Einstein's Irony

[RascalPuff]

At the end of 1932, due to ominously increasing anti-Semitism, Einstein moved from Fascist Germany to America. At the beginning of 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Had Einstein remained in Germany there is very little doubt that he would have perished in the Holocaust. Instead, he lived very happily in Princeton, New Jersey from 1935 to 1955.

Had not Russia, all the Allies of Europe and America, certainly including Australia overcome the 3rd Reich, there is very little doubt that Hitler would have dominated Europe, Russia and consequently, the world - all of that would most likely have come to pass if World War II had not been fought and come to its resolute conclusion - the destruction of the insatiable Fascist 3rd Reich.

Yet, as a devout pacifist, Einstein had this to say about war and soldiers:

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice."

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!"

"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

It is true that the years of World War One - 1914 to 1918 - signalled what became evident as a futile and disastrous war for all concerned participants, and, it is true that the young Einstein was profoundly influenced by that tragic and unnecessary war. Whereas, Einstein apparently did not distinguish the catastrophic and avoidable fiasco of World War One, from the globally urgent necessity of World War Two; the latter of which would in all likelihood have been his personal undoing - and that of millions of others who consequently survived and thrived - had it not been fought and won by the anti Fascist elements.

Question:
Did Einstein ever qualify his anti war posturing to accept that World War Two was indeed a self defensive and consequently justified war? What were his thoughts and feelings on the difference between unecessary and necessary war - did he ever express any such distinction?

Refer: Just And Unjust Wars, by Michael Walzer

"I find Just and Unjust Wars a magnificent book, an honor to its writer... a book that makes for a return of civilized discussion of the question of the morality of war." - The New York Review of Books

"... a clear, humane, and startlingly original survey of the moral issues that complicate modern warmaking." - The Atlantic Monthly

[austintorn@aol.com]

I'm not sure, but perhaps the wave of pacifism over WWI carried many for decades, even for the U.S. in the years just before it entered WWII. At least he wrote to FDR about the A-bomb.

[RascalPuff]

At the time, Einstein was working on developing his Unified Field Theory. He described it as an attempt to work out a relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm. My grandfather pointed out the parallel between the planets in their orbits and electrons in theirs. Einstein said, "I not interested so much in the particles as I am in the spaces between them."

Once, Einstein describing his leaving Germany: One night, Storm Troopers came to his house and took him and his wife outside, then went in to search for weapons. A little while later, they returned with a set of carving knives. "See?" they said. "Weapons." Then the smashed Einstein's sailboat. He said to his wife, "Look good at this place, for you will not see it again." They left the country that night. "You know," Einstein said, "if they had catched me, they would have killed me."
- Chuck Rothman, Long Island, N.Y. (Whose small town merchant grandfather, David Rothman, casually befriended Einstein in 1939)


Einstein renounced his former pacifist stand in the face of the awesome threat to humankind posed by the Nazi regime in Germany. In 1939 Einstein collaborated with several other physicists in writing a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, pointing out the possibility of making an atomic bomb and the likelihood that the German government was embarking on such a course. The letter, which bore only Einstein's signature, helped lend urgency to efforts in the U.S. to build the atomic bomb, but Einstein himself played no role in the work and knew nothing about it at the time.
- Excerpt, Davitt Publications

http://www.sff.net/people/rothman/einstein.htm
http://www.germanheritage.com/biogra.../einstein.html
(Also: Google - "Albert Einstein leaving Germany" )

NOTE:
As regards the development of the atomic bomb and the imposition of that menace upon the world ever since, it is advisable to be mindful that the Nazis were working on an atomic weapon (producing Deuterium - 'heavy water' - in Norway) as early as 1940. Had the Manhatten Project not beat them to it, well, draw your own conclusions...

London, Paris, Moscow and New York City were at the top of the Nazi list of prime nuclear targets.

Incidentally, World War Two ended in Europe with the taking of Berlin in April, '45, just before the bomb was ready for deployment. It was unleashed on Japan in August of '45, because it had not been ready for usage before then. Ironically, although hundreds of thousands of lives were lost due to its release on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it ended a war which would have gone on much longer, and taken many more American as well as Japanese lives.

[jag]

Incidentally, World War Two ended in Europe with the taking of Berlin in April, '45, just before the bomb was ready for deployment. It was unleashed on Japan in August of '45, because it had not been ready for usage before then. Ironically, although hundreds of thousands of lives were lost due to its release on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it ended a war which would have gone on much longer, and taken many more American as well as Japanese lives.[/SIZE]

Please don't glorify or justify the single most voilent act commited in the history of mankind. The bombs could have been dropped on an unpopulated area as a warning and possibly have achieved Japans surrender.

The scariest thing in this life is the nuclear threat, and the fact that the largest arsenal of these weapons is in the hands of the only country to have ever used them in anger.

I remember, as a child, growing up on the west coast of south Florida during the Cuban missile being told that an aerial detonation a few miles off the coast of Miami would send a wall of water across the entire state. It is insanity that these weapons exist!

We have to find a way to make war illegal...through the U.N. or some united democratic world government. The world government that is emerging now...basically the U.S. and NATO...is unacceptable. All the nations of the world have to be equal partners and share in the protection of themselves against terrorism. This will, for one thing, produce a world police force. No more war...no more one nation against another...only police actions sanctioned by all nations.
At that point nuclear weapons would be obsolete. There can be no possible scenario where a nuclear weapon would be necessary in a police action.

The belief that nations would benefit from acting independently rather than collectively,emphasizing national rather than international goals is the chief barrier to world peace.

"World peace cannot be maintained by treaties, diplomacy, foreign policies, alliances, balance of power or any other type of makeshift juggling with the sovereignties of nationalism. World law must come into being and must be enforced by world government-the sovereignty of all mankind."

jag

[austintorn@aol.com]

World law must come into being and must be enforced by world government-the sovereignty of all mankind." jag

That's the ticket, and, as all nations will not agreed to it, it will be above and beyond any law of any nation, kind of like the "Ninja Empire"…

I nominate Rascal to head it up.

[RascalPuff]

We have to find a way to make war illegal...through the U.N. or some united democratic world government. The world government that is emerging now...basically the U.S. and NATO...is unacceptable. All the nations of the world have to be equal partners and share in the protection of themselves against terrorism. This will, for one thing, produce a world police force. No more war...no more one nation against another...only police actions sanctioned by all nations.
At that point nuclear weapons would be obsolete. There can be no possible scenario where a nuclear weapon would be necessary in a police action.

The belief that nations would benefit from acting independently rather than collectively,emphasizing national rather than international goals is the chief barrier to world peace.

"World peace cannot be maintained by treaties, diplomacy, foreign policies, alliances, balance of power or any other type of makeshift juggling with the sovereignties of nationalism. World law must come into being and must be enforced by world government-the sovereignty of all mankind."

jag

H.G. Wells (1866–1946). A Short History of the World. 1922.
(Public domain; copyright free - this pre nuclear reminder is presented as a public service. - RP)

LXV. The Age of Armament in Europe, and the Great War of 1914–18


THE PROGRESS in material science that created this vast steamboat-and-railway republic of America and spread this precarious British steamship empire over the world, produced quite other effects upon the congested nations upon the continent of Europe. They found themselves confined within boundaries fixed during the horse-and-high-road period of human life, and their expansion overseas had been very largely anticipated by Great Britain. Only Russia had any freedom to expand eastward; and she drove a great railway across Siberia until she entangled herself in a conflict with Japan, and pushed south-eastwardly towards the borders of Persia and India to the annoyance of Britain.

The rest of the European Powers were in a state of intensifying congestion. In order to realize the full possibilities of the new apparatus of human life they had to rearrange their affairs upon a broader basis, either by some sort of voluntary union or by a union imposed upon them by some predominant power. The tendency of modern thought was in the direction of the former alternative, but all-the force of political tradition drove Europe towards the latter. 1 The downfall of the “empire” of Napoleon III, the establishment of the new German Empire, pointed men’s hopes and fears towards the idea of a Europe consolidated under German auspices. For thirty-six years of uneasy peace the politics of Europe centred upon that possibility. France, the steadfast rival of Germany for European ascendancy since the division of the empire of Charlemagne, sought to correct her own weakness by a close alliance with Russia, and Germany linked herself closely with the Austrian Empire (it had ceased to be the Holy Roman Empire in the days of Napoleon I) and less successfully with the new kingdom of Italy. At first Great Britain stood as usual half in and half out of continental affairs. But she was gradually forced into a close association with the Franco-Russian group by the aggressive development of a great German navy. The grandiose imagination of the Emperor William II (1888–191 thrust Germany into premature overseas enterprise that ultimately brought not only Great Britain but Japan and the United States into the circle of her enemies.

All these nations armed. Year after year the proportion of national production devoted to the making of guns, equipment, battleships and the like increased. Year after year the balance of things seemed trembling towards war, and then war would be averted. At last it came. Germany and Austria struck at France and Russia and Serbia; the German armies marching through Belgium, Britain immediately came into the war on the side of Belgium, bringing in Japan as her ally, and very soon Turkey followed on the German side. Italy entered the war against Austria in 1915, and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in the October of that year. In 1916 Rumania, and in 1917 the United States and China were forced into war against Germany. It is not within the scope of this history to define the exact share of blame for this vast catastrophe. The more interesting question is not why the Great War was begun but why the Great War was not anticipated and prevented. It is a far graver thing for mankind that scores of millions of people were too “patriotic,” stupid, or apathetic to prevent this disaster by a movement towards European unity upon frank and generous lines, than that a small number of people may have been active in bringing it about. 3 It is impossible within the space at our command here to trace the intricate details of the war. Within a few months it became apparent that the progress of modern technical science had changed the nature of warfare very profoundly. Physical science gives power, power over steel, over distance, over disease; whether that power is used well or ill depends upon the moral and political intelligence of the world. The governments of Europe, inspired by antiquated policies of hate and suspicion, found themselves with unexampled powers both of destruction and resistance in their hands. The war became a consuming fire round and about the world, causing losses both to victors and vanquished out of all proportion to the issues involved. The first phase of the war was a tremendous rush of the Germans upon Paris and an invasion of East Prussia by the Russians. Both attacks were held and turned. Then the power of the defensive developed; there was a rapid elaboration of trench warfare until for a time the opposing armies lay entrenched in long lines right across Europe, unable to make any advance without enormous losses. The armies were millions strong, and behind them entire populations were organized for the supply of food and munitions to the front. There was a cessation of nearly every sort of productive activity except such as contributed to military operations.

All the able-bodied manhood of Europe was drawn into the armies or navies or into the improvised factories that served them. There was an enormous replacement of men by women in industry. Probably more than half the people in the belligerent countries of Europe changed their employment altogether during this stupendous struggle. They were socially uprooted and transplanted. Education and normal scientific work were restricted or diverted to immediate military ends, and the distribution of news was crippled and corrupted by military control and “propaganda” activities. 4 The phase of military deadlock passed slowly into one of aggression upon the combatant populations behind the fronts by the destruction of food supplies and by attacks through the air. And also there was a steady improvement in the size and range of the guns employed and of such ingenious devices as poison-gas shells and the small mobile forts known as tanks, to break down the resistance of troops in the trenches.

The air offensive was the most revolutionary of all the new methods. It carried warfare from two dimensions into three. Hitherto in the history of mankind war had gone on only where the armies marched and met. Now it went on everywhere. First the Zeppelin and then the bombing aeroplane carried war over and past the front to an ever-increasing area of civilian activities beyond. The old distinction maintained in civilized warfare between the civilian and combatant population disappeared. Everyone who grew food, or who sewed a garment, everyone who felled a tree or repaired a house, every railway station and every warehouse was held to be fair game for destruction. The air offensive increased in range and terror with every month in the war. At last great areas of Europe were in a state of siege and subject to nightly raids. Such exposed cities as London and Paris passed sleepless night after sleepless night while the bombs burst, the anti-aircraft guns maintained an intolerable racket, and the fire engines and ambulances rattled headlong through the darkened and deserted streets. The effects upon the minds and health of old people and of young children were particularly distressing and destructive. 5 Pestilence, that old follower of warfare, did not arrive until the very end of the fighting in 1918. For four years medical science staved off any general epidemic; then came a great outbreak of influenza about the world which destroyed many millions of people. Famine also was staved off for some time. By the beginning of 1918 however most of Europe was in a state of mitigated and regulated famine. The production of food throughout the world had fallen very greatly through the calling off of peasant mankind to the fronts, and the distribution of such food as was produced was impeded by the havoc wrought by the submarine, by the rupture of customary routes through the closing of frontiers, and by the disorganization of the transport system of the world. The various governments took possession of the dwindling food supplies, and, with more or less success, rationed their populations. 6 The actual warfare ceased in November, 1918. After a supreme effort in the spring of 1918 that almost carried the Germans to Paris, the Central Powers collapsed. They had come to an end of their spirit and resources.

[austintorn@aol.com]

It became clear only in 2002 that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USS Beale had depth-charged an unidentified submarine which was in fact Soviet and armed with nuclear weapons, and whose commanders argued over whether to retaliate with a nuclear torpedo.

On January 25 1995, Russian President Boris Yeltsin came within minutes of initiating a full nuclear strike on the United States because of an unidentified Norwegian scientific rocket.

[austintorn@aol.com]

The global Ninja Empire will decide whether to neutralize nuclear launches, and perhaps even the whole country of origin. A complete breakdown of all electronics will be caused by a giant electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The implications of such an event will be enormous. Phones will not work. There will be no way to find out via the internet what happened. All electricity will stop, etc.