OK, the Bertrand Russell psychodrama is also malicious but maybe not dangerously so. About six months ago, I came across a web posting announcing the formation of a Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Palestine. Yes, it was one of those false kangaroo courts in which, from the Stalin era on, convenes not to evaluate evidence but to condemn. In loads of cases the verdicts brought quick impositions of the death sentence. One such process is now unfolding in Tehran, and its backers are Muslim millenarians and western leftists who are prone to support every revolution even if it is decidedly and objectively reactionary, nay, fascistic. This hangmen's jurisprudence will soon end its proceedings and it will end in blood. The Russell production will be a show trial.
The convener of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal, Ken Coates, is the chairman of the Betrand Russell Peace Foundation who has been in this unproductive line of work at least as early as 1975 when he and Noam Chomsky wrote their sympathizers (through the New York Review of Books, of course) to ask for help in raising 20,000 pounds, not a big sum for an organization with so many flashy supporters. Now, fast forward to 2009, and the occupiers of the Russell name are still out on the street pandering for support. Dorothy Day's sweet old Catholic Worker does better.
