Peace is the only alternative

The Welsh born Third Earl of Russell, Bertrand Russell was much more than an aristocrat, born into wealth and privilege. He was a deeply intellectual student, a polymath, whose search for philosophical answers to some of the world’s most pressing issues saw him apply mathematics and logic in several diverse areas of concern.

He was a late nineteenth, early twentieth century anti-imperialist, who railed against the United Kingdom’s colonialist policies, particularly in respect of its continued pillaging of the Indian sub-continent. He didn’t just talk social activism either, as he was imprisoned for six months towards the end of the Great War in 1918 for his pacifist views.

Conflict was always an intrusive element in Russell’s public persona, and he was an early advocate of Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, but was disappointed in the innate cruelty forced upon his own people and whilst supporting a Communist perspective, was disappointed in the ‘nature of the beast’. He felt that Marx’s metaphysical justifications were “simply nonsense,” while not being opposed to socialism in its ‘pure’ form.

He was, during World War II, an early critic of Adolf Hitler’s blitzkrieg, he became vocal in his anti-Nazi view that democracy would become a “permanent threat to democracy,” so he formed a ‘pragmatic pacifist’ perspective that the German threat must be countered, as “War was an evil, but that in extreme circumstances, it is the lesser of two evils.”

Post WWII, he was to utter the famous phrase, “War does not determine who is right, but who is left.”

Russell’s peace activism was as vigorous as ever during the so-called, ‘Cold War,’ with Russia, and he publicly begged then United States President John F Kennedy to retract his confrontation with Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev, writing boldly of Kennedy’s “desperate threat to human survival,” with “no conceivable justification,” continuing that civilised man condemns it, and would not sustain the madness of the “mass murder” the American was contemplating.

He wasn’t shy of expressing his opinions on any social issue, which alienated him both at home in the United Kingdom, but particularly in the United States, with his criticism of Kennedy, who was idolised across the Republican/Democratic political divide. He often quoted his good friend Albert Einstein’s view however, that a nation could not ‘simultaneously prevent and prepare for war,’ which flies in the face of the military and armaments manufacturers who would argue otherwise.

Mostly though, he canvassed the widely held political disdain which politicians held everywhere for their constituents, seeing them as “monstrous and immoral in that the general principle of tolerance (sic) does not apply to them,” comparing their callousness to that of the Spanish Inquisition of King Ferdinand II of Spain, during the 15th century.

I’m no particular advocate of Bertrand Russell, but what does occur to me is that this individual was, while wealthy and privileged, he always supported ‘the man and woman in the street.’ He was aware of, and rarely overlooked the fact that war and conflict casualties were inevitably drawn from this lower income group. Princes and Presidents don’t perish, those without the protection of wealth, privilege and power... do.

My main point however, is that conflict and war, pain, injury and death, on the international scene, are never the final alternative, but a convenient one for the power brokers, militarist hawks and weak politicians. There will always be other options, other solutions... and if that means swallowing a little pride, or back-tracking on a political statement or ideology. It must be done.

Wars cost lives, cost money, cost opportunities... the cost is just simply too high, and if we look at the conflicts around us now, there is so much that swallowing some ‘pride,’ massaging some ego, and putting historic wrongs behind us, cannot appease.