By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
I have often wondered what I would select if someone asked me to put together a list of five or ten books that I would recommend to a young Catholic to help them understand the great cultural and political issues that divide the left and the right in Western society.
Whenever I try to devise such a list, I experience the same reaction as when someone asks me to list my ten favorite movies or songs. Within seconds of finishing the list, I smack my forehead over four or five favorites that I have left out.
Still, I can say with confidence that my list of books would include a title or two from Paul Johnson, maybe The Intellectuals, Modern Times, or The Birth of the Modern. I’d be tempted to list all three, except that doing so would exclude too many other authors of great merit. Johnson is that good. There was a time in the 1990s when younger conservative intellectuals would refer to Johnson as “Chairman Paul,” whimsically comparing his influence to that of Chairman Mao in China.
The recent terrorist attacks in Paris illustrate why it is well worth it to spend serious time with Johnson’s work.
In the mid-1960s, at the height of the Cold War, James Burnham wrote Suicide of the West, one of the most widely discussed books at the time in conservative circles. His theme was that liberalism was undermining the cultural and political heritage in the countries that were part of what was once routinely called the Christian West. Paul Johnson updates the scenario.
Consider a column Johnson wrote for Forbes on November 2, entitled “More Horrors to Come.” Johnson’s topic was the implications of the massive waves of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East sweeping over Europe. We all have seen the scenes. Johnson calls our attention what they portend, looking beyond the trees to focus on the forest.
He locates the roots of the current refugee problem in the “failed states” brought about by the end of the European colonial system. Modern medicine, introduced by the European colonial powers, “particularly in the management of childbirth,” caused “a huge jump in the numbers of children” in the former colonies. This led to “a growing need to export the new population surplus.” In search of jobs and a life with some dignity, Third Worlders began moving to the countries of their former colonial masters. Johnson:
“Britain first experienced this with the arrival of West Indians who had been recruited as nurses for the National Health Service. The French, who had exported a million Europeans to Algeria during the 19th century, now found that growing numbers of native Algerians were coming to France.”
The former colonies lost more than large numbers of their best educated people. Their problems, Johnson continues, “were compounded by the disappearance of the colonial governments. The rule of law began to erode, and a new, sinister term came into use: the ‘failed state’.” The colonial governments were replaced by “lawless dictatorships, eventually falling into chaos.”
That chaos is exemplified by the images we now see routinely on the nightly news, of the stately old buildings in the former colonies in Africa and Latin America. They are now crumbling and smeared with graffiti. The new governments cannot provide for their basic maintenance, much less improve and expand upon what was built during the time they were colonies.
The so-called Arab Spring, promoted by the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton, added to the problem, exacerbating the “post-imperial collapse of order and the proliferation of failed states.” I would bet serious money that if you asked the huddled masses in the lifeboats leaving Libya whether they wish that Muammar Qadhafi were back in power that you would get an emphatic “Yes.”
No doubt Hillary Clinton thought she was being clever when she quipped, after seeing the images of Qadhafi’s death at the hands of radical Islamists, “We came, we saw, he died.” I doubt that many Libyans thought it was a witty comment then, even fewer now. We are left with what Johnson calls “in practical terms” a “limitless” supply of “frightened Africans who will risk their lives to get to Europe.”
I don’t hear it said out loud when the commentators propose a solution to the refugee problem, but it is a thought that I cannot help but think is in the back of their minds: It is unrealistic to suggest that the refugees “go home to their own countries.” They have no functioning countries to return to, only the prospect of life in tent cities. They come from the failed states that Johnson describes, societies without the capacity to provide employment and the basic necessities of life, countries, in Johnson’s words, on the “brink of ruin.”
An overstatement? Those who contend that is the case have the obligation to point out who it will be that will rebuild the infrastructure and a working economy in Libya, in Somaliland, in Eritrea. No one from those countries, that’s for sure. Those individuals don’t exist. Those with the potential to do it have already left. The UN? That no one in the media or in Washington suggests that we turn to the world body for a solution makes clear that it is an irrelevancy. The UN’s tub-thumpers refrain from admitting to that in public, partly because of their sense of noblesse oblige toward struggling Third Worlders, partly because they don’t want to admit in public how mistaken they once were about “mankind’s last great hope.”
It is likely to get worse. Johnson points to South Africa. “If its mining industry goes under, the whole of sub-Saharan Africa will join the rush to get out.”
Which will overwhelm Europe. Johnson: “The idea that the EU is the solution to the world’s refugee crisis is nonsense. The more people it takes in, the more will want to come.”
What should the United States do? Johnson doesn’t see much hope from us: “President Obama, whose deliberate inactivity” in Libya and Syria, “lies at the root of this crisis, refuses to do anything to help Europe. So we must grit our teeth and prepare for what is to come.”
Johnson warned of “what is to come” weeks before the November 13 massacre carried out by Muslim terrorists in Paris. Those who did not get his point when he wrote the words may get it now.
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