Historian Paul Johnson is popular among libertarians. His books, such as Intellectuals, A History of the American People, and Modern Times show a skepticism toward the 20th century’s collectivist movements which is unfortunately unusual among historians, and he discusses some of the unpleasant things done by the left, which other historians have tended to gloss over.
Modern Times begins in 1919, with the confirmation of the theory of relativity by observations of the orbit of Mercury. This moment, Johnson writes, brought on the defining characteristics of the “modern” age:
It was grasped that absolute time and absolute length had been dethroned, that motion was cuvinlinear. All at once, nothing seemed certain in the movements of the spheres. “The word is out of joint,” as Hamlet sadly observed…. At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.
Relativism coincided with notions which had been percolating in the humanities for several decades already, as Louis Menand has explained in The Metaphysical Club. The end of a concept of unchanging justice, combined with the notion of the survival of the fittest, “formed a knife,” writes Johnson, “to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.”
The advantages of that are obvious: the immense advances in technology and society in the course of the twentieth century, the greater freedom brought to previously excluded groups. But moral relativism had terrible consequences as well: the 20th century became the bloodiest century in the history of man, in particular due to the attempt by philosophers and strongmen, to shore up that relativism with majoritarianism, or with notions of class warfare. Presented with this great opportunity, the world of political philosophy did not devise a philosophy which could find universal notions of justice in humanity, as opposed to the realm of mysticism. Rather, the people of the 20th century were presented with the choice of mysticism versus the new religion of totalitarianism: fascism of communism. Any other alternatives were largely ignored by the world’s rulers. Communism preached modernity through collectivism and enslavement to the state; fascism preached the rejection of modernity, and the embrace of older, more brutal values of “permanence.” Writes Johnson
By [1939] Mussolini and Hitler had collaborated together in the first of the ideological proxy-wars. Their “opponent” in this cynical ritual was Stalin. The theatre selected for their devastating performance was Spain, which had been virtually outside the European power system since the early nineteenth century and which now became its agonized focus. This was itself extraordinary: Spain was aloof, self-contained, xenophobic, the European country most resistant to the holistic principle, the least vulnerable to the foreign viruses of totalitarianism, of Left or Right, social engineering, relative morality. This is what makes the Spanish Civil War so peculiarly tragic.
As the false dichotomy of communism versus fascism played itself out in Spain, the western intellectual class put itself behind the communist forces—and ignored the evidence of communism’s evil that was accumulating around them. The “Republican” forces of the Civil War murdered countless civilians:
Eleven bishops, a fifth of the total number, were murdered, 12 percent of the monks, 13 percent of the priests…. In the providence of Ciudad Real, the mother of two Jesuits was murdered by having a crucifix thrust down her throat…. The Republicans also murdered nationalist laity…. In Ronda 512 people were thrown into the gorge which dramatically bisects the town, an episode used in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls…. In all, the Left appears to have murdered about 55,000 civilians…including about 4,000 women and several hundred children.
The fascists, of course, murdered tens of thousands also. But what is so astonishing is how the western left, made up of perfectly humane people, ignored these and worse atrocities. As the Republican forces became more and more a proxy for Stalin, the evils committed by the Republicans were increasingly glossed over: “Throughout the Spanish war,” writes Johnson,
Stalinism was assisted not only by superb public relations, but by the naivety, gullibility, and, it must also be said, the mendacity and corruption of Western intellectuals, especially their willingness to overlook what W.H. Auden called “the necessary murder.” When Orwell escaped and sought to publish an account of [one Stalinist atrocity]…in The New Statesman, its editor, Kingsley Martin, turned it down on the grounds that it would damage Western support for the Republican cause…. The intellectuals of the Left did not want to know the objective truth; they were unwilling for their illusions to be shattered. They were overwhelmed by the glamour and excitement of the cause and few had the gritty determination of Orwell to uphold absolute standards of morality, or the experience of the horrors that occurred when relative ones took their place….
The western left’s infatuation with communism continues to this day to darken their vision of the true nature of its atrocities. To the left, it is anti-communism that is the evil, rather than the communism that murdered at least 100,000,000 people in the course of the bloodiest century.
At the same time that the left was concocting romantic fantasies about “necessary murder,” the right was singing its on romance: the reactionary element that would build Nazism began with “the German romantic movement, with its stress upon the Volk, its mythology and its natural setting in the German landscape, especially its dark, mysterious forests.” German collectivism rejected modernity for being too “atomistic,” individualistic, and technological: modernity “alienated” people from one another, from their tribe and their racial homeland: “A Volk had a soul, which was derived from its natural habitat…. The Jews were not a Volk because they had lost their soul: they lacked ‘rootedness….’ The true basis of the Volk was the peasant. There could of course be workers, but they had to be “artisans,” organized in local guilds. The proletariat, on the other hand, was the creation of the Jew….” According to this racial romanticism and rejection of “atomistic” industrial society, even the concept of a written constitution was anathema, because a true nation arose from the mystical bonds between members of society:
Th[e] ruling caste hated the West with passionate loathing, both for its liberal ideas and for the gross materialism and lack of spirituality which (in their view) those ideas embodied….. These Easterners drew a fundamental distinction between “civilization,” which they defined as rootless, cosmopolitan, immoral, un-German, Western, materialistic, and racially-defiled; and “culture,” which was pure, national, German, spiritual, and authentic. Civilization pulled Germany to the West, culture to the East….. Weimar was a “Western” republic. It stood for civilization rather than culture…. Weimar was less hostile to modernism than any other society or political system…. This was highly provocative to the Easterners…. Throughout the [First World] war the German ultra-patriotic press had warned that defeat would bring the triumph of Western “decadent” art, literature and philosophy, as though Lloyd George and Clemenceau could not wait to get to Berlin to ram Cubism down German throats. Now it had actually happened!
German nationalism and reactionary romanticism thus portrayed Germany as “noble, hopeless and suffering, stricken in defeat and jeeringly tormented by cosmopolitan riff-raff who appeared to control all access to the platforms of the arts and, by secret conspiracy, were systematically replacing German Kultur by their own, accursed Zivilisation.” Sound like a culture war that you know?
Johnson has his shortcomings: his analysis of the Civil War in A History of the American People leaves much to be desired, and, more importantly, his rejection of moral relativism, while entirely justified, does not seem to be backed up with any alternative except a return to religion, which I think would be just as catastrophic if not moreso. But his writing is lively, very thorough, and focuses on aspects of history that other writers tend to ignore. Check out Modern Times today.
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