There is a transcription but reading the original letter, typewritten by Bertrand Russell, with all the typing corrections that probably stemmed from some kind of holy anger he must have felt responding to someone like Mosley, was incredibly more pleasurable.
I thought that was how one simply started letters -- you used to even say "Dear Sirs" in the past -- but it seems "dear" has come to be reserved only for close recipients.
It is not entirely true that the usage has changed; I usually start my emails with this salutation, both to recipients close to me and those whom I do not know well. I address mailing lists with a simple "Dear all".
Nonetheless, this is the first time I have done so in a Hacker News post, and it shall probably be the last too.
One other reason for using the 'Dear [name]' salutation is that you can demonstrate that you can spell someone's name correctly. It takes time and effort to get this detail right and there can be consequences when getting it wrong. If I write to Stephen with 'Dear Steven' then nothing might be said, but you know it will be noted, albeit momentarily. There is also a level of familiarity to get right. Stephen might be 'Steve' in everyday conversation with just his mother using 'STEPHEN' when he is in trouble.
My mother could not spell so I have a common name with an uncommon spelling. I am not too fussed about that, however, it acts like a check word of sorts. If someone goes to the effort of spelling my name correctly then they have passed the test and I know, from the first line, that I need to take them a bit more seriously than those that are unable to pass the test.
The only times I have tried to correct anyone is when it is to do with bureaucracy as that is needed if you want things like your banking to work. I certainly would not try and correct anyone else as I would not want anyone to feel bad for getting this minor detail wrong.
As well as the salutation there is the way we close a message. As well as the standard 'Yours sincerely/Yours faithfully/Best wishes/Kind regards' there are interesting variants that people use.
The former British Prime Minister John Major used 'Yours ever', which I have not seen anyone else use.
Just for the lols, I might start my HN messages with 'To whom it may concern'. Not really. But I am glad that the people that don't use salutations have won. In the early days of email and the web, a considerable amount of bytes were wasted with salutations and, more notably, signatures.
I receive even e-mails addressed that way on occasion. It's not "dead" but you need to be careful as it can also easily come across as sarcastic, in a "who do you think you are? Let me treat you with overstated importance" kind of way (but then it would generally be followed by other excessive formality and a level of deference you know will seem over-the-top)
Anyone wondering what might have prompted his evident change of attitude after already having engaged in a "correspondence" with Mosley should note that this letter was written during Ralph Schoenman's infamous tenure as Russell's secretary.
My dad went to a Bertrand Russell lecture at Michigan State University. This would have been around 1960. He can't remember anything BR talked about, though.
> more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
For people who haven't encountered it yet, this problem is the famous "Russell's Paradox"[1], which can be stated as
Consider the set R, consisting of all sets S such that S is not an element of S.
Ie in set builder notation
R = {S : S ∉ S}
and then the paradox comes from the followup question. Is R an element of R? Because of course if it is in R, then it is an element of itself so it should not be. And if it's not in R, then it is not an element of itself, so it should be. This is a logical paradox along the same lines as the famous "The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?"
In modern axiomatic set theory, Russell's paradox is avoided these days by the "axiom of regularity"[2] which prevents a set builder like "the set of all sets who are not members of themselves", so what I wrote above would not be accepted as a valid set builder for this reason by most people.
Russell proposed instead Type theory which got revived when computer science got going.
> The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?
I'm not familiar with this one but is it misstated here? The barber doesn't only shave men who don't shave themselves. If he doesn't shave himself then he shaves himself and therefore can shave himself without contradiction. If he shaves himself he can shave himself without contradiction. Either way he shaves himself.
They had a long history of correspondence. The preceding letter is archived and you can probably get a copy. (https://bracers.mcmaster.ca/79128)
> Jan 6/1962 Re nuclear disarmament and world government. BR is not inclined to agree or disagree with Mosley's views, but he does think that Mosley is "rather optimistic" in his expectations. BR provides criticism of his main two objections. (A polite letter.)
> Jan 11/1962 Mosley wants to lunch privately with BR about their differences.
These are basically all the letters exchanged with Mosley:
This letter makes perfect sense to me if he had sent it as his first reply to a fascist in 1946. Why did he correspond with him over 43 previous letters from 1946 and only in 1962 act as though he had principled objections to corresponding with fascists? The tone is not "this time you've gone too far", or "I have decided we're not getting anywhere", but "We have nothing in common and could never converse". I wonder if he realized it was the same guy, or was submitting this to some public forum.
As I wrote above they did not have a long history of correspondence (previous correspondence was mainly with a Gordon Mosley).
The letter written by Russell was preceded by a letter from Mosley (maybe trying to bait BR) on "the root differences between us" in December 1961 to which BR replied with two letters before Mosley tried to invite BR for a private lunch which prompted the letter of note response. I think this makes perfect sense, he initially engaged intellectually, but when invited to associate privately he strongly refuses.
Bertrand Russel also was - and hopefully still is - a public intellectual, like Einstein or Chomsky (for better or worse), whose opinions on many areas of life reached ordinary people. His values were ahead of his time.
This is a wonderful interview with him that gives a great sense of what he was all about:
For general context, this was addressed to post-ww2 Mosley, in the 60s, who argued a unique form of holocaust denialism at the time. He didn’t take the position that the holocaust didn’t happen, he took the position that it was justified.
Thing is though, it would be more useful to have such an intellectual actually take apart Mosely's views. For posterity. For all of those people who haven't properly thought things through (which is, I would say, most people)
Thinking completely outside of our post-WWI bubble, history has been far more brutal in the past. This is the anomaly. Taken as a whole, human history has been full of genocide, slavery, brutality.
When somebody misrepresents "survival of the fittest" in the way that the 20th century fascists did, and embark on mass extermination "for the good of the world" (in their warped view), citing the fairly recent Darwinian view of evolution, isn't it better to tackle these views head on, for the benefit of those who haven't the inclination or the ability to think it through themselves?
What I see nowadays is a complete lack of curiosity. Nobody wants to try to understand why people "go bad", they just want to put them in the bin. That only works if those "bad" people are a minority.
Also, when the "good" people stop engaging in debate with the "bad" people, there's a danger of creating a dogmatic society. Looking at Christianity in the middle ages, and extremely confident sense of your own rightness can lead to atrocities too.
Sorry, probably nonsense, boarding a flight, not paying full attention to my post
You're right, but I believe the problem is that populists use arguments and ways of speaking that are deceiving and very hard to counter even if absolutely wrong. This makes a public debate a bad platform for engaging them.
For example, with the idea of "survival of the fittest" claiming that some genes are better than others and we should prioritise them sounds simple enough to some poeple, but explaining all the ways in which that's not only wrong but dangerous to the human race is nuanced and by then people stopped listening. Then the populist claims you're an elitist and the debate is over.
But I understand your concern it's a difficult topic to tackle.
> Thing is though, it would be more useful to have such an intellectual actually take apart Mosely's views. For posterity. For all of those people who haven't properly thought things through (which is, I would say, most people)
I agree. Celebrating a dressed up "I don't want to talk to you" note is a bit silly.
You can dismantle them from the outside, like Arendt, but "debating" them gives them a platform to Gish gallop their views to an accepting audience.
Fascism sounds great. It has terrific marketing. It's like cigarettes, awesome product apart from the bit where it kills people. Including people who never consumed the product.
You raise a very important point. Which is why i'm so dismayed by the complete unwillingness of anyone on the left to substantially debate populist talking points. There's a limit to how much you can dismiss trump as a fascist when he's so clearly popular with so many people.
Ironically this letter is the opposite of that idea. BR is opposed to fascism on such a fundamental level that he sees no point in engaging with it's chief proponent, Mosley, at all.
> What I see nowadays is a complete lack of curiosity. Nobody wants to try to understand why people "go bad", they just want to put them in the bin. That only works if those "bad" people are a minority.
It's simple. If I'm good (and I am), and if you disagree with me, you're bad. What's to talk about? Stop yapping.
That house is in Belgravia which is one of the wealthiest and most exclusive districts in London. Some of the most expensive real estate in the world, even at that time.
Feels relevant, thank you for posting. I have so many swirling thoughts and emotions from recent prominent events and this letter provides a compass for that.
This is the genetic forebear of what we have today, a congenially disguised infection of the essence that has set man against man.
People who vehemently disagree are supposed to and should have open dialogue, not elaborate letters of visceral moral rage. Without dialogue you are left with only force.
I have good news for you afpx! We don't have to pick either of those options in the real world. This is all the more telling for the folks who have chosen fascism despite not needing to.
> Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy
That title is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege (in particular his 1884 book "Grundlagen der Arithmetik", and his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung") who directly influenced Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who all later became large influences on analytic philosophy themselves. Frege is most known for the invention of modern predicate logic.
"He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."
—Srinivasa Ramanujan
"The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy
Way, way off-topic now, but if you ever get a chance to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disappearing_Number, don't miss it. It's rare to see a play weave mathematics and history into such a form, threading them through our modern world and showing the humanity of those who lived and breathed the equations on the page.
Is this a critical thinking test? All sorts of public religious figures claim all sorts of miracles as an introductory biography item. I happen to believe in miracles! but this is not one of them. Symbolic logic, and certainly math, is not inherently written in one character set or another. Dreams mean things and things could carry effects somehow but a dream of math symbols with crimson curtains is not convincing from this view.
Of what? Both the OP and those who've responded have primarily done so with an air of
> SEE?
as if the letter's current relevance is obvious. Are they implying Russell, a noted pacifist incarcerated for anti-war activism during the Great War, would have endorsed Kirk's assassination? Or is this about the protests in the UK?
People who've actually read Russell will recall many instances of him saying things that would get him [flagged] [dead] on HN or dogpiled on Bluesky. For example, note here how he, like Voltaire, takes for granted that Islam is inherently more violent than Christianity due to its theology of martyrdom that promises carnal paradise to those who die in its service:
> Then came Islam with its fanatical belief that every soldier dying in battle for the True Faith went straight to a Paradise more attractive than that of the Christians, as houris [e.g., 72 virgins] are more attractive than harps.
Mosley was an anachronism but his time seems to be coming. Shying away from it isn't the answer. Young men are online a lot and they're seeing an appeal in traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms. The left is weak, and these spasms of violence like the Kirk assassination are symptoms of that. Let's hope this right wing energy can be released productively and some of their grievances addressed before it builds further.
> Young men are online a lot and they're seeing an appeal in traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms.
> The left is weak
When you say that young men see appeal in group identity, are you suggesting that 'the left' isn't one? From my observations of online discourse, it is far more common to see people claim that identity than anything else.
It isn't. That's just projection from the left who are dismayed that the young generation are not as enthusiastic as they are about the arbitrary, opaque and ever changing social justice causes that they love. "luxury beliefs".
Put another way, the left wing, particularly in the US has a single, holistic philosophy with very little tolerance for anyone who doesn't support every aspect of it and the young generation cannot see how that vision can substantially improve their lives.
You even said it yourself
>traditional values and group
identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms.
What on earth does that have to do with facism? Not a personal criticism, to be clear, just a general observation.
Nazis made fascists temporarily embarrassed. We had Mosley, the business plot and American Nazi rallies, last one was German fascism which wouldn't really have worked but its back and draped in the American flag and christianity, they even have their boogeyman.
Letter written in 1962, when England was 0.72% non-White. When Russell died, that number had only climbed up to 2.3% [1]. Some of those who fought WWII, the "original antifa" as some call them, and lived longer, had this to say [2]:
How do I feel about the country today? My two uncle’s gave their lives for this country, my father’s health was broken from gas in WW1. I did my little bit, my brother did his national service in the Canal Zone in Egypt. What has been our reward? EVERYTHING we fought for has been taken from us and given to foreigners, we are now third rate citizens in our own country.
Our enemies rule us from Brussels and we are being colonized by *** and *** in this country. There is not one political party that is prepared to stand up and fight for our country and indigenous population. The holocaust is now being carried out on us. What are my main regrets? That I didn’t fight for Hitler, at least he was for his own people.
2 selected anecdotes is not exactly an overwhelming argument. IIRC, the golden generation who actually fought in the war voted against Brexit. And why mention race at all? TFA is about fascism.
From the surveys I've seen, you're not like any other.
No Idea what you mean by "white", are Jews white ? Polish, Russians, Germans ? Hitler killed Millions of "his own people" and I'm very grateful for the "slavic subhumans" and british colonial subjects who liberated Germany. If Britain had not committed the grave crime of colonialism and imposed it's language on the globe people from far flung places might not now be colonizing britain. Let's just hope that the new Hindu/Muslim version of England shall be more tolerant than the previous iteration.
>If Britain had not committed the grave crime of colonialism and imposed it's language on the globe people from far flung places might not now be colonizing britain.
If that were the defining line you'd see it for a lot of places and contexts other than just the west no?. Including let's say the arab empires but berbers and co aren't "recolonising" north africa let alone Saudi Arabia or Yemen and the Ful, Masalit, etc are continuing to be wiped out in Sudan rather than Sudan being taken over by non arabs.
IDK, I see this as in some ways verbose, not succinct at all. A completely succinct reply to Mr Mosley would be two words only, the second being "off".
This letter tries to "unpack" its point of view rather than reply succinctly. But you're right that LLMs do not do it that clearly.
The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective. That's succinct, not "the minimum amount of words communicating anything that might roughly align with a view".
The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me, they're not fluff or pointless pleasantries for code reasons.
English is a very front-loaded language, information-theoretically, isn't it? Often the first few words of the sentence tells us everything we're going to need to know about the rest of it.
Yeah but f.. off simply does not say the same thing that his letter says, now matter how succinct.
He writes like he assumes good faith, then explains why he thinks that exactly this attempt won't be fruitful, giving a good-faith argument for why Oswald should consider further correspondence fruitless, unless he changes his whole political ideology.
That's a lot more than just "I don't want to talk to you and I think badly of you"
> English is a very front-loaded language, information-theoretically, isn't it?
It's more that journalism and in other context though, it is good writing style to "not bury the lede", i.e. put the main point upfront. It's a writing choice, not a language feature.
> The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me
I agree, and I don't say otherwise. I still though don't agree that someone else should characterise the piece as "succinct" because of that thoughtfulness. These are different qualities of writing, are they not?.
> The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective.
Yes, it's a good concise argument, to third parties who read it. I see that. It's a different thing to a succinct reply to Mr Mosley - that is what the words "in some ways" mean in the comment above.
That would not convey nearly the depth of emotion, sincerity, etc. nor would it demonstrate Russell's own innate good will the way he would like to see it characterized.
"F off" has exactly zero semantic meaning (unless you actually believe this is a literal expression). Without context, it barely even has emotional meaning.
It's no less or more a spontaneous expression of emotion than yelling some curse word when you step on a piece of Lego.
I don't think that's relevant. There are many ways to say no within few words - "No." is a complete sentence, "No thank you." is a polite one, "Get lost" has the semantic meaning that you want. etc.
The rest is not actually a reply to Mr Mosley, it seems more intended for other audiences such as us. Appeals to introspection not action, is not language that the fascists appreciate or even understand.
Don't get me wrong, there are many things to like about that thoughtful text. I just don't characterise it as "a succinct reply".
I gather by the mention of fascism that the correspondent is a bad person. So it makes sense that Russell told him to get bent. But, that is all that he's really saying here.
I can only guess this is noteworthy due to the parties corresponding because it isn't very interesting outside of that.
Have you been reading the news? Perhaps about someone who engaged people in debate while holding extreme views? In the process, they gained some measure of credit amongst people with less radical views, merely for the act of having conversations. Except in this case the debates were not with Bertrand Russell, but with 18 year old college freshman.
I understood the posting to be a subtweet-style comment on that.
There is a transcription but reading the original letter, typewritten by Bertrand Russell, with all the typing corrections that probably stemmed from some kind of holy anger he must have felt responding to someone like Mosley, was incredibly more pleasurable.
It's amazing how much fuck-you-and-fuck-who-you-fuck-with Russell managed to fit into a few ink smudges on a piece of paper.
And in such polite prose too
You can almost feel the hammer violently hitting the paper and nearly poking a hole in it with some of these words.
He also had just turned 91 years old when he wrote this
If you’re really interested in his works and correspondence, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario holds the Bertrand Russell archives.
Some stuff is online. Here’s a curated collection of some really interesting letters sent to him:
https://dearbertie.mcmaster.ca/letters
Studs Terkel interview with Bertrand Russell: https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/interviewing-lord-bert...
I always feel funny starting letters with “dear”, but next time that happens I'm going to remember that this one started with “Dear Sir Oswald,”.
Well, when you're saying "goodbye", remember you're really saying "God be with ye"....
Which is also what "adios, "adieu", "adéu", "tschüss", etc. approximately mean.
I can guarantee I absolutely am not saying that :)
WHAT is that true!?!?
https://english.stackexchange.com/a/387742
Near the bottom is this gem:
> kthxbye is the pinnacle of English's advancement, shortening All correct, Thank you, God be with you. into seven lowercase letters.
Now I think I'll start letters with “Dear Sir Oswald,” regardless of who they are to.
I thought that was how one simply started letters -- you used to even say "Dear Sirs" in the past -- but it seems "dear" has come to be reserved only for close recipients.
Dear esafak,
It is not entirely true that the usage has changed; I usually start my emails with this salutation, both to recipients close to me and those whom I do not know well. I address mailing lists with a simple "Dear all".
Nonetheless, this is the first time I have done so in a Hacker News post, and it shall probably be the last too.
Best wishes,
seabass
For an actual letter I think I would use Dear, not an email.
But it's so very seldom that I write a physical letter these days.
Dear Seabass,
One other reason for using the 'Dear [name]' salutation is that you can demonstrate that you can spell someone's name correctly. It takes time and effort to get this detail right and there can be consequences when getting it wrong. If I write to Stephen with 'Dear Steven' then nothing might be said, but you know it will be noted, albeit momentarily. There is also a level of familiarity to get right. Stephen might be 'Steve' in everyday conversation with just his mother using 'STEPHEN' when he is in trouble.
My mother could not spell so I have a common name with an uncommon spelling. I am not too fussed about that, however, it acts like a check word of sorts. If someone goes to the effort of spelling my name correctly then they have passed the test and I know, from the first line, that I need to take them a bit more seriously than those that are unable to pass the test.
The only times I have tried to correct anyone is when it is to do with bureaucracy as that is needed if you want things like your banking to work. I certainly would not try and correct anyone else as I would not want anyone to feel bad for getting this minor detail wrong.
As well as the salutation there is the way we close a message. As well as the standard 'Yours sincerely/Yours faithfully/Best wishes/Kind regards' there are interesting variants that people use.
The former British Prime Minister John Major used 'Yours ever', which I have not seen anyone else use.
Just for the lols, I might start my HN messages with 'To whom it may concern'. Not really. But I am glad that the people that don't use salutations have won. In the early days of email and the web, a considerable amount of bytes were wasted with salutations and, more notably, signatures.
Until next time,
Theodores
I receive even e-mails addressed that way on occasion. It's not "dead" but you need to be careful as it can also easily come across as sarcastic, in a "who do you think you are? Let me treat you with overstated importance" kind of way (but then it would generally be followed by other excessive formality and a level of deference you know will seem over-the-top)
Anyone wondering what might have prompted his evident change of attitude after already having engaged in a "correspondence" with Mosley should note that this letter was written during Ralph Schoenman's infamous tenure as Russell's secretary.
I wonder if this was a response to a letter from Mosley. Would love to see more context.
My dad went to a Bertrand Russell lecture at Michigan State University. This would have been around 1960. He can't remember anything BR talked about, though.
He also gave the inaugural BBC Reith Lectures, available here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hgk62
Thanks mods for the title fix.
I can't find a copy of the letter this is in response to which would provide more context. I believe it was an invitation of some sort.
Bertrand Russel was a prominent logician and philosopher, more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Mosley
> more or less invented types to solve a problem he was having with set theory.
For people who haven't encountered it yet, this problem is the famous "Russell's Paradox"[1], which can be stated as
Consider the set R, consisting of all sets S such that S is not an element of S.
Ie in set builder notation
R = {S : S ∉ S}
and then the paradox comes from the followup question. Is R an element of R? Because of course if it is in R, then it is an element of itself so it should not be. And if it's not in R, then it is not an element of itself, so it should be. This is a logical paradox along the same lines as the famous "The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?"
In modern axiomatic set theory, Russell's paradox is avoided these days by the "axiom of regularity"[2] which prevents a set builder like "the set of all sets who are not members of themselves", so what I wrote above would not be accepted as a valid set builder for this reason by most people.
Russell proposed instead Type theory which got revived when computer science got going.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_paradox
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_regularity
> The barber in this town shaves all men who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?
I'm not familiar with this one but is it misstated here? The barber doesn't only shave men who don't shave themselves. If he doesn't shave himself then he shaves himself and therefore can shave himself without contradiction. If he shaves himself he can shave himself without contradiction. Either way he shaves himself.
(Or maybe I'm just bad at logic)
Yes you're right it's typically stated as "shaves all those, and those only, who do not..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber_paradox
They had a long history of correspondence. The preceding letter is archived and you can probably get a copy. (https://bracers.mcmaster.ca/79128)
> Jan 6/1962 Re nuclear disarmament and world government. BR is not inclined to agree or disagree with Mosley's views, but he does think that Mosley is "rather optimistic" in his expectations. BR provides criticism of his main two objections. (A polite letter.)
> Jan 11/1962 Mosley wants to lunch privately with BR about their differences.
These are basically all the letters exchanged with Mosley:
https://bracers.mcmaster.ca/bracers-basic-search?search_api_...
This letter makes perfect sense to me if he had sent it as his first reply to a fascist in 1946. Why did he correspond with him over 43 previous letters from 1946 and only in 1962 act as though he had principled objections to corresponding with fascists? The tone is not "this time you've gone too far", or "I have decided we're not getting anywhere", but "We have nothing in common and could never converse". I wonder if he realized it was the same guy, or was submitting this to some public forum.
As I wrote above they did not have a long history of correspondence (previous correspondence was mainly with a Gordon Mosley).
The letter written by Russell was preceded by a letter from Mosley (maybe trying to bait BR) on "the root differences between us" in December 1961 to which BR replied with two letters before Mosley tried to invite BR for a private lunch which prompted the letter of note response. I think this makes perfect sense, he initially engaged intellectually, but when invited to associate privately he strongly refuses.
The long correspondence that you describe (from the 40's to the 60's) was with Gordon Mosley of the BBC, and not with Oswald.
The only letters that Russell personally wrote to Oswald were sent in January 1961.
I was incorrect here. The letters were all from december 61 to jan 62.
That's incorrect if you read the summaries and recipients, most of the Mosleys are not Oswald Mosley.
You are absolutely right! The couple from 62 are correct.
Bertrand Russel also was - and hopefully still is - a public intellectual, like Einstein or Chomsky (for better or worse), whose opinions on many areas of life reached ordinary people. His values were ahead of his time.
This is a wonderful interview with him that gives a great sense of what he was all about:
• A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952) https://youtu.be/xL_sMXfzzyA
Russell also lived a long time, with family who did too.
While young his grandfather told Bertrand about meeting Napoleon. Late in life Bertrand watched the moon landing on TV.
Obviously that two experiences that span more than one life time, but they are very far apart.
https://www.openculture.com/2022/05/philosopher-bertrand-rus...
His (ex-)wife Dora was my wife's neighbour, she was quite a force in her own right (and lived to 92):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_Russell
I understand that Professor Yaffle -- the woodpecker bookend in the classic kids' TV show Bagpuss -- was loosely based on Russell.
For general context, this was addressed to post-ww2 Mosley, in the 60s, who argued a unique form of holocaust denialism at the time. He didn’t take the position that the holocaust didn’t happen, he took the position that it was justified.
Mr Mosley also had a pretty well known son lol.
For reference, this is alluding to Max Mosley who used to be prominent in formula one car racing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Mosley
As well as F1, he was quite a popular figure in some Nazi cosplaying dungeons.
Thats what I was really trying to get at.
Thing is though, it would be more useful to have such an intellectual actually take apart Mosely's views. For posterity. For all of those people who haven't properly thought things through (which is, I would say, most people)
Thinking completely outside of our post-WWI bubble, history has been far more brutal in the past. This is the anomaly. Taken as a whole, human history has been full of genocide, slavery, brutality.
When somebody misrepresents "survival of the fittest" in the way that the 20th century fascists did, and embark on mass extermination "for the good of the world" (in their warped view), citing the fairly recent Darwinian view of evolution, isn't it better to tackle these views head on, for the benefit of those who haven't the inclination or the ability to think it through themselves?
What I see nowadays is a complete lack of curiosity. Nobody wants to try to understand why people "go bad", they just want to put them in the bin. That only works if those "bad" people are a minority.
Also, when the "good" people stop engaging in debate with the "bad" people, there's a danger of creating a dogmatic society. Looking at Christianity in the middle ages, and extremely confident sense of your own rightness can lead to atrocities too.
Sorry, probably nonsense, boarding a flight, not paying full attention to my post
You're right, but I believe the problem is that populists use arguments and ways of speaking that are deceiving and very hard to counter even if absolutely wrong. This makes a public debate a bad platform for engaging them.
For example, with the idea of "survival of the fittest" claiming that some genes are better than others and we should prioritise them sounds simple enough to some poeple, but explaining all the ways in which that's not only wrong but dangerous to the human race is nuanced and by then people stopped listening. Then the populist claims you're an elitist and the debate is over.
But I understand your concern it's a difficult topic to tackle.
> Thing is though, it would be more useful to have such an intellectual actually take apart Mosely's views. For posterity. For all of those people who haven't properly thought things through (which is, I would say, most people)
I agree. Celebrating a dressed up "I don't want to talk to you" note is a bit silly.
And yet here we are...
You can dismantle them from the outside, like Arendt, but "debating" them gives them a platform to Gish gallop their views to an accepting audience.
Fascism sounds great. It has terrific marketing. It's like cigarettes, awesome product apart from the bit where it kills people. Including people who never consumed the product.
Intellectual laziness. Easier to capture your ideological opponent in a box of dismissal than to tackle the points head-on.
You raise a very important point. Which is why i'm so dismayed by the complete unwillingness of anyone on the left to substantially debate populist talking points. There's a limit to how much you can dismiss trump as a fascist when he's so clearly popular with so many people.
Ironically this letter is the opposite of that idea. BR is opposed to fascism on such a fundamental level that he sees no point in engaging with it's chief proponent, Mosley, at all.
> What I see nowadays is a complete lack of curiosity. Nobody wants to try to understand why people "go bad", they just want to put them in the bin. That only works if those "bad" people are a minority.
It's simple. If I'm good (and I am), and if you disagree with me, you're bad. What's to talk about? Stop yapping.
In case someone's too lazy to enter the address in Google maps, here you go: https://maps.app.goo.gl/oZ5c8aqH1uJ35VaD8
That house is in Belgravia which is one of the wealthiest and most exclusive districts in London. Some of the most expensive real estate in the world, even at that time.
Feels relevant, thank you for posting. I have so many swirling thoughts and emotions from recent prominent events and this letter provides a compass for that.
This is the genetic forebear of what we have today, a congenially disguised infection of the essence that has set man against man.
People who vehemently disagree are supposed to and should have open dialogue, not elaborate letters of visceral moral rage. Without dialogue you are left with only force.
What did Mosley write to him?
I was a politically active liberal all of my life, but if the world forces me to choose between communism and fascism, I'm choosing fascism.
I have good news for you afpx! We don't have to pick either of those options in the real world. This is all the more telling for the folks who have chosen fascism despite not needing to.
I sure hope so!
Offtopic: Anyone else noticed an explosion in this kind of comment over the last few days? Not just here but all over the web.
I sure hope it's just bots...
Features of communism, government owns the means of production and private property is illegal.
scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds
I guess so
A tangent..
> Bertrand Russell, one of the great intellectuals of his generation, was known by most as the founder of analytic philosophy
That title is usually attributed to Gottlob Frege (in particular his 1884 book "Grundlagen der Arithmetik", and his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung") who directly influenced Bertrand Russell, Rudolph Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who all later became large influences on analytic philosophy themselves. Frege is most known for the invention of modern predicate logic.
Where do any of us stand but on the shoulders of giants?
On the shoulders of god(s)?, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
"He credited his acumen to his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar (Goddess Mahalakshmi) of Namakkal. He looked to her for inspiration in his work[111] and said he dreamed of blood drops that symbolised her consort, Narasimha. Later he had visions of scrolls of complex mathematical content unfolding before his eyes.[112] He often said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
"While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing."
—Srinivasa Ramanujan
"The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was..." - G. H. Hardy
Way, way off-topic now, but if you ever get a chance to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disappearing_Number, don't miss it. It's rare to see a play weave mathematics and history into such a form, threading them through our modern world and showing the humanity of those who lived and breathed the equations on the page.
That's about the opposite of analytic philosophy though. Frege and Russell would have said it relies on reason, not intuition.
Reason works as a result of its limits. Reason fails as a result of its limits.
Is this a critical thinking test? All sorts of public religious figures claim all sorts of miracles as an introductory biography item. I happen to believe in miracles! but this is not one of them. Symbolic logic, and certainly math, is not inherently written in one character set or another. Dreams mean things and things could carry effects somehow but a dream of math symbols with crimson curtains is not convincing from this view.
A propos
Of what? Both the OP and those who've responded have primarily done so with an air of
> SEE?
as if the letter's current relevance is obvious. Are they implying Russell, a noted pacifist incarcerated for anti-war activism during the Great War, would have endorsed Kirk's assassination? Or is this about the protests in the UK?
People who've actually read Russell will recall many instances of him saying things that would get him [flagged] [dead] on HN or dogpiled on Bluesky. For example, note here how he, like Voltaire, takes for granted that Islam is inherently more violent than Christianity due to its theology of martyrdom that promises carnal paradise to those who die in its service:
https://www.panarchy.org/russell/ideas.1946.html
> Then came Islam with its fanatical belief that every soldier dying in battle for the True Faith went straight to a Paradise more attractive than that of the Christians, as houris [e.g., 72 virgins] are more attractive than harps.
Mosley was an anachronism but his time seems to be coming. Shying away from it isn't the answer. Young men are online a lot and they're seeing an appeal in traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms. The left is weak, and these spasms of violence like the Kirk assassination are symptoms of that. Let's hope this right wing energy can be released productively and some of their grievances addressed before it builds further.
> Young men are online a lot and they're seeing an appeal in traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms.
> The left is weak
When you say that young men see appeal in group identity, are you suggesting that 'the left' isn't one? From my observations of online discourse, it is far more common to see people claim that identity than anything else.
It isn't. That's just projection from the left who are dismayed that the young generation are not as enthusiastic as they are about the arbitrary, opaque and ever changing social justice causes that they love. "luxury beliefs".
Put another way, the left wing, particularly in the US has a single, holistic philosophy with very little tolerance for anyone who doesn't support every aspect of it and the young generation cannot see how that vision can substantially improve their lives.
You even said it yourself
>traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms.
What on earth does that have to do with facism? Not a personal criticism, to be clear, just a general observation.
Nazis made fascists temporarily embarrassed. We had Mosley, the business plot and American Nazi rallies, last one was German fascism which wouldn't really have worked but its back and draped in the American flag and christianity, they even have their boogeyman.
quite the redditor
He was so angry he could hardly contain himself.
Letter written in 1962, when England was 0.72% non-White. When Russell died, that number had only climbed up to 2.3% [1]. Some of those who fought WWII, the "original antifa" as some call them, and lived longer, had this to say [2]:
How do I feel about the country today? My two uncle’s gave their lives for this country, my father’s health was broken from gas in WW1. I did my little bit, my brother did his national service in the Canal Zone in Egypt. What has been our reward? EVERYTHING we fought for has been taken from us and given to foreigners, we are now third rate citizens in our own country.
Our enemies rule us from Brussels and we are being colonized by *** and *** in this country. There is not one political party that is prepared to stand up and fight for our country and indigenous population. The holocaust is now being carried out on us. What are my main regrets? That I didn’t fight for Hitler, at least he was for his own people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_England#Ethnic...
[2] https://archive.org/details/the-unknown-warriors
2 selected anecdotes is not exactly an overwhelming argument. IIRC, the golden generation who actually fought in the war voted against Brexit. And why mention race at all? TFA is about fascism.
From the surveys I've seen, you're not like any other.
guy fights in the larger fight for colonial possessions for the elites, and blame immigrants.
No Idea what you mean by "white", are Jews white ? Polish, Russians, Germans ? Hitler killed Millions of "his own people" and I'm very grateful for the "slavic subhumans" and british colonial subjects who liberated Germany. If Britain had not committed the grave crime of colonialism and imposed it's language on the globe people from far flung places might not now be colonizing britain. Let's just hope that the new Hindu/Muslim version of England shall be more tolerant than the previous iteration.
>If Britain had not committed the grave crime of colonialism and imposed it's language on the globe people from far flung places might not now be colonizing britain.
If that were the defining line you'd see it for a lot of places and contexts other than just the west no?. Including let's say the arab empires but berbers and co aren't "recolonising" north africa let alone Saudi Arabia or Yemen and the Ful, Masalit, etc are continuing to be wiped out in Sudan rather than Sudan being taken over by non arabs.
Simultaneously polite, peaceful, respectful, diplomatic, and succinct in writing. LLMs have a long way to go.
IDK, I see this as in some ways verbose, not succinct at all. A completely succinct reply to Mr Mosley would be two words only, the second being "off".
This letter tries to "unpack" its point of view rather than reply succinctly. But you're right that LLMs do not do it that clearly.
Why did you write so many words then?
Your second paragraph says nothing.
The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective. That's succinct, not "the minimum amount of words communicating anything that might roughly align with a view".
The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me, they're not fluff or pointless pleasantries for code reasons.
English is a very front-loaded language, information-theoretically, isn't it? Often the first few words of the sentence tells us everything we're going to need to know about the rest of it.
Yeah but f.. off simply does not say the same thing that his letter says, now matter how succinct.
He writes like he assumes good faith, then explains why he thinks that exactly this attempt won't be fruitful, giving a good-faith argument for why Oswald should consider further correspondence fruitless, unless he changes his whole political ideology.
That's a lot more than just "I don't want to talk to you and I think badly of you"
The point is that a large percentage of the words in any sentence are there to provide structure, not meaning.
Removing those words makes the text more difficult to understand, not easier.
> English is a very front-loaded language, information-theoretically, isn't it?
It's more that journalism and in other context though, it is good writing style to "not bury the lede", i.e. put the main point upfront. It's a writing choice, not a language feature.
> Why did you write so many words then?
I wasn't claiming to be succinct.
> The sentences he writes to explain why he doesn't consider further correspondence fruitful seem genuinely thoughtful to me
I agree, and I don't say otherwise. I still though don't agree that someone else should characterise the piece as "succinct" because of that thoughtfulness. These are different qualities of writing, are they not?.
> The letter in question here doesn't have a sentence that is irrelevant to Russells perspective.
Yes, it's a good concise argument, to third parties who read it. I see that. It's a different thing to a succinct reply to Mr Mosley - that is what the words "in some ways" mean in the comment above.
That would not convey nearly the depth of emotion, sincerity, etc. nor would it demonstrate Russell's own innate good will the way he would like to see it characterized.
While I agree with that, does that in itself make the writing "succinct" ?
You confuse "succinct" with "laconic".
"F off" has exactly zero semantic meaning (unless you actually believe this is a literal expression). Without context, it barely even has emotional meaning.
It's no less or more a spontaneous expression of emotion than yelling some curse word when you step on a piece of Lego.
> F off" has exactly zero semantic meaning
I don't think that's relevant. There are many ways to say no within few words - "No." is a complete sentence, "No thank you." is a polite one, "Get lost" has the semantic meaning that you want. etc.
The rest is not actually a reply to Mr Mosley, it seems more intended for other audiences such as us. Appeals to introspection not action, is not language that the fascists appreciate or even understand.
Don't get me wrong, there are many things to like about that thoughtful text. I just don't characterise it as "a succinct reply".
I gather by the mention of fascism that the correspondent is a bad person. So it makes sense that Russell told him to get bent. But, that is all that he's really saying here.
I can only guess this is noteworthy due to the parties corresponding because it isn't very interesting outside of that.
Have you been reading the news? Perhaps about someone who engaged people in debate while holding extreme views? In the process, they gained some measure of credit amongst people with less radical views, merely for the act of having conversations. Except in this case the debates were not with Bertrand Russell, but with 18 year old college freshman.
I understood the posting to be a subtweet-style comment on that.