Participants:
Series Code: LI
Program Code: LI200484A
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00:27 Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
00:29 This is your program that's designed 00:31 to bring you up to speed on religious liberty, 00:34 dynamics both in present day events, 00:37 and some of the history and legal background 00:39 to this freedom above all freedoms, 00:43 the first freedom. 00:44 My name is Lincoln Steed, Editor of Liberty Magazine. 00:48 And I want to share some things with you today. 00:53 The best way I can do 00:54 is to quote from my own writings 00:56 from Liberty Magazine, 00:58 which I hope you're familiar with. 01:01 This is a cover of a recent one. 01:03 Actually, the latest is the time of filming this 01:07 bit of a flashback 01:08 to an American presidential candidate 01:12 who was a self-proclaimed 01:13 king of the world and a religious leader 01:18 who wanted to join church and state. 01:20 He was treated as a joke 01:22 because he was never a serious contender 01:23 but to imagine that this central principle 01:28 of the constitution restrains everyone 01:30 is to be naive. 01:31 Of course, there are people 01:32 then and now who want to join church and state. 01:36 We're living in a very interesting time 01:38 of the world's history. 01:39 There's no question. 01:41 Everything is up for grabs in the last few decades, 01:44 the old norm seemed to be fading. 01:47 At the moment, we're suffering 01:48 under a global pandemic 01:52 COVID-19. 01:56 How truly deadly this is, on an individual basis, 01:59 we don't really know. 02:01 But one thing is undeniable, 02:03 at least, from direct deaths and deaths 02:06 were contributed by COVID with other co-morbidities 02:11 200,000 plus in the United States, 02:14 a million globally, and probably at least double 02:18 that before we're over. 02:19 It's significant. 02:21 And it's disrupted every element of life, 02:24 and in many ways, affected religious liberty 02:26 in most unpredictable and usually negative ways. 02:29 One thing that is hardly come to mention 02:33 is that in those countries 02:35 where there was already persecution 02:37 of religious minorities 02:38 and direct restriction of religious practice, 02:41 such as China, it's only gotten worse with COVID. 02:46 If for no other reason, 02:47 that undercover of this global distraction, 02:51 they've tightened the screws down. 02:53 For example, in China, they persecuted, 02:57 there's no other word for it, the minority Uighur population 03:01 who are mostly Muslims, and incidentally, 03:05 a number of them were part of the nonliving conspiracy. 03:08 So there's radical Islamic elements there. 03:11 But China has a problem with assimilating the Uighurs, 03:15 they're different culturally, 03:18 ethnically, and as far as ideology, 03:21 they're not hardcore communists, 03:22 they are Muslim religionists. 03:25 And so China has really restricted them 03:28 and castrated them in massive numbers, 03:31 as many as 1 to 3 million of the figures that I see. 03:36 And the internment problem with the Uighurs is merged 03:39 with what we've known for some time 03:42 that in Chinese prisons, 03:44 there's basically a business of harvesting organs 03:47 and basically organs and human body parts for sale. 03:53 And it's gotten so bad that in China, 03:56 they coordinate the executions, with the orders for organs. 04:01 Sometimes people get condemned and given the rough justice 04:06 just because there's an immediate need 04:08 for certain organs. 04:09 I've read well-documented articles 04:11 in national newspapers. 04:14 I remember Harper's Magazine was one 04:16 that had an in-depth article 04:18 about how they were harvesting organs 04:21 from still warm prisoners, including a man that defected 04:26 who his job was to take the skin 04:29 of a still-warm prisoner who'd been executed. 04:34 You know, skin grafts are in great demand. 04:36 So I want to read something that I read recently 04:40 that refers to this. 04:41 It is a true religious liberty aspect 04:44 to what's going on. 04:45 But it's a little deeper than 04:47 just denying religious liberty rights. 04:49 It's something that has even larger implications 04:52 for civil and religious liberty. 04:54 It's the commoditization of human life. 04:59 And that's no more evident than 05:01 in the Chinese communist regime. 05:06 Now right there that history is sepia colored 05:10 and correctly distant for most of us. 05:13 If any of us think on the past at all. 05:16 I can still remember my own shock. 05:18 Some years ago after I had regale the committee group 05:22 with my memories of the Vietnam War, 05:25 an era all too real in my memory. 05:28 One of the design assistants looked at me blankly 05:32 I wasn't born then he started 05:35 what was made me be lie to him. 05:38 You know, me lie for those that don't remember 05:41 that was when an American contingent 05:43 operating under skill but suggestive orders, 05:48 just butchered an entire village 05:50 of innocent villages. 05:52 And what was me lie to him nice I wondered. 05:55 Anti-war protests if he'd ever heard of them 05:58 could only be images 06:00 of close crop bell-bottomed youthful peak, 06:04 a thing that is passed of which they are unmoved 06:08 to lift the reverend John Owens lament 06:10 to Parliament in the mid-1600s. 06:13 It's drifted away from the republican experiment 06:17 with godly rule in England. 06:20 Attila the Hun, the Black Death in Europe, the crusades, 06:25 and even the US Civil War have become abstractions 06:30 removed from reality 06:32 and without any linkage to present actions. 06:36 American Henry David Thoreau, 06:39 I hope you remember him or know who he was he of Walden Pond. 06:43 American Henry David Thoreau professed horror at the idea 06:47 that cable messages from Europe might enter as he put it 06:50 the grape flapping air of America 06:53 but mixed metaphors aside, 06:55 the curiosity factors was not factor 06:57 was not that high, even then. 07:01 I love history 07:02 and read and study as much of it as I can. 07:06 I might have my young friend's tabula rasa, 07:10 in other words blank, have first-hand experience 07:13 of something as recent as World War II 07:15 and the horrors it brought 07:17 to our technologically emergent world, 07:19 but I seek out the facts. 07:21 I find that unlike the mythology of history, 07:25 the reality is that the entire western world of the 1930s 07:30 was enamored with what they called eugenics 07:34 or the science of human genetic improvement. 07:39 The Germans may have bailed out the threat 07:41 from the onomantia or the underman 07:44 and champion their view of the Ubermensch, 07:47 the over man, the ruler, the superman, 07:50 but it was in the United States 07:54 that the poor people ran the risk of imposed 07:56 sterilization and lobotomization. 07:59 And it was to us 08:00 that the German officials came formally 08:04 before World War II 08:05 to learn the protocols of miscegenation laws. 08:09 No wonder the history books still have little appetite 08:13 to explain the systemic commoditization 08:18 of human beings in Germany during the 1930s 08:21 and Europe into the next decade. 08:24 As a young man, I was horrified to see photos 08:29 of piles of eyeglasses, gold teeth, 08:32 and shoes taken from concentration camp inmates 08:36 as they were prepping 08:38 for gassing or boiling down for soap. 08:41 It seemed purely malicious and sadistic, 08:45 but it actually was worse. 08:47 The Nazis in particular reduced humans, 08:50 especially their unwanted captives to basic value units. 08:56 Businesses using the slave labor 08:58 were charged a minimal 09:00 but specific amount that together 09:03 with the pillaging of personal goods 09:05 was designed to make 09:06 the whole operation self-funding. 09:09 Just like an animal slaughterhouse, 09:11 each particle, fiber, and hide was used. 09:15 The state saw not persons 09:18 but units of cost and income. 09:22 But that was yesterday. 09:24 And many choose not to remember yesterday or at least, 09:28 not easily invoke such times 09:30 when reacting to periodic horrors, 09:33 such as the genocide 09:34 in the Balkans and Rwanda or the Middle East. 09:39 Horrors of blood they surely were 09:42 but not so parallel to the commoditization 09:46 that operated less from bloodlust 09:48 than from the depersonalized business policy of the times. 09:53 There is an echo of those smokestack days today, 09:57 however, it is a situation of several decades, 10:01 and yet still largely ignored by the West. 10:05 China has officially 10:06 some 1.5 million detainees in prison camps. 10:11 This is a large number 10:13 but actually lower than the total in US prisons. 10:16 What makes these camps of special interest 10:18 is the makeup of their population, 10:21 a very high percentage of practices of Falun Gong. 10:26 Largely unknown in the West or ignored 10:29 as their representatives routinely pass 10:31 that appeals for help at public gatherings. 10:33 This group is as large as 70 million in China. 10:37 While the movement is a modern reiteration 10:39 of Buddhist traditions that combine meditation, 10:42 moral philosophy, and exercise, 10:43 its mere size is seen as a threat 10:46 by the Chinese government. 10:47 Persecution has been severe. 10:50 Another significant element in the prisons 10:52 comes from what I shared earlier, 10:54 the Muslim Uighur ethnic group who are in severe conflict 10:58 with the state largely for their faith. 11:01 And of course, we cannot dismiss the reality 11:04 of many Christian detainees. 11:07 While Christianity is allowed and administered in China 11:10 under what they call the three self-patriotic movement, 11:15 any deviation from this control, 11:17 such as private house meetings is severely punished. 11:20 And China does control. 11:22 I, not long ago 11:24 was talking to a North American church member 11:28 who has a ministry in China and she said that 11:31 when they were driving there, 11:32 as they drove along the roads every hundred yards 11:35 or so there were sensors that photograph them 11:38 and the lights were going off. 11:39 And if they turned off on a side road 11:41 to go to one of these meetings, 11:43 again, they would know exactly where they turned 11:45 and could be tracked. 11:48 We're on the way to doing the same thing. 11:49 But electronics offers the ability of a control state 11:53 to know everything you do and everywhere you go. 11:58 Study after study and various commissions, 12:02 and congressional inquiries have looked 12:04 into the shocking abuse in these Chinese prisons. 12:08 These for-profit prisons, 12:10 prisoners are routinely tested and evaluated 12:13 on the health of their organs, 12:15 markedly organs only not general health. 12:19 Organs are systematically harvested from the prisoners. 12:22 This is not denied. 12:24 The discussion is only on the scale. 12:27 But the billion-dollar 12:29 organ donation business in China 12:30 involves very few private donors. 12:33 So the math on prisoner donation is damning. 12:36 Stories have come out via defectors and informants 12:39 of on demand extraction on living victims 12:43 of people skinned alive, have executions performed 12:46 to fulfill specific organ needs. 12:49 China may be communist in ideological identity, 12:52 but it has embraced and all that capitalism 12:55 that goes a long way toward describing 12:58 this profiteering approach to persecution. 13:01 The question is, how will people of conscience 13:05 in the West react to this 13:07 and do what they can do in the practice? 13:10 The last US administration famously declared publicly 13:15 that they were delinking civil rights discussions 13:18 from trade talks. 13:20 At present, we are in a trade war with China. 13:23 But it seems all about trade 13:25 and not contingent on addressing 13:28 a crying crisis like this. 13:32 I didn't write it at the time. 13:34 But I remember some years ago, I was almost as troubled 13:38 by the fact that there was a booming market 13:41 in private prisons in the United States. 13:44 The government may incarcerate you. 13:47 But your internment may be in a for-profit prison system 13:52 that gets a certain amount per prisoner from the state 13:56 and under guidelines, perhaps not as tight 14:00 as they might be from the state runs the prison. 14:03 And there was an experiment that was loaded from the top, 14:09 the highest levels on down 14:10 in US prisons run by Christians, 14:14 where they would try to treat prisoners as objects 14:19 to be reoriented toward faith practices. 14:24 That's an interesting dynamic. 14:26 We'll take a break now and finish this discussion 14:29 and this presentation in a few moments. 14:31 But stay with me because there's a lot at stake 14:34 in this commoditization of a human being. |
Revised 2020-12-05