Heroes or Criminals: What is the Standard We Use to Measure a Just Action?

"Noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good."
-- Mohandas K. Gandhi

(By Leeshai Lemish, contributing writer for the Falun Dafa Information Centre)

NEW YORK, May 28, 2002 (Falun Dafa Information Centre) - Last week, four more Falun Gong practitioners were handed sentences of up to 16 years in prison for their "illegal" act of broadcasting programs that reveal the persecution of Falun Gong on state-run television. By broadcasting these programs, these individuals sought to counter inflammatory propaganda with facts and information about Falun Gong. For this, they have been sentenced to long jail terms where they will invariably face torture and other forms of brutal persecution in Chinese prisons. Thus, as those who sought to expose human rights abuses and give a voice to those who have none in China's state-run media are sent off to prison for their efforts, we ask who are the criminals and who are the victims?

[note to Clear Harmony readers – for recent reports on the broadcasting of programs to reveal the truth in China, click here]

A Just Action Against Evil Tyranny

Sources in China reported that regular TV broadcasts on January 1, 2002 in Chongqing, China were replaced by video footage revealing information about the ongoing persecution by Chinese president Jiang Zemin's regime against Falun Gong. The footage also showed Falun Gong being widely practised in over 50 countries around the world. Similar broadcasts have appeared in at least three other major Chinese cities.

Sources close to Jiang indicate that these broadcasts have enraged the Chinese dictator. Chinese state media have denounced the acts as "illegal" and noted that those responsible would face punishment under the "law".

Jiang Zemin and his SS-like " 610 Office", however, have broken both international and Chinese laws in unsuccessfully trying to eradicate Falun Gong. According to the International Criminal Court classifications, Jiang's persecution is responsible for at least ten varieties of crimes against humanity, and it has violated nearly every item on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which China signed in 1998.

Jiang has arbitrarily issued dictates that clash with the Chinese constitution, and has closed off all legal appeal channels. While paying lip service to freedom of speech, he sends those who exercise it by saying "Falun Dafa is good" to labour camps for "re-education," Orwellian doublespeak for brainwashing, torture and slave labour.

Jiang would like the world to believe that Falun Gong practitioners are being "unlawful." However, the "laws" that they "break" have been contrived by a totalitarian regime interested only in preserving its power and crushing a peaceful, spiritual practice.

History's Lesson on "Moral Responsibility"

In Nazi Germany, Hitler and his propaganda advisor, Joseph Goebbels, manipulated state-run media to try to demonise the Jewish people, thereby garnering support for the Nazi treatment of the Jews as well as holding critics from abroad at bay. Jiang and his propaganda advisor, Ding Guangen, are manipulating their state-run media to demonise Falun Gong with the same intent.

Dr. Martin Luther King stated in his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." In his letter, King praised those who hid the Jews in Europe during World War II. At the time, the kind-hearted people who did so were considered criminals. The Chinese who attempt to break through the barrage of propaganda with fact-based information about Falun Gong today have courageously taken a similar course.

People today applaud Gandhi's action of deliberately breaking the British Salt-Law, just as future generations will sing the praise of the valiant Chinese who deliberately break Jiang's unjust laws and quietly sit in meditation in Tiananmen Square. Gandhi taught us that, "Non cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good." And for this reason, Falun Gong practitioners indeed do not cooperate with Jiang Zemin.

Which side are we on?

The recent broadcasts over Chinese cable networks sought to present the people of China with the truth - Falun Gong is a peaceful, spiritual practice widely embraced by people throughout the world who attest to better health and happiness because of the practice. The violent persecution of people who peacefully practise Falun Gong, therefore, is wrong. Had such broadcasts taken place in Nazi Germany, how would people today view those who risked their lives to give a voice to the Jewish people amidst the whirlwind of propaganda engulfing them? How should we view the recent sentencing of these four practitioners in China?

Jiang Zemin is on the wrong side of history. Which side are we on?

Source: http://www.faluninfo.net/DisplayAnArticle.asp?ID=5687