BLOOD LETTERS # 1

BLOOD LETTERS # 1

IN THE PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH- HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONE.BLOGSPOT.COM - SUN. APR. 29/18

    Excerpts from the book by Lian Xi, "Blood Letters" The Untold of Lin Zhad, A Martyr in Mao's China.

Introduction - 1-4

    According to the authorities, the poem "A Day in Prometheus's Passion" "viciously attacked" the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the socialist system and inspired fellow counterrevolutionaries to blatantly call for 'a peaceful, democratic, and free' China. She was sentenced to twenty years in prison.  "This is a shameful ruling!" Lin Zhao wrote on the back of the verdict the next day, in her own blood."But I heard it with pride! It is the enemy's estimation of my individual act of combat. Deep inside my heart I feel the pride of a combatant! I have done too little. It is far from enough. Yes, I must do more to live up to your estimation! Other than that, this so-called ruling is completely meaningless to me! I despise it. It was unexpected jarring note in the sympathy of Mao's revolution....

    The revolution had turned communism into a sacred creed and a mass religion in China, complete with its Marxist and Maoist scriptures, priests (the cadres), and revolutionary liturgy. The cult of Mao dated to the 1940s but blossomed with the publication of Quotations from Chairman Mao  - known in the The Little Red Book  - in 1964. Over one billion copies were printed over the next decade....  At that time when critics of the party had been silenced throughout China, Lin Zhao chose to oppose it openly from her prison cell. "From the day of my arrest I have declared in front of those Communists my identity as a resister," she wrote in a blood letter to her mother from prison. "I have been open in my basic stand as a freedom fighter against communism and against tyranny."

    Lin Zhao's dissent seemed as futile as it was suicidal. What sustained it was her intense religious faith. She has been baptized in her teens a the Laura Haywood Memorial School, a Southern Methodist mission school in her home town of Suzhou, but drifted away from the church when she joined the communist revolution in 1949 to help "emancipate" the masses and create a new, just society, as she believed. Her disenchantment  with the revolution came in the late 1950s, when she was purged as a Rightist - along with 1.2 million others across China for expressing democratic ideas. There-after she gradually returned to a fervent Christian faith.

    As a Christian, she believed that her struggle was both political and spiritual. In a postsenticing letter from prison to the editors of People's Daily - the party's mouthpiece - she explained that in opposing communism, she was following "the line of a servant of God, the political line of Christ." "My life belongs to God," she claimed. I will only be grateful from the bottom of my heart for the honor He bestows on me.  Lin Zhao's defiance of the regime was unparalleled in Mao's China. The tens of millions who perished as a result of CCP rule died as victims, their voices unheard. NO SIGNIFICANT, SECULAR OPPOSITION TO THE IDEOLOGY OF COMMUNISM WAS RECORDED IN CHINA DURING MAO'S REIGN....

    The title of this book comes from Lin Zhao's impassioned means of expressing that dissent. "During her imprisonment," an official document read, Lin Zhao "poked her flesh countless times and used her filthy blood to write hundreds of thousands words of extremely reactionary, extremely malicious letters, notes, and diaries, madly attacking, abusing, and slandering our party and its leader." Her letters were addressed variously to the party propaganda apparatus, the United Nations, the prison authorities, and her mother. She called them her freedom writings."  "As a human being, I fight for my right to live a whole, upright, and clean life - my right to life," she explained. "It shall forever be an irreproachable struggle! Nobody has the right to tell me: in order to live, you must have chains on your neck and endure the humiliation of slavery."

    Lin Zhao's prison writings, which total some 500,000 characters, include essays, poems, letters, and even a play. She wrote in both ink and blood, using the latter when she was denied stationery or as an extreme act of protest. She drew blood with a make-shift prick - a bamboo pick, a hair clip, or the plastic handle of her toothbrush, sharpened against the concrete floor - and held in a plastic spoon, in which she dipped her "pen." often a thin bamboo strip or a straw stem. Her writings were done on paper when it was available and on shirts and torn up bed sheets when it was not.  George H. Kubeck

(Lin Zhao was executed 50 years ago today. The vicious Communist tyranny is still in Cuba & Vietnam.)