…who ended his life lending his prestige to an effort by barely closeted Stalinists to declare the United States the moral equal of Nazi Germany for its conduct during the war in Vietnam. Praise him all you like, Derb. Here’s what Russell said of Vietnam at the opening of the War Crimes Tribunal named for him in 1967: “I cannot help thinking of the events of my life, because of the crimes I have seen and the hopes I have nurtured. I have lived through the Dreyfus Case and been party to the investigation of the crimes committed by King Leopold in the Congo. I can recall many wars. Much injustice has been recorded quietly during these decades. In my own experience I cannot discover a situation quite comparable. I cannot recall a people so tormented, yet so devoid of the failings of their tormentors. I do not know any other conflict in which the disparity in physical power was so vast. I have no memory of any people so enduring, or of any nation with a spirit of resistance so unquenchable.”

Poland? The Low Countries? The counterinsurgency war in Algeria? The Japanese in Manchuria? Russell passed over these to claim the United States had done something uniquely evil in the course of human history.

Russell ended his life a lamentable fool and a Communist dupe. David Horowitz goes into brilliant detail about the War Crimes Tribunal in his book Radical Son. No wonder Russell is little remembered and mourned even less.