The following is the text of the speech given by Mr. William J. Murray, the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition. The speech was given during
The Epoch Times forum on “The Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party” held at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on December 21, 2004. Introductory remark is by host Stephen Gregory, the Opinion editor of
The Epoch Times.
See original article on the forum here.
The Nine Commentaries in its entirety can be downloaded in PDF format here.
The third speaker is Mr. William J. Murray. Mr. Murray is the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a Washington DC based social conservative organization concerned with the rights of Christians around the world. Mr. Murray has appeared on ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news as well as Nightline and various Fox News programs. He is a regular guest on numerous radio talk shows.
I do have a prepared statement, which is available in the back. As I take notes, I find many of the comments very interesting, very enlightening. Although I’m the chairman of a non-profit, and I have been operating or working with social conservative non-profits for 25 years, I just happen to be a businessman on the side, and back in the 1980s, among other enterprises, I owned a travel agency. I decided to go to the Soviet Union, when glasnost and perestroika got started, in order to see if perhaps I could do business there. So I got on an airplane, and I went over there, and went to Moscow, and I was amazed: the grass at the monuments weren’t cut, the main four-way/six-way traffic signal at the Kremlin didn’t work, the glass cage for the policemen up there during the winter, had panes broken out—this was in front of the Kremlin—there were huge potholes in front of the Kremlin. About the only thing that functioned was the underground, nothing above ground functioned. There were lines to gas stations—cars, that literally went on for miles, not blocks, miles. People would start to queue up at midnight for a service station to open at 6 a.m. When I got there in the early 1980s, it’s estimated that about 40% of the economy was in the black market. People would line up at a square, at a corner, not to go into a store—there was nothing in any of the stores—you could go into GUM, it didn’t matter, there was nothing there. There was literally nothing. But around GUM, by Red Square, there were all these people standing with paper boxes next to them, selling clothes, or whatever, at much, much more than the official prices. The economy was a joke. The nation was bankrupt. Bankrupt! I never forgot—I got on a tour bus, I got off, there were military officers, not enlisted men, officers, trying to sell their belt buckles and their medals to tourists as they got off the bus, for hard currency so they could feed their families. Not enlisted men, but officers. The nation was bankrupt. You know what? The Chinese government, Communist government, I believe, holds $700 billion of U.S. debt. They are so flush with money, that they finance the government of the United States of America. Somehow I don’t think the comparison of China with the fall of the Soviet Union and the situation in Cuba (also a bankrupt nation) or the bankrupt nation of North Korea—we face a different situation because we finance the totalitarian regime of China. We finance them. And with that, I’d like to go a little bit into my prepared statement.
During the 20th Century more people died at the hands of communist governments than died in all the wars in all the history of mankind.
In the Soviet Union, the communist dictator, Joseph Stalin, starved millions to death in the Ukraine and filled Gulags - slave labor camps - with millions more. Untold millions died as entire towns and villages vanished from Russia. The iron fist of communism enslaved hundreds of millions in Eastern Europe and mass graves are still today being uncovered.
In Cambodia, the communist, Pol Pot, murdered one half of the population making the rice fields of that nation killing fields. In his effort to begin mankind over in the communist image, he ordered that anyone who could read and write be killed, except of course for members of his Communist Party.
In China the death toll was in excess of 40,000,000 under Mao. The real figure will never be known because many died in forced labor camps.
Most believe that the horror of communism died as the 20th Century ended, but there are still those nations which hold communist dictatorial rule over their peoples. In Cuba, North Korea and China there is no freedom of expression. Brutality is the rule of law in the remaining communist nations of the world.
Some in the West say that China is the exception, that there is change and modernization. The way of doing business may have changed in China, but the business of repression has not changed at all. There is one political party, the Communist Party. The press is censored as is the Internet. American and European companies are paid millions of dollars by the Chinese communists to help them suppress free speech, particularly on the Internet.
Dissidents, those that dare speak out against the tactics of the communists, either disappear or are imprisoned. Religious oppression in China is equaled only with that in extremist Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia. Catholic priests have been imprisoned some times for decades. Catholics in China are in jail today just for practicing their religion. Protestants, particularly evangelicals
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are targets of economic suffering as well as imprisonment in slave labor camps. But, the Communist Party of China reserves its most violent and oppressive behavior for the Falun Gong, a group once sponsored by the Chinese government. Its growth among the Chinese people so scared the totalitarian communist rulers of China that is suppression became a priority.
Falun Gong women have received forced abortions during their ninth month of pregnancy without anesthesia so the doctors could show them their babies chopped to pieces. Falun Gong women have been particular targets of the communists, often gang raped by police in front of their chained husbands. Extreme torture has been used on the men of Falun Gong including amputations. Electrodes have been used on the private areas of both men and women during “interrogations.”
The small outdoor Christmas lights that adorn our homes this time of year are manufactured for the most part in slave labor camps operated by the Chinese military. Most of those prisoners are Christians and Falun Gong.
The Falun Gong presents no more a threat to the Chinese government than does any other religious order. Communism, however, at its core is atheistic. In the mind of the communist rulers of China the government, not God must come first in the lives of those people it enslaves. To that end schools teach of the “horrors” of religion while leaving out the misery and death brought to the world by communism. In China the heroes of the world are still Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. While their statues have been torn down in most of the world, they remain standing in China.
Big business in Europe and the United States prefer the atmosphere of oppression in China to that of democracies. Democracy is messy. An American businessman does not know who will control the government in India or Russia or what the tax laws will be because the people can vote for change. But business in China is stable. There can be no labor strife, no strikes, no demands for higher pay and the laws will never change because the Communist Party is unchanging. Thus American and European business leaders reward totalitarian regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, China and the Sudan with investment and trade. “Why build a factory in a democracy like India when a totalitarian government like China is available,” is the logic of GE, GM, Boeing, FORD, Wal-Mart and hundreds more I could name.
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Most likely many of the Christmas gifts under our trees this year were made by underpaid, impoverished or imprisoned laborers in China.
The world refuses to act in the Southern Sudan where the corrupt extremist Islamic government has murdered millions of Christians and others. The West wants oil from the Sudan and doesn’t care if it is mixed with blood. Likewise we don’t seem to care if the Christmas lights that celebrate the birth of the One who freed us from the slavery of sin are made in slave labor camps by Christians. It seems that Americans have reached the point of caring more about the price displayed on a Wal-Mart cash register than the horrendous sub-human conditions in which the products are made.
In 2004 the Chinese communists launched their first ballistic missile submarine. The sub will sail up and down the coast of the United States, its missiles pointed at our major cities. The sub was built with Russian technology using profits from the sale of clothing and consumer electronics to Americans. In the end perhaps Lenin was right when he said that the capitalists would sell the rope to the communists that would used to hang them.
The time has come for the West to stop financing the torture and imprisonment of the people of China. The conditions of believers, such as the Falun Gong, is not that much different than that of 17th century slaves, perhaps worse.
The time has come to ask ourselves, is the money saved on a cheap Chinese DVD player worth the knowledge that it finances the torture and murder of human beings at the hands of one of the worlds last remaining totalitarian governments.
America and the West must stop financing a corrupt communist regime that could not continue to rule without outside help.
Communism must finally be allowed to rot in the grave of history.
