Greatest Social Impact

[MrBishop]

Which of the last century's social leaders would you say had the largest impacts on todays world as we know it? (positive or negative)

Ghandi
Dr. Martin Luther King jr.
Susan B. Anthony
Adolf Hitler
Nelson Mandella
Lenin
Ho Chi Minh
Freud
Einstein

etc etc...

[Spock]

you have a mixed bag of politicians, dictators, thinkers and 'rights' people....IMO not all fit into the category "social leaders".

[brownjenkins]

ghandi, fdr and hitler

[Lotesse]

Che Guevara

[Spock]

How about Susan B. Anthony for a SOCIAL leader? Womens rights created an entirely new society and it started with her.....basically.

[sun-star]

In the US, perhaps. Not in the world as a whole.

IMO, social change isn't usually brought about by individuals alone, unlike other kinds of change (political, technological etc). That said, I nominate Hitler and Lenin/Stalin, simply because of the huge effects their actions had on millions of people in the twentieth century.

[Lotesse]

No, not in the US necessarily, but in the other Americas - central & south - and it's a shame he was murdered by the c.i.a., because he was awfully young when he died, before he could REALLY shake things up and cause social reform.

Hmmm. Let's see... Henry Ford, and Oppenheimer?

[Insidious Rex]

Originally Posted by sun-star

said, I nominate Hitler and Lenin/Stalin, simply because of the huge effects their actions had on millions of people in the twentieth century.

Right on the money. Hitler by far overshadowed anyone with Stalin being a distant second. Remember, its a lot easier to impact people in a negative way then a positive way (unfortunately). Hitler literally directly influenced the physical, the social, the political even the religious borders in Europe and elsewhere. The after shocks from his existence were immense. Why we could even say hes a big part of why the Middle East is the way it is today because he directly effected the establishment of a Jewish state in the region. Most Israeli’s are European immigrants thanks to hitler.

[Lotesse]

J. Robert Oppenheimer


The following excerpt taken from "A Science Odyssey," an online article...


On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer witnessed the first explosion of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. "We knew the world would not be the same," he said. Within a month, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities. Japan surrendered on August 10, 1945.


Absorbed in his studies and the theoretical world of physics, he was often somewhat distracted from the "real world." But the rise of fascism in the 1930s caught his attention, and he took a strong stand against it. By 1939, Niels Bohr brought news to the U.S. that Germans had split the atom. The implication that the Nazis could develop extremely powerful weapons prompted President Roosevelt to establish the Manhattan Project in 1941. In June 1942, Robert Oppenheimer was appointed its director.

After the war, Oppenheimer chaired the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. He opposed developing an even more powerful hydrogen bomb. When President Truman finally approved it, Oppenheimer did not argue, but his initial reluctance and the political climate turned against him. In 1953, at the height of U.S. anticommunist feeling, Oppenheimer was accused of having communist sympathies, and his security clearance was taken away. He had, in fact, had friends who were communists, mostly people involved in the antifascist movement of the thirties. This loss of security clearance ended Oppenheimer's influence on science policy. He held the academic post of director of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, and in the last years of his life, he thought and wrote much about the problems of intellectual ethics and morality. He died of throat cancer in 1967.

[sun-star]

Originally Posted by Lotesse

No, not in the US necessarily, but in the other Americas - central & south - and it's a shame he was murdered by the c.i.a., because he was awfully young when he died, before he could REALLY shake things up and cause social reform.

I was responding to Spock about Susan B Anthony

[Lotesse]

Originally Posted by sun-star

I was responding to Spock about Susan B Anthony

Oh...

[Lotesse]

Spock - are you speaking to me?

[Spock]

все не по мере того как оно кажется

[Andúril]

David Hasselhoff.

[Lotesse]

[brownjenkins]

great one

[The Gaffer]

Alexander Fleming: the penicillin dude.

[Lotesse]

Fleming is a good call - here is his biography -
http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laure...eming-bio.html

[The Gaffer]

Cool, thanks for that.

I guess I have a bit of a medical bias; another one would be Sir Richard Doll who discovered that smoking is bad for your ass. Doubly biased because I met him a couple of times and he was a charming old chap. Died just this year.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3826939.stm

[Bombadillo]

This reminds me, Simon Wiesenthal is dead.

Who had the largest impact on today's world as we know it. Hitler most definately affected the world, but I don't think he actually changed the way societies think as much as Einstein or Freud did. By that I mean, the world already knew and believed that racism, baby-killing, and all else that he represented was wrong; he merely exemplified that and reinforced our beliefs. In altering our history, he is unrivaled, but I think Freud and Einstien had more affect on our methods of thought. And I'm sure I'm biased toward Freud, but still I think his theories are more relevant to everyday life, and therefor society in general. I'm'a go with Freud.

EDIT: I love Dilbert.