I'm reminded of an old truth: An extremely well-educated, highly intelligent man without Christ is an intellectual barbarian.
Posted on 02/19/2014 2:24:17 PM PST by BenLurkin
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Museum of Tolerance has acquired a 1937 letter written by Bertrand Russell in which the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher says if the Nazi army invades his native England the British should invite Adolf Hitler to dinner rather than fight.
...
“The fact of the matter is he had all the credentials. He probably was Britain’s greatest philosopher and won the Nobel Prize for literature after all,” Hier said. “But he didn’t understand a basic concept: that the idea that you allow evil to flourish under these conditions, that if we act nice to Hitler, serve him the best wine, that Hitler will come around to see things our way is just preposterous.”
Russell, one of the 20th century’s leading pacifists...
“We may win or we may lose,” he wrote. “If we lose obviously no good has been done. If we win we shall inevitably during the struggle acquire their bad qualities and the world at the end will be no better off than if we had lost.”
(Excerpt) Read more at losangeles.cbslocal.com ...
Bertrand Russell was a fraud who hated mankind as much as he hated himself.
Dr. Sidney Hook included in his autobiography his correspondence with Albert Einstein in the early 1950’s. Whether it was executing the Rosenbergs for atomic spying or going all kumbaya with Stalin over the H-bomb, Dr. Einstein was as naïve as a child in the woods.
Dr. Hook also thoroughly skewered Bertrand Russell for not only not being a pacifist, but for being a Red cheerleader desirous of communist victory from the Stalin era to the Korean War down to Ho Chi Minh.
Bolsheviks had definition of “Peace” that Pacifists supported: “An absence of resistance to Socialism.”
I'm reminded of an old truth: An extremely well-educated, highly intelligent man without Christ is an intellectual barbarian.
They lived in a rarified intellectual circle where as the chosen elites, they could smoke their pipes and stroke their chins, and actually believe that the "little people" would somehow be better off, with the enlightened overlords telling them what to do.
Not that different from today's liberals. They're smarter than you, and know what best for you.
I'm always stunned to think that George Orwell was an avowed socialist.
He had no idea just how influential his books would become, as shining examples of why socialism is the very WORST system.
He KNEW the true nature of socialism, but couldn't quite "accept" where it would lead.
Probably Aspergers Syndrome. A lot of highly intelligent individuals have this autistic spectrum disorder, which whilst not inhibiting their general intellect, does compromise their social skills and ability to understand and empathise with other people. Unfortunately, their powerful intellects often make them arrogant, and it blinds them to their own weaknesses when it comes to understanding people, which means they come out with monumentally retarded ideas like this without doubting themselves, even to the point where they probably actually believe they are so ingenious that any difference of opinion they might have with someone with simple common sense on these matters is down to the fact that they have an elevated understanding about the human condition, rather than a dangerously stupid and flawed one...
Museum of tolerance.
Tolerance is what lead to the Cambodian killing fields, Hitler’s ovens, and Stalin’s purges. Unless I hear the word “tolerance” when it comes to my beer consumption and engineering drawings it is a word that has led the world to mayhem.
Taller Ants?
I think them ants are tall enough
Ahead of his time—he would have gone to the camps had the Germans invaded—if not the gas chambers. Today, people think that by being nice the foes of freedom will also act kind. They see this only as weakness and will reply with bullets or a rifle butt to the head. Islam only wants all to become narrow minded Muslims like they are. they will not even tollerate liberal thinking Islamic people—they will behead them.
Bertrand Russell was a demented atheist. I wonder how he became appointed as some kind of intellectual authority.
Russell once said that the world would have been better off if the Jews had never existed.
Does this museum of tolerance hold this letter in high esteem of lofty goals to seek to attain or is it held up as a warning that sometimes such idealism would spell the doom of humanity?
Orwell changed a great deal over time. As a young man he wrote saccharine poetry as he fought alongside the Spanish socialists in that country’s civil war: “No bomb that ever bursts shatters the crystal spirit,” he wrote. (I think that’s from Homage To Catalonia)
But as an older man he saw where the Russian experiment with socialism, at least, had gone awry because of human nature itself. From this time in his life we get Animal Farm and of course Nineteen Eighty-Four. By this time Orwell knew all too well that he had been naive. Winston Smith protests to O’Brien in 1984 that the spirit of humanity will ultimately defeat The Party, but we know how Smith ended up. O’Brien taught him the future of humanity is a boot stomping on a human face, forever. Crystal spirit, shattered.
He remained a sort of socialist, but clearly of the “Swedish not Soviet” sort.
Maybe so, but the Swedes are becoming VERY weakened in their brand of socialism. And there are barbarians at their gate.
In fact, a huge number INSIDE their gate.
Sadly I think that their softness will be their downfall.
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