The Holocaust Is Back—This Time in China

With its concentration camps, mass slaughter, and unprecedented cruelty, the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of the Falun Gong meditation practice has sometimes been compared to the Holocaust that took place in Europe.

For the past 15 years, adherents of Falun Gong have been harassed, severely tortured, and often killed for their beliefs. The persecution doesn’t involve only a small or isolated group of people. When it began in 1999, there were an estimated 70 to 100 million people practicing Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa).

However, most of the world’s media are reluctant to report on it.

Only a few have been bold enough to cover the persecution in detail. The Chinese Communist Party has gone to great lengths to keep their human rights crimes a secret, including threatening or buying international media companies to keep them quiet.

Since the persecution hasn’t appeared all over the news, as something like this normally would, many people have not heard accurate reports about it and only know the Party’s propagandized version of events.

This propaganda was designed to justify the persecution, just as the Nazi regime spread lies about the Jews to try to justify killing them. The Party has claimed that Falun Gong practitioners are trying to seize political power, that their practice involves setting themselves on fire, and any number of other falsehoods.

In reality, Falun Gong includes five simple qigong exercises, one of which is a sitting meditation, as well as moral teachings based on truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Its adherents are not interested in political power, and the practice does not permit suicide or other violence. People in China knew this before the propaganda started, but after hearing Falun Gong slandered so heavily and for so long, many began to believe the lies.

There are still many people in China and abroad who believe these fabrications. This has been a major impediment to Falun Gong practitioners’ efforts to raise awareness about the persecution.

After many years, they have had some success in getting the word out. However, the persecution still continues, and it is not likely to stop until enough people in China and elsewhere have learned what’s going on.

That’s why the international community would do well to learn this lesson from the Holocaust: When a group of people says they are being persecuted, and keeps saying so for years … you listen.