BERTRAND RUSSELL'S "CONVERSION"
Sir.-Your leading article on Bertrand Russell's "conversion" from pacifism in your issue of August 2 showed a restraint which, in the circumstances, was praiseworthy. I mean, you forbore to gloat. At the same time, you naturally used this volte-face by a tired, embittered old intellectual to implyeven if you didn’t actually say it-that the pacifist philosophy is built on sand. It may have been natural to do this, but I'd like to suggest that, from your own point of view, it is a dangerous line of reasoning. In effect you argued: "Here is a man whom pacifists have held up as one of their idols, confessing now that he has been wrong. And this time he must undoubtedly be right." But if I remember correctly, Gamelin was built up as the greatest general since Napoleon; Petain and Weygand were, at one stage, going to put everything right in France; Leopold was the bravest of the brave; and Daladier and Chamberlain were held up to us as bulwarks of all that is best in democracy. Fortunately for democracy-and for pacifism-one defection does not damn a cause. Fortunately, democracy still has Churchill, Attlee, Roosevelt, de Gaulle and the rest; and fortunately also, George Lansbury (a better Christian than Halifax will ever be) died true to his convictions, while Aldous Huxley, Lord Ponsonby, Middleton Murry, Gandhi and others still live true to theirs. Yours. etc..
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Wellington.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 59, 9 August 1940, Page 4
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240BERTRAND RUSSELL'S "CONVERSION" New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 59, 9 August 1940, Page 4
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