whining notwithstanding The news from home in the papers is the worst part of the day. I don’t know how to endure what is
being done in Ireland — it is too utterly bestial and vile. And I see that there is a much more severe repression of communists in England than there used to be. In this part of the world the people who appear most wicked are
the Japs and the people who appear least so are the
Americans. But I think all mankind utterly vile.
The Bolsheviks, till I knew them, seemed better;
now they don’t. If the
Sinn Feiners got their independence, and England turned Socialist,
Ireland would play the part
Poland has been
playing lately.
People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim. The world is
rushing down into barbarism, and there seems nothing to do but keep alive civilization in one’s corner, as the Irish did in
the 7th and 8th centuries. So I study
Einstein and dream of retiring to a
Buddhist monastery in the hills.
— From a letter to
Ottoline Morrell, 2 Sui an Po Hutung, 17 December 1920, in
The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell: The Public Years, 1914-1970, edited by Nicholas Griffin, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 214-215, emphasis added.
( Read more... ) Crossposted to
larvatus and
history.