Bertrand Russell's Political Fantasies:

...But the italicized sentence that I quoted from Russell is not contained in the four paragraphs he cited...

...It lived up very faithfully to those it concluded with Nazi Germany until Hitler turned against it...

...It is difficult for me to imagine that Russell himself seriously believes this...

...Hook for this...

...Everybody knows that neither the U.S...

...Until disarmament under effective controls is achieved, this deterrent is our best guarantee of peace...

...Russell knows perfectly well that I have as little love for Franco as he had for the Kaiser, or presently has for Khrushchev...

...The most recent illustration of Soviet reliability were the promise to live up to the Geneva summit agreements of 1955...

...In the same issue, I labelled this a retreat from his original position...

...I still recall the rage with which, fists clenched, he stood over me and...

...is pledged to come to the aid of its allies if they are attacked, but this does not commit it to the use of the ultimate deterrent in response to any act of aggression...

...I wrote: "Retaliation would be a function of the kind of weapons the enemy himself used...

...Before embarking upon controversial matters, I will emphasize the extent of agreement by repeating a statement, the first three paragraphs of which were originally made to the American Nobel Anniversary Committee and subsequently published, with the addition of the last paragraph, in many countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain...

...We would say to the Kremlin, in the words of Denis Healey: 'If you move, we will hit you so hard that it will hurt you more to keep on fighting than you can possibly gain by persisting in aggression.' " My sole criticism of Russell was for his political folly in proclaiming: "I am for controlled nuclear disarmament, but, if the Communists cannot be induced to agree to it, then I am for unilateral disarmament even if it means the horrors of Communist domination" (my italics...

...History has its strange and small ironies...

...But such efforts have almost always failed...

...It is extremely unlikely that the Soviet Union will use hydrogen weapons in a surprise attack on Western Europe for three reasons: (1) It would like to absorb Western Europe s people and resources...

...Otherwise the Red Armies would overrun Europe in the sanguine expectation that no one could seriously resist them...

...This reaction will be a function of how the attack is made and with what weapons...

...Nor do I need ambiguous lessons from The Merchant of Venice, in which Communists are cast as a new oppressed minority, to convince me that they belong to the human race...

...He also wrote: "The argument that you cannot negotiate if you announce in advance that, if pressed, you will yield, is entirely valid...

...The first, already mentioned, is the existence of free institutions, which makes violations risky in the West, and the absence of such institutions in the USSR, which makes violations safe...

...This is as true now as it was when Hitler was running amuck...

...On the other hand, because Communists are human beings and Bolshevik-Leninists, once the fear of deterrence is completely removed, as Russell proposes, there is good reason to believe that they will move to carry out their program of world domination...

...Then what is the point, in this context, of his litany of Western failings and his continuous reminder of what no one disputes, least of all me, that the West is not perfect...

...For my whole argument is based on the simple view that as human beings Communists love life as dearly as we do, and that therefore they will not deliberately risk total war if they know it means destruction for themselves as well as their victims...

...nor the USSR will disarm unilaterally...

...I called this position foolish and irresponsible because it tended to create the very situation in which we may have to choose between outright capitulation to Communism or war...

...In his reply to me, Bertrand Russell for the most part is battering against wide open doors...

...To counterpose against the brutal suppression of cultural freedom in Communist countries a suggestion by Russell's publisher—which he was completely free to decline!—to drop a phrase about rich men's sons (we have said much worse about the sons of the rich as well as their fathers...

...I criticized this sentence once more in my rejoinder (also NL, May 26, 1958) on the ground that it flatly contradicted the very paragraphs Russell cited, as well as his profession of agreement with me...

...fails to keep an agreement in order to avoid world war, this would indicate its will to peace...

...That despite his knowledge he can bring himself to write in this vein is a measure of the distance our world has come and of the decline in the political morality of "the choice and master spirits of this age...

...3) It would face retaliation from the United States...

...The U.S...

...Will Russell deny this...

...Russell charges me with a second misrepresentation because I declared that his advice was addressed to the West, not to the East...

...It came into existence because the nations of Western Europe requested it, and as a direct consequence of Soviet aggression...

...If he does, I shall make a public apology to him...

...The fact is, however, that until I criticized his statement to Joseph Alsop...

...The question of whether either would be wise to do so is, therefore, no more than an exercise in theoretical ethics...

...bellowed: "The Kaiser would just love to hear Russell's denial of these German atrocities...

...if he cannot, he owes me one...

...That neither the victim nor his oppressor is free from evil does not wipe out the different degrees of guilt between the butchers of Budapest and the Freedom Fighters they slaughtered: nor...

...But of the many Soviet citizens who must have participated in this ghastly affair, not one has so far come forward to testify...

...He taxes me with assuming that the West "is wholly virtuous and the other side is wholly base...

...whether it lives up to its NATO agreements or not...

...To equate that possibility with actual violations of agreements by the USSR in order to go to war is to overlook a not unessential difference...

...Hook's article...

...The second is the record of past experiences, which should not be lightly disregarded...

...except with reference to Russell's jibe that Franco perhaps "would have no objection to anything that Hook wished to say...

...This was in connection with my contention that means exist in the West which permit citizens to denounce violations of agreements by their governments, but that such means are lacking in the Soviet Union...

...Was I guilty of "misrepresentation" in doing so...

...No one consulted me about whether he should be made a military ally of the West...

...On the other hand, Englishmen can denounce what happens in Cyprus, Frenchmen what happens in Algeria, Americans what happens in the South...

...Russell's rebuttal, (NL, July 7-14, 1958) begins as follows: "My discussion with Sidney Hook in your pages has not given a clear picture of what my position is...

...As his previous characterizations of the United States show, he wishes to persuade us that there is not such a great difference in degree of freedom between East and West as to justify defending our freedom against attack...

...For were the Kremlin assured we would unilaterally disarm if it refused reasonable controls, its resolution to refuse would harden...

...Once before the Kremlin refused to accept reasonable controls when the Dean Acheson-David E. Lilienthal proposals were made in 1948...

...The Kremlin, significantly, does not interpret Secretary of State Christian Herter's statement as Russell does...

...And sometimes efforts are made to stifle it...

...The reasons are obvious...

...Whatever we know of Soviet horrors has come first from Soviet escapees or defectors, not from criticisms of the Soviet regime by its own citizens at home...

...what is more relevant, between the regimes of Communist terror and democratic regimes which have failed, say, to abolish the harsh laws against homosexuality...

...But when Goeb-bels attacked the West's protests against Nazi genocide and concentration camps as self-righteous hypocrisy because of the West's practices of segregation, Russell treated this comparison with the intellectual contempt it deserved —though these practices are much worse than any Russell has presently enumerated...

...will fulfill its NATO agreement, then use this doubt to impugn America's "self-righteous assurances"—and at the same time hope that the U.S...

...I never dreamed that one day Russell himself would descend to the same level of controversy...

...But Franco at present is not threatening the peace of the world...

...the promise to withdraw Soviet troops from Budapest in 1956, and the promise of safe conduct to Premier Imre Nagy when he took refuge in the Yugoslav Embassy...

...In order that readers may judge what the real issue is between Bertrand Russell and me, and to determine who is misrepresenting whom, I call attention to the following facts: In my article "A Foreign Policy for Freedom and Survival" (NL, April 7, 1958), which provoked Russell's first reply, I argued for a policy of disengagement in Europe, for the military neutralization of a united Germany under guarantees, and for a strategy of graduated deterrence if the USSR violated these guarantees...

...Because I put the defense of freedom first, as the best way to preserve both peace and freedom, I am a fanatic...

...That he should convert this abstract possibility into one so probable as to justify "considerable doubt" that the U.S...

...After all, there is nothing remote or academic about this possibility...

...I challenge Russell to produce the evidence I am mistaken about this...

...And at that time Russell urged an all-out preventive war against the Soviet Union with atomic weapons...

...I have little more to say...

...I am not saying that the Soviet Union violated all its treaties...

...It will be seen that this statement is very similar to the first part of Dr...

...Let us grant now and for all time to come that none of us is free from fault or guilt...

...One could fill pages listing the non-aggression treaties and other major agreements the Soviet Union has violated since 1939, when it sent its troops into Poland in conjunction with Hitler...

...Nothing is "wholly" anything, but in all these judgments it is a matter of degree...

...Hook realizes...

...Not only was it a retreat—it was a disingenuous retreat because the proposition in question is emphatically not an academic exercise in theoretical ethics...

...Nonetheless, despite the fact that the lines from The Merchant of Venice, quoted by Russell, held true for the Nazis, too, it would not have been unreasonable even for a non-absolutist to distrust them as Russell, in common with many others, did in 1939...

...He changed his views because the hydrogen bomb was invented...

...Fortunately, Russell is wrong about NATO...

...When I was a boy it was Bertrand Russell's Justice in War Time, together with the Socialist literature of the day, which inspired me with strong sentiments against American participation in World War I. One day I quoted from Russell's book in a high-school class whose teacher was an ardent Anglophile of English descent...

...But whether his views then or now are considered wise or unwise, right or wrong, they were no more academic propositions in theoretical ethics in 1958 than they were in 1948...

...Because he puts peace first, peace at any price including freedom, he is a man of moderation...

...The last is the decisive consideration...

...It has a decided practical bearing, both cognitive and emotive, on the policy we should adopt if the Kremlin refuses to accept nuclear controls...

...Russell began his first reply to me with these sentences (NL, May 26, 1958) : "Dr...

...Let me restate the relevant point...

...2) The wind currents are too capricious and Communist Europe itself might suffer from fall-out...

...When I asserted that if there is an agreement between East and West, we can rely on the West keeping it but we cannot rely on the East, and therefore need adequate inspection, I was not speaking in absolutes but only-making a common sense probability judgment based on two main considerations...

...He has forgotten how many things we have jointly protested against in the West, not only the Suez expedition, in which the United States was blameless, but the enforced relocation of the Japanese during World War II and many other shameful actions...

...will be guilty of what he suspects—is to damn the U.S...

...I have been led into a purely academic issue as if it were one of practical politics...

...It is now commonly believed, even in Poland, that the Katyn massacres were the work of the Soviets...

...Russell's other illustrations of the West's shortcomings with respect to freedom exhibit the same lack of balance...

...The motivation is clear...

...Sidney Hook's article contains much with which I am in agreement—more, I think, than Dr...

...Russell issued no correction of that interview, despite the world hullabaloo about it...

...So much for the first "misrepresentation...

...Russell has asked me to note that he has not said that there is as much freedom in the East as in the West...

...I do not blame Dr...

...Subsequently, Russell used his rejoinder to me to generalize his argument and to give the same advice to blocs A and B. In my last article (NL, April 11), I was referring not to his views on disarmament but to his criticisms of Communist terror, and claimed that despite the fact that the screws of repression in the USSR were not so tight now as under Stalin, these views of Russell were not being published there...

...Where he and I disagree is as to the advisability of an ultimate resort to nuclear war if the Communist powers cannot be contained by anything less...

...I COME NOW to the present phase of Russell's argument...

...That Russell can balance against the long list of perfidious violations of its treaty obligations by the USSR the possibility that the United States may renege on its NATO pledge, is a striking piece of political il-logic...

...One need only compare the outcry in England against the Suez adventure with the absence of a single public protest in the USSR against Soviet repressions in Hungary to grasp the essential difference...

...To be sure, there is not enough criticism...

...We know how these promises were kept...

...After all, if the U.S...

...Nazi Germany, too, abided by some treaties...

...I also await evidence that I am wrong about this...

...to counterpose against the grim system of Soviet legal tyranny the laws against dispensing contraceptive information in Massachusetts and elsewhere, makes one wonder whether Russell is now totally bereft of a sense of proportion, as well as humor, in political matters...

...I have been as severe a critic as he of evils in the West and of illiberal aspects of its foreign policy...

...If I were to approve of his becoming an ally (better a "co-belligerent"), it would be on precisely the same grounds that Russell himself approved of making an ally of Stalin—a much worse dictator than Franco—to stop Hitler...

...Before April 7. 1958, Russell had not written anywhere, and certainly not for any Soviet organ, a single line advising the Kremlin that if the West refused reasonable controls of disarmament, the Kremlin should disarm unilaterally, even if this meant the triumph of democracy and all its evils...

...But Henry Kissinger has observed that a football game can also be lost by five-yard gains as well as by one long end run...

...I can assure Russell that Franco objects to a great deal I have said about him and his regime from the day he revolted against the Spanish Republican Government...

...Russell denies this...