September 1, 2022 • 19 mins
Einstein’s life story led him to the kind of cosmopolitanism that has no illusions about human nature. Especially today, as we cluelessly face global problems, it’s worth listening again to his clear call to establish a democratic federal government above the nation-states to really bring about peace and justice.
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Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:10):
One of the interesting sides of Albert Einsteinthat most people today do not know about,
is that he was a passionate advocateof establishing a federal state of the entire world,
a unified democratic political framework for all of humanity.
The story of how he came to this thinking is not only fascinating,
(00:32):
but one that is highly relevant to our times, considering the global challenges that we face.
The story begins with understandingthe political background that Einstein grew up in.
He was born in 1879, within the borders of a rather new political entity, called the German Reich.
(00:52):
This was a federation, a union of some 30 states and small kingdoms
that previously were legally separated and competing:
Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Württembergand many other smaller ones.
It was only 8 years before Einstein’s birth, in 1871,that they all joined under one constitution,
(01:14):
one parliament, and one strong prime minister, Bismarck.
The federal unity of Germany, made it very easyfor Einstein’s parents, for example, to move, when he was still a child,
from the state of Württemberg to theneighbouring state of Bavaria, within the German Reich.
Over the course of his life, Einstein would see many moredramatic changes in the political landscape of Germany, Europe and the world,
(01:41):
showing him how the existing political order at anygiven time and place is not something natural and eternal,
but a dynamic human creation, that people can always change and improve.
Albert was born to a family of secular Jews working in the high-tech business of the time,
which was electric power enlightenment (02:00):
they built generators to light public events, big fairs and then even major city streets.
Young Einstein immersed himself in the books of science and philosophy,
and came to increasingly doubtthe nationalist indoctrination of the German school system.
He hated the education techniquesthat sanctified dumb memorizing and blind obedience,
(02:26):
whose purpose, it seemed, was to preparegood soldiers for the German army.
At the age of 17, fearing the prospectof being enlisted to that army after high school,
he moved to Switzerlandto study physics in the university,
as Switzerland was known for itslongstanding tradition of peace and neutrality.
(02:47):
As he left Germany, however, in 1896,Einstein had to give up his German citizenship,
and he remained an officially stateless person for 5 years, until he got his Swiss citizenship.
As we all know, Einstein did amazingly in his studies,and in the year 1905,
when he was only 26 years old,he made a huge scientific revolution.
(03:11):
That year alone, he published 4 articles that described histheoretical discoveries of the most fundamental laws that govern our universe,
from the quantum theory about thebizarre behaviour of the tiniest particles,
to laying the foundations of the mind-blowing theory of general relativity,
that explains the movements of even entire galaxies and light in space and in time.
(03:36):
And as if that’s not enough, he also revealedthe rule that matter and energy are interchangeable,
which explained, for the first time, the nuclear reactionsthat kindle our sun, and all the other stars in the universe.
What an enlightenment!
Eight years later, in 1913, he was invited by the University of Berlin
(03:59):
to be the Head of their very prestigious Physics Research institute.
The following year he returned to Germany,for that job, and got his German citizenship back.
But that same year of his return, 1914,
happened to be the year in which the dark clouds of the First World War gathered and thundered over Europe.
(04:20):
Einstein found that he couldn’t just shut himself in the academic ivory tower,
and he joined other leading scientistswho wrote together a 'Manifesto to the Europeans’,
courageously calling on them to refuseto go to this “fratricidal war”, as they called it,
and instead come together to form a union of the continent.
(04:41):
Only in such a union, they wrote, “the terms of peace shall not become the cause of future wars.”
In a piece titled ‘My Opinion on the War,’ Einstein wrote: “I am convinced that it is possible, in the near future, (04:49):
undefined
to form a supra-national organization in Europe that will prevent European wars,
just as now a war between (the states of) Bavariaand Württemberg is impossible in the German Reich.”
(05:09):
The idea of a supra-national federationat the European level, or even at the global level,
has been dreamt up over the centuriesagain and again by philosophers, statesmen and poets.
Kant described it as the basis for ‘perpetual peace’, and Victor Hugo spoke passionately about a ‘United States of Europe’.
(05:32):
But, as we know, it would take the Europeanstwo devastating world wars
with tens of millions of dead before they finally started taking serious steps in that direction.
But when the first world war finally ended, the winnersfailed to rise to the grandness of the opportunity that they were given,
and rather than creating such a unionfor the benefit of all, already then,
(05:57):
they created just its pale shadow,the impotent ‘League of Nations.’
With regard to Germany, the winners applied a revengeful approach,that planted feelings of resentment in the German public.
Throughout the 1920s, the Nazi party tried to enflame these feelings,
but it had very little success so long as the German economywas on the path of recovery and reconstruction.
(06:23):
It is notable that despite the many hardships ,for the entire decade after the war,
most Germans endorsed the new democratic system,and the Nazi party remained tiny and insignificant,
in the margins of German politics.
But at the very end of that decade it all changed,with the crash of the New York Stock exchange in the United States.
(06:47):
You see, already then, the economy was global,
so the financial crisis quickly spread to many other countries, and Germany was hit particularly hard.
And as their economy plummeted, many Germans lost faith in democracy,
and they became susceptible to the Nazi’s message about restoring German prosperity, greatness and superiority over all the others.
(07:11):
Because of that crisis, in the elections of 1930,
the Nazi party could suddenly soarfrom a tiny minority group to be the second largest party.
Einstein, who by now had receivedthe Nobel Prize in physics and gained international fame,
publicly criticized not only the racistand militant government that the Nazis formed,
(07:33):
but the anarchic structure of the international system,that could not provide real security, peace or justice to anyone.
In a lecture he gave in 1931 he said:
"Anybody who really wants to abolish war
must resolutely declare himself in favour of his own country's resigning a portion of its sovereignty to international institutions:
(07:58):
he must be ready to make his own country amenable, in case of a dispute,
to the jurisdiction of an international court."
But the Nazis’ grip on power only grew stronger,
and in 1933, while Einstein was on a long visit to the USA,they confiscated his property and his German citizenship,
(08:18):
and he remained in the United States of America for the rest of his life.
The Nazi’s increasingly blatant racist persecutionsand war mongering made Einstein change his mind about pacifism.
Whereas, during the First World War,he called on the Europeans to refuse to go to war,
with regard to the Nazis he came to concludethat this monster could not be tamed by peaceful means.
(08:45):
Only military force could defeat them and had to be used.
In August 1939, a month before the war began, Einstein wrote a secret letter to the American President Roosevelt.
Nazi Germany, he warned, could take his ideas about nuclear energy and try to develop a new type of a bomb,
(09:05):
that would be so destructivethat it would give Germany a decisive strategic advantage.
The USA, therefore, should try to develop such a weapon in advance, as a deterrent.
This letter is a great example that Einstein was far frombeing some naïve thinker, who believed that ‘all you need is love’.
He did have the love of humanity in his heart, for sure,
(09:29):
but for the love of humanity, in some extreme cases,
when you stand against Nazis,you better have also an atomic bomb before they get it.
Two years later, at the height of the war, in 1941,
when an American conscientious objector facing jailwrote to Einstein asking for his support,
Einstein wrote in reply that there are two types of pacifism, sound and unsound. I quote,
(09:55):
“Sound pacifism tries to prevent wars through a world order based on power,
not through a purely passive attitude toward international problems.
Unsound, irresponsible pacifism contributed in large measure to the defeat of France
as well as to the difficult situation in which England finds herself today.
(10:17):
And I urge you to do your share, lest this country [the USA] make the same mistake!”
President Roosevelt took Einstein’s advice and set up a military program to develop the nuclear bomb
But besides writing that letter, Einstein was not a part of that program.
And after six years of a horrendous world war,
(10:38):
by May 1945, not only Italy,but also Germany had finally surrendered,
and only Japan, though exhausted and battered,refused to give up and continued to fight.
Three months later, in August, soon after finally succeeding in developing the atomic bomb,
aircrafts of the US army droppedone bomb on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki in Japan,
(11:03):
erasing the cities and causing the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Japan quickly surrendered.
After the bombardment of the two cities,Einstein remained publicly silent for a whole month.
When he finally agreed to give a big interview to the Atlantic Magazine,
he told the reporter (11:23):
“The only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of a world government.
As long as sovereign states continue to have armamentsand armaments secrets, new world wars will be inevitable.”
The idea of a world government was thenfar more popular and better accepted than it is today.
(11:46):
After yet another devastating world war,the question on everyone’s mind was how to prevent a third one.
The United Nations wasn’t formed yet, and there was a giant question mark regarding the new post-war world order.
It was already evident that the age of empireswas quickly coming to an end,
(12:06):
that that form of government had lost its legitimacy,
and many felt that it had to be replaced with representative democracy.
And not only on the national, but also on the global level.
The American team of scientists who developed the atomic bombfelt a particular responsibility and great worry.
They knew that if only other countriesalso invested sufficiently in research,
(12:30):
they could also develop nuclear arms which would makethe next war far more horrendous than the one just ended.
Indeed, the next world war could be the very last.
In September ‘45, just a month before the establishment of the UN,
a few of them, without consulting Einstein,published their own manifesto,
(12:51):
calling for the creation of a ‘council of nations’to supervise nuclear arms.
Einstein fiercely criticized them,saying that a ‘council of nations’ is entirely insufficient.
We’ve already seen, he said,the uselessness of the ‘League of Nations’
and we just cannot afford more of those toothless institutions.
(13:14):
Just as a government is necessary at the national level
to stop people in conflict from using violence against each other, he reasoned,
so at the global level even more so,that a government is necessary for peace and justice.
On the 24th of October ‘45,
the United Nations Organization officially came into being
(13:35):
when 27 states ratified the UN Charterthat had been signed earlier that year in San Francisco
Two weeks earlier, Einstein together with other notable thinkers,
published in the New York Timesa fierce condemnation of the proposed Charter,
who gave complete sovereignty to the member governments,without any power above them.
(13:58):
In that sense, they wrote, it was comparable to the American “Articles of Confederation”,
the document that first united the13 American republics that later became the USA
That confederation didn’t work and it was quickly replacedwith the Federal Constitution of the United States of America.
Similarly, and I quote: “We must aim at a Federal Constitution of the world, (14:19):
undefined
a working world-wide legal order,if we hope to prevent an atomic war.”
In interviews, Einstein warmly recommended a book that has just been published then, titled ‘The Anatomy of Peace’.
In it, his friend the writer Emery Reves presentedconcisely and convincingly the case for a federal world government.
(14:46):
This small book made it to the topof the bestsellers list in the USA in March of 1946
and stayed at the top for 6 months.
It was translated into 18 languages
and its ideas about a world federationbecame extremely popular around the world.
Later that year, Einstein and few otherleading physicists published a collection of essays
called 'One World or None (15:08):
A report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb”.
In his essay, Einstein wrote about the most vital lessons
that we should learn from the failure of the League of Nations system.
After the First World War, he explained,
the international community had set up two institutions that resembled judicial and legislative branches of government.
(15:34):
The first, the ‘judicial’, was the International Court of Justice
whose aim was to solve disputes and conflicts between states on the basis of inter-national law.
The second, the ‘legislative’, was the League of Nations,where representatives of member governments
could come together to peacefully negotiate the writing of that inter-national law.
(15:57):
When they all gathered in one big assembly room,it had the semblance of a kind of a world parliament.
What’s more, one of their resolutions was to outlawas criminal the method of solving conflicts by war.
“Thus”, he wrote, and I quote, “the nations were imbuedwith an illusion of security that led inevitably to bitter disappointment.
(16:21):
For the best court is meaningless unless it is backedby the authority and power to execute its decisions,
and exactly the same thing is true of a world parliament.
An individual state with sufficient militaryand economic power can easily resort to violence,
and voluntarily destroy the entire structureof supranational security built on nothing but words and documents.
(16:46):
Moral authority alone is an inadequate means of securing the peace.
[…] It is necessary that the individual state be prevented from making war
by a supra-national organization supported by a military power that is exclusively under its control.
Only [then] can we have some assurance that we shallnot vanish into the atmosphere, dissolved into atoms, one of these days.”
(17:13):
This text also shows how Einstein’s vision about a unified world,
was as far as can be from naïve,but rather based on hard realism.
He couldn’t be satisfied with nice wordsand noble declarations of the strong,
but wanted a government above themthat belongs to all of us, the people of the world.
(17:34):
A federal government with proper checks and balances, and a proper rule of law,
which are arrangements that to this dayare limited only to the nation state level,
while our society in reality, and our mutual impacts, are increasingly global.
Naturally, the main worry of Einstein that justifiedsuch a government was the problem of war in a nuclear age.
(17:59):
And while his fears in this field did not materialize, at least for now,
it is nevertheless evident that the dynamics of the Cold War,
the power politics, the proxy wars,the mutual mistrust and the preparations for war,
took, and are still taking, a huge tollon countless individuals and groups around the world.
(18:20):
A terribly heavy toll, that could have been avoided
Had only Einstein’s moral and rational voicebeen better listened to by more people
we could have been living in a much more safe,just and happy world than the one that we have.
I think that today, as we increasingly face global problems,we can draw important inspiration from his message and activism.
(18:46):
Thank you for listening,and thank you for sharing this important message.
One of the interesting sides of Albert Einsteinthat most people today do not know about,
is that he was a passionate advocateof establishing a federal state of the entire world,
a unified democratic political framework for all of humanity.
The story of how he came to this thinking is not only fascinating,
(00:32):
but one that is highly relevant to our times, considering the global challenges that we face.
The story begins with understandingthe political background that Einstein grew up in.
He was born in 1879, within the borders of a rather new political entity, called the German Reich.
(00:52):
This was a federation, a union of some 30 states and small kingdoms
that previously were legally separated and competing:
Prussia, Saxony, Bavaria, Württembergand many other smaller ones.
It was only 8 years before Einstein’s birth, in 1871,that they all joined under one constitution,
(01:14):
one parliament, and one strong prime minister, Bismarck.
The federal unity of Germany, made it very easyfor Einstein’s parents, for example, to move, when he was still a child,
from the state of Württemberg to theneighbouring state of Bavaria, within the German Reich.
Over the course of his life, Einstein would see many moredramatic changes in the political landscape of Germany, Europe and the world,
(01:41):
showing him how the existing political order at anygiven time and place is not something natural and eternal,
but a dynamic human creation, that people can always change and improve.
Albert was born to a family of secular Jews working in the high-tech business of the time,
which was electric power enlightenment (02:00):
they built generators to light public events, big fairs and then even major city streets.
Young Einstein immersed himself in the books of science and philosophy,
and came to increasingly doubtthe nationalist indoctrination of the German school system.
He hated the education techniquesthat sanctified dumb memorizing and blind obedience,
(02:26):
whose purpose, it seemed, was to preparegood soldiers for the German army.
At the age of 17, fearing the prospectof being enlisted to that army after high school,
he moved to Switzerlandto study physics in the university,
as Switzerland was known for itslongstanding tradition of peace and neutrality.
(02:47):
As he left Germany, however, in 1896,Einstein had to give up his German citizenship,
and he remained an officially stateless person for 5 years, until he got his Swiss citizenship.
As we all know, Einstein did amazingly in his studies,and in the year 1905,
when he was only 26 years old,he made a huge scientific revolution.
(03:11):
That year alone, he published 4 articles that described histheoretical discoveries of the most fundamental laws that govern our universe,
from the quantum theory about thebizarre behaviour of the tiniest particles,
to laying the foundations of the mind-blowing theory of general relativity,
that explains the movements of even entire galaxies and light in space and in time.
(03:36):
And as if that’s not enough, he also revealedthe rule that matter and energy are interchangeable,
which explained, for the first time, the nuclear reactionsthat kindle our sun, and all the other stars in the universe.
What an enlightenment!
Eight years later, in 1913, he was invited by the University of Berlin
(03:59):
to be the Head of their very prestigious Physics Research institute.
The following year he returned to Germany,for that job, and got his German citizenship back.
But that same year of his return, 1914,
happened to be the year in which the dark clouds of the First World War gathered and thundered over Europe.
(04:20):
Einstein found that he couldn’t just shut himself in the academic ivory tower,
and he joined other leading scientistswho wrote together a 'Manifesto to the Europeans’,
courageously calling on them to refuseto go to this “fratricidal war”, as they called it,
and instead come together to form a union of the continent.
(04:41):
Only in such a union, they wrote, “the terms of peace shall not become the cause of future wars.”
In a piece titled ‘My Opinion on the War,’ Einstein wrote: “I am convinced that it is possible, in the near future, (04:49):
undefined
to form a supra-national organization in Europe that will prevent European wars,
just as now a war between (the states of) Bavariaand Württemberg is impossible in the German Reich.”
(05:09):
The idea of a supra-national federationat the European level, or even at the global level,
has been dreamt up over the centuriesagain and again by philosophers, statesmen and poets.
Kant described it as the basis for ‘perpetual peace’, and Victor Hugo spoke passionately about a ‘United States of Europe’.
(05:32):
But, as we know, it would take the Europeanstwo devastating world wars
with tens of millions of dead before they finally started taking serious steps in that direction.
But when the first world war finally ended, the winnersfailed to rise to the grandness of the opportunity that they were given,
and rather than creating such a unionfor the benefit of all, already then,
(05:57):
they created just its pale shadow,the impotent ‘League of Nations.’
With regard to Germany, the winners applied a revengeful approach,that planted feelings of resentment in the German public.
Throughout the 1920s, the Nazi party tried to enflame these feelings,
but it had very little success so long as the German economywas on the path of recovery and reconstruction.
(06:23):
It is notable that despite the many hardships ,for the entire decade after the war,
most Germans endorsed the new democratic system,and the Nazi party remained tiny and insignificant,
in the margins of German politics.
But at the very end of that decade it all changed,with the crash of the New York Stock exchange in the United States.
(06:47):
You see, already then, the economy was global,
so the financial crisis quickly spread to many other countries, and Germany was hit particularly hard.
And as their economy plummeted, many Germans lost faith in democracy,
and they became susceptible to the Nazi’s message about restoring German prosperity, greatness and superiority over all the others.
(07:11):
Because of that crisis, in the elections of 1930,
the Nazi party could suddenly soarfrom a tiny minority group to be the second largest party.
Einstein, who by now had receivedthe Nobel Prize in physics and gained international fame,
publicly criticized not only the racistand militant government that the Nazis formed,
(07:33):
but the anarchic structure of the international system,that could not provide real security, peace or justice to anyone.
In a lecture he gave in 1931 he said:
"Anybody who really wants to abolish war
must resolutely declare himself in favour of his own country's resigning a portion of its sovereignty to international institutions:
(07:58):
he must be ready to make his own country amenable, in case of a dispute,
to the jurisdiction of an international court."
But the Nazis’ grip on power only grew stronger,
and in 1933, while Einstein was on a long visit to the USA,they confiscated his property and his German citizenship,
(08:18):
and he remained in the United States of America for the rest of his life.
The Nazi’s increasingly blatant racist persecutionsand war mongering made Einstein change his mind about pacifism.
Whereas, during the First World War,he called on the Europeans to refuse to go to war,
with regard to the Nazis he came to concludethat this monster could not be tamed by peaceful means.
(08:45):
Only military force could defeat them and had to be used.
In August 1939, a month before the war began, Einstein wrote a secret letter to the American President Roosevelt.
Nazi Germany, he warned, could take his ideas about nuclear energy and try to develop a new type of a bomb,
(09:05):
that would be so destructivethat it would give Germany a decisive strategic advantage.
The USA, therefore, should try to develop such a weapon in advance, as a deterrent.
This letter is a great example that Einstein was far frombeing some naïve thinker, who believed that ‘all you need is love’.
He did have the love of humanity in his heart, for sure,
(09:29):
but for the love of humanity, in some extreme cases,
when you stand against Nazis,you better have also an atomic bomb before they get it.
Two years later, at the height of the war, in 1941,
when an American conscientious objector facing jailwrote to Einstein asking for his support,
Einstein wrote in reply that there are two types of pacifism, sound and unsound. I quote,
(09:55):
“Sound pacifism tries to prevent wars through a world order based on power,
not through a purely passive attitude toward international problems.
Unsound, irresponsible pacifism contributed in large measure to the defeat of France
as well as to the difficult situation in which England finds herself today.
(10:17):
And I urge you to do your share, lest this country [the USA] make the same mistake!”
President Roosevelt took Einstein’s advice and set up a military program to develop the nuclear bomb
But besides writing that letter, Einstein was not a part of that program.
And after six years of a horrendous world war,
(10:38):
by May 1945, not only Italy,but also Germany had finally surrendered,
and only Japan, though exhausted and battered,refused to give up and continued to fight.
Three months later, in August, soon after finally succeeding in developing the atomic bomb,
aircrafts of the US army droppedone bomb on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki in Japan,
(11:03):
erasing the cities and causing the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Japan quickly surrendered.
After the bombardment of the two cities,Einstein remained publicly silent for a whole month.
When he finally agreed to give a big interview to the Atlantic Magazine,
he told the reporter (11:23):
“The only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of a world government.
As long as sovereign states continue to have armamentsand armaments secrets, new world wars will be inevitable.”
The idea of a world government was thenfar more popular and better accepted than it is today.
(11:46):
After yet another devastating world war,the question on everyone’s mind was how to prevent a third one.
The United Nations wasn’t formed yet, and there was a giant question mark regarding the new post-war world order.
It was already evident that the age of empireswas quickly coming to an end,
(12:06):
that that form of government had lost its legitimacy,
and many felt that it had to be replaced with representative democracy.
And not only on the national, but also on the global level.
The American team of scientists who developed the atomic bombfelt a particular responsibility and great worry.
They knew that if only other countriesalso invested sufficiently in research,
(12:30):
they could also develop nuclear arms which would makethe next war far more horrendous than the one just ended.
Indeed, the next world war could be the very last.
In September ‘45, just a month before the establishment of the UN,
a few of them, without consulting Einstein,published their own manifesto,
(12:51):
calling for the creation of a ‘council of nations’to supervise nuclear arms.
Einstein fiercely criticized them,saying that a ‘council of nations’ is entirely insufficient.
We’ve already seen, he said,the uselessness of the ‘League of Nations’
and we just cannot afford more of those toothless institutions.
(13:14):
Just as a government is necessary at the national level
to stop people in conflict from using violence against each other, he reasoned,
so at the global level even more so,that a government is necessary for peace and justice.
On the 24th of October ‘45,
the United Nations Organization officially came into being
(13:35):
when 27 states ratified the UN Charterthat had been signed earlier that year in San Francisco
Two weeks earlier, Einstein together with other notable thinkers,
published in the New York Timesa fierce condemnation of the proposed Charter,
who gave complete sovereignty to the member governments,without any power above them.
(13:58):
In that sense, they wrote, it was comparable to the American “Articles of Confederation”,
the document that first united the13 American republics that later became the USA
That confederation didn’t work and it was quickly replacedwith the Federal Constitution of the United States of America.
Similarly, and I quote: “We must aim at a Federal Constitution of the world, (14:19):
undefined
a working world-wide legal order,if we hope to prevent an atomic war.”
In interviews, Einstein warmly recommended a book that has just been published then, titled ‘The Anatomy of Peace’.
In it, his friend the writer Emery Reves presentedconcisely and convincingly the case for a federal world government.
(14:46):
This small book made it to the topof the bestsellers list in the USA in March of 1946
and stayed at the top for 6 months.
It was translated into 18 languages
and its ideas about a world federationbecame extremely popular around the world.
Later that year, Einstein and few otherleading physicists published a collection of essays
called 'One World or None (15:08):
A report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb”.
In his essay, Einstein wrote about the most vital lessons
that we should learn from the failure of the League of Nations system.
After the First World War, he explained,
the international community had set up two institutions that resembled judicial and legislative branches of government.
(15:34):
The first, the ‘judicial’, was the International Court of Justice
whose aim was to solve disputes and conflicts between states on the basis of inter-national law.
The second, the ‘legislative’, was the League of Nations,where representatives of member governments
could come together to peacefully negotiate the writing of that inter-national law.
(15:57):
When they all gathered in one big assembly room,it had the semblance of a kind of a world parliament.
What’s more, one of their resolutions was to outlawas criminal the method of solving conflicts by war.
“Thus”, he wrote, and I quote, “the nations were imbuedwith an illusion of security that led inevitably to bitter disappointment.
(16:21):
For the best court is meaningless unless it is backedby the authority and power to execute its decisions,
and exactly the same thing is true of a world parliament.
An individual state with sufficient militaryand economic power can easily resort to violence,
and voluntarily destroy the entire structureof supranational security built on nothing but words and documents.
(16:46):
Moral authority alone is an inadequate means of securing the peace.
[…] It is necessary that the individual state be prevented from making war
by a supra-national organization supported by a military power that is exclusively under its control.
Only [then] can we have some assurance that we shallnot vanish into the atmosphere, dissolved into atoms, one of these days.”
(17:13):
This text also shows how Einstein’s vision about a unified world,
was as far as can be from naïve,but rather based on hard realism.
He couldn’t be satisfied with nice wordsand noble declarations of the strong,
but wanted a government above themthat belongs to all of us, the people of the world.
(17:34):
A federal government with proper checks and balances, and a proper rule of law,
which are arrangements that to this dayare limited only to the nation state level,
while our society in reality, and our mutual impacts, are increasingly global.
Naturally, the main worry of Einstein that justifiedsuch a government was the problem of war in a nuclear age.
(17:59):
And while his fears in this field did not materialize, at least for now,
it is nevertheless evident that the dynamics of the Cold War,
the power politics, the proxy wars,the mutual mistrust and the preparations for war,
took, and are still taking, a huge tollon countless individuals and groups around the world.
(18:20):
A terribly heavy toll, that could have been avoided
Had only Einstein’s moral and rational voicebeen better listened to by more people
we could have been living in a much more safe,just and happy world than the one that we have.
I think that today, as we increasingly face global problems,we can draw important inspiration from his message and activism.
(18:46):
Thank you for listening,and thank you for sharing this important message.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.