Albert Einstein and politics

This is a video about Albert Einstein and the E=mc² equation.

From History News Network in the USA:

6-25-07

What Were Einstein’s Politics?

By David E. Rowe and Robert Schulmann

David E. Rowe & Robert Schulmann are the editors of Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and the Bomb (Princeton University Press, 2007).

The Cold War ushered in a period of intense rivalry and suspicion between the United States and the Soviet Union. Domestically, formal and unofficial probes into an individual’s political reliability became commonplace. The era of the loyalty oath and the security-clearance boards had arrived. Given Einstein’s propensity to speak his mind and his fearless association with organizations under suspicion he presented a tempting target for those who viewed expressions of sympathy for the wartime Russian ally, however measured, as treasonable.

Claims that he was an extremist had been levied against Einstein early in his career. In response to the charge in 1919 that he was “a Communist and anarchist,” he declared in an interview that “nothing is farther from my mind than anarchist ideas. I do advocate a planned economy, which cannot, however, be carried out in all workplaces. In this sense I am a socialist.” Similar wild-eyed accusations of radicalism were floated after the Second World War. Infuriated, for example, by Einstein’s call to break relations in late 1945 with Spanish leader Francisco Franco, an erstwhile ally of Hitler’s Germany, Rep. John Rankin of Mississippi attacked Einstein on the floor of Congress as a “foreign-born agitator” who sought “to further the spread of Communism throughout the world.”

Often detractors skirted the issue of outright allegiance to Moscow by asserting that Einstein was but a hapless victim. Just months before the Russian regime exploded an atomic device, Life magazine presented a powerful visual display of Einstein’s questionable loyalties by situating him prominently in a rogue’s gallery of photos. The banner title read: “Dupes and Fellow Travelers Dress up Communist Fronts.” Thus were assertions of political unreliability readily paired with claims of naïveté.

Transition from “communism” to capitalism in the 1990s in Eastern Europe cost many lives: here.

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