Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk: Seeing and listening to the jungles of our human society

Eighty years ago this week, Czechoslovakia’s first president Tomáš
Garrigue Masaryk died at the age of eighty-seven. He had led the country
from its independence in 1918 for the next seventeen years, enjoying
immense popularity throughout that time. Masaryk was known widely as the
“President Liberator” and “Father of the Nation”, but although this
popularity often slipped into hero-worship, he remained a lifelong democrat
and humanist, in stark contrast with many of the world leaders emerging in
the 1920s and 1930s. His values are reflected in several recordings of and
about President Masaryk that are preserved in the Czech Radio archives.
Some of them remain strikingly relevant even to our own time. David Vaughan
has more.