On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 9:04 PM, <cgreen7223 at aol.com> wrote:
> Yes, there is a side to Mencken's opinions that are revolting. In the book
> I quoted from he also argued that Native Americans are racially inferior;
> that if the dust bowl farmers and southern sharecroppers were all killed
> then it would be of benefit to humanity; that people who have more children
> than they can afford should be sterilized;that something should be done to
> limit the offspring of the "unfit" i.e. the different classes of poor
> people, etc. In the months before he suffered a massive stroke that sent
> him into dementia in November 1948, he fervently supported the red scare
> then underway and argued for a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union.
> He was a fanatical anti-communist and anti-socialist. He seemed to have
> bigoted things to say about most ethnic groups. He attacked unions as
> tending to be full of workers who wanted to do less work for more money.
>
> But as Henwood has said before, there might be a few things in his
> writings that leftists can learn from. He was very funny and some leftists
> need more of a sense of humor. Ze'ev Chaffets, in his recent biography of
> Limbaugh, compares Mencken to Limbaugh. That is, of course, idiotic. I
> doubt limbaugh, if he were alive in the 1920's and 30's would have, as
> Mencken did, refer to the US occupation of Haiti as murderous and conducted
> for the benefit of US businessmen making an "unfair and excessive" income
> from Haitian resources. I doubt Limbaugh would have contributed to the
> Sacco and Vanzetti defense fund and lobbied for Emma Goldman's readmission
> to the US or paid Goldman's hospital and funeral bills. I doubt Limbaugh
> would have protested against the imprisonment of Eugene Debs and other
> leftist radicals or testified before congress in support of federal
> legislation against lynching.
>
> He was certainly a very independent minded and intelligent, within the
> limitations of his conservative and social darwinist ideology. Most people
> admire him for the way he wrote not the substance of what he said. They
> enjoy reading him denounce people as morons but they don't really
> comprehend his most important ideas, such as on the role of conformity in
> society, his attacks on patriotism and moral rage, etc. They think of as a
> comedian before anything else, which is probably what he was to a
> significant extent. Alexander Berkman, in a letter to Emma Goldman in the
> early 30's refered to Mencken as a "superficial clown." He probably was
> that to an extent. Goldman replied that Mencken had some significant flaws
> but that he had done a great deal for civil liberties and for pushing down
> barriers to dissent in the US. Mencken wrote an article on Berkman and
> Goldman in the mid-20's, portraying them in a friendly light, calling their
> anarchist beliefs nonsense but praising their writing style and
> intelligence and their criticisms of the Soviet Union. He paid Goldman's
> hospital and funeral bills after she died and wrote government officials
> arguing for her re-admission to the country.
>
> Chris Green
>
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>
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