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Facts in Reports for Clarifying the Truth Should be Verified and Used Carefully

August 15, 2005 |   By an Overseas Dafa Practitioner

(Clearwisdom.net)

At the recent experience sharing conference in Washington DC, there were obvious improvements over last year in the orderliness of the event, both inside and outside the conference room. I also felt that while in the past, only some Westerners' papers conveyed a sense of purity, this time, more of the experience sharing papers by practitioners from China also included it. There was much less of a feeling of Party culture in the papers of fellow Chinese practitioners. As a personal understanding, I feel this is one of many good phenomena arising since the publication of the Nine Commentaries. By eliminating the Party culture that had poisoned our minds, the sharing between our fellow practitioners can be more substantial, more effective and pure.

Looking at the influence of the elimination of Party culture in clarifying the truth, it is also very important. Online, I often see practitioners' articles reminding fellow practitioners that the news they spread needs to be matter of fact and unexaggerated. I agree very much with this reminder. I feel that only through eliminating old Party culture in our minds and actions can we achieve that form of unexaggerated reporting. Furthermore, if we do not pay attention to eliminating it, there will be negative effects in clarifying the truth.

For example, sometimes we use the case of Wang Lixuan and her baby boy to clarify the truth. The mother Wang Lixuan and her child died as a result of persecution. That is unquestionable. The specifics of how they died, however, were unable to be provided by the practitioners who first spread the news. They only told about how the corpses looked, and then made their own inferences for the cause of death. Later, in the process of clarifying the truth, some practitioners said that the death was caused directly by torture, and they even told the location of persecution incorrectly. When other practitioners pointed out that this way was irrational, these practitioners tried to validate their methods, saying that in this way, the ordinary people were touched. These inaccurate stories have been represented in songs, paintings, dances, and new reports, spreading very widely and quickly.

In actuality, the deaths of the mother and child did not occur in a labor camp, but in a Beijing office. This can be seen easily by a quick search on the internet. How exactly were the mother and child killed? Because the persecution is still continuing, we have no evidence of anything. People understand this. In exposing the persecution, however, if we go by the individual judgments of practitioners, it will be said that they were killed as a direct result of "torture." And yet, the practitioner would not say that it is a personal judgment. He would even go about spreading it as a fact. Then, how can we behave like rational and responsible practitioners? Isn't this the influence of Party culture on our minds?

There are still some other areas of inaccuracy. For instance, some practitioners passed away because of reasons other than arrest, beating, detention, or torture. When other practitioners put together reports about these death cases, they did not make it clear that these deaths were not caused by persecution, because they hoped that the cases they offered would be put onto the list of practitioners persecuted to death, and not some other list. As a result, this brings about unnecessary difficulty to the entire process of exposing the evil.

These individual cases are brought about because the practitioners writing the reports can oftentimes become emotional, or care too little about accuracy and being factual. Furthermore, these inaccuracies are very easily utilized by the evil that may take the reports to labor camps and brainwashing classes to do "transformations." They would attack the Minghui website and Dafa materials, exposing every wrong detail and claiming that information on Minghui is "completely" false. This then brings about the "transformation" of those with less understanding of Fa principles and heavy attachments to fear. Some practitioners even deviated from Dafa. These are losses created by the sentimentality of individuals, who do not look at the overall situation, trying to save a little only to lose a lot.

Actually, traditional Chinese culture teaches people to be honest, professional, and precise. Party culture, however, teaches people to do things by any kinds of means and to be rough. This is why people are unprofessional, lazy, and care little for basic skills; and they think it is very normal. They even say: "The advantages go to oneself, the disadvantages go to everyone" and "If one does not live for self, he will be eradicated" (the "self" could mean the person himself or his own small household). Therefore, people do not believe they should emphasize being responsible to the whole or being responsible to others, as long as their own goals are achieved.

These bad notions should all be completely eliminated from our minds and bodies. It is very easy to find information on the Internet. On Minhui, one can simply use the search function, and be able to learn an overall understanding of the subject. Verifying the validity of information on a case before it is posted online is rather difficult. But with righteous thoughts, and entire mind focusing on collecting information, one might find it easier than thought. When the circumstances of the case are not entirely clear, one can tell the readers that "details are still being investigated."

These are some of my personal understandings. Fellow practitioners, please point out anything improper.