Germany: Speech from the Opening of the Travelling Exhibition ‘Fields of Shame”

The following speech was given by a German Falun Gong practitioner at the Fields of Shame exhibition. To find out more about the exhibition, please see
http://www.clearharmony.net/articles/200511/30107.html

I am honoured to address all those present.

Stalin once said, “The death of one person is a tragedy, while the death of millions are statistics.”

From the day the communists came to power between fifty eight million to eighty million Chinese people died of unnatural causes. Counting the deaths in China amount to more deaths than the deaths during the two world wars combined. During Stalin’s persecution, twenty million people died, amounting to about ten per cent of the former USSR population. After the Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia, more than one quarter of the Cambodian population was killed.

Please, let us take a closer look at the nature of the communist psyche: Communists preach class struggle, atheism, and materialism and have assumed such as the foundation of their existence. As a direct consequence of such principles, communist systems persecute the traditional way of thinking, every religion and all people who practise religion.

The communist system is the same everywhere. Society’s structures in a communist regime are composed of watch systems, such as the neighborhood committee of a given street, as well as the security division and the ideological questioning division at the work place. Religious groups are forced to register and are told to look at communism as the god or Buddha. These are just a few examples. The forced labour camps and the atrocities committed there are like nightmarish shadows, which move around in the subconscious mind of humanity.

Almost everyone thinks that all this seems far away from Europe and Germany. But, in reality, the Chinese forced labour camps force prisoners to make goods for export that will be sold in our stores. Over ninety per cent of all toys that are sold worldwide are “Made in China.” What is hidden behind that label is hard to imagine by westerners. Often, these are toys that were manufactured under degrading circumstances.

The tools employed by the communist systems are deceit, force, espionage and betrayal (even among family members), pressure, social ostracism, imprisonment in psychiatric clinics and forced medical treatments of dissidents. It is force and the threat of death.

In response to the power orgies, brainwashing and brutality of the communists, peaceful and nonviolent revolutions emerged, such as the velvet revolution of Georgia, the orange revolution of the Ukraine, the carnation revolution of Portugal and so on.

The above gives an important signal, although it is no more than the tip of the iceberg. It is a way that helps us to understand the unspoken human fates in Laos, Myanmar, North Korea, Vietnam and so on. The aforementioned helps us understand how to view the persecution of people.

I wish to take of one of such fate today, namely the persecution of Falun Gong in China, which is kept hidden from the public in our country.

Four-year-old Wan Shu-Jie lived in Laiwu City, Shandong Province. On July 19th 2000, a group of police broke into the home of little Shu-Jie’s uncle and arrested all grown ups in front of the little girl. On December 3rd 2000, the police arrested Shu-Jie’s father and took him to the police station for interrogation. The child fainted when she was forced to watch the mistreatment of her father. After she came to, she broke out in cold sweat and had a fever. Since then, she was no longer herself, hit her head against the wall, cried a lot and stopped growing. She was in shock and suffered trauma since this experience with the police. She lived in constant fear. At the age of four, Shu-Jie died on July 15th 2002.

This is one of the many hidden tragedies of the people who have no voice. Therefore it is imperative that courageous and compassionate people and organisations like the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR) take a step forward and speak of this, so people hear about it. One should never forget that human rights couldn’t be taken away.

It is of the greatest importance that people hear about this now, as Hu Jintao, the Chinese President will visit Berlin, Dusseldorf and Dortmund from November 10th to the 13th. It is important that people hear about the living conditions of the Chinese people and about the daily violation of human rights.

We wish to thank the International Society for Human Rights (ISHR) for all their great support in preparation of this exhibition. Also, we wish to thank the ISHR for the thousand little as well as great things they do to uphold human rights, especially since they do them quietly without making them public. The ISHR gives these people a future, a voice and life. I’m pleased to participate in this and glad to be able to tell people about the persecution of Falun Gong, which end is dear to my heart.

Thank you for your attention concerning this matter.

Originally published in German at http://de.clearharmony.net/articles/200511/27510.html