Russell received the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature and was cited as “the champion of humanity and freedom of thought.”

His emphasis on logical analysis influenced the course of 20th-century philosophy.

Organiser of the International War Crimes Tribunal

 

Bertrand Russell. 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS.

British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic.

 

Russell was a prominent anti-war activist; he championed free trade and anti-imperialism. Russell went to prison for his pacifist activism during World War I. Later, he campaigned against Adolf Hitler, then criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the United States of America's involvement in the Vietnam War, and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. Russell was the organiser of the Russell Tribunal also known as the International War Crimes Tribunal.

Born in Trelleck, Wales, on May 18, 1872, and educated at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. From an early age he developed a strong sense of social consciousness; at the same time, he involved himself in the study of logical and mathematical questions, which he had made his special fields and on which he was called to lecture at many institutions throughout the world. He achieved prominence with his first major work, The Principles of Mathematics (1902), in which he attempted to remove mathematics from the realm of abstract philosophical notions and to give it a precise scientific framework.

Russell then collaborated for eight years with the British philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead to produce the monumental work Principia Mathematica (3 volumes, 1910-1913) which became a masterpiece of rational thought.

 

PACIFIST AND SOCIALIST

Russell condemned both sides in World War I (1914-1918), and for his uncompromising stand he was fined, imprisoned, and deprived of his teaching post at Cambridge. In prison he wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), combining the two areas of knowledge he regarded as inseparable. After the war he visited the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, and in his book Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920) he expressed his disappointment with the form of socialism practiced there. He felt that the methods used to achieve a Communist system were intolerable and that the results obtained were not worth the price paid.

Russell taught at Beijing University in China during 1921 and 1922. From 1928 to 1932, after he returned to England, he conducted the private, highly progressive Beacon Hill School for young children. From 1938 to 1944 he taught at various educational institutions in the United States. He was barred, however, from teaching at the College of the City of New York (now City College of the City University of New York) by the state supreme court because of his attacks on religion in such works as What I Believe (1925) and his advocacy of sexual freedom, expressed in Marriage and Morals (1929).

Russell returned to England in 1944 and was reinstated as a fellow of Trinity College. Although he abandoned pacifism to support the Allied cause in World War II (1939-1945), he became an ardent and active opponent of nuclear weapons. He led a movement in the late 1950s advocating unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain, and at the age of 89 he was imprisoned after an antinuclear demonstration. He died on February 2, 1970.

 

PHILOSOPHER AND AUTHOR

In addition to his earlier work, Russell also made a major contribution to the development of logical positivism, a strong philosophical movement of the 1930s and 1940s. The major Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, at one time Russell's student at Cambridge, was strongly influenced by his original concept of logical atomism. In his search for the nature and limits of knowledge, Russell was a leader in the revival of the philosophy of empiricism in the larger field of epistemology. In Our Knowledge of the External World (1926) and Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1962), he attempted to explain all factual knowledge as constructed out of immediate experiences. Among his other books are The ABC of Relativity (1925), Education and the Social Order (1932), A History of Western Philosophy (1945), The Impact of Science upon Society (1952), My Philosophical Development (1959), War Crimes in Vietnam (1967).

 

INTERNATIONAL WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL

The Russell Tribunal, also known as the International War Crimes Tribunal was a public body organized by Russell and hosted by French philosopher and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre. Along with Ken Coates, Ralph Schoenman, and several others, the tribunal investigated and evaluated American foreign policy and military intervention in Vietnam, following the 1954 defeat of French forces at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and the establishment of North and South Vietnam.

Russell justified the establishment of this body as follows:

 

“If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.” —Justice Robert H. Jackson, Chief Prosecutor, Nuremberg War Crimes Trial The formation of this investigative body immediately followed the 1966 publication of Russell's book, War Crimes in Vietnam. Prompted in part by the My Lai massacre, in 1969 the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation organized Citizens Commissions of Inquiry (CCI) to hold hearings intended to document testimony of war crimes in Indochina. These hearings were held in several American cities, and would eventually form the foundation of two national investigations: the National Veterans Inquiry sponsored by the CCI, and the Winter Soldier Investigation sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The Russell Tribunal / International War Crimes Tribunal stated that its conclusions were:   Has the Government of the United States committed acts of aggression against Vietnam under the terms of international law? Yes (unanimously).   Has there been, and if so, on what scale, bombardment of purely civilian targets, for example, hospitals, schools, medical establishments, dams, etc? Yes (unanimously). We find the government and armed forces of the United States are guilty of the deliberate, systematic and large-scale bombardment of civilian targets, including civilian populations, dwellings, villages, dams, dikes, medical establishments, leper colonies, schools, churches, pagodas, historical and cultural monuments. We also find unanimously, with one abstention, that the government of the United States of America is guilty of repeated violations of the sovereignty, neutrality and territorial integrity of Cambodia, that it is guilty of attacks against the civilian population of a certain number of Cambodian towns and villages.   Have the governments of Australia, New Zealand and South Korea been accomplices of the United States in the aggression against Vietnam in violation of international law? Yes (unanimously).   The question also arises as to whether or not the governments of Thailand and other countries have become accomplices to acts of aggression or other crimes against Vietnam and its populations. We have not been able to study this question during the present session. We intend to examine at the next session legal aspects of the problem and to seek proofs of any incriminating facts.   Is the Government of Thailand guilty of complicity in the aggression committed by the United States Government against Vietnam? Yes (unanimously).   Is the Government of the Philippines guilty of complicity in the aggression committed by the United States Government against Vietnam? Yes (unanimously).   Is the Government of Japan guilty of complicity in the aggression committed by the United States Government against Vietnam? Yes, (by 8 Votes to 3). The three Tribunal members who voted against agree that the Japanese Government gives considerable aid to the Government of the United States, but do not agree on its complicity in the crime of aggression.   Has the United States Government committed aggression against the people of Laos, according to the definition provided by international law? Yes (unanimously).   Have the armed forces of the United States used or experimented with weapons prohibited by the laws of war? Yes (unanimously).   Have prisoners of war captured by the armed forces of the United States been subjected to treatment prohibited by the laws of war? Yes (unanimously).   Have the armed forces of the United States subjected the civilian population to inhuman treatment prohibited by international law? Yes (unanimously).   Is the United States Government guilty of genocide against the people of Vietnam? Yes (unanimously).

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Russell Quotations:

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

 

“I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”

 

“It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion.”

 

“Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.”

 

"The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was ‘given’ by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.” Message from Bertrand Russell to the International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo, February 1970.

 

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.”

 

“Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence; it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.”

 

“So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."

 

“Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindness in favour of systematic hatred.”

 

“The degree of one's emotions varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts.”

 

“The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.”

 

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

 

“The trouble with the world today is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

 

“There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.”

 

“One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.”

 

“Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour all their own.”

 

Are you never afraid of God's judgment in denying him?  "Most certainly not. I also deny Zeus and Jupiter and Odin and Brahma, but this causes me no qualms. I observe that a very large portion of the human race does not believe in God and suffers no visible punishment in consequence. And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence."

 

"All the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins."

 

Encarta, Encyclopædia Britannica, various Internet Sites.