Timothy Birdnow

Justa n observation; Americans are woefully ignorant of history and don't know basic civics. Not even those who produce television documentaries.

I was watching a documentary about Albert Einstein yesterday on Biography (on Story t.v.). I missed most of it but came in late in the show. They were discussing the possibility of Einstein being a Communist.

I don't know all the details about Einstein's politics; he was often an inscrutable man on matters outside of physics (and often inside too) and there is still debate on whether Einstein believed in God or not. He held left-wing ideas, but some not so left wing ideas. And many of his contemporaries WERE Communists. Certainly Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan Project, was a flaming Red and had to be guarded closely by Graves, his leash-keeper.

But that's not the point. The point is J. Edgar Hoover thought Einstein was a Red and he wanted him deported.

Here's where we see a biography turn into propaganda. The show pretty much just sneered at the accusation without presenting any of the evidence the FBI collected on Einstein. Now they didn't have to do an exhaustive list of things, but a point or two to justify why the FBI was investigating Einstein was warranted. There was none. Just mockery of this and sneering.

I will add this shows the FBI has always been an anti-American institution spying on private citizens. But that's another story.

My main point here though was that they also mentioned Sen. Joseph McCarthy. They said he headed up the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

Who sees the problem with that?

Ding ding...we have a winner!

McCarthy had nothing at all to do with the HOUSE committee in question. He was a SENATOR.

How can you make that kind of mistake and put it into a documentary, then rebroadcast it without a correction?

It's because they don't care about accuracy or real history, but rather about a political posture they want to make. They were busy virtue signaling and couldn't be bothered with little factual details.

"Tailgunner Joe" was never in the House of Representatives. He had been a circuit judge before enlisting in the Marines during the War, then ran for the Senate in Wisconsin in 1946.

Also, it seems unlikely he had any interest in Einstein, who was getting long in the tooth by this point.

Einstein was critical of McCarthy, no question, but McCarthy never went after Einstein. That is a fable being promoted here by the producers of this documentary.

There is considerable evidence Einstein WAS, well, maybe not a Communist but he clearly had sympathies. He promoted international government. He promoted socialism. He was a member of Communist front groups like Friends of the Soviet.

Now, some of this stemmed from Einstein's activities against Naziism. He networked, and often that meant with Bolsheviks. He realized the need to forge an alliance with Stalinists. He did refuse an invitation by Stalin to visit the USSR.

Again, it was not uncommon to find a lot of these physicists to be on board with the utopian world government scheme and socialism. They were brilliant men at what they did but pretty much idiot savants otherwise, incapable of functioning. They always thought in a straight line and, well golly!  it just made sense to them to have government tell people what to do. So much neater than the messy nature of freedom.

Of course it's totally at odds with human psychology or economics, but they didn't know much about that.

So the jury is out on Einstein's Communism, but it is most definitely IN on the people who produced that documentary. Careless and ignorant and promoting fake news.

I wonder if Joe Biden's Fake News ministry would have come down on this documentary? I wonder if Facebook would have Politifact review it and call it Fake?

Somehow I doubt it.

Ignorance is the most expensive commodity we have. The Bible says "My People are dying from lack of knowledge". America is so dying.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:47 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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