larvatus prodeo

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.