OPINION: Allan Stevo - Face Masks: It's Not Enough to Free Yourself. You Must Be Ready to Shout Down the Lynch Mob

  • Printer friendly view
 Sunday, December 27, 2020 - 08:25
Lynching scene from "The Bad Man" (1941, MGM)
Lynching scene from "The Bad Man" (1941, MGM)

Mark Twain writes in Huck Finn  about the cowardice of the mob, how it takes more bravery to refuse to be part of the mob than to hide in a lynch mob, and how not one in 10,000 men in a lynch mob have that sort of bravery.

He calls them cowards every one.

“The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.  But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness.”

The slightest hint of a steel-spined righteous man and almost every lynch mob backs down, especially in our current era. The ones that don’t, the very few, the ones who Twain calls “half-a-man” at best, well that’s for me and my maker to deal with, and goes beyond shouting down a mob.

“Twain wrote: I watched a man shout down a lynch mob and make it go home. Where is that moral man today?”

Read more at LewRockwell.com. 

 

A contributor to Economic Policy Journal, The Hill, The Daily Caller, and Mises.org, Stevo is author of The Bitcoin Manifesto (2017) and Face Masks in One Lesson (2020).