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Of War and Peace
Jul. 22nd, 2014 07:13 amBertrand Russell was a little like Einstein in being a brilliant man but who was given to arguably wooly headed idealism when it came to issues of social justice and world peace. This quotation reminds us that pursing peace is not always as simple as countering evil. Hitler, for instance, certainly did not think he was an evil man, even as he went ahead with the Final Solution.
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The peace agenda of Russell and his followers was always based on the assumption that war is simply a euphemism for the madness of state-sponsored mass murder, and that we could prevent it by standing up for moral and political sanity – by committing ourselves to global justice and the relief of poverty, for instance, or social and sexual equality, or common ownership, or world government, or a Lawrentian explosion of creativity and sex. But the paths to war are paved not with malice but with righteous self-certainty. People who choose to participate in military action are more likely to be altruists than egotists: they are prepared to sacrifice their own lives for the sake of something that transcends them, such as their country or their religion, or socialism, secularism or democracy, or a world where peace and tolerance will reign in perpetuity.
-- Jonathan Rée at Rationalist.org
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The peace agenda of Russell and his followers was always based on the assumption that war is simply a euphemism for the madness of state-sponsored mass murder, and that we could prevent it by standing up for moral and political sanity – by committing ourselves to global justice and the relief of poverty, for instance, or social and sexual equality, or common ownership, or world government, or a Lawrentian explosion of creativity and sex. But the paths to war are paved not with malice but with righteous self-certainty. People who choose to participate in military action are more likely to be altruists than egotists: they are prepared to sacrifice their own lives for the sake of something that transcends them, such as their country or their religion, or socialism, secularism or democracy, or a world where peace and tolerance will reign in perpetuity.
-- Jonathan Rée at Rationalist.org
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