This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.

Maoists meet the Falun Gong in Boston

BOSTON, July 28, 2004--We hope you like our coverage of the Democratic National Convention. Part of the convention includes the negative comments MIM received and we'd like to tell you about some of them.

As MIM handed out thousands of copies of the August 1 MIM Notes featuring a lead story on U.$. torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, a few people said that the Afghans "deserved it after what they did to us."

Such reasoning obviously is part of an endless spiral of violence with no great goal. We told them that they had the wrong people, that Osama Bin Laden appears to have escaped anyway and that children tortured in Iraqi prisons by Amerikans had done nothing to Amerikans.

We also had to explain to a few people the difference between Mao and Deng Xiaoping, namely that Mao wanted to win students over with his lofty goals and political zeal while Deng used bureaucratic methods such as locking students into cafeterias in 1966 and shooting demonstrators in 1989. We hope to persuade our readers that Mao's method of political disorder combined with political zeal was the right approach. We even had one older Kerry delegate admit that Amerikans were pro-Deng until 1989, so there should be no reason for Amerikans to try to blame Mao for Deng.

MIM is used to ignorant comments, usually very short ones that their makers cannot back up with a factual argument. In contrast, the Falun Gong present on the Boston Common July 28th told us that they found all Amerikans to be compassionate and in solidarity with the Falun Gong. So while MIM found very many people relieved to see that communists are still active--partly as a check on the state of Amerikan political conditions--the Falun Gong reported more universal love from the population.


This part of the art exhibit shows a Chinese prison guard with a bloody poker standing over a prisoner seated.


More prisoners and prison guards in front of a banner criticizing Jiang Zemin.

Before we spoke with the Falun Gong, we had a pair of people show a real humyn interest in what happens when Maoists cross paths with the Falun Gong. The Falun Gong was staging a very graphic art exhibit of Chinese torture enacted by Chinese with convincing costumes and blood. The exhibit followed a march against Jiang Zemin. We told one persyn interested in our opinion that we wished the Falun Gong would not do this exhibit in the united $tates or England, that they could probably do it in 200 countries without provoking war but that there is already a war climate against China in the united $tates that exists among a portion of Amerikans.

Later, MIM went further and went to talk to the Falun Gong to tell them about some comments we received and also our own experience as Amerikans. We came prepared to ask the Falun Gong if they did not believe this exhibit is contributing to a war atmosphere against China. When the Falun Gong spoke of humyn rights, we asked them if the war against Iraq did not come couched in terms of Saddam Hussein as a dictator violating humyn rights. When they said China was worse than Iraq, we asked if that did not justify Amerikans in thinking war against China was more just than war against Iraq.

Here is what the Falun Gong had to say. The Falun Gong stressed that it does not advocate war or violent means.

We stressed that many people could look at these exhibits and not take them the wrong way, but there would be a portion of Amerikans who already have reasons they want a war with China. We said there are some already upset about trade. Other really backward Amerikans believe China is taking over California and still others would like to go to war with just about any country still calling itself communist.

We're happy to have had a reasonable discussion with the Falun Gong. We had advocated including Afghan and Iraqi prisoners in their exhbit to make the message clear if they want to oppose all prison torture. That's part of why we offered that if they came with us they would see some of these comments about Afghan prisoners and about China, made by the same Amerikans who support the exhibit on the prisons in China. These Amerikans believe the "other guy" is to blame for humyn rights violations and "humyn rights" rhetoric is just a mask for their aggression.

We also tried to convince the Falun Gong that they are political and they should just go all the way in their politics; even though politics is inevitably "dirty." After all, they talked to us about Chinese trade, what the Chinese embassy did to threaten certain U.$. localities with a reduction of trade and how the Chinese bought off some countries globally to keep them from voicing solidarity with Falun Gong. To us, it would seem that coming up with a strategy to counter trade and embassy moves is political, not just something spiritual, and since they are already thinking along those lines, they should just go the whole way into politics. Once we realize that we are in the realm of politics and humyn frailty, we realize that we cannot ask politicians to be god-like. We are confident that when they compare politicians objectively, they will find that Mao was the greatest politician in the Third World since World War II--for doubling China's life expectancy, bringing universal education and health-care and eliminating foot-binding and restrictions on divorce.