D O C U M E N T 2 P R E F A C E T O R U S S E L L 2 3 immensely productive again. Out of consideration for this person all other interests must give way, legitimate or serious though they may be. As long as he is fruitfully at work, I shall never be held to blame for his being disturbed. You must understand this and not think of it as an unwillingness to help.[4] I am very glad that you are experiencing such fine success with your teaching. It is doubly difficult for a woman to be heard and win recognition. That you are offering lectures for workers I rate particularly highly. I also tried it but noticed that it is quite difficult to fathom the way of thinking of people of so entirely different a mental prehistory.[5] With best wishes for 1922, I am yours, Albert Einstein. 2. “Preface” to Bertrand Russell, Political Ideals [Einstein 1922d] PUBLISHED 1922 IN: Bertrand Russell, Politische Ideale. Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte m. b. H., 1922, p.[5] The availability to the German public of this great English mathematician’s[1] lucid discourse is very welcome. It is not some wavering professor vacillating between “on the one hand and on the other” speaking to us here, but one of those resolute, straightforward individuals who exist independent of the period into which they happened almost by chance to have been born. Unbending consistency and warm human sensitivity prescribe his path. He follows down this path unper- turbed by the consequences his stance may bring. He did not play the martyr when he let himself be robbed of his professorship and found himself in prison for anti- militaristic propaganda.[2] He wants military force to be completely eliminated and recommends consistent training of the population in organized passive resistance as the means of counter- acting aggressive military force from abroad. This solution will not appear utopian to those who experienced the Kapp putsch[3] in Germany.
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