evidence: Russell was also anti-war but inconsistently so. He opposed Britain’s entry into World War I and was an organizer of the movement to protest the draft, eventually serving six months in jail for his activities. But he also said war wasn’t always wrong, and in fact he supported, albeit reluctantly, the war against the Nazis. After World War II, Russell advocated for dropping atomic bombs on the Soviet Union—and then later for nuclear disarmament. Toward the end of his life he protested the Vietnam War, organizing and financing a war crimes tribunal in 1967 presided over by Sartre and Isaac Deutscher that issued indictments of US military practice. Though he was in his nineties, Russell was perhaps at his most outspoken in those days. He said John F. Kennedy was worse than Adolf Hitler and compared America’s presence in Vietnam to the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He called for a UN commission to investigate allegations of genocide by US troops. His statements at times were so outrageous that some of his good friends wrote him in the 1960s to ask if he had really said the things he was supposed to have said. [...] "War is a mad horror," Russell wrote to a friend. It strained his relationships. He was shocked to see people he considered to be close companions and fellow liberals become pro-war, and it drove a wedge between them. At the same time, he claimed the war rejuvenated him and shook him out of his prejudices.