Bertrand Russell ─ Peace Activist


                                    
                                               Bertie in 1958 at the tender age of 85. Old peace activists
                                               never die...at least not until they've outlived everybody else.

    After writing last week’s article on peace sloganeers, my mind wandered to the many dedicated activists who’ve hit the big screen in years gone by ─ brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan for example, sometime Catholic priests, whose anti-war, anti-nuclear crusading spanned the latter third of the 20th century and succeeded in accomplishing...absolutely nothing. (In case you’re wondering, neither brother was accused of having sex with choir boys, though Phil came a cropper with the authorities when he secretly married a nun. I guess it would have been okay in these enlightened times if he had secretly married a fellow priest instead.)
    Be that as it may, of the small army of peace activists spawned by two world wars, by the thrilling new religion of Marxism, by the advent of nuclear weaponry and ICBMs, by the Vietnam conflict, by adulation of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, by the burning desire to escape the draft, and by hatred of their native countries, one individual towered above the rest ─ the once-famous, once-living darling of the intelligentsia, English philosopher, mathematician, logician, Nobelist, and twit, Bertrand Russell.
    During World War I ─ early in his well-publicized career ─ Lord Russell solidified his already impressive pacifist credentials by quite logically (for he was a renowned logician) advocating the novel concept that war, being evil, the aim of British statesmanship should be to bring hostilities to an end as quickly as possible by surrendering to Germany. (The boys in the trenches must have had a hearty chuckle at Bertie’s naughty, oh-so-English, oh-so-upper-class bon mot as they were being gassed or bayoneted or taken prisoner by the Kaiser’s troops and summarily executed.)

    Alas, the humorless British authorities failed to appreciate Bertrand’s logic or wit, visiting a terrible punishment upon the brilliant savant ─ a £100 fine under the Defence of the Realm Act.
    A few years later Lord Russell got another chance to speak up for Peace when the preliminaries to WW2 were gathering steam. Ever consistent in his brilliance and cutting-edge logic, he advised his countrymen not to interfere with Hitler’s peccadilloes on the continent (Kristallnacht, the Anschluss, the rape of Czechoslovakia, the race laws) lest the Führer become upset and hostilities ensue. Unfortunately, after the mean old Nazis had enslaved most of Europe and started to bomb Britain on a daily basis, Bertie grudgingly conceded that a bit of the old bang-bang, shoot-shoot might occasionally be a necessary evil.
    How it must have wounded the great man’s pride to be forced by those nasty Teutons to modify his views!
    Having made this small concession to evil warmongers such as Winston Churchill, the daring, now-seventy-year-old free thinker quite logically packed his aging bones off to a neutral country. Once again, always the cool-headed philosopher, he reasoned that "homicidal lunatics were well employed in killing each other, but that sensible men would keep out of their way while they were doing it."
    
As proof of his perspicacity, Bertrand Russell survived quite nicely, thank you, to the ripe old age of 97 ─ in sharp contrast to the 10 to 15 million dummies who let themselves be butchered in cold blood by the dedicated soldiers of the Third Reich 
    And who can deny that those slaughtered jerks got just what they deserved? Not only didn’t they have the foresight to have Bertie’s kind of academic credentials and connections; they didn’t even have the brains to heed his witty advice.
    And besides, who told them not to have been born into the English aristocracy?

Certainly not Lord Russell.

     And who forced them to be members of inferior races rather than hereditary peers of the realm?

Certainly not Lord Russell.

     And who was to blame for them not having the common sense to request politely of the SS not to be herded at gun point into cattle cars and thrown into concentration camps behind barbed-wire and starved until they were living skeletons and gassed to death with their wives and children when all they had to do was book a reservation on a luxury liner bound for the Caribbean?

Certainly not that rich, brilliant, and famous crusader for "Peace at Any Price;" Lord Bertrand Arthur William Russell, the Third Earl Russell,

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

 

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