DEDICATED TO CARDINAL ZEN AND THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS OF HONG KONG AND CHINA

DEDICATED TO CARDINAL ZEN AND THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS OF HONG KONG AND CHINA

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP://WWW.CINOPSBEGONEBLOGSPOT.COM - FRI. AUG. 2, 2019

ALSO IN MEMORY OF THE CHINESE FREEDOM FIGHTER, LIN ZHAO, EXECUTED APRIL 29, 1968

Blood Letters, "Lin Zhao, A Martyr in Mao's China, By Lian XI, Basic Books", New York, 2018

Excerpts from Blood Letters # 3: page 6- 12 - Today the events going on in Hong Kong. 

    
First posted on this blog on April 29, 2018 and March 18, 2019

"And Lin Zhao had written an appeal to the United Nations in 1966 asking to testify in person about her torture and human rights abuses in China. In the even of her death while in detention she asked the United Nations to "conduct a detailed, rigorous and true investigation" of her case and igt public. Similar appeals from dissidents in the Soviet Union made it to the United Nations Committee for Human Rights during the 1960s, yet Lin Zhao's letter never reached beyond her prison walls.

Her death sentence began with a "supreme instruction" from Chairman Mao"There certainly will be those who refuse to change till they die. They are willing to see God carrying their granite heads on their shoulders. That will be of little consequence."

   
 That would be true,  and this book would not have been possible, if her prison writings not survived.

Lin Zhao had believed - against all hope - that they would. Unimaginable, they did. In spite of the "extremely reactionary" and damning nature of her writings, no prism or public security bureaucrat apparently dared to risk a potentially costly political mistake by ordering their destruction. Instead, her writings were collected and filed away as part of her criminal evidence in her counterrevolutionary case. Her writings were returned to the family the next year.

In 2004, digitized version of Lin Halo's 1965 letter to People's Daily appeared on the Internet. It quickly became a Promethean fire to political dissent in China today. The late Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo called Lin Zhao "the only voice of freedom left for contemporary China,"

During the past decade, an increasing number of democracy activists in China have visited Lin XZhao's tomb on Lingyan Hill on the outskirts of Suzhou to pay their respects. In recent years, as the government's crackdown on dissidents has intensified, plainclothes as well as uniformed police in riot gear have shown up dutifully on the anniversary of her execution to block access to her tomb and break up gatherings of human rights advocates who traveled from across the country to commemorate her. The result has been an annual ritual of police detaining and roughing up pilgrims a the foot of Lingyan Hill.

Throughout contemporary China, no other spirit of the dead has required such unrelenting exorcism. In death even more so than in life, Lin Zhao has become a nemesis of the communist state. To the poet Shen Zeyi, Lin Zhao's friend .... a poem he penned in 1979 when he merged from his own banishment, only to learn about her death. "Lamplight in the Snowy Fields"

For some reason, I always miss the lamplight on the other side of mountain.

On a desolate night filled with a cold fog, in the middle of the field covered with white snow,

it shone a beautiful lonely; inviolable light, Where its radiance touched, it cast off as it could, 

the thick, dark night of windswept, deep snow.

That lamplight bore witness to human dignity and the tenacity of the human will to be free. In the course of the twentieth century, the giant wheel of totalitarian systems rolled over the lives of untold tens of millions worldwide. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Sophie Scholl during the Nazi era. Aleksandr Solzenitsyn under the Soviet regime, and Jerzy Popieluszko in Communist Poland, Lin Zhao attempted - to borrow Bonhoeffer's words - to "drive a spoke into the wheel itself." Religious faith played a role in the heroic struggles of these individuals..."    George H. Kubeck