Nuclear Launch Detected... =o - Page 21

From Paul Johnson's book:
"Russell may have hated war but there were times when he loved force. There was something aggressive, even bellicose, about his pacifism. Aftel the initial declaration of war, he wrote, 'For several weeks I felt that ff I should happen to meet Asquith or Grey I should be unable to refrain from murder.' In fact, some time later he did come across Asquith Russell emerged from swimming at Garsington Manor, stark naked, to find the Prime Minister sitting on the bank. But his anger had cooled by now and instead of murdering him, he embarked on a discussion of Plato, Asquith being a fine classical scholar. The great editor under whom I served, Kingsley Martin, who knew Russell well, often used to say that all the most pugnacious people he had come across were pacifists, and instanced Russell. Russell's pupil T. S. Eliot said the same: '[Russell] considered any excuse good enough for homicide.' It was not that Russell had any taste for fisticuffs. But he was in some ways an absolutist who believed in total solutions. He returned more than once to the notion of an era of perpetual peace being imposed on the world by an initial act of forceful statesmanship.

"The first time this idea occurred to him was towards the end of the First World War when he argued that America should use its superior power to insist on disarmament: 'The mixture of races and the comparative absence of a national tradition make America peculiarly suited to the fulfillment of this task." Then, when America secured a monopoly of nuclear weapons, in 1946-49, the suggestion returned with tremendous force. Since Russell later tried to deny, obfuscate or explain away his views during this period, it is important to set them out in some detail and in chronological order. As his biographer Ronald Clark has established, he advocated a preventative war against Russia not once but many times and over several years. Unlike most members of the left, Russell had never been taken in by the Soviet regime. He had always rejected Marxism completely. The book in which he described his 1920 visit to Russia, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920), was highly critical of Lenin and what he was doing. He regarded Stalin as a monster and accepted as true the fragmentary accounts of the forced collectivization, the great famine, the purges and the camps which reached the West. In all these ways he was quite untypical of the progressive intelligentsia. Nor did he share the complacency with which, in 1944-45, they accepted the extension of Soviet rule to most of Eastern Europe. To Russell this was a catastrophe for Western civilization. 'I hate the Soviet government too much for sanity,' he wrote on 15 January 1945. He believed that Soviet expansion would continue unless halted by the threat or use of force. In a letter dated 1 September 1945 he asserted: 'I think Stalin has inherited Hitler's ambition to world dictatorship.' Hence, when the first nuclear weapons were exploded by the US over Japan, he immediately resurrected his view that America should impose peace and disarmament on the world, using the new weapons to coerce a recalcitrant Russia. To him it was a heaven-sent opportunity which might never recur. He first set out his strategy in articles in the Labour journal Forward, published in Glasgow 18 August 1945, and the Manchester Guardian, 2 October. There was a further article on the same theme in Cavalcade, 20 October. This was entitled 'Humanity's Last Chance' and included the significant remark 'A casus belli would not be difficult to find.'

"Russell reiterated these or similar views over a period of five years. He set them out in Polemic, July-August 1946, in a talk to the Royal Empire Society on 3 December 1947 printed in the United Empire, January-February 1948 and New Commonwealth, January 1948, in a lecture at the Imperial Defence College, 9 December 1947, repeated on various occasions, at a student conference at Westminster School, November 1948, printed in the Nineteenth Century and After, January 1949, and again in an article in World Horizon in March 1950. He did not mince his words. The Royal Empire Society talk proposed an alliance - adumbrating NATO - which would then dictate terms to Russia: 'I am inclined to think that Russia would acquiesce; if not, provided this is done soon, the world might survive the resulting war and emerge with a single government such as the world needs.' 'If Russia overruns Western Europe,' he wrote to an American disarmament expert, Dr Walter Marseille, in May 1948, 'the destruction will be such as no subsequent reconquest can undo. Practically the whole educated population will be sent to labour camps in north-east Siberia or on the shores of the White Sea, where most will die of hardship and the survivors will be turned into animals. Atomic bombs, if used, will at first have to be dropped on Western Europe, since Russia will be out of reach. The Russians, even without atomic bombs, will be able to destroy all the big towns in England ...I have no doubt that America would win in the end, but unless Western Europe can be preserved from invasion, it will be lost to civilization for centuries. Even at such a price, I think war would be worth while. Communism must be wiped out, and world government must be estab-lished.' Russell constantly stressed the need for speed: 'Sooner or later, the Russians will have atom bombs, and when they have them it will be a much tougher proposition. Everything must be done in a hurry, with the utmost celerity.' Even when Russia exploded an A-bomb, he still pressed his argument, urging that the West must develop the hydrogen bomb. 'I do not think that, in the present temper of the world, an agreement to limit atomic warfare would do anything but harm, because each side would think that the other was evading it'. He then put the 'Better Dead than Red' argument in its most uncompromising form: 'The next war, if it comes, will be the greatest disaster that will have befallen the human race up to that moment. I can think of only one greater disaster: the extension of the Kremlin's power over the whole world.'

"Russell's advocacy of preventative war was widely known and much discussed in these years. At the International Congress of Philosophy at Amsterdam in 1948 he was furiously attacked for it by the Soviet delegate, Arnost Kolman, and replied with equal asperity: 'Go back and tell your masters in the Kremlin that they must send more competent servants to carry out their programme of propaganda and deceit.' As late as 27 September 1953 he wrote in the New York Times Magazine: 'Terrible as a new world war would be, I still for my part would prefer it to a world communist empire.'

"It must have been at about this time, however, that Russell's views began to change abruptly and fundamentally. The very next month, October 1953, he denied in the Nation that he had ever 'supported a preventative war against Russia'. The entire story, he wrote, was 'a com-munist invention'.' For some time, a friend recorded, whenever his post-war views were presented to him, he would insist: 'Never. That's just the invention of a communist journalist.' In March 1959, in an interview on BBC television with John Freeman, in one of his famous Face to Face programmes, Russell changed his tack. Disarmament experts in America had sent him chapter and verse of his earlier statements and he could no longer deny they had been made. So he said to Freeman, who questioned him about the preventative war line: 'It's entirely true, and I don't repent of it. It's entirely consistent with what I think now. "I He followed this with a letter to the BBC weekly, the Listener, saying: 'I had, in fact completely forgotten that I had ever thought a policy of threat involving possible war desirable. In 1958 Mr Alfred Kohlberg and Mr Walter W. Marseille brought to my notice things which I said in 1947, and I read these with amazement. I have no excuses to offer.' In the third volume of his autobiography (1968) he ventured a further explanation: '. . . at the time I gave this advice, I gave it so casually, without any real hope it would be followed, that I soon forgot I had given it.' He added: 'I had mentioned it in a private letter and again in a speech that I did not know to be the subject of dissection by the press' But as the investigation by Ronald Clark showed, Russell had argued the case for preventative war repeatedly, in numerous articles and speeches, and over a period of several years. It is hard to believe he could have forgotten so completely this tenacious and protracted stance."

On November 03 2008 05:47 Jibba wrote:
Hoho, looks like I tainted your idol. Russell kicks ass, but for a time he DID advocate preventative war.

On November 03 2008 05:57 iNfuNdiBuLuM wrote:

the rest of it did not have to burn. do you not understand this, or are you trolling?