Yesterday I went to see my friend Tom in San Francisco. Pam, Addie, Tom, his wife Rosemarie and me decided to explore the Chinatown area in San Francisco. We had a great time. I even took some nice pictures. But... the pictures and the fact that we had a good time aren't what this post is about. It's about the little newspaper a friendly old lady gave to Pam. Both me and Pam usually ignore people who try to shove all sorts of things in your hands on the streets but for some reason Pam actually accepted this newspaper. "hmmm wait... this may actually be interesting", I thought and I put it in my backpack.

On the way back to Sunnyvale on the CalTrain I got bored, grabbed it from my backpack and started reading. It was a publication by a group of volunteers in NYC about Falun Gong. That's right, operators of the Golden Shield Project, it was about Falun Gong.

Gentlemen, the IP of my site is 208.97.179.128. You may now proceed and add it to the firewall.

I had heard about Falun Gong in the news but I never got to actually look into what it actually was. According to the Chinese government, Falun Gong is a dangerous and evil cult that should be crushed with the full force of whatever means are available. So, what is it? Let's take a look at what Wikipedia has on the subject.

Falun Gong is a spiritual discipline founded in China by Li Hongzhi in 1992. It has five sets of meditation exercises and teaches the principles truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, as set out in the main books Falun Gong and Zhuan Falun. The teachings deal with issues such as "cultivation of virtue and character", "moral standards for different levels", and "salvation of all sentient beings."

Damn... truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. How dare they. Straight from hell! Keep your daughters inside and hide them from these evildoers!

Anyway, back to the newspaper. To make a long story short, it was full of horror stories about the persecution of Falun Gong members in China that made anything I ever heard about Guantanamo Bay sound like a 5-star Hilton hotel treatment. Starvation, torture, abuse, rape and execution, sometimes even on special order for the purpose of organ harvesting. The Communist Party of China sure has her way of dealing with those pesky truthful and compassionate people. You can read a lot more about what's happening at Faluninfo.net. Some highlights:

There has been sexual torture, including stripping 18 women of their clothes and forcing them into the jail cells of male criminal offenders to be gang-raped. Some women have been subjected to forced, late-term abortions. [The policemen] have ripped off our clothes in public and shocked us with electric batons. Iron wire has been used to pierce our nipples. They have sexually violated our bodies using eggplants, toothbrushes, and plastic water bottles. In one Female Labor Camp located in Jilin Province, the police inserted hot pepper powder into women's vaginas in order to force them to give up their belief and practice of Falun Dafa. They have forced electric stun batons into female practitioners' vaginas to torture and shock them...

- Excerpt from a letter from female Falun Gong adherents in China

On the evening of April 26th, 2001, Tan Yongjie was arrested and beaten by Chinese policemen for distributing literature on the persecution of Falun Gong. He was taken to a forced labor camp where he was tied to a post while three policemen burned his legs with red-hot iron rods, leaving him with disfiguring scars. Unable to perform hard labor, he was taken to an orchard and left to die. Miraculously, he made his way to Hong Kong, boarded a cargo ship and found refuge in the United States.

Yongjie Tan: An Amazing Escape

Of course, all this is just evil, anti government propaganda, right?

After reading more about Falun Gong I for one fail to see the evil. And apparently the 70+ countries besides China in which it's practiced do too. Heck, they even have it a few miles from where I live. It actually sounds pretty interesting to me as it seems to match pretty well with my own insanely evil atheist views as it doesn't have any kind of god figure. And there's very little wrong with meditation and trying to live like a good person. Even if you are religious unlike me it may still be interesting as it doesn't really conflict with any of the big religions.

• Falun Dafa (Falun Gong)
• FalunInfo.net (about the human rights atrocities happening in China)

To the operators of the Great Firewall: hopefully one day you'll learn how to think for yourself. Until then let me repeat the IP: 208.97.179.128

Fight the power. May strenght and knowledge (eventually) be with you.

Tags: falun gong, falun dafa, human rights, china