>>2449276514 Sept 1915
Dear Russell,
I’m going to quarrel with you again. You simply don’t speak the truth, you simply are not sincere. The article you send me is a plausible lie, and I hate it. If it says some true things, that is not the point. The fact is that you, in the Essay, are all the time a lie.
Your basic desire is the maximum of desire of war, you are really the super-war-spirit. What you want is to jab and strike, like the soldier with the bayonet, only you are sublimated into words. And you are like a soldier who might jab man after man with his bayonet, saying “this is for ultimate peace.” The soldier would be a liar. And it isn’t in the least true that you, your basic self, want ultimate peace. You are satisfying in an indirect, false way your lust to jab and strike. Either satisfy it in a direct and honorable way, saying “I hate you all, liars and swine, and am out to set upon you,” or stick to mathematics, where you can be true—But to come as the angel of peace—no, I prefer Tirpitz a thousand times in that role.
You are simply full of repressed desires, which have become savage and anti-social. And they come out in this sheep’s clothing of peace propaganda. As a woman said to me, who had been to one of your meetings: “It seemed so strange, with his face looking so evil, to be talking about peace and love. He can’t have meant what he said.”
I believe in your inherent power for realising the truth. But I don’t believe in your will, not for a second. Your will is false and cruel. You are too full of devilish repressions to be anything but lustful and cruel. I would rather have the German soldiers with rapine and cruelty, than you with your words of goodness. It is the falsity I can’t bear. I wouldn’t care if you were six times a murderer, so long as you said to yourself, “I am this.” The enemy of all mankind, you are, full of the lust of enmity. It is not the hatred of falsehood which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood. It is a perverted, mental blood-lust. Why don’t you own it.
Let us become strangers again, I think it is better.
D. H. Lawrence
