I attended a protest in San Francisco on Sunday called the Human Rights Torch Relay, which is a protest to the real torch relay which is scheduled to arrive in San Francisco on Wednesday. Many more protests are scheduled, including this gigantic banner which protesters climbed up the Golden Gate Bridge to hang from it’s suspension cables.

This is a link to a Flickr page that somebody got some excellent shots of the bridge today before they took down the banners and arrested the people who put them up, for climbing the bridge. Just click the next picture to see all the shots. Also, that Team Tibet 08 hoodie is super rad, lots of people had them at the protest this weekend.

 The protests are happening because the Chinese Communist Party is not fit to host the Olympics. They are commiting horrendous acts against humanity within their borders and supporting other regimes outside their country in their genocide of innocent people. The torch is going to many other cities in over 150 countries world-wide.

At the protest I saw a female speaker who talked about being imprisoned twice and eventually sent to a "mental institution" for "re-education" because of her religious beliefs in Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa. She was removed from her home and family to a forced-labor camp to work with other Falun Gong practitioners making clothes for american companies, while living in 40 sq ft rooms with 13 or more people to a room. She would  be injected with unknown substances at anytime, and subjected to interviews where the interviewers had tasers that they would shock her with repeatedly in the head and back and all over her body (other pictures showed people’s genitals and other body parts, rotted and festering from repeaded electric shocks) in an attempt to make her give up her religious beliefs. She also underwent medical examinations, the results of which were never given to her, to see if she was a candidate for organ removal. Those removed organs are sold, and I don’t know who they’re sold to.

All this and more goes on within China’s borders under the rule of their communist government. They’re also funding arms for regimes that are committing mass genocide in Sudan (Africa), in a place called Darfur. There was another speaker at the protest who was from Darfur and he spoke about having his whole family killed and how he was so lucky to have made it to the united states. Imagine if someone killed your whole family, for no reason other than they were a different race, and then think "Would I want those people hosting the Olympic Games?"

The Olympics is a privelege that countries who follow the rules get. And while it’s not supposed to be about politics, the Olympics has been used a political arena for centuries. Look at the Torch Relay, Adolf Hitler started the entire thing as a way to get international support for the up and coming Nazi Reich, which went on to commit mass genocide against most of Europe after they hosted those games in 1936. We can’t let China think that they can perform these acts of inhumanity and the whole rest of the world is cool with it. Americans need to send them a sign that says what they’re doing is wrong, and we’re not going to stand for it.

Unfortunately that would be pointless anyway, because our business sector in America is never going to give up the cheap labor they provide, which keeps their costs low low low. It’s easy to sell a shirt or lamp at Walmart that costs 90 cents when you use slave labor in China to produce it. Almost every product in America right now is made in China, doesn’t that worry anyone? Well it worries me.

Consider this: China devalues it’s currenty drastically to suck up all the manufacturing from American companies, to the point that almost everything you buy now is made in China. It’s ridiculous, and if they ever value their currenty appropriately it could cause a great recession in America. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that happens soon.

This website has lots of info on the persecution of Falun Gong Practitioners in China, if you want to read more about it.

Please don’t support the Olympics in China this year. I’m not buying any olympic stuff (especially because most of those souvenirs are being made in Chinese sweatshops up the street from where they’re hosting the games) nor will I be watching the games. I’m also going to write to my congressman about my outrage that the games were given to China this year, especially since they were awarded it in 2001 on the grounds that they clean up their Human Rights  policies, which have only gotten worse btw.

Here’s some more links:
Torture Methods (graphic material, viewer discretion advised)

YouTube coverage of the Human Rights Torch Relay in San Francisco on April 5th, 2008. You can click on other videos, a lot of the videos have different perspectives on it, and full versions of all the speeches. They’re really compelling.

A link about China devalueing it’s currency.