"I sense a bitter mood moving over FR..."
How many mass graves filled with thousands of dead men, women and children does it take to say that a dictator is evil and needs to be removed from power? What if Hawking were an Iraqi and he and his family had been exterminated because they defied Saddam? What a loss for science! Considering how many Jewish physicists escaped the clutches of Nazism, it alarms me that the following generations of physicists are ultraliberal and apparently unconcerned about totalitarian regimes. They are ostriches with their heads in the sand.
One of my physics mentors spent some time in a Nazi concentration camp. He was forced to work on high energy experiments as he was a student of Bohr. When he taught his classes after the war, he always reminded us to learn the material so you never had to use a book, because someday, he said, all the books may be burned. He told us to learn to use physics in a common-sense way because someday you may be in a political prison and need to use your wits to escape. At the time (1970s) we thought he was a little senile, but now I understand exactly what he meant.