Good-Bye, Friend: Paul Johnson, 1928-2023

In his early days, [Paul] Johnson’s political outlook was “leftist” by his own admission. But he not only wrote history; he learned from it. And the more he learned, the less credible the leftist perspective was. 

Thus writes Lawrence W. Reed in his obituary at The American Spectator, indirectly explaining why the West's (suicidal) leftists are constantly trying to rewrite the history of America, of the West, and of the world. (If you do not have time for this entire post, please skip to the very last blockquote at the bottom thereof…)

In an editorial tribute last weekend, the Wall Street Journal noted that “[f]ew working journalists have written history with as much elan and narrative force” as Johnson did. “This devoted Christian and Catholic gentleman, this truly Renaissance man,” wrote Francis P. Sempa in these pages on Saturday, “was the greatest chronicler of our age.”

Some of Johnson’s books are masterpieces of epic proportion: Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s; Ireland: A Concise History from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day; Art: A New History; The Civilization of Ancient Egypt; The Renaissance; A History of Christianity; A History of the American People; A History of the Jews; and A History of the English People; plus biographies of Mozart, Napoleon, Washington, Churchill, Socrates, John Paul II, and God knows who else (because Johnson wrote a book about Him too). You name it, there’s a good chance Johnson penned an article or a full-blown history of it.

Regarding Paul Johnson, the aforementioned Wall Street Journal piece pointed out that,

Though he was British, his writing often concerned the United States, which he called a “marvelous” country, as he told these pages in 2011; “a working multiracial democracy” and “the greatest of all human adventures.” That view is unfashionable now on the American left and even the so-called nationalist conservative right, most of whose denizens could benefit from reading Johnson’s “A History of the American People,” which invites readers in with this subversive opening note: 

“I have not bowed to current academic nostrums about nomenclature or accepted the flyblown philacteries of Political Correctness. So I do not acknowledge the existence of hyphenated Americans, or Native Americans or any other qualified kind. They are all Americans to me: black, white, red, brown, yellow, thrown together by fate in that swirling maelstrom of history which has produced the most remarkable people the world has ever seen.”

That has been taken up enthusiastically by No Pasarán, and through the blog's nearly two-decade run, 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"

Let us end with three quotes. the first from Lawrence Reed's American Spectator colleague, Francis P. Sempa:

The Birth of the Modern, though written later, was effectively the prequel to Johnson’s historical masterpiece Modern Times. Johnson began that book with the intellectual currents that flowed from science, mass education, the growth of relativism, and the decline of religion. The absolutes of good and evil were discarded. Society, Johnson wrote, was “cut adrift” from the “faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.” Secular ideologies replaced the religious impulse and led to the emergence of “despotic utopias” — first in Russia under the Bolsheviks, then in Italy under the fascists, in Japan under the Bushido-inspired militarists, then in Germany under the Nazis, and later in Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Southeast Asia, and Cuba under the communists. But even in democracies, the growth of state power was enormous and impinged on individual liberty. 

Collectivist state power motivated by secular ideologies led to wars, genocides, Gulags, reeducation camps, and state-induced famines on a scale never before seen. In Russia and Germany, Johnson wrote, “the devils had taken over” in the late 1920s and 1930s. Stalin and Hitler, and later Mao Zedong in China, sacrificed their peoples on the altar of totalitarian idols. The communist powers in the Cold War challenged the democracies and for a time appeared to be winning — especially in the 1960s and early 1970s when, Johnson writes, the United States attempted “suicide” by leftist-inspired self-loathing which culminated in the loss in Vietnam and a dangerous geopolitical retreat in the late 1970s.

Second, another quote from Lawrence W. Reed:

Marx still has lots of avid disciples … — the man whose vitriol led to regimes that killed an estimated 100 million people. As economist Thomas Sowell summed it up so well, “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

And finally, Paul Johnson himself. If you need an explanation of the Democratic Party in the past third of a century (if not longer, far longer), what the Old World has managed to do (not least with the German intellectuals [sic] emigrating to the USA in the first half of the century) is export its teachings (actually, its biases and hatred) to America's Democrats as well as to all the first the universities and second the schools of the New World…

Anti-Americanism is the prevailing disease of intellectuals today. Like other diseases, it doesn't have to be logical or rational. But, like other diseases, it has a syndrome — a concurrent set of underlying symptoms that are also causes.

• First, an unadmitted contempt for democracy. The U.S. is the world's most successful democracy. …

It is this feature that intellectuals—especially in Europe—find embittering. They know they must genuflect to democracy as a system. They cannot openly admit that an entire people—especially one comprising nearly 300 million, who enjoy all the freedoms—can be mistaken. But in their hearts these intellectuals do not accept the principle of one person, one vote. They scornfully, if privately, reject the notion that a farmer in Kansas, a miner in Pennsylvania or an auto assembler in Michigan can carry as much social and moral weight as they do. In fact, they have a special derogatory word for anyone who acts on this assumption: "populist." A populist is someone who accepts the people's verdict, even — and especially — when it runs counter to the intellectual consensus (as with capital punishment, for example). In the jargon of intellectual persiflage, populism is almost as bad as fascism — indeed, it's a step toward it. Hence, the argument goes, the U.S. is not so much an "educated democracy" as it is a media-swayed and interest-group-controlled populist regime. 

 … The truth is, any accusation that comes to hand is used without scruple by the Old World intelligentsia. Anti-Americanism is factually absurd, contradictory, racist, crude, childish, self-defeating and, at bottom, nonsensical. It is based on the powerful but irrational impulse of envy — an envy of American wealth, power, success and determination. 

Read the whole thing…