BR TO ANNA MELISSA GRAVES, 28 DEC. 1950
BRACERS 56376. ALS(X). Swarthmore College. SLBR 2: #506
Edited by N. Griffin. Proofread by K. Blackwell

41 Queen’s Road
Richmond, Surrey.a
Dec. 28, 1950

Dear Miss Graves

Your letter moved me deeply, and I wish with all my heart that I could agree with you completely. Up to a point, I agree; beyond that point, I disagree hesitatingly. I favour evacuation of Korea and Formosa and Hong Kong and Indo-China; also of Malaya, as soon as the Malays can be secured against massacre. But I do not favour the surrender of Western Europe to Russia. I know Europeans are abominable in dealing with coloured people. I know what Leopold did in the Congo;1 I suspect the British in W. Africa; I know what is being done in S. Africa;2 I have read Haywood Patterson.3 But when I compare the home government of England or France with the home government of Russia, and when I reflect that the Russian system could easily spread over the whole world, I cannot but feel that a war would do less harm than world-wide tyranny. It is not true that the West is as bad as Russia. Take one single fact: Henry Wallace is still alive.4 Similar men in Russia are all dead. Consider the large-scale use of slave labour in Russia as an essential part of the economic system, and reflect how easily this can spread elsewhere. Consider Lysenko5 and intellectual enslavement. Consider the practice of teaching schoolchildren to denounce their parents, who then are made to disagree.

But, you will say, whatever merits the West may possess will vanish in a war. This is largely true, but not, I think, completely. America was illiberal in 1920, liberal in 1933. I think the same sort of thing would happen again. And I think democracy is sufficiently established in the West to make large-scale slave labour scarcely possible except where there has been foreign conquest. I do not see American wage-earners submitting to Russian conditions unless they have first been conquered. But I think they cannot avoid being conquered unless they can offer military resistance to the Russians.

I have not changed my opinions since the 1914–1918 war. In 1915, in the International Journal of Ethics, I published an article on “The Ethics of War”, in which I mentioned four kinds of war that I thought justifiable.6 I did not think then, and I do not think now, that the 1914–1918 war was of any one of these four kinds.

With all good wishes,

Yours very truly
Bertrand Russell.

P.S. John shares a house with me here. Kate lives in Washington, being married to a man in a humble position in the State Department.

• 1

  I know what Leopold did in the Congo In 1885 Leopold II of the Belgians had established himself as ruler of the Congo Free State which he financed by extracting rubber, typically by looting, and by holding local inhabitants hostage until their villages provided the required amount of rubber. Roger Casement was instrumental in exposing the appalling abuses.

• 2

  what is being done in S. Africa In 1948 the Afrikaner National Party gained power in South Africa and began to create the rigid system of apartheid for which the country became notorious.

• 3

  I have read Haywood Patterson. Haywood Patterson and Earl Conrad, Scottsboro Boy (1950). Patterson was one of the nine young “Scottsboro Boys”, all black, convicted in 1931 in Scottsboro, Alabama, for the rape of two white girls. In what amounted to a kangaroo court, eight were sentenced to death and the ninth (who was only thirteen) to life imprisonment. After six years of appeals and retrials five of the defendants were released and the other four given long prison terms — 75 years in Patterson’s case. In 1946 all were paroled except Patterson, who in 1948 escaped to Michigan which refused to extradite him. Scottsboro Boy is not only an account of the original miscarriage of justice but of the appalling conditions in Alabama prisons where Patterson spent most of his adult life.

• 4

  Henry Wallace is still alive Henry Agard Wallace (1888–1965) was American vice-president under Roosevelt (1941–45) and one of the architects of the New Deal. He ran against Truman in 1948 on a radical Progressive Party ticket. Although he escaped with his life, not all his supporters were so fortunate: there was a good deal of violence and intimidation during the campaign, and the chair of the Wallace-for-President committee in Charleston, South Carolina was murdered.

• 5

  Lysenko Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976) a Soviet biologist and President of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences. With Stalin’s support, he used his position to impose his unconventional and often fraudulently supported views about the inheritance of acquired characteristics on Russian biologists. In 1948 the USSR Academy of Sciences had proscribed biological research at variance with Lysenkoism.

• 6

  four kinds of war that I thought justifiable See Papers 13: 63–73.

Textual Notes

• a

  41 Queen’s Road | Richmond, Surrey. above deleted <letterhead> Penralltgoch | Llan Festiniog | Merioneth