America after the Holy War, part 4

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by Revilo P. Oliver

AS SOON AS THE frenetic Americans began to squander their men and money in Europe [in WW1], the Federal government, using its “emergency powers” forbade the production of all beverages containing alcohol, and by the end of the year the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution was enacted in Washington and approved by a majority of the state legislatures before the end of the war. Very few Americans were sufficiently sane to perceive that they had repudiated the American conception of government and had replaced it with the legal principle of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which was the theoretical justification of the Jews’ revolution in Russia. A government which had the power and the right to forbid a man to drink a glass of beer or wine obviously had the power and right to apply its tyranny to every detail of his personal life: It could forbid him to own property, to raise children, to read books, to speak English, to drink water. . . There could be no theoretical limit to the imposition of total slavery, and a pretext that it was “not good for him” to have the freedom to make his own decisions about any act of his private life would not be theoretically necessary, although convenient for keeping the dumb brutes docile in their stalls. The foolish Americans recited Wilson’s gabble about “democracy” but lacked either the intelligence or the honesty to admit frankly that they were carrying out a totalitarian revolution and destroying a society based on the principle that it bestowed on its citizens certain rights that no government could infringe. They had a Constitution that had been designed to prevent the “democracy” about which they had become enthusiastic, and had they been logical, they would simply have abrogated that Constitution, instead of circumventing and nullifying its spirit by an amendment that was legally possible only because the authors of that document had not foreseen the possibility that citizens could become so mad as to contemplate such an enormity.

The hysteria of a jihad may account for the enactment of ‘Prohibition,’ but the Americans persisted in this lunacy from 1918 to 1933, for reasons which I, who grew up in the last years of that era, could not understand. Every legislator — every politician to whom I talked had a stock excuse: “It’s those God-damn women and their votes.” To which I had a stock answer, that females formed only half of the adult population, of which the other half was supposed to have a quality called manhood. That was more effective than arguing that women were not necessarily irrational.

It is true that the whole nation was filled with the clamor of epoptic females who, drunk with “do-gooding” and the ecstasy of imposing their fanaticism on their betters, rushed around, wilder than Maenads in pursuit of fauns on Mount Cithaeron and exalted by the delusion that they were chasing the Demon Rum. But many males encouraged delusions profitable to themselves. In almost every pulpit a holy man was bawling for legislated righteousness and the sanctity of preventing people from having private lives. They had, of course, the unscrupulousness of theologians, who are never concerned with factual truth or consistency, but only with what they can make people believe — for the people’s own good, of course, which, by divine dispensation, is always equivalent to what will augment the theologians’ revenue and power. I remember having heard one of them make his spiel, claiming that he had done philological research and ascertained that the word [in the “New Testament” water-into-wine parable] meant, not wine but grape juice, with the happy result that Jesus had not been guilty of violating the Eighteenth Amendment. As he spoke, his eyes roved over the upturned countenances of his audience to make certain that they were too ignorant or somnolent to protest, and when he saw that only a stranger was grinning, he could not prevent his visage from betraying his unctuous satisfaction at having put that one over on his flock. And the marabouts were inspired by idealist plans to chevy the populace some more: They were talking of constitutional amendments to prohibit the use of tobacco and to prohibit sexual intercourse to unmarried persons. (Prohibiting married men and women from indulging in it would have been very bad for business.) Their secular emulators were no better: The professional educators, always alert for a chance to cadge more bucks from the taxpayers, promised that, if enough bond issues were approved, they would so deform the minds of the young that the next generation would identify alcohol with Satan, and in many states they were able further to dilute and debase the curriculum by requiring in high schools year-long courses in “Americanism” that were entirely devoted to twaddle about the virtues of Prohibition. (The result, naturally, was that self-respecting young men felt a moral obligation to have a drink before enduring such a class, and for some reason it seemed proper to buy the drink at the “speak-easy” nearest the school instead of taking it from one’s own pocket flask.) Politicians cursed women, but were careful to protect their greatest source of income, and they could always afford to buy reasonably good whiskey, which they usually kept in bottles behind the law books in their office, secure from the eyes of such Prohibitionists as might come to receive assurances that The Law would be more stringently enforced as soon as taxes were raised.

As sane men knew from the very first, it was absolutely impossible to interdict a pleasant form of relaxation that was a custom of mankind much older than civilization itself; it might have been possible to coerce a mass of closely supervised slaves with fair success, but it certainly could not be done with a population that had a tradition of personal liberty and self-respect. And no sane man pretended that it could, although many a gentleman, in both New England and the South, would remark, while filling your glass, on the virtues of legislation that made liquor expensive and so helped to keep it out of the throats of the rabble or the niggers. The gentlemen were mistaken.

It is true that it would have taken the entire monthly salary of a teller in a bank to purchase five fifths of genuine, unadulterated Scotch whisky from a dealer of known reliability, but for the price of a seat in a repertory theatre one could purchase anywhere a pint of non-poisonous alcohol that was potable when mixed with fruit juice, and the very poor, if willing to risk their eyesight or their stomachs, could purchase for much less nauseous liquids that would produce intoxication.

I very much doubt that there was any inhabited spot in the United States in which potable alcohol was not available. And this vast business, remember, was criminal, operated by syndicates of gangsters who protected their allotted territories with machine guns, drove specially equipped models of the most expensive and powerful automobiles, always had wads of “C-notes” and sometimes “G-notes” in their pockets, and flourished mightily, although their business expenses included payoffs to all influential politicians in their territory and, of course, the cost of “putting the fix” on the local police and on most of the special Federal agents. Occasionally, to be sure, in the swarms of Federal agents there were a few, usually new recruits, who could not be corrupted. If they tried to interfere with large-scale operations, their bodies were found by the side of lonely roads, while the individual bootlegger, if pursued while making his deliveries, could always count on the sympathy and protection of a considerable part of the population: He could, for example, take refuge in almost any country club or college fraternity with confidence that he would be sheltered as a benefactor of mankind.

The Americans, who had had the reputation of being a conspicuously law-abiding people (outside the slums), became a nation of scoff-laws, justly contemptuous of both statute law and government, since they knew full well that there was scarcely a politician or officer who did not have his palm crossed regularly with treasury notes redeemable in gold, and that the numerous arrests and raids (conducted “on suspicion” without warrants) were chiefly (a) to suppress individuals who tried to go into business for themselves without a license from the local syndicate, (b) staged to give publicity to deserving officials before the next election, or (c) to teach the entirely innocent proprietors of hotels and restaurants that they should pay “protection” to induce Federal agents not to smash up their furniture and break their mirrors. The Americans also became a nation of hypocrites: The newspaper editor who boasted about the quality of the liquor he was serving his guests had just written editorials in commendation of the “Noble Experiment.” And the hypocrisy was contagious: When, near the end, a few public figures dared to denounce the tyranny, they did not boldly affirm the basic principles of American society, but instead talked meachingly about the additional revenue governments could obtain from taxation of a legal trade in liquors.

The consequences of the “Noble Experiment” which any man not imbecilic or moon-struck should have anticipated from the first were, not necessarily in order of importance:

1. The petty local gangs that had flourished chiefly in the slums of large cities were expanded into a great and powerful network covering the entire country and provided with an unfailing source of wealth.
2. Local governments, which had been reasonably honest outside large cities that had slums filled with immigrants who were foolishly permitted to vote, became universally corrupt and venal, and the constable of even the meanest village learned to augment his salary with “sweeteners” from the violators of laws that he thought ridiculous, while men sought the office of state’s attorney or sheriff primarily to enjoy the luxuries they could buy with “payoffs” from the syndicate.
3. Americans became accustomed to the concept of totalitarian (i.e., unlimited) government. As I have remarked above, a government that has the acknowledged right to prevent a man from taking a glass of wine with his dinner has the right to impose on him any form of despotism it wishes. So when, a few years hence, Federal thugs batter down your front door because they say they suspect you may be bootlegging a cure for cancer, or an agent of Infernal Revenue pulls open your jaws to make certain you have no undeclared gold fillings in your teeth, you may in your own mind (if you dare have thoughts of your own) curse the Commissars and the Jews, but do not forget the holy men and the “do-gooding” Maenads of the 1920s.
4. The egregious folly of “Prohibition” was made the paramount political issue for more than a decade, virtually eclipsing every real issue of national importance. Except in a few communities in which foreigners were dominant, election to public office was limited to hypocrites, who would publicly promise to tighten the control of a police state over Americans, and privately tell themselves that the “Noble Experiment” was sure to provide them with untaxable income and good liquor.
5. The Jews were officially recognized as a privileged race that must not be subjected to laws imposed on lower species. As a face-saving gesture, the law limited the Jews’ consumption to ten gallons a head per annum, but no one ever suggested that the theoretical restriction should or could be enforced. The Jews used their religion as a pretext for the exemption, just as they have used that pretext to claim special privileges throughout their history, e.g., at Rome in the time of Cicero, when, as every reader of the Pro Flacco well knows, their devotion to their tribal god gave them the right to create financial crises among the goyim by suddenly contracting the supply of gold under the cover of a holy duty to export it to Jerusalem.
6. The solid bulk of the American population, comprising almost the whole of the middle class and a large part of the other classes, the ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestants,’ made themselves ridiculous. It was then that the derisive acronymous epithet, ‘Wasp,’ came into use, and the racial body that was meant, here and abroad, when the word ‘American’ was used ethnically, forfeited the respect it had formerly enjoyed and has never since regained.

To be fair, we must recognize that the Americans’ unwitting abrogation of their Constitution was not entirely a matter of unreasoning fanaticism. The trade in alcoholic beverages, which was almost entirely in the hands of Jews except on the retail level and except for small local breweries, had become an essentially criminal operation, both as a source of revenue for gangs in large cities and for political corruption, and, more importantly, because most of the wine, whiskey, gin, etc. sold to the general public had been illegally adulterated with poisonous ingredients and the only way to obtain spirits that were not injurious was to purchase very expensive imported liquors from a dealer who could be trusted not to have opened the bottles and adulterated the contents or simply to have put forged labels on his own concoction. The great American industrialist, Henry Ford, was probably right when he explained in 1921 the success of the agitation for the Eighteenth Amendment, of which he himself had been one of the leaders:

The Prohibitionist has been able to command victory over the “personal liberty” advocate because the stuff that the Prohibitionist is against ought not to be sold or used under any circumstances, whereas the stuff the “personal liberty” advocate thinks he favors is not the stuff he thinks it is at all. . . The liquor which caused the adoption of Prohibition was most dangerous to the individual and society. The question was not one of “liberty” but of safety.

That, no doubt, was true, but none seemed aware of the fatal concession to expediency in a society that was traditionally founded on principle.

(to be continued)

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Source: America’s Decline