WASHINGTON—Awareness of the evils of communism is growing among Americans, but the popular will to reject communism and its trampling of human dignity is nascent, according to Don Ritter, founding chairman of The Remembrance Society.
The Remembrance Society was founded to document and expose the crimes of totalitarian regimes.
In a world where human rights have been divorced from foreign policy, “governments are loath to do inconvenient things,” Ritter, former Pennsylvania congressman and trustee emeritus of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told The Epoch Times.
But the story of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) industrial-scale, state-sponsored forced organ harvesting of religious believers, as told in “Killed to Order,” is a clarifying message that Ritter said he believes can move Americans and governments to follow the popular will.
He points to the recent U.S. operations in Venezuela and Iran, and the increasingly fragile nature of totalitarian regimes.
Decades of Forced Organ Harvesting
As recounted in “Killed to Order,” the Chinese regime’s forced organ harvesting program began decades ago, possibly as early as the 1980s, as CCP elites pursued unethical medical experimentation in order to prolong the health and lifespan of Party cadres.The CCP’s directive of perverting medicine for unethical ends—combined with Western support in transplant research, development, and surgical training, and the detention of possibly a million prisoners of conscience—meant that what began as experimentation suddenly exploded into a global industry, Jekielek explained at the event.
“This forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience can only happen in a place where there’s a state actor,” Ritter said. “One is you have to be able to push massive coercive power through the population.
“The other part is you have to be able to incarcerate a huge number of people, maybe a million, maybe two [million], maybe more.”
In 1999, the CCP targeted Falun Gong with a violent persecution to “eradicate” the practice—the abuses continue to this day. Then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin had even claimed that the practice would fall within days, yet practitioners proved resilient, Jekielek said.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice centered on the teachings of truth, compassion, and forbearance. The three principles are also sometimes translated as “to be true, good, and endure,” Jekielek said.
Growing primarily through word of mouth after it was introduced to the public in the 1990s, an estimated one in 13 Chinese people, from all walks of life, were practicing Falun Gong by the end of the decade.
“A lot of people almost can’t grasp it in the West, how grassroots it was,” Jekielek said. “There’s no hierarchy of any sort ... there’s no worship, there’s no collection of money.”
When the CCP ordered Falun Gong practitioners to renounce their faith and the three principles, millions refused.
This led to a massive population of Falun Gong practitioners being detained at the same time in what the CCP calls “reeducation by labor camps,” where detainees were subjected to brainwashing, torture, and forced labor without formal charges.
And in 2000, Chinese organ transplants began to rise. This was a country with no organ donation program, with transplantation numbers suddenly growing at an unprecedented pace. Chinese hospitals began advertising transplants on demand, scheduling surgeries between one and four weeks out.
CCP’s War on Religion
Grace Jin Drexel has been campaigning for the release of her father, Zion Church pastor and founder Ezra Jin, ever since the CCP carried out what she calls “the largest takedown of an independent church congregation in China since the Cultural Revolution,” when the regime arrested 27 pastors last year. Eighteen remain detained.
At the book launch event, Jin Drexel said that the CCP does this under the banner of “sinicization,” which it claims is to make religion “more culturally acceptable in China, or more Chinese.”
“Christians in China have been Chinese for generations. We have already used Chinese Bibles, sing indigenous hymns, and are led by Chinese pastors,” Jin Drexel said, adding that the CCP’s framing falls apart when looking at the regime’s record of religious persecution.
“Falun Gong is the most indigenous one can get in terms of religion, Chinese religion,” she pointed out.
“What we truly see under sinicization is the removing of crosses and replacing them with portraits of Xi Jinping, switching out hymns with Revolutionary Party songs, rewriting sermons to align with socialist core values, and shutting down or even leveling churches.”
This duplicity is something “Killed to Order” exposes, she said, adding, “This book is tremendously important, because it highlights, again, what the nature of this regime is.”
Jin Drexel said that the CCP’s assault on religious freedom “is a direct challenge to [the] oldest and most sacred American values.”
“It undermines authority of America’s founding, value of global leadership. We cannot let this challenge be unanswered,” she said.
Paul Marshall, a professor, author, and senior fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, said the hope, 30 years ago, that opening up the world to China would liberalize its society was a naive one, as Nazi Germany had been a wealthy, industrial power when it committed totalitarian atrocities.
Though illusions about the CCP may be gone, many countries are watching and waiting to see whether the United States or China will come out on top and are hedging their bets, he said.
Marshall, who began following what was happening to Falun Gong when the persecution began in 1999, said journalists he knew in England expressed frustration at not being able to get stories on the CCP’s forced organ harvesting published from the beginning, but noted that there are now multiple bills before the U.S. Congress to combat forced organ harvesting, and “Killed to Order” is garnering attention.
The story exposes “how cruel this regime can be,” he told The Epoch Times. “It has no concern for human life, but will do anything to achieve its goals.”
“This is something that everybody should pay attention to, and moral clarity starts from there, by recognizing, calling it out, speaking about it,” she told The Epoch Times.
Sam Brownback, former ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, who served as governor and senator for the state of Kansas, said that “Killed to Order” should change how Americans deal with the CCP, and, like several other attendees, said the CCP’s days are numbered.
“We just can’t treat a horrific regime like this one [as] normal, like you would any other country,” he said. “Jan exposes this. These things don’t change until they’re exposed.”
Brownback pointed to the fall of the Soviet Union, which was preceded by then-President Ronald Reagan’s campaign to delegitimize the Soviet regime.
“He said, ‘No, this is a morally bankrupt, godless regime, and it cannot continue in the world with us at the same time,’” Brownback said. “The American public, once they become aware of something, then they kind of go, ‘OK, we’ve got to do something here.’
“It is a moral-based public, but they have to be educated, because they’ve got to be shown. In many respects, you’ve got to kind of push it right in their face.
“I believe the end of the night here is coming. I believe it really is. Seventy-seven years is long enough of destruction.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that his colleagues running their own human rights organizations had similar reactions. “By doing that, we are making a step ahead for the changes.”
Mary Vigil, senior adviser to Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) on national security and foreign policy, said the CCP’s forced organ harvesting “is not speculation.”
“This really must be the year that we finish the job,” Vigil said.
