True Atrocities in Our Own Time
Here’s a strange facet of human psychology: When presented with incomplete information about a person, we tend to assume the best about him. We project what we would like to believe onto those we don’t know much about. This is why, for example, a political pollster who wants to generate bad news for a Republican incumbent will run a poll between the incumbent and an unnamed Democrat. Unnamed Democrats are more appealing than actual Democrats. We view an unnamed anybody as better than a specific somebody, because in the absence of knowledge we see what we want to see.
Totalitarian regimes understand this principle and use it to their advantage:The less they tell the world about what’s going on inside, the easier it is for those on the outside to assume that everything on the inside is going just fine. It isn’t pleasant to think about horrible things happening, while it’s pleasant to imagine that life under totalitarians isn’t too bad. So we tend to assume pleasant thoughts.
This is a powerful force in international politics. It helped prolong the Soviet Union by years or decades, as western useful idiots loudly declared that it was a workers’ paradise and ignored all evidence to the contrary. It supports much of the opposition to the liberation of Iraq, with the MSM rarely if ever pointing out just how vicious of a monster Saddam really was. It allows people today to act as if pressuring the US to leave South Vietnam was a noble cause, rather than condemning millions to Communism’s cruel yoke. It allowed the MSM to complain loudly about phatom prisoner abuses in Guantanamo Bay, while ignoring the very real torture and oppression that the rest of Cuba has experienced for decades.
And this desire to see beauty in ambiguity dominates our thinking about China. Even many conservatives want to believe that China will somehow blossom into a democracy without military pressure. On this theory, a prosperous middle class will form, and they’ll demand more political freedom. These demands will cause the Chinese communists to quake in their boots, wet themselves, and then peacefully surrender. The communists will give up all their power, perks, and prestige in exchange for the chance to participate in an election where they will almost certainly lose.
Or maybe not. You and I might be willing to give up our own power and daily happiness to bring prosperity and happiness to the masses, but then you and I aren’t the kind of people who would become ruling members of a Communist party. Maybe the communists don’t have such delicate sensibilities, and they’ll decide to slaughter some protestors to stay in power and keep living the high life, just like they did at Tiananmen.
If you consider the latter view to be too pessimistic, then read this article on NRO, and click through as many of the links as your stomach can handle.
If you prefer not to click, I’ll summarize: China is in the business of selling human body parts from executed criminals and other political undesirables. Witnesses report on a facility designed for this purpose in the Sujiatun District, governed by the city of Shenyang in Liaoning Provice. The facility is located underground, beneath the Liaoning Provincial Thrombosis Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine. In this facility, people are killed, their organs extracted, and those organs are sold domestically and abroad at a profit of about $30,000 per victim.
They don’t always do it in that order, though. In about three-quarters of the cases, the organ extraction comes before death. The kidneys, livers, and corneas are the valuable parts; the rest they incinerate. Looting the corpses of jewelry is apparently quite profitable for the local workers who handle the cremation.
The Chinese Communists have long done this with their criminals, but these involuntary organ donors are guilty only of practicing Falun Gong. About 6,000 of them are reported to have been held in a complex underneath a hospital, waiting to be carved up and sold, though only 2,000 remain at last report. The links in the NRO piece will give you all the gory details, especially the many articles in The Epoch Times.
The MSM once made it so easy for people not to know about what really happens in Communist countries. The public took its news from a limited number of sources, which underneath were all essentially the same source, and people who read or watched the news believed that they were getting an accurate view of the world. It was once very difficult to see past the MSM. But no more. It’s all just a few clicks away: the pictures,the first-person accounts, the details. All you can stand. More than you can stand.
It isn’t much fun to look at what men do without religion or morality. But all decent people should look and look again, until they learn the lesson. Few will do so. It’s much easier to generate ostentatious outrage over, say, American slavery or Hitler’s atrocities, rather than bothering to notice the atrocities going on today.