Modern Times, by Paul Johnson

"Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties", by Paul Johnson is not just another history book about the modern world. It is an explanation of why the 20th century was both the best and the bloodiest in the annals of mankind.

Paul Johnson tells us that nearly every repressive regime that managed to kill millions of its own people and untold numbers of others was spawned by some utopian philosophy. Hitler's Nazi dream was based on a pure race. Mao destroyed the culture, economy and the lives of a whole nation through repression and starvation in the name of some Marxist notion of the ultimate good. Lenin and Stalin starved and murdered whole classes of people in the name of communism. As Johnson said of Lenin, "His humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular."

Meanwhile, the greater good that marked the century came from a laissez faire attitude in democratic republics that allowed innovators to innovate, entrepreneurs to invest and people, in general, choices in their politics, religion and even consumption. The information age was a transforming force when coupled with freedom and the right to property. The Berlin Wall fell, and communism shrivelled like a watered down Wicked Witch in the "Merry Old Land of Oz".

Paul Johnson in "Modern Times" that moral relativism is what made all this possible. No longer were regimes responsible for what they did to individuals, for the ends justified the means in trying to forge a "great society". If 8 million Kulaks had to be sent to Siberia to starve and die in camps for the benefit of all society, then so be it. Stalin and his liberal supporters in the West were blind to individual suffering even on a massive scale, if only for the sake of the idea. It did not matter that the idea itself could never work. It was the good intentions of the perpetrators of the deed that counted. But ultimately, the utopian idea would become a cudgel for thugs to rule and to maintain their rule in the face of the human misery it spawned.

"Modern Times" is a great tool for not only learning about the history of the 20th Century, but also in understanding it.