Albert Einstein’s activities as a passionate advocate for peace were well-documented during his lifetime. His celebrity as a famous physicist and one of the world’s most recognizable faces lent a great deal of weight to his pacifism, a view otherwise not given much consideration in the popular press at almost any time in history. However, according to a 2006 book titled Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Roger Taylor, the scientist was also as passionate about combating racism and segregation as he was about combating war. This facet of Einstein’s life was virtually ignored by the media, as was a visit he made in 1946 to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the first degree-granting college for African-Americans and the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall.
Invited to Lincoln to receive an honorary degree, Einstein gave a lecture on physics but also bluntly addressed the racial animus that held the country in its grip, reportedly calling racism, “a disease of white people” and saying he “did not intend to be quiet” about his opposition to segregation and racist public policy. Lest anyone think the Nobel-prize-winning physicist was pandering to his audience, the Harvard Gazette offers a comprehensive summary of Einstein’s support of progressive anti-racist causes, including his personal support of members of Princeton’s black community (he paid one man’s college tuition), a town Princeton native Paul Robeson once called “the northernmost town in the south.”
Einstein formed relationships with several prominent black leaders—inviting opera singer Marian Anderson to stay in his home after she was refused a room at the Nassau Inn and appearing as a character witness for W.E.B. Dubois when the latter stood accused of “failing to register as a foreign agent.” But it was his 20-year friendship with Robeson that seems central to his involvement in civil rights causes. The Harvard Gazette writes:
Einstein met Paul Robeson when the famous singer and actor came to perform at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in 1935. The two found they had much in common. Both were concerned about the rise of fascism, and both gave their support to efforts to defend the democratically elected government of Spain against the fascist forces of Francisco Franco. Einstein and Robeson also worked together on the American Crusade to End Lynching, in response to an upsurge in racial murders as black soldiers returned home in the aftermath of World War II.
At the time of the Gazette article, 2007, a movie about Einstein and Robeson’s friendship was apparently in the works, with Danny Glover as Robeson and Ben Kingsley as Einstein. The project is apparently stalled, but with the upsurge in popular interest in the history of civil rights—with the overturning of the Voting Rights Act and the widespread coverage of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington—perhaps the project will see new life soon. I certainly hope so.
We’ve already featured former Black Flag frontman and current spoken-word artist Henry Rollins explaining why, to his mind, only education can restore democracy. He also believes it can cure something he calls “disaster capitalism,” and you can hear more from him about it in the Big Think video above. He addresses, in his characteristically straightforward manner, the questions of what exactly ails the American economy, how that ailment might have come about, and how the country can educate itself back to health. We may individually get our educations now, he grants, but “how long will it be until America fiscally turns itself around” to the point of repaying “the risk of the investment on that student loan to get a person through four years of college? Will that person get a job where paying off that loan and getting a house and affording a family, will that be a possibility? In the present America, it doesn’t look like it is.”
Seeing a dire national situation, Rollins recommends doing like China, but not in the way you might assume. He suggests looking “500 years at a time,” much farther up the road than we have of late. “I’d be looking up the road so far my eyes would fall out of my head.” He wants the country to become “like Europe, where they’ll educate your kid until his head explodes,” producing “three doctors per floor of every apartment building” and doing so by making “college tuition either free or really low.” Generally thought of as liberal, Rollins sums this up in a way that might appeal to his ideological opponents: “If you have a country full of whip-crack smart people, you have a country the rest of the world will fear. They will not invade a country of educated people because we are so smart we’ll build a laser that will burn you, the enemy, in your sleep before you can even mobilize your air force to kill us. We will kill you so fast because we are so smart and we will have foreign policy that will not piss you off to the point to where you have to attack us.”
The rift between the two high-profile intellectuals began, as you may recall, when Chomsky criticized Žižek and other continental philosophers for essentially talking nonsense — for cloaking trivialities in fancy language and using the scientific-sounding term “theory” to describe propositions that could never be tested empirically. Žižek lashed back, saying of Chomsky, “I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong.” He went on to criticize Chomsky’s controversial early position on American assessments of the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia. (To read Žižek’s comments, click here to open the earlier post in a new window.) In response yesterday, Chomsky said he had received numerous requests to comment on our post:
I had read it, with some interest, hoping to learn something from it, and given the title, to find some errors that should be corrected — of course they exist in virtually anything that reaches print, even technical scholarly monographs, as one can see by reading reviews in professional journals. And when I find them or am informed about them I correct them.
But not here. Žižek finds nothing, literally nothing, that is empirically wrong. That’s hardly a surprise. Anyone who claims to find empirical errors, and is minimally serious, will at the very least provide a few particles of evidence — some quotes, references, at least something. But there is nothing here — which, I’m afraid, doesn’t surprise me either. I’ve come across instances of Žižek’s concept of empirical fact and reasoned argument.
Chomsky goes on to recount an instance when he says Žižek misattributed a “racist comment on Obama” to Chomsky, only to explain it away later and say that he had discussed the issue with Chomsky on the telephone. “Of course,” writes Chomsky, “sheer fantasy.” Chomsky then moves on to Žižek’s comments reported by Open Culture, which he says are typical of Žižek’s methods. “According to him,” writes Chomsky, “I claim that ‘we don’t need any critique of ideology’ — that is, we don’t need what I’ve devoted enormous efforts to for many years. His evidence? He heard that from some people who talked to me. Sheer fantasy again, but another indication of his concept of empirical fact and rational discussion.”
Chomsky devotes the rest of his article to defending his work with Edward Herman on the Khmer Rouge atrocities. He claims that no factual errors have been found in their work on the subject, and he draws attention to a passage in their book After the Cataclysm, quoted last week by Open Culture reader Poyâ Pâkzâd, in which they write, “our primary concern here is not to establish the facts with regard to postwar Indochina, but rather to investigate their refraction through the prism of Western ideology, a very different task.”
Earlier this month we posted an excerpt from an interview in which linguist Noam Chomsky slams the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, along with the late French theorists Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, for cloaking trivial ideas in obscure and inflated language to make them seem profound.
“There’s no ‘theory’ in any of this stuff,” Chomsky says to an interviewer who had asked him about the three continental thinkers, “not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it.”
Chomsky’s remarks sparked a heated debate on Open Culture and elsewhere. Many readers applauded Chomsky; others said he just didn’t get it. On Friday, Žižek addressed some of Chomsky’s criticisms during a panel discussion with a group of colleagues at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London:
Žižek’s remarks about Chomsky don’t appear until about the one-hour, 30-minute mark, but Sam Burgum, a PhD student at the University of York, has transcribed the pertinent statements and posted them on his site, EsJayBe. Here are the key passages:
What is that about, again, the academy and Chomsky and so on? Well with all deep respect that I do have for Chomsky, my first point is that Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical, accurate, not just some crazy Lacanian speculations and so on… well I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong in his descriptions in his whatever! Let’s look… I remember when he defended this demonstration of Khmer Rouge. And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.” And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe and so on, his defense was quite shocking for me. It was that “No, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn’t yet know enough, so… you know.” But I totally reject this line of reasoning.
For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there. For example, Khmer Rouge: Even if we have no data about their prisons and so on, isn’t it in a perverse way almost fascinating to have a regime which in the first two years (’75 to ’77) behaved towards itself, treated itself, as illegal? You know the regime was nameless. It was called “Angka,” an organization — not communist party of Cambodia — an organization. Leaders were nameless. If you ask “Who is my leader?” your head was chopped off immediately and so on.
Okay, next point about Chomsky, you know the consequence of this attitude of his empirical and so on — and that’s my basic difference with him — and precisely Corey Robinson and some other people talking with him recently confirmed this to me. His idea is today that cynicism of those in power is so open that we don’t need any critique of ideology, you reach symptomatically between the lines, everything is cynically openly admitted. We just have to bring out the facts of people. Like “This company is profiting in Iraq” and so on and so on. Here I violently disagree.
First, more than ever today, our daily life is ideology. how can you doubt ideology when recntly I think Paul Krugman published a relatively good text where he demonstrated how this idea of austerity, this is not even good bourgeois economic theory! It’s a kind of a primordial, common-sense magical thinking when you confront a crisis, “Oh, we must have done something wrong, we spent too much so let’s economize and so on and so on.”
My second point, cynicists are those who are most prone to fall into illusions. Cynicists are not people who see things the way they really are and so on. Think about 2008 and the ongoing financial crisis. It was not cooked up in some crazy welfare state; social democrats who are spending too much. The crisis exploded because of activity of those other cynicists who precisely thought “screw human rights, screw dignity, all that maters is,” and so on and so on.
So as this “problem” of are we studying the facts enough I claim emphatically more than ever “no” today. And as to popularity, I get a little bit annoyed with this idea that we with our deep sophisms are really hegemonic in the humanities. Are people crazy? I mean we are always marginal. No, what is for me real academic hegemony: it’s brutal. Who can get academic posts? Who can get grants, foundations and so on? We are totally marginalized here. I mean look at my position: “Oh yeah, you are a mega-star in United States.” Well, I would like to be because I would like power to brutally use it! But I am far from that. I react so like this because a couple of days ago I got a letter from a friend in United States for whom I wrote a letter of recommendation, and he told me “I didn’t get the job, not in spite of your letter but because of your letter!” He had a spy in the committee and this spy told him “You almost got it, but then somebody says “Oh, if Žižek recommends him it must be something terribly wrong with him.”
So I claim that all these “how popular we are” is really a mask of… remember the large majority of academia are these gray either cognitivists or historians blah blah… and you don’t see them but they are the power. They are the power. On the other hand, why are they in power worried? Because you know… don’t exaggerate this leftist paranoia idea that “we can all be recuperated” and so on and so on. No! I still quite naively believe in the efficiency of theoretical thinking. It’s not as simple as to recuperate everything in. But you know there are different strategies of how to contain us. I must say that I maybe am not innocent in this, because people like to say about me, “Oh, go and listen to him, he is an amusing clown blah blah blah.” This is another way to say “Don’t take it seriously.”
Russian punk performance art collective Pussy Riot will not be deterred. Despite two of their members still languishing in prison labor camps for a musical protest in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the band continues to rail against its country’s corruption and abuses. This time, in their first music video in almost a year, they take on the Russian oil industry and other targets in the song above called “Like in a Red Prison.” The Wall Street Journal writes:
The confusing and caustic lyrics to the hard-to-listen-to song decry sexism, “homophobic vermin,” actor Gerard Depardieu (a recent recipient of Russian citizenship courtesy of Mr. Putin), and likens Russia’s president to the Ayatollah of Iran.
I don’t find the song hard to listen to at all—quite the contrary—and the video’s pretty exhilarating too, with the band members, in trademark multi-colored balaclavas, clambering atop an oil derrick and defacing a portrait of oil executive Igor Sechin and a head of the Investigative Committee (Russia’s FBI). Definitely a lot going on here, but the central focus is the critique of Russian big oil. The band explains on their site that “Russia’s revenues from the oil industry amounted to 7 trillion rubles ($216 billion), but only Russian President Vladimir Putin and ‘several of his friend see this’” [sic]. The new song’s lyrics were partly written by one of the still-imprisoned members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.
Burly Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei has never lost his sense of humor, even when facing harsh repression from his government. But while the idea of 55-year old Ai recording a heavy metal record might seem like a stunt, the source material for his first single, “Dumbass” (above), is anything but funny. The furiously angry, expletive-filled song is inspired by Ai’s harsh treatment during his 81-day imprisonment in 2011. He’s calling the musical project “a kind of self-therapy” and will release six tracks on June 22—the second anniversary of his release—as an album called The Divine Comedy.
Ai sings (or howls, growls, and bellows) in Chinese. As you can see from the grim images in the video above—with the artist re-enacting and re-imagining his experiences in detention—the memories of his incarceration are still raw and painful. While he’s called his music “heavy metal,” The Guardian points out that “it’s not exactly Metallica” (unless you count that Lou Reed collaboration). Ai himself says of his sound:
After I said it would be heavy metal I ran back to check what heavy metal would be like. Then I thought, oh my god, it’s quite different…. So it’s Chinese heavy metal, or maybe Caochangdi [where his studio is based] heavy metal.
Call it what you want: Chinese heavy metal, practical joke, avant garde performance piece… it’s still likely to get Ai in even further trouble with Chinese authorities. As he explained to the New York Times, however, he “wanted to do something impossible…. I wanted to show young people here we can all sing…. It’s our voice.”
The United States has only five percent of the world’s population, but somewhere between 35 and 50 percent of the world’s privately owned guns. Is it a surprise, then, that we have significantly higher rates of gun violence?
According to research published by the National Institutes of Health, homicide rates in the U.S. are 6.9 times higher than they are in other high-income nations. For 15- to 24-year-olds, the homicide rate is 42.7 times higher. Firearm suicide rates are 5.8 times higher in America than in other countries, even though the overall suicide rates are 30 percent lower.
A succession of high-profile massacres–Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook–has taken place against a baseline of daily gun deaths that rarely make the national headlines: murders, suicides, accidental killings. Since the December 14 mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 children and six adults were gunned down by a heavily armed man, there have been well over 3,300 gun-related deaths in America. If current trends continue, gun deaths are projected to exceed traffic deaths for the first time by the year 2015.
So what is being done? At the federal level, nothing.
Earlier this month the Senate not only struck down legislation to ban assault weapons and high-capacity gun magazines, it also struck down–at the will of a 45-member minority–a bipartison compromise to expand background checks for gun buyers, a measure supported by 90 percent of the American people.
In response to the paralysis (some would say cowardice) on Capitol Hill, a group of 23 prominent cartoonists, including Garry Trudeau, Ruben Bolling, Art Spiegelman and Tom Tomorrow, have joined forces to fight back against the gun lobby. The cartoon (above) was organized by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and is narrated by actors Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
“Enough. Demand action,” say Moore and Hoffman. “As a dad, as a mom, as a husband, as a wife, as a family, as a friend. As an American. It’s time. We can’t back down. It’s time for our leaders to act right now. Demand action”
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
In the early ’90s, the so-called “Iron Archives” of Russian political documents from the Cold War era opened up to historians, shedding light on the earliest days of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin’s diplomatic alliance.
But not all of the Russian documents were declassified at that time. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars has launched a new digital archive containing recently declassified materials from some 100 different international collections, including a cable Mao sent to Commander Filippov (Stalin’s alias) eagerly detailing his plans to study Russia and complaining about his poor health.
The subsequent exchange between the two world leaders is as banal as their later correspondence would be ideological. Mao suggests, once his health improves, that they use the aerodrome in Weixian for his departure and he includes the exact dimensions of the landing strip. One wonders whether Obama and Israeli President Shimon Peres worked so closely together on travel details for their meetings in March.
The details contained in the thousands of cables, telegrams and memos are part of the fun. Other documents exchanged between the KGB chairman and East German Minister in July, 1981 include blunt language about the difficulties of reading the Reagan Administration’s intentions and the importance of quashing the Polish Solidarity Movement.
Because the world’s biggest issues tend to have long roots, there is a lot of material here that echoes today’s headlines. Here, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs records a 1958 memo about his assessment of North Korea’s plans for a nuclear program.
During a 1960 global communist delegation meeting, Mao Zedong spoke at length with Che Guevara about sugar sales, American influence and counter-revolutionaries.
As a side note, the Wilson Center is a one of the more intellectual memorials to an American president. Woodrow Wilson was, after all, the only President of the United States to hold a Ph.D. The Center is one of the world’s top think tanks, with research and projects focused on U.S.-Russia relations, the Middle East, North Korea and, oddly, emerging nanotechnologies. But, of course, the Wilson Center is more known for its centrist analysis of international diplomacy issues.
The new digital archive (whose tagline is “International History Declassified”) offers several ways to search: by place, year (beginning with1938) or subject. For scholars or history buffs, this is a trove worth browsing.
Kate Rix writes about education and digital media. Visit her website: .
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
