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…

Evidence of Fraud in 2020 Election? A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign

Note: The following post originally appeared eight years ago, in April 2012, as that year's elections were moving forward, under the same title except for one word — the year…

Evidence of Fraud in 2008 Election? A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign

In some ways the most dangerous kind of politician is a man who is good at PR and nothing else

writes Paul Johnson in his monumental History of the American People.

No, he was not talking about the current occupant [Barack Obama] of the White House (his book was written in 1999, after all — before Obama had even published his (first) autobiography), but about John F Kennedy, and I am speaking as a former Kennedy devotee and Camelot maniac. (Yes, even if the book was written before 911 and even the George W Bush presidency, it is a must-read — as you will see below.)

I was coaxed into pulling Paul Johnson's masterpiece from my shelves again, as I read Instapundit's review of the PJMedia piece on what the Wikileaks memos say about the 2008 election, getting increasingly angry as I read through the J Christian Adams original.

What we do know is this: First, that people in the McCain campaign thought they had evidence of election tampering that cost McCain the election. Second, that McCain thought it best for the country to do nothing about it, in part because of fears of mob violence.

Interestingly, Glenn Reynolds calls his link to J Christian Adams' article "Bad Call." That turns out to be entirely appropriate, in view of the fact that Bernie Marcus recently pointed out (video) that

the Republicans play the rules of … golf. In golf, if you miss a putt or you touch the ball, you call a shot on yourself. We're playing the game of golf. The Democrats are playing ice hockey. It's a killer game. And that's the difference in politics.

This brings to mind uncounted parallels with the 1960 election, rarely if ever disclosed in mainstream history books, and which I only learned through Paul Johnson's History of the American People, the reading of which sometimes made my eyes pop out as previously-undisclosed facts (of the unpalatable sort) were revealed.

As I re-read part of the book this morning, it turns out that there are many more parallels than you would at first assume.

Just consider:

By all historical standards, Nixon should have been an American media hero. He was a natural candidate for laurels in the grand old tradition of self-help, of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. He came from nowhere.

Think of John McCain, who should have been — and who was! — an American hero for other reasons, linked to dramatic combat, horrific jail conditions (with — very — violent wardens, of a decidedly racist bent), and the ever-present risk of death in a foreign country. (In France, while both of Obama's autobiographies became best-sellers, McCain's autobiography, with its full life (written past the age of 60) and with all the drama of its war "adventures", was not even translated.)

Yet, from start to finish, the media, especially the 'quality' press, distrusted [Nixon], consistently denigrated him, and sought to destroy him, indeed in a sense did destroy him. At every crisis in his career — except the last — he had to appeal above the heads of the media to the great mass of the ordinary American people, the 'silent majority' as he called them.

When I first read Paul Johnson's book, incidentally, I remember thinking, But of course! What has always been described as an unsavory character trait in Richard Mulhouse Nixon — his alleged paranoia — turns out perhaps not to have been so paranoid at all and to have been provoked by those who claimed to be innocent bystanders, if not the actual entirely-innocent victims of "Tricky Dick"… (If only for Paul Johnson's description of Watergate — which he likens, persuasively, to a witch hunt — you must read A History of the American People.)

[2020 update: and cannot similar lines be written about Donald Trump?]

By contrast, the media did everything in its power to build up and sustain the beatific myth of John F. Kennedy, throughout his life and long after his death, until it finally collapsed in ruins under the weight of incontrovertible evidence. The media protected him, suppressed what it knew to be the truth about him, and if necessary lied about him, on a scale which it had never done even for Franklin Roosevelt.

C'mon. Don't tell me that I really need to point out the parallels here with Barack Hussein Obama, the anointed One come to save America and Americans from their own demons.

And this was all the more surprising because Kennedy had most of the characteristics of an American anti-hero. … the running theme of the Kennedy family [was] how to turn money into political power … Maximum use was made of Jack's war career in all his campaigns. … Old Joe set about making Kennedy first a congressman, then a senator, then president. This train of events is worth studying because it shows the extent to which money paved the way to political power in mid-20th-century America …

Again: need I really point out the parallels with Obama, and his war-chest(s), along with his billion-dollar campaigns and his spending sprees? At this point of the book, Paul Johnson brings an interesting aside:

As Tip O'Neill put it: …

'I'd have to say that [Jack] was only nominally a Democrat. He was a Kennedy, which more than family affiliation. It quickly developed into an entire political party, with its own people, its own approach and its own strategies.'

The man who got it right at the time was the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. He grasped the important point that electing a Kennedy was not so much giving office to an individual as handing over power to a family business, a clan, almost a milieu, with a set of attitudes about how office was to be acquired and used which at no point coincided with the American ethic. Having paid his first visit after Kennedy's election as President, Macmillan was asked on his return what it was like in Kennedy's Washington.

'Oh,' said he, 'it's rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian city.'

But let's get back to the election of 1960 (as you read the few next parts, remember all the nasty things you have heard through the years about Tricky Dick).

Nixon had deliberately decided to keep Catholicism out of the campaign, and succeeded in doing so. The day after the result, he said to his aide Pete Flanigan:

'Pete, here's one thing we can be satisfied about. The campaign has laid to rest for ever the issue of a candidate's religion in presidential politics. Bad for me, perhaps, but good for America.'

In fact, Kennedy's catholicism won him the election … In the Northern industrial states, where the margins were very close, the swing of the Catholic vote to a Catholic candidate made all the difference.

Think of McCain opining that the election of a black man was good for America — which it undoubtedly was. But regarding America's alleged nightmarish racism, note that it was precisely Barack Obama's race that won him, or that helped win him, the election — as much among minorities as among liberal whites pining to demonstrate their status as "good" whites.

Unfortunately, there is a more ominous parallel between 1960 and 2008 (although not necessarily in the states specifically mentioned), which should overshadow Nixon's (and McCain's) satisfaction with the (respective) result(s), along with pride in his (in their) countrymen. Indeed, why be satisfied with a result (and why be proud of your country) if the result was the product of cheating?

This was a crooked election, especially in Texas and Illinois, two states notorious for fraud, and both of which Kennedy won. In Texas, which gave its twenty-four college votes to Kennedy, by a margin of 46,000 votes (out of 2.3 million), one expert made the calculation that

'a minimum of 100,000 votes for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket simply were non-existent.'

… (in one polling station, where only 4,895 voters were registered, 6,138 votes were counted as cast)

Then again, perhaps there does turn out to be a parallel between 1960 and 2008 in regards to one of the states mentioned: …

In Illinois, Nixon carried 93 of the state's 102 counties, yet lost the state by 8,858 votes. This was entirely due to an enormous Democratic turnout in Chicago, under the control of the notorious Democratic city boss and mayor, Richard Daley. Daley gave Kennedy the Windy City by the astonishing margin of 450,000 votes, and the evidence was overwhelming that fraud was committed on a large scale in Kennedy's favor.

An interesting side-note:

The mafia played an important part in this fraud. Afterwards, its boss Giancana often boasted to Judith Campbell, the mistress he shared with the President, 'Listen, honey, if it wasn't for me your boyfriend wouldn't even be in the White House.'

I don't suppose the mafia helped Obama in 2008; however — No, I wouldn't want to call into question the honesty and the civility of members of ACORN and of the Black Panthers (for fear of being labeled a racist, natch).

While reading History of the American People the first time, I remember thinking: it can't be possible that the MSM history books wouldn't mention this, so probably the fraud was tiny, and/or hard to prove, and not worth mentioning, so perhaps Paul Johnson is exaggerating, if ever so slightly. Then I came to this part:

If Nixon, instead of Kennedy, had carried Texas and Illinois, the shift in electoral votes would have given him the presidency, and the evidence of electoral fraud makes it clear that Kennedy's overall 112,803 vote plurality was a myth: Nixon probably won overall by about 250,000 votes. Evidence of fraud in the two states was so blatant that a number of senior figures, including Eisenhower, urged Nixon to make a formal legal challenge to the result. But Nixon declined. … A legal challenge … would have produced a 'constitutional nightmare' and worked heavily against the national interest.

Doesn't this sound like the Wikileaks memo stating that "McCain felt the crowds assembled in support of Obama and such would be detrimental to our country and it would do our nation no good for this to drag out like last go around" — Bernie Marcus's dependable, mature golf player acting responsibly to prevent the ice hockey players from going berserk?

Just as interesting is the passage preceding the story of the 1960 election, which explains the downplaying of the Republican candidate while the extolling of the Democrat's alleged virtues. As you read the following passage, think also of all the ways that Rupert Murdoch has been demonized over the years, as has his Fox News network.

We come now to an important structural change in America. America had always been, from the earliest time, a democratic society, in that men (and indeed women) paid little attention to formal rank, even where it existed. Every man felt he had the right to shake hands with every other man, even the President … But this democratic spirit was balanced by the tribute of respect to those who, for one reason or another — experience, learning, position, wealth, office, or personality — had earned the title of 'boss.' The balance struck between egalitarianism and deference was one of the most remarkable characteristics of America, and one of its great strengths.

The Sixties brought a change. In the space of a decade, the word 'boss' passed almost out of the language, certainly out of universal usage. Deference itself deferred to a new spirit of hostility to authority. It became the fashion to challenge long-established hierarchies, to revolt against them or to ignore them. Nowhere was this spirit more manifest than in the media …

The gradual but cumulatively almost complete transfer of opinion-forming power from the owners and commercial managers of TV stations to the program-makers and presenters was one of the great new facts of life, unheard of before the 1950s, axiomatic by the end of the 1960s. And it was gradually paralleled by a similar shift in the newspaper world, especially on the great dailies and magazines of the East Coast, where political power, with few exceptions, passed from proprietors and major stockholders to editors and writers. Owners like Hearst and McCormick (of the Chicago Tribune), Pulitzer and Henry Luce (of Time-Life), who had once decided the political line of their publications in considerable detail, moved out of the picture and their places were taken by the working journalists. Since the latter tended to be overwhelmingly liberal in their views, this was not just a political but a cultural change of considerable importance. Indeed it is likely that nothing did more to cut America loose from its traditional moorings.

… The change could be seen in 1960, in the way the East Coast media (the New York Times and Washington Post, Time and Newsweek), handled the contest between Nixon and Kennedy.

The final word?

There is a sense in which Kennedy, who loved to use words like 'bearing,' 'results,' and 'in,' was a professional sportsman, a political huckster, and a propagandist rather than a serious statesman

Related: From November 2008: Stealing the Election: The 1960 and the 2008 Contests Compared

• I knew Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon was a friend of mine, and you, Barack are no Richard Nixon (thanks to Instapundit)

• The Watergate Cover-Up Trial: Justice Denied? (thanks to Instapundit)

There were real crimes and real criminals. But newly found documents suggest a denial of due process of law to the defendants, a move that did the Constitution no favors.

Evidence of Fraud in 2008 Election? A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign

In some ways the most dangerous kind of politician is a man who is good at PR and nothing else

writes Paul Johnson in his monumental History of the American People.

No, he was not talking about the current occupant of the White House (his book was written in 1999, after all — before Obama had even published his (first) autobiography), but about John F Kennedy, and I am speaking as a former Kennedy devotee and Camelot maniac. (Yes, even if the book was written before 911 and even the George W Bush presidency, it is a must-read — as you will see below.)

I was coaxed into pulling Paul Johnson's masterpiece from my shelves again, as I read Instapundit's review of the PJMedia piece on what the Wikileaks memos say about the 2008 election, getting increasingly angry as I read through the J Christian Adams original.

What we do know is this: First, that people in the McCain campaign thought they had evidence of election tampering that cost McCain the election. Second, that McCain thought it best for the country to do nothing about it, in part because of fears of mob violence.

Interestingly, Glenn Reynolds calls his link to J Christian Adams' article "Bad Call." That turns out to be entirely appropriate, in view of the fact that Bernie Marcus recently pointed out (video) that

the Republicans play the rules of … golf. In golf, if you miss a putt or you touch the ball, you call a shot on yourself. We're playing the game of golf. The Democrats are playing ice hockey. It's a killer game. And that's the difference in politics.

This brings to mind uncounted parallels with the 1960 election, rarely if ever disclosed in mainstream history books, and which I only learned through Paul Johnson's History of the American People, the reading of which sometimes made my eyes pop out as previously-undisclosed facts (of the unpalatable sort) were revealed.

As I re-read part of the book this morning, it turns out that there are many more parallels than you would at first assume.

Just consider:

By all historical standards, Nixon should have been an American media hero. He was a natural candidate for laurels in the grand old tradition of self-help, of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. He came from nowhere.

Think of John McCain, who should have been — and who was! — an American hero for other reasons, linked to dramatic combat, horrific jail conditions (with — very — violent wardens, of a decidedly racist bent), and the ever-present risk of death in a foreign country. (In France, while both of Obama's autobiographies became best-sellers, McCain's autobiography, with its full life (written past the age of 60) and with all the drama of its war "adventures", was not even translated.)

Yet, from start to finish, the media, especially the 'quality' press, distrusted [Nixon], consistently denigrated him, and sought to destroy him, indeed in a sense did destroy him. At every crisis in his career — except the last — he had to appeal above the heads of the media to the great mass of the ordinary American people, the 'silent majority' as he called them.

When I first read Paul Johnson's book, incidentally, I remember thinking, But of course! What has always been described as an unsavory character trait in Richard Mulhouse Nixon — his alleged paranoia — turns out perhaps not to have been so paranoid at all and to have been provoked by those who claimed to be innocent bystanders, if not the actual entirely-innocent victims of "Tricky Dick"… (If only for Paul Johnson's description of Watergate — which he likens, persuasively, to a witch hunt — you must read A History of the American People.)

By contrast, the media did everything in its power to build up and sustain the beatific myth of John F. Kennedy, throughout his life and long after his death, until it finally collapsed in ruins under the weight of incontrovertible evidence. The media protected him, suppressed what it knew to be the truth about him, and if necessary lied about him, on a scale which it had never done even for Franklin Roosevelt.

C'mon. Don't tell me that I really need to point out the parallels here with Barack Hussein Obama, the anointed One come to save America and Americans from their own demons.

And this was all the more surprising because Kennedy had most of the characteristics of an American anti-hero. … the running theme of the Kennedy family [was] how to turn money into political power … Maximum use was made of Jack's war career in all his campaigns. … Old Joe set about making Kennedy first a congressman, then a senator, then president. This train of events is worth studying because it shows the extent to which money paved the way to political power in mid-20th-century America …

Again: need I really point out the parallels with Obama, and his war-chest(s), along with his billion-dollar campaigns and his spending sprees? At this point of the book, Paul Johnson brings an interesting aside:

As Tip O'Neill put it: …

'I'd have to say that [Jack] was only nominally a Democrat. He was a Kennedy, which more than family affiliation. It quickly developed into an entire political party, with its own people, its own approach and its own strategies.'

The man who got it right at the time was the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. He grasped the important point that electing a Kennedy was not so much giving office to an individual as handing over power to a family business, a clan, almost a milieu, with a set of attitudes about how office was to be acquired and used which at no point coincided with the American ethic. Having paid his first visit after Kennedy's election as President, Macmillan was asked on his return what it was like in Kennedy's Washington.

'Oh,' said he, 'it's rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian city.'

But let's get back to the election of 1960 (as you read the few next parts, remember all the nasty things you have heard through the years about Tricky Dick).

Nixon had deliberately decided to keep Catholicism out of the campaign, and succeeded in doing so. The day after the result, he said to his aide Pete Flanigan:

'Pete, here's one thing we can be satisfied about. The campaign has laid to rest for ever the issue of a candidate's religion in presidential politics. Bad for me, perhaps, but good for America.'

In fact, Kennedy's catholicism won him the election … In the Northern industrial states, where the margins were very close, the swing of the Catholic vote to a Catholic candidate made all the difference.

Think of McCain opining that the election of a black man was good for America — which it undoubtedly was. But regarding America's alleged nightmarish racism, note that it was precisely Barack Obama's race that won him, or that helped win him, the election — as much among minorities as among liberal whites pining to demonstrate their status as "good" whites.

Unfortunately, there is a more ominous parallel between 1960 and 2008 (although not necessarily in the states specifically mentioned), which should overshadow Nixon's (and McCain's) satisfaction with the (respective) result(s), along with pride in his (in their) countrymen. Indeed, why be satisfied with a result (and why be proud of your country) if the result was the product of cheating?

This was a crooked election, especially in Texas and Illinois, two states notorious for fraud, and both of which Kennedy won. In Texas, which gave its twenty-four college votes to Kennedy, by a margin of 46,000 votes (out of 2.3 million), one expert made the calculation that

'a minimum of 100,000 votes for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket simply were non-existent.'

… (in one polling station, where only 4,895 voters were registered, 6,138 votes were counted as cast)

Then again, perhaps there does turn out to be a parallel between 1960 and 2008 in regards to one of the states mentioned: …

In Illinois, Nixon carried 93 of the state's 102 counties, yet lost the state by 8,858 votes. This was entirely due to an enormous Democratic turnout in Chicago, under the control of the notorious Democratic city boss and mayor, Richard Daley. Daley gave Kennedy the Windy City by the astonishing margin of 450,000 votes, and the evidence was overwhelming that fraud was committed on a large scale in Kennedy's favor.

An interesting side-note:

The mafia played an important part in this fraud. Afterwards, its boss Giancana often boasted to Judith Campbell, the mistress he shared with the President, 'Listen, honey, if it wasn't for me your boyfriend wouldn't even be in the White House.'

I don't suppose the mafia helped Obama in 2008; however — No, I wouldn't want to call into question the honesty and the civility of members of ACORN and of the Black Panthers (for fear of being labeled a racist, natch).

While reading History of the American People the first time, I remember thinking: it can't be possible that the MSM history books wouldn't mention this, so probably the fraud was tiny, and/or hard to prove, and not worth mentioning, so perhaps Paul Johnson is exaggerating, if ever so slightly. Then I came to this part:

If Nixon, instead of Kennedy, had carried Texas and Illinois, the shift in electoral votes would have given him the presidency, and the evidence of electoral fraud makes it clear that Kennedy's overall 112,803 vote plurality was a myth: Nixon probably won overall by about 250,000 votes. Evidence of fraud in the two states was so blatant that a number of senior figures, including Eisenhower, urged Nixon to make a formal legal challenge to the result. But Nixon declined. … A legal challenge … would have produced a 'constitutional nightmare' and worked heavily against the national interest.

Doesn't this sound like the Wikileaks memo stating that "McCain felt the crowds assembled in support of Obama and such would be detrimental to our country and it would do our nation no good for this to drag out like last go around" — Bernie Marcus's dependable, mature golf player acting responsibly to prevent the ice hockey players from going berserk?

Just as interesting is the passage preceding the story of the 1960 election, which explains the downplaying of the Republican candidate while the extolling of the Democrat's alleged virtues. As you read the following passage, think also of all the ways that Rupert Murdoch has been demonized over the years, as has his Fox News network.

We come now to an important structural change in America. America had always been, from the earliest time, a democratic society, in that men (and indeed women) paid little attention to formal rank, even where it existed. Every man felt he had the right to shake hands with every other man, even the President … But this democratic spirit was balanced by the tribute of respect to those who, for one reason or another — experience, learning, position, wealth, office, or personality — had earned the title of 'boss.' The balance struck between egalitarianism and deference was one of the most remarkable characteristics of America, and one of its great strengths.

The Sixties brought a change. In the space of a decade, the word 'boss' passed almost out of the language, certainly out of universal usage. Deference itself deferred to a new spirit of hostility to authority. It became the fashion to challenge long-established hierarchies, to revolt against them or to ignore them. Nowhere was this spirit more manifest than in the media …

The gradual but cumulatively almost complete transfer of opinion-forming power from the owners and commercial managers of TV stations to the program-makers and presenters was one of the great new facts of life, unheard of before the 1950s, axiomatic by the end of the 1960s. And it was gradually paralleled by a similar shift in the newspaper world, especially on the great dailies and magazines of the East Coast, where political power, with few exceptions, passed from proprietors and major stockholders to editors and writers. Owners like Hearst and McCormick (of the Chicago Tribune), Pulitzer and Henry Luce (of Time-Life), who had once decided the political line of their publications in considerable detail, moved out of the picture and their places were taken by the working journalists. Since the latter tended to be overwhelmingly liberal in their views, this was not just a political but a cultural change of considerable importance. Indeed it is likely that nothing did more to cut America loose from its traditional moorings.

… The change could be seen in 1960, in the way the East Coast media (the New York Times and Washington Post, Time and Newsweek), handled the contest between Nixon and Kennedy.

The final word?

There is a sense in which Kennedy, who loved to use words like 'bearing,' 'results,' and 'in,' was a professional sportsman, a political huckster, and a propagandist rather than a serious statesman

Note: After spending hours writing the above, I decided to do a search of Paul Johnson in the No Pasarán archives, discovering to my great surprise that I had actually used A History of the American People once in the past to compare the elections of the 1960 and 2008, and that in… November 2008 no less (!)
Here t'is: Stealing the Election: The 1960 and the 2008 Contests Compared

Update: I knew Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon was a friend of mine, and you, Barack are no Richard Nixon (thanks to Instapundit)

Update: The Watergate Cover-Up Trial: Justice Denied? (thanks to Instapundit)

There were real crimes and real criminals. But newly found documents suggest a denial of due process of law to the defendants, a move that did the Constitution no favors.

In Spain in 1937 and 1938, many thousands of Leftists of all descriptions, were executed or tortured to death in Communist prisons (one who escaped was George Orwell)

On this day, VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM DAY (spasiba to Tovarich Glenn Reynolds), and in view of Ed Driscoll's thorough post over at Instapundit on George Orwell and his Spanish War period (gracias por los Instavínculos, compañeros Ed Driscoll y Sarah Hoyt), I would like to take the opportunity to add to the discussion by quoting from Paul Johnson's history of the 20th century, from which there is much to learn, not least the appalling truth about the "Republican" camp during the Spanish Civil War. 

Tom Wolfe is quoted as saying that, with the publication of the Venona transcripts, “it turns out that “the Loyalists secretly called in the Soviets at the very outset of hostilities—and if they’d won, Spain would have been the first Soviet puppet state!”

True enough. But according to Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s), Paul Johnson points out that while the war lasted, this was already the case: the Kremlin's Soviet NKVD (forerunner of the KGB), not the Spanish, were in fact already in charge of the country (or of that part held by the so-called Loyalists).

Behind [Prime Minister Juan] 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

Among the things the reader learns from Chapter Nine (The High Noon of Aggression) is that 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

Indeed,

Andrès Nin, the POUM leader [was] the model for Orwell's hero Goldstein in Nineteen Eighty-Four …

Although "Germany, Russia and Italy [all] had gangster dictatorships", ironically,

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.' 

 … 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'

 … 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       

And, perhaps as interesting is the group, the circle of intellectuals, that Orwell also managed to "escape" from:

… 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

 … 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

More generally, from Paul Johnson's previous chapter (Chapter Eight), The Devils, we learn 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:

 … 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

 … 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

 … 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

One of my very first posts on the internet, 20 years ago or more, was about Chile's Allende and Pinochet, but used the Spanish Civil War to make a significant point:

Again and again, the truth eventually reveals how the sequels "of arrests, death, torture, and exile" are often worse under would-be leftist authoritarian régimes than under rightist ones. Stalin, of course, killed far more people than Hitler did, and a … best-seller (Checas de Madrid by César Vidal) teaches that the Spanish Republicans ran a series of sinister detention centers patterned on the Soviet Checas, which savagely tortured and often slaughtered its prisoners, without the slightest hint of legality; the dead and disappeared in the province of Madrid alone were, in only a couple of years, almost four times as numerous as the victims over 17 years of none other than… Chile's Pinochet (almost 12,000 in Madrid versus some 3,000 in Chile). In the Miami Herald, Carlos Alberto Montaner added that before going after alleged criminals abroad, such Europeans as Judge Baltasar Garzón would perhaps do better to start bringing their own killers (both left and right) to justice.

The main post on Paul Johnson's Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s) — with many more excerpts from the 780-page book — is here:

• "Hitler remained to the end a socialist"; the Führer "was totally irreligious and" wanted to hang the Pope in St Peter's Square

Bottom: The trailer for Land and Freedom, Ken Loach's pro-Republican film but with a handful of scenes critical of the Soviet presence in Spain

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

What if, in the 1970s, Richard Nixon had had access to a Twitter account?

I'm askin', because your eyes are likely to open wide in disbelief as you read the description of the Watergate "scandal" in Paul Johnson's History of the American People.

You probably have always thought that no matter how good a president Richard Milhous Nixon may have been in certain areas, nobody can deny (nobody, that is, but a zealous — and untrustworthy — Republican hard-liner) that he was a shady (or a "flawed") character who, in no uncertain way, failed in one area that truly mattered, as Tricky Dick obviously did something very wrong (and illegal) and he was therefore some kind of conflicted Shakespearean soul who brought the scandal upon himself.

All I can say is: Prepare to be disillusioned.
(Update: thanks for the Instapundit link, Ed.)

Indeed, as you read about a Republican president's travails in the 1970s, you are going to think you are reading about the valiant fight to bring down the equivalent of Adolf Hitler by the likes of… Jim Acosta, Nancy Pelosi, and — yes — Robert Mueller.

In fact, as you read below, you are likely to think that so many coincidences can't be accidental, that the author can only have been writing with Donald Trump's White House in mind. As it happens, Paul Johnson's History of the American People was first published in 1997, the year after Bill Clinton's reelection.

Plus ça change…

(When you're done reading the (lengthy) excerpt in the post below, don't forget to check out Nixon and Watergate: What Do the MSM and History Books Fail to Tell Us About the 1970s Scandal? Money shot Money quote: "The truest description of what occurred in 1974 is not that the independent media brought down a president of the United States. What occurred was that the left-leaning MSM brought down a Republican.")

Without further ado, let us return to what Paul Johnson calls

"Watergate and the Putsch Against the Executive"

 … In parts of the media, there was an inclination to deny the legitimacy of Nixon's presidency and to seek to reverse the verdict by non-constitutional means.  …  'Remember,' Nixon told his staff, 'the press is the enemy.  When news is concerned, nobody in the press is a friend.  They are all enemies.'  That was increasingly true. …

 … at the time it was the triumphant Nixon who seemed to be in control, and his success not only humiliated the media liberals but actually frightened them.    …    The aim was to use the power of the press and TV to reverse the electoral verdict of 1972 which was felt to be, in some metaphorical sense, illegitimate — rather as conservative Germans, in the 1920s, had regarded the entire Weimar regime as illegitimate, or Latin American army generals, in the 1960s and 1970s, regarded elected but radical governments as illegitimate.  The media in the 1970s, rather like the Hispanic generals, felt that they were in some deep but intuitive sense the repository of the honor and conscience of the nation and had a quasi-constitutional duty to assert it in times of crises, whatever the means or the consequences.

This view was given some spurious justification by what was coming to be called the 'Imperial presidency,'  That the power of the executive had been growing since Woodrow Wilson's times, with dips in the Twenties and again in the late Forties and Fifties, was undeniable.

 … Nixon's reciprocal hostility to the media and his unwillingness to trust them, even more pronounced than under LBJ, persuaded some editors that 'something was going on,' which fitted into their other critical assumptions on what they termed the 'Nixon regime.'  And of course something was going on.  The White House was a power center engaged in all kinds of activities which would not always bear scrutiny.  It necessarily engaged, in a wicked, actual world, in the realpolitik which was theoretically banned by an idealistic Constitution.

 … Bad habits had set in under FDR

 … Though Truman and Eisenhower, who hated underhand dealings, kept clear of clandestine activities by their staff and the CIA, as a rule, they were generally aware of them and considered that in dealing with Soviet Russia and other totalitarian terror regimes, they were unavoidable

 … Kennedy's chief regret was that he had not made his brother Bobby head of the CIA, to bring it under family control

 … Under Kennedy and Johnson, phone-tapping increased markedly.  So did 'bugging' and 'taping.'

 … Until the Nixon era, the media was extremely selective in the publicity it gave to presidential wrongdoing

 … The anti-Nixon campaign, especially in the Washington Post and the New York Times, was continual, venomous, unscrupulous, inventive, and sometimes unlawful.  This was to be expected, and though it lowered the standard of US journalism, it was something Nixon was prepared to put up with.  What was more serious, and a matter which could not be ignored, was the theft, purchase, or leaking of secret material to these two papers (and others) and its subsequent appearance in print.  Under the First Amendment, legislation designed to protect military security, such as the British Official Secrets Act, was generally thought to be unconstitutional.

 … The appearance of secret material in newspapers shot up in spectacular fashion after Nixon assumed the presidency.     …     It is not known how many US lives were lost as a result of these leaks, but the damage to US interests was in some cases considerable

'Pentagon papers'

 … The administration discovered that publication of the source notes of the Pentagon papers, if analyzed by KGB experts, could jeopardize a whole range of CIA codes and operations.  So serious were the security breaches that at one point it was thought Ellsberg was a Soviet agent.

 … The Plumbers were engaged in a variety of activities of an entirely justifiable nature. … This break-in was the point at which the Nixon administration, albeit quite unknown to the President, overstepped the bounds of legality.  But at least it could be claimed that the infraction was dictated by national security

 … election-year dirty tricks were common.  Johnson had certainly 'bugged' Republican Party headquarters during the Goldwater campaign

 … However, in the paranoid atmosphere generated by the media's anti-Nixon vendetta, anything served as ammunition to hurl against the 'enemy.'  The Washington Post's editor, Ben Bradlee, was particularly angry, not to say hysterical

 … a series of 'investigative' articles seeking to make the Watergate burglary a major moral issue.

 … The campaign might have had no impact but the Post was lucky.  A publicity-hungry judge, John Sirica, known as 'Maximum John' from the severity of his sentences — and not a judge under any other circumstances likely to enjoy the approval of the liberal media — gave the burglars, when they came before him, provisional life-sentences to force them to provide evidence against members of the administration.

 … sadly typical of the judicial vendetta by means of which members of the Nixon administration were hounded and convicted of various offenses, chiefly obstructing justice — a notoriously easy charge to press home, granted a prejudiced judge.  In some cases the accused had no alternative but to plea-bargain, pleading guilty to lesser offenses, in order to avoid the financial ruin of an expensive defense.  Some of the sentences bore no conceivable relation to the gravity, or non-gravity, of the original offenses.

Thus the Watergate scandal 'broke,' and allowed the machinery of Congressional investigation, where of course the Democrats enjoyed majority control, to make a frontal assault on the 'Imperial Presidency.'

 … the witch hunters

 … These transcribed tapes, which the courts and Congressional investigators insisted Nixon hand over, were used to mount a putative impeachment of the President.  The witchhunt in the Senate was led by Sam Ervin, the man who had successfully covered up LBJ's crimes in the Bobby Baker affair, a shrewd and resourceful operator who concealed his acuteness and partisanship under a cloud of Southern wisecracking

(Haldeman had been driven into resignation by the witchhunters)

 … feeding all the damaging material they could muster to an eager anti-Nixon media … It became difficult for the President to handle an international crisis.  On October 6, 1973 a treacherous attack was launched on Israel, without warning, by Egypt and Syria, which had picked Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, for this Pearl-Harbor-type strike.  Both the CIA and Israel's secret intelligence service, Mossad, were caught napping, and the results were devastating.  The Israelis lost a fifth of their air force and a third of their tanks in four days, and it became necessary to resupply them.  The American media did not let up in its hunt for Nixon's scalp, but he actually had to deal with the crisis and save Israel from annihilation.  Nixon acted with great courage and decisiveness, cutting through red-tape, military and diplomatic obstructiveness and insisting that Israel be resupplied.

Without the resupply, which transformed Israel's sagging morale, it is likely that the Israeli army would have been destroyed and the entire Israeli nation exterminated.  Indeed it is probable that this is precisely what would have happened, had Nixon already been driven from his post at this stage.  As it was, he was still around to save Israel.  In many ways, October 1973, his last major international achievement, was his finest hour.

 … With darker times coming, the pressures on Nixon increased, and he strove desperately to combine two objects:  to preserve his presidency and to do what was in the national interest.

 … while Nixon was struggling to save Israel, he had been fanged by the man he called 'the viper we planted in our bosom,' Archibald Cox, special prosecutor charged with the Watergate inquiry

 …  It was at this point that hysteria usually associated with American witchhunts took over, and all reason, balance, and consideration for the national interest was abandoned.  It was an ugly moment in America's story and on which future historians      …    are likely to judge a dark hour in the history of a republic which prides itself in its love of order and its patient submissions to the rule of law

Incidentally, note that this blog has previously used Paul Johnson's monumental History of the American People to point out parallels between modern-day politics and elections in the 1960s and the 1970s:

• Evidence of Fraud in 2008 Election? (A Surprising Number of Parallels with JFK's 1960 Campaign)
• In 1976, a Democrat politician with very little experience "transcended" politics as usual and was lifted on waves of good will to the White House.

Let us end with a five-year-old post: in I knew Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon was a friend of mine, and you, Barack are no Richard Nixon (thanks to Instapundit), Bill Kristol hits, deliberately or otherwise, on the reasons why America's 37th president was so hated:

Will no one stand up for Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon was a combat veteran, a staunch and brave anti-Communist, a man who took on the liberal establishment and at times his own party's as well, a leader who often thought for himself and had the courage of his convictions, a president who assembled a first-rate Cabinet and one who—while flawed both in character and in policy judgment—usually tried to confront the real problems and deal with challenges of his times.

(As it happens, the former Weekly Standard [RIP] editor's NeverTrump attitude is all the more startling when you realize that Bill Kristol obviously seems to know all about the demonization and the hounding of a Republican president.)

Update: The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised by Andrew Klavan (thanks to Ed Driscoll):

That changes what Watergate means. That transforms it from a heroic crusade into a political hit job, Democrat hackery masquerading as nobility. The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised — despised in part because he battled the Communism many of them had espoused.

 … Journalism today is a corrupt shadow of even its biased former self. Competition, cutbacks and desperate attempts to appease a dwindling audience have turned former newspapers like the New York Times into little better than college rags run by starry-eyed leftist children and answerable to an audience that demands to have their prejudices confirmed.

As a result, the reportage on the Donald Trump administration has been a two and a half year hit job. The constant, breathless reporting of the incipient end of the administration — this is a tipping point, the walls are closing in, the president will be impeached! — has been nothing but the out-loud infantile fantasies of under-read underage make-believe radicals who are not equipped to do the job they are paid to do.

Update: What Trump learned from Watergate by Don Surber (thanks to Ed Driscoll):

The [Watergate] archives have revealed that Nixon was railroaded.

In American Spectator, [Geoff] Shepard wrote,

"There is documented proof of a series of secret meetings between Chief Judge John Sirica and Watergate prosecutors. I don’t know which is the bigger surprise: that they were secretly meeting to resolve issues in advance of trial or that they were documenting their agreements in memos to their files."

 … Archibald Cox in retrospect made Jimmy the Weasel Comey look honest.

The deep state won.

Shepard wrote,

"It should have come as no surprise that Cox delegated the Watergate Special Prosecution Force recruiting to James Vorenberg, a fellow law professor who had taught criminal law. Vorenberg hired only people whom he knew or who were recommended by people he knew, and he assembled a specially selected team of some 70 lawyers, virtually all Ivy League graduates, the top 17 of whom had worked together in the Kennedy/Johnson Department of Justice. Readers should note the constitutional inversion here: these were the very people voted out of office with Nixon’s 1968 election, now in control of the government’s investigative and prosecutorial powers. Vorenberg announced at their first press conference in June 1973 their intent to investigate each and every allegation of wrongdoing by the Nixon administration since it had assumed office some five years prior."

Sound familiar?

That is why this will not happen again, or at least not to President Donald John Trump. He learned the lesson of Watergate.

We said of Sarah Palin, we cannot spare her; she fights. Donald Trump does not simply fight; he wins.

He was in his 20s when he beat the deep state the first time. Nixon's HUD sued him in its administrative court, hoping to coerce an admission of guilt. Trump's lawyer -- the commie-beating Roy Cohn -- advised him to take HUD to real court. 2 years later, the charges were dropped.

 … President Trump learned from President Nixon's mishandling of the press.

 … after a year of propaganda by the media and Democrats, the public fell for the Democrat lies. Kennedy somehow became the victim. And he never had to give up drunk driving. Always bear in mind, the Germans were the best-educated people in the world when they fell for Nazism.

 … President Trump learned from Nixon's firing of Cox, which created a backlash. He kept Mueller, which avoided an obstruction of justice claim.

The president has needled and ridiculed the hapless Democrats, but he also has given them everything they asked for. When they objected to his July 25 phone call to Ukraine, President Trump released the transcript. There will be no nonsense about the cover-up being worse than the crime on his watch.

That transcript should have ended the controversy, but Adam Schiff is insane, Jerry Nadler is a fool, and the press is corrupt. Down the rabbit hole of impeachment they dove.

Public sentiment, the law, and the facts are in President Donald John Trump's favor. He learned from Nixon. it is not paranoia when they really are out to kill you.

"Hitler remained to the end a socialist"; the Führer "was totally irreligious and" wanted to hang the Pope in St Peter's Square

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 humane level. To counter the ruin and the atrocities of international socialism, the Left in Europe invented and turned to national socialism. (Vielen Dank für die Hyperlinks, Kamarad Gail Heriot und Kamarad Kleine Tote Tiere…)

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

Religion was important to him [Lenin], in that he hated it.  Unlike Marx, who despised it and treated it as marginal, Lenin saw it as a powerful and ubiquitous enemy. … 'There can be nothing more abominable', he wrote, 'than religion.'

 … His writings abound in military metaphors [cf. LBJ's "war against poverty"]

 … Italy was also a semi-industrialized country, where Marxists were looking for ways to speed up the revolution… These ideas were taken up by [another] Italian Marxist, Benito Mussolini … Again, there is the endless repetition of activist verbs, the militaristic imagery. In the years before 1914, from his impotent exile in Switzerland, Lenin watched the progress of Mussolini with approval and some envy 

… Certainly there was nothing legal about the way in which Lenin came to power.  But it was not a revolutionary uprising either.  It was an old-style coup, or as the Germans were soon to call it, a putsch

 … In fact the real tragedy of the the Leninist Revolution, or rather one of its many tragedies, is that it revived a savage national method of government which was actually dying out quite fast.  In the eighty years up to 1917, the number of people executed in the Russian empire averaged only seventeen a year, and the great bulk of those occurred in the earlier part of the period.  Wartime Russia in the last years of the Tsars was in some ways more liberal than Britain and France under their wartime regulations.  The republic abolished the death penalty completely, although Kerensky restored it at the front in September 1917.  Most of Lenin's own comrades were opposed to it

 … It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the decision to use terror and oppressive police power was taken very early on by Lenin, endorsed by his chief military agent Trotsky… As early as 1901 Lenin warned:  'In principle we have never renounced terror and cannot renounce it'

 … Lenin had thus displaced one ruling class by another, the party 

One of the most depressing features of the Lenin regime, as Rosa Luxembourg had feared, was the almost conscious reproduction of the very worst features of Tsardom.  The Tsars, too, had periodically experimented with 'responsible government', a cabinet system like Sovnarkom … In each case, the combination of autocracy plus bureaucracy wrecked the system, as the Tsar dealt privately with individual ministers instead of allowing the cabinet to function.  The whiff of Divine Right was too strong in the Tsar's nostrils, just as now the whiff of history,  and its handmaiden the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, was too strong in Lenin's.  When it came to the point, he did not want responsible government', any more than he wanted any kind of legal, constitutional or democratic restraints on his decisions

This meant crushing all opposition within the party, the third stage in the building of Lenin's autocracy

 … [When] Lenin had his first stroke … his work was already complete.  He had systematically constructed, in all its essentials, the most carefully engineered apparatus of state tyranny the world had ever seen.  In the old world, personal autocracies, except perhaps for brief periods, had been limited, or at least qualified, by other forces in society:  a church, an aristocracy, an urban bourgeoisie, ancient charters and courts and assemblies.  And there was, too, the notion of an external, restraining force, in the idea of a Deity, or Natural Law, or some absolute system of morality.  Lenin's new despotic utopia had no such counterweights or inhibitions.  Church, aristocracy, bourgeoisie had all been swept away.  Everything that was left was owned or controlled by the state.  All rights whatsoever were vested in the state.  And, within that state, enormous and ever-growing as it was, every single filament of power could be traced back to the hands of a minute group of men — ultimately to one man

 … Lenin hated the essence of democracy, and he regarded its forms merely as a means to legitimize violence and oppression … an unrestricted license for terror

 … Lenin's legacy was a solidly built police state surrounded by economic ruins

 … [In the West] 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"

 
HITLER AND CHRISTIANITY

• 卐mas Caroling: The Extremes Hitler Wanted to Go To in Order to Replace Christianity with the "Religion" of National Socialism.

• Adolf Hitler in Religious Surroundings: Is There Really Evidence That the Führer Was a Christian?

• Worshipping Little Else But the Aryan Race, Hitler Abhorred the Christian Faith and Wanted to Replace Christmas with the Pagans' Yule

• "Out With Jesus" — During His 12 Years in Power, Hitler Tried to Ban the Tradition of Christmas

Related: • Jonah Goldberg: Just for the record, Hitler detested Christianity

• Ray Comfort, whose “Hitler, God and the Bible” points out Hitler devised a master strategy to crush all Christian churches, explains that it would be either ignorant or disingenuous to call Hitler a Christian:

In a special Christian Broadcasting Network program, Comfort cites the head of Hitler Youth, Boldur von Schirach, who said, “Destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist Movement.”

 … The CBN program explains how Hitler put on a religious, even Christian, façade, until he became powerful.

 … But later one of his inner circle acknowledged: “I’m absolutely clear in my own mind, and I think I can speak for the Fuhrer as well, that both the Catholic and Protestant churches will vanish from the life of our people.”

• How Hitler's Nazi propaganda machine tried to take Christ out of Christmas (danke zu Ed Driscoll)

 … the way Christmas was used by the atheist Nazis, who tried to turn it into a pagan winter solstice celebration.

 … 'Christmas was a provocation for the Nazis - after all, the baby Jesus was a Jewish child,' Judith Breuer told the German newspaper Spiegel. 'The most important celebration in the year didn't fit with their racist beliefs so they had to react, by trying to make it less Christian.'

The exhibition includes swastika-shaped cookie-cutters and Christmas tree baubles shaped like Iron Cross medals.

The Nazis attempted to persuade housewives to bake cookies in the shape of swastikas, and they replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas, who traditionally brings German children treats on December 6, with the Norse god Odin.

The symbol that posed a particular problem for the Nazis was the star, which traditionally decorates Christmas trees.

 … The is a legacy of the Nazi Christmas. The wartime version of the traditional Christmas carol 'Unto us a time has come' is still sung. 'The Nazis took out the references to Jesus and made it into a song about walking through the snow,' Breuer said.

Surprisingly, German churches put up little opposition to the Nazification of Christmas. 'You would have expected them to protest loudly and insist that it was a Christian festival,' said Breuer. 'But instead they largely kept quiet, out of fear.'