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.”

Seven years later, the same points were echoed in an interview by Nazi kingpin Hermann Goering, who was on trial for war crimes in 1946 at Nuremberg:

“Of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he  can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece…But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along.”

Goering explained why self-government was a mirage when rulers chose war:

“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” 

Goering committed suicide before he could be triumphally hanged.

Back in 1939, Mencken wrote in his same article, “The main reason why it is easy to sell war to peaceful people is that the demagogues who act as salesmen quickly acquire a monopoly of both public information and public instruction.” Looking at the peril of another world war, Mencken warned, “On the day war is declared, the Espionage Act will come into effect, and all free discussion will cease…Any argument against the war itself, and any criticism of the persons appointed to carry it on, will become aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Mencken predicted, “A few weeks of [pro-war] razzle-dazzle will suffice to convert most people to the war an to intimidate and silence the stray recalcitrant who holds out.” Thanks to massive pressure to confirm and submit, “The dissenter is not only suspected by all his neighbors; he also begins to suspect himself.”

(Okay, maybe not dissenters who follow the Libertarian Institute, but most of the rest of them.)

Mencken’s perspicacity was shaped by bitter experience during World War I. In 1915, the most popular song in America was “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.” Two years later, President Woodrow Wilson and his propagandists easily ignited war fever. Mencken chronicled the lies used to justify intervention until his views on the war were silenced. He watched as his fellow German-Americans were vilified and hounded as if they were all seeking to detonate the U.S. Capitol. He watched Wilson endlessly invoke the ideal of liberty as the government seized nearly absolute power, including the power to conscript millions of Americans to fight wherever Wilson chose (including Siberia) and to send more than a hundred thousand American troops to their death in Europe. Mencken was targeted by the Justice Department for surveillance. His 1917 essay, “Why Free Speech is Impossible During War,” was suppressed.

Mencken helped re-define the war after Armistice Day. In 1920, he ridiculed “the posse of ‘two thousand American Historians’ assembled by Mr. Creel [chief of the U.S. Committee on Public Information] to instruct the plain people in the new theory of American history, whereby the [1776] Revolution was represented as a lamentable row in an otherwise happy family, deliberately instigated by German intrigue.” Hyperbole? No. Robert Goldstein, the producer of the patriotic film The Spirit of ’76, was convicted under the Espionage Act in 1917 for  denigrating British soldiers during the Revolution and thereby endangering support for Allies.

On the eve of the 1920 presidential election, Mencken wrote that Americans were tired “of a steady diet of white protestations and black acts; they are weary of hearing highfalutin and meaningless words; they sicken of an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.” Mencken explained why a typical voter would support Warren Harding: “Tired to death of intellectual charlatanry, he turns despairingly to honest imbecility.”

Maybe some Donald Trump voters last year had the same sense of resignation. But the push for war with Iran is bringing out every charlatan in the land. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) may have offered the most shameless defense for launching a U.S. bombing campaign: “This is not warmongering. This is peace mongering.”

Mencken mostly silenced himself during the Second World War. FBI agents repeatedly investigated him, even interrogating his physician. But, as biographer Fred Hobson noted, Mencken’s “earlier acquaintance with J. Edgar Hoover may have helped forestall any further investigations.” After the war, he bitterly lamented in his dairy, “The course of the United States in World War II was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the [Baltimore] Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt’s foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.”

H.L. Mencken was recently labeled “The Greatest American Critic of the Great War” by the Roads to the Great War website. Mencken wasn’t perfect; he had some boneheaded pro-war utterances, perhaps due to his youthful infatuation with philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. But Mencken offers an antidote to people exposed to the angst-ridden laptop bombardiers who increasingly dominate social media and political discourse.