IT IS DOUBTFUL that many of the young to middle-aged Twitter-tots would recognize the name of Bertrand Russell but to lefties of my generation he was a hero, due to his secularist, anti-religious nonconformism, his reputation as a giant of logic, though few if any of us could follow him on that count, but, to me at least, for his role in the anti-nuclear movement of my youth and young adulthood.
I thought of something Russell said in the early 1960s when someone sent me a post from Baby Blue a little while ago slamming the hapless diplomat Michael McFaul for committing the recently created sin among those in-the-know - which I don't remember being a sin - of comparing Putin to Hitler. McFaul, quickly realizing he'd violated a rule that I don't remember being a rule until recently, apologized abjectly but, in the way of secularist in-the-knowism, there is no such thing as forgiveness and redemption for violating such rules. The condemnation of him has been something to behold.
I wonder what those in the online commentariat, untillectual class would have made of this.
“We used to think that Hitler was wicked when he wanted to kill all the Jews, but what Kennedy and Macmillan and others both in the East and in the West pursue policies which will probably lead to killing not only all the Jews but all the rest of us too. They are much more wicked than Hitler and this idea of weapons of mass extermination is utterly and absolutely horrible and it is a thing which no man with one spark of humanity can tolerate and I will not pretend to obey a government which is organising the massacre of the whole of mankind. I will do anything I can to oppose such Governments in any non-violent way that seems likely to be fruitful, and I should exhort all of you to feel the same way. We cannot obey these murderers. They are wicked and abominable. They are the wickedest people that ever lived in the history of man and it is our duty to do what we can.”
— Bertrand Russell
Would him saying that today get him on the list of those with Twitter cooties? The unforgivable? The forever damned?
It should always go without saying that Hitler was surpassingly evil, but other surpassingly evil men have also killed tens and scores of millions of People, done terrible things short of murdering, blighted lives and landscapes, continents and history. There is something surpassingly vulgar and unspeakably vile about excusing one of them as being less evil by denominating someone as the most evil. How are you supposed to do that? By the numbers murdered? Given the difficulty of figuring mass murders into the tens of millions, there are such estimates that would put Stalin and Mao ahead of Hitler in such a means of measurement.
Worse, is, of course, practicing Nazi thinking by giving a variable weight to the value of lives taken according to what group they were part of that got them placed on a list for extermination. And I think it's often done on the most Nazi like of thinking about race and ethnicity as rendering people unequal in value. Or, really, assigning People to the practice of valuation. That is something which Western intellectuals and scribblers and politicians have done, it is endemic to the kind of "enlightenment" thinking which Russell, as well found it hard not to practice.
It is why, as I've pointed out, some of my once fellow lefties could wax nostalgic over crap like the Progressive Labor Party and other Maoists who had their Maoist asses planted firmly and safely on the democratic United States as their hero, Mao, was planning and overseeing the murders of millions during the Cultural Revolution. That someone in the 2000s writing for what is taken as a respectable magazine could write about that moral atrocity in terms of nostalgia certainly proves that for them that the lives taken were not Europeans makes them of lesser value, if they even consider them worth considering.
I've pointed out that the great leftist historian Howard Zinn noted something like that about the Harvard historian and biographer of Columbus the initiator of the European genocide of the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere, Samuel Elliot Morrison.
Past the elementary and high schools, there are only occasional hints of something else. Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian, was the most distinguished writer on Columbus, the author of a multivolume biography, and was himself a sailor who retraced Columbus’s route across the Atlantic. In his popular book Christopher Columbus, Mariner, written in 1954, he tells about the enslavement and the killing: “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.”
That is on one page, buried halfway into the telling of a grand romance. In the book’s last paragraph, Morison sums up his view of Columbus:
"He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great—his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities—his seamanship."
One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.
But he does something else—he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important—it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.
No one will ever get me to believe that he would have done that if those enslaved, murdered and wiped out had been white, Western Europeans. He would not have figured that was an unimportant, though unfortunate detail of his life's story.
That is what's most dangerous about this, is that you can't make the claim that Hitler's surpassing evil was more suprassingly evil than that of Stalin or Mao without doing what was done in both of those cases, holding, tacitly if not explicitly, that some lives taken by dictators are more significant than those taken by other dictators. In the case of Putin in Ukraine, if his nuclear or biological or chemical weapons are used as we have every reason to believe he is contemplating as Russell warned about, he may be recreating or surpassing what Stalin did in the Holodomor, the genocide by starvation he mounted against Ukraine in the 1930s. I would bet that easily most of the Twitter-blog-rat crowd would have never heard of that before this year, if they have now.
May they all spend an aeon in hell for their evil. All of them. I won't dishonor any of the victims by ranking their killers as less-evil-than.
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