Friday 11 March 2011

Bertrand Russell and racism - the Pharisee of the drawing room

Bertrand, Earl Russell was one of the more hypocritical of the thinkers of the Left.

Living a life of ease and comfort due to mere circumstances of birth, he nevertheless claimed to believe in neither. He even claimed to be a "liberal" (i.e. Leftist) because his ancestors were!

Russell's ancestors were those same Russells who had seized upon the property of the monasteries, enriching themselves at the expense of the poor and becoming the new, dominant men of the Tudor period, avaricious, greedy, narrow, cunning, sly, anti-Catholic thieves, robbers and murderers.

These were the "liberals" Russell seemed to be proud of descending from.

Russell himself seemed incapable of seeing the irony of his being proud to descend from such scoundrels whilst claiming, himself, to be a champion of right. In fact, he resembled his hypocritical ancestors all too well.

John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford,
the ancestors of the Russells, who enriched himself from the monasteries and the patrimony of the poor, he helped suppress the Catholic Pilgrimage of Grace, and was a friend of the odious Thomas Cromwell. On the dissolution of the greater monasteries Henry VIII granted him lands and properties of the Cistercian Abbey at Dunkeswell, Devon, the Abbey of Tavistock, Devon, and the kitchen garden of Westminster Abbey, which is now the site of Covent Garden. He was created Earl of Bedford on 19 January 1549 for persecuting and murdering Catholics, smashing religious statues and relics, and for promoting heresy. A perfect ratbag, he died in his bed.



Bertrand Russell purported to champion women but did not scruple to leave a trail of destruction behind his numerous marital infidelities.

He began (inevitably) by supporting the Communist revolution until it turned into what anyone with common sense (which ruled out Russell) could see it would turn into - a bloodbath.

As to race, he was, like Marx, a racist.

Here are a couple of choice quotes:

"In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one race to another[...] It seems on the whole fair to regard Negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart from the question of humanity) would be highly undesirable".

Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals, 1929, p.266.

He was a supporter of birth control for eugenic reasons, sharing this particularly odious view with Hitler and the Nazis.

On 16 November 1922, for instance, he gave a lecture to the General Meeting of Marie Stopes' Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress on "Birth Control and International Relations," in which he described the importance of extending Western birth control worldwide so as to avoid an encroachment of the non-white races.

His views prefigure those of the population control movement of the 1960s but their origins lie deep in the so-called "racial hygiene" movement that inspired the Nazis.

Marie Stopes.
Butter wouldn't melt in the mouth of this enthusiastic Nazi-sympathiser and eugenic campaigner for "racial hygiene" and the "elimination" of "inferior" races.


It was no accident that Marie Stopes was an enthusiast for Nazism, nor that the funder of research that resulted in the contraceptive pill, Margaret Sanger, was also an enthusiast for Nazism.

Sanger even lectured on birth control to the women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan (e.g. at in Silver Lake, New Jersey in 1926) as she admitted in her autobiography Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1938, pp. 361, 366–7.

Margaret Sanger, eugenicist, racist and enthusiast for Nazism.


In 1935 Stopes attended the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin, held under the Nazi regime. Even other birth-control enthusiasts, such as Havelock Ellis, admitted Stopes was anti-Semitic.

She was, indeed, a personal and political devotee of Adolf Hitler, once writing to him thus:

“Dear Herr Hitler, Love is the greatest thing in the world: so will you accept from me these (poems) that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them?”

Her son, Dr Harry Stopes-Roe, is an advocate of euthanasia and, along with Richard "Dorky" Dawkins, a Vice-President of the British Humanist Association which rejects any idea of God.

Now let's hear what Russell said:

"This policy may last some time, but, in the end, under it we shall have to give way — we are only putting off the evil day; the one real remedy is birth control, that is getting the people of the world to limit themselves to those numbers which they can keep upon their own soil... I do not see how we can hope permanently to be strong enough to keep the coloured races out; sooner or later they are bound to overflow, so the best we can do is to hope that those nations will see the wisdom of Birth Control.... We need a strong international authority."

- "Lecture by Bertrand Russell", Birth Control News, vol 1, no 8 (December 1922), p.2.

And the merchants of racism and death are still with us, alas, despite the defeat of Hitler and his thugs.


The logic of eugenics!

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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Another good post. It is a pity that you are perceived as to eccentric to be picked up by a wider audience.

Admin said...

Hear, hear. Russell was a sanctimonious bore from the same stable as AC Grayling and Polly Toynbee. At least he rejected the Russian Revolution, though, after he'd visited the place and met Lenin for himself.

Anonymous said...

What is an old reactionary like you doing supporting the absurd idea that the races of mankind are equal in intelligence?

Tribunus said...

Dear Anonymous (both of you, if there are two),

You need to free yourself from the slavery of propaganda and the illiberal bigotry of the so-called "Liberals" who are neither liberal nor free but the opposite.

That they currently rule in high places is nothing new.

They are the real eccentrics and reactionaries. They have no new ideas, just the same old hatred of truths they find inconvenient.

And the point of this post (did you miss it?) is that they are also hypocrites who pretend to be in favour of equality but actually are'nt.

Of course, they are racists. Russell is but one among many such hypocrites.

Welcome to the real world, my friend!

Anonymous said...

I am the first anonymous, not the second. Eccentric is not an insult, even though I left out an 'o'. I have not posted here for some time, as I felt you were rather unfair about my comment on the 1943 bombing of Hamburg. Nevertheless, keep up the good work.

Regarding an earlier post, I was most interested to read that George I was 58th in line for the throne. I had always thought that he was 3rd or 4th. Are you able to provide a list or a link to this? Only today I had a discussion with my younger son about the legitimacy of the Hanoverians.

Tribunus said...

Dear Anonymous,

I'm afraid I cannot remember what the Hamburg bombing commnet was to which you objected.

King George I was 56th in line to throne as you can see from the following link:

http://www.jacobite.ca/essays/1714succession.htm

Please do show it to your son, if he doubts the facts of history.

Thank you for reading.

All good wishes,


Trib