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NEW NATIONS BULLETIN
14 JUNE 2010
TARGETING THE HERETICS
China has both friends and admirers who can also be critics. The article we publish today about the Falun Gong describes a particularly Chinese institution, probably known outside China, if at all, from witnessing earnest young helpers handing out leaflets in city centres. They are motivated by outrage at the injustice of the Chinese authorities in suppressing this home grown manifestation of a ‘spiritual search’, which until it was proscribed, was massively popular in China over several years.
The significance to us is that in their suppression of Falun Gong, Beijing and its regional capitals have turned those influenced by this belief system into victims, for an adherence which objectively looks to be harmless.
Harmless that is, except in one meaningful respect in a police state. It became huge. Claiming at one point a hundred million members, it spelled its own doom because although it was manifestly not political, it was not a part of the communist apparat.
That kind of exceptionalism is just not allowed in China’s heavily managed, top-down power system.
Our article is justified we maintain, because any belief system that can attract 100 million followers within a few years, has got to be worth a little research and explanation - but there is more.
The Chinese Government in their approach, the objections they raise and their treatment of Falun Gong practitioners, amounts to what the west would recognise as a witch hunt, a search for heretics which has happened historically in Europe and the Americas, with self-appointed demon hunters, and official licensed persecutors. These reached their classic form as the ‘Holy Inquisition’ that operated with extreme powers, readily identifiable today as evil, over all conditions of humankind throughout the Roman Catholic world, for some five centuries.
Thought Police
The very concept of heresy – that ‘belief’ must conform to a dogma approved by some higher authority and policed by them, is deeply repugnant to 21st century man. A critical point for any democratic society to have reached is that individual belief is not to be controlled.
Clearly China has not arrived at that point. Nevertheless, its control of thought and subsequent treatment of its targeted heretics, is deeply repugnant to those around the world who otherwise can find much to admire in what China has achieved.
There is also despair that China cannot see the unacceptability of not only persecuting those whom they call heretics, but differing from world history in that they are quite arbitrarily punished and imprisoned in special gulags by the Police, without their case being heard in any trial.
Since Falun Gong was at first for some years tolerated as harmless by the Chinese Government, our article looks at the processes by which it became demonized and what has happened since:
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is also published at our www.geopolemics web site where readers comments are welcome
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