Listen as Albert Einstein Calls for Peace and Social Justice in 1945

Here is a rare record­ing of Albert Ein­stein read­ing his speech on the imme­di­ate after­math of World War II, “The War is Won, But the Peace is Not”:

The speech was deliv­ered on Decem­ber 10, 1945, at the Fifth Nobel Anniver­sary Din­ner at the Hotel Astor in New York. Only four months ear­li­er, the Unit­ed States had dropped atom­ic bombs on civil­ian pop­u­la­tions in the Japan­ese cities of Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki. Ein­stein did­n’t work on the atom­ic bomb, but in 1939 he had signed a let­ter to Pres­i­dent Franklin D. Roo­sevelt urg­ing him to pro­cure ura­ni­um and accel­er­ate nuclear research. In his speech, Ein­stein draws a com­par­i­son between con­tem­po­rary physi­cists and the founder of the Nobel Prize, who invent­ed dyna­mite.

Physi­cists find them­selves in a posi­tion not unlike that of Alfred Nobel him­self. Alfred Nobel invent­ed the most pow­er­ful explo­sive ever known up to his time, a means of destruc­tion par excel­lence. In order to atone for this, in order to relieve his human con­science, he insti­tut­ed his awards for the pro­mo­tion of peace and for achieve­ments of peace. Today, the physi­cists who par­tic­i­pat­ed in forg­ing the most for­mi­da­ble and dan­ger­ous weapon of all times are harassed by an equal feel­ing of respon­si­bil­i­ty, not to say guilt. And we can­not desist from warn­ing, and warn­ing again, we can­not and should not slack­en in our efforts to make the nations of the world, and espe­cial­ly their gov­ern­ments, aware of the unspeak­able dis­as­ter they are cer­tain to pro­voke unless they change their atti­tude toward each oth­er and toward the task of shap­ing the future.

But Ein­stein says he is trou­bled by what he sees in the months fol­low­ing World War II.

The war is won, but the peace is not. The great pow­ers, unit­ed in fight­ing, are now divid­ed over the peace set­tle­ments. The world was promised free­dom from fear, but in fact fear has increased tremen­dous­ly since the ter­mi­na­tion of the war. The world was promised free­dom from want, but large parts of the world are faced with star­va­tion while oth­ers are liv­ing in abun­dance. The nations were promised lib­er­a­tion and jus­tice. But we have wit­nessed, and are wit­ness­ing even now, the sad spec­ta­cle of “lib­er­at­ing” armies fir­ing into pop­u­la­tions who want their inde­pen­dence and social equal­i­ty, and sup­port­ing in those coun­tries, by force of arms, such par­ties and per­son­al­i­ties as appear to be most suit­ed to serve vest­ed inter­ests. Ter­ri­to­r­i­al ques­tions and argu­ments of pow­er, obso­lete though they are, still pre­vail over the essen­tial demands of com­mon wel­fare and jus­tice.

Ein­stein then goes on to talk about a spe­cif­ic case: the plight of his own peo­ple, the Euro­pean Jews.

While in Europe ter­ri­to­ries are being dis­trib­uted with­out any qualms about the wish­es of the peo­ple con­cerned, the remain­ders of Euro­pean Jew­ry, one-fifth of its pre­war pop­u­la­tion, are again denied access to their haven in Pales­tine and left to hunger and cold and per­sist­ing hos­til­i­ty. There is no coun­try, even today, that would be will­ing or able to offer them a place where they could live in peace and secu­ri­ty. And the fact that many of them are still kept in the degrad­ing con­di­tions of con­cen­tra­tion camps by the Allies gives suf­fi­cient evi­dence of the shame­ful­ness and hope­less­ness of the sit­u­a­tion.

Ein­stein con­cludes by call­ing for “a rad­i­cal change in our whole atti­tude, in the entire polit­i­cal con­cept.” With­out doing so, he says, “human civ­i­liza­tion will be doomed.”

Note: The full text of “The War is Won, But the Peace is Not” is avail­able in the Ein­stein antholo­gies Out of My Lat­er Years and Ideas and Opin­ions.