Remembering Journalist Paul Johnson

Conrad Black writes:

* Paul Johnson: “What sustained the English during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation years, what enabled them to preserve heterodoxy in England and uphold it on the continent, what enabled them to defeat the Armada and rip open the world empire of Spain—in short to thrust aside the inert log of the Roman heritage and allow the stream of progress to flow again—was not just patriotism, or nationalism, but racism, the most powerful of all human impulses. The English came to believe that they were the chosen people…. They could thus answer the Continental armory of faith and superstition with the vehement conviction of divinely inspired direction—the English reached the audacious conclusion that God, having found the Jews inadequate for His great purposes, had entrusted the island race with the unique role of completing his kingdom on earth. Their island situation had made them natural racists, overbearing and aggressive towards strangers, holding their own superiority to the rest of mankind to be self-evident.”

* he held that the meeting of the officers of Cromwell’s New Model Army at St. Mary’s Church in Putney in 1647

“proceeded to invent modern politics—in fact, the public framework of the world in which nearly 3 billion people now live…. The ideas flung across that communion table and all the exciting novelty of their pristine conception traveled around the world, hurled down thrones and subverted empires, and became the common everyday currency of political exchange. Every major political concept known to us today, all the assumptions which underlie the thoughts of men in the White House, or the Kremlin, or Downing Street, or in presidential mansions or senates or parliaments through five continents were expressed or adumbrated in the little church of St. Mary, Putney.”

* Paul Johnson was above all a believer in order, with a reasonable amount of freedom, and in the dignity and fundamental equality of all people, although he did certainly believe that the English-speaking Judeo-Christian peoples were psychologically, historically, and societally superior. His enthusiasm for the newer English-speaking countries was undoubtedly enhanced because “the arrogance of the English is gone and with it their self-confidence. The world suddenly seems a vast and alien place.” England had not needed “nation states as allies, because her true allies were the forces of enlightenment, moral, economic, and constitutional.” Paul never explained how he thought Britain lost the magic touch, any more than he explained how Israel fumbled the torch of the chosen, across a millennium, to the English. The custodians of all this are now the British offspring and particularly the Americans. This is the source of his great affection for the United States and for the Dominions of the old Commonwealth: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.