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"Clarify the truth thoroughly, eliminate the evil with righteous thoughts, save all beings, and safeguard the Fa with determination" (Dafa is Indestructible) Wall Street Journal: Torquemada Would Have Admired China's Inquisitors [Excerpt] By George Melloan Hard-nosed political cops who use medieval methods to extract
information or
punish incorrect behavior were much reduced in number in Europe by the
Soviet
Union's collapse. But they are still thick on the ground in China.
Torquemada,
the 15th-century Spanish grand inquisitor, would no doubt marvel at how
efficiently the Chinese security services conduct their nasty
thought-control
assignments. [...] [...]. Last Friday, wire services and human-rights
monitors were
reporting the death of 33-year-old Li Changjun, who was arrested in
Wuhan in May
for printing information dealing with the persecution of members of the
Falun
Gong spiritual movement. Witnesses who viewed the corpse claimed that he
had
obviously been brutally tortured during his 40 days in custody. A Falun
Gong
information center charges that 258 practitioners have died in police
hands
since Beijing launched its terror campaign against the group two years
ago. The
campaign also has included crackdowns on "unofficial" Roman Catholic
congregations and other believers who meet informally outside the
confines of
officially authorized churches. As in police states everywhere throughout history, the security services
in
China attract sadists who enjoy wreaking mayhem on helpless victims. But
it is
doubtful that China's is a case of a security service that has gone out
of
control. There is evidence that the terror is being directed from
Beijing with
the full knowledge and support of the highest political leaders.
Protestors of
the death of Li Changjun report that they were told by the Wuhan city
officials
that they were only following the policies of the central government.
A lot of ink has been spilled on theories about why the smiley,
innocent-looking
President Jiang Zemin has seen fit to unleash mass murder and the
imprisonment
of Americanized scholars on flimsy charges of "spying." [...] [...] China's [party's name omitted] has followed enlightened policies
when
compared to these three sinkholes, but it still retains the instruments
of a
police state. And over the past two years it has clearly demonstrated
that it is
willing to use them. [...] The Chinese security
services
compile dossiers on Americans of Chinese descent and accuse them of
working
against Chinese interests. Because the U.S. is a free country, not much
is
stopping the Chinese cops from finding out all they want to know about
Chinese-born academics in order to concoct their spying charges. They
cast the
Falun Gong as a foreign influence despite its typically Chinese origins,
because
its leader happens to live in the U.S. What the Chinese leaders fail to recognize is that in using the secret
police
for their purposes, they are employing methods that have become
increasingly
distasteful to the modern world. In so doing, they are revealing how far
China
still has to go to become a civilized state.
Posting date: 8/11/2001 |