China's Barbarism

Last Friday I posted a piece on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the CCP in which I mentioned the brutal history of the party.

What I mentioned in that post was really just the tip of the communist iceberg. A pair of articles at The Epoch Times gives us more of the grisly details of the communists' barbarism.

The first article highlights the CCP's long hostility toward religious belief.

During the decade long Cultural Revolution, for instance,

Priests and nuns were forced to kneel down in front of a large bonfire, watching helplessly as the flames devoured their sacred instruments and burned their skin.

In another Chinese city, students wearing red armbands hit Catholics with sharp wooden sticks, throwing one priest into a fire pit after he collapsed in pain. They beat one nun to death after she refused to stomp on a statue of the Virgin Mary.

One Catholic priest was buried alive in Beijing after declining to give up his faith.

Since then successive Party leaders have launched campaign after campaign to crush and control people of faith in China, be they Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghurs, or the Falun Gong meditation discipline:

One year after the CCP took power in 1949, Chinese troops marched into Tibet and forced upon the Tibetans a 17-point agreement to legitimize the CCP’s rule. Yet despite rosy promises of Tibetan autonomy on paper, Beijing turned the region into a surveillance state and installed labor camps.

The Dalai Lama, the region’s spiritual leader, went into exile in India in 1959 after the regime brutally crushed an uprising, killing tens of thousands of Tibetans. In the 20 years following, about 1.2 million Tibetans have died under the regime’s repressive policies.... More than 150 have resorted to setting themselves on fire in a desperate act of defiance.

A recent example is that of a Tibetan herder named Lhamo, a 36-year-old mother of three, who was detained in June 2020 for sending money to her family in India. The family members who saw her two months later found her “badly bruised and unable to speak,” according to advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

She died days later at a local hospital and was immediately cremated.

Of course it's not only Tibetan Buddhists who suffer under the boot of Communist oppression:

The CCP’s suppression of Catholic and Protestant churches has also intensified under current leader Xi Jinping’s watch.

Chinese authorities have removed thousands of crosses from churches, arrested pastors, ordered the removal of Christian images, and aggressively pursued a “sinicization” policy by establishing “patriotic churches,” in which pictures of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary are replaced with portraits of Xi or Mao.

The Chinese regime is also reinterpreting and retranslating the Bible to promote “Chinese-style Christianity,” with one Chinese ethics textbook twisting a story from the Bible to have Jesus stone a woman to death while claiming himself a sinner.

In 2017, at least four cities and one province restricted Christmas celebrations, banning displays of Christmas decorations, themed performances, and promotional activities. Communist officials in one university banned activities related to Western religious holidays in the name of helping the younger generation “build cultural confidence.”

One Christian this January received a hefty fine of 160,000 yuan ($24,733) for celebrating the holiday.

Underground churches have proliferated as a result of the regime’s oppression. In response, Chinese officials have detained church members and handed lengthy prison sentences to pastors.

Wang Yi, a pastor in central China’s Chengdu who founded one of the country’s largest unregistered Christian churches, was sentenced to nine years in prison in December 2019 for “illegal business operations” and “inciting to subvert state power,” a charge the regime frequently uses to silence dissidents.

In April, Radio Free Asia reported that Beijing was running secret brainwashing facilities, which usually involve torture, in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province to force Christians to give up their faith.

Last Friday's post mentioned the genocide of the Uyghurs in western China where they face forced labor, torture, sexual abuse, political indoctrination, forced abortion, and forced sterilization, but perhaps equally as bad is what the Chinese are doing to the Falun Gong.

Millions of Falun Gong adherents have been held in prisons, labor camps, psychiatric hospitals, and other detention facilities in China. Hundreds of thousands have been tortured in those venues in a bid to force practitioners to give up their belief.

An untold number have died under China’s state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting, with their organs cut out to be sold on the transplant market.

An eye witness the Times calls "Bob" describes how the organ transplant operation works in the second of The Epoch Times articles:

Over the first five months of 2021, 599 Falun Gong practitioners are documented to have been sentenced for their faith; one of them, 81 years old, received nine years, according to data from Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that monitors the persecution of the faith group.

More than 15,000 were documented to have experienced harassment or arrests last year.

The prisoners determined to be suitable to have their organs extracted...would get injected with a drug said to relieve their pain. Its actual goal, though, was to prevent blood to coagulate after brain death and damage the organs, Bob said.

Those slated for organ harvesting were typically young, healthy men, usually in their 20s and 30s without a history of major illness, according to Bob.

At the execution site, prisoners were arranged in a line to be shot in the back of the head.

Many of the victims were Falun Gong. The article then describes how the bodies were removed to a van and cut open to harvest the organs for transplantation into the bodies of foreigners who paid well for the procedure:

George Zheng, a former Chinese medical intern, recalled assisting in an organ removal operation in the 1990s alongside two nurses and three military doctors, in a mountainous area near an army prison close to Dalian, a city in northeastern China.

The patient, a young man, was unresponsive but his body was still warm. The doctors had removed two kidneys from the man and then instructed Zheng to extract his eyes.

“At that moment, his eyelids moved and he looked at me,” he told The Epoch Times in 2015. “There was sheer terror in his eyes … My mind went blank and my whole body began to shake.”

The memories of those two eyes haunted Zheng for years.

The Chinese claim that they no longer harvest organs, but there's apparently a lot of evidence they still do. In any case, they also claimed they weren't responsible for the Wuhan virus which has killed millions of people worldwide, so their denials aren't worth much.

But even if it's true that they're no longer killing people in order to harvest their organs they're still a tyrannical and brutal regime.

To quote the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once again, "If God is dead then everything is permitted," and Vladimir Lenin said that, "Everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order..."

The communists, whether under Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao or whomever, insist that God is dead and that therefore there are no moral constraints on what they do.

Everything is permitted. It's all moral.