On January 23, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lifted the ban on women in combat. He gave the generals three years to open up all positions to women, and if any of them think there is a job women can’t do, they’ll have to explain themselves.

The combat arms—infantry, armor, and artillery—are closed to women for good reasons: They can’t do the job, and they keep men from doing the job.

Drones and laser-guided munitions haven’t changed things for a grunt: You still have to run up hills with an 80-pound pack, live in dirt for weeks, and hump 96-pound 155mm artillery shells onto the back of a truck. Your buddies count on you to carry them out of the fight if they are wounded, and they can’t count on someone with half the upper-body strength of a man.

An extensive 1994 Army study of men and women—written by a woman—discovered the obvious: “The average woman does not have the same physical capacity, nor can she be trained to have the same physical capacity as the average man.” There were tests with practically no overlap. On Maximum Lifting Strength, the worst 2 percent of men were at the 92nd percentile for women.

Soldiers may have to kill or be killed at close quarters. All your enemy needs is an extra inch of reach, an extra pound of muscle, or an extra burst of speed, and he will use that advantage to kill you. No one is talking about putting women on professional sports teams—we might lose a game!—but the military is now asking for weak links that could get the whole squad killed.

Last year, a lady Marine captain named Katie Petronio wrote an article for the Marine Corps Gazette called “Get Over It! We Are Not All Created Equal.” She is a pretty tough gal—she says she could bench-press 145 pounds and squat 200 pounds—but when she worked with men in the field, “the rate of my deterioration was noticeably faster than that of male Marines.”

She writes that if women join up, the infantry is “going to experience a colossal increase in crippling and career-ending medical conditions for females.” Some of these toy soldiers will break before they even see the enemy and then spend their lives drawing disability pay they don’t deserve.
Women in combat? Combat means close quarters. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, Marine Ryan Smith rode in an amphibious assault vehicle designed for 15 men. There were breakdowns and “by the end of the invasion we had as many as 25 men stuffed into the back.” They went 48 straight hours in the vehicle with no sanitation, and men got dysentery. “When an uncontrollable urge hit a Marine, he would be forced to stand, as best he could, hold an MRE [meals ready to eat] bag up to his rear, and defecate inches from his seated comrade’s face.”
 
When they got to Baghdad:
 

We had not showered in well over a month and our chemical protective suits were covered in a mixture of filth and dried blood. We were told to strip and place our suits in pits to be burned immediately. My unit stood there…naked, sores dotted all over our bodies, feet peeling, watching our suits burn. Later, they lined us up naked and washed us off with pressure washers.

 
Squad Leader Smith does not want women in combat.
 
As ex-Marine John Luddy explained in a Heritage Foundation report, there are other reasons why women don’t belong at the front:
 

[I]n the one historical case where women were deliberately placed in combat—in Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War—they were removed within weeks. The reason: It was clear that men reacted to the presence of women by trying to protect them and aiding them when they became casualties instead of continuing to attack. The Israelis also learned that unit morale was seriously damaged when men saw women killed and injured on the battlefield.

 
Men take crazy risks to make sure women are not captured and to rescue them if they are. Remember Jessica Lynch, the 100-pound supply clerk who got into a traffic accident during the Iraq invasion and was taken prisoner? The Army told colossal lies about her Rambo-style knife fight with Iraqis—she went down on her knees to pray and never fired a shot—and then went to absurd lengths to get her back. There was a diversionary battle to draw off Iraqi troops, and a joint team of Delta Force, Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and Air Force Pararescue Jumpers—with much better things to do—snatched her from a hospital that turned out to be unguarded.
 
PFC Lynch was lucky. She fell into the hands of a regular Army that treated her well. But what would the Taliban do with a captured American woman? Gang-rape her, for sure. Then would she disappear into the most wretched brothel in Afghanistan or come back mutilated and pregnant and a psychological wreck?

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Finally, there is sex. As one Marine Corps veteran 
explains, “Male bonding is what takes the hill. And male bonding just doesn’t happen with women around.”
A soldier recently put it this way on a Web page:

The Infantry squad is, hands friggen’ down, the backbone of any armed conflict. They can do anything, anywhere, anytime—because the lives of their buddies depend on it. The bond between men in an Infantry squad is like no other….The addition of women would utterly turn the squad’s level of cohesion and unity upside-down faster than anything. The female would become the center of attention, and the butt-end of every joke. Morale would be a crushing weight dragging the squad down into the dirt.

It destroys what the Army calls “group cohesion” if a man has been jilted by the squad tart and then has to listen to her squealing all night in someone else’s foxhole.

The military hands out condoms as if they were candy, but accidents happen. In the 1990s, 
Navy Captain Martha Whitehead testified before a military commission that women were three times more likely to be “non-deployable” than men, and that 47 percent of the time it was because they were pregnant.

In 2009, so many pregnant lady soldiers were being evacuated from Iraq that Major General Anthony Cucolo ordered a court martial and possible jail time for any woman in his command who got pregnant—and for the man responsible. “I’ve got a mission to do.” he said. “I’m given a finite number of soldiers with which to do it and I need every one of them.”

There are other problems. From 2006 to 2011, the rate of violent sex crimes in the military shot up 64 percent, with an estimated 19,000 sexual assaults in 2010 alone. Women are 14 percent of Army personnel but are 95 percent of sex-crime victims.  (The Army warns there will be more cases of men raping men now that homosexuals don’t have to worry about being kicked out, but that is a different problem.)
General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says he thinks women in combat will help solve the problem of sexual harassment. He pushed Leon Panetta very hard to lift the ban. “I have to believe,” he explains, “that the more we can treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each other equally.” This is certifiably insane.
 
A man in fighting trim runs on testosterone. That is what makes him an effective killer; it also makes him think about sex every minute of the day. Putting women on the battlefield is like shoving the cheerleaders into the locker room with the team after a football game and locking the doors.
 
Combat troops are young men who kill people for a living. In the all-volunteer Army they are there because they like killing people. The military throws young women at them and is shocked—shocked—to discover that the men don’t always behave like gentlemen. So the Navy has 
mandatory anti-sex-assault training for every sailor, and the Army has SHARP (Sexual Harassment/Assault Response & Prevention). They don’t change their idiotic policies; they try to change men.
When Leon Panetta made his announcement, President Obama was delighted:

Today, every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love.

 
He got it exactly backward. Men go to war precisely so that their mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters don’t have to go. War is ultimately about national survival. Half the men could die in combat but if women survive, the men who are left can keep the nation going. A society that sends child-bearers into combat has gone mad.

Secretary of the Army Togo West once said that keeping women out of combat slows their promotions and prevents them “from reaching their full potential.” The only men who talk like that wear ribbons instead of helmets. A soldier’s job is to find the enemy and kill him—yes, him—not to be part of a giant experiment in egalitarian fantasy. Only degenerate countries put women in combat.
 
Of course, it will work for a while—with higher casualties, grinding inefficiencies, and endless lies and cover-ups. But when the century draws to a close and the Chinese write the history of what used to be the United States, they will note that it was a sure sign the place was doomed when the American soldier became a social worker with a rifle instead of a professional killer. 

Yesterday I stopped by a Methodist church that was having a charity Christmas-tree sale. A man told me the sale was over for the day and then wished me “Happy Holidays.”
 
“Don’t you mean ‘Merry Christmas’?” I asked, smoke coming out of my ears.
 
Yes, this is the season in which we must spare the sensitivities of Jews—and now Hindus and Buddhists and atheists, I suppose—by downgrading Christmas to just another “holiday.” Even people who sell Christmas trees at churches don’t dare utter the offensive word.
 
Christmas has not been completely rubbed out, though. Surely the preacher, from the safety of his altar, will bring himself to wish the congregation a Merry Christmas. Greater damage to the language has been done by everything having to do with “gender.”
 
First, let’s get one thing straight: We humans don’t have a gender; we have a sex—until recently, just one each. Gender is a grammatical term used in languages such as French and Spanish to describe the differences between such things as masculine and feminine nouns, and adjectives that agree with them. Examples are la grande fille and le grand garçon. English has gender in such words as waiter/waitress and actor/actress.

In the past, writers occasionally used “gender” instead of “sex,” as in this 1723 letter written by Lady Mary Montagu:
 

To say truth, I have never had any great esteem for the fair sex, and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them.

 
It wasn’t until the 1960s that feminists cranked up the word “gender” as a replacement for sex, but D. H. Lawrence unwittingly pushed things in that direction back in 1929. He was the first to use the word “sex” as a euphemism for coitus rather than to mean what distinguishes men from women. The expression “to have sex” is an absurd construction when you think about what the word “sex” really means, but it is now ubiquitous. It’s also completely unnecessary. English has plenty of polite words for the act—coitus, copulation, intercourse, rutting, congress—and even situational refinements such as adultery and fornication. The impolite variants are endless.
 
Thanks to D. H. Lawrence, even movies or books can now “have a lot of sex” in them, when before his time they would have been lewd, lascivious, or lubricious. The point is that once sex ceased to be merely a clinical distinction and also began to mean copulation, the feminists had an opening and offered “gender” as a replacement. But they wanted to do a lot more than that.

Feminists were willing to keep “sex” as a mere biological detail, but “gender” was much more important. It meant all the oppressive freight society loaded onto women which kept them from their natural roles as mathematicians and physicists and made them want to have children. Now we have grotesque expressions such as “gender equality,” “gender-neutral,” and “gender-inclusive.”

“Gender” was meant to work the way “race as a social construct” works. Race, the lefties tell us, is a sociological optical illusion that has nothing to do with biology. We may think there are racial differences, but it’s all in our minds. That’s exactly what feminists wanted us to think about sex. “Gender” means “sex as a social construct.” It’s only brutish custom, not biology, that makes men into soldiers and women into nurses.

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“Gender” was the name for this fraud that the left trotted out from the world of grammar and dressed up in fancy ideological clothes. So far, no one has come up with a word that means “race as a social construct.” I suggest “render.” It’s just ridiculous enough to appeal to lefties.

But the feminists were too successful with “gender.” It became so common it began to lose its ideological baggage and started to mean just, well, sex. Forms now ask for your “gender”—and it’s not to thwart the jokers who used to write in “as often as possible.”

“Gender” is one of those words that has been slipped into the language for baldly political purposes. “Homeless” is another one. Sometime in the 1970s, all the world’s bums and winos got a promotion and became “the homeless,” as if their trim houses in the suburbs had all just been leveled by tornadoes.

The feminists have done even worse things, such as bullying us into breaking the laws of grammar. It is a peculiarity of English that we use the singular pronoun “he” and the possessive “his” when the subject’s sex is unspecified, as in “Each student has his own desk.” The students can be boys or girls, but each has a desk. Feminists can’t stand this. They claim that “his” excludes half the population, but this is absurd. Did anyone ever think that “He who hesitates is lost” doesn’t apply to women? Or that only men would be living in the workers’ paradise of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”?

Once again, however, Americans have been browbeaten into either the clumsy “his or her” or the ungrammatical “their,” as in “Each student has their own desk.” “Their” is pathetically, miserably wrong. It is the plural possessive, as in “The fourth-graders left their classroom.” However, when Twitter wants you to find out more about someone, you can click to “View their profile.” What craven surrender!

This kind of language subversion comes only from the left. Every change is a tiny attempt to poison someone’s mind—if not yours then your children’s. Today, plenty of young people would be astonished to be told that “Every student should do their homework” is as wrong as “They goes home.”

Every day, the left is beavering away at the language. Fight back. Proudly use such sentences as “Man is a mammal so he suckles his young.”

And in the meantime, Merry Christmas. Or should I say “Mary Christmas”? After all, she did all the work, didn’t she?

Image of gender symbols courtesy of Shutterstock

Thomas Jefferson

Every so often some clown decides to call Thomas Jefferson a “racist,” and other clowns let him publish the charge. The most recent clown is Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School, and the accessory clowns are The New York Times. Prof. Finkelman is shocked to find that Jefferson thought blacks were less intelligent than whites. And since Jefferson wrote the words “all men are created equal” but bought and sold slaves, that makes him “a creepy, brutal hypocrite.” Like all clowns of his kind, Prof. Finkelmen tells us Jefferson fathered children with his black slave, Sally Hemings.
 
In other words, it’s the usual rubbish.
 
James Callender, a transplanted Scotsman, started the Hemings rumor in September 1802 after Jefferson turned him down for a patronage job. Callender claimed the president was sporting with “dusky Sally,” a “wooly-headed concubine,” who was part of his “Congo harem.”

“By the wench Sally our president has had several children,” he wrote, later claiming that the total was five. Callender called Sally a “slut common as the pavement” who was “romping with half a dozen black fellows.”

Callender never claimed he met “dusky Sally” or explained how he got the dope on her rompings. The next year, Callender drowned in two or three feet of water in the James River, reportedly too drunk to fish himself out, but Jefferson’s Federalist enemies never stopped whooping up the Hemings story. Callender may have been right to claim he had done more damage to Jefferson’s reputation in five months than all his other critics had done in ten years. Deviants have cackled with joy ever since at the thought that Monticello was a love nest of miscegenation.
 
DNA testing on Sally Hemings’s descendants in 1998 proved that Jefferson was not the father of one of her older children, but that someone who had the Jefferson Y chromosome fathered her youngest child, Eston. The trouble is, there were 26 men of romping age who carried that chromosome and who could have been the father. This includes Randolph Jefferson and his sons, Thomas Jefferson’s nephews, and a number of other men in the Jefferson line. They were all of reproductive age and living in Virginia at the time of conception.
 
Was it Jefferson? Eston was conceived in 1807 when old Tom was 64, in bad health, and in his second term as president. The chances of the aging, ailing president shacking up with his slave under those circumstances are close to zero. But the Sally rumors had been circulating for five years and had already hurt him.
 
There are several likelier candidates, and the most likely is Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph, who was a 51-year-old widower. A former Jefferson slave named Isaac later wrote that “Old Master’s brother, Mass Randall, was a mighty simple man: used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night”—behavior that could easily lead to romping. Randolph later remarried and had more children, so we know he was a romper. No one ever claimed Thomas Jefferson socialized with slaves.
 
Any law-school professor has heard of “innocent until proven guilty.” At Albany there must be a new gloss on the doctrine to explain why it doesn’t apply to people who are dead and can’t defend themselves.

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In July 1802, a Federalist weekly called the Port Folio published a poem that it put into the mouth of a fictional Jefferson slave named Quashee:

Our massa Jeffeson he say,
Dat all mans free alike are born:
Den tell me, why should Quashee stay,
To tend de cow and hoe de corn?
Huzza for massa Jeffeson
 
And why should one hab de white wife,
And me hab only Quangeroo?
Me no see reason for me life!
No. Quashee hab de white wife too.
Huzza for massa Jeffeson.

 
And does Prof. Finkelman think there is even a hint of originality in accusing Jefferson of hypocrisy? Jefferson’s enemies were pointing out the silliness of “all men are created equal” before the Hemings rumor even started. Jefferson didn’t believe all men were created equal any more than Prof. Finkelman does, and to handcuff Jefferson to those five words is profoundly stupid. The Declaration of Independence explains to George III why the colonists wanted out. It starts with rhetorical throat-clearing in which the signers say they are the King’s equals and have the right to leave. When the founders got around to writing the rules for actually running their new country—either in the Articles or the Constitution—they didn’t put in any gauzy bunk about equality.
 
Prof. Finkelman is shocked—shocked—that Jefferson thought blacks were dimmer than whites, but Jefferson was right. Anyone not blinkered by fashionable egalitarian bunk knows he was right. Prof. Finkelman is just as shocked to find out that Jefferson was worried that free blacks could become “pests in society,” but old Tom was on to something there, too. If Prof. Finkelman disagrees, he can tell us whether there is a single Martin Luther King Boulevard he’d like to go strolling on after sundown.
 
Prof. Finkelman makes it sound as though Jefferson loved slavery and wanted it to go on forever. Jefferson disliked slavery but disliked free Negroes even more. He wanted to emancipate the slaves and deport them “beyond the reach of mixture.”
 
The title of Prof. Finkleman’s Times article is “The Monster of Monticello.” It must take a lot of courage to spit on Jefferson because he owned slaves, and the professor better be ready to do a lot of spitting: Nine of the first 11 presidents owned slaves, and James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, John Marshall, Roger Taney, James Monroe, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln all wanted to send blacks out of the country.
 
People who actually knew Jefferson found him charming, cultivated, and a man of great honor. At a distance of 186 years, Prof. Finkelman tells us he was “creepy,” but Prof. Finkelman is only the most recent of many creeps. Black Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane tells us Jefferson was a “horny hypocrite” and black columnist Clarence Page called him a “deadbeat dad.” Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and called for the Jefferson Memorial to be torn down “stone by stone.” Conor Cruise O’Brien writes that Jefferson is “of necessity abhorrent.”
 
Jefferson’s reputation will survive, but that of The New York Times may not. It used to be an influential newspaper, but publishing vermin such as Prof. Finkelman will only speed its collapse into irrelevance.

H.L. Mencken

Why do we still read Henry Louis Mencken? He was mostly a columnist, and columns are usually forgotten the day after they are published. One of the main reasons we still read Mencken is that he was enormously funny. The ability to write humorously about serious things is one of the rarest gifts an author can have.

Mencken also wrote about his own times with great detachment. In the 1930s, he had Freud pegged for a quack and predicted that the Soviet Union would run out of gas and collapse. People also still read Mencken because he wrote—in the bluntest possible way—that men are not equal and that it was insane to pretend that they were. He was a eugenicist and he ridiculed democracy. In our era of “sensitivity,” reading Mencken is almost a guilty pleasure.

INEQUALITY

This is what Mencken said about ordinary people:

The mob is inert and moves ahead only when it is dragged or driven….A geological epoch is required to rid it of a single error, and it is so helpless and cowardly that every fresh boon it receives, every lift upon its slow journey upward, must come to it as a free gift from its betters—as a gift not only free but forced.
—Men Versus the Man

As for America:

Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy.

Mencken laughed at the idea that “all men are created equal.” He argued that the Declaration was a thumb in King George’s eye and that the phrase—if properly translated into ordinary English—meant: “Me and you are as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better.” Mencken pointed out that there is no silly chatter about equality in the Constitution, which contained the rules for actually running the country.

DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT

Mencken wrote:

If it were actually possible to give every citizen an equal voice in the management of the world…the democratic ideal would reduce itself to an absurdity in six months. There would be an end to all progress.
—Men Versus the Man

Mencken was convinced that a democracy cannot produce honest leaders:

The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache. After trying a few shots of it on his customers, the aspiring statesman concludes sadly that it must hurt them, and after that he taps a more humane keg, and in a little while the whole audience is singing “Glory, glory hallelujah,” and when the returns come in the candidate is on his way to the White House….The candidates will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he she or it wants. They’ll all be roving the land…curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money that no one will have to earn. They will all know that votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense, and they will apply themselves to the job with a hearty yo-heave-ho.
—A Mencken Chrestomathy

For Mencken, the less government the better:

The ideal government…is one which lets the individual alone—one which barely escapes being government at all.
—Prejudices: Third Series

Mencken was, however, a firm believer in law and order. As a reporter he attended no less than nine hangings, and he thought the rope was an effective and humane way to clear out the dross.

EUGENICS

Mencken was emphatically a eugenicist. This passage uses one of his favorite terms for poor whites—lintheads—from the bits of fluff that got caught in the hair of textile workers:

The great problem ahead of the United States is that of reducing the high differential birthrate of the inferior orders, for example, the hillbillies of Appalachia, the gimme farmers of the Middle West, the lintheads of the South, and the Negroes. The prevailing political mountebanks have sought to put down a discussion of this as immoral: their aim has been to prosper and increase the unfit as much as possible, always at the expense of the fit. But this can’t go on forever, else we’ll have frank ochlocracy in America, and the progress of civilization will be halted altogether.
—Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks

RELIGION

Mencken was a famous scoffer:

What the faithful Christian professes to believe, if put into the form of an affidavit, would be such shocking nonsense that even bishops and archbishops would laugh at it.
—A Treatise on the Gods

However, he recognized that faith was a great solace to many people and did not want to change their minds: In the preface to A Treatise on the Gods he wrote:

There is no purpose here to shake the faithful, for I am completely free of the messianic itch, and do not like converts. Let those who believe, and enjoy it, heave this book into the dustbin, and go on reading the War Cry [the Salvation Army magazine].

THE SOUTH

Mencken considered the entire South a cultural desert, “the Sahara of the Bozart.” As he put it, “There are single acres of Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac.”

When Mencken wrote a column calling Arkansas “the capital of Moronia” and claiming that the people were starving to death through congenital stupidity, the Little Rock legislature voted to censure him. When Mencken was asked to comment, he said, “I didn’t make Arkansas the butt of ridicule. God did it.”

The Arkansas House of Representatives then offered prayers for Mencken’s soul. When the AP asked him what he thought about that, he said:

I felt a great uplift, shooting sensations in my nerves, and the sound of many things in my ears and I knew the house of representatives was praying for me again.

Mencken opposed lynching and thought Southerners should take up bullfighting instead: “every bull that was killed would save a Christian Ethiope.”

Mencken thought it would have been much better for both the North and the South if the South had won the war:

Whatever the defects of the new commonwealth below the Potomac, it would have at least been a commonwealth founded upon a concept of human inequality, and with a superior minority at the helm.

Mencken called the Gettysburg Address a “genuinely stupendous” piece of oratory, but:

Let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday, the doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—“that government of the people, by the people, and for the people” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

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After Americans began to worship FDR and after the country went to war for the second time against Mencken’s advice, he cut back on his political writing so he could be “a carefree butterfly with no more sense of responsibility than a glamour girl in Hollywood or the President of the United States.”

Mencken despised Roosevelt, writing in his diary that the president was “a fraud from snout to tail,” adding that “he had every quality that morons esteem in their heroes.” As for the New Deal, Mencken called it “just another political swindle, simply a scheme of robbing A to buy the vote of B.” The best he could say about the New Deal was that there was one article of the Bill of Rights it hadn’t violated. So far, no soldiers had been quartered in any man’s house without the owner’s consent.

During this period he worked hard on The American Language, a massive work of scholarship about every nuance of the way Americans write and speak. Here is a passage about what he called the “unearthly” names mothers give their daughters:

The masterpieces of this art show a determination to achieve something unmatched and unimagined, at whatever cost to tradition and decorum….On what other theory is one to arrive at the genesis of Flouzette, Ulestine, Wheirmelda and Moonean? The woman who achieves so shining a novelty not only marks off her little darling from all other little darlings within ear- or rumor-shot; she also establishes herself in her community as a salient social reformer and forward-looker….The woman next door who can fetch up nothing better than Echo, Kiwanis or Apple is plainly of an inferior order.

He wrote about black names:

Medical men making a malaria survey of Northampton County, North Carolina, staggered back to civilization with the news that they had found male Afro-Americans named Handbag, Squirrel, Bootjack, and Solicitor….Many of the double names in vogue among the dark-blanket Christians of the South are the product of piety, for the uneducated Negro is almost as religious as the white Cracker. Examples are King Solomon, Queen Esther, Holy Moses, and Virgin Mary. Once in a while these combinations run to formidable length, recalling the worst imbecilities of the Puritans, e.g., I Will Arise and Go Unto My Father, Jesus Christ and Him Crucified.

THE DIARY

There was much screeching about Mencken’s diary when it was published in 1989. Its editor, Charles Fecher, wrote in the introduction: “Let it be said at once, clearly and unequivocally: Mencken was an anti-Semite.”

Mencken an anti-Semite? This reminds me of an old joke: What do you call someone who hates blacks, Jews, Arabs, Mexicans, and the Chinese? An anti-Semite.

But in his diary, Mencken said nothing unkind about Jews in general; he simply noticed when people were Jewish. He was much more insulting about the South. He said of one man, “He is a Tennessean and will never get over it” and dismissed an Army general as “a southern cracker.” The harshest language in the whole diary was about Southern whites:

Only a rare linthead girl remains a virgin after the age of twelve. Her deflowering, in fact, is usually performed by her brothers, and if not by her brothers, then by her father. Incest is almost as common as fornication among these vermin, and no doubt it is largely responsible for their physical and mental deterioration.

Mencken called poor whites “ill-fed men and filthy, slatternly women and children, who all live like animals and are next to animals in their habits and ideas.”

But there was nonstop howling about anti-Semitism, and even serious talk of taking his name off the H. L. Mencken room at the National Press Club. These self-righteous asses were ignoramuses. Mencken had written very rough things about Jews that had been in print for years. In A Treatise on the Gods, he wrote:

As commonly encountered, they strike other people as predominantly unpleasant, and everywhere on earth they seem to be disliked. This dislike, despite their own belief to the contrary, has nothing to do with their religion: it is founded, rather, on their bad manners, their curious lack of tact. They have an extraordinary capacity for offending and alarming the Goyim.

However, he also wrote that the Bible is a remarkable work of beauty:

All these transcendent riches Christianity inherits from a little tribe of sedentary Bedouins, so obscure and unimportant that secular history scarcely knows them. No heritage of modern man is richer and none has made a more brilliant mark upon human thought, not even the legacy of the Greeks.

Mencken’s harshest passage about Jews is in his introduction to his translation of Nietzsche’s The Antichrist:

On the Continent, the day is saved by the fact that the plutocracy tends to become more and more Jewish. Here the intellectual cynicism of the Jew almost counterbalances his social unpleasantness. If he is destined to lead the plutocracy of the world out of Little Bethel he will fail, of course, to turn it into an aristocracy—i.e., a caste of gentlemen—but he will at least make it clever, and hence worthy of consideration. The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world. But whenever you find a Davidsbündlerschaft making practice against the Philistines, there you will find a Jew laying on. Maybe it was this fact that caused Nietzsche to speak up for the children of Israel quite as often as he spoke against them. He was not blind to their faults, but when he set them beside Christians he could not deny their general superiority.
—The Antichrist

Mencken was accused of being pro-Nazi, but he called Hitler “an idiot followed by idiots.”

On the Jews streaming out of Germany after Hitler came to power, Mencken wrote: “Why shouldn’t the United States take in a couple of hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?”

At one point in his career, Mencken was mistakenly identified as Jewish in some kind of who’s-who listing. When he learned about this, he said he didn’t much mind. His best friends were Jewish and through years of wear and tear he was pretty nearly circumcised.

In his diary, Mencken also said a few mildly unkind things about blacks. The ignoramuses went off like firecrackers about this, too, but they had obviously never read any Mencken. As far back as 1910, he wrote:

So long as we refrain, in the case of the negro loafer, from the measures of extermination we have adopted in the case of parasites further down the scale, we are being amply and even excessively faithful to an ethical ideal which makes constant war upon expediency and common sense.
—Men Versus the Man

And further:

In any chance crowd of Southern Negroes one is bound to note individuals who resemble apes quite as much as they resemble Modern Man, and among the inferior tribes of Africa, say the Bushmen, they are predominant. The same thing is true of any chance crowd of Southern poor whites.
—Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks

However, Mencken recognized the talents of individual blacks. He admired the black writer George Schuyler and was very impressed with a 1926 collection of essays by black intellectuals called The New Negro: An Interpretation:

Here a Negro of a quite new sort comes upon the scene—a Negro full of easy grace and not at all flustered by good society. He discusses the problems of his people soberly, shrewdly and without heat….Here, indeed, the Negro challenges the white Southerner on a common ground, and beats him hands down.

However, in the same article, Mencken says this about Negro progress:

There are serious difficulties in their way. The vast majority of people of their race are but two or three inches removed from gorillas: it will be a sheer impossibility, for a long, long while, to interest them in anything above pork-chops and bootleg gin.
—“The Aframerican: New Style,” in the American Mercury

But let us not forget how he wrote about whites:

If all the farmers in the Dust Bowl were shot tomorrow, and all the share-croppers in the South burned at the stake, every decent American would be better off, and not a soul would miss a meal.
—Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks

And further:

If all the inhabitants of the Appalachian chain succumbed to some sudden pestilence tomorrow, the effect upon civilization would be but little more than that of the fall of a meteor into the Ross Sea.
—Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks

Sometimes Mencken thought of himself as an American Voltaire, but even Voltaire said this when he was asked for a comment after learning an enemy had died: “He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.”

Jared Taylor is the editor of AmRen.com and the author of White Identity. This was an excerpt from a recent speech he delivered at a private gathering of Mencken admirers.