Bertrand Russell: Dupe of Racist Jews appears in many garbled online junk 'scraper' sites. Nothing to do with me! This genuine file by Rerevisionist is a long serious piece on Russell as 'useful idiot'. I've just noticed (2016) that there's a Bertrand Russell Society (online at www.bertrandrussell.org) by 'useful idiots', of shockingly poor quality.

• Bertrand Russell: Dupe of Racist Jews (including Jewish Physicists)

Propagandists, nuke liars, frauds, publicists, dupes—but also some debunkers—of nuclear and other issues

Bertrand Russell: Dupe of Racist Jews (including Jewish Physicists)

This is a long set of articles. Click to move directly to material on:
• Bertrand Russell's Life: Evidence he was Duped all his Life by Jews
        • 'Nuclear Weapons', Cyrus Eaton and Pugwash
        • Russell's life and opinions, more or less in sequence
        • Russell on 'Socialism'
        • Russell on the 'Labour Party'
        • Russell on 'Fascism'
        • Omission of Jewish Characteristics in Philosophers
        • Russell's 90th Birthday: 1962 Marking New Jewish Policies
        • Vietnam War
        • Permanent Value of Russell's Work?
• Faked quotation from Russell's Impact of Science on Society
• 'Nuclear Disarmament: Committee of 100, CND, etc
• Russell on World Government
• Russell's Practice and Theory of Bolshevism and Russell's Omission of Jews
• Emails with McMaster University in 1998 (where Russell's papers are mostly stored. Shortly after these exchanges, that group was closed; I do not know if there is a connection)

Bertrand Russell: Dupe of Racist Jews—including Jewish Physicists

Inserted 12 April 2023 - RW   The two pages below are scanned from Yours Faithfully, Bertrand Russell edited by Ray Perkins Jr and published in 2002 in the USA.
    This letter of 1963 (assuming the reproduction is accurate) states that Russell's grandfather was 'responsible for the elimination of legal discrimination against Jews in Great Britain.' This is in a reply to Khruschchev and the people behind Izvestia who of course were very familiar with what Jews had done. The letter reinforces the thesis in my article on Russell's duped status.
      Russell gets it exactly wrong, using the fake 'Holocaust' (not his phrase; this was 1963) and fake persecutions to make his case. He seems to applaud Jewish culture, religion and even nationality without knowing anything about these things; he seems to have had no idea that their 'culture' is based on continuous aggression and deprivation from non-Jews. The supposed suppression by Stalin of Jews is impossible to judge accurately in view of the systematic suppression by Jews of any opinions or facts which they don't like, where they can.
      All this reflects on Russell and the Vietnam War. Why should Russell have been surrounded by Jews in his campaigns? My best guess is that the Jews who wanted to get, or keep, banking in south-east Asia, and make money from reconstruction, lost interest in war; but the American simpletons were making fortunes (or at least careers) out of it, or medals, or trials of weapons, or cheap whores. To this day simpletons think the War in Vietnam was lost, when of course Jews were left in control. It's a typical example of partial revisionism: American non-Jews haven't understood what victory means to Jews, and favour things which ought not to be supported. For example, William Luther Pierce in about 2000 took this view.
      And of course it blackwashed American troops and airmen, who were shown up to be vicious and evil. Putin in 2023 uses this point.

I'm interested in Bertrand Russell, mainly because of his wide range of topics, including, as well as philosophy and mathematics, some scientific topics, plus world history, and literature, though not art. And his literary style (modelled on Milton, and on Baedecker guidebooks, he said). And his reformist passion. And something else—his apparently wide experience of influential people. Russell regarded his principal work as his book co-written with A N Whitehead, 'Principia Mathematica'—the title no doubt modelled on Newton's. Toward the end of his life he seems to have regarded mathematics as just an elaborate set of tautologies. He was also an aristocratic reformer type, belonging to the political part of the aristocracy rather than the landowners, and an Independent Labour Party supporter, and later a Labour Party supporter, until he became aware of war crimes in Vietnam. He also campaigned against nuclear weapons, though he never had any doubts as to their existence.

Russell's Autobiography states that 'the founder of my family had been a protégé' of Henry VIII. Henry VIII re-introduced interest on money. Possibly Russell's ancestors were promoted after Cromwell and then the 'Glorious Revolution', as a result of being pro-Jewish, though I doubt Russell would ever have stated this.

Who's Who entry 1948 on Bertrand Russell
Who's Who, 1948.   Bertrand Russell was proud to be an aristocrat, and used his title all his life. But the fact is, this honour was only created eleven years before his birth, for his grandfather's work.
His Autobiography mentions Kingston Russell House, in Dorset, an 18th century building, and the village where his family 'began its more notable career', which is consistent with wealth coinciding with the enclosures. (I haven't attempted to inspect Russell's family tree, which included the Stanleys and of course must have included others). Many people feel loyalty to, or fear leaving, some organisation (nation, NASA, company, army, teaching place, home town, country, church, university...). Russell's main loyalty *may* have been to 'Jews'. His grandfather, Lord John Russell, had something to do with 19th century pro-Jewish reforms; Portraits from Memory has Bertrand's account of the repeal of the Test Act, and the repeal of the Corporation Act, in 1828, when Lord John Russell was 35. These were to do with taking the sacrament of the Lord's supper and denying transubstantiation. Bertrand Russell says this was Lord John Russell's 'first great achievement', and described 50 years later, when he (Bertrand) was nearly 6, a 'large gathering of earnest men on the lawn in front of our house'; these were 'nonconformists', though Lord John was too ill to see them. The same meeting is described for example in Life of Lord John Russell by Spencer Walpole. However, 'nonconformist' (and 'dissenter') appear to be vaguely worded—they could be English or Welsh Protestant Christians, or include Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers—or include Jews, despite their different, tribal, basis. No doubt the meaning subtly changed.

The thesis of this piece is that Bertrand Russell naïvely assumed, all his life, that tribal and race-based cults (Confucianism, Hinduism, but especially Judaism and Mohammedanism) were on the same footing as the potentially universal Christianity. Bertrand Russell wrote that 'the carrying of the Reform Bill in 1832, ... started Britain on the course that led to complete democracy.' But possibly the rather bogus forms of 'democracy' that have developed had the same root—certainly some people maintain that the Constitutional monarchy with nominal opposition, was, along with company law, Jewish control of money, and one-sided free speech, Jewish-inspired. Russell's unqualified adulation of Bentham, the legal reformer, who was connected with the formation of the non-Church of England University College, might suggest something similar. (See Freedom and Organization 1814-1914, Russell's history of the 19th century. Russell dates the faltering of utilitarianism to 1874, without saying why—possibly the election of Disraeli?). And Russell almost never comments on the post-Napoleonic effects of the Rothschilds on Britain's wealthy families—admittedly a taboo topic in almost all 19th century English writing; I know of no novel (apart from Belloc's Belinda) dealing with impoverishment of English families as a result of that deception. This provides a convincing explanation of Russell's deeply-ingrained omission of any criticism of Jews, including their historical origin, while at the same time he allowed himself to freely mock almost any other category of white humankind, apart from his fellow students at Cambridge.

Note that Russell talks about 'our house', despite the fact that Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park was 'in the gift of the monarch', and so presumably he was removable. In effect, Lord John Russell was subsidised, and there must be a suspicion that he was subsidised for some reason. (It's worth noting that a great deal of property was held in this way: the entire plot of Pride and Prejudice revolves around the possibility that Mr Bennet might die soon, leaving his family homeless. The Church of England was structured around property ownership by the Church—vicars got a 'living' related to the poverty or wealth of the neighbourhood; but on retirement, if they lasted that long, they were ejected from their vicarages; though I doubt this would apply to bishops and archbishops. To this day, the Duke of Westminster owns large swathes of London on what remains of 999-year leases. Oxbridge dons received income, but not property—Russell mentions one who did no work since the age of 22. Possibly this was assumed to be their due: after all, members of the Church hierarchy were usually appointed soon after graduation, and others might be expected to have accepted similar terms of work. Tenant farmers illustrate the same kind of thing).

Russell's very last published piece, I think 1969, was on Israel's expansionism. There is some recorded material, both voice and movie, for example of his radio and TV appearances. He opposed the First World War to the best of his abilities; I don't think he ever commented on the coincidence of the Balfour Declaration coinciding with the US decision to enter that war. He supported the Second World War, but only from some time in the late 1930s; before that he favoured a pacifist course. I mean of course against Hitler—it's truly amazing how gently Lenin and Stalin were treated—partly because there was lingering anti-Russian feeling left over from the 19th century. I don't know when he switched to active opposition to Hitler; I'd guess it must have been after the time Churchill secretly started taking his bribes. (On this subject, see this 90 minute video on Churchill's War https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1MOTRIdVuQ Note that Lord Portal, later in charge of bombing Germany, was a cousin of Russell's, according to his Autobiography) (vol 3).

Russell was very influenced by the prospect of nuclear war and the possible extinction of mankind. He wrote a shortish piece 'The Atomic Bomb' (published as 'The Bomb and Civilization') in 1945, including this: 'It would be possible for Americans to use their position of temporary superiority to insist upon disarmament, not only in Germany and Japan, but everywhere except in the United States' at about the time of Nagasaki, though the unsourced scientific detail he quotes must have been supplied to him. In my opinion, Jews were very keen to prevent this, since their genocidal activities in the USSR would probably have become known. And probably this was the reason that the USSR was declared to be nuclear-armed. In 1954 Russell broadcast 'Man's Peril' about the 'hydrogen bomb', on BBC radio—the only British radio station in Britain of course (apart from rather unclear overseas ones). He wrote introductions to (for example) Jungk's Brighter than a Thousand Suns (1956 German; 1958 English editions), and A. Osada's translated Japanese children's essays Children of the A-Bomb (1963 in English), and also a collection of letters between the fraud Claud Eatherly, who pretended to have piloted the bomber at Hiroshima, and Gunther Anders (who changed his name—'Anders' means 'Others'), Burning Conscience. All these books are seriously problematical—see their threads on this site (now www.nuke-lies.org), and Amazon reviews. Jungk was a Jew, as was Anders, who was something like a hanger-on of the Frankfurt School—he received an award from Adorno!
    Cyrus Eaton and Pugwash was a significant component of 'controlled opposition' to 'the nuclear threat'. Cyrus Eaton was a Jew, a Canadian equivalent of someone like Felix Warburg. Eaton funded the Pugwash Conferences from July 1957. Eaton stipulated that the nuclear discussions should start in Pugwash, his birthplace, possibly (this is my guess) to watch for serious critics. (Incidentally, Russell stated that Aristotle Onassis offered to fund much the same thing; if he had, maybe events would have followed a different course). Note that McMaster University in Canada, where Russell's papers were bought and are stored, was the university that Eaton attended. Russell's Autobiography names Professor Rotblat, Professor Powell, Dr Burhop, and Dr Patricia Lindop as involved with this meeting. Professor Powell was Cecil F. Powell, who appears not to have been a Jew; but he was in the 'World Federation of Scientific Workers', founded 1946, a Jewish front. All this foreshadows the Jewish corralling effort around both Russell's nuclear work and Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal.
    Russell wrote several shortish books on supposed nuclear weapons, including 'Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare' (1959) and 'Has Man a Future?' (1961). In fact, the division by dates of his The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell—Vol I 1872-1914, Vol II 1914-1944, Vol III 1944-1967—reflects his concerns over the First World War, and over the supposed invention of nuclear weapons. He published 'Unarmed Victory' (1963) on Cuba, with many telegrams between Kennedy and Khrushchev and Russell,—and on the China-India border dispute. One of his short stories is on the theme of the technological extermination of mankind by a small technocratic clique.
Note Nov 2017: Is it true that Khrushchev's original name was Solomon Perlmutter?? - rerevisionist: Looks like it, doesn't it. Plenty of online references. Khruschev = Solomon Perlmutter 1894-1971 USSR 'Premier' 1958-1964. Includes the Cuba Crisis, in my view a jewish collusion fake. 1932-33 Holodomor -- when 'Khruschev' was getting on for 40, if dates are correct. Just another Jew liar and murderer. I have a Penguin biography; I must trawl through it some time.

Russell's papers were sold to McMaster University in Toronto, which became a gathering-point for Russelliana, and which is I think still in the process of editing and publishing his collected papers—quite a task, as Russell's letter-writing habits, established in his youth, and his long life and vast written output, ensured a voluminous paper-trail. I suspect it will gradually become clear that the McMaster volumes have been arranged, like Russell's Autobiography, on a discredited intellectual basis.

From this site's viewpoint, Russell looks very much like a dupe of Jews. I'll just bullet-point some evidence.
Early life: almost the sole reference in his writings is to Moses Montefiore, then very 'ancient', in Broadstairs on the south coast, in Russell's boyhood. Russell was told about 'the misfortunes of Jews', I think by his guardian grandma. He presumed, all his life as far as I know, as did most people in the 'West', that 'Jews' in the Bible were the same as people presenting themselves as 'Jews' in 1900-ish and after. A comment by Belloc is also relevant; Belloc said in effect that the British in the 18th century saw no conflict of interest with Jews—they were (my interpretation), after all, mostly in East Europe or Russia, and not therefore in obvious conflict with a sea empire.
'Anti-Semitism' Agitations: note added Sept 2019: in 1873, La Conquête du monde par les Juifs was published, attributed to Major Osman Bey. By 1878, a translation by F W Mathias was published in Britain, so the topic was live when Bertrand was aged 6. The author's real name appears to have been Millingen; no doubt there were enraged disputes over the facts.
      L'Affaire Dreyfus (the Dreyfus Affair) in France and its colonies may have been the Jewish reaction to that one publication; it was a psyop, and I believe nobody before Miles Mathis, putting Josh's work on Internet, disentangled the likely truth behind this Jewish all-media psyop. Russell, all his life, thought Dreyfus was a victim of horrible anti-Semites, as shown in Dear Bertrand Russell.
      Russell's naïvete about finance I think is undeniable. Despite his aristocratic connections, his writings on for example the Erie Railroad, Panama, and bank crashes, all in his youth, show a combination of the influence of newspaper sensationalism and lies, with only marginal grasp of events. He wrote (letter, autobiography) he'd assumed rail bankruptcies were evidence of incompetence, until he realised they were just the opposite. But he had no overview; money in he ancient and medieval worlds, Machiavelli not writing on money, transfers of silver and gold, the Federal Reserve, the place of the Bank of International Settlements, secrecy in international transfers (such as USA to USSR), bribery, secret payments to influential persons, were largely replaced by distracting excitements of the Dreyfus type. It's irritating that in his young years he decided economics was too trivial to study.
The Boer War sparked Russell's political interest. One of his letters (1905) describes a dinner party at the Webbs' house in London. It must have been an odd social event—an unhappily married woman writer, J H Mackinder of geopolitics, an actor/producer, a spiritualist, and Balfour, the then-Prime Minister. But also Wernher, misspelt by Russell, of Wernher and Beit (mostly of South Africa). Russell says 'Werner.. bearing very lightly the load of blood, of nations destroyed and hatreds generated, of Chinese slavery and English corruption... though Balfour governs the Empire, Werner governs Balfour. ...' This was written after the Boer War. Yet thirty years later, Russell's book 'Freedom and Organization 1814-1914' only has accounts of British and German wars against Africans, and also of Rhodes—nothing else despite the relevance of Jews to the Boer War, and their ownership of minerals, the connection with the First World War—and the lasting bitterness of Africans. Arnold Leese, writing in the 1930s, gives a far better account of the mineral wealth and Jewish financial connections. Russell suppressed, or just possibly was not aware, of all this
All Russell's writings on socialism fail to mention the imported Jewish aspect. Monopolies based on industry developed in Britain before they did in any other country, and the home-grown socialism of Robert Owen, Ruskin, F D Maurice, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Keir Hardie, H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw etc favoured some sort of economic redistribution; however, the 'red' variety favoured redistribution mainly to Jews. This is why there was little authentic socialism in the USA and Germany, since the monopolies grew in those countries later, at a time postdating Jewish penetration. In the same way, British socialism in the shape of the Labour Party became 'compromised', and that situation remains to this day. Note that the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia in English was published between 1901-1906. Its account of 'socialism' presents it explicitly as a Jewish movement. (This work is now out of copyright and online, though I can't vouch for the fidelity of the online version). It's typical of Russell that his writings on socialism give priority to Jewish writers in German, rather than non-Jews, and rather than practical activities. Russell all his life was averse from commenting on non-mainstream people; he never, for example, described Henry George's ideas in detail
Russell's automatic avoidance of non-mainstream people was connected with his high Victorian attitude, reflected in the public school/ University education system based largely on Greek and Latin classics, with some non-linguistic and non-archaeological Biblical material. Such people dominated government and the Church of England, and heavily influenced the professions. "My name is Jowett; I'm Master of this College. What I don't know isn't knowledge" illustrates the outlook, though there were some doubters (T H Green? Nettlefold?) who wondered whether 21-year old B.A.s could in fact have read every book worth reading. Russell had an unsceptical attitude; his overview of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography makes it clear he had no doubt as to the factual basis of John Mill's education of his son. Russell never made any attempt to investigate Jews, either historically or in relatively modern times, even when writing his History of Western Philosophy
The 'Labour' party. Russell says nothing about 'Sidney Webb' (described as a 'lower-class Jew' by Christopher Booker) beyond the fact that he worked tirelessly to deceive other people. Why didn't Russell say more? Russell did his best to delve into other personality types—there are many examples in his autobiography—but, generally, he exempted Jews from critical comment. A letter (at the end of the chapter Engagement in his Autobiography) says 'Beatrice Webb... married a man whom all her smart relations hated...' which is entirely in the spirit of the convention of the time. There is another reference: 'When I mentioned at home that I had met Sidney Webb, my grandmother replied that she had heard him lecture once in Richmond, and that he was '"not quite...." "Not quite what?" I persisted. "Not quite a gentleman in mind or manners,' she finally said.' If his grandmother had been more honest, perhaps Russell might have looked into historical avenues which he never in fact investigated.
The First World War: Russell opposed this from the start. His autobiography records the depths of his disappointment at the intellectual cowardice and dishonesty of Cambridge academics, the crowd psychology of fanaticism and loss of judgment, and the shallowness of ordinary people. It's not clear to me how much of his attitude to 'ordinary people' was taken from the press of the time which of course was controlled: the idea that the announcement of war was greeted by cheering crowds may well be propaganda. He almost became a 'complete antinomian'. His books Principles of Social Reconstruction, Political Ideals, and Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism were written and published at this time. Russell was often referred to as a 'pacifist'; in fact his attitude was that, if a war on the whole is justified, then it should be fought; but not otherwise—as in the case of the First World War, in his view. Russell's protests were in the form of speeches and writings, in what he called, much later in a TV interview, 'obscure sheets'.
. . . The idea that Britain should have remained neutral, and stayed out of the German-French War, is of course censored from the present education system at most levels. This is Russell in 1957: '.. the consequences of a German victory in the First War would have been deplorable [but] ... less deplorable than the consequences of our victory. ... militarism has steadily increased since 1918. ... democracy has steadily diminished. ... it was followed by an even worse war. Both the Nazis and the Communists resulted from the ferocity of the First War. ...' (From Dear Bertrand Russell (1969)—note that Jewish influence is not considered; obviously the Communist Manifesto preceded 1914!). Russell's writings during 1914 to 1918 have never I think been arranged chronologically, but would be an interesting introduction to that period, starting with the crowds in Trafalgar Square 'cheering to the echo' the news that the government of elderly gentlemen had decided to have them all killed—at least as reported in newspapers—to the introduction of conscription, the 'white-feather girls', jail for dissidents, and the death penalty for 'cowards', and of course including the entrance of other powers into the war. Note that the Jew Sidney Webb said 'our' soldiers should be kept with their 'noses to the grindstone'
In the First World War, as far as I know Russell totally ignored the Balfour Declaration, despite his passionate opposition to that War. He principally blamed Lloyd George and Edward Grey for the war. He seems hopelessly naive about the sinking of the Lusitania; and had no idea about the then-recent formation of the Jewish Federal Reserve, and the influence of Bernard Baruch
'The end of 'The First War' (in '..Autobiography..'- 'the end of the War was so swift and dramatic..')—it's clear Russell had no idea of the logistics side of war, and the effects of control of supplies. His autobiographical chapter is most diverse—accounts of some meetings disrupted, his smuggled letter to President Wilson, asides on prison, notes made at the time, his lovers, D H Lawrence, the suffocating atmosphere of censorship ...—but it's clear he has no idea about strategic materials and products
Wartime controls had considerable fascination for Russell, who described Sir Arthur Salter's book Allied Shipping Control as 'in all essentials a complete international Socialism. The Allied Governments jointly were the sole buyer of food and raw material, ... They controlled production absolutely ... and could ration factories... As regards food they even controlled retail distribution. They fixed prices as well as quantities. ... mainly through the Allied Maritime Transport Council..' (From a speech to the LSE - London School of Economics - in 1923, The Need for Political Scepticism'). The contrast with his idealistic, democratic, creativity-liberating 'socialism' is very striking. The point here though is that, certainly in the USA, the entire war economy was run, or at least controlled financially, by Jews
The new USSR: Russell's autobiography has a letter (a private letter home, 1919 I think) on Americanised Jews instituting a new terror system. He actually met Ulyanov ('Lenin') and Bernstein ('Trotzky')—I don't know if Trotsky spoke English, but if so it would no doubt be New York-Yiddish accented. Anyway Russell knew perfectly well this was going on, and yet his 1920 book 'The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism' has only two extremely minute mentions of Jews ('life and outlook of peasants, village schoolmasters, small Jew traders' and '.. the desire for Asiatic dominion, which is probably accompanied in the minds of some with dreams of sapphires and rubies and golden thrones and all the glories of their forefather Solomon.') On this book, here's a much more detailed piece, posted below—it's the most contemptible piece of deception by Russell. And in fact it's only by luck the letter was printed—pressure was brought to bear (by Leonard Woolf and maybe others, according to Anton Felton) not to include his letter in Vol. II of Russell's Autobiography. Russell commented I think in 'New Hopes for a Changing World' that the USSR 'did nothing to alleviate famine', presumably in Ukraine, which again is a contemptible misrepresentation
Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1922 English edition) had a boldly-advertised introduction by Russell, which must have helped promote it. However, Russell shows no awareness of likely Jewish roots in Wittgenstein, which of course might have helped explain, and very possibly demote, that work. He said nothing about Wittgenstein's family wealth. Not even the title was Wittgenstein's. ('Tractatus' sounds to me a Romanisation of the Jewish word 'tractate'; though I'm not certain on this point). Readers who interpret Wittgenstein as just another example of 'boom', or in a more modern trope publicity 'hype', in a group with Charlie Chaplin, Einstein, Freud and many more, displacing English Great War-dead thinkers, must be on the right track.
      Wittgenstein may have joined Jewish USSR-supporting groups; there is some evidence online. He was at the same school as Hitler for a time; and if revisionists are even partly correct, Hitler was a crypto-Jew.
'The Prospects of Industrial Civilization' (1923—with Dora Russell, then aged 26) is an unsatisfactory book (review on this site here Inconclusive Brew - 'Great War', USSR under Jews, Chinese Civilization, Factories... ) but is in line with everything I'm saying here
[Not in time sequence:] Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919) (one of a series of titles for a philosophical library) is a rather depressing illustration of Russell's uncreativity. There's an exhaustive treatment of numbers (including irrationals etc) and things like continuity—all part of what was at the time called 'analysis'. But any wide view—what is the next possible mathematical advance? Is there some intellectual continuity from enumeration to such analysis of change as is found in calculus? Is arithmetic a picture of the world, as geometry perhaps is? What is it that makes some things more amenable to 'mathematics' than others? Given some new phenomenon, or for that matter something long accepted, is there some 'mathematical' methodology to try to deal with it?—such questions are not part of Russell's work. Note that–
Russell swallowed completely the supposed proof of relativity at the solar eclipse by Eddington (I think—from memory); in fact there were scientific problems with Eddington's observations—a mistake with timing damaged the telescope, and the photographic plate of the stars was not of sufficiently high resolution to test for bending of light
Russell makes virtually no comment on Jews and either the theatre, or (later) the cinema or the more ubiquitous media of newspapers and (later) television. This is important e.g. as regards G B Shaw (a friend of his) and the production of his plays. It was definitely a live issue, as Belloc's works show
Russell hardly ever mentioned Jews even when in the news: one of the letters in his Autobiography comments on the Leopold and Loeb murder; one of his books mentions the Lindbergh baby murder; in neither case does Russell comment on the Jewish connections, unless editor(s) removed such comment. As far as I recall, he never even discussed the Jewish 'declaration of war against Germany', for example in Untermeyer's 1933 speech
[In 1926, the Jewish Daily Forward published a piece by Russell, Why England is Friendly to Jews. This is not yet online, and I've never read it, though it will be in vol 17 of Russell's Collected Papers, 'edited by Nicholas Griffin'. It's not clear when—the relevant page hadn't been updated since 2004, though in 2014 there seems to have been a negligible change by Arlene Duncan. Of vols. 12-34 of the Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, the 'Political and Cultural Series', more than half are still 'In Progress' in 2015! I'd guess the team of 'scholars' is uncertain how to treat such matters as Stalin, the Second World War, the 'Cold War' and nuclear issues.
    I'm willing to predict that there will not be a discussion about Belloc's book The Jews, despite Belloc's fame at the time (as half of the 'Chesterbelloc') with G K Chesterton. And that war as a lucrative Jewish activity will not be mentioned.]
It goes without saying, no doubt, that his books have no analysis of the growth and influence of the paper money system. In view of the fact he was a close friend of Keynes, who wrote on money, this is on the face of it surprising. (Here's my account of the way paper money, arranged by Jews, has led to a two-tier system of money.)
Russell mentions Bela Kun in Hungary, but not the Jewish connection; nor did he during and after the 1956 'Hungarian Revolution'

In a 1930 collection of essays, he states—and of course this was common then, as now—that there is no analysis of fascism; only psychoanalysis—i.e. Russell claimed fascism, which he did not distinguish from German National Socialism, was entirely irrational. This of course is untrue. His analysis leans heavily on Carlyle and Nietzsche, but completely omits German writers concerned with such topics as Jews and pornography, and Jews banding together in businesses to exclude Germans. There was a fairly large literature on Jews in Germany, coinciding with cheaper paper and better printing, and coinciding also with a Jewish population explosion. About fifty years before London and New York, Germans noted their unstoppable influx, with concern. As far as I know, Russell never quoted any such material. (He was fairly familiar with Germany and the German language: as examples, he had a German woman tutor when young; he examined German Sozialdemokraten in his early 20s; mentions many German titles, including by Marx; he quoted from Die Mneme, by Richard Semon; he quotes Treitschke, but omitting all the Jewish information).
      Much of Russell's mental framework seems Marxian, for example the careless use of 'feudalism', the assumption that all slavery is indistinguishable (black slaves castrated by Arabs, the same as poor whites in the USA?), and his use of 'war' to cover everything from presumed prehistoric battles to small mediaeval clashes to large-scale bombing. Russell often takes 'exploitation' for granted; as an example in Power he states '.. gains made in commerce, for example in Venice or in the towns of the Hanseatic League, were made at the expense of the foreigner..'
[Added 2018] May as well insert Russell's definition (spoken to the British Embassy in Washington, according to the chapter America. 1938-1944 in his Autobiography: ‘You will admit that the essence of Fascism consists in the subordination of the legislative to the executive...’
[Added 2013] Russell on 'fascism': in mid-2008 Brett Lintott, of Toronto University, uploaded a piece on an abandoned book, planned by Russell for 1936, under the working title The Revolt Against Reason. One reason for his abandonment may have been that two books on 'German and Italian Fascism' [sic] were commissioned for early 1938, written by 'University in Exile scholars'—presumably code for Jews. Lintott assembled three sets of notes by Russell for his piece, presumably from papers in the Russell archives:–
  1. A letter to his publisher, on the 'cult of feeling'. 'Feeling' presumably in Tennyson's sense in In Memoriam. This is the supposed break-up of 18th-century rationalism and 'its connection with violence in politics'. Names listed are Rousseau and Marie Antoinette; Scott, Coleridge, Tractarians (i.e. pro-Roman Catholics), and, oddly, Disraeli as a mediaevalist; Carlyle, Nietzsche, William James, and Bergson, all described as irrational; and Hitler. There is nothing on Jewish assassinations.
  2. A 1935 outline of his book, which closely resembles the modern parts of History of Western Philosophy. He includes in effect Newton, Tom Paine, the 'noble savage', Cromwell, the Quakers, the arts and crafts movements, 'Liberty', industry, nationalism—quite a rag-bag, many of the ideas on the face of it not having any necessary sequence. Obviously, Fichte and Hegel appear too: Russell was keen to attribute things he disliked to foreigners: secret societies (Italy, he says, became full of them; I don't know one single reference to 'Freemasons' anywhere is Russell's work), dangerous thoughts (Japan), bombing innocents (Mussolini in Abyssinia), censorship (German censors at the time of Marx), exclusive interest in making money (USA), and, here, nationalism and Germany.
  3. A sheet of paper by Russell on despair—from the philosophical despair of not being able to know, to sin, and rage and disgust over ugly industries, war, unemployment, and over-rapid change.
Lintott mentions Russell made a few notes on Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Kipling, and even says "race" was a late nineteenth-century concept. This misrepresents Russell, I think, who was perfectly aware races exist, though he had no consistent views on what to do racially: he accepted, from the First World War onward, the risk of white race extinction; he advocated eugenics as the solution to the political problem of Darwinism.
      All this shows Russell had no idea about either fascism or the NSDAP. I know of no evidence he even read party manifestoes.
      I hadn't known until 2015 that the logician Gottlob Frege in his old age supported Hitler and/or the NSDAP, though Frege died in 1925, about a week after Mein Kampf was published. There is no mention of this in Russell as far as I know.
      I've just (26 July 2019) been informed of a book by Kimberley Cornish, The Jew of Linz Wittgenstein, Hitler, and their Secret Battle for the Mind which appears to claim that Hitler and Wittgenstein were at a school together and examines consequences.
      Ronald Clark's The Life of Bertrand Russell quotes Russell replying to Oswald Mosley, who sent him letter 'with [undisclosed] enclosures' in 1962. Part of Russell's letter was: ... every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism. ... However, Russell also said: Peisistratus, Caesar and Napoleon were fascists of the Mussolini sort; Fichte was of the Hitler sort.
      Russell accepted atrocity stories (for example, on pogroms) uncritically. He seems to use 'fascism' as a synonym for what newspapers call 'mindless violence'. George Orwell's essay on No Orchids for Miss Blandish (perhaps written in mock-US gangster style by a French author—one of the Schlesingers said this) made the same comparison.
      I have a copy of an amateurish book by 'Frank A. Ridley' (from 'South Place Ethical Society' in London). Francis Ambrose Ridley (b 1897; almost certainly regarded himself as a Jew) wrote (and no doubt orated) material on 'fascism' which is strikingly similar to Russell's, for example on Julius Caesar and Napoleon as 'fascists'. I suspect Russell simply had nobody to debate these issues with; hence his inability to focus on his final definitive treatment. Russell may have changed his mind about Napoleon; in Power, Napoleon appears as a soldier of fortune.
      (I've attempted to explain Napoleon's career, essentially as a thief and killer secretly paid by Jews after a supposed revolution, which in fact was promoted by Jews. Russell's view of Napoleon was excessively individualistic, as of course is necessary if the economic underpinnings are to be concealed.)
      The legal present of control of paper money by Jews—which spread into every aspect of life in Germany—is simply not understood by Russell. In this respect, Belloc is vastly his superior. The dynamic of fascism in Italy was very different, at least directly, but Russell's unpublished work was hopelessly inadequate to describe and understand it.
Worth mentioning that in a 1930s book of essays Russell described Nazism as a 'godsend' to Germans who didn't think of themselves as working-class etc. This phrase was altered in later printings, though I don't think these were referred to as new editions. Note that National Socialism was suppressed as a phrase: many people favoured socialism in the vernacular sense, so it was important to erase this—'fascism' sounds foreign.

The 1931 going off the gold standard in Britain (policies here varied—gold coins had been suspended since 1914, I believe, then partially reintroduced) brought some comment from Russell—he regarded the use of gold as money as a superstition, like referring to 'blood' as race. His comment in the late 1930s on Africa and gold was that it resulted in the transfer of gold from one underground place to another. Unfortunately Russell never managed a synthesis between the practical aspects of gold—including 'value' but also liability to theft—and the practical aspects of state money—including support from the entire state apparatus, but also the possibility of state failure.
1932: Russell mentions the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, saying the world was shocked by it, but such incidents would be commonplace in a war. However, the Jewish connection goes unmentioned
'Freedom and Organization, 1814-1914' (Russell's history of the 19th century, written in the 1930s before he moved to the USA) mentions Jews in Poland, in a subsidiary footnote-y way, as providing income for Polish 'nobles'. No analysis of them. Their activities in the USA as regards slavery, and the 'greenbacks' of Lincoln—and Russell's book has a lot on north America—are totally missing
Russell in that book describes 'anti-Semitism' as 'abominable'. It's strange that such a fastidious writer could find no better expression than that recently-coined slang. It's strange too that he should select just one group. Per contra someone in the Russian Orthodox Church is described as a 'grim bigot' in Freedom and Organization, as though the fanatical racist cult of Judaism is the apex of sanity
In Freedom and Organization Russell picks on 'Two men ... supreme in creating the modern world: Rockefeller and Bismarck. One in economics, one in politics, refuted the liberal dream of universal happiness through competition, substituting monopoly and the corporate state, or at least movements towards them. Rockefeller was important, not through his ideas ... [sc. of competition] but through his purely practical grasp of the type of organization that would enable him to grow rich. ...'
      In fact this a multiple misdirection from the truth: in the first place, in assuming individuals can be identified as having complete responsibility. Rothschild was much more influential than either Rockefeller or Bismarck, but this was partly due to the backup of huge numbers of anonymous 'Jews' whose entire cast of mind was in favour of monopolies and Jewish-controlled states.
Worth noting: in 1935 the first ever official translation of the 'Soncino Talmud' was made into English. I know of no evidence Russell made any attempt to study this (or the Quran, for that matter, though he mentions it in his introduction to Human Knowledge). Certainly his 'History of Western Philosophy', most of which was written after 1941, shows no evidence of any reading in the roots of Judaism. (Russell mentions rather off-beam-ly 'the invaluable work of the Rev. Charles [not identified by me-RW] who published translations of Jewish works written shortly before the time of Christ and in a great degree anticipating His teaching.')
Russell's book 'Which Way to Peace?'
[Note added in 2023: Which Way to Peace is now here in HTML format]
(1936 or perhaps 1937) is anomalous. All Russell's books were published by George Unwin or Allen & Unwin—except for some small books written for rationalist presses. This book appears to have been published by Jonathan Cape or Michael Joseph. (I have no copy—unlike Russell's other books it was never reprinted, and he specifically refers in his autobiography to his not wishing it to be reprinted). At the time I write this (July 2012) an index of the book is online; Versailles and Hitler are indexed, but there is no mention of Balfour, Jews or Mosley. The book presumably is both small and hopelessly incomplete.
      Note: 2 July 2017: Since writing that, I've uploaded the British edition online scanned and OCR'd with my endnotes, I believe for the first time. I will repeat the endnotes here; these look at Russell's awareness, not the detail of his book:-
Notes to Russell's Which Way to Peace? 1 July 2017:
(1) It's curious how little abstract analysis Russell was able to apply. All his examples are ad hoc. The only exception is Broadly speaking, when the defensive is strong civilization makes progress, and when the offensive is strong men revert towards barbarism. He was pleased with this remark, which appears elsewhere in his work.
(2) It is remarkable how little mental effort he puts into the problem of war. Notably, he says nothing about the freedom to manufacture weaponry, and to finance it, even though he was accustomed to attacking 'capitalism' in a broad-brush style.
(3) Russell had no idea of the intensity of control over opinion, at that time, by newspaper and radio. Consider for example this: Any one who will take the trouble to look up a newspaper published during the Great War will be amazed by the hot flame of insanity, melodrama, and ferocious tribal morality that leaps from its lurid pages. It seems surprising that, at the time, we were able to take all this seriously. Russell seems to think that newspapers write themselves.
(4) Russell's impracticability is a trip hazard. A revealing note at the end of Chapter VIII describes an optimistic future, farming potatoes, growing in huge towers. It's painfully obvious Russell doesn't understand simple things such as photosynthesis and the need of plants for essential elements, plus many other details. He is not the sort of person able to think out and describe bombs, gas, fire and so on. This weakness of course applied to Russell later, in his campaigning against 'nuclear weapons'.
(5) Russell assumes everyone wants peace. This of course is pitifully naïve. It's abundantly clear that Jews want wars, and are more than happy to fund puppets, such as Churchill and Roosevelt, and more than happy to kill off both sides in their wars.
      Closely related is Russell's error in assuming the historical principles he learned when young were in fact true. He really did think that fanaticism was the cause of some wars, rather than the supply of weaponry to one (or both) sides, with instructions what to do with them.
(6) And Russell is naïve about money—his introductory passage talks of loans (without a whisper of criticism) which he thinks governments need for weapons, and the traditional cautious money policy of Britain! He had not the slightest idea of the Cromwellian/ 'Glorious' financial basis in England.
NASA Hoax (7) Russell has an automaton-like bias against Germany, and for USSR. All his references to the slang expression of 'Nazis' says they are warlike, aggressive, and the rest of it, without the slightest attempt at evidence. Conversely, he even goes so far as to say that the USSR is in the economic interest of Russians!
(8) Russell assumes that nations are the building blocks of policies; 'great powers' and so on; he has no idea at all of the effects, in particular, of Jews, though in principle there could be other similar groups putting their own, transnational, interests absolutely first. Throughout the 20th century, Russell always referred to the Jew-controlled USSR as 'Russia'.
(9) Courage. Russell states a number of times (as he did during the First World War) that pacifists needed more courage than participants in war. It struck me that the rarest form of courage is that of finding the carefully-buried truth, and doing something about it. Russell finds it almost completely natural that an enormous war could start based on shallow assurances about, say, 'Nazis'.

Even in Russell's book 'Power' (1938) Jews are presented as victims—and this in a book supposedly dealing with abstract human power
He replied to Oswald Mosley, who had proposed they join in some sort of joint thinking about the world, that he 'lived in a different moral universe' and attributed violence to Mosley. This was at a time when Jews, who had flooded into the East End of London before there were passports—and incidentally one reason nothing was done for years was because Churchill filibustered Parliament—were actively involved in street violence
In 'Power' he describes—and these are descriptions in a very casual sense—fascism and communism as being developed from secret societies. This of course permits specifically Jewish activity to be regarded as just one of many species, which seems highly improbable
Russell made, I think, no comment whatever on Deir Yassin or the Anglo-Israel War, 1945-1948, which included bombings and hangings by piano-wire. The end point more or less coincided with Nuremberg, no doubt intentionally
Russell was of course a believer in what was named, much later, 'The Holocaust'. It's possibly odd, or revealing, that Russell did not attend the Nuremberg mock trials; I don't know whether he was invited to observe—quite a motley collection were, for example Laura Knight, the painter. A footnote in a 1950s book by Russell judiciously notes there's doubt over numbers; Russell says (something like) it may have been 4.7 million. In 'Dear Bertrand Russell' he defends the Second World War retrospectively on the grounds, in effect, that bomb-damaged children are preferable to 'innocent Jews herded into gas chambers'
His 'History of Western Philosophy' (shortly post-WW2) makes no mention of the Khazars, even though their conversion was fairly widely known at the time. (For example, it's in H G Wells's 1920 'Outline of History'). Nor does Russell seem to have entertained the obvious question of a homeland in somewhere like Kazakhstan. His book also states that romanticism 'led to Auschwitz'—this attitude to 'romanticism' seems to have been a carry-over of Victorian attitudes to Rousseau and the French Revolution. (It occurs to me that his dislike of D H Lawrence was another spin-off from jewish propaganda). He attributes rape to German soldiers, rather than the historically accurate USSR 'red army'. As with 'Power' Russell fails to take a long-term view. Russell regarded Jews in 'History of Western Philosophy' as considerable contributors to civilisation, both in groups or as individuals, but unsurprisingly gives no illustrative examples. It's no surprise to find Jewish interests suppressed: Isaiah Berlin's long 1947 review of History of Western Philosophy in Mind has exactly one explicit reference to Jews, despite their presumably having been Berlin's principal interest. (Popper's much-hyped Open Society is reviewed in the same 'number' of Mind; the Jewish link with vast cruelties is of course omitted, there, too).
Russell mentioned, somewhere, atrocities and killings of Germans in eastern Europe after 1945. In the passages in question, he gives no sources; Russell was never really aware of systematised lies. However, he clearly was uneasy and perhaps had been tipped off by well-connected friends or associates. He regarded Lloyd George as satanic, but not Eisenhower
Russell was never able to tease out Jewish assumptions in some philosophers. Dewey, Bergson, and Wittgenstein help reveal Russell's limitations. John Dewey—who Mencken mocked as lecturing in Yiddish accents at Columbia—regarded truth as an elastic concept; 'pragmatism' was the real truth, and no doubt this is entirely consonant with people who treat lies as a sort of fine art. Russell mocked Dewey, in his History of Western Philosophy, and was undoubtedly correct to do so, if the a priori axiom that truth always stands irrespective of effects is granted. From the Jewish point of view, if the 'Holocaust' story makes money, it is 'true', and Russell of course had no grasp of this perverse view of 'truth'. Russell wasn't keen on A J Ayer who, it occurs to me, displayed his Jewish clannishness by claiming he believed in the theory of relativity
Worth mentioning that Russell viewed religions in the Christian way—i.e. a belief system which you could take or leave, though of course he recognised that beliefs and propaganda played a part. As I've stated, he had no idea about the tribal cult systems, mainly Islam and then Judaism, in which the belief system is regarded as an integral part the tribe, and both of which in their modern forms postdate Christianity. (To repeat—these are both relatively modern compared to Christianity—both Islam and Khazar 'Jews' postdate Christianity by about half a millennium)
Worth mentioning too that Russell, despite his theories, took nationalism for granted almost unconsciously. He always talks about 'Russia', but never the 'USSR', pretending Russians were in control. In Power (1938) he wrote something like 'The Nazis have exiled most of their ablest Germans, and this must, sooner or later, have disastrous effects on their military technique' and he said much the same about 'Communists' after WW2—where in fact secret Jewish collection of new inventions allowed international transmission of techniques, and indeed international transmission of Jewish policies and lies. In Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare he says: 'Powerful countries hitherto ... on the one hand, ... have sought the prosperity of their own countries; on the other hand, they have sought dominion, political, economic or ideological, over other countries.' Interest groups which span countries—such as Jews or Muslims or multinationals or large migrants groups or empires—are elided away; so are internal divisions within countries. This mistake becomes serious whenever communications are well-developed. Chapter XII, Powers and Forms of Governments in Power (1938), reveals this very well: almost all Russell's examples are clubs, societies, unions, structures of (e.g.) corporations, national governments. There is no consideration of organisation such as multinational companies, or widespread news organisations controlling information in multiple areas, or cartels, or the transfer of technologies, or, of course, Jews. This makes for very serious misunderstandings, when for instance the USSR secretly imported western technologies on a large scale, or when Jewish news interests could easily promote different lies in different countries. The only exception I can think of in Russell is his recognition of large marketing areas, in for example south America considered as a Monroe Doctrine zone, and weapons selling, and of nationalist economics in the German Empire, the Zollverein (i.e. customs/tariffs free zone).
Worth mentioning also is the related point that not only ideals but also practical matters have been liable to corruption by Jews. (Here's my account of Jewish corruption of ideas in white countries.) This is of course obvious now—race laws in white countries are clearly targeted against whites, whilst permitting Jewish racism. But looking back, it's likely that company law was and is heavily Jewish-influenced. For example, the money basis of shareholdings, as opposed to any consideration for inventors and workers, which Russell simply assumed to be part of the nature of 'capitalism', is likely to be Jewish in origin. The fact that newspaper and media lies are subject to no penalty is likely to show Jewish influence. Electoral systems—often proportional in Europe, but first-past-the-post in the English-speaking world—must have been Jewish-influenced. Russell's calm assumption that all almost economic activity is exploitative, except that of Jews, shows the same sort of bias
And worth pointing out is Russell's naïveté about organisations, or at least his failure to note some important features. In Power (1938, when Russell was over 65, the post-WW2 retiring age), he wrote in Chapter XI, 'The Biology of Organizations', 'An organization is a set of people who are combined in virtue of activities directed to common ends. It may be purely voluntary, ... a natural biological group, ... compulsory, ... or a complicated mixture. The purpose of the organization may be explicit or unexpressed, conscious or unconscious; ... There must be a government, which takes decisions in the name of the whole body...' Russell's description is of non-secretive groups which are endogenous—i.e. self-generated and self-supporting—with fairly identifiable motives and a fairly clear structure. It omits groups, such as fake think-tanks and pressure-groups and news media, where much of the policy, such as fomenting war, or promoting population reduction, or damaging the quality of education, or falsifying history, or providing contacts for illegal purposes, may be funded and controlled externally. It omits consideration of people in work they don't agree with, or in work they don't understand—many 20th-century wars included men in this position. It omits consideration of intersecting groups, for example lawyers interacting with multiple groups in the rest of a country or federation. In short, Russell describes assorted types of organization, but not the resultant effects of them when they in totality; and, after all, this is important.
Russell was primarily influenced by his reading, rather than observation or word of mouth. For example, he specifically supported Stalin, but disliked Hitler, because, according to his reading, 'Communists' say they favour social equality and rights! Well, if that's what they wrote, that must be what they believed in, surely! Most of his books on social movements, for example German Social Democrats and Marxists, quote writers, but say nothing about actual activists' activities. Russell was something like a sitting duck for secret Jewish promotion. In one of his essays he says 'the psychology of Jews is identical to that of Protestants' (quoted from memory)—an extraordinarily ridiculous thing to say. In the same vein, he wrote 'it is a peculiarity of modern communities that they are divided into sets which differ profoundly in their morals and in their beliefs'—ignoring the rifts between mediaeval Jews and Christians. He wrote '.. religions, like wines, mature with age ...' showing no understanding of Talmudic material. Russell, in fact, was exactly the type described by Kevin MacDonald—vulnerable to attack by secret deceptive unified groups.
      In the very last chapter of his Autobiography (The Foundation) Russell writes: In the last forties and early fifties [i.e. after the Second World War, though not much; and note he had no idea of Eisenhower's killing fields], I hade been profoundly impressed by the horror of Stalin's dictatorship, ... I later came to see that for all his ruthlessness, Stalin had been very conservative. ... the West ... had given him Eastern Europe as part of the spoils of the Second World War, ... All the deaths in Germany and across to Russia are regarded by Russell as war casualties due to Hitler. It's truly amazing how wars can be misread when a major 'player', in this case world Jewry, is forced below consciousness.
Amazingly, Russell said somewhere he was proud to be a member of his generation! The generation that ruined Europe, ushered in vast deceptions, and did little to improve the non-white world.
In 1945, Russell supported the USA threatening the USSR in order to bring about world government. A 'preventive nuclear war'. As we've seen, Russell wrote this immediately on hearing the official reports on Nagasaki. He later denied it; it was a volte face not unlike that before 1939. In fact, from the viewpoint of this site, one of the reasons for making up the myth of H Bombs was precisely the fact that such a US threat of preventive nuclear war would be disliked by Jews in the USSR, and their co-racists in the USA. Hence they invented H bombs, so that preventive war would seem to be too dangerous. If a threat to the Soviet Union was 'unthinkable' the Jews there could continue their 'work'. (See our piece H-bomb-myth-and-its-purpose.html on this subject)
It's interesting to see in 'The Impact of Science on Society' this passage, from a speech dated 1949:—'Only government propaganda on a large scale could quickly change the biological habits of Asia. But most Eastern governments would never consent to this except after defeat in war. And without such a change of biological habits Asia cannot become prosperous except by defeating the Western nations, exterminating a large part of their population, and opening the territories now occupied by them to Asiatic immigration. For the Western nations this is not an attractive prospect, but it is not impossible that it may happen.' I wonder if this was influenced by the secret Jewish desire at the time to force immigration onto white countries? It's in any case wrong—the combined population of the whole of Asia was far larger than Europe, even then, so that invasion of Europe wouldn't have made much difference to Asian populations. It would make even less difference now
As late as 1954, when Russell gave the first of the BBC 'Reith Lectures' on the radio, Russell still regarded Lenin as a sort of magician-cum-orator, trying to impose a vision of 'Communism', rather than one of a vicious group, funded secretly by outsiders, who used the power of money ruthlessly to impose their group on Russia and other countries. Somewhere in his writings he says that types like Richard the Lionheart and Lenin, in other historical eras, were 'unknown to history'—these seem inaccurate generalisations—Lenin's forebears, no doubt, were swindlers and crooks from time immemorial. (The first of the 6 half-hour Reith lectures by Russell is archived somewhere on the BBC website, so you may sample his radio manner).
Portraits from Memory and other essays (first published in 1956) has retrospective material which in effect prefigured his Autobiography. Even at that late date, with Russell in his 80s, he did not understand the Soviet Union. He wrote for example (in 'Symptoms of Orwell's 1984'): Only those who remember the world before 1914 can adequately realize how much has already been lost. In that happy age, one could travel without a passport, everywhere except in Russia. One could freely express any political opinion, except in Russia. Press censorship was unknown, except in Russia. Any white man could emigrate freely to any part of the world. The limitations of freedom in Czarist Russia were regarded with horror throughout the rest of the civilized world, and the power of the Russian Secret Police was regarded as an abomination. ... For a long time after the Russian Revolution, it was customary to say, 'No doubt the new regime has its faults, but at any rate it is better than that which it has superseded.' This was a complete delusion. When one re-reads accounts of exile in Siberia under the czar, it is impossible to recapture the revulsion with which one read them long ago. The exiles had a very considerable degree of liberty, both mental and physical, and their lot was in no way comparable to that of people subjected to forced labour under the Soviet Government. ... I quote this at some length because if shows (1) Russell had no idea of the extent of censorship of Jewish activity—Belloc was nearer the mark describing the astonishment of many British people during the First World War on finding that many strategic materials were controlled by Jews. (2) Russell had no idea of the extent to which Russia was targeted, as reflected in his account—he seemed to think there was complete press freedom in the Arab world, the French colonial empire, Hong Kong and China, India, Africa, South America. The passage in bold type suggests to me that the image and view of 'Russia' was shaped by Jewish propagandists.

Note on 1962: Russell's 90th birthday

1962- the end of one period of Jewish power: By 1962, the 'Holocaust', though not given that name, he been largely established in films, TV, book, the press. So had the related issue of the Soviet Union and Germany: most people had only shadowy ideas of the facts behind Jews and mass murder, Churchill's warmongering and bombs and the ruin of much of Europe, and the way international Jews worked behind the 'Fed'. The 'nuclear' fakes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and related nuclear frauds were probably accepted by almost everyone apart from inner circles; as a result vast resources could be used by Jews building up militarised empires. NASA was established by Eisenhower as another fraud cash-cow. Jewish paper money had established almost universal monopolies over information, including the USA, Europe, and Asia. The recently-established Israel received endless funding and weaponry, and little criticism from the 'West'. Population worries had been instilled into white populations. All of this was supported by the expansion of 'higher education', and all, without exception, was accepted by Russell; he must have been laughed at by others in addition to Rothschild. His naive nuclear protests must have amused all the Jews involved; it's (as far as I know) still obscure how much such people as Kennedy and Stalin understood. Russell only began to be censored when he tried to help investigate Kennedy's murder, and, later, war crimes in Vietnam.
1962 - start of the next period of Jewish power: Kennedy's murder and the obviously dishonest investigation made some impact on Americans, although of course very few had much idea what was happening. There were murders all around the world by Jews and their agents: in that sense Chomsky was right when he said, of Kennedy, 'people die all the time'. However LBJ was installed as a secret Jew; hence the Liberty, the Vietnam War (to make money for Jews through weapons, and through lending junk money to the US government, and controlling drugs and prostitution, and getting control of the money system). Plus the Hart-Celler law, the object of which was to flood the USA with coloured immigrants. Another law destroyed black families. The 'Holocaust' was christened (so to speak) and made into a cash cow. This period marked the ever-increasing emergence of Jewish anti-white activities concentrated on nations individually (USA, Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Australia...) in place of the earlier successful (as Jews thought) fomenting of inter-nation wars.
1962 - Russell's 90th Birthday: Thanks to Internet, some evidence survives: faded grey ITN film rushes at the Café Royal on the evening of Friday 18th May, largely of Russell and A J Ayer, followed by an interview; a press advert in the New Scientist for a concert at the Royal Festival Hall next day at 3 p.m.—Stravinsky and two Mozart pieces, presentations by Lili Kraus, tickets 10 shillings, 'all the proceeds will be presented to him to use as he wishes'. A 'luncheon' a week later at the Harcourt Room in the House of Commons seems to have left no Internet trace
    Vol. III of Russell's Autobiography has his account of the event, very touchingly described. There's not room to include it here; I'll record the names he gives, but omitting actors, artists, musicians, novelists, and organisers: A J Ayer, Julian Huxley, the Duke of Bedford, Arthur Waley, Victor William Williams Saunders Purcell; Morley Nkosi 'of Africa'; Fenner Brockway. I've given Purcell's name in full; Russell became close friends with him, having a high opinion of his literary talents and as an administrator in south-east Asia. But the title of one of Purcell's works Malaya: Communist or Free? suggests a simple view of the world. Fenner Brockway (b Calcutta 1888) was in effect an unestablishment version of Purcell. Morley Nkosi may have been part of the Jewish anti-white system, from South Africa. I'm afraid, if Russell really was a world-famous figure, it's not an impressive list.

Russell did his best to campaign against the Vietnam War from I think 1962 and definitely influenced the protest movement. (A collection of his essays was published as 'War Crimes in Vietnam', in the UK and the US). The first essay in that book was on the New York Times editing his letters in misleading ways, and then not publishing him. Russell, as of course was the case of many others, would not face the facts regarding Jewish media ownership. His Autobiography (vol 2) describes receiving newspapers and letters from Europe, when he was in China, as a blast of insanity, like an oven door being open. Of course there was a Jew power struggle, notably in the USSR; what did he expect?
    (A letter dated 1963, published some years later in Dear Bertrand Russell, has this: '... The Cold War is polarised in the Soviet Union and the United States, and one would ... expect to find dissident opinion most carefully controlled ... [there]. In the United States this suppression has become so complete that it has created ... widespread fanaticism. Economic interests which ensure American support of dozens of feudal dictatorships around the globe make it necessary to propound a devil-theory about Communism ... which bears no relationship to the facts...' Note that Russell doesn't mention the Jewish ownership of the New York Times, and has no concept of fraud and deliberate waste, as with paper money and military spending). Russell's mention of 'American Power', without Jews, is illustrated also by this letter: '.. intrusion of the U.N. will mean little more than the introduction of American power into the area concerned. ..' with no analysis of the components making up 'American power'.
Russell formed the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal which did its best to collect evidence. All of this of course was largely censored by the media and BBC, and still is. (There's film somewhere of Ralph Schoenman speaking at its inauguration—when he starts talking of napalm and burning peasants alive, the BBC drop the volume. Incidentally a piece 'Selected Letters' can be read online, and has interesting material on his War Crimes Tribunal and damage limitation lies by Americans and their puppets). The conclusion of the Tribunal (Russell wrote) was that the cause of the war was the search for raw materials and markets. Russell never considered the question of control of currency, or the fact that the Jew Kissinger was the de facto controller of genocide in Vietnam; nor was he tipped off about the Jewishness of LBJ, though it's not credible this fact was unknown to Jews
The Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal is online here
Russell's statement on Israel included: .. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender, but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. ... It's the lesson when bombs are wasted, or not very powerful. It appears Russell was not well informed about Tokyo, Dresden etc.
One of the odd side-effects of Jewish media control, and its censorship of U.S. war crimes, is that vast numbers of Americans have no idea what was and is being done in their name. And there is a widespread feeling in USA whites that they are the good guys, the innocent guys, the genetically co-operative, gentle and sympathetic human beings. It's conceivable that rage with Jews will increase to the point at which ruthless slaughters of Jews take place, backed up by that idea that whites have always been the good guys. And it may be true: it depends whether they are perceived as having been tricked and deceived by Jews
According to Caroline Moorehead's rather vacant life of Russell, the very unpleasant New York Times piece on Russell during Russell's inauguration of the War Crimes Tribunal ('.. say, rather, it comes..') was written by Bernard Levin, one of these Jews who unaccountably appears from nowhere—Levin was on That Was the Week That Was, an inevitably limp BBC 'satire' programme
Vol III of Russell's Autobiography (1967 I think) favourably mentions Ralph Miliband (misspelling his name with 2 l's)—a Belgian Jew and extremely dull Marxist writer who seems to not even have been legally in Britain—an ancestor, if you believe the story, of the present disastrous 'Labour Party' 'leader'
Vol III of his Autobiography has this summary: 'Later I was brought around to a more favourable view of Communism by the death of Stalin in 1953 and by the Bikini test in 1954; and I came gradually to attribute, more and more, the danger of nuclear war to the West, to the United States of America, and less to Russia. This change was supported by developments inside the United States, such as McCarthyism and the restriction of civil liberties. ...' Though Russell didn't understand this, he was adopting an anti-Jewish policy, and therefore suffered progressive denigration: Jewish policy was to make money through the pretence of nuclear weapons; and to set up 'spies' who supposedly told the 'Russians' the 'secrets', so that commentators who advocated the threat of nuclear weapons against the USSR, would stop doing so—these commentators included Russell; the USSR's Jewish controllers meanwhile imported US industry into the USSR, for the cheap labour; McCarthy, of course, went some way to try to expose all this. Other issues included channelling American taxpayers' money into Israel, and the Vietnam War: judging by Kennedy's murder—which Russell tried to help investigate—the entire war was about making money (from weapons and equipment and building bases and probably prostitution and drugs), and currency control, rather than raw materials. Anyway—Russell increasingly opposed Jewish 'interests' (in quotes because the long-term results are unclear)—but he was still duped! Possibly this was the source of the increasing friction with Schoenman; and maybe neither realised
A general comment on 'Communism': the Jewish origin, and subsequent Jewish influence, was always in effect denied by Russell, along with many others of course. It's a truly amazing aspect of censorship, and it's only been weakened by Internet. Many 20th century 'intellectuals', if they can be called that, were part of this—for example the 'Shanghai Group' which included E H Carr, whose 'History of Soviet Russia' is a monument of deceit. A J P Taylor was another. I think I'm right in saying all Penguin—i.e. cheap—paperback histories of the USSR were until long after Russell's death written by Jews: An Economic History of the USSR, Alec Nove, illustrates the type. Hobsbawm is another example of omission of Jews from 'Communism'.
Ronald Kasrils (and Barry Feinberg) edited some of Russell's papers after his death—'Bertrand Russell's America' (2 vols, 1973; vol. II 1983—the delay is not explained in the introduction—my guess is it was held back for Jewish propaganda reasons) and, earlier, 'Dear Bertrand Russell' (1969), the latter 'a postcript' to Russell's Autobiography—some letters between Russell and the public, possibly intended to raise money for the 'Foundation'. The whole slant of 'Dear Bertrand Russell' is the Jewish view. Kasrils was in the ANC, along with repulsive people like 'Joe Slovo', supporting it during its current anti-white genocide period. Kasrils was, or seems to be, one of the tiny number of Jews not to wholeheartedly support Israel. However, so far as I know South African minerals remain Jewish— the obvious inference is that both editors were wholehearted Jews. Dear Bertrand Russell includes a 1964 letter on 'racism' from an American girl, including Russell's removal of a passage on black Africans. The no doubt false idea of races being equal seems to have been forced onto Russell, who was not well enough based in empiricism to challenge it. However, he never adopted the ridiculous Jewish idea notably attributed to Boas that races didn't exist—apart from Jews. Russell was or seemed unaware of the malignancy of Lyndon Johnson. I don't think he commented on the cover-up of the attack on the Liberty, for example. (Admittedly he was about 95 at the time!) Russell even attributed the bloodshed of the Vietnam War to Christianity—'blood red banners' and so on. It's not credible that Jews were unaware of Johnson's Jewish roots, though whether they communicated this to Russell I simply don't know. Bertrand Russell's America—Vol II 1945-1970 deals with Russell on nuclear weapons, and 'atom spies', but also Kennedy, the Vietnam War, blacks in the USA, and to some minor extent the 'Third World' and massive poverty there, though this latter is unemphasized. Russell never guessed that nuclear weapons were a fraud or even that there was something suspicious about them.
    This forum [now 'Nukelies.org'] has Russell on McCarthyism and 'atom spies' https://www.big-lies.org/nuke-lies/www.nukelies.com/forum/mccarthyism-atom-spies-rosenberg-sobell.html, and Herman Kahn https://www.big-lies.org/nuke-lies/www.nukelies.com/forum/herman-kahn-hungarian-jew-money-threats.html and the Vietnam War https://www.big-lies.org/nuke-lies/www.nukelies.com/forum/Vietnam-JFK-LBJ-Civil-Rights-Act-drugs-1945-1965.html. Russell never commented on Jews, except in the 'anti-Semitism' sense—or at least, no material like this has surfaced; it's not credible to me that Russell never met the evidence or arguments, so it's possible Feinberg and Kasrils and others buried evidence which didn't suit them. It's typical of 'Bertrand Russell's America' that the CIA funding of the magazine 'Encounter', and of the 'Congress of Cultural Freedom', go unremarked.
The 'London Bulletin' of the Russell Peace Foundation had some mention of Jews, but never in any critically intelligent sense. For example, there was a piece on Gomulka and Poland, and the 'danger of anti-Semitism', rather than any comment on the influence of Jews there. This continues to the present day, giving their publications a rather tired feel; Ken Coates, who died recently, seems to have controlled their editorial policy.
I'll just note here without comment other Jews mentioned now and then in Russell's works, usually his discursive chatty material: Rufus Isaacs, Mark Gertler, S Koteliansky, Bernard Berenson, Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel, Wittgenstein, 'Barrows Dunham', Norbert Weiner (?), 'Ashley Montagu', H M Sheffer, A J Ayer, Josef Rotblat, Cyrus Eaton, Mark Lane

However, from the point of view of this forum on nuclear issues, science is important. Russell accepted the conventional views of Einstein—(1) that he was a great scientist, (2) that he was a great humanitarian ('.. he was also a wise man' wrote BR somewhere). Now of course it's asking a lot to oppose fashion. However, Russell was supposed to have been a supreme logician. But his accounts of relativity (first published as a series of newspaper articles; then in book form as The ABC of Relativity—many editions) add nothing to the already existing accounts, and indeed seem to be simply copied; they are very unsatisfactory indeed. This is all very well for crummy publicists of the modern type—one hardly expects informed comment on any topic these days—but it's not satisfactory for someone supposedly of mathematical and philosophical eminence.

Something similar is true as regards physics. Russell was open about not being a scientist—he had no practical skills at all. (He literally could not make a cup of tea—see Russell Remembered). He wrote a book 'The Analysis of Matter' which tried to survey atomic theory as far as it was known at the time. There were some philosophical advances (I think) at the time—e.g. the fact or claim that atoms are mostly empty space, and it's only our crude senses that hide this. There was also the rather ill-fated 'uncertainty principle' which caused an endless output of junk comment. Anyway—although Russell could have spoken to the great names of the time—Rutherford, for example, or Blackett—I don’t think there's much evidence he did.

Russell became famous and remained so. He shared, possibly through partial self-interest, an incredible naïveté about the media. For example, he thought the best way book publication should be arranged, to permit free speech, was simply to have the arrangement of numerous small publishers. The lessons of control of information suggested e.g. by the Catholic church had been lost. (J M Keynes was similar—he thought the anti-German newspaper, and popular music, explosion in the USA from 1916 was a manifestation of popular US opinion). This wide but vaguely-based fame lasted until Russell started serious opposition to nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, and other issues, where he found himself censored, including from the BBC.

However Russell was no fool, or not entirely—he says somewhere that, with the introduction of television, people could be made to believe anything. (I forget his wording). He says somewhere else that science might develop its own systems of power which would make it an obstruction to intellectual progress. Both points were, unfortunately, spot on.

I have to say I'm unsure of the permanent value of his work. Russell's obsession with 'Cretan Liar'-style paradoxes, which he felt it necessary to deal with, simply show that ordinary language has not developed in a way to make self-referential statements consistent, and indeed there's no reason why it should, any more than biological evolution would produce sense organs able to examine themselves—in both cases these things have quite enough work to do already. It strikes me that 'Lewis Carroll' in Alice in Wonderland... (1865) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (1871) with its games and puzzles, and wordplay between common and literal expressions, and its multiple worlds, may have had more influence on Russell than might be guessed. And the problem with 'Principia Mathematica' is related—beyond some point, precise definitions start to become unworkable, since the components themselves need to be scrutinised, leading to something like circularity or endless regresses. I'm not aware of any mathematical advance based on Russell, and the claim that computers were based on his logic seems definitely wrong; I don't think their designers needed to have been influenced by him, even unconsciously. The mass of mathematics is still based on calculus, as it has been since Newton. Pre-Newtonian maths had counting and geography, essentially simple models of the world, of objects which were fixed. Algebra made this more fluid. Calculus allowed for changes to be analysed within narrow limits. New concepts able to be manipulable by symbols seem not to have emerged, though statistical methods and thermodynamics may be leaning that way. Worth noting also is C.P. Snow's claim that the Indian mathematician Ramanujan sent some of his work to two well-known British mathematicians, who however returned his letter, complete with colourful Indian stamps. Snow does not name the two, but it's a good guess that they were Russell and Whitehead, who saw no value—i.e. didn't understand—his work. I find it slightly surprising that Russell made no attempt to develop theories of power based mathematically; he was aware of Lewis Fry Richardson, but added nothing to him; Russell's sociological statements included material from dynamics—stable societies having (in effect) momentum or pressure or kinetic energy—but only in passing. (Added later: it occurs to me, looking at lists of historians, scientists, writers et al whose work is more or less useless, that new attitudes may unleash some genuine talent from the reservoir).
    Anyway—it seems likely that Russell's work is not as important as he hoped.
There's an account in 'Russell Remembered' (Rupert Crawshay-Williams, 1970) of his disappointment that his book 'Human Knowledge', published in 1948, made little impression.

Incidentally of course Russell fell under the influence of Ralph Schoenman near the end of his life. Russell, despite being famous, was extraordinarily socially isolated, particularly later in life as his old friends died off. One has to wonder if Schoenman was yet another planted Jewish influence. According to Caroline Moorehead, he was a Hungarian Jew, and it occurs to me he may have known e.g. Edward Teller. Personally I doubt it, but the chance is clearly there. It's conceivable Schoenman might have had something to do with the British 'Who Killed Kennedy Committee', which included Hugh Trevor-Roper and Russell. Obviously it would be important to head off speculation about the link with paper money and the dollar. It's also possible that nuclear interests had some connection with Schoenman, and wanted information on Russell.

Freud's idea of the unconscious—Russell said in an interview that everything else in Freud left him uninfluenced—was used by Russell to excuse Jews and others. (See The Prospects of Industrial Civilization for indirect evidence). It worked like this: Russell knew the USSR after the Jewish coup was run by Jews. They told him they were bringing about socialism, or some other lie, correctly perceiving Russell as a gullible goy. Russell writes that Bolsheviks, and other more or less autocratic types, are 'unconscious' of the fact that their idea of the State just happens to give them a key position in it! How could this possibly apply to a group that spent years planning against the Tsar, arranged finance, got the British government of Balfour onside, murdered the Tsar's family, and used about 600 of them to take control of Russia and its empire?
. . . . There's another analogous example in The Impact of Science on Society where he says people liked the Second World War (well... he was talking of some British people) and therefore they will be led by their unconscious to support specious plans for peace. He didn't want to face the fact that there are groups that make money, or status, or excitement out of war—provided it doesn't get out of control—so in that sense it's partly rational for them to support war. He prefers to think their deception is unconscious.

I could also comment on Cantor (of 'transfinite numbers', a topic that excited some people in 1900-ish, including Russell), and on 'non-Euclidean geometry'.

In fact I think Russell was much more influenced than he realised by Christianity. Like Tony Benn, his socialism was probably based on theoretical Christian ethics. His book Human Society in Ethics and Politics just assumes any person has similar entitlements to any other person. He said himself there's nothing particularly original in his ethical scheme. This means that any group deliberately expanding their population gets the advantage over groups that behave, in their own view, more responsibly. And any group that puts themselves first—notably the tribal systems of Judaism and Islam—can take advantage in assorted ways, as is becoming painfully clear. He also advocated the view that it's better that 100 criminals go free than that one person be unfairly jailed—though I forget the exact wording. This is of course likely to be in contradiction to his utilitarian outlook, that in effect the sum of likely consequences of one course of action should be compared with the sum of likely consequences of an alternative. Russell also (in 'Human Society..', 1954) said it would be better that criminals should be free to live on a desert island than be punished—but he added, presumably as a joke, that if this became known crime levels would increase, something which he then failed to factor in. Russell was to some extent a 'useful idiot'—as this entire piece shows. I think this helps explain why many ordinary unintellectual people had a low opinion of Russell, without being able to explain quite why. I remember a rather smug teacher (I think) and his rather smug son saying Russell was "a silly old man" in about 1970.

Another example of the deep influence of Christianity on Russell is his treatment of the control of beliefs, in Power (1938), in the short chapters Power over Opinion and Creeds as Sources of Power. He regards Christianity as having undergone several centuries of persuasion, then being able to seize power, and finally, in a 'kind of see-saw', imposing its beliefs by force until almost everyone believed them. He doesn't seem to realise the set of beliefs of a small minority would be unlikely to remain the same after such events. And he seems not to realise that Christianity might have been seen as useful, since a crumbling empire might well fear internal wars, and Constantine might have imposed his modified form for that reason. To see how weak his arguments are here, consider how (e.g.) Americans were convinced that men had walked on the moon, or that millions of Jews had been killed, or that Vietnamese peasants were a danger to them:– they were simply told from the top down, repeatedly, with no preparatory period. Russell understood the iteration, but his view of the history of Christianity made him unable to grasp the tribal aspects of Hinduism, Confucianism, and especially Islam and Judaism.
      Yet another example is his limited scepticism. Sceptical Essays, a collection of seventeen reprinted essays and speeches (1935), comments attractively on a wide range of topics, including the First World War, science, psychology, philosophies, the party system, and primitive religions. But he was most confident in his religious, i.e. anti-Christian, scepticism. He was not at all sceptical of Einstein, the Stratford man, Piltdown man, the Labour Party, war profiteers, Jews, the development of paper money, Freud...

It occurs to me to add a comment on one of his sons, Conrad Russell, who was an academic historian for most of his life, mostly researching into the history of the English Civil War. He followed the family tradition—he had little or no idea of the financial involvements of Cromwell with continental Jews, and the changes this induced in Britain. It's probably fair to say his work is essentially worthless as a result. (There is a typical laudatory review in Amazon by Stephen Bull—'real name'—along with other rather childish reviews of war books of the gung-ho school).

Maybe, if more relaxed and honest times should transpire, there will be an analytical process applied to such people as Russell, on similar lines to those in Kevin MacDonald's books. It's entirely possible that the legacy of people like-minded to Russell, opening the door to so-called Jews, was the most disastrous error made in Britain in the entire modern era; and the analogous comment applies to other countries.
Last edited by rerevisionist on 17 Feb 2012 17:34, edited 98 times in total.
Reason: From time to time I've added a new sentence or observation, or corrected a typo. Latest entries: possible traditional Russell family loyalty to Jews 13 Nov 2011, Lord John Russell 5 Dec 2011, Bertrand Russell's America Vol 2 10 Dec 2011. Comment on Dewey inserted 16 Apr 2012. Ramanujan, Ayer, some corrections 24 May 2012. Russell's Christian history as a model of belief system spread added 5 Aug 2012. Salter and WW1 controls, and comment on omission of German books on Jews, and Russell's use in effect of localised but not widespread intersecting sets, added 19 Aug 2012. Letter on U.S. fanaticism from Dear Bertrand Russell added 14 Sept 2012. Lintott on Russell on fascism added 16 Mar 2013. Frank Ridley 17 March 2013. A few more remarks and names 4 Sept 2013. US war criminals unreported by Jewish media 6 Oct 2013. Small number of stylistic changes 22 Nov 2103. D H Lawrence remark 27 Dec 2013. Eaton, Pugwash, Rotblat, Powell, Burhop, Lindop added 2014-02-15. Wittgenstein as Jew 2014-02-15. Isaiah Berlin, Popper, 2014-02-17. Leopold & Loeb, Lindbergh, Untermeyer 2014-02-20. Cromwell, Bentham, Napoleon, French Revolution remarks and links and a few other things 2015-03-31. Russell's 70th birthday in 1962, and clickable menu, 2015-10-20
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Re: Bertrand Russell as a Dupe of Jews

Postby rerevisionist » 30 Apr 2011 15:24

I've just found that Russell's papers can be read online. Amazon has details of each volume of the 'Collected Papers' which are edited by a team at McMasters University in Canada. I believe so far there are 20 volumes, each with a title more-or-less relevant to the range of years of the volume.

'Man's Peril: 1954-55' is one such volume. It can be searched online, apparently completely. Russell on Baruch (and on birth control, immigration, world government, population..) can be searched; also Bikini, Hitler, Stalin, and so on.

I have to say Russell accepted the entire pre-1939 and post-1945 consensus, which in the face of revisionist criticisms of the various components looks distinctly worn and frayed.
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Re: Bertrand Russell as a Dupe of Jews

Postby rerevisionist » 30 Apr 2011 16:57

I've also found that Spokesman Books, founded round about 1970, is still in existence. (In fact, I remember donating to the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, years ago). Apart from the Vietnam War investigation, it appears to be 100% standard Jewish-money-influenced 'left', with a British flavour, as might be expected. A tremendous disappointment for rationalist-minded people. It's inconceivable that they'd publish any new genuinely intellectual material; it's just so sad.
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Re: Bertrand Russell as a Dupe of Racist Jews

Postby NUKELIES » 03 May 2011 21:47

rerevisionist One of the few quotes I have memorized is "There is no nonsense so arrant it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action," by Bertrand Russell. That quote does lead one to believe that he thought himself superior to the masses, and anyone who really falls into the trap of truly believing themselves superior may very well be a dupe. People are different, and have different developed capacities, some of these capacities manifest as racial strains, but all animals and living beings have the same infinite potential. Anyone who believes otherwise is impoverished—as is the case with elitists like Russell.
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Re: Bertrand Russell as a Dupe of Racist Jews

Postby rerevisionist » 04 May 2011 11:59

Ahem, arrant (=extreme, overweening, complete). I think that quotation isn't by Russell, although the sentiment is. I've read most of Russell's stuff and there's no doubt he had great verbal skill and intelligence. He wrote 'Power' in the late 1930s in an attempt to found a new science, of human power. In the way he regarded Adam Smith as founding economics. Also I like 'History of Western Philosophy' but it's true that he got the Jews completely wrong. I think he also got Islam wrong, but it's difficult—modern historians are so useless that we're largely on our own.
    The confluence of printing and associated technologies, and increase in wealth, or perhaps increase in some directions combined with reduction in others, led to new writings. It was not only economics that was designed to remove mention of Jews, but many other reassembled subjects.

The depressing thing is that although Russell was aware of the Jewish coup—idealists being shot, networks of spies, 'communist' Jews working 24/7 for their racial vision—he still thought it was the right govt. for Russia at the time. Anyway, as a result of these nukes theories, I've come to view Russell's post-1945 years as a nuclear activist as 'useful idiot' stuff. However this doesn't seem to apply to the Vietnam War, where his humanitarian concerns were involved rather than theories.

All his life he seems to have thought the press could provide the truth. He thought if you read a 'communist' newspaper, and also a 'right wing' newspaper, you could infer what really happened. [Added later: he seems to have had the same attitude to reference books. A letter (1894, to his future wife Alys) says '.. One hour spent in reading Wagner's statistics is probably of more value than three months in ... society'. Sixty years later he puzzled over reference books not giving information on what sort of person a Korean is. I presume Wagner's Statistics was a then-well-known compilation of population/ output etc figures—I haven't found online information about it.]

Sorry to drone on... I think trying to take an overview that it's a result of incredibly improved techniques of travel and communication. I think Victorian economists were being fairly honest in their 'free market' views, because although there was a landowning class, there really were hosts of small farms, hosts of manufacturers, hosts of small boats and ships, hosts of shops and roadmenders and blacksmiths, and hosts of newspapers and books. But better communications allowed the growth of monopolies. This was earlier in Britain than most places, and I think is why British socialism developed here. It was obviously unfair that someone who had overseen (say) the amalgamation of a hundred small local breweries into one, should have corresponding economic power. The same thing happened in the USA and Germany, but a bit later, and by then Jews were around, who subverted the movement from socialism to redistribution to Jews. It has to be said that, in a world of monopolies, Jews have shown more skill in understanding and manipulating the system than non-Jews, who tend to stick with inaccurate ideas on fair competition, some openness, noninterference in politics, etc.

And no doubt if gas/petrol gets expensive, the process will reverse and unravel.
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Re: Bertrand Russell as a Dupe of Racist Jews

Postby NUKELIES » 05 May 2011 21:10

Oops—touche. At least my misspelling proves I do indeed have it memorised—if it would have been copy/pasted it would have been spelled correctly. Anyways—corrected thank you very much. :)
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Re: Bertrand Russell as a Dupe of Racist Jews

Postby rerevisionist » 15 Jun 2011 22:17

Lol, as they say.

Just a note: I've added to the original article here whenever a relevant thought occurred to me—I try to leave it alone now!—15 June 2011

FAKED ONLINE 'QUOTATION', FALSELY ATTRIBUTED TO BERTRAND RUSSELL'S 'IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY'
There's a 'quotation' attributed to Russell's essay collection The Impact of Science on Society online which is definitely false. Russell was discussing 'diet, injections and injunctions' which is altered online to include fluoride, and other things, something definitely not in Russell. It may have been someone trying to expand Russell, to make what he was saying easier to grasp; or it may have been someone with an agenda, twisting Russell. Either way it's a misquotation.
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Re: Bertrand Russell as a Dupe of Racist Jews

Postby rerevisionist » 28 Jun 2011 07:14

'NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT'—Committee of 100, CND, etc
Russell described his lifestyle in the 1950s and 1960s in 'Dear Bertrand Russell'—he 'dealt with' newspapers and his letters in the morning—perhaps I should point out that emails didn't yet exist. And read other material—'chiefly nuclear writings'. In the afternoon he'd meet people, in his house in north Wales. He must have been sent such things as the 'Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' and books by such phonies as Edward Teller and Herman Kahn. (There's a parallel with E P Thompson, who however lived 'independently' on family money while writing, with his wife Dorothy). Russell's 'Autobiography' (vol. III) mentions meetings—with politicians, with whom he'd explain his arguments from 'Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare', and with various would-be activists. During the 1960s he progressively regarded the USA as more dangerous than the USSR, because of the Vietnam War, and other genocides—his thoughts on nuclear war receded, because its claimed risks were obvious, even to politicians. In the early 1960s Russell was mostly concerned with British policy. (He mentions French 'nuclear tests' as well, for example in his autobiography, but doesn't seem to have factored them in). His policy was nuclear disarmament for the UK, and he worked for this through several organisations—the 'Committee of 100', which included Canon Collins—'impossible to work with'; and CND, the 'Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament', which is described in considerable detail in vol III of his Autobiography. And there are black and white films, broadcast on TV, of this phase of Russell's life, with quite well-filmed footage of Russell's home in I think Chelsea, and a sit-down protest, CND symbols, and Trafalgar Square, where a policeman curtails his speech on disarmament and survival. Another clip shows Russell, interviewed, expecting full-on nuclear war in just a few years. He supported an annual pro-disarmament march, carefully organised by CND, based around Aldermaston's AWRE ('Atomic Weapons Research Establishment'), with the informal slogan 'ban the bomb'. ('The bomb' being shorthand for nuclear weapons). CND's 'executive committee' included Lord Simon of Wythenshawe, in Manchester, who however died in 1960. I'm fairly sure he must have been a Jew from Manchester. It's impossible not to speculate that his role was simply to check that the nuclear mythology was retained. Tariq Ali was another rich activist type who knew Russell and *may* have had a similar function in respect to supposed nuclear weapons in Pakistan.

Russell had some support in disarmament policies from a Prof Rotblat, a nuclear physics professor at Liverpool University. Rotblat was still active years later as an opponent of nuclear weapons, in the Vanunu affair, which in retrospect must have been another media planted hoax. It's impossible for me to know how much Rotblat was aware of the facts. There's a bit of TV film of Rotblat; he may have been a planted liar and spy; he may have been someone grateful for his post-war job—his TV presentation is unimpressive; he may have been sincere; he may have been secretly pushing for Israel's nuclear weapons, which he may or may not have believed in—disarmament was to be unilateral for Britain!

Anyway, Russell's attitude was that Britain should unilaterally disarm, and await negotiations between the USA and USSR. He simply had no idea of the interplay of Jews in both countries. Russell went into supporting detail—for example, considering whether accidental nuclear wars might start (he used an insurance company's probabilities as an example), and whether factories could be converted for peacetime uses (he seemed to think there were conveyor-belt style assembly plants), and whether detectives could in fact check on the weapons that he believed existed.

Other complications included the fact that Attlee's Labour Party, which defeated Churchill in 1945, secretly decided to go for what they believed to be the atom bomb. (Britain's first-past-the-post system produces very skewed results—the 1945 election was not a 'landslide' as it's often claimed to be—the two leading parties divided 10 million votes to 12 million. The Independent Labour Party got 2 seats—Russell preferred this party). Also weapons were largely in the hands of private industry—for example Weinstock of General Electric Company, GEC. This encouraged huge frauds, though the story is of course still not really known. See this site's 'The Sociology and Economics of Science Frauds' https://www.big-lies.org/nuke-lies/www.nukelies.com/forum/sociology-economics-of-science-weapons-frauds-1-of-2.html
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Re: Bertrand Russell as a Dupe of Racist Jews

Postby rerevisionist » 28 Jun 2011 07:35

BERTRAND RUSSELL ON WORLD GOVERNMENT
This is a review of 'Authority and the Individual'—the text of the BBC's very first 'Reith Lectures', a series of 6, broadcast in 1948. (The BBC seems to think nobody's attention span could exceed about half an hour).

Fascinating, but rather baffling mixture. Russell said afterwards that everyone agreed with what he said, so he thought he must have been wrong. The Soviet Union was reportedly furious at social Darwinist references from Sir Arthur Keith.

Anyway Russell's object was to
[1] Promote world government. This was to avoid nuclear war. The sole function of world government was to prevent war. [Note: this is unlike any usual conception of government, and isn't described in any detail]
[2] Permit competition between states. There should be competition, but not war. Everything should be hierarchical, with lower levels allowed the maximum of freedom compatible with the layer(s) above. The internal arrangements of each state, or territory etc, should be their own business only.

That in essence is his world government idea.

Subsidiary to that are various other aims (roughly, 'the individual') Russell thinks
[1] Moral reformers of the first rank usually opposed cruelties, and were themselves opposed by the masses. This is obviously taken straight from Christianity, 'Jesus' and e.g. Wilberforce and Elizabeth Fry etc, and from consideration of the reduction in cruel beliefs which Russell believed dominated primitive societies. Confucians, Taoists, Jews, Muslims would recognise none of this.
[2] Intellectual progress—this means poetic, mystic, artistic, scientific—is necessary, and the best that can be done is insist on free speech. Competition should be intellectual and academic, not economic. (It's not clear where propaganda would slot in—probably it's expected not to flourish. A philosopher's idea of competition, not a businessman's. And of course could conflict with internal arrangements!)
[3] Diversity is important, because it gives material for selection to work on—uniformity is not helpful.
[4] The long view of history suggests units get larger and larger, the entire globe being the obvious limit. (Russell doesn't really consider that maybe this is an artefact of the last couple of thousand years, and may not last, though he does date modern states to the invention of gunpowder, 15th century).
[5] Poverty is a cause of instability. He specifically instances south east Asia, mainly I suppose China and India; the huge population growth in Africa wasn't then clear. (Again, who knows; poverty-stricken hordes in remote areas may well be more stable than worldwide relative equality; and rich powerful groups may be the source of far more instability than struggling poor groups—probably Russell here was deceived by the 20th century Jewish/Marxist propaganda emphasis on 'revolution').

Much of Russell's argument is highly dubious: he says scientists are indifferent to money, which may have been true in Victorian times and earlier, but certainly doesn't apply now, though of course he was thinking of really first rank people. Another oddity is his distinctively 20th century omission of Jews; for instance he says the career of Lenin was astonishing—when of course it was simply a matter of being secretly funded, and of companies being willing to take blood money. Interestingly, he says nothing of mass migrations—in those days, expensive ocean liners were almost the only method of migration, so the modern stuff is totally omitted. He offloads (e.g.) shortage of oil and uranium and fertile ground onto the future—with luck, inventors will invent new inventions.

Recommended as the product of someone who spent his life thinking, and was trying to sum up after the immense catastrophes of 20th century wars. But it's not even remotely definitive.
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Re: Bertrand Russell: Dupe of Racist Jews (inc. Physicists)

Postby rerevisionist » 06 Dec 2011 02:36

Bertrand Russell on Bolshevism—why did he omit Jews?

On Russell and Jews generally, the above material is a fairly detailed outline of Russell as a dupe of Jews. I haven't tried to cover Russell's two science books The ABC of Relativity and The Analysis of Matter in any detail.

This section is specifically to do with Russell's comments in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (first published in 1920—but he had decades to update it). It was debated online with a group based at McMaster University, Toronto, and I've included email exchanges in the second half. There is a remote link with Hungarian and other Jews in the USA who were supposed to have developed nuclear reactions. It's slightly changed here—the pictures showing Russell's comments are missing, and I've taken out email addresses.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism by Bertrand Russell (c) Rae West 2000
Russell's deliberate omission of Jews from his study of Bolshevism: Why?


Bertrand Russell visited the new 'Soviet Union' in 1920, arriving on May 11th and leaving on June 16th. The official delegation he accompanied (not as an official delegate) was fêted with regimental bands, banquets, speeches, and military reviews. About a week later he wrote to Ottoline Morrell from Sweden. Two or three months later (September) he wrote the preface to his new book, which was first published in 1920, according to its copyright page. My paperback copy records no reprints until 1949, when he dropped a chapter written by Dora, his woman companion of 1920, and altered the word "Communism" to "Socialism" 'in many places', 'in order to conform to modern usage'. He wrote that, at the time, there was no sharp distinction between the two words.
. . . The point of this brief note is to point out that Russell, who was perfectly aware of the Jewish nature of the Revolution, or coup, consistently failed to mention it in this book.
. . . And he continued to fail to mention Jewishness in modern politics, so far as I know both privately as well as in public (though I haven't attempted to check this in detail). For example Russell's character-sketches of Beatrice Webb go into considerable detail as to her family background (something like war profiteers from the Crimean War), her habits (strange use of the word 'we', fasting, dining), and influence with politicians. But Sidney Webb is left a much shadowier figure—he was industrious, in fact very industrious, not very scrupulous, and had been a civil servant. But his Jewishness is omitted, as is any psychological point or philosophical outlook which might be attributed to Jewishness. Even his real name isn't given.
. . . Why this should be, I have no rational (or irrational) explanation. Russell happily said unpleasant things about Americans, authors, bishops, bookmakers, businessmen, Christians, Muslims, politicians, Russians and so forth. Why this taboo? The following remarks don't address the issue directly I leave it to the reader to note the ways the omission distorted Russell's analyses.

. . . Only two pages from The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (right) contain references to Jews; and one of them is encoded. Compare this with Russell's letter, above.
. . .• Russell chose the word 'Bolshevism' in the title carefully. The word 'communist' had a sort of vague meaning; suggesting Italian Comune, the Paris commune, millennarians and perhaps medieval monks (although their vows to poverty were something of a fake, as the institution itself was rich). Russell adopted the Russian meaning when he wrote (p. xi): 'A full-fledged Communist is not merely a man who believes that land and capital should be held in common, and their produce distributed as nearly equally as possible. He is a man who entertains a number of elaborate and dogmatic beliefs..' and he wrote 'Communism may become as unimportant [to Bolshevism] as abstaining from alcohol is in Islam.' Ironically, there was real communism of a sort: 'To a remarkable extent, each village is an independent unit. So long as the Government obtains the food and the soldiers that it requires, it does not interfere, and leaves untouched the old village communism...' (p. 66)
. . . Russell corrects the view he says was held in England by advanced Socialists, who '.. think of the dictatorship of the proletariat as merely a new form of representative government, in which only working men and women have votes, and the constituencies are partly occupational.. They think that "proletariat" means "proletariat", but "dictatorship" does not quite mean "dictatorship." This is the opposite of the truth. When a Russian Communist speaks of dictatorship, he means the word literally, but when he speaks of the proletariat, he uses the word in a Pickwickian sense. He means the "class-conscious" part of the proletariat, i.e. the Communist Party.'
. . . When Russell arrived, the system of 'Soviets' was 'moribund'. (p. 40)
. . . How was this done? 'No conceivable system of free election would give majorities to the Communists, either in town or in country. Various methods are therefore adopted.. voting is by show of hands, so that all who vote against the Government are marked men. .. no candidate who is not a Communist can have any printing done, the printing works being all in the hands of the State. .. he cannot address any meetings.. The whole of the press, is of course, official; .. it is easy for the Government to exercise pressure over the election of the Executive Committee, and again over the election of the Presidium. ... in the villages.. I was met always with the reply that they were not represented at all.. if they elected a non-Communist representative he could not obtain a pass on the railway.. All real power is in the hands of the Communist Party, who number about 600,000 in a population of about 120 millions. ..' (pp. 41-43)
. . . What had this to do with the belief 'that land and capital should be held in common, and their produce distributed as nearly equally as possible'?
. . . It's very important to understand the deliberate confusion of socialism, communism, bolshevism, and the rest. There was enormous opposition to socialism by a mixed bag of people, and it was useful to be able to point to a disaster and say "Look, that's socialism." In my view, 'communist' organisations and theory have been tacitly encouraged, because of their uselessness, and socialist organisations and theory discouraged. Britain's LSE illustrates the sort of thing.
. . . Another myth is the idea that revolutionaries were persecuted: '.. all the older members of the party have proved their sincerity by years of persecution. ..' In fact the conditions were lenient. The real victims were the soldiers (more than a million killed?) and the peasants fighting the Germans. The revolutionaries mostly had a relatively easy time, typically in the US, in Switzerland, or safe in camps.
. . . As Russell points out, Marxist theory predicted revolution in the USA. He doesn't emphasise the essential absurdity of the Russian situation: 85% of the population were peasants, and most of the remaining 15% must have been soldiers, government workers, teachers, domestics and so on. Perhaps 4% were workers in the Marxist proletarian sense. This of course is why 'workers' had to be altered to 'workers and peasants'.
. . . Russell invented or took up the claim that 'bureaucracy' might become the main problem (this was, I think, Weber's new and perhaps exciting word). It is of course absurd—bureaucrats don't oppress, rounding-up, and killing people.
. . .• It's important to understand various attitudes to Russia and 'Communism':-
. . . . . .1. Russia had an empire both west (bits of Poland) and east (places like Siberia, Khamchatka). It was important for English ideology to claim that Britain was much more civilised. So, it was habitual to call the entire Russian empire 'Russia', so they could talk about the horrors of Russia under the Tsar. Whereas India was not called 'England'!
. . . . . .2. This permitted considerable hypocrisy. Thus Russell, after the Second World War, contemplating nuclear weapons, said that Russia had always been imperialist.
. . . . . .3. It's important to realise there was great hostility to the Russian empire. This appears for example in Kipling, and his 'great game'. The Germans were not the only people anxious for its downfall.
. . . . . .4. 'Marx has taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come about; this fits in with the Oriental traits in the Russian character, and produces a state of mind not unlike that of the early successors of Mahomet. Opposition is crushed without mercy...' Russell believed in Asiatic characteristics for most of his life. He doesn't explain why, if something is inevitable, people should be energetic; why not just sit back and wait?
. . . . . .5. Russell also insisted on the stupidity of the peasants whose 'reasons for disliking the Bolsheviks are very inadequate. .. the peasants are better off than they ever were before. I saw no one—man woman, or child—who looked underfed in the villages. The big landowners are dispossessed, and the peasants have profited. ..' (pp. 43-44). In fact, the peasants achieved this partly as a result of Tsarist reforms, and partly as a result of taking things into their own hands as the First World War dissolved into chaos. The Bolsheviks did nothing for them.
. . . . . .6. Also, Russians are lazy. This contrasts oddly with: '.. The fact is that the rations [BR doesn't state what they were] are not sufficient, .. food in the market costs about fifty times the fixed Government price. .. Some do additional work..' (63) 'By proclaiming itself the friend of the proletarian, the Government has been enabled to establish an iron discipline, beyond the wildest dreams of the most autocratic American magnate. ..' (59) '.. very many people do extra work, because the official rates do not afford a living wage. .. When the day's work is over, a great deal of time has to be spent in fetching food and water...' (57)
. . . . . .7. Russell accepted the legend of Lenin as a sort of superman. 'Napoleon said you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them; Lenin disproved the exception' Russell wrote, years later (from memory—this quotation mayn't be exactly correct). The facts of secret financial support by the Germans and various others, all as far as is known Jews, weren't guessed by Russell.
. . .• Russell talked to Lenin for an hour, saw Trotsky at the opera, listened to Kamenev, and was 'acquainted' with Sverdlov, the 'Acting Minister of Transport'. He also met, and liked, Gorky: '.. very ill... heartbroken.. begged me.. always to emphasize what Russia had suffered. He supports the Government.. because the possible alternatives are worse. One felt.. a love of the Russian people.. All the intellectuals whom I met—a class who have suffered terribly—expressed their gratitude to him..' (pp 38-39)
. . .• Russell has an interesting chapter (at the start of his 'theory' section) on 'the materialist conception of history', i.e. economic determinism, in which he comments that other determinisms (climate, sex) are just as possible, and other remarks which however aren't very relevant here. Another interesting chapter looks at 'Deciding Forces in Politics', a theme he liked and which appeared in other books, as e.g. 'politically important desires'. His theory chapter however is weak on Marxism (for example, the 'labour theory of value') an omission he remedied much later in his jointly-written book on 19th century history.
. . .• Pages 28-9 have Russell's comparison with Plato's Republic, which, he thought, annoyed many people. He also says: 'The Communists in many ways resemble the British public-school type: they have all the good and bad traits of an aristocracy which is young and vital. They are courageous, energetic, capable of command, always ready to serve the State; on the other hand, they are dictatorial.. They are practically the sole possessors of power, and they enjoy innumerable advantages in consequence..' A.J.P. Taylor made the same point, that Communism instilled self-confidence. Here again, the facts seem a bit more complicated. Possibly there is such a thing as endogenous self-confidence; but, usually, self-confidence is instilled by outside circumstances—being part of a large group, for example, or owning money. Their self-confidence is equally attributable to their position.
. . .• In retrospect, one of the distinctive features of 'communism' was its lack of prosperity. Was this caused by money being secretly siphoned away? Or weapons production? Or incompetence? Or was it that simple arithmetic shows that a country with little industry must take longer to build things up than one with more? It's difficult to be certain, and Russell brings up the possibility that the Soviet Union might sustain an enormous industrial revolution. Most people have no experience in building up industries or infrastructure, and so find it impossible to judge. So this made quite an effective scare story, as did the idea that 'the doctrines of Communism are almost certain, in the long run, to make progress among American wage-earners..' (p 75). It's curious just how uncreative the experiment was. Consider industries which have been distinctive of the 20th century: motor vehicles and air flight. In neither case did the new arrangement achieve much. Even such things as battery chickens, for which 'Communism' might have seem well adapted, weren't developed there.
. . .• A final point, to emphasise the lack of understanding by people who are (or in many cases pretend to be) on the left: Ken Coates' 1995 foreword states that 'All attempts by the left to replicate its previous experience have been blocked..' his two examples being the Chinese revolution, which in my view unsurprisingly was unique, and Cuba not being repeated in Bolivia. But in fact, Hungary and Poland, and no doubt other less well-documented places (for example, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), had 'revolutions' very like the USSR ones, also Jewish, in the aftermath of war.

__________________________________________________
Finally, some E-mails looking at Russell's Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. Late 1998. These are from russell-l, a group closed in May 2000. All emails (except for the first) unedited and unaltered, except for formatting and cutting of header info. -RW

Delivery-date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 02:48:39 +0100
From: Kenneth Blackwell

On Sun, 30 Aug 1998, Raeto West wrote:
.... [3] Dora also contributed a chapter on women to 'the Practice and Theory of Bolshevism' which was dropped unceremoniously in the next edition by BR of 1949. On this book, I have a query which perhaps someone could help answer. In BR's autobiog vol II, he says in a letter to Ottoline M, 'Bolshevism is a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige of liberty remains..' Yet in 'The Practice and Theory..' there is no mention of this at all, apart perhaps from hints such as a mention of 'Solomon's splendour' somewhere. What on earth was going on here?Perhaps the soon-to-be-completed Papers 15: Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia, China and the West, 1919-22 has an explanation. As Moorehead is at pains to show, Leonard Woolf was very upset at this private remark published 46 years later.

KENNETH BLACKWELL

Research on Bertrand Russell
X-From: russell-l@informer1.CIS.McMaster.CA

Mon Aug 31 07:54:38 1998
From: "Charles.Pigden"

Re Leonard Woolf, It is clear that Leonard Woolf had to swallow a good deal of low-level casual anti-semitism from his Bloomsbury friends and even his wife. He claimed otherwise and obviously tried not to notice (after all, they WERE his friends and were too decent to be anti-semitic in any deep or serious sense). But he seems to have harboured some subconscious resentments. When Russell was revealed as making similar comments in his letters to those that Virginia had made his diaries this resentment boiled over in what was probably one of his last reviews.

Re Russell. I think we have already remarked on the low-level, casual anti-semitism in Russell's early correspondence. About 1930 he seems to have decided that anti-semitism and other forms of racial and ethnic prejudice constituted a serious problem. Thereafter he was a campaigner against racial and ethnic prejudice, both in his writings and in his personal conduct. There is some good stuff about how to combat prejudice in oneself and others in 'The Importance of Keeping a Wide Horizon' (CPBR 10), NEW HOPES FOR A CHANGING WORLD and elsewhere and I believe Russell refused to join anti-semitic country clubs when invited to do so. (I'm not sure whether he cleaned up his act with respect to his private correspondence-perhaps Ray or Nick Griffin could tell us.). But the interesting question is what brought about the change. It was, of course, a change of emphasis not a change of fundamental doctrine. Russell had admired jews (Spinoza, Einstein) befriended jews (Horace Kallen, various students) and defended jews (Sheffer of Sheffer's stroke fame) before, and he was always proud of Lord John's record on jewish civil rights. But the change of emphasis was quite considerable. So what made him take the matter seriously? The rise of Nazism? A growing awareness of the importance of prejudice in American society? What?

Re BR's attitude to Bolshevism. Rae West writes:
In BR's autobiog vol II, he says in a letter to Ottoline M, 'Bolshevism is a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige of liberty remains..' Yet in 'The Practice and Theory..' there is no mention of this at all, apart perhaps from hints such as a mention of 'Solomon's splendour' somewhere. What on earth was going on here?
Surely there is not a problem here. The letter to Ottoline represents Russell's immediate-and raw-reaction. (A reaction he felt free to express to someone of his own age and class.) The book represents his attempt at a balanced view. Moreover it represents an attempt to tell the truth about Bolshevism without raising leftist hackles including those of his wife. We now know that (setting aside the anti-semitism) his raw reactions were more nearly correct than his attempt to take a balanced view. THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF BOLSHEVISM is unduly charitable towards the Bolsheviks. But if it did any good at all in sensitizing the Left to the evils of Bolshevism, it did it because of its studied moderation. A serving of raw reactions would only have been counterproductive.

Regards
Charles Pigden

Delivery-date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 10:20:58 +0100
From: Louis Greenspan

Dear Charles,
I have been thinking off and on,of writing an article on Russell and the Jews. Russell's contacts with Jewish life is more extensive than one would think-over twenty articles for Jewish Daily Forward, first recipient of Israel Prize, early champion of Soviet Jewry etc. In connection with this I asked Katherine Tait when he stopped making antisemitiv remarks. She told me that they ceased with the rise of Nazism.
Louis

Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 09:57:38 -0400(EDT)
From: "Charles.Pigden"

Dear Louis,
A. I rather thought it was the rise of Nazism which sensitized Russell
to the issue anti-semitism and led to the change of style. ('Change of heart' isn't quite right for the reasons I mentioned in my last missive.) But another-perhaps complimentary-alternative occurs to me. Russell spent a lot of time in the States between the wars and made the acquaintance of a number of Jewish intellectuals, principally philosophers. This may have made him aware of the existence of institutionalized and semi-institutionalized anti-semitism. 'On Keeping a Wide Horizon' (CPBR 1, p. 456) contains some pertinent material. Russell is giving advice on how to be a good citizen. I quote:

'1. 'If you are at a party and someone begins to disparage the Jews, or any other race, do not let them get away with it. Remember that it is from such small beginnings that terrible persecutions grow.

2. If you share such a prejudice struggle against it. [There then follows some advice on how to conduct this struggle, together with the comment that Hitler has won a victory in making us 'race conscious'.] if you have such a prejudice that you are unable to conquer, at leastkeep it to yourself. Remember that other people less responsible than yourself may think dislike a reason for persecution.'

I suspect that when Russell realized what dislike could lead to-including the mild social dislike manifest in his own asides, conversation and private correspondence-he was forced to reexamine his own attitudes. But it would be nice to have some more explicit documentary evidence.

B. Do you think I am right about Leonard Woolf? He SAID that anti-semitism 'had not touched him personally and only very peripherally' (Letters p. 566) but I just don't believe it. There was plenty of low-level casual anti-semitism of the kind that characterized Russell's conversation and correspondence in the conversation, correspondence and diaries of the leading Bloomsberries. Of course, it was not SERIOUS in a certain sense. After all, LW himself was elected to the Apostles and Virginia married him. Nor was he the only Jew to be on intimate terms with the leading Bloomsberries. (Keynes chief disciple, Richard, Lord Kahn was jewish.) But I can't help thinking that the constant drip-drip of the low-level stuff must have hurt. (See the Letters p. 470 for details.) He could not take it out on on his wife or his friends so he took it out on Russell, accusing him of an 'aristocratic' anti-semitism, when the truth was that it was an anti-semitism shared by the upper middle-classes, including many of his closest associates. (Lest anyone misunderstand I should add that LW is one of my minor heroes. His autobiography is excellent.]

C. I look forward to your mooted article.

Regards
charles
From: Self
To: russell-l@ informer1.cis.mcmaster.ca
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1998 21:41:42
In BR's autobiog vol II, he says in a letter to Ottoline M, 'Bolshevism is a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige of liberty remains..' Yet in 'The Practice and Theory..' there is no mention of this at all, apart perhaps from hints such as a mention of 'Solomon's splendour' somewhere. What on earth was going on here?
Surely there is not a problem here. The letter to Ottoline represents Russell's immediate-and raw-reaction. (A reaction he felt free to express to someone of his own age and class.) The book represents his attempt at a balanced view. Moreover it represents an attempt to tell the truth about Bolshevism without raising leftist hackles including those of his wife. We now know that (setting aside the anti-semitism) his raw reactions etc.
Thus Charles Pigden. But of course there's a problem. Why should BR suppress an important piece of information? (He explicitly states in his autobiography that he determined to say what he thought about the situation in 1920 in Russia. He wasn't afraid to be outspoken on most other issues.) So what happened?

Regards Rae

Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1998 02:04:30 -0400 (EDT)
From: Nicholas Griffin

Charles Pigden asks about the occurrence of low-level anti-semitic remarks in Russell's later letters: From the 1930's on such references disappear (so far as I can remember, completely). It's also true that Russell and Peter refused to join an American club which would not admit Jews. I'm sure the rise of Nazism was the cause.

Nick Griffin

Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1998 07:43:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: Kenneth Blackwell

On Tue, 1 Sep 1998, Nicholas Griffin wrote:
Charles Pigden asks about the occurrence of low-level anti-semitic remarks in Russell's later letters: From the 1930's on such references disappear (so far as I can remember, completely). It's also true that Russell and Peter refused to join an American club which would not admit Jews. I'm sure the rise of Nazism was the cause.
My recollection of BR's letters matches Nick's on this score.

Russell tells the club story in "Some Impressions of America" (RA1 220.018540), a typed essay of 1944-45 for which I have found no appearance in print:

"Almost all English people, when they go to America, are amazed by the strength of anti-semitism. I could hardly believe it when I first discovered that there are hotels and summer camps which will not admit Jews. At one time I wanted to join a swimming club for the benefit of my children. I found one which seemed admirable, but when the management explained that no Jews were admitted, my principles forbade me to join. I failed to find one in my neighbourhood that would admit them."

Patricia Russell protested in a letter to the editor of an old New York liberal daily in "`Juden Verboten'", PM, 8 Dec. 1942, p. 21. Guilt by association is a nasty device, but it is true that 20 days later BR was fired from the Barnes Foundation.

There is a fair amount on the evils of anti-semitism in Vol. 22 of the Collected Papers.

KENNETH BLACKWELL

Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1998 09:26:36 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Richard A. Rempel"

Dear Nick,
Don't you think that more needs to be made of BR being of the late Victorian mind set of so many British intellectuals-much milder that the Continental equivalents-. Look at J. A. Hobson's anti-semitic statements during the Boer War or Henry Labouchere, the old radical editor of *Truth*. It was knee jerk and related to the distaste many Britons felt for the flood of Jews into the country from the 1870s on.-especially into the East End, Moss Bank in Manchester, parts of Liverpool and Leeds. BR and others like him were not like Houston S. Chamberlain, or Stocker or Lueger. The Brits just talked loosely about Jews-but did not call for ill treatment of them. Not trying to let them off-just differentiate.
Yrs., Dick Rempel.
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1998 11:50:07 -0400 (EDT)From: "Richard A. Rempel"

Dear Nick,
I neglected to mention the dislike/loathing that Hobson-perhaps BR-had for Jewish financiers who, they alleged, had been instrumental in conniving to bring about the South African War. BR's allusions to Lady Ottoline (25 June 1920)about Rufus Isaacs(later Lord Reading) surely relates to his involvement with his brother Godfrey and Lloyd George in the Marconi Scandal of 1913, when they were accused of financial corruption in transactions of the Marconi Co. of AMERICA. They were acquitted, but the stain would not wash out. Also, BR was repelled by Lenin's interest in "Taylorism"-Yankee assembly line industry...

Yrs., Dick Rempel

Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1998 12:14:39 -0400 (EDT)
From: Kenneth Blackwell

On Mon, 31 Aug 1998, Raeto West wrote:
In BR's autobiog vol II, he says in a letter to Ottoline M, 'Bolshevism is a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige of liberty remains..' Yet in 'The Practice and Theory..' there is no mention of this at all, apart perhaps from hints such as a mention of 'Solomon's splendour' somewhere. What on earth was going on here?
[/Surely there is not a problem here. The letter to Ottoline represents Russell's immediate-and raw-reaction. (A reaction he felt free to express to someone of his own age and class.) The book represents his attempt at a balanced view. Moreover it represents an attempt to tell the truth about Bolshevism without raising leftist hackles including those of his wife.
. . . . . We now know that (setting aside the anti-semitism) his raw reactions etc.Thus Charles Pigden. But of course there's a problem. Why should BR suppress an important piece of information? (He explicitly states in his autobiography that he determined to say what he thought about the situation in 1920 in Russia. He wasn't afraid to be outspoken on most other issues.) So what happened?
I think you are fastening on the phrase
"Americanized Jews". Where BR put the emphasis, or where you do, is unknown to me. What can be made of it for a book? It is true that some of the Bolshevik leaders were Jewish, and that some of these people -- including Trotsky -- had spent time in the US. (This I learned from R.A. Rempel.) Indeed, Trotsky arrived in New York with his family in Jan. 1917 and left in March -- only to be taken into custody by *British naval authorities* when his ship docked at Halifax.

If BR put the emphasis on "Americanized", there will probably be parallels drawn in some of his public writings between Soviet Russia and the USA.

KENNETH BLACKWELL

Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 02:47:55 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Charles.Pigden"

Two more remarks on Russell's 'Americanized Jews' comment and then, perhaps, we should have done.

Rae West seems to think there is a puzzle about Russell's dropping the comment about Americanized Jews from his published account of the Bolsheviks. There is none. Although Russell was outspoken he did not feel the need to express every private opinion-let alone every raw reaction-in public. For example, in 1922 he held the Nietzschian view that all moral judgements are false. He reserved this opinion for his brethren in the Apostles. Since he had alredy been imprisoned for opposing the British Empire there was no need to bring more trouble down on his head by attacking the eternal moral verities. THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF BOLSHEVISM was an attempt to convert the Left to a more critical view of the Bolshevik Revolution. It would have been an act of folly-not to mention downright rude-to needlessly offend potential Jewish readers. Another consideration may have influenced Russell. There WAS someone on the left who agreed with him and she was, quite literally, an Americanized Jew , namely Emma Goldman. (She was born in the Russian Empire and emigrated to the US as a teenager, but was deported back to Russia during the war.) Since her life was probably in danger during 1920, he would not have wanted to add anti-semitic insults to the injuries she was all too likely to sustain.. (Though he did not go as far as she would have liked, her autobiography makes it clear that he was the one member of the Labour delegation for whom she felt any respect.)

As to the comment itself, did Russell have anyone specifically in mind? Ken obviously thinks it was Trotsky, but a much more likely candidate is Zinoviev. As head of Comintern and satrap of Petrograd, Russell is likely to have had more to do with Zinoviev than Trotsky who he only met once. Zinoviev was a flashy orator, but lacking in 'bottom' (indeed Trotsky thought him a coward). In his personal manners he resembled certain anti-semitic stereotypes that Russell would have been aware of. He was arrogant and bullying towards his subordinates and was prone to swanning around Petrograd surrounded by an entourage of bodyguards and prostitutes. (See Figges) Just the other day I was reading Hornung's RAFFLES: AMATEUR CRACKSMAN, which features a vulgar, bullying, arrogant south African millionaire named Reuben Rosenthal, who swans around London in the company of a retired pugilist and several ladies of easy virtue. Hornung is nothing if not an exploiter of the cultural stereotypes of the ruling classes. Under the circumstances Zinoviev was just the sort of person to arouse BR's visceral anti-semitism (visceral, because even then he was probably a bit ashamed of it.) The only snag is I don't think Zinoviev spent much time in America.

All this, as Dick Rempel puts it, is explanation rather than excuse.

Never let it be said that the subscibers to this list are a collection of hagiographers who avert their eyes from the darker side of Russell!

Charles
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 11:52:43 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Raeto West"

Both Ken Blackwell and Charles Pigden seem unable to understand the simple point I'm making. BR, who visited Russia, found a 'close tyrannical bureacracy' of 'Americanized Jews', an 'insolent aristocracy'. That's his opinion of what he found. Pigden seems to think BR was referring to perhaps a couple of men. Ken Blackwell seems to think a few more. But what BR wrote is perfectly clear (except for the possible doubt over the meaning of 'Americanized'). Why should he not mention this in his book? The only replies from russell-l seem to be that it would offend Jewish readers and be 'an act of folly', that it was a first reaction & not considered, and that it would be 'counter-productive'. But BR had little hesitation in offending other types of readers. Moreover there are possible philosophical/history of ideas implications, which BR often liked (cf. e.g. his comments on ex-Catholics and ex-Protestants). So why (part from possible rather concealed remarks e.g. on Solomon's riches) didn't he mention this?

Rae

Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 21:57:09 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Charles.Pigden"

OK Rae. Here is another reason for Russell NOT to say in public that Russia was run by an insolent aristocracy of Americanized Jews. IT WAS NOT TRUE. The Bolsheviks may have been an insolent aristocracy, but only a minority were Jewish. Though there was a disproportionate number of Jews in the higher echelons of the Party they never constituted the majority. Lenin's politbureau (if memory serves me correctly) consisted of Lenin himself, Stalin, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky. Only the last three were Jewish. And the proportion of Jews at lower levels in the Party hierarchy was LOWER than on the Politbureau and on Sovnarkom. In fact, the Party was not so much remarkable for its Jewishness as for the high proportion of leading members from the MANY ethnic and racial minorities, Jews, Latvians, Poles, Georgians etc. Only three members of Lenins's Polibureau were of authentic 'Great Russian' ancestry: Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky. Stalin was a Georgian, and Lenin himself was a mixed bag with Kalmyck, Swedish, German and Jewish antecedents. (The Kalmyck predominates in his physionomy.) Why then did Russell tell Ottoline something that was not true? Because he was reporting his raw reactions rather than trying to give a sober acount of the facts.

Let me suggest an analogy. Suppose I boldly go where no philosopher has gone before and give a seminar to the Englsih Department at my university. Afterwards I send a splenetic email to a friend: 'The whole place was crawling with post-modernists whose half-witted drivel made me want to vomit.' Subsequently I am invited to chair the academic audit panel for he English Department and end up writing the report. There is no mention of half-wittedness or vomiting and I either say nothing about post-modernism or blandly report that it is an influential view. (It turns out that the post-modernists were in a minority anyway. My prejudices agaisnt postmodernism and the fact that some of the local postmodernists have a propensity for self-advertisement made them stand out in my recollection of the seminar.) Instead of rantings about postmodernists my audit report is full of dull stuff about teaching evaluations, publications, assessment policies and so forth. Now, suppose too that I become (let us say undeservedly) famous and that my email correspondence is published. A latter-day Rae West notices the discrepancy between my email and my report. He starts a controversy on the Pigden-l list. Various people try to explain to him that a private email is one thing and a public document another, and that there is a difference between voicing one's raw reactions and giving a considered judgement. But the latter-day Rae is not satisfied.

'Pigden, who visited the English Department, found it to be 'crawling with post-modernists whose half-witted drivel made him want to vomit'.. That's his opinion of what he found. Why should he not mention this in his report? The only replies from Pigden-l seem to be that it would offend post-modernist readers and be 'an act of folly', that it was a first reaction & not considered, and that it would be 'counter-productive'. But Pigden had little hesitation in offending other types of readers (or indeed post-modernists on other occasions). Moreover there are possible philosophical/history of ideas implications, which Pigden often liked (cf. e.g. his comments on the Catholicsm of G.EM. Anscombe). So why (apart from rather concealed remarks e.g. on the 'influential voice of post-modernism') didn't he mention this?'

Not to put to fine a point on it, wouldn't such a reaction from a latter-day Rae be GROTESQUELY SILLY? And aren't the similar remarks from the present-day Rae equally so?

In fact, there IS a serious issue here which brings me to yet another reason for Russell to keep his comments about Americanized Jews to himself. Though they were always in a minority, there is no denying that there were a number of prominent Jews amongst the Bolshevik leadership. Their propensity for self-advertisement (I'm thinking of Trotsky and Zinoviev here) together with the anti-semitic prejudices of the age made them all the more noticeable. The result was that many of the Whites came to see Bolshevism (which was certainly an insolent, and indeed, a cruel aristocracy) as a Jewish conspiracy. Thus they took out their anger towards the Bolsheviks on the hapless and largely innocent Jews in the areas they controlled. (Only a minority of Bolshevks were Jews and only a minority of Jews were Bolsheviks.) There was a series of savage pogroms. The irony in this was that the leading Jewish BolshEvIks rejected their
Jewish heritage and preferred to see themselves as revolutionaries, workers or cosmopolitan intellectuals rather than Jews The point was well put by a rabbi alluding to Trotsky's original and Jewish-sounding name of Bronstein. 'The Bronsteins are paying for the crimes of the Trotskys'. If Russell was aware of these facts (and I suspect he probably was) he had an excellent reason not to stress the Jewish element in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, particularly when criticizing the Bolsheviks' tyrannical propensities. He would be stoking the flames of an anti-semitism which was already consuming numerous innocent lives.

If Rae West does not consider himself answered by this I don't know what will satisfy him.

Charles Pigden

PS. My sources for all this information are the books we have already discussed on the list in connection with BR and the Bolsheviks: Pipes' THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION and RUSSIA UNDER THE BOLSHEVIK REGIME and Figes' A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1891-1924, also Dmitry Volkogonov's biographies of Lenin and Trotsky. I haven't checked with the texts to verify my assertions but I have a pretty good memory for this sort of thing. Anyone interested should consult the indices of these books under such headings as anti-semitism, jews, pogroms etc.
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1998 02:03:37 -0400 (EDT)
From: Nicholas Griffin

Dear Dick,

I'm sure you're right. These remarks (like all remarks) have to be read in historical context. The context changed dramatically in the 1930s and Russell's language changed with it.

Ken's remark about the timing of Russell's dismissal from the Barnes Foundation and Peter's letter about anti-semitism is very interesting. Was Barnes known to be anti-semitic? Is anything known about the Foundation's attitude to Jews?

Nick Griffin

On Tue, 1 Sep 1998, Richard A. Rempel wrote:
Dear Nick,

Don't you think that more needs to be made of BR being of the late Victorian mind set of so many British intellectuals-much milder that the Continental equivalents-. Look at J. A. Hobson's anti-semitic statements during the Boer War or Henry Labouchere, the old radical editor of *Truth*. It was knee jerk and related to the distaste many Britons felt for the flood of Jews into the country from the 1870s on.-especially into the East End, Moss Bank in Manchester, parts of Liverpool and Leeds. BR and others like him were not like Houston S. Chamberlain, or Stocker or Lueger. The Brits just talked loosely about Jews-but did not call for ill treatment of them. Not trying to let them off-just differentiate.

Yrs., Dick Rempel.

Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1998 15:36:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: Kenneth Blackwell

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1998 08:46:13 -0400 (EDT)

From: CHARLES.PIGDEN.

Rae West writes:
Charles Pigden still seems unable to see the point. He comments on proportions of racial minorities etc (in my view probably incorrectly; there are plenty of reports of the domination at the top levels by Jews, nor would this be surprising, in view of their numbers in W. Russia. Moreover because of name-changing of the Bronstein-Trotsky type, it's difficult to be sure). However, the issue isn't what Pigden thinks, or what I think, but what BR thought. I can see why conventional people at the time should have not mentioned this, as the feeling was presumably that Jews had in effect been allies in WW1. But BR was happy to describe whole classes of people as evil and despotic etc, and to discuss the effects of philosophical beliefs on peoples' mindsets, and to shock people about sex, bishops etc. This is why I think his suppression of 'Americanized Jews' needs an explanation. I'd hoped someone might have read what survives of BR's correspondence in detail and have a few serious comments.

Rae.
I am going to have one more go with Rae West and then I shall stop.

In a letter to Ottoline BR writes that the Bolsheviks were an insolent aristocracy of Americanized Jews. THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF BOLSHEVISM contains no such remarks. Rae West thinks this 'suppression' needs an explanation. Perhaps it does, but explanations of this 'suppresion' are not hard to come by. There are plenty of good reasons why Russell might have chosen to 'suppress' this remark.

1. The remark was not true and Russell may have come to realise this. Though Jews were both numerous and prominent in the upper echelons of the Bolshevik Party they did not constitute a majority. For example, only three out of seven members of Lenin's Politbureau were Jewish. And the proportion of jews at the very top was higher than the proportion of Jews at the second and third levels. At the beginning of 1917 only 959 out of 23,600 Bolshevik Party members were Jews. (Se Pipes RR, p. 511 and RUBR, p. 113.) This is an important point becasue the 23,600 veterans consituted the core of the vastly expanded Party in 1919 and occupied all the senior positions. Less that 5% were Jews. But if Russell's remark was not true why did he make it? Because he was reporting his raw reactions which were fuelled by anti-semitic prejudice. This led him to inflate prominence into prevalence, a not uncommon failing. (Two Asian families buy houses in the street and suddenly its little India.) It probably did not help that some of the prominent Jews (eg Zinoviev) conformed to BR's anti-semitic stereotypes. When writing up his experieinces for publication, BR may well have decided that his initial reactions were somewhat exaggerated and that an insolent aristocracy CONTAINING many Jews is not the same thing as an insolent aristocracy COMPOSED of Jews.

2. Even if BR continued to believe that the Bolshevik leadership was largely Jewish, he had plenty of reasons to play this down in his published writings. His mission was partly to alert the Left to the evils of the Bolshevik Regime. To do this he had to adopt a tone of studied moderation. In particular he had to avoid anything that might sound like White propaganda since this would destroy his credibility with his intended audience. But it was the common cry of the Whites that the Bolsheviks WERE an insolent aristocracy of upstart (I don't know about 'Americanized') Jews, and that Bolshevism itself was a Jewish conspiracy. (Wild claims were made eg that of the 36 commissars resident in Moscow, all but Lenin were Jews. These claims were simply false.) If Russell wanted to persuade-especially if he wanted to persuade those on the Left-the last thing he needed was to come on like a rabid apologist for Kolchak or Denikin (Even if, on this point, he secretly agreed with them.)

3. He may not have wanted to needlessly offend Jewish readers with what would have sounded like anti-semitic cracks.

4. Remarks about 'Americanized Jews' may have seemed out of place given that one of his few anti-Bolshevik allies on the political Left was herself an Americanized Jew, namely Emma Goldman.

5. The belief that the Bolsheviks WERE an aristocracy of upstart Jews and Bolshevism a Jewish conspiracy was being used at the time to justify a series of horrific pogroms on the part of the Whites. (Figes estimates up to 150,000 dead. ) Russell's mild anti-semitic prejudices were as nothing to the virulence of White feeling. Like Russell, the Whites were inclined to conclude that because Jews were prominent in the Bolshevik Party, they must be prevalent. Unlike Russell they seemed to think that because most Bolsheviks were Jews, most Jews were Bolsheviks (or at least Bolshevik sympathisers) and should therefore be treated accordingly. If Russell knew about this-and I presume he did, though not perhaps the extent of the carnage-then he may have been reluctant to say anything that could be construed as excusing such crimes.

6. Russell's subsiduary purpose in writing THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF BOLSHEVISM was to end Allied aid to the Whites. (He thought the Bolshevik excesses were partly due to the Civil War and that if the Civil War ended so would some of the excesses. Moreover, he thought the Civil War had to be ended to save Russia from economic catastrophe.) Parroting White propaganda by talking of an aristocracy of Americanized Jews would not have served this purpose.

7. Rae West seems to think that because Russell was outspoken, that he spoke his mind on every subject. (Or almost every subject) This is just a mistake. As I explained in a previous missive, Russell kept some of his opinions to himself or to a narrow circle of friends. In 1922 he was briefly a convert to what is now known as the error theory.. Nobody besides his Apostolic brethren knew about this till Alan Ryan published the paper in 1987. Everyone familiar wth the CPBR will be aware that Russell's book reviews, which usually end with some words praise no matter how faint, are often at odds with his virulent marginalia. Russell could be circumspect on occasion and was sometimes willing to moderate or even 'suppress' his opinions. His private thoughts were not always for public consumption. [Note: Russell in his Autobiography wrote: 'To say anything against Bolshevism was, of course, to play into the hands of reaction, and most of my friends took the view that one ought not to say what one thought about Russia unless what one thought was favourable. I had, however, been impervious to similar arguments from patriots during the War, and it seemed to me that in the long run no good purpose would be served by holding one's tongue. ...'-RW]

Thus there is no problem explaining why Russell 'suppressed' his comments about 'Americanized Jews' especially as these comments probably did not express his considered opinion.

Regards

Charles Pigden
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1998 19:27:20 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Raeto West"

I'm delighted that Charles Pigden will say no more on this topic-let's hope he means what he says. Since (e.g.) he used the expression 'Vietcong' I've resigned myself to the perhaps obvious fact that he has nothing to contribute.

. . . But maybe some others can address my serious question about BR's book 'The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism' and the fact that in BR's letter, published by BR, voluntarily, 45 or so years later, he described the system as (let me repeat, plus a bit more:) '..a close tyrannical bureaucracy, with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige of liberty remains, in thought or speech or action. I was stifled.. Yet I think it the right government for Russia at this moment. ..'

. . . The question is, why should Russell not mention this in his book, given that generally he had no objection to insulting and/or analysing (e.g.) monarchists, aristocrats, bishops, women, Islam, Catholicism and so on?

. . . The passage, the only passage, I found in his book vaguely referring to this (p. 73) is '..the desire for Asiatic dominion, which is probably accompanied in the minds of some with dreams of sapphires and rubies and golden thrones and all the glories of their forefather Solomon.'

. . . Another odd feature of this book is the concern BR shows for the British empire and for the possibility that Bolshevism might become a force that might acquire the whole of Asia within ten years (70), showing a concern for the British empire which seems out of place and which he states without any other comment would 'mean utter ruin'. (A similar concern shows up in some of his other books, e.g. where he predicts or fears that stupidity caused by silly education systems may well lose the empire). I wonder if this represents an ambivalence as also found in A J P Taylor, for example?

. . . There are other odd features (e.g. the absurd contradiction in which 20 he talks of years of persecution and Puritan morality; then on 21 'Most of them.. have better food than other people.'

. . . No doubt some of this is caused by the loathing BR felt for the Soviet Union-what he always insisted on calling Russia-and perhaps by a deadline being imposed for this book. (Moreover it seems not to have been popular and seems not to have had a second edition until 1949, if I read the publication information correctly, and so seems never to have been revised except in the sense of dropping Dora's chapter). However, I still seek a convincing explanation for this self-censorship by BR in not discussing Jews at all here.

Regards, Rae West. (PS I imagine the page numbers quoted above apply to all copies)

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