Falun Gong can be described as an ancient Chinese spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition, combining meditation and gentle exercises similar to yoga or tai chi, with a moral philosophy centred on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance.

It is difficult to see why anybody would be against Falun Gong “practitioners” as adherents style themselves. Not one myself, I sense a great virtue among them like that seen in those who serve and fight for all good causes, from the old anti-slavery movement to modern firefighting, lifesaving, nursing, and compassionate religion.

PERSECUTION

In brief, the Falun Gong are good people, and while nobody deserves the treatment the regime dishes out to them, their persecution is initially incomprehensible.

It can only be understood when we recall that, from their record of extraordinary evil, the acolytes of the Devil himself must now reside in Beijing.

In any event, when I arrived, I heard pleasant music being played by a large brass band in front of two rows of mostly escaped practitioners. They, or their friends and family, had experienced cruel treatment of the inhuman standard our soldiers, captured at the fall of Singapore, had once known.

They were holding up signs about their beliefs and the persecution, black on golden backgrounds, together forming one large CinemaScope-like screen. There was a sense of peace and order.

After Falun Gong Association President Dr Lucy Zhao recalled the way the CCP had brutally turned on the Falun Gong, this was my short message:

We have been celebrating this week what Winston Churchill once called the third great title deed on which the liberties of the English-speaking people are founded, the American Declaration of Independence, now in its 246th year.

Central to this is John Locke’s great theme which had already formed England’s 1688 Glorious (or Bloodless) Revolution: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

Savour those words. They are fundamental to civilisation.

Notice especially that man is “endowed by his Creator”. Not by the Party, not by the ruling class, but by their Creator.

Notice too that they are not just for Americans or Britons, but for “all men”, including, of course, the people of China, even if, as the Black Book of Communism concludes, of the at least 94 million lives stolen worldwide by communist brutes, Beijing has extinguished at least 65 million. And every day, they extinguish more.

On this day we remember the terrible persecution which began 23 years ago. But why? The Falun Gong had no political ambitions; it was no competitor for Beijing’s hold on unlimited power and riches.

But to the Party bosses, they were threatening. With a new way of presenting old traditional culture and emphasising true virtue, their growth had been spectacular.

GLITTERING

The Falun Gong was proving vastly more attractive to people than membership of the Communist Party, no matter what glittering advantages the Party could bring in terms of access to earthly power and riches.

To understand that attraction, just look at the people involved, so stoically reminding us of their noble and fundamental themes, themes which the Chinese people were choosing over that grotesquely evil world of corruption, greed, cruelty, and gross abuse of power that communism always is and will always be.

When we think of the millions of victims persecuted in China, including at this very moment, think especially of their odious practice of selecting those many young healthy men and women, estimated so far to be 60,000 to 90,000 and growing, all for no other reason than that they are suspected of being Falun Gong practitioners believing in the “heresies” of their “cult” ─ truth, compassion, and tolerance.

Think of Xi, through his acolytes, strapping their young healthy bodies to a hospital bed, and, without a drop of anaesthetic, ripping from those living bodies their hearts, their livers, and their kidneys.

As the Chairman of the London Tribunal, eminent lawyer Sir Geoffrey Nice QC (prosecutor of Slobodan Milosevic) said, these are “indescribably hideous deaths”.

The ultimate proof is the massively lucrative trade in organs-on-demand from which the depraved criminals in Beijing now profit, ignored by the Western, including the Australian establishment.