Exist on Sufferance; Mme. Chiang Kai Shek speech

The National Association of educational broadcasters in cooperation with the University of Michigan broadcasting service presents a recording of the special talk given by Matt M junk ice yak of Nationalist China. This talk entitled exist on sufferance was given by Madame Chang upon her being awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of Michigan. The next voice you will hear will be that of Madame junker I shook my head. The demands of the universe. A Michigan man does have the faculty members of the Union this city ladies and gentlemen. I deem it a very great honor to be able to participate in this convocation. It is a privilege because not

only am I given the opportunity to be in your midst but the colors I am given the opportunity to be transported back to my own college days. How well I remember that just prior to receiving our degrees I felt that my alma mater having devoted her best efforts so unstintingly in preparing us for the future was giving us the perspective graduates. Her final and formal recognition. The years of training had forced it in us sharpened and inquiring minds

and we realized that with sharpened and inquiring minds we would have a better grasp of the cause and effect of ideas events and matters in relation to facts that are contiguous in time or place. Be they empirical or vicarious due to the liberal tradition. We the student body were enabled to study absorb and digest what appealed to our intellect and reject what was avian to our nature. We were not afraid of new ideas from any quarter. And this is quite the opposite of the intellectual conformity which is a must in certain

countries today. Like an artisan just coming into his own after years of apprenticeship we coopt deeply from the exhilarating and heady wine of exuberant graduation meant that here at last we had equipped ourselves for the trade though perhaps not with a maximum of skill or a full complement of all necessary tools. But what we really lacked in savoir faire. We firmly believe they could be made up by enthusiasm self confidence and our willingness to live such a long and self-assured view. Looking back

all this simplicity if not and tired naivety is memorable. On the voyage toward self-discovery. From what I know I feel that college students of today in many ways appear more mature and adult than we world. For one thing they do not go in so much for the foofaraw and robust practical jokes so often associated with college life. Many eminent scientists of today in various fields of endeavor are young men in their late 20s or early 30s. This points to the significant fact that we have reached maturity of mind and peak of faculty. They must have thirst absorbed

and digested. Currently the most connected theories ideas and facts relative to their line of work prior to making their great contributions responsible youth today in stew. Chef you are and to a lesser degree the many illusions about the world that people of my generation entertained. Life has become. All earnest and serious now. Why is it so. I think we can attribute it largely to the mental attitude today towards education which in turn. Affects and influences the making other men.

With all due respect for the great strides education has made in the direction of the technological progress I think we'll. Nevertheless that certain present trends have created a crisis which is quite undesirable. Let me quote here Mr. Stanley Baldwin. Who. In addressing the 5th Congress of the university is of the British Empire. On July 14 1936 said political freedom freedom of thought is essential to the maintenance and progress of democracy. In my day education is served as an instrument whereby men was brought to know more of himself and his own nature in relation to his world.

Through books both literary and scientific discussions both formal. And informal as well as an acquaintanceship with grammar painting and sculpture. In short what is known as culture education in the last two decades in trying to keep pace with the past the scientific war developments. This of Germany and now. Of Communist Russia has become a frenzied attempt to express itself only in the physical chemical mechanistic and electronic sense. There is nothing wrong in giving every encouragement and support to scientific advancement so that. We will not be

deluged by the enemy but must education be propaganda stick stereotyped and stultifying. If the mind is to remain third tile and plastic condition which only come into being from unhurried and unheralded thinking in the quest of immutable that use it must avoid uniformity. The present in Belen of and this is I'm afraid has colored the intellectual elysium of a whole generation. William Penn in sixteen ninety nine wrote much reality is an oppression of the mind and extinguish the natural candle which is the reason

of so many senseless scholars in the world here. He was undoubtedly talking of the abstract of a bookish in the more sterile sense but what seems to me to be even more dangerous as I have pointed out is uniformity leading to petrification of the intellect brought about by certain ideologies because of the basic liberal tradition in our thinking. Endless social theory which poses as the highest order of knowledge and action has almost a fatal fascination for all of us. I would venture further to say that the humanity

in us would be less than perfect. Were we to understand nothing but ourselves. On the other hand it would be equally imperfect were we to understand everything but ourselves. There is no doubt that the ideas and ideals of communal good per se have much to recommend in themselves. Communism did not the existence of God and Rob strongarmed the many humanitarian tenets and teachings of Christianity. The Communists pre empt and to themselves God's first light have said yes and. The last light of recent

Communism seems to excite the imagination of what human beings rightfully aspire to be. But in truth it negates with violence these very same aspirations. One need not recall East Germany Poland and Hungary and the more recent communist rioting years and opposition to the parliamentary proceedings of the Republic of France. The most recent example of communist savagery and perfidy was of course the execution in Renault premier of Hungary during the heroic uprising in

legal out of sanctuary from the Yugoslav embassy but a pledge of safe conduct. He was promptly arrested and imprisoned and then only recently secretly murdered thus capping and lit up place with murder. Our attempts to study and understand Marxian Leninism through reason our efforts to understand the mind in so far. As it applies to reason and actually reason and judges nothing unto itself excepting that which can deduce is the understanding. The mind in the sense of the intellect is a most wonderful and down went in nature for.

To any thinking person. He cannot conceive what the body is without the mind and the healthy mind reacts categorically to all attempts at coercion. This does not mean that the liberal tradition of education with which we come into contact direct or indirect does not have its drawbacks and weaknesses in point that are that they are the fistulas in the Democratic arm of the mock recy as we have it is composed of all hue and shades of opinion that cannot be galvanised quickly into action unless it is attacked at full throttle. Because it is slow to attain total vision. It

is often. At a disadvantage initially over the open minded possesses no real certitude of views unless it quiets ideas and opinions through the process of true reasoning and beliefs. The horrors of present day technology have become so uppermost and central to the mind the freedom and values of human dignity which we were taught to cherish about all else have become secondary to biological survival. A concrete case in point is a view entertained by some present day eminent men who opine that although this armament by the free world

will probably bring a communist domination that domination is preferrable to the prospect of a nuclear and hydrogen war. The 15 mile march staged in protest of nuclear tests to Britain's Atomic Research Center. At Aldermaston is another. Example of what I mean. This in citizen and supine disability was I admit a bit of a surprise. In saying that domination is preferrable to nuclear war it is quite clear that this is an attempt to take refuge behind the thought that since the free world is not the aggressor and since the free YOU world wants peace at any price. And since

Soviet Russia capitalizes on the slogan of peace we should as they feel ourselves of the opportunity given by Sabia Russia. By preparing the ground for our calculation to communism. It is tantamount to telling ourselves that in the hierarchy of human values we regard our logical survival to be above all else and that to exist even on sufferance as beasts of burden is preferrable to struggling as human beings. This sluggish reasoning attributed to the Oriental mind has often been pointed out as a cause of the self inflicted degradation in human dignity. By permitting an instrumentalist approach to communism

which ignores the paramount issue of basic right and wrong we are and love the mind too deep. Become diverted through we be aware of our specious argument about means of survival. But were we to pause and consider the leaders of communism today both big and small are really arch conservatives yesterday. Since they not only do not defend the true norms of the standards of good society they profess but are actually behaving in the opposite manner. This conduct emanating from the brainwaves of those whose sole concern is for the peculiar group the communists who after all comprise but a trifling minor minority

in any country gives no decent bases for a common weale. How mean is a man in action merely has the interest of the new ruling class in mind as Milligan genius the author of The New Class and many other communist inclined writers over the years have shown standards and politics have been flooded and abuse in every age by the rich and the powerful. Where as in the communist countries the abuse of power is exclusively exercised by the executive. The bureaucrats the cardroom and their fellow travelers. From an intellectual standpoint it must not be denied that communism in certain aspects is an

application of intelligence with both depth and breadth. It pictures the universe as an assemblage of the material governed by the laws of nature. As applied to men this turgid and extremely materialistic. The ocean of human beings has attracted and inspired many well-meaning men and women to be fired with Evan Jellicoe zeal to remake the world and men in the light of dialectic materialism. They are misled by the belief that communism is the only answer. What Communism actually does is to present its own brand of rationalization.

And it precludes rationalization as you and I understand it let alone how to rate it. Gradually having been unmasked as a prophet savior It took me years to give us an account of the sort of political economic and sociological world we are in and then. Assume that it has a ton of. Answers to all the problems of the world. In reality it is giving us only a partial picture of the whole and diverting our attention from Bassett's it does not wish us to dwell on it is barren and uncreative in that political thinking of the liberal tradition of one shade or another.

Permits the mind to generate ideas from ideas where reds communist ideas are made in Moscow by the very top people few and passed down the issue along any departure is revisionism and that is equivalent to apostasy in the Middle Ages that led to excommunication. Once no new thought is introduced into the mind while revolving around his ready made little circle of care and thoughts and ideas it stands to reason that in part and create ative thinking becomes accepted. This results in the grab an isolation intellectual courage and produces Marl cowardice. It is a tragedy

that some powerful minds have allowed themselves to be enmeshed in arguments over me. Such as relaxation of tension appeasement and finally slavery. That then hellacious groveling in the hopeless hope that life would be spared them. These intellectuals faced with portentous facts lend themselves to see question reasoning and in time to self hypnosis. Without realizing it these intellectuals I stand in that you know letting others do their thinking for them. Indeed a sharp departure from their very stock in trade they confused the need for peace with survival

at any cost. They've nullified and perhaps unwittingly desecrate the principle of human dignity which has been the motivating force against tyranny. They are ignoring the fact that it's total darkness to fall upon the world. It would be they who had made the communist conquest possible by destroying the will to fight. They would be achieving what communist imperialism could never. Have hoped to achieve if the will to stand had been attacked. Hi. The Kremlin leaders in their way are versatile B. For example the Kremlin condemning the Yugoslavia as imperialist to us and shameless traitors for trading with

and receiving aid from the United States while the next moment the Soviet premier himself proposed trade on a gigantic scale with this country and even went so far as to ask for a huge dollar along the crude light does to the world at large. Posing as champions of peace endlessly talking about peace but at the same time with cunning patients obstructing in the United Nations and wherever possible. And surely constructive measures for peace. They preach and exhort the comrades of international Communism to the alms while at home and in the satellite countries they wield without compunction. The heavin out on the backs

of the room wholesale liquidation. I'm now going on in both. The Russian and Chinese Communist controlled lands in the form of slave labor and out right massacre. The magnitude of which even surpasses the barbaric and systematic extermination of the Jews by Hitler for the simple reason that there are many more millions of people under their heel. I have dealt at some length on communist methods which to the fainthearted justify the defeatist views of the so called realists of today fighting communism appears to them to be but rear

guard action against the inevitable. And they have come to believe that total spiritual and physical surrender is the better part of that. But I believe otherwise communism is in conflict with our ethical experiences and is moving toward its own do in fact anti communism runs deep just where ever. It is under the communist heel. On the Shoulders of you the youth of today largely lie the responsibility and potential leadership

of the immediate future. It is you who will make the history of the next generation. And it is the youth of tomorrow who will continue on where you leave off. I would earnestly that you ask yourselves whether. You are reconciled to your own physical and intellectual and whether. You have the right to sell that posterity. You heard an address by Madame John Kai-Shek of Nationalist China spoke on the subject exist on sufferance. This talk followed the awarding to a Madame John of the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at a special convocation of the University of Michigan.

This program was recorded through the facilities of the University of Michigan Broadcasting Service. This is the NOAA radio network.