Кръгла маса за трафика с органи в Китай Епизод 2: Жертви и числа

For over a decade, the Chinese Communist Party has been butchering thousands of prisoners of conscience for their organs, one of the most horrific genocides in modern history. Doctors schedule an exact day that foreign patients get an organ, whereas in the US, it usually takes around two years to find a match. So I think this is a key issue to the story of organ harvesting. The story of organ harvesting is very much the story of Falun Gong. 1999, it becomes the most controversial hot-button issue in China. What was Falun Gong before 1999 and what happened after? Before 1999, the Chinese government actually actively promoted Falun Gong as this way to improve health. It's part of the Qigong movement. At that time, it's not just Falun Gong. There are hundreds of other Qigong movements that emerged. And they were promoting it in state media? They were promoting it not only in state media, they also gave a word to Falun Gong for improving the health, the general state of the population. Falun Gong is more than just a practice that's beneficial to the health. It also has a spiritual side. That is, there are three principles, truthfulness, compassion, tolerance. And these Falun Gong practitioners are encouraged to use these three principles to judge their daily action, their daily decisions. And because of that, they sort of rely on their own conscience and their own judgment. They don't follow the communist propaganda anymore. And for communists, that's an ideological challenge. So how do you go from a practice that is promoted? It helps people's health. It preaches the truth, compassion, tolerance, you're saying. How does it go from that to then becoming a cult? Too many people doing Falun Gong, and that's the numbers. So because of the spiritual vacuum after the Cultural Revolution, Chinese people, they lost their tradition completely. They lost the spiritual side, belief, everything. And when Qigong exercise emerged, especially in Falun Gong, it became extremely popular. In the course of seven years, there were 70 million to 100 million people practicing Falun Gong in China. The actual number, we don't know. It might be much higher than that. But because this popularity, 70 million to 100 million at that time in China is about one-tenth of Chinese population. If the Communist Party is going to persecute one-tenth of Chinese people, one out of ten Chinese people, they need to turn the public opinion around. For people like us who live in the South, maybe some of us have never heard of Falun Gong before because we're not really tuned into that Qigong yoga movement thing anyway. I was a kid. That persecution, that propaganda on TV every day in every level of media really did the damage. And when the Western world first got to know Falun Gong, it was after the persecution started. I think we have to put this in the context of intolerance generally. I mean, you wouldn't ask, you know, what is it about Christianity that makes ISIS go after Christians or any of the other examples of religious intolerance? David, you can think that way, but that's not the way I thought about it. One of my main purposes in my book was to go out and actually find out what this was about because that was not a satisfactory answer to me, to just say, well, maybe they're a cult, maybe they're not, and who knows, but, you know, they shouldn't be persecuted. No, I felt this is important to establish what this group is. And I mean, there's a simple definition that people can test for themselves and doesn't require some expert coming out and saying, well, this is the definition of a cult and this is how it works. It's like, that's very vague stuff. My parents were psychologists. Trust me, this isn't an exact science. What we found, though, is real cults have angry people who've left. That's what you have. You have people who've left the thing and they hate it. It's consumed their lives and they're mad as hell and they can't stop telling the world about it. So if you go to Children of God's website, Post Children of God, you will find dramatic stories. If you go to the Scientologist, you'll find incredible stuff. If you go to, you know, Divine Light Mission, you'll find these kinds of stories. You will not find this website for Fallen God. You will find a Chinese government-sponsored website that hasn't been updated for years, okay, because it's not real. It's astroturf. It's fake. The point is, there is real action. I know people who've left Fallen God. I know practitioners who have no longer do the exercises. They don't strike me as particularly angry about it. They're still actually quite concerned about the human rights aspect, okay? And I think that's very important because that's what separates out a cult, is that experience of, oh my God, this thing took over my life. It abused me. It used me. It separated me from my family. Here's your academic definitions. It took my money. You know, those are the... And so there's a little bit of truth in the academic definitions, but the point is, Fallen God doesn't meet that, and I can say that with some confidence because I could not have hung around a group for that many years if it had been like that. I absolutely agree with you. It's not a cult. In fact, I used to be responsible for cults in the Department of the Attorney General in Alberta for a brief period, and so I got to know some of them, and you mentioned one of them a minute ago, and we've actually had a case in the courts in Canada where it was ruled that Fallen God is not a cult, and if you look at, as you said, all the cults, it is not one, and it's simply a part of this demonization that goes on. It's an easy term to throw out. David and I have met Fallen God practitioners in probably 50 countries. Or even more, maybe, yeah. Okay, all walks of life, all ages, all backgrounds, all education. I've found them to be a wonderful group of people. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't disagree with any of that. I mean, Fallen God, first of all, it's not even an organization because it's a set of exercises with a spiritual foundation. Everything's on the internet. You don't pay anything. You don't sign up to anything. You can start whenever you want. You can stop whenever you want. You don't even have to tell anybody you're doing it. Their principles are very simple and ethical, and I mean, all of that is true, I'd still say, in terms of victimization. It doesn't matter. There is no excuse for killing anybody for their organs, no matter what you think. I think what the issue is, sorry, I didn't make this point. This ties into exactly the problem with organ harvesting. Anastasia, everything you said about Falun Gong, I dismiss it because you're a Falun Gong practitioner. I don't believe a word you said. And everything you've heard, Falun Gong is not a cult. You've been told this by your interaction with Falun Gong. How do you deal with this just kind of broad dismissal? If we frame the whole debate in the terms that are set by the Communist Party, then you get into this kind of dead end where you're arguing whether or not Falun Gong is a cult. And it's just like this bizarre, dead, just stupid line of argument. Of course, it's not first of all, but the only reason that would ever be even the terms in which it was discussed is because of this massive persecution. And the biggest thing that persecution did was turn something that wasn't even necessarily defined. And so it turned it into this disparate thing that you do into a group. See, Jews are very familiar with this, okay? I'm half Jewish, and David Medus is a Jew, and I think we're very familiar with this because all the years that we've been alive, we've gone to at least other countries or something, and people have said, yeah, you know that Holocaust thing? You know, you guys must have done something. You know, but this is true. So we're very used to this idea that people say, well, you know that bad thing that happened to you? You kind of brought it on yourselves maybe a little bit. You know, I'm involved in human rights generally, and I see sometimes the instrumentalization of human rights accusations, and sometimes political opposition will accuse their opponents of human rights violations which are not real as a way of making a political point. So, I mean, one has to evaluate a human rights accusation and look at the evidence. And you're right, we can't just trust somebody, whether Falun Gong or not, simply because they say it. And I wouldn't dismiss somebody because they're Falun Gong. I wouldn't trust them because they're Falun Gong either. But most of our evidence, like for the update, we have 2,400 footnotes, 2,200 of them are Chinese official sources. For people to really come to terms with what Falun Gong is, they would need to come to terms with an absolutely extraordinary injustice. Because Falun Gong says that they believe truthfulness, compassion, forbearance, and that they just want to follow these values and assimilate to the universe. And it's this very simple, like primal goodness. And if that's all it is, and they're being eliminated because of that, like that is a lot to swallow. I didn't ask anyone to accept anything I had to say about Falun Gong in my book. I simply said, you base these things on their actions. You can go through my book, you will not find violence, okay? The most violence you'll find is somebody cutting a wire and connecting it to another wire. And even a lot of practitioners were upset about that. It was very controversial within the practitioner community when they were cutting wires so they could transmit a different program over the Chinese airways. In fact, what I found living around Falun Gong was that they spend most of their time discussing ethical matters like this, and the agreements are pretty brisk. When a couple of years ago we were walking in a group of about a thousand Falun Gong practitioners in Hong Kong, there was this group called the Youth Care Society, what it really is is a branch of the 610 office that harasses and shouts down, they tried to shout down you in Hong Kong recently, David. I would go like this to them when we walked by them, and a Falun Gong practitioner beside me said, don't do that, please, we don't do that kind of thing. And then the next time I saw these people, they would take the subway, and they'd come up every 10 blocks, and the next time I saw them, one of the guys went like this to me. There's enormous respect for Falun Gong practitioners, the ones I've met around the world. But there's an enormous problem with this within the journalism community. Again, I hate to bring it back to journalism, one more time. You know, I once met with a, I think he was a Reuters RAP, I don't want to remember, and I met with this guy in Hong Kong, and somebody said, oh, you should have a drink with him. And he said, oh, yeah, I'm a China expert, I do China stories. And he said, you know, the one thing I'll never do, though, is I'll never interview somebody from China who's got an agenda. And I was like, how do you do stories? What do you do? Do you just exchange pleasantries? I mean, you know, nobody coming out of China has a grudge or an agenda or an idea. It's just a standard we would never hold our own society to. I'd like to follow up a bit on what Matt says. I think part of the problem we're faced with is that accepting Falun Gong for what it is means accepting the persecution for what it is. People are hesitant to admit that for a number of different reasons. I mean, it impacts their interaction, the economics, and it's just the horror of what's happening. It has no place in our world. We don't have good and evil anymore. We have interests. We have competing interests. Falun Gong defies that. And the victimization of Falun Gong defies that, too. There is obviously no justification for what's happening, and admitting that it's happening is admitting something that people have difficulty even imagining that it's happening. If you look what's happening in China with the Catholic Church, the Communist Party appoints bishops. And with the Buddhism, they've got their own Panchen Lama. In Islam, they have their own imams, but they can't do that with Falun Gong. And because they can't control them by appointing somebody who is the head of Falun Gong, the persecution is the only way out, which is to a certain extent explains the persecution, but also explains their strength. Because if Falun Gong cannot be destroyed in that way by appointing somebody, the Communists decide to appoint as their head because there is no head. So you end up with a large group. The official numbers from the Communist Party were 70 to 100 million practitioners. Persecution begins 1999. You end up with a huge body of unnamed, unidentified people in the prisons, in the labor camp that everyone else in society has backed away from. And then they become just this huge pool for organs. You know, we've talked to people who've got out of these camps, by the way, and we probably should mention something about that because we've talked to them on about 15 capitals and we're absolutely horrified by what they go through in these camps. This is all small fry. I mean, what happened six months later was that they started to systematically build a machine to monetize those people. And this was not clear until this report came out. When all the evidence was put together, it became clear that they built a machine to do transplantations. So the reason the death count is so high now, or is suspected to be so high, is because there's no other plausible source. Except house Christians, which we don't know enough about. It's possible that they're an emerging source, at least. But look, I was always estimating at least half a million to a million had fallen gone in detention at any given time. And every time I sort of thought, well, you know what, this has got to be fading. New evidence comes out and shows that I'm wrong. I think that's right. And I think this is an extraordinary machine. And it was also provincial. I mean, every province has gotten involved now. Now, this is what we're seeing as a truly national, incentivized. They turned a political persecution into also a commercial. A commercial killing business. And this is another facet of the update, the institutionalization of this killing. It's in the five-year plans. It's in the budgets. It's in the grants. It's embedded into the system. The amount of awards these hospitals get individually is extraordinary. I mean, it's not just them bragging about, oh, I'm the number one kidney hospital. No, they actually receive special awards. They proudly list them. They're competitive, competing for them. Matt, you had a point? Hospitals were rated for their advancedness on how many organs they, how many transplants they did. And it was a criteria for judging like how good a hospital is. So it was completely built into the system. Anastasia? Do the Chinese archive all these materials? They wipe them out the minute we look at them. Then you usually have to re-archive them. I have a strong belief that they do not actually archive these materials, that they're incredibly careless about them, that they wipe them out all the time. But they're also careless about them, fortunately, in a good way as well. They tend to throw them in the trash and then not delete the trash, if you follow me. It's something we've all done on a computer. A lot of the mistakes are very elemental. The bottom line is we have no idea what their internal accounting mechanism is. Not exactly. We honestly don't know whether this was a centralized campaign to eliminate Falun Gong or if it was simply creating the incentives and letting it rip. I think both actually can be going on at the same time. If the question is, will you ever find a kind of master plan, something labeled the final solution for Falun Gong? No, I doubt that document will ever emerge. And if it existed, it's probably gone. So what we have here is a massive persecution, organ harvesting, which we may never know the full scope of, is still but one aspect of this persecution of this group. Research wasn't done to the same degree with their campaign of thought reform against Falun Gong, but it was similar in that an industry was created. Like there was specialist academics in how you brainwash Falun Gong practitioners effectively. They had like book series and then that would be distributed to prisons. They had like experts in this. They had training programs for this. And prisons got awards and so forth. Again, they were ranked and they got awards and prisons boasted about being the number one in transformation. We do have a better idea of what other victimization is going on because the other victimization, a lot of the victims survive and they can talk about it and about the torture and about the forced labor and the sleep deprivation and so on. But obviously with killing for their organs, they don't survive. So we don't have the same access to information.