There is much to learn from
Paul Johnson's history of the 20th century, not least the appalling truth about the "Republican" camp during the Spanish Civil War; some unpalatable facts about FDR and his "vanity … compounded by an astonishing naivety"; and, most importantly, the many ways in which the autocrats of the left (Lenin,
Stalin, Mao, etc…) and of the right (Hitler, Mussolini, Pétain, etc…) inspired, complemented, and even
conspired with, one another.
Much of what we have learned turns out to be myths. What explains the rise of rightist fascism, and how does it differ from leftist communism? According to Paul Johnson, there isn't much difference at all, and the reason for its rise in Europe was the genuine shock, by the general population as well as by the Left itself, over the disastrous results of Lenin's communist revolution in Russia, as much on an economic level as on a humanistic level. To counter the ruin and the atrocities of international socialism, the Left in Europe invented and turned to national socialism.
Also fascinating is the thread that runs through the book, by which the expansion of the State in general and the appearance of "gangster statesmen" in particular took place in the wake of the disappearance of religion and moral absolutes in public life.
"By early 1933, … the two largest and strongest nations of
Europe were firmly in the grip of totalitarian regimes which preached
and practiced, and indeed embodied, moral relativism, with all its
horrifying potentialities."
Perhaps the most interesting regarding Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s) is that efforts by the Left to link Hitler and the Fascists with the Right's (and/or with the bourgeoisie's) religion and capitalism are the complete opposite of the truth. Not only were the Nazis and il Duce die-hard (even Karl Marx-quoting) socialists (in Hitler's case, a Leninist, according to Paul Johnson, and, in Mussolini's, virtually a Marxist), but the Germans engaged in "attacks on Christianity" and der Führer — who was simply "a race-socialist as opposed to a class-socialist" — had plans for the Pope to "be hanged in full pontificals in St Peter's Square."
Another piece of evidence that Hitler was in no way beholden to any part of the Judeo-Christian religion (danke zu Stephen Green): Christians Save Western Civilization From Islam — to Hitler's Regret:
… on Oct. 10, 732, one of world history’s most decisive battles saved
Europe from becoming Islamic. Interestingly, none other than Adolf
Hitler regretted this development
… the führer — who further accused Christianity of promoting “meekness and
flabbiness” — believed what many in the West continue to believe,
particularly those whose worldview is colored by Hollywood: that,
historically, Christianity only bred weak and feeble men, especially
when compared to more “robust” peoples, in this case, Muslims.
Back to Paul Johnson and praise about his books:
Beginning with Modern Times (1985), Paul Johnson's books are acknowledged masterpieces of historical analysis. He is a regular columnist for Forbes and The Spectator, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.
That was Amazon's description of the late author and below, find excerpts from the first half of Paul Johnson's history book of 780 pages:
Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s) Chapter One A Relativistic World
Marxism, now for the first time easing itself into the seat of power, was another form of gnosticism claiming to peer through the empirically-perceived veneer of things to the hidden truth beneath
… Feelings of guilt were thus not a sign of vice, but of virtue
… But personal guilt-feelings were an illusion to be dispelled. None of us was individually guilty; we were all guilty
… The destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and that destructive capacity necessarily expands too, part passu. … The effect of the Great War was to enormously to increase the size, and therefore the destructive capacity and propensity to oppress, of the state. Before 1914, all state sectors were small, though most were growing, some of them fast
Among the advanced races, the decline and ultimately the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum … In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology … The end of the old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such gangster-statesmen to emerge
Chapter Two The First Despotic Utopias
Lenin's legacy was a solidly built police state surrounded by economic ruins
… There was genuine fear of a Red Terror, for the catholic newspapers were full of Lenin's atrocities and the Russian famine. Mussolini was not personally identified with the violence [in Italy]. On the contrary: he seemed to many to be the one to stop it
… Once installed, [Mussolini] did not make any of Lenin's obvious mistakes. He did not create a secret police, or abolish parliament. The press remained free, opposition leaders at liberty. There were some murders, but fewer than before the coup
… One senses that Mussolini was a reluctant fascist because, underneath, he remained a Marxist, albeit a heretical one; and to him 'revolution' was meaningless without large-scale expropriation, something the bulk of his followers and colleagues did not want
… a new kind of mountebank dictatorships, less bloodthirsty than Leninism and much less dangerous to property. But to Marxists it was much more serious. By the mid-1920s, there were fascist movements all over Europe. One thing they all had in common was anti-Communism of the most active kind
… Mussolini's Italy was now an empirical fact. just like Lenin's Russia, inviting the world to study it, with a view to imitation, perhaps, or avoidance
… No utopia was emerging in Italy, but the contrast with hungry, terrorized Russia was striking, To those north of the Alps, who rejected alike the Bolshevism of the East and the liberalism of the West, the Italian renaissance seemed to offer a third way
Chapter Three Waiting for Hitler
… Christianity was content with a solitary hate-figure to explain evil: Satan. But modern secular faiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The enemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race
… The new anti-Semitism, in short, was part of the sinister drift away from the apportionment of individual responsibility towards the notion of collective guilt — the revival, in modern guise, of one of the most primitive and barbarous, even bestial, of instincts
… German anti-Semitism, in fact, was to a large extent a 'back to the countryside' movement … Unlike Marxism, which was essentially a quasi-religious movement, German anti-Semitism was a cultural and artistic phenomenon, a form of romanticism
… Paul de Lagarde preached a Germanistic religion stripped of Christianity because it had been Judaized by St Paul, 'the Rabbi'
… Hitler was totally irreligious and had no interest in honour or ethics. He believed in biological determinism, just as Lenin believed in historical determinism. He thought race, not class, was the true revolutionary principle of the twentieth century, just as nationalism had been in the nineteenth. He had a similar background to Lenin
… Hitler, like Lenin, was the product of an age increasingly obsessed by politics … in that barren and cheerless world, he, like Lenin, was a master…
… Like Lenin and still more like Stalin, he [Hitler] was an outstanding practitioner of the century's most radical vice: social engineering — the notion that human beings can be shovelled around like concrete
… in important respects he remained a Leninist to the end
Chapter Four Legitimacy in Decadence
William Temple … was the first of the Anglo-Saxon clergy to opt for progressive politics as a substitute for evangelism of dogma, and was thus part of that huge movement which, as Nietzsche had foreseen, was transforming religious energy into secular Utopianism
Chapter Eight The Devils
… [Stalin's] colossal exercise in social engineering, the destruction of the independent Russian peasantry … [it was] time to exact a dreadful revenge on the rural multitudes who had humbled Soviet power
… the way in which the pursuit of Utopia leads the tiny handful of men in power abruptly to assault a society many centuries in the making, to treat men like ants and to stamp on their nest
… Collectivisation was a calamity such as no peasantry had known since the Thirty Years' War in Germany
… The cost in Russian lives was staggering [and led to the] re-feudalization of the Soviet peasantry, who then formed three-quarters of the population
… It was Stalin who pointed the way to Hitler
… Under the influence of Stalin, the German CP made no real distinction between the Social Democrats ('Social Fascists') and Hitler. Their leader, Ernst Thälmann, told the Reichstag on 11 February 1930 that fascism was already in power in Germany, when the head of the government was a Social Democrat
… Blinded by their absurd political analysis, the Communists actually wanted a Hitler government, believing it would be a farcical affair, the prelude to their own seizure of power
… The events immediately preceding Hitler's accession to power are curiously reminiscent of Lenin's rise albeit the first used the law and the second demolished it — in that they both show how irresistible is clarity of aim combined with a huge, ruthless will to power
… It had taken Hitler less than five months to destroy German democracy completely, about the same time as Lenin. Not a soul stirred
… Hitler had thought that Lenin's greatest economic mistake had been to order party members to take over the running of industry, and kill or expel its capitalist manager
… There is no evidence that Hitler was, even to the smallest degree, influenced by big business philosophy. He bowed to business advice only when convinced it would forward his military and external aims. He regarded himself as a socialist, and the essence of his socialism was that every individual or group in the state should unhesitatingly work for national policy. It did not matter who owned the actual factory so long as those managing it did what they were told.
… German socialism, he told Herman Rauschning, was not about nationalization:
'Our socialism reaches much deeper. It does not change the external order of things, it orders solely the relationship of man to the state … Then what does property and income count for? Why should we need to socialize the banks and the factories? We are socializing the people.'
… Far from big business corrupting his socialism, it was the other way around … some Catholic peasants … refused to give the Nazi salute and greetings, and bitterly resented attacks on Christianity
… Hitler also appealed to the moralistic nature of many Germans, that is, those who had a keen desire for 'moral' behaviour without possessing a code of moral absolutes rooted in the Christian faith
… The notion of obeying 'iron laws' or 'a higher law', rather than the traditional, absolute morality taught in the churches, was a Hegelian one. Marx and Lenin translated it into a class concept; Hitler into a race one. Just as the Soviet cadres were taught to justify the most revolting crimes in the name of a moralistic class warfare, so the SS acted in the name of race — which Hitler insisted was a far more powerful and central human motivation than class. Service to the race, as opposed to the Marxist proletariat, was the basis of Nazi puritanism
… By early 1933, therefore, the two largest and strongest nations of Europe were firmly in the grip of totalitarian regimes which preached and practiced, and indeed embodied, moral relativism, with all its horrifying potentialities
… Like Lenin he [Hitler] was a gnostic
… From the end of 1936 to the second half of 1938, Stalin struck at every group in the regime … He had been in secret negotiations with Hitler since 1935. The following year he persuaded the Nazi government to concoct forged evidence of secret contacts between the Soviet army commander, Marshal Tukhachevsky, and Hitler's generals; it was done by the Gestapo and transmitted by one of its agents
… the furtive contacts which the security services of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia maintained throughout this period. On the whole, European Communists were safer in their own fascist homelands than in the 'Socialist mother-country'. Roy Medvedev, the independent Soviet Marxist historian, noted: "It is a terrible paradox that most European Communist leaders and activists who lived in the USSR perished, while most of those who were in prison in their native lands in 1937-8 survived.'
… In social engineering, mass murder on an industrial scale is always the ultimate weapon: Hitler's 'final solution' for the Jews had its origins not only in his own fevered mind but in [Stalin's] collectivization of the Soviet peasantry
… The attempt by Western intellectuals to defend Stalinism involved them in a process of self-corruption which transferred to them, and so to their countries, which their writings helped to shape, some of the moral decay inherent in totalitarianism itself, especially its denial of individual responsibility for good or ill
Chapter Nine The High Noon of Aggression
… Germany, Russia and Italy had gangster dictatorships
… Behind [PM] Negrin's complaisant ignorance, the Communists — that is, Stalin's secret police — took over Republican Spain. The result was one of the major political tragedies of the century
… The purge coincided with Stalin's massacre of his own party in Russia, and it bore all the marks of his methods [what with] the former Barcelona convent of St Ursula [becoming] known as 'the Dachau of Republican Spain'
Andrès Nin, the POUM leader [was] the model for Orwell's hero Goldstein in Nineteen Eighty-Four … During the rest of 1937 and well into 1938, many thousands of POUM members, and indeed other Leftists of all descriptions, were executed or tortured to death in Communist prisons. They included a large number of foreigners … Among those … who managed to escape were Orwell and Willy Brandt, the future German Chancellor
… It was one of Spain's many misfortunes at this time that her … Civil War coincided with the climax of Stalin's great terror
… Stalin was having his leading agents killed all over the world in 1937-8. And, as in Russia, virtually all the creatures who helped him to take over the Left in Spain, and then to terrorize it, were murdered in turn
… Throughout the Spanish war, Stalinism was assisted not only by superb public relations but by naivety, gullibility and, it must also be said, the mendacity and corruption of Western intellectuals
… The intellectuals of the Left did not want to know the objective truth; they were unwilling for their illusions to be shattered. Many of them treated 'the Party' with abject subservience
Chapter Ten The End of Old Europe
… The lesson he had learned from the First World War and from Ludendorff's analysis of it was that it was essential for Germany to effect a break-out from its Central European base, which could always be encircled. In Hitler's view, Ludendorff had just begun to attain this, at Brest-Litovsk, when the 'stab in the back' by the home front wrecked everything. Hence his real plans began where Brest-Litovsk ended: the clock was to put back to spring 1918, but with Germany solid, united, fresh and, above all, 'cleansed'
… Being a race-socialist as opposed to a class-socialist, Hitler believed the dynamic of history was race. The dynamic was interrupted when race-poisoning took place
Chapter Eleven The Watershed Year
… Hitler and Stalin played chess with humanity
… when the moral restraints of religion and tradition, hierarchy and precedent, are removed, the power to suspend or unleash catastrophic events does not devolve on the impersonal benevolence of the masses but falls into the hands of men who are isolated by the very totality of their evil natures
… Hitler was not in the business of liberation. Like Stalin, he was in the business of slavery
in essential respects they were fellow ideologues, pursuing Utopias based on a fundamental division of mankind into élites and helots [in which the] Einsatzgruppen [would form] the most audacious exercise in social engineering ever conceived
… The Alps would be the boundary between 'the German Empire of the North', with a new 'Germania' as its capital, and 'the Roman empire of the South'. The Pope would be hanged in full pontificals in St Peter's Square
…He [Hitler] would forbid smoking, make vegeterianism compulsory, 'revive the Cambrian art of knitting', appoint a 'Special Commissioner for the Care of Dogs' and an 'Assistant Secretary for Defence Against Gnats and Insects'
… With the prospect of death on all sides of him, the ordinary Russian soldier had no real alternatives but to fight to the last
Stalin's ruthlessness, combined with Hitler's folly, ensured Soviet survival. Yet, as generalissimos, the two men were strangely alike, in their total indifference to casualties, however calamitous, in their refusal to visit the fronts (in both cases for security reasons) and in their personal direction of their campaigns
… On a moral plane Stalin was no better than Hitler; worse in some ways
… Always pro-Soviet, [FDR's] bellicosity increased sharply once Russia entered the war
… In his twilight, Mussolini reverted to his Lenin-type totalitarian socialism, always the bedrock of his political philosophy, and preached the destruction of 'plutocracy' and the supremacy of syndicalism. By the end of march 1945 he had carried through, albeit largely on paper, a socialist revolution which had nationalized all firms employing more than one hundred workers
… It was essentially Hitler's decision to fight the war to its inevitable finish. For a time at least Stalin was always prepared to revert to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He offered to negotiate with Hitler in December 1942 and again in summer 1943
… Hitler remained to the end a socialist, though an eccentric one. Like Stalin he lived in hideous discomfort
… It cannot be too strongly emphasized that Hitler's aims could not be achieved except through war and under cover of war. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler believed in ultimate social engineering
… [For Hitler] the massacre of entire categories of mankind was nothing more than a distasteful duty. Lenin seems to have cultivated exactly the same attitude
… Because Stalin believed, as Lenin had done, that a Soviet Germany would emerge from the war, he underplayed German war-guilt in his public statements and encouraged Western supporters to do the same. His private feelings were quite different
… The links between the Nazi and Soviet security forces had always been strong, and were cordially resumed after the war. Himmler had always admired Soviet police methods (he believed Stalin had distinguished Mongol blood from Genghis Khan's horde) and his head of the Gestapo, SS General Mueller, probably went to work for the NKVD. Many of the Prussian police officials, who had served Goering, went on to high office in the police of the East German People's Republic, which Stalin in due course set up
… The Japanese POW record, in fact, was much worse than the Nazis': of 235,000 Anglo-American POWs held by Germany and Italy only 4 percent died, whereas of the 132,000 in Japanese custody 27 percent died … In fact Japanese atrocities against Indian and Filippino soldiers and against Chinese, Malay and other non-white civilians were infinitely more savage and numerous than any inflicted on the Anglo-Americans
… the confusion of moral issues by the end of the war was fundamentally compounded by the presence, in the ranks of the righteous, of the Soviet totalitarian power. There was scarcely a crime the Nazis or the knights of Bushido had committed, or even imagined, which the Soviet regime hand not also perpetrated, usually on an even larger scale. It ran precisely the type of system which had produced the war and its horrors. More specifically, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of September 1939 and the Japanese-Soviet Pact of April 1941 had made the Axis aggressions possible.
… Nevertheless, Soviet Russia not only judged the guilty of the war it had helped to create but emerged as its sole beneficiary
Chapter Thirteen Peace by Terror
…Roosevelt also wanted to bypass Churchill, whom he thought an incorrigible old imperialist, incapable of understanding ideological idealism
… This vanity, so reminiscent of Chamberlain's belief that he could 'handle' Hitler, was compounded by an astonishing naivety. He did not believe Stalin wanted territory … The menace which Roosevelt's blindness constituted to the post-war stability of Europe
… The Cold War may be said to date from the immediate aftermath of the Yalta Conference, to be precise from March 1945
… Eastern Europe and most of the Balkans were lost to totalitarianism. It was unclear for some time whether Western Europe could be saved too
… it was Stalin's greed which led him to overplay his hand and so reverse the process of American withdrawal. And it was greed not only for land and power but for blood.
… Like Stalin, [Tito] was an experienced gangster familiar with the rules of survival
… Of course the reason Truman wanted UN backing [for Korea] was that he took America into the war without getting Congressional approval first
… If the Cold War began over Poland it reached maturity over Korea and embraced the whole world. In effect, Stalin had polarized the earth
… Stalin hated 'Westerners' in the same way Hitler hated Jews, using the same term: 'cosmopolitanism'. This explains the extraordinary thoroughness and venom with which, in 1945-6, he destroyed or isolated in camps all those who had been in contact with non-Soviet ideas: not only prisoners of war but serving officers, technicians, journalists and party members whose wartime duties had taken them abroad
… [Stalin] was running what the Chinese Communists were later to term a Cultural Revolution, an attempt to change fundamental human attitudes over the whole range of knowledge by the use of naked police power
Chapter Fourteen The Bandung Generation
Until the early 1950s, the Americans had controlled the UN. Their first mistake was to involve it in Korea, especially through the forum of the General Assembly, a pseudo-representative body which spoke only for governments, a growing proportion of which were undemocratic. Korea broke Trygve Lie, the Norwegian Secretary-General, who was loyal to the principles of the old Western alliance. He resigned when the Russians boycotted him and got the Left to stir up his own Secretariat against him. At this point the Western powers should have dropped the UN and concentrated instead on expanding NATO into a world-wide security of free nations.
Chapter Fifteen Caliban's Kingdoms
The former colonies [after WWII] became the superlative prey for the great human scourge of the twentieth century: the professional politician
No Pasarán has linked to and quoted
Paul Johnson numerous times, notably from his
History of the American People.
• NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY (2022 & 2021): Is Thanksgiving a "Myth" or a "Problematic Holiday"? What Nobody Tells You About Indians and Other Native Americans
• AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY (2021): The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence
• WHITE HISTORY (2021): Thanksgiving: Can
the Élites' Contempt for American History and for the Voters' Desires
in the 21st Century Be Traced All the Way Back to the Jamestown and
Plymouth Colonies?
• JIMMY CARTER (2008): 32 years ago a
Democrat politician with very little experience "transcended" politics
as usual and was lifted on waves of good will to the White House
• NIXON & WATERGATE (2018 & 2017): The Troubling Parallels Between Today and the Watergate Era: The media was determined to "reverse the verdict of the election by non-constitutional means"; Trump 2016? No, Nixon 1972 • Nixon and Watergate: What Do the MSM and History Books Fail to Tell Us About the 1970s Scandal?
• JFK'S 1960 CAMPAIGN (2020, 2012, 2008): Evidence of Fraud in 2020 Election? A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign • Evidence of Fraud in 2008 Election? A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign • Stealing the Election: The 1960 and the 2008 Contests Compared
• EUROPEAN HISTORY (2005, 2020): The Europe of totalitarianism, in which
communism, fascism and Nazism competed to impose regulations on every aspect of human existence • Why Does Nobody Ever Fret About
Scandinavia's — Ghastly — 19th-C Slavery Conditions?
• ANTI-AMERICANISM (2004, 2006 (twice)): The truth is, any accusation against America that comes to hand is used without scruple by the Old World intelligentsia • No American citizen should stoop to apologize for being American; doing so is nothing short of despicable • "Go sell peanuts in the Métro"
