Review of   Bertrand Russell   Power: A New Social Analysis   published October 1938

Bertrand Russell wanted to invent a new science of human power. Review notes: June 26, 2010/ 4 Sept 2013/ 4 Sept 2014/ 18 March 2015/ 4 July 2015/ 18 Sept 2015/ 16 November 2017 on Germany, Jews, and WW2/ 2 May 2018/ 11 May 2018/ and later comments, up to 17 Jan 2024

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Russell intended this book to found a new science, of human power, in the societal sense. Power meaning 'the production of intended effects'. (His definition, not mine. He seemed to assume power-loving men would always know what they wanted, and how to get it).

LONG REVIEW WARNING!

Power is well worth reading. Five stars for breadth of content. I collected some books with the title Power or something similar, but found nothing comparable. One problem of course is that when education is corralled by Jews, discussion of Talmudic beliefs will be censored out.
      But there's more to Russell: one attraction of Russell is his aura of aristocratic family with centuries of rule, or at least familiarity with rulers, combined with suggestions of immense erudition and wisdom. Many people must have felt his words carried more weight than legions of John Smiths. Russell often gives examples which glimpse the truth.
      For example, he says in The Biology of Organizations ‘Small States exist, not by their own power, but through the jealousies of large ones; Belgium, e.g., exists because its existence is convenient for England and France.’ and one feels he may have had inside knowledge. As another example, he writes ‘Italy after the fall of Napoleon became filled with secret societies...’ suggesting a conclusion drawn from comprehensive examinations of secret societies. Another example is his admiration of democracy, as a method of registering the rights of people who have been ignored in the past. The idea that 'democracy' is just a Jewish scheme is missing from Russell.
      But Power has innumerable difficulties; which I'll try to sketch out, starting from the chapter headings –

I THE IMPULSE TO POWER/ II LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS
These chapters try to integrate practical needs (e.g. houses have to be built somewhere) with giving and taking orders.

There's a problem with Russell's analysis. He takes it as given that leaders have the same motives as followers. (A concrete example might be Churchill, and most Britons). Leaders may gain followers by pretence, something of course rather obvious now. Such tricks are largely out of Russell's range, unless perhaps he submerged them as unsuited to plebeians.

Russell is emphatic (following Darwin) that man is an animal, but differs from other animals in having 'imagination'. He cannot just mean the ability to conjure up images in 'the mind's eye', since some forms of mental ability, for example a speech, or a law, are not images. In fact Russell ignores differences in knowledge, both things around people, and the scope of their awarenesses. Jews have often outsmarted people simply by knowing how things work, who's who in geographically distinct areas, and how to communicate such things as escape routes.
      And Russell ignores the fact that the possibility and the development of language differentiates man from other animals. Thus predators and prey illustrate what happens when one animal wants to eat another. But planning and commanding and discussion needs language for anything more difficult. Special or secret languages—and the possibilities of languages within other species—aren't discussed by Russell.
      Russell saw no reason to differentiate between 'men'. If you consider monkeys, they very roughly have similar strength, limbs, vision, calorie consumption, and anatomy, to 'men'. A visitor from Mars might be puzzled that they build no houses and make no music. Russell had no theory to begin to explain differences in 'imagination', and resulting differences in ambition, and in struggles for power.

Worth noting that Russell (like us) belongs to a stage in anatomy when the brain was not understood; he distinguishes anatomy from human motivations, without knowing whether these latter are genetically determined. Russell does not see the biological nature of life as imposing limitations: it's obvious that people have their own surroundings, their own sights and sounds and landscapes and associates and surroundings, and their own spheres of knowledge—concrete things which impose limits. In 500 AD Britain was divided amongst tribes; modern ease of travel has changed that, but, if things collapse, who can say whether this will not happen again?

Russell has what seems now a strange attitude to human beings; possibly this is explained by the transition from a religious view to Darwinian. He says for example ' ... each of us would like to conceive of it [social co-operation] after the pattern of the co-operation between God and His worshippers, with ourself in the place of God. ...' and 'Every man would like to be God, if it were possible.' Not quite the same as pecking order, or monkey bands.

'Some men's characters lead them always to command, others always to obey; between these extremes lie the mass of average human beings..' (Russell seems pretty completely to discount competence, strength, dexterity, and learning and understanding the ways things are done). Russell mentions the family, for example in China, but there's more scope for kidnapping, adoption, rape, unassignable parents, making orphans, castration and so on than he seems to realise; he follows Plato in only tinkering with the family. He thinks the 'confidence necessary to be a leader' has commonly been 'a hereditary position of command'—he says nothing of education through books, or training of princes.
      An explanation of Russell's unreal overview is that he neglects the part played by laws, in all senses from the most casual to the most elaborate. People are to some extent mediated or influenced by laws, but Russell has no analysis of legal systems; this is I'd guess a result of Jewish pressure on intellectual investigation. For example, 19th century novels (familiar to Russell) usually have some emphasis on lawyers, usually shown as honest and dutiful. They may show laws in (for example) India, the USA, Russia. He seems to have simply assumed—as a beneficiary of the system—that laws need no analysis.

Russell is unrealistic in appraising the natural limits of learning; how can people with no experience of (e.g.) planning or judging schemes or technical issues or languages gain 'power' in these things? I think he assumes, as his model, schools and training, which people may or may not choose and may or may not succeed in. But this seems to omit large parts of life; strata and classes and groups. Russell dodges the issue: '... the men who are active in public events' desire to obtain power. ...' He talks as though 'public events' are obvious to everyone, which they aren't, and that power-loving types will work for and operate them. He says nothing about closely-controlled secret training; Jews for example have had their own secret schooling and language and learning, kept secret from 'goyim'.

And Russell is unrealistic in assessing knowledge. He writes 'A large proportion of the human race... is obliged to work so hard in obtaining necessaries that little energy is left over for other purposes;...' but this may contain a subtle error. How hard, in fact, do people in 'Third World' countries, as they have come to be called, work? I've seen it stated that 'slash and burn' primitive agriculturalists work much less hard than modern whites. And what would they do with spare energy if they had it? Imagination may be 'the goad that forces human beings into restless exertion', but imaginations are limited.
      But there is a very important point here, since 'energy left over for other purposes' must include all cultural achievements in the broadest sense. Some will be time-wasting; some cruel; some family-related, for example. With modern techniques, enormous scope has opened up—and this includes vast frauds.

Russell doesn't distinguish carefully between people who aim to influence powerful people, and people who aim at overall communities of some sort. Jews seem to be inbred into attacking human hierarchies, for example. But differences of this sort are all subsumed under 'power'.

Russell is not impressed by 'economic causation'. He writes: when a moderate degree of comfort is assured, both individuals and communities will pursue power rather than wealth: they may seek wealth as a means to power, or they may forgo an increase of wealth in order to secure an increase of power, but in the former case as in the latter their fundamental motive is not economic. This is not as helpful as might be thought. What is a 'community'? The activities of Jews have focussed attention on the possibilities of some parts of an apparent community acting against other parts. What is a 'moderate degree of comfort'? Russell writes as though human societies have always had the option of increased 'comfort'; very likely a mistake, given that many people, including Russell, believed that most people don't ever have new ideas.

He regards people as being influenceable in three ways—direct force, economic effects—goodies vs fines—and beliefs. He goes on to look at variations on these themes...

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Russell identifies Hitler, Cromwell, Lenin, and Napoleon as 'some of the ablest leaders known to history'. Anyone familiar with 'revisionist' schools of thought must be pained at those names, all of which, apart perhaps from Napoleon, were puppets of Jews. Russell made no attempt to study Jews. The index to the book (not in the Unwin paperback) lists many events, but not authors, who tend to be named in the text, and of course these are largely Victorian, but all are Jew-unaware. For example Cambridge Mediaeval History is Russell's source on Roman Catholicism.

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Russell says: A sense of of solidarity sufficient to make government by discussion possible can be generated without difficulty in a family, such as the Fuggers or Rothschilds, in a small religious body such as the Quakers, in a barbarous tribe, or in a nation at war or in danger of war. But outside pressure is all but indispensable: the members of a group hang together for fear of hanging separately. A common peril is much the easiest way of producing homogeneity. But Russell does not discuss whether small hostile groups should be tolerated.

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Russell (writing after the 'Great War' but before the 'Second World War'—named by Churchill)—feared more mechanised warfare. Here's his book Which Way to Peace?. Russell, in a new world with heavy vehicles powered by petrol/gasoline, heavy airplanes, aircraft carriers, huge bombs, feared 'men ... whose love of power has been fed by control over mechanism.' In former days, men sold themselves to the Devil to acquire magical powers. Nowadays they acquire these powers from science, and find themselves compelled to become devils'. He starts with an account of Mussolini 'in the Abyssinian War': typically of Russell, unpleasant things are attributed to foreigners.
      Russell is unable to be precise, and stays with oratory. However he is aware that gunpowder and cannon ended the era of castles. I don't think he found any modern generalisations.

III THE FORMS OF POWER/ IV PRIESTLY POWER/ V KINGLY POWER/ VI NAKED POWER/ VII REVOLUTIONARY POWER/ VIII ECONOMIC POWER/ IX POWER OVER OPINION

Russell identifies 'power' as a central concept, like energy in physics, presumably derived in the same way by slowly noticing phenomena have things in common. He doesn't consider extensions of biological features: he does not (e.g.) examine sight and feeling and hearing and the brain, though he gives a bit of space to Aesopian analogies—performing animals, and the pig version of a 'Judas goat' (squealing 'pig with a rope round its middle hoisted into a ship', as examples.

Quite often he uses metaphors evidently based on things like kinetic energy, or stored energy. It's never quite clear whether his examples are idiosyncratic, one-off, unrepeatable illustrations which are only used e.g. to show power coalescing into ever-larger units, or whether the processes they illustrate are in principle considered to be capable of recurring. For instance, he says at one point that given a totalitarian state, all the forms of power he's considered become outdated and only of historical interest. He says somewhere else China has 'always been an exception to all rules'. He says the most successful democratic politicians are those who become dictators: 'Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler owed their rise to democracy.'—omitting the small matter of the 'Great War' and its causers, and the incompleteness and novelty of 'democracy'.
      Russell had no idea that Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler were propped up behind the scenes. The idea they were able leaders, started by democracy, is false, but useful as propaganda against democracy, which has been turned on and off in the modern periods.

Most historians are (or are believed to be) experts in just one period, country, or subject. Russell in effect follows this presumption: he has no general consideration of transitions, though he has bits here and there: The usual plan [of innovators] is to minimize the elements of novelty in their system. The usual plan is to invent a more or less fictitious past and pretend to be restoring its institutions. In 2 Kings xxii we are told how the priests 'found' the Book of the Law, and the King caused a 'return' to observance of its precepts. ... Russell seems unaware of the Khazar idea. Russell is not aware of the possibility of large-scale fakes: if Fomenko and others are even partially true, much of history was simply copied with modifications. Note also the omission of transitions may show Jewish influence: Jewish academics are likely to discourage examination of ruin and collapse. Here's a fuller passage by Russell showing his underestimation of 'Jewish' influence:

It's worth noting that Russell says a lot about 'traditional power', but without assigning it a chapter of its own.

When I first read this book (about fifty years ago!) I was disappointed in Russell's use of such outmoded ideas as 'kings'. I thought he should have worked out a more general, mathematical, system. Russell regards Egypt, and Babylonia in part, as the supreme end-point of the 'evolution' of 'kingship', with the Pyramids as the physical product. The word 'evolution' is worrying: for all we know, Egypt may have been the final development of a 100,000 years process, and perhaps therefore the most impressive example, only recently perturbed through some collapse. And 'kings' may have needed specific circumstances, such as geographical security, and security appropriate to their weapons technology. Some of the works of Miles Mathis suggest that kingmakers, from long-term dynasties, are more important than temporary kings in the same way that presidents and leaders of political parties are often or usually less important than their backers.

Russell on 'Kingly Power' states that the natural consequence of a fall in kingly power is the formation of an 'oligopoly'. This word is taken from economics, an 'oligopoly' being a less dramatic version of 'monopoly'. It suggests a smallish number of powerful companies, rather than a single monopoly. Important note: Russell implicitly elides away the possibility of a large number of co-operating people; in particular, he has no analysis of Jewish power, or of large secret groups, such as Freemasons. Whether this is deliberate, I don't know. Thomas Carlyle (Heroes and Hero-Worship, and his book on Cromwell) points the same way; so does Nietzsche. Both these writers were widely-promoted, I'd expect because of this misdirection.
      Russell describes the increase in kingly power in the Middle Ages (e.g. Magna Carta to keep unruly nobles in order) but doesn't explain how one person could accomplish this. My guess is that the role of Jews as kingmakers (in exchange for hidden looting rights) has been downplayed. Just as Jews in defining and promoting 'nations' in the 19th century has been not noted, and Jews at the time of Caesar were downplayed. Russell writes, in Priestly Power, ‘Most of the bankers, owing to their large transactions in collecting the papal revenue, were already on the side of the Pope’ [this was about 1260; Russell mentions Guelphs and Ghibellines, Urban IV and Manfred, failing, like most 'historians', to separate then-current names from the actual processes.]
      There has been a change of meaning in 'banker' which we may date from 1913, when Russell was about 40 and seems to have not been informed by Keynes, from an organisation which deals in bullion and valuables into an organisation which prints money under its own control.

When Kings and Kingmakers are concealed—'Sometimes his mana is such that no subject may look upon him...—they can be overlooked more or less indefinitely, perhaps in their island or mountain territory. For example, since about 1920 Arab oil territories seem to have been ruled by Jews, masquerading as Arabs.

'Priestly power' omits all consideration of science; and yet surely astronomy and calendars, or knowledge of food and agriculture and animals, were the bases of many traditional priesthoods; the working-out of the year's length calendars and eclipses and planetary movements for example is a considerable achievement, which is generally ignored, just as most people ignore discoveries which led to present benefits. Russell writes The truth is that the respect accorded to men of learning was never bestowed for genuine knowledge, but for the supposed possession of magical powers. This was Russell's way to try to reconcile the power of science with the employee status of scientists.

In a remarkable passage, Russell writes Greece and Rome were peculiar in antiquity owing to their almost complete freedom from priestly power. In Greece, such religious power as existed was closely concentrated in the oracles, especially Delphi [long passage on bribery of the 'Pythoness'] ... free thought ultimately made it possible for the Romans ... to rob Greek temples of most of their wealth and all of their authority. ... A remarkable passage, since at the time the usual view was that these countries had been almost the inventors of civilisation. Russell didn't and perhaps couldn't recognise this oddity. He certainly was aware of it: a laconic endnote The greatest age of Greece was brought to an end by the Peloponnesian War. [Note added in 1917] ends his Mathematics and the Mathematicians.
      But Russell does not mention the Jewish religion insofar as Greece and Rome were affected. It's possible the falls of both Greece and Rome were the result of Jewish loans to both (or many) sides in wars. This link brings up passages by Herbert Spencer on tax burdens. This theory is not present anywhere in Russell, as far as I know; he discusses things like public morals, women not having children, the enfeebling effects alleged of prolonged wars, and Caesar allegedly 'snapping his fingers' at his creditors, but not the remoter implications of money and its control.
      We might rewrite the passage above: 'Greece and Rome appeared free from Jewish influence, until it expanded inserted itself and caused widespread ruin'.

      Russell liked civilisation, and yet seems to accept the fall of Greece and Rome and the painfully long subsequent reign of fanatical Jews and Christians.
      It's noticeable that such things as far easier travel and knowledge of maps have had a diminishing effect on Greece and Rome, once mainstays of academic life under Jewish influence. Look at Sparta and the Athenian area on modern maps, and see how tiny they are. Look at the work on the Odyssey and see how the evidence suggests Odysseus only navigated around Greek islands.

His separation of 'priestly power' from 'kingly power' seems to be a tribute to Christianity (but this is itself a tribute to Jews) and perhaps 'medicine men' or 'shamans'. In most societies, surely, there was not such a notable demarcation.
      Here's Russell on the Papacy: it was ‘not hereditary, and ... not troubled with long minorities ... A man could not easily rise to eminence in the Church except by piety, learning, or statesmanship; consequently most Popes were men considerably above the average in one or more respects. ...’ Well, maybe. But all the early Popes were 'circumsized Jews' as Gibbon says. Russell entirely ignores wealth, especially in the form of wealthy families.
      Russell irritatingly ignores other lessons on priestly power, notably the Greek Church, and the Russian and other Orthodox churches, and the roots of Islam, which appear to be Jewish.

Russell gives 'naked power' a foundation-stone status to his structure, rather than one of the forms of power which can transmute. He thinks 'naked power' is fundamental. And yet surely there are costs associated with military power: resources needed for manpower, upbringing, weaponry, food, training, risks and so on. Russell comes close to censoring out the relation between money and force. And his use of the phrase 'naked power' is worryingly elastic; not just killings and direct force, but this: '.. a Socialist may feel it unjust that his income is less than that of his employer; in that case, it is naked power that compels him to acquiesce.' Russell seemed to believe that anyone 'convinced' by reading and oratory could step into the shoes of a rival and is only prevented by sheer force.

      It's worth quoting Russell on 'the great abominations of human history' to show the extent to which he had been duped by Jewish attitudes and lies: '... not only ... war, but others equally terrible if less spectacular. Slavery and the slave trade, the exploitation of the Congo, the horrors of early industrialism, cruelty to children, judicial torture, the criminal law, prisons, workhouses, religious persecution, the atrocious treatment of the Jews, the merciless frivolities of despots [but not frivolities of ordinary people!], the unbelievable iniquity of the treatment of political opponents in Germany and Russia at the present day [i.e. 1930s]—all these are examples of the use of naked power against defenceless victims.' Russell accepted all the traditional Jewish lies via their media, but more important is his casual remark, in passing, about war. The 'Great War' ended about twenty years before Russell wrote; Russell was as engaged in opposing it as was possible for someone outside the inner circles. There were direct deaths, injuries, deaths caused by blockades, and deaths attributed to influenza rather than impoverishment. Something like 10 million dead, 20 million wounded, 10 million civilians. Russell barely mentions them, and does not mention Islamic mass slaughters in his list. These attitudes are just as Jews like it—no mention of goyim, and an alliance with Islam when they think it's to their advantage.
    Russell doesn't seem to recognise smaller uses of force, such as his example of St Ambrose being backed by a large force of, presumably, 'thugs'. In Russell's 20s, the Boer Wars were supported at home by threats against pro-Boers. The police may be instructed more or less secretly to favour one side: white women killed by blacks in modern-day USA, for example, get no publicity in controlled media; drug distribution may be controlled, and in non-medical cases arranged in a vague pyramid, supported by the police; and propaganda organisations may use a similar system, usually run by Jews as far as I know, typically to support Jews. Russell's analysis of 'naked power' omits all this sort of thing.
    I think, though I'm not sure, that Russell has a rather schoolboyish attitude to 'winning' and 'losing' wars, possibly traceable indirectly to the 19th century public school education system in Britain in which Greek and Latin literature was given primacy, and Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles left uncriticized, and Caesar's histories regarded as a valuable training manual—see H Trevor-Roper. There must have been many wars where the targets were met, but what happened next was not calculated; for example Spanish ships captured gold and often took it home, but they had little skill in using the gold sensibly. Most Americans in the 20th century and onward had no idea what to do with their Jew-backed 'victories'.
      Russell writes Pursuing the history of his [landowner's] title backwards, we come ultimately to some man who acquired the land by force—either .. of a king in favour of some courtier, or a large-scale conquest such as those of the Saxons and Normans. This is reminiscent of people who wander around enviously in country houses, without any idea of the complications of running such places.

His category of 'revolutionary power' was no doubt influenced by the USSR, which reinforced the idea (from the 'French Revolution') that revolutions were to be expected at intervals. Russell writes somewhere of 19th century European governments ‘opposing the ideas of the French Revolution’—but he thought these were (e.g.) Liberté, égalité, fraternité and démocratie, rather than inventing 'nations', and permitting Jewish financial frauds, and allowing Jew collaborations to plunder treasuries.
      It's unlikely that revolutions are anything like as common as Russell seemed to think. The 'Russian Revolution' (when Russell was about 45) stamped itself into Russell for the rest of his life. This is an illusion—shared by many writers and journalists of the time—caused by the Jewish coup in Russia being mislabelled a 'revolution'. (And of course by the equally mislabelled 'French Revolution' opening the nineteenth century). He includes early Christianity, the Reformation and 'Rights of Man' revolution, this latter, leaning heavily on Tom Paine—let's hope not too optimistically.
      Russell has, perhaps unconsciously from his childhood, absorbed the view that Jesus was an heroic isolated figure, struggling against huge odds against an evil system, with only his personality to lead, eventually, to triumph. A different view—that 'Jesus' was made up, and that the Roman Emperor decided to invent an artificial religious system designed to be acceptable to most tribes and groups, to try to hold his empire together, and which he was in a position to enforce, would seem far more convincing. So is the view that Jews became early Popes, and invented and led Christianity themselves, with intervals of simulated mutual hostility.
      It's worth making a point here on Russell's interpretation of the novelty of Christianity: '... the most important of Christian doctrines was ‘we ought to obey God rather than man.’ ... a precept to which nothing analogous had previously existed, except among the Jews. It only struck me recently that, if Jews can persuade people they are official experts on God, they can infiltrate their own interests. Since then they can persuade people what is meant by 'obeying God'. Except among the Jews.
      With the Reformation, Russell views the reformers like this: '... the ardent innovator ... Such men have seldom been believers in free speech. They have been willing themselves to suffer martyrdom, but have been equally willing to inflict it... in the past, determined men could speak freely in spite of governments... etc.' The view that many Europeans were increasingly irritated by the Church taking ever-more money from them, and provoking a perfectly reasonable calculated reaction, is not present in Russell.
      REVOLUTIONARY POWER (Chapter VII) has four examples: I Early Christianity, II The Reformation, III The French Revolution and Nationalism, IV Socialism and The Russian Revolution. It's clear, now, that I, III, and IV were largely Jewish movements, operating secretly, and to this day therefore considered 'controversial'. II The Reformation (which must include the Renaissance before it) is less clear. Russell talks of 'The State' as something whose power went up as the power of 'The Church' went down. He does not separate out all the components. 'The State' seems to be everything not part of everyday life, which includes activities on the side of the 'nationals', but plus activities by hostile elite members, notably Jews. He's of course right in attributing these events to the feeling that the old system 'has become obsolete', but without noticing that it was Jews who felt this. The Renaissance was left out (and the Aufklärung) in effect possibly because Jews were or seemed less obvious.
    This category incidentally also shows Russell assumes things will evolve for the better—his whole book shows developments as tending to be beneficial. Thus he says e.g. 'Monarchy consequently remained weak until it had got the better of both the Church and the feudal [i.e. Germanic] nobility'. Russell is weak on the actual geography of the world: he doesn't consider e.g. Europe as subdivided by mountains and other obstacles, and thus packed with 'defensible space', as opposed to say the steppes of Russia or prairies of north America.

    Russell is in my view weak in his chapter on ECONOMIC POWER; his description of 'economic power' in its most 'ultimate analysis' is this: '... economic power ... consists in being able to decide ... who shall be allowed to stand upon a given piece of land and to put things into it and take things from it ...' His examples are oil, gold, iron ore, rent and crops and ownership, and industrial lock-outs. I've omitted labour, and military work, which Russell mentions, but Russell seems stuck in the mindset of some economists, talking of 'land, labour, and capital', and probably with farm productivity in mind or landed aristocracies. Much of economics is concerned with processing materials, packing and storing and moving them, organising and building, and innovating, and planning, for all of which Russell seems to have little accurate overview.

'Economic Power' seems to me largely a collection of miscellaneous accounts of financial and legal arrangements. He includes Berle & Means, with 1930s 'modern executives analogous to kings and Popes. '.. by a very careful ... investigation they [conclude] ... that two thousand individuals control half the industry of the United States.' This uses 'control' in a misleading sense, I think. The phrase 'separation of ownership from control' is deliberately misleading: paper money owned by Jews allows any assets to be bought out, sooner or later. The managers are temporary, even though in a sense while they are employed they have some control. Separation of ownership from day-to-day running sounds more accurate. Russell says of what's now Zimbabwe: '... Rhodesian goldfields belong to certain rich men because the British democracy thought it worth while to make these men rich by going to war with Lobengula.' Russell may be assuming here that Lobengula was in some sense a legitimate owner of the area; though this seems unlikely.
    Russell notes that fines make some options unattractive. But he is far less aware of the way in which token jobs can be handed out, quite a serious consideration today; for example 'positive discrimination' by race to blacks and Jews, or the handing out of 'work' to unqualified people for political reasons, go unmentioned, even speculatively. There have been plenty of nepotistical eras; it's disappointing to find Russell has little comment on such short-cuts to power.
    Russell doesn't seem aware of some possibilities in organised groups which have economic effects: he says 'The power of trade unions is the converse of the power of the rich' but of course some unions, such as the NUJ now in Britain, and 'UNISON', and unions of 'public servants', are more opposed to the poor than the rich. Unions of civil servants can enforce astonishing frauds on the public. Russell's verbalisms don't manage to capture the fluid sets of the real world.

    Russell regards credit as the ability to transfer a consumable surplus from group A to group B, but doesn't mention the time element—which could be many centuries of debt, many centuries of production which never existed at the time of the original credit, 'consumable surpluses' perhaps extending over centuries. He doesn't mention the problem of trust in paper money and credit. He describes then-modern corporate capitalism as presented by Berle and Means, but without defining 'capitalism' or having evidence why financial power should coalesce—not surprising as he had no idea about the Federal Reserve and similar structures. He follows (I think) R H Tawney of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism in assuming the Catholic Church (then possibly the wealthiest organisation ever) in thinking the Church has a 'debtor's morality'. The issue must have been more complicated than that. Russell assumes 'usury' simply means interest, but there appear to be technical issues of definition of which he knew nothing. For example, The Merchant of Venice specifically says of usury (the precise wording isn't known)

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This is I think a reference to the Shetar, 'in English Law': When incorporated into English practice, the notion from Jewish law that debts could be recovered against a loan secured by "all property, movable and immovable" was a weapon of socio-economic change that tore the fabric of feudal society and established the power of liquid wealth in place of land holding. Note the extreme and fixed nature here, which is characteristic of Jews when given free rein: the Fed was and is allowed vast freedom in printing money. And extermination is a recommended Jewish policy. The Kahals extorted as much as they could. Their traditional tax is a general 10%. I think it's true to say that carefully detailed contracts with limitations are unnatural to Jews and natural for the west, and perhaps all others.

    There is just one mention (in effect) of Jewish money power. And even that is in the wrong chapter. Russell writes: 'The word 'tyrant' did not, originally, imply any bad qualities ... but only an absence of legal or traditional title. ... The first age of tyranny was that in which coinage first came into use, and this had the same kind of effect in increasing the power of rich men as credit and paper money have had in recent times. It has been maintained [footnote: See P.N. Ure, The origin of Tyranny] ... that the introduction of currency was connected with the rise of tyranny...' In all of Russell's writings, I know of only one other comment of that sort, though I don't have the source, in which Russell described paper money power, in the 1930s I think, allowed to be in the hands of private groups, as 'very unwise'.
    Let me just quote Russell on economic power within states, showing Russell did not understand Jewish power:–

Julius Caesar seems to have been assassinated because of Jewish entanglements. The City of London, i.e. the Jewish money power, calculated the results of both Great War, the insertion of Hitler, and the Second World War, all of which they won.

    Russell talks about 'coloured labour': 'Let us consider.. the power of the plutocracy in a democratic country. It has been unable to introduce Asiatic labour in California, except in early days in small numbers...' For some reason, he splits 'power over opinion' from creeds. It's worth noticing this is a Christian outlook, as many 'creeds' are not of a nature that can be separated from actions—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism interlock with their followers' habits. Russell's concept of 'power over opinion' is in essence rulers over subjects, within nations: deliberate lies by subgroups—Jews being the obvious example, then and now—are elided away: '.. the Churches, business advertisers, political parties, the plutocracy, and the State' comprise systematic large-scale propaganda in democratic countries, according to Russell. His entire discussion of power over people's minds is in terms of religion, as in his following chapter: lies, spying, concealment, academic fraud and so on are barely mentioned. On secret societies, he as was traditional mentions Communists and Fascists, but says Italy was filled with secret societies, after Napoleon; no discussion of the vast network of Freemasons.


      Russell makes a big blunder in Chapter IX 'POWER OVER OPINION'. He says: ‘ ... a creed never has force at its command to begin with, and the first steps in the production of a wide-spread opinion must be taken by means of persuasion alone. ...’ I expect this attitude—minority conversion, then wide belief, then force to make it spread— comes from the supposed history of early Christianity, and subsequent spread around Europe. It's now clear that successful creeds are usually secretly promoted. A good example is the absurd idea of many sexes, often called 'LGBT' or other acronyms, which is backed secretly with Jewish paper money. Gullible people thing "Oh, everybody's talking about this!" with no understanding of the source. Successful creeds need organisers, printed or spoken propaganda, buildings. ownership and all the rest, so it's no surprise that so-called Christianity has tithes, donations, salaries, official positions, and so on.
      Russell wasn't able to discount his own background: he says 'Armies are useless unless the soldiers believe in the cause for which they are fighting...' and forgets Russians forced by Jew-run groups in the lines behind tasked to kill deserters, and forgets compulsory conscription in America, and press-gangs in Britain.
      Russell says ('Power over Opinion', p 94 my paperback): 'It is customary nowadays to decry Reason as a force in human affairs, yet the rise of science is an overwhelming argument on the other side.' his arguments are on Copernican astronomy, Galileo's theory of falling bodies, and geology as useful in mining. But such arguments applied through the entire middle ages! Russell doesn't consider anti-science views, or knowledge islands kept the preserve of groups.
    To show Russell's underlying error here, consider this: .. Belief, when it is not simply traditional, is a product of several factors: desire, evidence, and iteration. When either the desire or the evidence is nil, there will be no belief; ... To produce a mass belief ... all three elements must exist in some degree; ... More propaganda is necessary to cause ... belief for which there is little evidence than ... for which the evidence is strong, if both are equally satisfactory to desire... This omits intentional lies and all forms of top-down propaganda. How many people desired to believe in moon landings, or U.S. bases round the world, or nuclear weapons, or Jewish paper money, or wicked Vietnamese peasants? Russell would probably say that believers felt flattered that their country is strong, or something similar. But in fact the belief is produced simply by being told it's true, of course with large-scale iteration, and, in the case of false flag psychological operations, faked and uncheckable evidence. This process certainly worked with Russell!
    It also omits paid beliefs, which may be slogans, credos, manifestoes, ill-defined statements, aspirations, or whatever, which Russell almost always ignores. He also ignores money as a source of power: the 'use of force', to Russell, is always violence, but intermediate stages such as the funding of movements and bribing of politicians, are generally ignored. I'm not sure why: Was he so certain of his own income that he simply had no grasp of other people being in a modern phrase 'incentivized'? Surely not. Perhaps it was an uneasy feeling that, once desire to believe was linked with money, then the roots of money deserve examination? Anyway, clearly 'desire, evidence, and iteration' should be replaced by something like 'desire, evidence, iteration, and widely-defined self-interest'.

    More on this; sorry! The plain facts of having somewhere to go to be employed, or being cared for by parents, or learning a language when young which is their parents', show that many 'beliefs' simply exist without any opposition; just as joining a Church needed no evidence from a 19th-century Oxford graduate beyond offering a living. This seems obvious; but it's important. Did US young men go off to the US Civil War because they had detailed schedules of what might be right? No, they were told to go, paid, equipped, but had no detailed knowledge at all.

    Russell knew by description, but did not feel, the extent to which propaganda can seep into every corner of life, I suppose because easier printing, and media such as radio and film and distributed TV, were not part of his life, and were regarded as crude and simple by intellectuals, except when officially supported, for example the King James Bible, in which case it was established. Jews have a powerful motive to downplay propaganda; see for example Chomsky on Propaganda, which omits important Jewish instances. Russell gives 'a classic example of the transformation of propaganda power into economic power', which turns out to be minor instances of a Pope telling debtors it was their Christian duty not to pay their debts.

Russell gives examples of mixtures of types of power, in everyday life. He uses animals to illustrate (e.g. pigs hoisted onto ships, donkey and stick and carrot, flock of sheep following a leader which was dragged into a ship, and trained performing animals). I'll quote here Russell on Germany (note that he uses the slang 'Nazi'):

    This is all highly misleading. Germany's loss after Britain declared war—the 'Great War'—left deaths and chaos and starvation; the idea that 'the lower middle class' was a well-defined bloc twenty years later cannot be correct. Russell's contempt for millions of German and Austrian voters doesn't match his support for democracy. But probably most important is his misstatement of NSDAP policy: it was not 'the abolition of interest' but the removal of Jewish money power and corruption—interest was not 'abolished'. Russell omits the most important aspects of the 'Nazi' programme, in his 'Britzi' way.
    (It strikes me that Russell made little effort in his animal analogies. For example, a horse may be attracted by carrots and driven by a stick; but a horse may also be faced with a firm sheltered path, a downward slope, and a friendly herd in the distance).

X CREEDS AS SOURCES OF POWER/ XI THE BIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS/ XII POWERS AND FORMS OF GOVERNMENTS/ XIII ORGANIZATIONS AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Russell considers 'The classic example of power through fanaticism is the rise of Islam'

which added nothing to Arabic economic power or technique, but nevertheless 'won'. It's a typical example from history taken from these not very satisfactory chapters. (Russell never comes up with the Judaic equivalent). Russell was trying to decide whether fanaticism is likely to succeed, and comes up with the classic liberal denial of this possibility: 'the cases in which fanaticism has brought nothing but disaster are much more numerous than those in which it has brought even temporary success. It ruined Jerusalem in the time of Titus, and Constantinople in 1453 ... It brought about the decay of Spain.. through the expulsion of the Jews and Moors ... the most successful nations, throughout modern times, have been those least addicted to the persecution of heretics. [This was a popular opinion in the 19th century] ... it is necessary to find a compromise between two opposite truisms. The first.. is: men who agree in their beliefs can co-operate more whole-heartedly than men who disagree. The second is: men whose beliefs are in accordance with fact are more likely to succeed than men whose beliefs are mistaken. ..' Russell has no model of intra-national conflicts. He assumes—a serious error, which wrecks his entire analysis—that anyone within a geographical boundary works for the interests of everybody there. In this way, Jews and their associates such as Christians and Freemasons are left out of Russell's picture. Russell's six or so pages on this issue make quite painful reading: Russell is totally unaware of the possibilities of unified group actions, and has no idea of instinctive networking—he always discusses beliefs as if they are thought up and adopted individually. Apart from Judaic beliefs, we might consider the caste system in India; Russell has nothing to say, useful or otherwise, about it.
      Russell, as someone with minimal knowledge of practical matters, is over-keen to assign causes to simple ideas. He thinks Spain was weakened by kicking out Jews and Muslims. It doesn't occur to him that Jews and Muslims attacked Spain from outside; causing it seems damage particularly to coastal Spain. It doesn't occur to him that Jewish-run Britain's attacks on Spain might have weakened it. He doesn't mention (e.g.) genetic weaknesses in the Hapsburgs.

Russell says, to repeat, ‘the most successful nations, throughout modern times, have been those least addicted to the persecution of heretics.’ Problems with this include the difficulties in assessing 'persecution' of ideas. Who knows how much damage the BBC has done, for example, by its censorship? And what are the important types of 'heresy'?—If someone says Churchill was a monster, is that 'heretical'? And what is a 'successful' country—one with a stratum of very rich people? In modern times, Mugabe in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe was not 'persecuted' by the British. Nor were Jewish oligarchs who'd lived in Russia. Were these examples of 'success'?

Russell liked the idea that fanaticism was self-defeating. Here he is on two European examples: ‘... the history of the French Revolution is analogous to that of the Commonwealth [supposedly under Oliver Cromwell] in England: fanaticism, victory, despotism, collapse, and reaction. Even in these two most favourable instances, the success of the fanatics was short-lived.’ As always, Russell has no idea that there are powers behind the movements, who got what they wanted in each country, and then took the path of least effort. And Russell as always assumes that men and races are similar: the fanatics may have exterminated many, but Russell assumes it makes no difference.
      Russell came from a more-or-less aristocratic family; but he seems to have been rather limited temporally. Possibly because jews have a habit of destroying documents, letters, evidence generally, and thus stunting long-term awareness. In the case of fanaticism, his few examples are short term. It may be the case that fanaticism can persist for thousands of years—as indeed jewish activities suggest.

Russell vaguely liked creeds; probably his outlook was suggested by the Church of England. He says ‘Social cohesion demands a creed, or a code of behaviour, or a prevailing sentiments, or, best, some combination ...’ which is irritatingly vague.

Russell has long passages on the medieval Roman Catholic Church, probably the basis of his later History of Western Philosophy. He quotes Gibbon, but not Gibbon's views of the long-term effects of the Church. He thinks the most important Christian doctrine was 'We ought to obey God rather than man.' He does not attempt to trace the divergent opinions on what happened in Palestine.

XI THE BIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS/ XII POWERS AND FORMS OF GOVERNMENTS show Russell looking at 'organization theory' as it was known to USA Jews. This includes constructions such as 'democracy', 'trade unions', and 'political parties'. Russell missed the entire topic of Jews aiming to take over the upper reaches of governments; it's obvious, now, that early proponents of democracy were insincere, wanting to arrange things so parties controlled by money would gain power. The Jewish late-20th century expression, the 'post-democratic era', is a small part of the evidence. It's a sad business to read 1900-ish books on the conduct of elections, with fine detail on correct procedures, with 2000-ish elections in Britain, with immigrants being told that can vote, where to put their mark, and funded thugs potentially present.
      Russell thought trade unions distributed power to workers, when in fact Jew-funded union leaders, and funded leaders in schools and universities, arranged things to suit jews.
      Parts of this chapter reflect events in the 1930s. For example, 'In Italy a very drastic capital levy is being introduced, whereas a much milder form of the same measure, when proposed by the British Labour Party, caused a capitalist outcry which was completely successful.' From today's perspective, one guesses that Italian Jews took over non-Jewish capital, while Britain did not need that, being already controlled by Jews. Or something like that: it would need someone au fait with the financial systems of both countries at the time to decode Russell, who presumably quoted news sources available to him.
      'Now, [i.e. after aristocratic parties] especially in the Labour Party, men are pledged to orthodoxy, and failure to keep this pledge usually involves both political extinction and financial loss. Two kinds of loyalty are demanded: to the programme, in the opinions professed; and to the leaders, in the action taken from day to day. The programme is decided in a manner which is nominally democratic, but is very much influenced by a small number of wire-pullers. It is left to the leaders to decide, in their parliamentary or governmental activities, whether they shall attempt to carry out the programme; if they decide not to do so, it is the duty of their followers to support their breach of faith by their votes, while denying, in their speeches, that it has taken place. It is this system that has given to leaders the power to thwart their rank-and-file supporters, and to advocate reforms without having to enact them.' That's Russell on British politics since I suppose about 1900. As always Russell hasn't a clue about Jews.
      Russell has interesting passages on roads and empires in 'The Biology of Organizations'. These are of course historical artefacts, in a way different from sea-lanes which may vary in the way air travel does. I'm a bit disappointed that he omits tracks in Watkins's 'ley' sense, perhaps because they were regarded as silly at the time, though they provide a basis for times before roads.

Powers and Forms of Governments Russell looks at the power structures of all organisations, though he soon elides this into national governments only. (I had to recheck the chapter title—'Powers and Forms of Governments'—for its plural of 'Governments'). On organisations, Russell regards law and medicine purely as professions with internal rules, but is not aware of the possibilities of legal frauds and corruption and medical frauds. In Britain in the 1930s, they were unthinkable, or at least unspeakable. He had no idea of the immense longevity of Galen's influence on so-called medicine, for example.
    His analysis of organisations, and their internal government and density of control over members, assumes general good behaviour, and fails to deal with criminals, determined long-term liars, vicious invasions, vicious subversives, and the sort of behaviour attributable to Jews. It therefore fails to get to grips with the most serious problems.
    Another issue is the purpose of organisations. (Russell allows organisations to have 'unconscious' purposes, though disappointingly gives no examples. He doesn't seem to know that very secret organisations can exist). Russell was aware of multiple purposes: somewhere he says a railway company has the purpose of providing rail travel, but also of making a profit. In truth, who can say what the purpose of the BBC is? State propaganda? Jewish propaganda? Profit-making? Secure lifetime employment? Or the purpose of (say) a cancer research establishment now: is it to maximise revenue from fake research? To avoid finding a cure? What is the function of a 'civil service'? Or, to take an example current at the time, the 'Focus Group' which appears to have been Jewish was funding Churchill to take Britain into war with Germany, so that Jews wouldn't lose their money-making capacities from Germany and elsewhere. Churchill didn't build up an organisation (as Napoleon III did). Nor did civil servants and politicians carry out their duties of checking on the nominal reasons Churchill wanted war. Russell's view of organisations resembles his view of nations: he thought of them as neat subsets with firm boundaries with members mostly working together, and had no place for interactions and secret overarching groups such as Freemasons and Common Purpose. Russell does not face the issue that organisations may work against their members: military commanders may plan deaths, media propagandists may wreck their employees' lives, teachers may spend a lifetime telling useless lies, employees may be forced to train foreign replacements, actors' unions may be more interested in promoting myths than increasing actors' pay.
      Russell wrote: 'In capitalistic enterprises there is a peculiar duality of purpose: on the one hand they exist to ... profits for the shareholders.' Perhaps this focuses on Russell's error: everybody has 'a duality of purpose'!
    Here's Russell on the British 'Labour Party': '... The [party] programme is decided in a manner which is nominally democratic, but ... influenced by a small number of wire-pullers. ... the leaders decide... whether they shall attempt to carry out the programme; if they decide not to do so, it is the duty of their followers to support their breach of faith by their votes, while denying, in their speeches, that it has taken place. ...' Russell chooses not to notice Jews and the 'Conservative Party'.

Russell tends to subtly smuggle in some implicit assumptions, usually I think where they support the traditional Anglo-Saxon comfortable myths. He says: 'Human beings['] ... desires, unlike those of bees in a hive, remain largely individual; hence ... the difficulty of social life and the need of government...' which all sounds very reasonable until reflection on groups, languages, customs, and learning cast doubt on 'individual desires': most people copy almost everything, such as food, housing, styles of dress, language, habits. And probably they copy modes of interpersonal relations too. Another implicit assumption is embodied in the word 'government': what about the results of invasions, attacks, pestilential criminal gangs, bombings, and violent imposed regimes? Are they 'governments'? He says '... the most successful nations, throughout modern times, have been those least addicted to the persecution of heretics ...' but Russia in 1910 or so had a very casual attitude to Jews in Siberia, such as Lenin: if the Russians had killed every one of them, Russia might have survived the coup and millions of lives might have been saved.
    Here's another implicit assumption: 'In times of peace all governments take steps ... to insure willingness to fight when the moment comes, and loyalty to the national cause at all times.' Russell has no place for treachery, loyalty to bribes, the 'national cause' as something subsidiary: consider for example Ireland giving up all it fought for for a few Jews in the time of the 'European' Union.
    And yet another widespread assumption: '... The advantages of successful war are doubtful, but the disadvantages of unsuccessful war are certain. If ... the supermen at the head of affairs could foresee who was going to win, there would be no wars. ... in every war the government on one side, if not both, must have miscalculated ...' Russell simply has no clue that subsets on one or both nominal sides might benefit from war, and want war.
    Here's Russell (at the end of the chapter 'Organizations and the Individual') on the 'national State', no doubt heavily influenced by the 'Great War' twenty years or so before: 'The contests of States ... are all-in contests. The whole civilized world was shocked by ... the murder of one Lindbergh baby, but such acts, on a vast scale, are to be the commonplaces of the next war ... No other organization rouses anything like the loyalty aroused by the national State. And the chief activity of the state is preparation for large-scale homicide. ...'
    Russell is dishonest about war; he simply will not recognise that some groups (not just technicians) want war. Here's a short extract from the earlier chapter Economic Power: ' ... A nation cannot succeed in modern war unless most people are willing to suffer hardship and many people are willing to die. .. to produce this willingness, the rulers have to persuade their subjects that the war is about something important—so important, in fact, as to be worthy of martyrdom. ...' In fact, powerful countries may lose little, or gain, from war; 'most people' are paid, in many cases more than in peacetime; and the probability of death is not very high.

Russell, as anyone trying to analyse the mid-term in human existence, has a view on the decline of civilisations. His two main examples are ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, though he knew about Haiti, and in pessimistic moments during the 'Great War' wondered about Europe. '... the relations of States. There are innumerable instances of small States growing into great empires by conquest, but hardly any of voluntary federation. For Greece in the time of Philip, and Italy in the Renaissance, some degree of co-operation between different sovereign States as a matter of life and death, and yet it could not be brought about. ...' 'In both ages, after ... about a hundred and fifty years, all were extinguished .. by more cohesive nations...' In fact, it's difficult to defend the idea that there were innumerable great empires; or that groups of invading looters were 'cohesive'.

XIV COMPETITION/ XV POWER AND MORAL CODES/ XVI POWER PHILOSOPHIES/ XVII THE ETHICS OF POWER
Four more chapters dealing with (roughly) people's attitudes to power. 'Competition for power is of two sorts: between organizations, and between individuals for leadership within an organization. Competition .. only arises when they have objects which are more or less similar, but incompatible'. Russell lived of course during a time of great expansion in technology; competition seemed inevitably to lead to absorption and unification. But he had no general formulation of the balance of forces which may prevent such monopolisation.

    'Competition' ought to be the most interesting chapter in Russell's book: he divides influences on people into propaganda, force, and economic influences, and competition can and does happen within each grouping, and also between them. But the chapter fails to work well; it's bitty, and deals only with a few historical events, and these are made to seem only end-points in the switch from one monopolistic group (Stuarts) to another (American industrialists).
    Here's Russell on ideas about competition in the 19th century: '... America [i.e. USA], with the longest Liberal tradition, was the first to enter the stage of trusts, i.e. of monopolies not granted by the State, like those of earlier times ... It was discovered that competition, unless artificially maintained, brings about its own extinction by leading to the complete victory of some one of the competitors. ... broadly speaking, where increase in size ... means increase of efficiency. ...etc..' Russell mentions Rockefeller; elsewhere he mentions Fisk and Gould, and Carnegie, like everyone else in the late 19th century. But Russell does not discuss monopolistic tendencies in finance; as always, he shies away or suppresses such material. He misses the entire movement for realism about Jews and about private central banks.

    The huge weakness in Russell on competition is that he lacks a large overview. Russell starts: 'The nineteenth century, which was keenly aware of the dangers of arbitrary power, had a favourite device for avoiding them, namely competition.' Taking the largest view, clearly any future generations are entirely derived from the contemporary groups of people; short of genetic engineering, there are no other sources. What effects can competition have on the entire human genetic structure? What's the point of shifting ownership from one group to another, if the net resulting effect leads to civilisations which are unsustainable by future people? Russell's discourses include competition in armed force (he thought 'German Nazis' 'proclaimed ... national war is the noblest of human activities') and propaganda (not just economics).
    He gives precise dates for 'freedoms desired by Liberals' (meaning Laissez faire; but excluding the Jewish component—USA 1776, England 1824-1846, France 1871, Germany 1848-1918; Italy the Risorgimento, and 'even in Russia' the February Revolution) and for 'freedom of propaganda... destroyed' (France 1793, Russia 1918, Germany 1933—again excluding the Jewish component. But the missing overview means Russell had mastered a lot of material, but not enough to make a full theory.

    'Power and Moral Codes' (the longest chapter) is Russell on (in effect) the spread of Christianity, or universal sympathy and ethics, a process he considers will continue until the world is conquered by it. Russell has nothing on the genetics and/or characteristics of groups; to some extent groups evolve to match their surroundings, and nominal belief systems may have little effect faced with nature's instincts. Moreover, Russell was aware via Santayana that ethics are not objectively provable. I think all this explains the unsatisfactory length and confusion of the chapter.
    It's interesting to find Russell is aware of Jews, at least in the Old Testament, and mentions Saul, king Agag of the Amalekites, and destruction of everything of the Amalekites, except for Agag and some cattle and goods, which were spared, and the regret of 'the Lord' over this lapse. (Deuteronomy vii 1-4 and 14, and 1 Samuel xv 8-11). Russell assumes the traditional model, that people are more or less similar, and that early Christians wanted to extend sympathy to the world, and encoded this view into Christianity. I don't think he ever compared this theory with Roman Christianity, with its endless wars.
    Just as Russell is unconsciously Christian, Russell is unconsciously nationalistic: his view of world government is that it has to be a federation of states, and considers this is obviously true for everyone. The idea of 'multicultural societies' is almost completely missing, though he notes that Roman Catholicism never worked out a theoretical separation from those things 'that are Caesar's'. Similarly, Russell doesn't deal well with empires, monarchs claiming rule over other kingdoms, multinational companies, forms of expertise which transcend nations, or elites which straddle other groups, including Jews. Since this sort of thing has always been fairly common, it's a serious omission. A related issue is Russell's underestimation of possible civil wars and civil strife.
    Here's a short extract, on wars, illustrating Russell's unconscious and unexamined assumption that nations are solid single units, which conflicts strongly with his view of 'man' as self-interested individuals and groups, rather atomised and with no obvious motive for cohering into large blocs:-
This passage looks finely analytical at first sight, but Russell has no logical space for such ideas as (i) Taking advantage of alliances which are not meant seriously (such as the announcements about Poland before the Second World War), (ii) Using military groups to make profit for other groups (such as invading China and the destruction during the opium wars, for Jews), and (iii) Wars as money-making schemes for Jews at the expense of their host country (such as the Vietnam 'War' to consolidate Jewish money power in the USA, under the guise of action by 'the USA', while damaging the host and damaging Vietnam and the Vietnamese in the most sordid and cruel fashion. Also the Jewish paper money system in Vietnam was presumably consolidated, and rents, land, companies, cheap labour, prostitution and so on captured by Jews).

Russell's absorption of anti-German propaganda is shown by his refusal to allow Hegel to admire communities, rather than individuals. He is always anxious to assert that a State (in Hegel, this might well be a city state) may be unpleasant. He even wrote (not in this book) that 'nothing could be worse than Hitler'. But of course the fact is some communal action is necessary to achieve very many ends that Russell wanted. It seems odd to find Russell supporting a version of something like hero worship, of chosen individuals. Russell may have regarded himself as a 'hero' in this sense: [1] He considered himself a pioneering mathematician. But others did not: George Spencer Brown, who visited Russell, was surprised to find Russell had that belief. [2] Russell regarded Christ as ethically supreme (I think) apart from a few details, such as being nasty to the Gadarene swine. Russell seems to have existed before the idea of 'comparative religion', which itself of course has been perverted. Buddhism seems to admire nirvana; Judaism and Islam are both viciously tribal; Confucius was family- and community-centred; novelties such as Christian Science and Mormonism don't promote love of everyone. But Russell admired ethical innovators of the type of Christ, and believed other people did, too. And this despite what he regarded as 2,000 years of Christian failure.

Russell uses the word 'ethics' in a muscular Christian/Jewish sense: the imperative tense, the ethical thing to do is such-and-such, and I know what it is; rather than an analysis of what 'ethics' means. He says
This is an updated utilitarianism, excluding happiness based on theft, violence, fraud, triumphant war, and so on. It assumes 'good things' are self-evident, and that 'adequate material well-being' is in fact possible. Lewis Fry Richardson (about ten years Russell's junior) may be nearer the mark when he looks at minimising violence, or maximising beauty, or minimising poverty, or maximising wealth per person, or maximising the number of souls, or maximising personal subjective happiness over a lifetime (my examples); or many other imaginable ideals.

Much of this material is 1930s-specific: Spanish Civil War, Stalin, Italy, and so on. Russell is surprisingly insular, and always takes the conventional 'western' side, i.e. 'liberals' plus 'Jews' (in quotations because of the Khazar connection) as against foreigners, something which sits very uneasily with supposed philosophical objectivity. He says nothing much about the 'British' Empire as it was called (i.e. the second, excluding the earlier north American empire), though it must have been a significant part of his worldview. (The 1924 Exhibition at Wembley was only about fifteen years earlier; in 1933 the Japanese walked out of the League of Nations, apparently protesting against the hypocrisy of the British retaining their own Empire). Good King Charles's Golden Days from the Vicar of Bray are mentioned; but the days were not golden for everyone. Thus there's a section on Mussolini fire-bombing in Abyssinia—but not on the British bombing Iraq at the same time. Russell doesn't attempt to distinguish the NSDAP (bottom up) from Italian Fascism (top down), in the conventional manner of doing everything possible not to analyse them. His comments on 'Jews' are completely conventional (and yet he had seen for himself 'Jewish' groups taking over and inventing the USSR, and knew about Bela Kun in Hungary and Kurt Eisner in Germany). Hitler and Stalin are regarded as worshipping Wotan and Dialectical Materialism (in this way Russell is spared the examination of their actual writings and deeds and associates; it's similar to 'oriental despotism', a phrase also used by Russell). Japan has 'dangerous thoughts' as a problem, but apparently nowhere else. Secret societies are attributed in particular to Italy—Freemasonry in France and Britain is ignored, despite being enormously more important. The Spanish Inquisition is frowned upon; and yet Spain was unique in having the problem of dealing with both 'Jews' and Muslims, both holding as a religious axiom a belief in telling lies. Russell is aware of power behind the scenes; but his only named example is Baron Holstein of the German Foreign Office under the Kaiser. Russell says Liberals and democrats led 'the revolt against Spain in Latin America'—when it was part of American imperialism. There are some references in Russell's oeuvre to sadism; note of course that idea is implicitly attributed to a Frenchman. His example of political assassination is by Napoleon III, not any of the numerous 'Jewish' murders, such as British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, over Jewish money and the then-new USA. 'It would be a mistake to suppose that big business, under Fascism, controls the State more than it does in England, France, or America. On the contrary, in Italy and Germany the State has used the fear of Communism to make itself supreme over big business as over everything else.' — 'communism' is, incorrectly, not attributed by Russell to 'Jews'. He loathes the German philosopher Fichte, giving a quotation on children made impassive by miseducation, and yet many British and especially Jewish 'thinkers' had essentially identical ideas. Fichte and Nietzsche are more or less pointed out as believing they are 'God', and yet the Talmud makes Jews and/or their priests God or his superior. His brief examination of fanaticism includes Biblical references, early Islam, Cromwell, and of course Germany, Japan, and Italy, but carefully avoids fanaticisms of the US and UK (British War with US? Opium Wars? US Civil War? British Empire? Boer Wars? Great War?) and in Talmudic writings. He quotes that Lutherans in Germany had an almost slavish subservience to state power, but does not point out the same thing as regards the Church of England. He says 'freedom of propaganda was destroyed' in France in 1793, Russia in 1918, and Germany in 1993, but has no idea of the extent of suppression by, for example, the BBC. He states that 'commerce has lost its importance' since the days of shipping and trading companies, concealing the way in which many commodities (such as oil) are subsumed under (for example) artificial countries and artificial leaders designed for the purpose.

XVI POWER PHILOSOPHIES
Philosophy being Russell's speciality, it might be expected that this chapter might hold special insights. He uses his phrase in a special sense: first, he states that philosophy is a combination 'of desire with observation'. What he means is that, at any time, some things are not known; and these are liable to be perceived through a subjective lens of one sort or another: desire for knowledge, for virtue, for enjoyment, for beauty, for mystical union, or whatever. But one such lens is the desire for power. Such a philosopher 'seeks to ... decry the part played by facts that are not the result of our own will. ... men who invent theories which veil their own love of power... .' This sounds odd to me; luckily Russell provides four examples: Fichte, who invented, or was said to have invented, German nationalism and who comes under prolonged attack from Russell, probably because he's German; pragmatist's attack on the common view of truth; Bergson, who said 'it is only in action that life can be understood'; and Nietzsche, who (Russell says) stated 'the herd have no value of their own account, but only as a means to the greatness of the hero'. Some readers will notice that at least two well known philosophies, or religions, which Russell does not mention, are explicitly power-based, though not even in any unconscious sense.

Russell appears to misrepresent Fichte. Fichte 'maintains that everything starts from the ego'. And the reader is supposed to say 'Everything starts from Johann Gottlieb Fichte! How absurd!...'. But of course each separate individual has his or her own ego; it's hard to see how evolution could lead to anything else. Anyway, Russell writes 'In this way [i.e. mutual delusion] it is possible for solipsism to become the basis for a certain kind of social life. A collection of lunatics, each of whom thinks he is God, may learn to behave politely to one another. But etc'. To people brought up with most religions tucked away in their background, this seems idiotic. However Jews believe, or say they believe, that they, or Rabbis, are 'God'. A collection of lunatics, indeed.

However, Russell thinks Hitler believed himself to be Wotan, and Stalin 'Dialectical Materialism'. These of course are a long way from his list of rather ineffectual philosophers; Joad, Russell's media-savvy but low quality contemporary, perhaps was nearer the mark with his comment The .. notion of the influence exercised by philosophers upon .. events appeared to me to be arrant nonsense, which nobody who had ever spent five minutes with an accredited philosopher.. could seriously entertain for one moment.... Russell was feeling for something—dislike of cruelty or militarism, perhaps—but did not pin it down in this chapter. And part of his failure was undoubtedly due to his lack of understanding of Jewish extreme tribal ethics, and its extension to Islam.

XVII THE ETHICS OF POWER
It took me some time to understand that many of these chapters are not part of a chain of argument; they are stand-alone, like modules in modern universities, and have the same effect of handily permitting connections to be not drawn. This chapter lists some policies which (in Russell's view) lead to well-ordered communities. Russell has a touching naïveté, lacking in anthropological insight. He considers people who have not been badly treated when young are nearly always satisfied by a career. He doesn't seem to appreciate that wars and so on are, in fact, often started by people who are very 'comfortable' in the material sense. At least, he doesn't appreciate it in this chapter: but in another chapter he knows perfectly well that vast numbers of sons of Muslim leaders had wars with each other. And he assumes a European pattern of education and achievement and career structure, which seems unlikely to apply to primitive peoples, and must have seemed just as unlikely at the time, to Russell. In other writings he stated that democracy couldn't work in Africa—he made fun of Lloyd George for thinking it could.

Russell considers men who are attracted into war because it needs skill, for example in 'bomb throwing'. (This was written before mass heavy bombing). And in effect says men should be offered careers which are unlikely to result in net harm. I don't think he thought this through: his friend J M Keynes helped in the financing of the 'Great War', in effect by getting indebted to Jews in the USA, but Russell doesn't consider Keynes as an example of a careerist attracted into war.
    The rest of the chapter concerns logic: Russell liked Leibniz on 'compossibility', and produces examples, such as: 'Perhaps in time there will be a population in which everybody is fairly intelligent, but it is not possible for all to secure the rewards bestowed on exceptional intelligence'.

XVIII THE TAMING OF POWER
Russell has a page or so on the unsolved problem of power, giving historical examples of the traditional educated type: Confucius, Greek cities' tyranny and democracy etc, theocracies, and so on. It's striking how the 'hostile elite' idea is completely missing, unless 'oligarchy' is counted. Russell asks (in effect) how can cruelties and oppressions be stopped?

Russell has four preconditions—political, economic, and propaganda (shouldn't one of these be force?); and the psychological condition of people. There are about fifteen pages on these preconditions, and arguably they are the most important in the book. Russell sketches out what's needed for worldwide justice and progress.
    At least, that's the idea. In fact, the sections are lists of problems, rather than solutions:
I. POLITICAL CONDITIONS [to 'tame power']. Virtually all of this section is on democracy. However, this is of course an arithmetical issue: the bigger a population, the less 'power' on average each person has. Russell lists a lot of problems with democracy, including minorities with power over majorities, and majorities with power over minorities. In fact, he gives so many examples it's clear that 'democracy' has not been defined. It looks very much like a word without denotation. The thorny problems of democracy—the issues of technical competence, of simple lack of interest, of the fake forms of propagandized 'democracy'—are not even mentioned. One of his post-1945 books talks of England as a 'full democracy', rather astonishingly.
    The end of the section has a characteristically Russellian statement (based on considerations of policing) '.. a confession shall never, in any circumstances, be accepted as evidence.' And he says 'there must be two police forces and two Scotland Yards, one ... to prove guilt, the other to prove innocence..'
II. ECONOMIC CONDITIONS. Here's one of Russell's attitude which persisted through his life; there is similar wording in many of his books. 'Marx pointed out that there could be no equalization of power through politics alone [i.e. democracy] while economic power remained monarchical or oligarchic.' Many people must have puzzled over this; after all, if people have a vote, they can vote on economic issues, can't they? In fact this is part of the Jewish push to avoid discussion of Jewish high finance: Sidney Webb brushing aside 'currency cranks' illustrates the point. And it shares with many 'social scientists' the omission of actual physical bodily and mental needs.
    Russell wants state ownership, but hedged with democratic safeguards, giving a long extract from Assignment in Utopia by Eugene Lyons describing the USSR, failing to identify the crucial Jewish activity. Russell considers 'economic activity' to be what big corporations did. He assumes without proof that private ownership with safeguards is worse than state ownership with safeguards. He has nothing to say about the structure of corporations, beyond quoting descriptions. He says little about housing, purely I think because it's not obviously manufacturing and trade and business. And yet of course housing is an essential part of 'economics', with its own special rules. This section is not at all convincing or helpful.
III. PROPAGANDA CONDITIONS. This section is much shorter than the previous section on economics, but is just as unsatisfactory. Russell makes the usual comments on agitation, without breaches of the law. But the really serious issues, including which records should be open to the public, are not addressed. Russell regarded the BBC as a paragon of virtue, most of the time. Then as now, this is staggeringly naive. Russell believed advertisers led the way in modern propaganda, though of course there are huge limitations to the success of commercial advertising. As with Chomsky's Media Control: the Staggering Achievements of Propaganda, Russell concentrates on selling domestic items, not on selling wars, death, and disaster.
IV. PSYCHOLOGICAL AND EDUCATIONAL CONDITIONS. '.. Every man and woman in a democracy should be neither a slave nor a rebel, but a citizen..' Russell wants people to be kindly and unfanatical, and educated to be critical. He has an entire page on the desirability of exposing children to different and conflicting points of view. In fact, he seems to have omitted material on Jew realism all his life. (And I wonder whether he tried this on his own children; from what I could see, his daughter Kate Russell had no interest in such things, mainly wanting to romantically 'marry well', and later 'divorce well'). Russell thought advertisers led the way in propaganda, and that newspapers present opposite views from which the truth could be detected. His attitude to ordinary people dated from the start of the Great War in 1914. He knew people were excitable, and frantically applauded the future destruction, and their own deaths, resulting from supposedly glorious war; he knew this—because he'd read Jewish correspondents in newspapers. The sheer magnitude of Jewish lies was a closed book to him. And he had no idea of the length of time spent preparatory to wars: the 19th century English press had anti-German and anti-Russian propaganda on permanent drip-feed. As for kindliness in education, this was not wanted by the people, probably mostly Jews, who wanted war and white deaths. In effect, state education took over from the Church of England (and German equivalents) as a distributed system by which vast numbers of propagandised teachers in turn propagandised their classes.

Russell had some mathematical skill, so it surprises me he didn't to find try some method of predicting quarrels and perhaps countering them. If group A has power measured as 100 units, and B has 75, and if A fights B, the relative and absolute power balances are likely to change. There's scope for group C to benefit, too. Could two groups always gain by combining? Is there some cost-benefit rule that determines likely alliances? Or is there maybe some approach through set theories, and the showing-up of intersecting sets? Does genetics of human populations help show how exceptional characters affect things?—Russell wrongly assumes all human communities have identical abilities and characters. All minorities are in a sense opposed to everybody else; what is the best balance between assertion of minorities and general interests?
    Russell's atomistic analysis omits the whole problem of complicated human life: there seems no reason why human groups should cohere, or co-operate. He falls back on such ideas as beliefs in common, sentiments of community, but seems to underrate (for example) Hegel, for praising communities or city states. Maybe his upbringing left him feeling lonely and isolated. Throughout his book there's belief in isolated great men which allows him (for example) to claim that makers of revolutions are very different characters from their successors, as a revolution becomes traditional: he has no idea there *may* be a constant pressure behind the scenery and puppet actors.
      Another omission (very common in people educated on traditional lines, probably in all countries with educational institutions) is what could be called analysis of cryptocracies, mysterious or concealed groups. 'Educated' people don't like to admit they have gaps in their knowledge. For most of human life, people must have lived in smallish groups with little awareness beyond their own senses, unaware even that other languages existed. Such events as invasions, press gangs, taxes, battles, and the actions of remote groups of aristocrats could, presumably, not have been understood in any detail. Cryptic regimes must have been common, not necessarily in any sinister sense: many people must have found later in life that their schooling, housing, work and so on had aspects which they didn't know at earlier times in their lives. But true cryptocracy goes deeper—and its practitioners typically are never able to reveal their methods. It must be one of the tragedies of, for example, the Rothschilds, that they can never write honest autobiographies.
    Russell's approach has something in common with 'classical' economics. He certainly seems in need of something like a 'marginal revolution', recognising the importance of changes in power, rather than absolute power. After all, everyone proceeds step by step.
    Russell liked history, and the great advantage of history as a guide, as in Power, is that the events did actually happen—but only if it's reliable history. Nobody uses a theoretical model of human behaviour to guess. But Russell was naive about historians. Russell conforms to the Victorian English view of world history: ancient times; then Greece and its splendour; then Rome and its great (if unintellectual) empire; then—well, the Middle Ages; then the Renaissance, Reformation, and modern Europe. The rest of the world is almost elided away: Russell says nothing about Arabia and its vast slave trade with Africa; nothing about Huns, Mongols, and other migrating tribes and groups; nothing about Turks and the Ottoman Empire; nothing about the Byzantine Church despite its longevity; nothing about the Dutch East India Company; almost nothing about China; a few comments by Rivers on primitive societies.
    Russell's own mock obituary (1936; written after Russell's 60th birthday, and before Power) predicted a BBC organ would describe him as 'the last survivor of a dead epoch.' Unfortunately, he was more or less correct; there is nothing new in this 'new social analysis'. Considering changes such as air warfare, Russell's words were not new, and not even analytical.
    Anyway; disappointing and tantalising. Russell saw that 'abstraction' is better than piecemeal oddments. His attitude is shown by a passing remark in his book on relativity, to the effect that finance is abstract: a financier just has to know if prices will go up or down—a passive view of finance. He considers that Einstein's work was synthesis, in an age of analysis. We can see here how Russell, whose practical skills were zero, was led astray by a Platonic view of ideas of perfection: no doubt, as with structural engineers, abstraction succeeds, leaving architects to decorate. But simple description is not enough: Russell outlines and describes such things as corporations and aristocracies and modern life in modern countries, but doesn't explain how they happened, or why they did not happen in very many places. Russell describes organisations, from chess clubs and racehorse owners to police and big business, but none of these are the same as governments, which may have activities straddling all these things. This is not abstraction; it is more like distraction.

Power needs updating, and in fact rebuilding, with revised human biology, revised history, notably of the 500-year war of 'Jews', a revised approach to what 'power' means and its categories, and revised examples both in time, and from around the world. Russell is in the long European tradition, stretching back to the penetration of Jewish influences after the Americas were discovered. He is about 500 years out of date.

    Something Missing... An important part of the world, but entirely missing from Russell, is the way hierarchies react together. I'll try to illustrate with several examples, chosen to be diverse:
  [1] Business and company hierarchies: new employees see companies in a different way from long-term employees. Dissatisfied employees may see self-employment as an ideal: but people starting self-employment may need to build, or be part of, new organisations. In either case, there's a difference between people at different levels: at the highest level, decisions may involve selling the entire structure, moving it somewhere else, or otherwise doing things which mid-range people may well never even think about.
  [2] If populations in countries increase over time, new possibilities come into being, such as taking account of types of people who previously were too few to take into account. For example, in medicine, diseases may be discovered which only a few people have.
  [3] If countries are controlled by people concerned with conquest, there are obvious possibilities for alliances, any of which may have very difficult details to work through. And there are possibilities for tariffs, boycotts, dumping, promotion of crime, moving of populations.
  [4] Russell has a straightforward view of legal systems: parliament makes and unmakes laws, some people study law, some practitioners are better than others, fines make actions unattractive, some practitioners are struck off, the police are a separate hierarchy (and, according to Russell, there should be another Scotland Yard collecting evidence of innocence). But he's not good on the way laws can and do embody other groups' wishes.
Russell classifies human power in various types (usually as described in traditional history books) but has, in my view, little to say about the way the resulting chains and tangles of people and colleagues interact.

Russell on expulsions of Jews; a serious error which persisted probably up to the use of Internet. Two quotations (from Chapter X: Creeds as Sources of Power) illustrate:

... [Roman Catholic] Fanaticism ... brought about the decay of Spain, first through the expulsion of the Jews and Moors, and then by causing rebellion in the Netherlands and the long exhaustion of the Wars of Religion. ... —Russell assumes that Jews and Moors worked for 'Spain', rather than what they thought were their own interests. And Russell has no idea that secret Jew support assisted the invention and assistance of 'Wars of Religion'.
... The Nazis have exiled most of the ablest Germans, and this must, sooner or later, have disastrous effects upon their military technique. It is impossible for technique to remain long progressive without science, or for the science to flourish with no freedom of thought. ... —this canard continues, and in fact Jewish propaganda on the myth of nuclear weapons must have been designed to assist. In fact, after Jews were partly expelled from Germany as colonizers, German science BENEFITED, to such an extent that only a few years later the Jews' wartime puppets stole innumerable patents from Germany.
      This myth about Jews obviously applied to the USSR, but in addition must apply in the USA, something I only recently noticed. Cell biology and electron microscopy, medicine generally where empiricism failed (cancer etc), specialised money-making frauds and harms (AIDS, polio, SARS, salt, addictive drugs, COVID ...), faked psychology, teaching, 'nuclear physics' and things like NASA , energy studies, deliberate endless lies about history and religions. One of the functions of 'Nobel Prizes' is to pretend American Jews have been intellectual contributors. The main hugely expansive field has been digital electronics, though I doubt Jews played much of a part. Top of Page