Bertrand Russell’s grandmother’s favourite Bible verse was this:

“ Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.”
(Exodus 23:2)

We can think of a lot of people we would like to see taking that to heart. The ones with special vests and exploding underpants¹, for example. Christian missionaries and evangelists, for instance. This is how it works:

Perhaps these words from Bertrand Russell will enrich and enwisen(!) you as they do Sir Roger.

30 years ago Russell said of the “Palestinian problem”:

“ The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state.
The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased.

 

How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict.

 

No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate?

 

A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

 

We are frequently told that we must sympathise with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. […] What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.

—Bertrand Russell , 31 January 1970

How quaint! Look how much has changed in the 30 years since Russell made that statement!

… What? …

Yes, so the only thing that has changed is that the problem has become worse. The situation in Palestine now inexorably drives and inflames global politics. 9/11, Afghanistan, the rise of islamic fundamentalism all feed from this one trough. Not any amount of cosmetic or diplomatic pretense, no “negotiated compromise”, no artificial “roadmap to peace” will make any difference at all.

The problem is not on the surface but in the poison in the system that causes the inescapable and constant eruption of the angry, putrid, existential carbuncles that are likely to haunt this century as they have the last 50 years.

The Israelis know this (as do the Americans, of course) but they are willing to watch — no, force — the rest of the world to pay the price for what they believe is their god-given right to their “promised land”.

Religion.

Always a force for good.

Without it we wouldn’t know what was the right thing to do.

Here’s how Russell summed up his life at the age of 84:

“ Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

 

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

 

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

 

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

 

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. 

 
  ¹ Just a question … if a person’s exploding underpants actually do work, are the 72 virgins of any use to him in heaven? Just another question? (Okay, just a few more.) If a suicide bomber is a woman does she get the 72 virgins as well? How does that work? Does she have to fuck 12-year-old muslim boys (given, after all, that only muslims are allowed into heaven)? Does she really want to? If a muslim is male and over 12 and is still a virgin surely he’s gay? Does she have to fuck him? Does she want to? Will he let her? Or do female suicide bombers have to be lesbians? Are there enough muslim virgins in heaven to pass 72 around each suicide bomber? They must be getting younger and younger nowadays. Are the virgins forced to be fucked by suicide bombers? How would that not be rape? Or is rape okay in islam?

Sir Roger’s optimistic feeling about suicide bombers is that the dickheads are doing the rest of the world the favour of removing themselves from the gene pool. It can only get better, right?