Special to The Epoch Times
Jul 07, 2005
Amnesty International in its 2005 China report concludes that, "there was progress towards reform in some areas, but this failed to have a significant impact on serious and widespread human rights violations perpetrated across the country. Tens of thousands of people continued to be detained or imprisoned in violation of their fundamental human rights and were at high risk of torture or ill-treatment. Thousands of people were sentenced to death or executed, many after unfair trials." None of this information is to be found in China's official newspapers. Instead, the communist-controlled newspaper, The People's Daily, continues to glorify the regime's "economic achievements" and publishes official speeches by President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.
Is this phenomenon something that is unique to China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? Even though my expertise derives from witnessing and analyzing the collapse of the European communist regimes, it is not too difficult to see the many similarities that, regardless of the cultural differences, exist in China's communist system. Despite its economic flexibility, China's communist regime has preserved all the traditional totalitarian political characteristics. The other big communist powers are all gone, but one is still causing suffering to the people of a great country with rich cultural and spiritual traditions.
The history of the twentieth century reminds us that hate propaganda can bring enormous calamities to millions of innocent people. Communist hate propaganda is rooted in their antagonizing dogma of class struggle, and intends to justify state-sponsored mass violence against imaginary "enemies of the people." China's communist leadership has persecuted many groups of people during the decades of its dictatorial rule. Today it persecutes people with independent opinions, Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities. In the last five years it has chosen the spiritual movement Falun Gong as their main enemy.
I believe that China and its people would enormously benefit by learning not just from its own tragic history of communist rule, but also from the violent totalitarian past of other countries, and by avoiding the mistakes that have been made elsewhere. The lessons learned during the downfall of the communist regimes in Europe can be applied to China. The disintegration of the communist regimes was not always peaceful and it took time for the Western society to acknowledge its own illusions and to react forcefully to the organized mass violence in former Yugoslavia. The lack of proper international response contributed to destabilization in other regions and created a window of opportunity for other perpetrators. The 1994 genocidal events in Rwanda and Burundi are a tragic reminder of the complexity of regional and international power-balance.
Let's take a look at three examples from the recent and not-so-recent past. It has been already more than three years that Slobodan Milosevic, former Serbian president sits in his UN prison cell in Hague, the Netherlands, and faces new evidence of the mass atrocities committed by his regime under his leadership. Vukovar, Srebrenica and the names of many massacred and torched towns in Kosovo will hound the deposed dictator until the end of his days, which he most probably will see in prison.
On December 3, 2003 the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in the Tanzanian city of Arusha sentenced three Rwandan journalists for their role in fueling the genocide of 1994. Two of them, Ferdinand Nahimana, a founding member of Radio Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) and Hassan Ngeze, owner and editor of the Hutu extremist newspaper, Kaguru, were sentenced to life in prison. Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, another executive at RTLM, received a 35-year sentence. Less than a month earlier, on November 6, the trial of four former Rwandan ministers charged with genocide opened in Arusha.
On May 1, 1945, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, and his wife - to escape the inevitable war-crimes trial - committed suicide in the underground bunker of their leader, Adolf Hitler. Goebbels knew too well the magnitude of his own crime - his hate propaganda was responsible for the death of six million European Jews.
What do these three examples have in common and what do they have to do with
China's Communist Party? All these people were responsible for causing the violent death and suffering of thousands and millions of innocent people. One of the deadliest weapons of their crimes was hate propaganda. As powerful and they were during their rule of terror, in the end all of them had to face truth and justice. One would think these three examples should be sending a message powerful enough to stop anyone involved in hate propaganda or even contemplating it. Yet, we see that history seems to be repeating itself and that the CCP's leadership does not appear to learn from the lessons of the past.
Milosevic, before coming to absolute power, was a former communist functionary trained in propaganda methods by his Soviet mentors. He and the Rwandan culprits differ in their background but they are similar in their use of methods and the consequences of their hate propaganda. Both Serbian and Rwandan instigators used propaganda techniques that included the most destructive elements of Goebbels's and Marxist-Leninist methods. They all followed the advice that Goebbels gave to Nazi propagandists in his 1934
Nuremberg rally speech, that propaganda "must be creative" and use "productive fantasy."
Let's look at some examples. Some of them are relatively recent, some are quite fresh. From July 1988 until March 1991, the Serbian daily, Politika, run by Milosevic supporters, published a permanent column, "Echoes and Reactions," spreading unrestrained hatred against non-Serbs. The name of the mass crime that followed was "ethnic cleansing."
In November 2004, the Epoch Times reported that schoolchildren in China are forced to undergo hate indoctrination against Falun Gong. Because of the CCP's imposed information blockade, the true scale of the repression against Falun Gong can be only estimated.
At the end of 1993 and in early 1994, Rwandan radio station RTLM broadcast a series of hate programs in an effort to divide and polarize the country's population. The Hutu majority was told that the Tutsi minority harbored mysterious and diabolic plans against them. "Kill them, or they will kill you!" was the bottom-line message of RTLM. On May 23, AFP reported from Uganda that thousands of corpses pf the Rwanda genocide victims had washed up on the shores of Lake Victoria. In June 2005, many people in the US and Europe were surprised to receive repeated phone call with Chinese communist propaganda and anti-Falun Gong slogans.
The Falun Gong movement's information center reacted to this incident with great concern that this intrusive campaign was just an element in a larger Falun Gong purge undertaken by the communist regime. These concerns may be well founded if we consider the track record and methods of the previous communist persecutions in China and that the government-controlled newspaper, The People's Daily, which usually avoids mentioning the movement's name, in its July 5, 2005 issue alleged that Falun Gong had jammed government-owned satellite transmissions.
The CCP's paranoia with Falun Gong reminds me of the Soviet obsession with "Western ideological diversions" that made the Soviet communists to suspect Radio Free Europe and other Western broadcasters of being behind every independent opinion in the USSR and behind almost every one of the many failures of the Soviet system. The communist system cannot live without an enemy to fight and to blame for its own shortcomings, and without someone to persecute, in order to maintain its rule of terror and fear.
The communists have the tactical advantage of playing the propaganda game as they choose: they invoke or ignore the generally accepted rules and international law as it suits them. They create the image of new enemies to divert attention from their own failures.
They have two versions of propaganda. One is intended for domestic use and the other one is for foreign consumption. The CCP is trying to influence the governments of other countries by using government-level contacts and to induce action from below by using party and intelligence channels. The recent propaganda phone call campaign in the US and Europe clearly fits the latter.
In the 1950s, Chinese and Soviet communist propaganda ran several years-long, well-orchestrated and relatively successful campaigns falsely accusing the UN and Americans of using bacteriological weapons during the Korean War. Even the International Red Cross and World Health Organization were not spared and were portrayed as US-controlled spy agencies. The propagandists alleged that American bio-weapons had caused smallpox outbreaks in some Korean provinces. The consistent repetition of lies combined with repeated statements by communist government officials had its effect on leftist intellectuals in Western countries. Even some of the Western politicians started to ask questions about the conduct of UN troops during the Korean conflict.
Repetitious de-humanization of the intended victim are the main techniques of hate propaganda. Slobodan Milosevic's regime labeled every opposing opinion as "terrorist activity" and kept fighting against the "terrorism" of the international community and searching for "terrorists" inside the country. Rwandan perpetrators called their Tutsi victims "cockroaches." Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels instigated hatred against Jews. The Mass atrocities of all of the above regimes are well known. The Nazi criminals were sentenced at the Nuremberg trial, the Rwandan and Serbian culprits are still being tried by the UN courts. The only great totalitarian power that still persecutes innocent people and whose crimes are not yet fully accounted for is Communist China.
The name of the "enemy" may vary from one communist country to another but the rules of the game remain the same. Because the communist propaganda does not match reality, they need scapegoats to justify their own failures. Ideally, they choose an imaginary enemy outside the country and launch a campaign, or "witch hunt" - a search for alleged agents of this imaginary enemy inside the country. Over the course of its history, the CCP has had many victims labeled as its "enemies." The current victim, and hopefully the last one, is Falun Gong.
The CCP's campaign against Falun Gong in some ways is similar to such campaigns in the Soviet Union. One that lasted the longest was the Kremlin's fight against the "Western ideological diversions." When in the 1960s the Soviet leadership realized that every citizen could see that their slogans about building a prosperous socialist society did not match reality, they quickly blamed the failure on the "imperialist conspiracy." Yuri Andropov, then head of the state security (the KGB), in 1967 created the "Fifth Department" to combat the "ideological diversions." Western media in general and Radio Free Europe in particular, were diabolized. The huge bureaucratic apparatus had to prove their usefulness. State-controlled media unleashed defamation campaigns against the personalities of Western broadcasters and analysts; security forces persecuted listeners of the Western radio stations.
The myth of outside conspiracy was so convenient for the communist regime that it lasted almost to the end of the system. But the fate of this myth was ironic. People enforcing the myth on the one hand believed in the power of the alleged outside conspiracy, and on the other hand they believed that the information coming from the Western sources was at least 99% truthful. Some of the former party elite and security officials later confessed that they secretly used Western broadcasts as their main source of information.
Having seen the collapse of the Soviet communist system and the domino-like end of the European communist regimes, I feel confident in saying that the end of the CCP's rule in China is no longer in the distant future. The change is coming at an increasingly accelerating pace. I hope that for the sake of the Chinese people, the change comes sooner rather than later. The longer the CCP is allowed to play its dirty games, the bigger will grow the gap between its ideology and reality. Conversely, the shorter the lifespan of China's Communist Party, the less will be the risk that tragedies like those in Yugoslavia and Rwanda will repeat in Asia.
If people's minds are obscured and divorced from reality for too long, the awakening may be painful. Spreading truthful and independent information helps the people to wake up and come back to reality. The recent resignations from the CCP membership are clear signs of awakening. As soon as this phenomenon reaches a sufficient momentum, we will be referring to the CCP in the past tense.
Peter Zvagulis is an international affairs writer and former editor of Radio Free Europe
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Category: Falun Dafa in the Media
