I read this article by William Rhoden in NYT today, and I am also posting article on my visit to Vietnam War Museum in Saigon, Vietnam. In the article I have posted the pictures taken from the Museum. In a way both are related. ( F. Sheikh)

Excerpts from article;

I woke up Thursday morning and heard a familiar voice that I thought was part of a dream: Muhammad Ali was discussing why he had refused to be inducted into the Army.

This was no dream, but the commemoration of an unforgettable moment that was being replayed on the radio. The clip was taken from a June 20, 1967, interview after Ali was convicted of draft evasion. Two months earlier, at an Army induction center in Houston, Ali refused to step forward.

The radio show host, Joe Madison, who played the clip, said he was a high school senior in 1967 and that Ali’s defiant action made a profound impact on his life.

As a high school junior and varsity athlete in Chicago, I had a similar reaction to Ali’s act of resistance. We were engulfed in the Vietnam War in personal and often tragic ways. Two classmates of mine at Harlan High School — one a great track athlete, the other an outstanding quarterback — each lost their legs in combat.

Ali was one of the most identifiable human beings on the planet. Here was the Greatest, telling the world that he was not going to war. For me, words like conscience, principle and integrity were merely terms in a civics class. When Ali defended his controversial position, how he had no appetite for war, standing for one’s principle became concrete.

“My conscience won’t let me shoot my brother or some darker people,” he told reporters. “And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger.”

Click Link below for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/sports/in-alis-voice-from-the-past-a-stand-for-the-ages.html?src=recg

Posted By F. Sheikh

After reading Stephen Hawkins’ declaration ‘ Philosophy Is Dead “, It is a worth reading article;

Despite his enormous contributions to science, Albert Einstein was no reclusive genius, his ever-eager conversations and correspondence engaging such diverse partners as the Indian philosopher Tagore and a young South African girl who wanted to be a scientist. In 1931, the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation invited the renowned physicist to a cross-disciplinary exchange of ideas about politics and peace with a thinker of his choosing. He selected Sigmund Freud, born on May 6, 1856, whom he had met briefly in 1927 and whose work, despite being skeptical of psychoanalysis, the legendary physicist had come to admire. A series of letters followed, discussing the abstract generalities of human nature and the potential concrete steps for reducing violence in the world. In a twist of irony, the correspondence was only published in 1933 — after Hitler, who would eventually banish both Einstein and Freud into exile, rose to power — in a slim limited-edition pamphlet titled Why War?. Only 2,000 copies of the English translation were printed, most of which were lost during the war. But the gist of the correspondence, which remains surprisingly little-known, is preserved in the 1960 volume Einstein on Peace(public library), featuring a foreword by none other than Bertrand Russell.

In a letter dated April 29, 1931, Einstein laments to Freud:

I greatly admire your passion to ascertain the truth–a passion that has come to dominate all else in your thinking. You have shown with irresistible lucidity how inseparably the aggressive and destructive instincts are bound up in the human psyche with those of love and the lust for life. At the same time, your convincing arguments make manifest your deep devotion to the great goal of the internal and external liberation of man from the evils of war. This was the profound hope of all those who have been revered as moral and spiritual leaders beyond the limits of their own time and country, from Jesus to Goethe and Kant. Is it not significant that such men have been universally recognized as leaders, even though their desire to affect the course of human affairs was quite ineffective?

I am convinced that almost all great men who, because of their accomplishments, are recognized as leaders even of small groups share the same ideals. But they have little influence on the course of political events. It would almost appear that the very domain of human activity most crucial to the fate of nations is inescapably in the hands of wholly irresponsible political rulers.

Political leaders or governments owe their power either to the use of force or to their election by the masses. They cannot be regarded as representative of the superior moral or intellectual elements in a nation. In our time, the intellectual elite does not exercise any direct influence on the history of the world; the very fact of its division into many factions makes it impossible for its members to co-operate in the solution of today’s problems.

 

Read Full Article By clicking on Link;

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/06/why-war-einstein-freud/

Posted By F. Sheikh

Santiago Zabala & Creston Davis write in Aljazeera:

At a recent Google Zeitgeist conference, Stephen Hawking boldly pronounced that “philosophy is dead”.

It is dead, he thinks, because philosophy is passé. Hawking believes philosophy is like a guy who shows up at a cocktail party just after the guests have left. Why would one of the most intelligent humans alive say such a provocative thing? His reasons are obvious: “Philosophers,” Hawking says, “have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.”

According to Hawking, the conversation about the truth of the world rests in the hands of elite physics professors funded by multinational corporations and national governments. Should we believe this pronouncement just because it comes from an eminence such as Hawking? Could it be that some categorical mistake has been committed by the likes of Hawking who, in our opinion, mistakes philosophy for theology?

The debate over the death of philosophy begun by Hawking not only rests on wrong premises, but also searches for an inadequate solution. First, philosophy is still taught in universities, and second, philosophers continue to write books that disagree on the meaning of our existential relation with the world. We submit that a more precise question needs to be addressed: Which philosophy is dead?

The question over the death of philosophy is certainly not new. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant posited ideas such as “categories of the mind” and “transcendental apperception” that were themselves beyond philosophical interrogation, while last century saw Martin Heidegger arguing that philosophy ended with its dissolution into different disciplines (aesthetics, ethics, logics) and into particular sciences (physics, psychology, biology), and ignoring those fundamental questions that determine our lives. Click Link for Full Article;

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/06/201361082357860647.html

Posted By F. Sheikh

This video was sent to Editors@ThinkersForumUSABlog.Org by Fazil Sahib

This video is for the duration of 16.29 minutes. PLEASE WATCH IT!

UoPeople may have found the next Einstein. Watch my talk at TEDxKC and share!