Since I just posted about this the other day, I was tempted to use some disclaimer here about possibly overdoing the story about allegations of organ harvesting and murder by the Chinese government. But the point of the post is that if the allegations are true, then there can be no overdoing it.
Blogger Makina, who has been a regular source of information on this story, linked in a comment at another post on Sujiatun, to the text of a recent talk by Stephen Gregory, Opinion Editor of Epoch Times, to a group in St. Louis. The speech is helpful, I think, to anyone just coming to hear about the matter, because it confronts head-on the natural tendency not to believe the story simply because we'd rather not contemplate the horror of it.
On the lack of media and overall attention to the story, Gregory reminds us that we are talking about allegations which, if true, constitute a crime against humanity of monstrous proportions, an almost unspeakable evil. And it is human nature to doubt that which would be horrifying to know for certain. In fact Gregory quotes David Matas from the report of two independent Canadian journalists who concluded that the alleged organ harvesting was in fact going on:
The allegations here are so shocking that they are almost impossible to believe. The allegations, if true, would represent a grotesque form of evil which, despite all the depravations humanity has seen, would be new to this planet. The very horror makes us reel back in disbelief. But that disbelief does not mean that the allegations are untrue.
As Gregory puts it, "This horror inspires a certain skepticism."
But Gregory then goes on to place the allegations of this horrific evil into the context of the human rights record of the CCP over 50-plus years, their track record of persecution of any and all things religious or spiritual, and their open willingness, indeed their obsession, to destroy the Falun Gong movement by whatever means necessary.
"No measures are too excessive." Throughout China the police have told practitioners that anything can be done to them, and if the practitioners die, the death will be counted as suicide......The systematic nature of this persecution has provided the Chinese regime with a huge imprisoned population who potentially may be the victims of organ harvesting. The regime's propaganda has attempted to make the Falun Gong a group who are excluded from society and targeted for abuse. The regime's extra-legal persecution of the group has encouraged the most extreme measures to force practitioners to renounce the practice.
Within this context, the use of organ harvesting simply takes the logic of the persecution one step further. After all, if torturing someone to death is encouraged, then why shouldn't one harvest a practitioner's organs, and make a little profit in the bargain?
Put all of that together with a pre-existing system for harvesting organs from prisoners, for big profits, and the unthinkable starts to become more and more plausible.
Before there was the organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners, China had in place a system for harvesting organs from executed prisoners. It has used executed prisoners as the primary source for transplanted organs since organ transplantation began in China.This pre-existing system is itself something horrible. It treats prisoners as raw material to be exploited for profit. It hopelessly confounds the roles of courts and doctors. Courts are given incentives by the transplant industry to schedule executions. Doctors become de facto members of the criminal justice system. Instead of having as their only priority healing the sick, doctors become assistants in executions...
And the numbers just don't add up:
...the scale of transplantation is now far greater than under the pre-existing system. While China annually leads the world in executions, the rate of executions has not significantly increased since the persecution of Falun Gong began in 1999. However, the rate of organ harvesting has sky rocketed. A look at the official statistics for liver transplants tells the story.From 1991 to 1998, 78 liver transplants were done in China. The persecution of Falun Gong began in July 1999, and in that year alone the number of liver transplants totaled 118—more than the total for the previous seven years. By 2003, the number of liver transplants had grown to more than 3,000.
More excerpts from the Gregory speech:
...The CCP has ruled China through terror and lies. It has been responsible for killing an estimated 80 million Chinese.Posted by dan at September 10, 2006 6:22 PMOne does not kill 80 million people in a fit of absent-mindedness. Murder, often mass murder, has been CCP policy since it first took power.
The CCP kills in order to instill fear and to enforce absolute belief in its doctrines. However, no matter how much it kills, the CCP has found it needs to change its doctrines in order to assure its rule. Mao's glorification of the peasantry could never produce the wealth or the arms that could defend China from conquest. Thus, the CCP over time has continually had to refute its own ideology. A Party originally founded on the need to kill capitalists now invites capitalists to join its ranks.
The result, then, of 57 years of killing is that everyone in China fears the CCP, but no one, including especially the members of the CCP, believes in communism. The terror of the CCP finally serves only the determination to tyrannize over China, to assure the CCP's rule.
But, while no one in China believes in communism anymore, the CCP has also assured that no one believes in very much else...
... The persecution of Falun Gong is simply part of the CCP's long-standing hostility to faith of any kind. This hostility has uprooted in the Chinese people all of the sources of traditional morality. There is in China no publicly accepted belief that can restrain and give order to the passions and provide the basis for community.
Of course, the CCP's terror has inescapably taught important moral lessons to the Chinese people—negative ones. It has taught each individual to be wary, to trust no one, to place self-preservation above all, and to be insensitive to the sufferings of others.
The one positive moral injunction the CCP has urged on its citizens in the past two decades is to get rich. However, as Adam Smith understood, the human heart hardly needs to be told to be selfish. The pursuit for wealth in China occurs in a context within which there are no restrains on the desire to acquire....
... When a Chinese surgeon looks into the eyes of a living Falun Gong practitioner before slicing him open to take his kidney, this doctor is simply acting according to the same moral norms that are unfortunately all too common in today's China.
In short, the large scale organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners is finally possible because of the effects on the human heart of 57 years of rule by the CCP.
(ellipsis mine - DW)