Professor Albert Einstein, speaking in English in a symposium here last night on “America and the World Situation”, called for the elimination of those emotional taboos which obstruct dispassionate investigation of the causes of tension between governments and peoples.
“Although words exist for the most part for the transmission of ideas, there are some which produce such violent disturbance in our feelings that the role they play in the transmission of ideas is lost in the background.
“One has only to think of the word heretic at the time of the Inquisition, of the word Communist for the present day American, of the word bourgeois in Russia, of the word Jew for the reactionary group in Germany, of the word honor, prestige, fatherland in nearly all the countries of our present world.
“The use of such words is adapted for the driving out of all reason and the setting up of emotion in its place.”
Professor Einstein ascribed the present depression to the machine age and improved industrial methods with the resultant displacement of man and a drop in purchasing power.
The most dangerous threat to world peace will be removed if it is understood that economic evolution instead of war debts is responsible for the international depression, he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
