Prescient

Marching on the banks in downtown Oakland, Calif., November 2, 2011.

I've written before about encountering the thought and influence of the eminent British philosopher, mathematician and war resister Bertrand Russell. John Reynolds at Jadaliyya passes along a snippet from Russell's writing of the late 1920s that is almost too apt for today:

“It is evident that, in a world where there was leisure and economic security for all, the happiness of all would be greater than that of ninety-nine per cent of the present inhabitants of the planet.

“Why, then, do the ninety-nine per cent not combine to overcome the resistance of the privileged one per cent?”

Reynolds goes on to share Russell's forceful diagnosis, written at the age of 97 in 1970, of the intransigent pattern of aggression by which the Israeli state was annexing Palestinian land. Not much has changed.