russell in the news
In his review of Colin McGinn's new autobiography for The New Statesman, Nicholas Fearns has this to say about McGinn and Russell. While an undergraduate in philosophy at Manchester University, McGinn, whose heroes at that time were John Lennon and Bertrand Russell, began smoking Russell's favorite brand of pipe tobacco in the hopes that it would make him as brilliant as Russell. We find it hard to believe that McGinn actually thought that it was smoking a particular brand of pipe tobacco that made Russell brilliant, when everyone knows it was the Red Hackle that did it.
Fearns also says that McGinn was recently introduced to the film actress Jennifer Aniston at a Hollywood Party. Aniston was apparently quite impressed to meet a professional philosopher, but the encounter ended in embarrassment when she proved never to have heard of Kant, Descartes, or Russell. McGinn agonized for a long time over the "interpersonal discomfort" he had caused the poor multimillionaire movie star to suffer. – New Statesman, June 9, 2003
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The 53rd Annual
Pugwash Conference returned to Pugwash, Nova Scotia for the first time in 44 years this past July. The original Pugwash Conference had been called into being by the multimillionaire and Pugwash native son
Cyrus Eaton. Eaton had been impressed by the famous 1955 manifesto, signed by
Einstein, Russell, and others, that demanded that governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain renounce nuclear weapons, so he wrote to Russell offering to host and finance a conference on nuclear disarmament, and the famous 1957 Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs was born. Thirty-eight years later, it received the Nobel Peace Prize. By 1959, the annual conference had outgrown Pugwash and it moved on to bigger centers, although smaller workshops continued to be held there over the years. One of the original Pugwash participants, and last surviving signatory of the 1955 manifesto,
Joseph Rotblat, attended the most recent Pugwash Conference. It was a bittersweet visit for him: "It's a bit lonely now" the 94 year-old Polish-born nuclear physicist said. Rotblat was the 1983 recipient of the BRS Annual Award. –
McCleans, July, 2003.
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The Cold War CIA funding of the liberal anti-communist
Congress for Cultural Freedom has been gone over again by the press, this time in the London
Times. CIA funding for the Congress was first disclosed in 1967, but a large amount of historical evidence recently made available allows for a more complete understanding of the events. British intellectuals were suspicious of the Congress from the start, and its founding conference – in West Berlin in 1950 – was constantly interrupted by interventions from Hugh Trevor-Roper and A.J. Ayer, who objected to the organizers' excessive anti-communism. Nevertheless, the Congress was soon a regular part of British intellectual life.
The author of the
Times article, Hugh Wilford, asserts that Russell was one among "several eminent intellectuals who remained mistrustful of the CCF", and that he was "at the center of several embarrassing public rows about McCarthyism with the CCF's U.S. affiliate, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. This culminated in 1957 with his noisy resignation from one of the CCF's honorary chairs." Wilford also asserts that "most of the British intellectuals involved in the CCF's operations knew all along about the organization's links to the U.S. government."
Along with recent allegations by Timothy Garton Ash that Russell published three books (
Why Communism Must Fail, What is Freedom?, and
What is Democracy?) knowing that their publication was financed by the British Foreign Office, such allegations, however one might evaluate and interpret them, show a complexity to Cold War politics that was much more difficult, if not impossible, to discern while we were in its midst. –
Times Education Supplement (London), July 4, 2003
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In
The Spectator, Paul Johnson's nostalgic complaint about "old-fashioned Englishmen" and pipe smoking has this to say about Russell: "In my
New Statesman days in the Fifties, pipes were common among the intelligentsia, being seen as 'democratic'. Did not Uncle Joe smoke one? Bertrand Russell certainly did, adding another dimension to the compound aroma of sartorial fustiness, halitosis and cerebral dandruff he carried around with him. The most technological of the smokers was Ritchie Calder, appropriately our science correspondent. He assembled with other luminaries every Monday at 10:30 a. m. for our editorial conference. There were Dr Balogh and Barbara Castle, Professor Patrick Blackett, the defence expert, and Gerald Gardiner, later lord chancellor, with others including Russell himself, though he was not often asked as Kingsley Martin, the editor, thought him 'too disruptive'".
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The Spectator, August 23, 2003