There is a strategic price that the West will pay—and is paying already—for its failure to take a moral stand against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for its policy of genocide and other forms of persecution against its own people.
The West won the Cold War because it had built global prestige and, therefore, attracted the best minds and the most productive practices for its ethical positions in favor of freedom and human dignity. Even the West’s communist adversaries understood that their lack of legitimacy was directly tied to their rejection of their obligation to protect their citizens’ lives, beliefs, and individual sovereignty.
That prestige and legitimacy derived from the “Western values” began to flicker and dim as Western governments from Washington to Canberra and Berlin to Ottawa began to seek economic rewards from the CCP and, to gain them, put aside their ethical values to become subordinate partners of the CCP.
So do all of us who go about our lives around the world share in the guilt of the genocide being waged against the practitioners of the Falun Gong spiritual movement in China simply because we do not raise our voices against it?
Why do some in the West accept the evidence of genocide being committed by the CCP against the Uyghur people of Xinjiang and yet fail to see the genocide against the Falun Gong?
Clearly, the suffering Uyghurs are championed by a number of Western intelligence agencies because Xinjiang, now subordinated to communist China, sits on the critical geography that links China to Pakistan and much of Central Asia.
Resisting the genocide of Falun Gong practitioners has no such benefit to be exploited by Western intelligence services.
- Killing members of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
The CCP discreetly targets Falun Gong practitioners for the growing clandestine Chinese industry of organ harvesting, using arrested adherents of the practice to “donate” vital organs for sale because they are known to practice a healthy lifestyle, guaranteeing the marketability of their organs. The CCP is not alone in this practice; the authorities in Kosovo have also been linked to such kidnapping and “murder-for-organs” practices in the Balkans and Italy.
The alleged “crime” of Falun Gong against the Party—which makes them CCP targets—is merely that its believers think thoughts that are independent of the CCP, and that is a measure of the insecurity of the communists. The Party sees this refusal to kowtow by Falun Gong practitioners as a threat to its legitimacy because the group’s pacifism and independence contrast so visibly with the autocracy and tyranny of the Party. Falun Gong highlights the reality that the CCP has never had a mandate of authority from the Chinese population and that it lacks a “social contract” with the Chinese people.
Fingers are still pointed today, 90 years after the Holocaust began, at those in the West who turned back Jewish refugees from Germany and committed them, by default, to perish in Nazi death camps. Politicians are being shamed, even now, for refusing to acknowledge that the Turkish government engaged actively in genocide against its Armenian citizens in the first decades of the 20th century.
And few care to use the label of genocide to describe what has been visited upon the Amhara and Afar peoples of Ethiopia in recent years by the regional powers in Ethiopia’s Oromo and Tigray regions. The world studiously defines genocide but then refuses to see it in the faces, the bodies, and the emptied homes of its victims.
Genocide is a stain on the conscience of all humanity—not just the perpetrators of the crime. It is something that all the world’s peoples are obliged to prevent under the U.N.’s strictures. And few today can say that they are unaware of the genocide inflicted in China against Falun Gong practitioners, not just the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
The CCP has defined that the “new China” reflects only the thoughts of its dictators, and the currently accepted version of this is “Xi Jinping Thought.”
The world’s media and politicians, as well as the world’s intelligence agencies, have had almost a quarter of a century—24 years to be exact, as of July 20, 2023—of a striking example of how the CCP persecutes its own citizens in a manner that is specifically and legally genocidal because of their beliefs. The CCP began to outlaw Falun Gong in 1999 because of its growing popularity and its alleged transgression of the CCP’s policy of atheism. But the CCP does not practice atheism; it practices a more temporal religion of the worship of Party and Party leadership.
The CCP, having begun by defining the Falun Gong as enemies of the communist state, cannot recant on this ruling without being seen to have admitted wrongdoing. The Party has painted itself into a corner. But that is no reason for foreign governments and, more importantly, foreign individuals and corporations to support the genocidal CCP regime.
Many decades after the fact, there is a belief that the world would not, had it known of the concentration camps of the Third Reich, traded with Nazi Germany. But there is compelling evidence that many in the world did, in fact, know of the crimes of Adolf Hitler and yet refrained from confronting him until he'd moved Germany into a state of war against the Allies.
Today, we live in a world far more seriously committed to materialism and transactionalism than the world of the late 1930s. So today, we rationalize our immorality by saying that it benefits our own economy, and we close our ears to the cries of victims. We have become in modern societies more desensitized to mass violence—to genocide—than were our grandparents.
The question then is whether the West can reclaim its dignity and nobility—and therefore its old appeal to a troubled world—by standing firmly against the genocide of the Falun Gong. And by so doing, the eyes of the West will also be opened to the genocide being conducted against other peoples in China, Africa, the Balkans, and elsewhere.
The short-term loss of revenues from an already imploding communist economy in China resulting from a firm stand of support for the Falun Gong will be more than compensated for by the rising moral appeal of the West.
But the question is not just whether we can save Falun Gong adherents, but rather whether we can save ourselves by reaching our hand out to them.
