Civilized World Quotes
There is some debate as to whether this statement was made at this time or different parts of it on two different occasions. The sentiment and position appears to be genuine but the issue of the timing is in doubt.
His assumption about whether an army was “willing or able to train its guns on inoffensive people” was a little naïve. The Ottomans had massacred the Armenians, and soon the German troops would murder innocent civilians. As did the Japanese. The Russian Communists on many occasions massacred civilians engaging in passive resistance. In Cambodia, the Kmer Rouge Army killed almost 2 million, most of whom had educations which might have made them passive resisters. Islamic Fascist governments like Syria and Iran used heavy weapons to kill citizens in their own homes because they were in neighborhoods that housed many passive resisters. Extreme Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists regularly killed innocent civilians in their homes, on the streets or in busses, just to intimidate others to surrender to their religious and political demands. He was right that democratic governments and armies would not engage in such killing of their own people, but there are unfortunately still many other governments.
Although Churchill, FDR, and a few other world leaders also recognized this reality, most people, even in America and Europe were not yet knowledgeable about the danger of Hitler and Nazi Germany. What is fascinating is that a theoretical scientists—one whose work had little to do with reality could be that perspicacious to identify major political trends. But Einstein was not only one of the world’s great scientific thinkers but he was a very sophisticated political and philosophical thinker.
He left the priesthood in 1896.
A Mormon Periodical
Turkey, under the control of the triumvirate of the 3 Young Turks had massacred almost all of the Armenian population in the area claimed by Turkey. At the end of WWI, there were many demands that those who ordered the policy of a Turkish genocide and those who carried it out by brought to justice—tried and punished. The Sultan had done little if anything to stop the slaughters although he was very weak, Turkey under the Young Turks had also picked the wrong side and allied with the Germans. The Sultan and his Grand Vizier were trying to pick up the pieces and maintain the Ottoman Empire as best they could despite they the fact that they lost control of much of their vast territory. At the Paris Peace Conference, the Grand Vizier virtually admitted the crimes and committed the Turkish government to determining the guilty and bringing them to justice. He actually had 50 of the worst offenders arrested (See {620595}.). However, there were a few tried and one governor of a province was hanged and a few others received short jail sentences. Talaat, the worst of The Young Turks regarding the genocide, escaped to Germany. But he was tracked by a surviving Armenian who assassinated Talaat. The assassin was acquitted by a sympathetic German court which ruled that the extermination of the assassin’s family had been so traumatic that temporary insanity relieved the assassin of criminal responsibility.
