Spokesman the publishing imprint of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation

27/11/2025

Bertrand Russell unveiled

The plaque honouring the philosopher and anti-war activist will be put up on his home in Cambridge.

26/11/2025

In Memoriam Jack Shepherd

Trevor Griffiths wrote the screenplay for BILL BRAND, published by Spokesman

24/11/2025

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025/11/23/activist-and-artist-margaretta-darcy-dies-aged-91/

In Memoriam MARGARETTA D’ARCY

Anti-war protester from Greenham Common to Shannon Airport had ‘life fully and purposefully lived’

25/10/2025

Dear Bertrand Russell — link to book in comments

Bertrand Russell concerning political protest and civil disobedience:

“To defy the stupid, to oppose the malicious is no easy thing. Be isolated, be ignored, be attacked, be in doubt, be frightened but do not be silenced.”

— Bertrand Russell, Dear Bertrand Russell: A Selection of His Correspondence with the General Public (1950-1968), Part. IV: Youth and Old Age, p. 70

Russell continues:

“It may seem to you conceited to suppose that you personally can do anything important toward improving the lot of mankind. This is a fallacy. A good society is produced only by good individuals, just as truly as a majority in a election is produced by the votes of single electors. Everybody can do something toward creating in his own environment with kindly feelings rather than anger, reasonableness rather than hysteria, and happiness rather than misery.”

— Bertrand Russell, A Fresh Look at Empiricism (1927-1942), Part X. Appendixes, Essay 6: A Philosophy for You in These Times (1941), p. 639

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Image: Bertrand Russell, 11 February 1962. Pictured at a Ban the Bomb meeting in Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom.

Russell was one of the leading British philosophers and mathematicians of the twentieth century, a passionate rationalist who was outraged by what he considered humankind's irrational beliefs and needless cruelties. Politically active and habitually outspoken, at the age of eighty nine Russell was imprisoned for his role in a peace and nuclear disarmament demonstration. He was offered leniency by the magistrate on the condition that he promised to maintain 'good behaviour’. Russell's laconic response, simple yet forceful, was:

“No, I won't.”

20/10/2025

Palestine Testimonies - The Spokesman 161
See https://spokesmanbooks.org/product/the-spokesman-161-palestine-testimonies/

18/10/2025

How to confront a FASCIST: Bertrand Russell’s forceful yet dignified letter of refusal to debate a British fascist, a response to Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley (the most despised Briton in 1000 years).*

━━━

Dear Sir Oswald,

Thank you for your letters and for your enclosures. I have given some thought to our recent correspondence. It is always difficult to decide on how to respond to people whose ethos is so alien and, in fact, repellent to one’s own. It is not that I take exception to the general points made by you but that every ounce of my energy has been devoted to an active opposition to cruel bigotry, compulsive violence, and the sadistic persecution which has characterised the philosophy and practice of fascism.

I feel obliged to say that the emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.

I should like you to understand the intensity of this conviction on my part. It is not out of any attempt to be rude that I say this but because of all that I value in human experience and human achievement.

Yours sincerely,
Bertrand Russell

━━━

Image: Bertrand Russell’s return letter to Oswald Mosley. It was finally written after years of provoking correspondences for the 89 year old Russell to engage in public “talks“ in which Mosley believed he could persuade the poltically liberal and pacifist philosopher of the so-called “merits” of fascism.

* In 2006, BBC History Magazine selected Mosley as the worst and most hated Briton in 1000 years.

18/10/2025

European nuclear battlefield?
"The largest expansion of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe since the early 1980s is underway. The UK government’s announcement that it will join NATO’s ‘nuclear sharing’ arrangements, the forward positioning of US nuclear weapons at the Lakenheath airbase in England (see END Info 43) and the deployment of new B61-12 nuclear gravity bombs across bases in mainland Europe amounts to a significant and potentially deadly escalation..."

https://www.endinfo.net/blog/european-nuclear-battlefield

14/10/2025

Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell gets first feature biopic.

14/10/2025

battlefield?
END Info 44 | October 2025
Download here: https://spokesmanbooks.org/product/end-info-44-october-2025/