ahmed Al-Ahmed (the man who disarmed the ISIS terrorist in Australia on Sunday) received a phone call from the Foreign Minister of Syria.
During the call, Ahmed asks the Foreign Minister to pass on his “regards” to the new President of Syria, Al-Julani.
Both Al-Julani and Asaad al-Shaibani (the Foreign Minister of Syria) are members of Al Qaeda.
So we allegedly have somebody who sympathizes with terrorist Syrians stopping other terrorists?
Feels like a simulation.
"It does not matter whether this situation reflects planning on the part of a shadowy elite, or is emergent from the decline of your civilization. No matter whom you vote for, or what gloss your preferred candidate puts on these issues, nothing will change until you and enough of the people around you wake up to reality, and launch a campaign of consistent non-compliance with the antihuman trajectory that manipulative elites have set us upon.
It does not matter whether you label the centralizing ambitions of those elites as socialism, communism, technocracy, gobalism or fascism. It doesn’t matter whether you see them as reflecting philanthropic, criminal or satanic motives. The important thing about centralisation is that it absolutely requires censorship and comprehensive obliteration of rights and freedoms to persist, and that it is wholly incompatible with the flourishing of human beings...”
History doesn’t offer much hope. It seems always to have been the case that an ...
FBI Arrested A Fifth Trantifa Militant In NYE Bomb Plot
https://themanhattan.press/2025/12/17/fbi-arrested-a-fifth-trantifa-militant-in-nye-bomb-plot/