Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
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This is your
program that's designed
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to bring you up to
speed on religious liberty,
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dynamics both in
present day events,
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and some of the
history and legal background
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to this freedom
above all freedoms,
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the first freedom.
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My name is Lincoln Steed,
Editor of Liberty Magazine.
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And I want to share
some things with you today.
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The best way I can do
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is to quote from my own writings
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from Liberty Magazine,
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which I hope
you're familiar with.
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This is a cover of a recent one.
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Actually, the latest is
the time of filming this
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bit of a flashback
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to an American
presidential candidate
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who was a self-proclaimed
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king of the world
and a religious leader
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who wanted to
join church and state.
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He was treated as a joke
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because he was
never a serious contender
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but to imagine that
this central principle
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of the
constitution restrains everyone
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is to be naive.
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Of course, there are people
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then and now who want
to join church and state.
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We're living in a
very interesting time
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of the world's history.
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There's no question.
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Everything is up for
grabs in the last few decades,
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the old norm
seemed to be fading.
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At the moment, we're suffering
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under a global pandemic
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COVID-19.
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How truly deadly this
is, on an individual basis,
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we don't really know.
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But one thing is undeniable,
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at least, from
direct deaths and deaths
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were contributed by
COVID with other co-morbidities
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200,000 plus in
the United States,
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a million globally, and
probably at least double
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that before we're over.
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It's significant.
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And it's disrupted
every element of life,
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and in many ways,
affected religious liberty
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in most unpredictable
and usually negative ways.
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One thing that is
hardly come to mention
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is that in those countries
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where there was
already persecution
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of religious minorities
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and direct restriction
of religious practice,
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such as China, it's
only gotten worse with COVID.
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If for no other reason,
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that undercover of
this global distraction,
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they've
tightened the screws down.
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For example, in
China, they persecuted,
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there's no other word for it,
the minority Uighur population
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who are mostly
Muslims, and incidentally,
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a number of them were part
of the nonliving conspiracy.
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So there's radical
Islamic elements there.
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But China has a problem
with assimilating the Uighurs,
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they're different culturally,
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ethnically, and
as far as ideology,
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they're not hardcore communists,
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they are Muslim religionists.
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And so China has
really restricted them
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and castrated them
in massive numbers,
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as many as 1 to 3 million
of the figures that I see.
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And the internment problem
with the Uighurs is merged
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with what we've
known for some time
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that in Chinese prisons,
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there's basically a
business of harvesting organs
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and basically organs and
human body parts for sale.
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And it's gotten
so bad that in China,
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they coordinate the executions,
with the orders for organs.
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Sometimes people get condemned
and given the rough justice
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just because
there's an immediate need
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for certain organs.
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I've read
well-documented articles
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in national newspapers.
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I remember
Harper's Magazine was one
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that had an in-depth article
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about how they
were harvesting organs
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from still warm prisoners,
including a man that defected
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who his job was to take the skin
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of a still-warm
prisoner who'd been executed.
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You know, skin
grafts are in great demand.
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So I want to read
something that I read recently
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that refers to this.
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It is a true
religious liberty aspect
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to what's going on.
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But it's a little deeper than
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just denying
religious liberty rights.
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It's something that has
even larger implications
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for civil and religious liberty.
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It's the
commoditization of human life.
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And that's no more evident than
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in the Chinese communist regime.
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Now right there that
history is sepia colored
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and correctly
distant for most of us.
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If any of us think
on the past at all.
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I can still
remember my own shock.
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Some years ago after I
had regale the committee group
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with my memories
of the Vietnam War,
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an era all too
real in my memory.
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One of the design
assistants looked at me blankly
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I wasn't born then he started
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what was made me be lie to him.
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You know, me lie for
those that don't remember
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that was when an
American contingent
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operating under skill
but suggestive orders,
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just butchered an entire village
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of innocent villages.
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And what was me lie
to him nice I wondered.
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Anti-war protests if
he'd ever heard of them
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could only be images
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of close crop
bell-bottomed youthful peak,
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a thing that is passed
of which they are unmoved
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to lift the
reverend John Owens lament
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to Parliament in the mid-1600s.
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It's drifted away from
the republican experiment
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with godly rule in England.
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Attila the Hun, the Black
Death in Europe, the crusades,
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and even the US Civil
War have become abstractions
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removed from reality
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and without any
linkage to present actions.
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American Henry David Thoreau,
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I hope you remember him or know
who he was he of Walden Pond.
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American Henry David Thoreau
professed horror at the idea
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that cable messages from
Europe might enter as he put it
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the grape
flapping air of America
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but mixed metaphors aside,
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the curiosity
factors was not factor
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was not that high, even then.
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I love history
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and read and study
as much of it as I can.
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I might have my
young friend's tabula rasa,
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in other words blank,
have first-hand experience
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of something as
recent as World War II
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and the horrors it brought
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to our
technologically emergent world,
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but I seek out the facts.
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I find that unlike
the mythology of history,
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the reality is that the entire
western world of the 1930s
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was enamored with
what they called eugenics
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or the science of
human genetic improvement.
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The Germans may have
bailed out the threat
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from the
onomantia or the underman
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and champion their
view of the Ubermensch,
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the over man, the
ruler, the superman,
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but it was in the United States
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that the poor people
ran the risk of imposed
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sterilization
and lobotomization.
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And it was to us
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that the German
officials came formally
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before World War II
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to learn the
protocols of miscegenation laws.
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No wonder the history
books still have little appetite
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to explain the
systemic commoditization
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of human beings in
Germany during the 1930s
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and Europe into the next decade.
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As a young man, I was
horrified to see photos
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of piles of
eyeglasses, gold teeth,
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and shoes taken from
concentration camp inmates
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as they were prepping
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for gassing or
boiling down for soap.
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It seemed purely
malicious and sadistic,
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but it actually was worse.
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The Nazis in
particular reduced humans,
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especially their unwanted
captives to basic value units.
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Businesses using the slave labor
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were charged a minimal
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but specific
amount that together
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with the
pillaging of personal goods
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was designed to make
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the whole
operation self-funding.
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Just like an
animal slaughterhouse,
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each particle,
fiber, and hide was used.
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The state saw not persons
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but units of cost and income.
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But that was yesterday.
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And many choose not to
remember yesterday or at least,
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not easily invoke such times
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when reacting to
periodic horrors,
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such as the genocide
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in the Balkans and
Rwanda or the Middle East.
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Horrors of
blood they surely were
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but not so parallel
to the commoditization
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that operated
less from bloodlust
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than from the depersonalized
business policy of the times.
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There is an echo of
those smokestack days today,
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however, it is a
situation of several decades,
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and yet still
largely ignored by the West.
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China has officially
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some 1.5 million
detainees in prison camps.
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This is a large number
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but actually lower than
the total in US prisons.
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What makes these
camps of special interest
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is the makeup of
their population,
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a very high percentage
of practices of Falun Gong.
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Largely unknown in
the West or ignored
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as their
representatives routinely pass
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that appeals for
help at public gatherings.
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This group is as large
as 70 million in China.
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While the movement
is a modern reiteration
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of Buddhist traditions
that combine meditation,
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moral philosophy, and exercise,
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its mere size
is seen as a threat
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by the Chinese government.
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Persecution has been severe.
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Another significant
element in the prisons
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comes from what
I shared earlier,
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the Muslim Uighur ethnic
group who are in severe conflict
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with the state
largely for their faith.
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And of course, we
cannot dismiss the reality
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of many Christian detainees.
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While Christianity is allowed
and administered in China
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under what they call the
three self-patriotic movement,
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any deviation from this control,
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such as private house
meetings is severely punished.
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And China does control.
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I, not long ago
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was talking to a
North American church member
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who has a ministry in
China and she said that
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when they were driving there,
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as they drove along the
roads every hundred yards
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or so there were
sensors that photograph them
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and the lights were going off.
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And if they
turned off on a side road
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to go to one of these meetings,
00:11:41.86\00:11:43.20
again, they would know
exactly where they turned
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and could be tracked.
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We're on the way to
doing the same thing.
00:11:48.14\00:11:49.77
But electronics offers
the ability of a control state
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to know everything you
do and everywhere you go.
00:11:53.21\00:11:58.55
Study after study
and various commissions,
00:11:58.58\00:12:01.98
and congressional
inquiries have looked
00:12:02.02\00:12:03.99
into the shocking abuse
in these Chinese prisons.
00:12:04.02\00:12:08.46
These for-profit prisons,
00:12:08.49\00:12:10.59
prisoners are
routinely tested and evaluated
00:12:10.63\00:12:13.40
on the health of their organs,
00:12:13.43\00:12:15.70
markedly organs
only not general health.
00:12:15.73\00:12:19.23
Organs are systematically
harvested from the prisoners.
00:12:19.27\00:12:22.70
This is not denied.
00:12:22.74\00:12:24.74
The discussion is
only on the scale.
00:12:24.77\00:12:27.78
But the billion-dollar
00:12:27.81\00:12:29.14
organ donation business in China
00:12:29.18\00:12:30.85
involves very
few private donors.
00:12:30.88\00:12:33.21
So the math on
prisoner donation is damning.
00:12:33.25\00:12:36.85
Stories have come out
via defectors and informants
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of on demand
extraction on living victims
00:12:39.79\00:12:43.53
of people skinned alive,
have executions performed
00:12:43.56\00:12:46.70
to fulfill specific organ needs.
00:12:46.73\00:12:49.60
China may be communist
in ideological identity,
00:12:49.63\00:12:52.57
but it has embraced
and all that capitalism
00:12:52.60\00:12:55.77
that goes a long
way toward describing
00:12:55.80\00:12:58.44
this profiteering
approach to persecution.
00:12:58.47\00:13:01.88
The question is, how
will people of conscience
00:13:01.91\00:13:05.35
in the West react to this
00:13:05.38\00:13:07.45
and do what they
can do in the practice?
00:13:07.48\00:13:10.42
The last US administration
famously declared publicly
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that they were delinking
civil rights discussions
00:13:15.29\00:13:18.36
from trade talks.
00:13:18.39\00:13:20.66
At present, we are in
a trade war with China.
00:13:20.70\00:13:23.60
But it seems all about trade
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and not contingent on addressing
00:13:25.30\00:13:28.04
a crying crisis like this.
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I didn't write it at the time.
00:13:32.27\00:13:34.41
But I remember some years
ago, I was almost as troubled
00:13:34.44\00:13:38.51
by the fact that
there was a booming market
00:13:38.55\00:13:41.12
in private prisons
in the United States.
00:13:41.15\00:13:44.12
The government
may incarcerate you.
00:13:44.15\00:13:46.99
But your internment may be
in a for-profit prison system
00:13:47.02\00:13:52.69
that gets a certain amount
per prisoner from the state
00:13:52.73\00:13:56.56
and under
guidelines, perhaps not as tight
00:13:56.60\00:14:00.17
as they might be from
the state runs the prison.
00:14:00.20\00:14:03.41
And there was an experiment
that was loaded from the top,
00:14:03.44\00:14:08.98
the highest levels on down
00:14:09.01\00:14:10.91
in US prisons run by Christians,
00:14:10.95\00:14:14.05
where they would try to
treat prisoners as objects
00:14:14.08\00:14:19.92
to be reoriented
toward faith practices.
00:14:19.95\00:14:24.03
That's an interesting dynamic.
00:14:24.06\00:14:26.49
We'll take a break now
and finish this discussion
00:14:26.53\00:14:29.90
and this
presentation in a few moments.
00:14:29.93\00:14:31.80
But stay with me
because there's a lot at stake
00:14:31.83\00:14:34.80
in this commoditization
of a human being.
00:14:34.84\00:14:37.84