Which reminds me, novelist/screenwriter Frederic Raphael really puts the boot into Russell in an April 8 LA Times review -- shameless in its pro-American sycophancy -- of Ray Monk's Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921-1970. Excerpt:
"Trying to repeat in old age what had made him a heroic martyr in 1916, Russell became a vieillard terrible. While his families crumbled into raging and suicidal dysfunction, he imagined that civil disobedience, with him at its head, could save the world from nuclear incineration. After Khrushchev was persuaded to refuse Fidel Castro nuclear weapons (to which Schoenman-Russell had previously argued that Cuba had a perfect right, though Great Britain did not), Russell was easily persuaded to regard himself as the savior of mankind. He resented any suggestion that Kennedy's steady nerve (and nuclear muscle) might have been more significant than his own busy tongue.
"Today's paucity of durable heroes is due in good part to publishing scoundrels, commissioned to dig the dirt on great men. The scrupulous Monk is not of their number. His disappointment in Russell is matched by his pity for him and for the lives he distorted, blighted or destroyed. Some British veterans of 1960s demos and sit-ins have resented Monk's failure to sustain the juvenile illusions that they acquired from Bertie, not least that America was the source of all evil and uniquely responsible for taking the world to the brink."
[Full text: http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Books-X!ArticleDetail-28362,00.html]
Carl
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