Tue, Oct 23, 2018 page8

• Killing for money: the Chinese organ trade

  • By Hoon Ting 雲程
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  US investigative writer Ethan Gutmann testified to the Third Round Table Briefing on Forced Organ Harvesting in China at the UK Parliament last week.

  In his testimony, he said China was abusing organ transplantations, which were originally meant to save lives.

  Gutmann also said that the abuses are not contained within China’s borders and involve the entire international medical community.

  Organ transplantation is a hugely profitable business. Doctors trying to save lives and patients fighting for their lives to be saved sometimes choose to avert their gaze to what is going on. Those who do are complicit, as are the pharmacies, media and ordinary citizens who are aware of the abuses and yet do nothing.

  The organ transplantation industry in China reminds us of the persecution of the Jews at the hands of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) during the Holocaust.

  People tend to think the Nazis’ activities were limited within the scope of political mobilization: promoting Aryan Supremacy and National Socialism to consolidate the Third Reich and to proceed to wage war on their European neighbors. The Nazis were far more evil than that.

  Germany incurred heavy war debts after World War I and experienced disastrous consequences as a result, including hyperinflation. The bankrupt German voters looked to the Nazi party, which promised a bright vision of the future for all desperate Germans.

  The Nazis rearmed Germany by tearing up the Versailles Peace Treaty. However, they still needed huge amounts of money to rebuild the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany, and sold empty bonds, known as Mefo bills, as well as Offa bills.

  These bonds were worthless and were used as a way for the Nazis to rob Peter to pay Paul. By 1938, this trick was no longer fruitful and the Nazis began instead to target Jewish citizens.

  The pattern of robbing Jewish people was as follows: first, confiscate their property; banish or relocate them; murder them; take possession of the properties of the murdered families; transfer the properties to the ownership of the local authorities; and send this money to the Third Reich. Finally, Jewish families were rounded up and transported to extermination camps where they were murdered.

  The Nazis stipulated that all the properties of Jewish victims belonged to the state, not to their legitimate heirs. These crimes were carried out not just in Germany, but also in the occupied territories. That is the historical truth about the Holocaust.

  Medical technology has come a long way since World War II. It was primitive during the war compared with the 21st century. The Nazis profited from stealing property; the Holocaust was killing for the purpose of financing the war effort.

  If Beijing’s organ harvesting of Falun Gong members was targeting wealthy patients in East Asia, then locking up a million Uighurs, whose ethnicity is closer to the Caucasian people, must be targeting the even bigger markets of Europe and America.

  It takes a cold person indeed, with absolutely no empathy or moral standards, to watch this cruel business of “killing for money” and not be moved.

  Religious vegetarians have a principle that they do not kill, they do not watch anything being killed and they do not allow anything to be killed on their behalf. For organ transplantation, we should at least say: “Do no organ harvesting on my behalf.”

  Given China’s interest in Taiwan, shouldn’t all of this send shivers down our spines?

  HoonTing is a political commentator.
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