Philosopher, Pacifist, Radical: The Life of Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell was a lifelong pacifist and critic of warmongering imperialism...

Born on this day in 1872 in Monmouthshire, Russell was a scion of the Victorian aristocracy. His grandfather had been Prime Minister. His parents were a Viscount and Viscountess.
 
But Russell, over the course of his 97-year life, became a political radical.
 
After studying philosophy and maths at Cambridge during the early 1890s, Russell got a teaching post at the University. 
 
At that time, his views were broadly in line with the Liberals, which also meant support for the British Empire and its follies.
 
But that worldview began to crack during the Second Boer War of 1899-1902. 
 
Like many in Britain and the wider world, Russell saw the conflict in Southern Africa as a war of conquest. 
 
The British Empire began to appear to Russell less as a noble mission than a self-serving global tyrant.

In the years that followed, as Russell gained status as an academic philosopher at Cambridge, the forces of European imperialism which had bloodied Africa laid the ground for war in Europe, too. 
 
Russell was an isolated and determined critic of the First World War after it broke out in 1914. 
 
Besides a few radical groups, most of society supported the coming bloodbath, so Russell’s antiwar position took moral courage that few possess.
 
He spoke up for the rights of conscientious objectors, and persistently denounced the war as one of imperial profit masquerading as national interest. 
 
In 1916, Russell was even convicted under the Defence of the Realm Act for simply voicing opposition to the war. 
 
And in 1918 he spent 6 months in Brixton Prison after he spoke out against the U.S.A. joining the conflict, too.
 
In the years that followed WW1, Russell continued to practice politics alongside his academic career. 
 
He advocated women’s suffrage and gravitated further towards British socialism. 
 
But Russell’s North Star remained antiwar politics, and the anti-imperialism which came with it.

During the 1930s, Russell chaired the India League in London, working with Indian anticolonial activists to demand an end to the British Empire in South Asia.

Having opposed the politics of rearmament during the 1930s, Russell qualified his pacifism for the sake of World War Two, recognising that the Nazis posed an unprecedented threat which could only be met militarily. 
 
But afterwards, Russell continued his antiwar agitation. 
 
He denounced the British-led invasion of Nasser’s Egypt in 1956 as an imperialist farce. And during his final years, Russell was a leading voice of global opposition to the U.S. invasion of Vietnam.
 
He quit the U.K. Labour Party in 1965 over the mere possibility that its government might send troops to Southeast Asia in support of the American war, and he led calls for the prosecution of those responsible for war crimes in Vietnam during the 1960s. 
 
His very last public statement before his death on 2 February 1970 was to condemn Israel’s aerial bombardment of Egypt during the so-called ‘War of Attrition’ of 1967-70.
 
Since 1945, opposition to war now also meant opposition to nuclear war, and Bertrand Russell was the best-known anti-nuclear voice of the early Cold War. 
 
He worked with global luminaries like Albert Einstein to demand nuclear disarmament during the 1950s, and in the U.K. Russell co-founded the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1957. 
 
In 1967, Russell was once again jailed, fifty years after WW1, this time for his role in a mass anti-nuclear demonstration in London. 
 
Throughout his life, Russell spoke up for peace and democracy when it was most difficult to do so, and history vindicated him more often than not.