Dean Warns Of Dangers To Freedom Of Thought

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27603, 9 March 1955, Page 5

Dean Warns Of Dangers To Freedom Of Thought

“It is not only a hungry people who fall easy prey to the glib promises of Marxist communism,” said the Dean of Christchurch (the Very Rev. Martin Sullivan) yesterday; “so do a people who have been made uneasy, unhappy and distrustful by spying, 1 lying and deceit” Dean Sullivan—a Rotarian himself—;was addressing the annual conference of the 40th district of Rotary on "The Spirit of the Age.” 1 “A nation is badly shaken when isome of its leading specialists sell its secrets, and a world which has witnessed and endured the horrors and brutalities of concentration camps is ! further shattered by the application of | mental and physical torture, imposed ; at the will of and by the direction of so-called responsible governments,” 'said Dean Sullivan.

"New words have been introduced into our vocabulary, to describe what is happening. Who would have thought that we should use in common speech such a horrifying phrase as ‘brainwashing’ to describe something which is constantly practised? Do we fully realise the depths to which men have sunk in our time?

“We read of the spectacle of some unhappy citizen who has fallen foul of his country’s policy. He has not broken obvious laws: in fact he is often honourable and upright. His crime has been to speak or act for freedom, to champion the individual man against the overwhelming restraints of the , State.

“For that he is taken away at a moment’s notice from his home and family and thrown into prison,” said Dean Sullivan. "He may be killed: that is a quick and merciful ending. , wicked though it is. He may be left to a grimmer fate. Questioned relentlessly day and night, physically racked and diabolically tortured, and finally under the influence of some drug he does not even know he has taken, he is dragged before a tribunal, to make a bogus confession and to recant. “This is not only a travesty, a blasphemous caricature of justice: that is bad enough. It is worse. It is the complete and wilful disintegration < of a

human personality, a brutal defacing of the Divine image in every man. Such behaviour even once in a life time would appal us, but we need to remember it is now commonplace in almost half the world. The citizens- of the States in which it is practised, one might believe, take it for granted. Let us not fall under that spell. “We are reaching incredible depths of depravity in this modern age,” Dean Sullivan said. "I think we could almost take the atom bomb, if it were thrown at us. I do not know. But we can’t go on taking this utter distortion, this complete betrayal of mankind. The victims are. or ought to be. the constant occupation of our minds, and the objects of our compassion. Grievous as their plight is, their state and condition is not the worst thing we behold. “What of those who plan such horrors and what of those who carry them out? A vicious small boy who slowly tortures an insect, pulling it to pieces, wing by wing, and leg by leg, is an example of refinement compared with these monsters. We occupy a fools paradise if we think these things are too far away from us to cause us concern. On the contrary, they are I* perilously near our hearts and homes. I do not mean that they are actually in our midst, although some of their advocates may be. I mean that we arc no longer an isolated community, and that what goes on anywhere in the i world is our concern.

"What answers are men offering or being offered?" Dean Sullivan asked. He mentioned three of these answers— Marxist communism, the philosophy of the average man, with his belief that "all men are good and generous at heart,” and the Christian approach, which offered "something extra” to that of the average man. After outlining each of these approaches, Dean Sullivan said that surely the ideals of Rotary coincided with the teachings of Christianity. “Surely we exist, in part, to try to realise as much of them as imperfect men may expect to do,” he said. “As we contemplate the journey ahead of us as an organisation, can we not

make a firmer resolution to carry them out?”