Why Neo-Nazis Love Mencken

By Nicholas Stix

The following “thing” popped up in my Gab feed.

At first, I wan’t sure it came from Mencken. On social media, people pipe quotes all the time, by putting something they like into a hero’s mouth, and then encasing the whole sordid mess in a pretty word box. And the poster didn’t know how to quote properly. He put quotation marks at the beginning of the first paragraph, but not for the others. So, given the shallowness of the rest, I thought that the following paragraphs were the poster’s own deep, philosophical musings. But no, I was able to determine that the entire bloody mess was Mencken’s own concotion.

To a rabid anti-Semite, even Einstein was chopped liver.

I posted the following comment, in response:

Well. Now I know why neo-Nazis love Mencken. It’s not due to his countless witticisms. Rather, it’s due to the dumbest, vilest passage he ever wrote.

Peter Jee @sageantone

H.L. Mencken was a half-baked naturalist infant, whose ideological depth couldn’t hold a guppy... but his insight into jews was as incisive as anyone’s I’ve read:

“The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.

“I am one of the few Goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other Goyim. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.

“The Jewish theory that the goyim envy the superior ability of the Jews is not borne out by the facts. Most goyim, in fact, deny that the Jew is superior, and point in evidence to his failure to take the first prizes: he has to be content with the seconds. No Jewish composer has ever come within miles of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; no Jew has ever challenged the top-flight painters of the world, and no Jewish scientist has equaled Newton, Darwin, Pasteur or Mendel. In the latter bracket such apparent exception as Ehrlich, Freud and Einstein are only apparent. Ehrlich, in fact, contributed less to biochemical fact than to biochemical theory, and most of his theory was dubious. Freud was nine-tenths quack, and there is sound reason for believing that even Einstein will not hold up: in the long run his curved space may be classed with the psychosomatic bumps of Gall and Spurzheim. But whether this inferiority of the Jew is real or only a delusion, it must be manifest that it is generally accepted. The goy does not, in fact, believe that the Jew is better than the non-Jew; the most he will admit is that the Jew is smarter at achieving worldly success. But this he ascribes to sharp practices, not to superior ability.”