Human Rights

How often we hear of human rights and how little we hear of human responsibilities. How can we have one without the other? Every right suggests a claim and every claim suggests a responsibility. What makes human rights “work” is our ability to discern when particular human rights claims ought to be responsibly fulfilled and when particular claims are, in fact, a threat to either the good of the individual or the good of society. This is what Ryan Anderson was getting at recently when he pointed out that rights are “grounded in and thus limited by the demands of justice and common good“. An appeal to human rights that places an inordinate emphasis on, for instance, autonomy and individualism, is an appeal that fails to consider the entire spectrum of human goods—which include justice, the common good, and the exercise of virtue. Your right to do as you wish will eventually conflict with another’s right to do as they wish. Your “human rights” don’t include a right to suicide by physician, for instance, for the same reason that a physician’s rights do include the right to act in accord with their conscience and the historic ethics of the medical profession to do no harm. But “rights talk” has become confusing because we increasingly lack any shared ethical vision for what human life is “for” beyond autonomy, individualism, and material satisfactions. Is there a way out of the forest of our confusion? Start by asking yourself what you’re willing to strive towards; asking what person or future are you willing to sacrifice for? In thinking about this, we might realize that we’re contemplating goods that are higher than ourselves. In recognizing that there are goods outside of, and perhaps of higher value than, ourselves we catch the first glimpses of light out of the forest.

China is the world champion at “cancel culture.” Only when the communist tyranny cancels you, you aren’t just hounded off social media or pushed out of a job in the media or academia. You are literally canceled; executed, organ harvested, imprisoned, forced into a concentration camp, or excluded from all social participation in society. The targets of this despotism are primarily religious believers — Falun Gong, Uyghur Muslims, and, most recently, Christians. Millions have been victimized by these vicious pogroms in recent years — and it appears the persecution has just gotten started. Why is the Chinese government acting so ruthlessly against its major religions? People need meaning, not a strong suit of materialistic communism. But as the Bible states, faith can move mountains. Paranoid Chinese Communist Party leaders view organized religion as threatening their desired absolute control over the Chinese people by becoming potent competing power centers — even when that is not a religion’s intention. Indeed, Party leaders view faith as both subversive to the kind of utopian society they claim to want to construct and a competitor for the people’s loyalty. Nina Shea, Director for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, says that the Chinese regime is moving against religion to consolidate its power. “The ultimate goal is to eradicate religion by either squeezing or crushing it out,” Shea says. China is pursuing a two-tiered approach to this process of social pulverization: jackboot thuggery and social excommunication. The former is the more brutal, but the latter — as we shall see — may ultimately be the most effective form of despotism ever imposed by a government. The first contemporary anti-religion pogrom in China focused on the Falun Gong (also called Falun Dafa). Founded in the early 1990s, the religion describes itself as “an advanced self-cultivation practice of the Buddha School.” Adherents seek “assimilation to the highest qualities of the universe: Zhen, Shan, Ren (Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance)” through “practice” that employs meditation, specific stretching exercises “to open up all energy channels,” and studying books written by its founder, Fe Hongzhi. That would not seem threatening. But when the Falun Gong refused to establish Communist Party branches in the ’90s and gained tens of millions of adherents, the authorities decided to crush the movement. It was banned, and in 1999 the authorities mounted a persecution campaign, ranging from public beatings, to arrest and murder, sometimes accompanied by organ harvesting to provide China’s transplant black market with human kidneys and livers. The depth of this depravity was first forcefully exposed in an explosive report issued by Canadian former member of Parliament David Kilgour and prominent human-rights attorney David Matas. Their 2006 “Report Into Allegations of Organ Harvesting of Falun Gong Practitioners in China” shocked the consciences of all decent people. Even though China is, to say the least, an opaque society that does not allow oversight from the outside, the evidence mounted by Kilgour and Matas in 46 grueling pages built a compelling exposé of “large scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners.” The report noted that there were about 10,000 more transplants per year than “identifiable sources” for the organs that were procured. But it was the cumulative effect of the evidence that really proved persuasive. For example, from 2000 to 2005 — a time after the persecution of Falun Gong commenced — there was an increase of 41,500 transplants from the previous six-year period. “Where do the organs come from for the [additional] 41,500 transplants?,” the authors ask pointedly. “The allegation of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners provides an answer.” There was much more. Several surviving family members of Falun Gong who died in detention reported seeing their loved ones’ bodies with “surgical incisions and body parts missing.” One witness — not a Falun Gong member — told investigators that her surgeon husband “told her that he personally removed the corneas from approximately 2,000 anaesthetized Falun Gong prisoners.” According to this hearsay evidence, none of prisoners survived and all of the bodies were cremated. As shocking as these conversations are, the most compelling evidence of systemic wrongdoing in Chinese organ-procurement practices could be found in the breathtakingly brief time purchasers had to wait to receive a properly matched organ in China — often as short as a week, a period so brief that the authors worried that “there are a number of people now alive who are available almost on demand as sources of organs.” China denounced the report and denied the truth of its contents. But it also acted to outlaw organ selling. Unfortunately, that was mere veneer. In The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem, published in 2014, China expert and author Ethan Gutmann estimated that between 2001 and 2008 some 65,000 organs were harvested from Falun Gong. These people were tissue typed, matched to organ purchasers, executed, and harvested. Illustrating the factual basis for the charge of mass organ harvesting from political prisoners, in the 2009 book Larry’s Kidney Daniel Asa Rose tells the story of traveling with his cousin Larry to buy a new kidney in China. After a series of mishaps and complications, Larry got his new blood filter within a relatively short time. Oh, joy for Larry! But what about the dead, harvested donor? As the bioethicist Arthur L. Caplan, Director of Medical Ethics, NYU Langone Medical Center, once put it, “If you’re going to China and you’re going to get a liver transplant during the three weeks you are there, then that means someone is going to go schedule an execution.” Alas, forced organ harvesting in China was like the old saw about the weather: everyone complains, but no one does anything about it. Having essentially gotten away with the blood rape of Falun Gong, China next focused on the Muslim population of Uyghurs, who primarily live in the country’s western interior. If anything, the regime grew even more brutal as time went on, establishing concentration camps in which hundreds of thousands are imprisoned and engaging in monstrous crimes against Read More ›