Ideals Of Peace In The Hearts Of Men On June 14, during his five-week tour of the United States on behalf of the Indian government, Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Vice-President of the New Delhi regime, was honor guest at a Beverly Hills reception sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter of the American Association for the United Nations. Mayor Fletcher Bowron, Paul Hoffman, chairman of the Board of the "Fund For The Republic", and other prominent people attended this simple, friendly gathering. Introduced by Mr. Hoffman, Dr. Radhakrishnan spoke on some of the deeper aspects of India-American cooperation. We print here the introductory remarks of Mr. Hoffman and the text of Dr. Radhakrishnan's address.. Miss Sands, Mayor Bowron, Ladies and Gentlemen: If it weren't for the fact that I know you are all most eager to hear Dr. Radhakrishnan, I would have loved to have heard Mayor Bowron go on, because Mayor Bowron "on Hoffman" pleases me no end. you I have spent quite a little time in Asia over the past few years and find in Asia a phenomenon that we only find rarely in these United States. You find statesmen who are philosophers and philosophers who are statesmen. Dr. Radhakrishnan is in the first place a scholar; he was for sixteen years the Professor of Comparative Religions at Oxford. He has been Chancellor of two universities. Those scholarly achievements did not prevent his entering the political arena actively, as political are nas are known in Asia. He became, I think, the principle architect of one of the great constitutions of the world, the Constitution of the Republic of India. I hope he will find himself willing to tell you just the place a Vice-President has under the Constitution of India. He told us last night in Pasadena, and we found it most interesting. But he is also a great leader in India, quite apart from his political position as a VicePresident. I would like to just take one moment to try and make one point that he himself could make better but perhaps better but perhaps a testimony of one from some other land might be worth while. STANDING: 1-Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, 2-Paul Hoffman, 3-Hyman Lischner, Ed., New Outlook, 4-Charles Mackintosh, Assoc. Ed., New Outlook. SITTING: 5-Miss Elizabeth Sands, Pres., L. A. Chapter of the U. N. 6-Hon. David Tannenbaum, Acting Mayor Beverly Hills. 7-Hon, Fletcher Bowron, Mayor Los Angeles. NEW OUTLOOK a man who I think is making an honest effort to raise the level of living of his people by totalitarian methods. He learned his methods in Moscow: the methods of police state. Those methods will succeed to some extent in raising the level of the living of his people; at what cost we all know. You have in India, Prime Minister Nehru and his very able associates trying to raise the level of the living of the people of India, and meet the other manifold problems of government by democratic means. If Mr. Nehru and his associates succeed in India, in proving to the 360 million people of India that it's possible to enjoy both freedom and a reasonable standard of living, word of that example will help every other struggling democracy in Asia. It will help Pakistan; it will help Burma; it will help Indonesia. It will go up even further north to help the Philippines and Japan, and eventually, word of that will reach back into China. honor than that of presenting to you a great philosopher and a very great statesman, Dr. Radhakrishnan, VicePresident of the Republic of India. IDEALS OF U. N., U. S. AND INDIA Friends: I am happy to be here Own The ideals of the United Nations your You say that all men are created equal and they are endowed with inalienable rights and that these rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If these princi ples which you set at the top of your Constitution are implemented not In other words, those who are sincerely interested in stopping the march of Communism must be interested in the success of the government of India and the very noble adventure in which they're engaged -of establishing in India a work- merely in your country, but all over the world, that will be the greatest contribution which we can make to peace. able democracy. I am speaking to you in al ta The United Nations Charter also includes these principles. It says that all nations should be assisted to obtain political freedom, economic prosperity and racial equality. It argues that the difficulties of the world hitherto, wars, and so forth, were caused by the uneven development of different countries and by the tendency among some nations to exploit the backwardness of certain other nations. The United Nations. Charter stands against exploitation, political, economic and racial. The principles of that Charter are therefore more or less the same as the principles of your own Constitution. We in our country have drawn up a Constitution for ourselves which are echoes of your Constitution. We say that we wish to have for our people equality, justice, freedom and fraternity. When you judge our country you must realize that we have had independence for the last five and a half years. We developed a foreign policy of our own after August 1947 and we have done a little toward establishing security of person and property, integrating our State, giving freedom to our individuals, and we are attempting to build up a social and economic democracy without the sacrifice of human and spiritual values. That is the aim which we have at heart, and as Dr. Hoffman just told you, if we succeed in this attempt, it will be a great victory for democracy, though that victory may not be achieved on the battlefield. In the realm of ideas, where ideas are conflicting, we can achieve a victory. It's a greater victory than that which weapons can inflict, and that is the enterprise on which we are engaged. We are members of the United Nations for the simple reason that the United Nations organization stands for exactly the same ideals we hap pen to cherish. We do not believe that membership of the United Nations is in any way inconsistent with the membership in our own nation. U. N.-A FAMILY OF NATIONS This world of national autonomy and international interdependence are bound together. The Mayor, when he introduced Dr. Hoffman, said he's a citizen of Pasadena; we take him as a citizen of Los Angeles. Extend it a little farther and make him a citizen of California, and then of America, and he ended by saying (he did not give the intermediate steps; I put them in) he is a world citizen. That is the way in which your Mayor introduced him. We are members of families, we are members of communities we are members of states, and primarily belong to the human race. We are essentially and fundamentally members NEW OUTLOOK one of another. That is your Constitution, that is the United Nations charter, that is the proclamation of the religion which you profess. That is what it is. But it is not easy to adopt these principles in our actual life. Fine phrases are one thing: factual realities are quite different. There is a long distance to be covered between the two, and that can be covered only by organizations like this. It is here that education has to be imparted to people, pointing out to them that we are not living in the era of B. C. when city states constituted the fundamental unit, nor are we living in a state of empires; we are living in one world. Thanks to the inventions of science and technology, the whole world has become a close neighborhood. Either we must get on, one with another, or perish. This is the alternative that is presented to us. In this atomic age any kind of war will be suicidal; it will be destructive of the very civilization which we propose to guard by means of war, and so forth. In such circumstances the process of education has to go forward as rapidly and as widely as possible, calling on men to cast out their fears and believe in other men, and believe in the unquenchable reaches of the human spirit which will not stand any kind of tyranny, which is bound to exercise slavery if left to itself. U. N. AND NATIONAL In the United Nations you have a large number of organizations at tached to them. I happen for the time being to be the president of one specialized agency. People have got fantastic notions about these organizations. The United Nations--somebody misspelled it and called it “untied nations." Another was asked in one of the public service examinations to define what UNESCO meant. He said "United Nations Electrical Service Corporation." I am merely indicating these things to tell you what colossal ignorance prevails with regard to the fundamentals which we have at heart. If have to build an international common world where a nation's sovereignty will not be impaired or injured to any extent except in limited matters, it is necessary for us to know the value of these organizations themselves. you Unfortunately, when problems of controversy arise in the United Nations, though we talk about the destruction of colonialism, racial oppression, and so on, we are not always prepared to stand up for them when practical issues face us. What is necessary today is the courage to speak out, the courage to be free, the courage not to shrink from truth for fear of offending men or powers, |