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First World War
This is an from an autobiographical piece ('An Autobiographical Epitome'), an essay in Portraits from Memory written in about 1956 by Bertrand Russell, then aged about 84, explaining why he thought Britain should have stayed out of the 'Great War', later renamed the First World War. Russell started with a description of his life when young, and at Cambridge:-
..... All went well until 1914.
But when the First World War broke out, I thought it was a folly and a crime on the part of every one of the Powers involved on both sides. I hoped that England might remain neutral and, when this did not happen, I continued to protest. I found myself isolated from most of my former friends and, what I minded even more, estranged from the current of the national life. I had to fall back upon sources of strength that I hardly knew myself to possess. But something that if I had been religious I should have called the Voice of God, compelled me to persist. Neither then nor later did I think all war wrong. It was that war, not all war, that I condemned.
The Second World War I thought necessary, not because I had changed my opinions on war, but because the circumstances were different. In fact all that made the second war necessary was an outcome of the first war.
We owe to the first war and its aftermath Russian Communism, Italian Fascism and German Nazism. We owe to the first war the creation of a chaotic unstable world where there is every reason to fear that the Second World War was not the last, where there is the vast horror of Russian Communism to be combated, where Germany, France and what used to be the Austro-Hungarian Empire have all fallen lower in the scale of civilization, where there is every prospect of chaos in Asia and Africa, where the prospect of vast and horrible carnage inspires daily and hourly terror. All these evils have Sprung with the inevitability of Greek tragedy out of the First World War.
Consider by way of contrast what would have happened if Britain had remained neutral in that war. The war would have been short. It would have ended in victory for Germany. America would not have been dragged in. Britain would have remained strong and prosperous. Germany would not have been driven into Nazism, Russia, though it would have had a revolution, would in all likelihood have not had the Communist Revolution, since it could not in a short war have been reduced to the condition of utter chaos which prevailed in 1917. The Kaiser's Germany, although war propaganda on our side represented it as atrocious, was in fact swashbuckling and a little absurd. I had lived in the Kaiser's Germany and I {7} knew that progressive forces in that country were very strong and had every prospect of ultimate success. There was more freedom in the Kaiser's Germany than there is now in any country outside Britain and Scandinavia. We were told at the time that it was a war for freedom, a war for democracy and a war against militarism. As a result of that war freedom has vastly diminished and militarism has vastly increased. As for democracy, its future is still in doubt. I cannot think that the world would now be in anything like the bad state in which it is if English neutrality in the first war had allowed a quick victory to Germany. On these grounds I have never thought that I was mistaken in the line that I took at that time. I also do not regret having attempted throughout the war years to persuade people that the Germans were less wicked than official propaganda represented them as being, for a great deal of the subsequent evil resulted from the severity of the Treaty of Versailles and this severity would not have been possible but for the moral horror with which Germany was viewed. The Second World War was a totally different matter. Very largely as a result of our follies, Nazi Germany had to be fought if human life was to remain tolerable. If the Russians seek world dominion it is to be feared that war with them will be supposed equally necessary. But all this dreadful sequence is an outcome of the mistakes of 1914 and would not have occurred if those mistakes had been avoided.
The end of the first war was not the end of my isolation, but, on the contrary, the prelude to an even more complete isolation (except from close personal friends) which was due to my failure to applaud the new revolutionary government of Russia. When the Russian Revolution first broke out I welcomed it as did almost everybody else, including the British Embassy in Petrograd (as it then was). It was difficult at a distance to follow the confused events of 1918 and 1919 and I did not know what to think of the Bolsheviks. But in 1920 I went to Russia, had long talks with Lenin and other prominent men and saw as much as I could of what was going on. I came to the conclusion that everything that was being done and everything that was being intended was totally contrary to what any person of a liberal outlook would desire. I thought the regime already hateful and certain to become more so. I found the source of evil in a contempt for liberty and democracy which was a natural outcome of fanaticism. It was thought by radicals in those days that one ought to support the Russian Revolution whatever it might be doing, since it was opposed by reactionaries, and criticism of it played into their hands. I felt the force of this argument and was for some time in doubt as to what I ought to do. But in the end I decided in favour of what seemed to me to be the truth. I stated publicly that I thought the Bolshevik regime abominable, and I have never seen any reason to change this opinion. In this I differed from almost all the friends that I had acquired since 1914. Most people still hated me for having opposed the war, and the minority, who did not hate me on this ground, denounced me for not praising the Bolsheviks.
My visit to Russia in 1920 was a turning-point in my life. During the time that I was there I felt a gradually increasing horror which became an almost intolerable oppression. The country seemed to me one vast prison in which the jailers were cruel bigots. When I found my friends applauding these men as liberators and regarding the regime that they were creating as a paradise, I wondered in a bewildered manner whether it was my friends or I that were mad. But the habit of following my own judgment rather than that of others had grown strong in me during the war years. And as a matter of historical dynamics it seemed obvious that revolutionary ardour must develop into imperialism as it had done in the French Revolution. When I finally decided to say what I thought of the Bolsheviks my former political friends, including very many who have since come to my opinion, denounced me as a lackey of the bourgeoisie. But reactionaries did not notice what I said and continued to describe me in print as a 'lily-livered Bolshie swine'. And so I succeeded in getting the worst of both worlds. ....
These comments are of course completely censored from the mainstream media in Britain, including the BBC. When I first read them, I was very surprised. Possibly they are allowed in universities, though I'd guess any student before university would, still, risk a low exam mark.
This is just partial revisionism: what's needed is analysis of the full picture, and this includes the sort of thing Keynes looked at in 'How to Pay for the War'. Including war bonds and interest rates in addition to costs of weapons and other material. If some people benefit from war, or think they do, they are likely to support it. And the propagandist side, which of course was mastered by the Jewish 'communists', neeeded to get people to risk having themselves killed, It wouldn't surprise me if Farrakhan's remarks don't give a better picture.
