H. L. Mencken on War Propaganda and Public Opinion

 Each time one of the networks shows videos from the Russian ‘Defense’ Ministry I sense my stomach churning and my spirit sinking.  The videos are propaganda, like similar videos produced by the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department.  They remind viewers of the mission of all military forces, i.e., killing people and destroying stuff.  The soldiers with their rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, mortars, and flame throwers, the tanks, artillery pieces, ships, and aircraft loaded with high explosive weapons – all are intended to kill people and destroy stuff.  The plain message is ‘cross me and risk death and destruction.’  This is true of the Russian military.  This is true of the American military.  We’re all in the Death and Destruction business.  For smaller nations, their military forces may accurately be said to be defensive, at least in terms of perceived external threats.  For imperial nations, i.e., Russia, China, and the U.S., their military forces are ‘defense forces’ only in the sense that they are maintained to ‘defend’ whatever the national leaders want to accomplish with them, which may include aggression against weaker adversaries.  Nothing has changed since Thucydides observed the “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.”  In all of this, we wonder how much it matters what any of us thinks about the pendency of yet another European war that one way or another inevitably involves the U.S.  

 On May 9, 1939, a few months before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, H. L. Mencken wrote a piece in the Baltimore Sun, that seems a bit prescient:

    "The fact that all the polls run heavily against American participation in the threatening European war is not to be taken seriously.  A secret poll taken in any of the counties principally concerned would show the same result precisely.  The overwhelming majority of Englishmen don’t want war, and hope that it will never come again, and the same thing is true of the majority of Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Poles, Russians, Romanians and Serbs.  It was true of the same people down to August 2, 1914 and of Americans down to April 6, 1917.

    But wars are not made by common folk, scratching for livings in the heat of the day; they are made by demagogues infesting palaces. . .

    A few weeks of razzle-dazzle will suffice to convert most people to the war and to intimidate and silence the stray recalcitrants who hold out . . . Thus the job of demagogy is completed and a brave and united people confronts a craven and ignominious foe.  It is not until long afterward that anyone ventures to inquire into the matter more particularly, and it is then too late to do anything about it.  The dead are still dead, the fellows who lost legs still lack them, war widows go on suffering the orneriness of their second husbands, and taxpayers continue to pay, pay, pay.  In the schools children are taught that the war was fought for freedom, the home, and God."

    Right now Vladimir Putin is the demogogue in the driver’s seat and there is no telling whether the coalition of opponents threatening sanctions will deter him from crossing the Ukrainian border meting out Death and Destruction.  What we can be sure of is the ubiquity of his government’s razzle-dazzle justifying the Death and Destruction, the innocent suffering what they must, and the whole sordid exercise being justified on all sides as a defense of “freedom, the home, and God.”