FREE HONG KONG - BLOOD LETTERS # 3

BLOOD LETTERS # 3 - FREE HONG KONG

IN PURSUIT OF THE TRUTH - HTTP://W2WW.CINOPSBEGONE.BLOGSPOT.COM - MON.. NOV. 4/19

 

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

Introduction  p. 6-9

 

"And she (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... 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 never reached beyond her prison walls.

 

"Her death sentence began with a "supreme instruction" from Chairman Mao, "There will certainly will be those who refuse to change till they die.They are willing to go 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 had no survived... Her writings were collected and filed away apart of the criminal evidence in her counterrevolutionary case.

 

"In 1981, Shanghai High People's Court posthumously revoked Lin Zha's death sentence and declared her innocent. Her writings were returned to the family the next year.  .... 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 Likn Zhao's tomb on Lingyan Hill on the outskirts of Suzhou to pay their respects... 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 poet Shen Zeyi, Lin Zhao's friend and classmate at Peking University, she was the "Lamplight in the Snowy Fields,"the title of a poem he penned in 1979 when he emerged from his own banishment, only to learn about her death...

 

"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 in the Nazi era, and Jerzy Popieluszko in Communist Poland, Lin Zhao attempted - to borrow Bonhoeffer's words - to "drive a spoke into wheel itself."

 

"Religious faith played a role in the heroic struggles of these individuals... In the early 1980s, Father Jerzy Popieluszko stood with Solidarity, the Polish trade union, in defying the martial law the Communist party had imposed. "Woe betide state authorities who want to govern citizens by threat and fear," he cried, He believed that "to serve God is tod condemn evil in all it manifestations" - and he paid for that conviction with his life. ...

 

"In 2013, "The Collected Writings of Lin Zhao - including her returned prison writings and other extant works and correspondence compiled and annotated by her dedicated friends - was privately printed. I was given a copy.... I also paid my respects to Lin Zhao at her tomb, above which a surveillance camera was installed in 2008, in the lead up to the fortieth anniversary of her execution, lest, a spiritual and political plaque break out undetected from her tomb.

 

"In my exclusive interview with the now retired judge who reviewed Lin Zhao's case in 1981 for rehabilitation, I asked about his decision to return her prison writings ... an four journal notebooks that contain here "battlefield diaries," essays, and ink copies of her "blood letter home." Using a pen, she had meticulously copied onto notebooks and loose sheets of paper all her blood writings after they were handed to the guards so that her words would be preserved."

 

George H. Kubeck