Unarmed Victory, by Bertrand Russell

[p047] Unarmed Victory. By Bertrand Russell. Penguin Special, 2/6. The widespread belief that Bertrand Russell is opposed to nuclear weapons it totally wrong. As he made perfectly clear in an earlier book (“Has Man a Future?’), he believes that all weapons of mass destruction shov'ld be in the hands of a supreme World Authority. As long as only the United States possessed the bomb, this condition existed. Russell’s anti-bomb activities, therefore. date from its acquisition bv the Soviet Union. He says, in ‘Unarmed Victory’: ‘When these (H-bombs) came to be possessed hy both sides, it became obvious that nothing desired bv any government could be achieved by nuclear war.’ (Mv emphasis—G.G.) Moreover his pleas in this book to the Cubans, Russians and Chinese to make any and every concession, contrast sharply with his advice to the West when they had the H-bomb monopoly: ‘I think it is absolutely necessary to be firm on what we consider vital interests. I think it is more likely that you will get genuine co-operation from a certain firmness rather than merely going to them and begging them to co-operate.’ (Speech in House of Lords, 28.11.45.) Russell is, in fact, an ardent supporter of capitalism as such. He speaks of Marx’s ‘spite and hatred’. He regrets the loss of the “‘compara- tively civilised usages of the nine- teenth century’. As for the working class—‘their povery in the early days of industrialism was only a _ tem- porary phase.’ He was opposed to the Chinese Revolution—When the Communist Revolution took place in China, I felt desolated.” His desolation, it transpires, was due to the destruction of ‘delightful and admirable old traditions’. It is from this standpoint that Russell intervened in the recent crises in Cuba and on the Sino- Indian frontier. He sees the danger of war not from any conflict of incompatible social systems, sparked off by the contradictions of decaying imperialism, but arising instead from the absence of ‘sane men in the seats of power’, from ‘a lack of understanding of the feelings of an opponent’, from ‘insane paranoia’, ‘infantile codes of muscle-armed prestige’, etc., etc. Earl Russell’s separation of nuclear war from all other political questions (nuclear war ‘transcends’ them) leads him to seek a solution for one crisis after another, none of which can be explained or foreseen, by a series of desperate telegrams urging various leading statesmen to save the world. Invariably, these ‘solutions’ involve a strengthening of the positions of imperialism. Hence, Russell’s cable to Castro reads: ‘I ask you humbly to accept the unwarranted American demands.’ And, though he sees that US policy towards Cuba is based solely on the desire to overthrow the Cuban government for the benefit of American profiteers, and although he quotes “The Guardian’ of January 12, 1963, which reports Dean Rusk as saying that no American commit- ment to abstain from invasions of Cuba was in existence, Russell still

[p048] BOOK REVIEWS regards the outcome of the Cuban crisis as ‘on the whole, satisfactory’. It is the rejection of a consistent materialist conception of history as a struggle of class forces that leads Russell to view world events either as a bewildering series of crises caused by man’s stupidity or as the working out of peculiar ‘rules’ that come from nowhere. (‘Since the third century B.C.,’ he says, speaking of China, ‘the rule has been that, after a period of internal unrest, a strong government emerges which gradually loses its strength giving place to a new cycle of anarchy and order.’) What is more serious, however, is that some people in the: Marxist movement have tended to view the empirical blindness of this bourgeois philosopher as being in some way ‘progressive’, Having adopted his method themselves, they view events ‘as they happen’ instead of in the process of developing class struggles —hence they too begin to consider Khrushchev the saviour of the world —(Russell’s telegram to Khrushchev read: ‘I should like you to know of my personal feeling about your solving the Cuban crisis. I have never known any statesman act with the magnanimity and greatness that you have shown over Cuba and I wish you to be clear that every ~ sincere and honest human being pays you homage for your courage.’) Marxists in Britain, however, know very well that the Pacifist movement is an obstacle to peace. At the height of the Cuban crisis the paci- fists were either. paralysed completely, or else devoted their main energies, in alliance with the Communist Party, to preventing a turn towards the labour movement. A good comment on this breed was made by Christopher Caudwell: "The ‘bourgeois pacifist occupies perhaps the most ignoble place of a man in any civilisation. . . . He sits on the head of the workers and, while the big bourgeois kicks him, advises him to lie quiet.’ (Studies in a Dying Culture.) G.G. 1939 and all that