Einstein was an Idiot

I’m currently in the process of writing a short biography of Albert Einstein in preparation of launching my next “history blog”. 

The beauty of the internet is the ability to sit in your chair at home and do fairly extensive research. Obviously there is no shortage of material on Einstein online, some of it contradictory, sometimes poorly written, and then suddenly it becomes hateful.

I noticed in Wikipedia that access to editing the open source had been locked out due to “vandalism”. I pondered that for a moment then moved on, not really thinking too much about what sort of vandalism it might be.

Then today, while looking for a little more information about the length of Einstein’s employment at the patent office in Bern, I stumbled on a website called “The Christian Nation”. The specific page included my search text but the gist of the article was that Einstein stole all his ideas and was really an incompetent idiot (after all, he started at the patent office as an inspector third class. Failing to mention, of course, that most people just starting at the patent office likely start on the bottom rung of the hierarchy).

Then seeing links to pages describing the holocaust as a very clever hoax, things went from bad to worse.

Einstein wasn’t perfect. He was human. He didn’t treat his first wife very well, he cheated on both his wives. But he was certainly one of the great people that tower above the vast sea of humanity, upon whose shoulders the rest of us view the world.

The problem of course, in regard to the authors of this website, is that Einstein was a Jew. 

I was about to list all the subgroups of humans that are hated by these people. It’s better to do it the other way: unless you’re a white, American, “Christian” (in this case a perversion of the term), male; well, then you’re out. God is against you.

I know that everything under the sun that people have thought of is expressed somewhere out there in the web. I know the world is a troubled place; but it is still disturbing to read this crap. It makes you feel like you need to take a bath and that you’re someplace you shouldn’t be.  

But I was just trying to learn about Albert Einstein. I wasn’t prepared to stumble into this venomous philosophy of hate. 

That makes me real cranky.

So was Einstein an idiot?

Perhaps; and maybe George Bush is a genius.