My favorite history book is Modern Times:The World from The Twenties to the Nineties, by Paul Johnson.  I have read and re-read the book for over 20 years (when it was first released it featured the title Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties).

Johnson packs so much into every sentence, every paragraph and every episode of modern history, all with a perspective on the foibles of men throughout history. 

I've posted many of his weekly columns on this site and do so again this week.  But this week's column is particularly good  because it returns to the theme of Modern Times.

I remember Malcolm Muggeridge explaining in an interview that men are forever trying to create a Utopia on earth, not understanding that it is not just folly, but dangerous.  Not that we should throw up our hands, but that a project aiming for Utopia so often leads the way to the gulag for millions as the new world order is enforced.

Johnson in this week's column:

"Hitler and the Nazis called the criterion of morality ‘the Higher Law of the Party’, and followed it to launch world war and kill nearly six million Jews. Lenin and Stalin called it ‘the Revolutionary Conscience’, and its dictates led to the murder or death in the Gulag of 20 million ‘enemies of the people’. In China, Mao’s revolutionary conscience as the sole measure of right and wrong produced 70 million victims. Pre-war Japan followed the European lead and conducted its wars of aggression, first against China, then the West, without the smallest regard for morality in any form, except the relativism of ‘National Survival’. In this competitive corruption, the West succumbed, at least in part. Churchill used the spirit of moral relativism to authorise ‘aerial bombing’ of Germany: ‘The one thing that will bring [Hitler] down… is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.’ The Americans used the same argument for dropping nuclear weapons on Japan."