Anna

I'm afraid you are misunderstanding completely. @Outta Here said:
I'm merely showing you how what he is saying is correct. So what you are quoting is a very true statement.
I'm not saying I believe the last days started on October 4, 1914, I just picked that date because that's pretty close to the day that the Watchtower claims the last days must have started. If they did start then, you could say that everyone since that date has been living in the last part of the last days.
*** w14 7/15 p. 30 par. 9 “You Will Be Witnesses of Me” ***
That happened in October 1914, marking the beginning of “the last days” of Satan’s wicked system.
*** yb75 p. 138 Part 2—United States of America ***
around October 4/5, 1914 C.E. The people needed to know that through the Messianic kingdom then established Jehovah was ruling as king,
*** dp chap. 6 p. 97 par. 28 Unraveling the Mystery of the Great Tree ***
Thus, the “seven times,” or 2,520 years, ended by Tishri 15, or October 4/5, 1914 C.E.
*** po chap. 14 p. 177 par. 19 Triumph for the “Eternal Purpose” ***
So they would end about that time of the year in 1914 C.E., or about October 4/5, 1914.
*** ka chap. 12 p. 230 par. 40 Increasing the King’s Belongings ***
So the end of those Gentile Times about October 4/5 of 1914 should logically witness a reversal of the situation of such long standing. It was therefore not without significance that October 4/5, 1914, found the Gentile nations in trouble, already for two months embroiled in the first world war of human history.
*** kj chap. 19 p. 352 par. 7 Defeat Awaits Attack by Nations under Gog ***
they were fulfilled around October 4/5 of the year 1914 C.E.
Therefore, the following statement is also very true:
And so is this one:
 

No matter what the phrase "final part of the last days" implies to you, most Witnesses, and the rest of the world, it is a meaningless phrase for defining where we are within those last days. Outta Here is showing that, if one is in the last days, it is always a true statement. If the last days could be said to start on October 4, 1914, then the final part of the last days could have started on October 5, 1914.
Since we are now 38,696 days from October 4, 1914, we could divide that period into two parts, if we wished:
[1st part: 1st day] [2nd part: the next 38,695 days of the last days]
Therefore we can always be said to be the second part, the final part: the last days of the last days.
It's a true statement, but I think all of us would agree that it is misleading if it implies that we KNOW we are in the latter half of the period known as the last days. But it doesn't say that. It's a true statement if the end comes tonight, and it's a true statement if the end comes 100 or 1,000 years from now.
Some would say it's about the same as when Paul said:
(Romans 13:11, NIV): The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.
 
The difference is that Paul's statement is not misleading. Because he is referring to a salvation that can be made sure if we have lived our life and fought the fine fight to the finish, or if the Parousia/Judgment arrives before the end of our lives.
The expression "final part of the last days" or "last days of the last days" is misleading in that it implies that we are at least in the latter half of the last days, without saying it. It makes an implication, but has a loophole. So it's a true statement, even if the end comes 1,000 years from now. But the persons using this phrase are implying that they KNOW it is less than 106 years from now, because they are implying that we are at least in the latter half of the last days. We are all pretty sure that the last days can't go on for another 106 years, so that it is an expression of belief that few would deny, but no one can say that they absolutely KNOW this.
When this phrase was used in 1967, we were 53 years from October 1914. We are now another 53 years from 1967. We will soon know if we were even in the latter half of the last days, as the Watchtower defines them.
*** w67 4/1 p. 197 How We Know We Live in the “Last Days” ***
When the many factors are put together, we find that our generation, our day is the one that is identified in the Bible as the “last days.” In fact, in this year 1967 we are actually living in the final part of that time! This can be compared to, not just the last day of a week, but, rather, the last part of that last day.
That was much more misleading in that it split the last days into 7 equal parts, and said we were in the last part of the 7th part.
----------------------
** edited to add: Just to show how sure of himself the writer was (in 1967), even if the 7th equal part of the last days had just started, on April 1, 1967, then those equal parts were a maximum of 3,195 days long apiece, which worked out to be the equivalent of a prediction that the very end of the last days was April 1, 1967 + 3,195 days = December 30, 1975, at the latest.
Day 1 of the "week" of the last days: Oct. 4, 1914 to July 3, 1923 Day 2 of the "week" of the last days: July 4, 1923 to Apr. 2, 1932 ... ... Day 7 of the "week" of the last days: April 1, 1967 to Dec. 30, 1975. This helps explain the wording of this article just a few months later, in 1968, which indicated that the "end of 6,000 years" would come only weeks or months, not years after [October] 1975:
*** w68 8/15 pp. 499-500 pars. 30-33 Why Are You Looking Forward to 1975? ***
Our chronology, however, which is reasonably accurate (but admittedly not infallible), at the best only points to the autumn of 1975 as the end of 6,000 years of man’s existence on earth. It does not necessarily mean that 1975 marks the end of the first 6,000 years of Jehovah’s seventh creative “day.” ... And yet the end of that sixth creative “day” could end within the same Gregorian calendar year of Adam’s creation. It may involve only a difference of weeks or months, not years. ... Exactly how soon after Adam’s creation is not disclosed. ... After the sixth creative day ends, the seventh one begins.
33 This time between Adam’s creation and the beginning of the seventh day, the day of rest, let it be noted, need not have been a long time. It could have been a rather short one. The naming of the animals by Adam, and his discovery that there was no complement for himself, required no great length of time. The animals were in subjection to Adam; they were peaceful; they came under God’s leading; they were not needing to be chased down and caught. It took Noah only seven days to get the same kinds of animals, male and female, into the Ark. (Gen. 7:1-4) Eve’s creation was quickly accomplished, ‘while Adam was sleeping.’ (Gen. 2:21) So the lapse of time between Adam’s creation and the end of the sixth creative day, though unknown, was a comparatively short period of time.
 

Arbitrary nonsense.

Because the final part of the days means that God's Kingdom will fix things here on earth soon, and obviously that's a good thing, and something to look forward to.

It drives me a little nuts too. If those ex- members are to be believed, then they are supper happy, living the high life, and if not the high life, they are "finally" free!! I believe most of them. After all, not everyone wants to live by Bible standards or be accountable to God, or actually take regard of God in their life. We would be naive to think that everyone wants the "Truth". Although sad, we need to believe it and respect it. (Of course that doesn't mean we give up on them, anyone can change their mind).

You mean I ditched a perfectly good bad name for no reason?!
Actually, I partly mellowed by being here. I began to think it a bit like waving a red flag at any bull that was an ex. They’re not all ex for the same reason, and I felt it wouldn’t hurt to soften the word. Vomodog still suggests the verse, while being less in-your-face. After all, how many Vomodogs (or Vomidogs) can you find in the phone listings?
Still, in all honesty, your objection to it was what started the ball rolling. And now you tell me you never had any objection? See if I listen to you the next time you want to rename another character!

It's not fair to label every new religion a "cult" just to make use of the pejorative connotations. Obviously, this has been used against us, too, and against many religions which were "new" at some point in time. I use it here for the negative connotations, of course. For purposes of this discussion, the important thing is whether the leader of a new religion is able to tell lies that followers will believe without question, even when those lies have resulted in harm or death to those same followers. The followers do not necessarily know the leader is telling lies, of course, but as evidence mounts up, the followers are such strong believers in their leader that they have been able to avoid/deny the questions about harm or death. In other words, the leader's lies are accepted as truth against the cognitive dissonance that followers are actually being harmed or killed.
So, does Falun Gong believe some crackpot ideas? Sure. But that's not what makes me use the term cult. The beliefs of most religions seem like crackpot ideas to some other religion, even the idea that God needed a human sacrifice to release us from the bondage of Adam's sin. And giving all one's spare time to volunteering for projects that promote Falun Gong does not make it a cult either.
However, can we show that Falun Gong's leader has told obvious dangerous untruths? Yes. And this does not depend on what other people ("enemies") have said about this leader, but what he himself has said.
Can we show that at least one of those lies unnecessarily results in harm or death to followers? Yes. (Of course, the primary one is the lie about curing cancer and other diseases with exercises alone, and the claim that using human medicine to help with disease is not effective and shows a lack of faith.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/2001/11/20/falun-gong-whats-behind-the-movements/65f601dc-608a-452d-a6bd-6b7522af3cbf/
Now, when a person is willing to lie to followers to keep a leadership position, we can work from that point and look at the reasons people will tell this kind of lie: money, ego, extreme negative religious or political ideology. I say extreme negative because few people would really say God wants them to lie for a cause, but they might easily say that God is OK with them lying for a cause AGAINST something, because the end justifies the means. Turns out that extreme political ideology against so-called "evil regimes" is also the best explanation for why Reagan, Bush I and Clinton and the CIA told absolute lies related to foreign policy objectives against "enemies." We now know from documentation that they made false claims enemies all the while knowing that these claims were not true.  In a few years, I'm sure we could have the same type of documentary evidence already claimed against Bush II, Obama, Trump, etc.
Telling the most vicious kinds of lies against an enemy is actually a typical political tactic, but it can also be documented in religious circles. For example, if you have an interest in Dr. Massimo Introvigne, watch what he says here  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBj-9iLiL-s) about the famous Mormon attacker, "Ex Temple Mormon," Bill Schnoebelen. Then, to get a glimpse of what Schnoebelen claimed about the Mormons, try here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-dQvdotiKI
Of course, if someone says that reptile like creatures on two legs walk in the basements of the Mormon Temples, there are many who would eat that up and start spreading it far and wide. And if you really believe it's true, you should do this. I think there are groups like those behind Bitter Winter who feel they must speak up because the vicious claims seem true. But Dr. Massimo Introvigne has to very carefully show why he has come to believe that men like Schnoebelen are pathological liars, even though it ruins the favorite beliefs some had about devil worship going on in Mormon Temples.
Men like the leader of Falun Gong and Adrian Zenz, the people behind claims of organ harvesting of millions and Uyghur torture of millions, are exactly the same kind of racist, hateful fundamentalist liars that Schnoebelen is. They all believe they are lying for the greater good, for God! And there will always be people to eat up these lies. Just like the followers of Falun Gong, when they see how some of these lies don't make sense, they will shift to other claims which may or may not be totally true. If someone doesn't believe that people are being killed by taking out their organs when they are alive, then they will shift to: it must be true because look how China tries to control water, or fishing, or language teaching, or coronavirus, or terrorism in HK, etc., etc., etc. Or look how many people Mao "murdered" by mismanaging a famine. Many won't seem to notice that some of these arguments become circular, or some are even contradictory.
(Like: China is murdering Uyghurs so that there will be no problems from Uyghurs when the BRI goes through the Uyghur province. (?!?!) Or, Jehovah's Witnesses in China are jailed for conscientious objection, therefore if FG claims that FG followers are being murdered for organ harvesting, then it must be true. Or, China is the second largest economy in the world, and might soon be the largest economy in the world, and it was well on its way toward a primary goal for this year to raise all Han Chinese and minority Chinese out of poverty; therefore it makes sense that they have a brisk industry selling body parts even to people from outside China who go travel to China on a secret "organ transplant" visa. )

I have learned to live with it, and perhaps even acquiesce that it must be that way. Of course, I don’t know what examples you may have in mind, but...
Do you think I can persuade anybody that the (largely) atheist anti-cult movement is behind our woes in Russia? No. It is all the machinations of Babylon the Great is all anyone wants to hear. We are so hung up on Babylon the Great that we do not recognize that she is mostly licking her wounds these days, and a powerful atheist faction has arisen that would eradicate everyone clinging to worship of God—us no less than they. Yet we still, in the main, carry on as though publishers in Judge Rutherford’s day, announcing that religion is a “snare and a racket.” It is, but here in the West, it does not play as the most timely theme. The atheists and the skeptics perch above it all and ridicule the different religionists calling each other false. As rude as some trolls are here, I see brothers equally rude on social media with regard to tweets mentioning religion—appending insults that have little to do with the topic under consideration. Do they think themselves witnessing? It doesn’t leave a good impression. I could wish that we got training about social media besides the refrain to “be cautious” of it. 
Trained, we might be able to do some good with it. The articles posted on JW.org lately—about coping with anxiety, safeguarding children from the horror of world news, adapting them to “distance learning,” and so forth? These are excellent contributions—exactly what is needed today by anyone wishing to preserve sanity. It would take so little for ones who know how to use social media to judiciously spread this all over the internet, to the benefit of countless people. But we are advised to be cautious as to our use of it. We are not trained, and most of those who venture there with the idea of witnessing are horribly clumsy—saying outrageous things, oblivious to what their audience potentially might be.  It could be used to such powerful effect, but it is not in a nod to “caution.” 
Still, maybe the fixation on Babylon the Great, and turning a (it seems to me) blind eye to the atheists and skeptics is what one must expect of Bethel. They, more than anyone, strive to be “no part of the world.” Over time, they get to know little about it. They live primarily in the world of Scriptures, and the scriptures say that it is in the skirts of Babylon the Great (not the atheists or skeptics) that is found the blood of all those who have been slaughtered on the earth. Primarily, the sin is one of omission, not commision. Had religion not neglected to teach the Word of God, there would not be the bumper crop of atheists and skeptics of today. So who can say that Bethel is wrong to keep on harping over false religion—that picture is the overall picture, and the skeptics are but a resulting subset.
Another area of seeming bias is how we speak of ex-members—as though they are all train-wrecks, and will remain so until they come to their senses and return. This is a point of great ridicule among ex-Witnesses, who take bows before each other each time one emerges who is not a train-wreck. I mean, it really does seem an example of “confirmation bias” on our part.
Still, the Word indicates that those who leave after knowing the truth are like Vic Vomodog, whose name I changed from Vomidog to please @anna, who didn’t like the image. “A dog that returns to its own vomit” is how Peter puts it, so from there comes the notion that the world will “chew one up and spit one out.” If the brothers find someone who says it in exactly those words based upon his own experience, they eat it right up and cannot relay it quickly enough. 
It used to drive me nuts. It still does, a little, but it does so less. The brothers don’t know because they obey the Bible’s own counsel to not go where they might find out. “Keep an eye on those who cause division and stumbling and avoid them,” says Romans 16:17. So they do avoid them, and thus the only window they have to look upon them is that of scripture. 
Ah, well. I would like it if they didn’t do that, but who is to say they are wrong? It’s a little like God declaring that Adam and Eve will die the day they disobey. It the long run, it makes little difference whether that “day” is one of 24 hours or 1000 years. It’s a little like your spotting the glitch of the tablets long ago and saying “Who cares, really? Maybe it was that way.”
 
 

I've given examples before, and any others I know I will keep to myself. But your take is quite reasonable in the overall post. I like that you can give some benefit of the doubt even if you are pretty sure things can be done differently. I think this is the right attitude for almost everything.
Your first instincts have probably been better than some of the counsel you get from others. I liked Vic Vomidog much better before the name change. And Anna might've liked the idea of representing the BV's as cumbersome family household teraphim. For me, though, it was like a bur in the saddle.

Oh my, no. Oh dear. God could have just shot him a email and it would have made the same dif.
Why people waste their time striving to learn things I’ll never know.

What is this idiocy? It is the most childish view that these louts have—as though anything spiritual should have been known from the getgo.
When Columbus sailed the oceans blue and discovered America, Queen Isabella said: “And it only took you 1492 years to find it...sheesh”
When Einstein revealed that E=mc2, the science community said: “And it only took you 6000 years to find it....sheesh.”
Ludicrous examples. But these immature “Christians” expect it to be just that way with respect to spiritual things—that Santa should deliver all the presents under the tree on Christmas Eve, and he had better not drag his rear end and be tardy with anything. The idea of research is abhorant to them—everything ought be handed them on a platter.
These yo-yos deserve each other.

Interesting!

This is more and more true as the world gets more divided, more partisan, and more nationalistic. Pride in one's own cause, nation, religion or ideology causes one to be more apt to defend one's POV with bias, and condemn, with bias, those of an "opposite" POV . It happens to the best of us, and by that I mean that there have been several documented examples even within and among our own religion. 
Even sites that rarely say anything good about JWs have acknowledged this. It's not unrelated to the topic, so I'll include one article here:
Here is https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20191108/ecc-exhibit-tells-stories-of-lesser-known-holocaust-victims
(My father was born in Elgin, btw)
ECC exhibit tells stories of lesser-known Holocaust victims
When remembering the Holocaust, what immediately comes to mind is the genocide of six million Jewish people killed across Europe by the fascist Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.
But there were an estimated five million non-Jewish people also killed by the Nazis for their race, beliefs or occupation during World War II.
Created by the Arnold-Liebster Foundation, the exhibit highlights the relatively unknown stories of persecution endured by that faith community in Nazi-occupied Europe. Among them is the story of 89-year-old Holocaust survivor and foundation co-founder Simone Arnold Liebster of France.
A Jehovah's Witness, Arnold Liebster was 12 when she was sent to a Nazi re-education camp for refusing to hail Hitler at her girls' school. She was held in the camp for two years, while her parents were sent to concentration camps.
ECC assistant English professor Ginger Alms was inspired to bring the exhibit to the college after her students read Arnold Liebster's memoir and Alms came across the foundation's work to chronicle the struggles of these lesser-known Holocaust victims.
                                                                                                                                                                                                   "It's little-known history and I was really inspired by Simone," Alms said.
The exhibit features 12 story panels with information and images about the conditions faced by Jehovah's Witnesses during that period. It's a replica of an exhibit designed for the Holocaust museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, said Greg Milakovich, a foundation representative.
"We highlighted four things that make the experiences of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany significant to understand," Milakovich said.
• They refused to hail Hitler and their religion was banned.
• They were put in concentration camps as early as 1934.
• They were identified with their own insignia -- a purple triangle -- on their camp uniforms.
• They were asked to sign a declaration renouncing their faith and denouncing other members of the religion, and join the German military.
Jehovah's Witnesses raised many red flags in the early days of Hitler's rise by speaking out against Nazism, documenting and reporting the existence of and conditions within concentration camps, and distributing literature about it, Milakovich said.
They published diagrams of camps and smuggled information about them to the outside world, raising the alarm about poison gas experiments and the systematic destruction of Jews in Poland. Jehovah's Witnesses distributed more than 200,000 leaflets during the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
"Germany was on display in all of its glory, but it was a front because all these things were going on," Milakovich said.
   

The strange dynamic that is reality in “news” today is that if you are a member of a cause, you are biased and thus not reliable as a source. You would think that those with experience would be the first ones consulted, but they are the last. It is a skewed approach that really only applies with regard to religious views—with anything else, membership in a cause does not interfere significantly with their ‘expertise’—but it does with religion.
However, you cannot stay neutral with regard to the “word of God” because it “pierces even to the dividing of soul and spirit, and ...is able to discern thoughts and intentions of the heart,” says Hebrews 4:12. It separates people, either “for” or “against.” 
The “for” will be counted as biased under today’s system of news, and thus discounted. The “against” will not get the sense of it—whatever they say will miss the lion’s share of what matters. They will be like the “physical man” of 1 Corinthians 2:14 who “does not accept the things of the spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot get to know them, because they are examined spiritually.”
As for the opposite of the physical man who “cannot get to know” things of which he tries to report?—“the spiritual man examines all things, but he himself is not examined by any man.” So the only one who can report accurately is dismissed as biased in favor of the one who can’t possibly come to know what he is talking about. Is that a great system, or what?
It doesn’t matter what is said, as much as it matters who says it. This rule plays out time and again. From the German concentration camps prior to and during WWII, Jehovah’s Witnesses, who preceded the far more numerous Jews, smuggled out detailed diagrams of those camps. Those diagrams were published in the Watchtower—and dismissed by more respectable outlets as Time Magazine because they were not deemed credible. It turned out that only Jehovah’s Witnesses had “the scoop.”
The rule played out once more when Gunnar Samuelsonn, an evangelistic researcher, published that Jesus had not been put to death on a cross but on an upright stake  He received his 15 minutes of fame—his place in the academic community solidly cemented. Jehovah’s Witnesses have said the same for well over a century, only to be told to shut up since they didn’t go to college—what could they possibly know?
Can the Falun Gong make the same claim—that if the “right people” do not say something, it means nothing? They will have to state their own case—not me. For all I know, they are the nutcakes that people make them out to be, but when I see how the media butchers stories of Jehovah’s Witnesses, I do not assume that other “new religions” are given a fair shake. (“New religion” is the scholarly term for movements a century or two old. The term is preferred to “cult” for being non-incendiary, and those who prefer “cult” reject it for exactly that reason.)
Everyone in my area recently received a copy of the Epoch Times in the mail, along with an invitation to subscribe. “What is this garbage?!” my liberal followers on Twitter sputtered, outraged at it’s pro-Trump outlook. “I took it straight out to the trash!” So I told them what it was and where it came from. As for me—naw—I skimmed a little bit, but no more—the articles were very long and seemed nothing I hadn’t heard before. Not putting my trust in princes, there is a limit to how much I will delve into identifying the good guys vs the bad guys. There all bad guys to one degree or another—all who would advocate rule by man rather than by God.
It may be that members of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Falun Gong are getting to know each other quite well in the remote areas of China. Bitterwinter.org reports:
“According to a document issued in 2018 by the government of a locality in Xinjiang, members of three banned religious groups—The Church of Almighty God (CAG), Falun Gong, and Jehovah’s Witnesses—must be sent to transformation through education camps and kept indefinitely until they have been “transformed,” i.e., become atheist. Their release depends on whether they have implemented five musts. These are a written pledge to stop attending religious activities; relinquishment of all religious materials in their possession; public criticism of one’s faith, promising to break up with it; disclosure of information about fellow believers and group’s/church’s affairs; and aiding the government in transforming other believers.”
The two groups are anything but “two peas in a pod.” The Falun Gong are intensely political and hostile to the CCP, whereas the Jehovah’s Witnesses are neither. “Mandatory singing of revolutionary songs was particularly hard on Jehovah’s Witnesses, who practice the so-called political neutrality and refuse to sing national anthems, salute flags, or serve in the army,” the report said. 
BitterWinter is a subset of the Center for Studies on New Religions, headquartered in Torino, Italy. It is chaired by Massimo Introvigne, identified as “one of the most well-known scholars of religion internationally.” (I see my chum George Chrysiddes, who wrote that nice review of my first book under the pseudonym Ivor E. Tower, hangs out here at least sometimes) His name cropped up repeatedly as I was gathering background for Dear Mr. Putin - Jehovah’s Witnesses Write Russia. Though I did not get it from him (I got it from Joshua Gill), I see he is of the same view as I that a resolute “anti-cult” movement, and not the Russian Orthodox Church, is behind the troubles of Jehovah’s Witnesses in that land. Head ones of the ROC might cheer that ban like children at presents under the tree, but it does not originate with them. The “anti-cult” movement has the same apparent goal of that explicitly stated in BitterWinter—that religious ones should “become atheist”—and the more mainstream faiths are so watered down already that it hardly matters what they believe—they’ll do whatever they are told to do.
If the charge is made that anything harshly critical of the CCP is a production of Fulon Gong—as I have heard—by means of their media arm Epoch Times, that certainly cannot be said of BitterWinter. It’s About page tells of a “network of several hundred correspondents in all Chinese provinces” who work at “high risk for their security – some have been arrested.” To be sure, it “receives some of its reports directly from members of religious minorities and organizations persecuted,” however it would appear that these ones do not call the shots. BitterWinter “is independent of any religious or political organization and is mostly the fruit of volunteer work.” It “does not take positions on political issues [Good!—Like JWs—will Hebrews 4:12 some day go to work on them?] and limits itself to the field of human rights.”
Unfortunately, “human rights” itself may be perceived as political. Invariably they focus on the human rights of individuals, whereas any government will be an attempt at balancing the human rights of individuals with the human rights of groups. With some, the human rights of groups far outweighs those of individuals. Even as Putin says he does not understand why his country persecutes Jehovah’s Witnesses, he qualifies the remark by observing Russia is 90% one religion, and “one cannot throw everything overboard just to please the sects.”
Frankly, I could wish that BitterWinter was all pro-Western propaganda that could be dismissed on that account, for our people are reported as undergoing some very tough times there—it makes Russia look like a cakewalk. However, the website initially strikes one as a treasure trove of unbiased documentation, exceedingly well-done, and well worth the donations it accepts, and well-worth boning up on.
At first I thought nothing appeared In BitterWinter with regard to charges of organ harvesting of the Falun Gong. However, searching the phrase “organ harvesting” pulls quite a bit of information up—here Is an example, including things already cited here—statements from the US State Dept, for example, or the UN. If they got their information from the Epoch Times, that would be one thing, but it may not be that way at all. 
 

I planned to just let this sit because it reminded me of typical trolling behavior, and I've said all I want to say about 1914 for a while. But I have to agree with this part of what @Arauna said about you:
You already know that you will disagree with anything I say in support of the current teachings of the GB, and when I present the opinion that the GB are wrong about something, all of a sudden you treat me like I'm some important teacher of truth.
We all have opinions, and when it comes to interpretation, it doesn't matter how strongly we believe them or present them: they're still opinions.

A musician (orchestra) for Shen Yun, Falun Gong's traveling ballet company, says in this video  starting at 7m:30s:
"So [Li] Hongzhi was kicked out of China, and supposedly the religion was persecuted in China and they spread these stories of organ harvesting. so they will take Falun Dafa practitioners from China --the Chinese government will-- and they'll harvest their organs and sell them on the black market which, it's China, maybe that happens, but knowing what I know about the religious beliefs, uh, I'm just extremely skeptical of anything that this organization has to say." One of the comments to the video was also interesting:
Thank you Aarvoll. I got involved in Falun Gong after getting out of some very toxic 'love and light' communities. It caught my attention because I wanted something pure and clean. Lol, looking back the texts actually catch you right at the start, talking about how your Buddha self comes forward to draw you to Falun Dafa. Inconsistencies to the truth, compassion and tolerance fundamentals are really glaring in much of the text, and in what is considered 'proper' cultivator behaviour. The first time I really put on the brakes though was a couple of months in when I met a couple of the kids and tried to share chocolate with them. They were terrified to take it. And the parents were appalled that I'd offered. Like you said, these are really nice people, but the aura of fear is as thick as soup. That's not healthy spiritually or mentally by my reckoning. Just recently I've heard about a YouTube channel started up by EpochTimes, a Falun Dafa publication, who are in the thick of the disclosure/cultist spiritual community swallowing up social media right now. And they are on the nasty side of the fence, really pushing and supporting some twisted psychopathic behaviour and individuals. That was the last straw for me. Meditation is good. Conducting yourself through your life with the best of the cultivators characteristics is good. But extreme anything and handing over your capacity to think independently to group think.... That's not going anywhere good. Thank you for this video.

Not quite having the resources just yet to plow through all of the above, just skimming it quickly instead, understand that what I say are but preliminary impressions. I know next to nothing about FG.
Are they secretive? Are they uncomfortably effective in spreading their message? Do they withdraw from “normal” society? Do they learn to lead “double-lives?” Do they mislead the regular people as to their true mission? Do they have some offbeat (and therefore ‘dark’) beliefs about what the future holds? Do they have members who die because of not embracing all that modern medicine has to offer? (at 75, no less, as though no one of that age has ever died otherwise.) Do they even have an elaborate “compound” in NYS? Are they non-violent, but still a cause for concern, since “all cults are non-violent until they are not”—that cute line from the #cultexpert—in his wacko world, the more peaceful people are, the greater the cause for concern.
When I see how JWs are slammed in the media as a cult, do I imagine that all the other “cults” are getting a fair shake? 
In TTvs the A, I wrote of the Moonies something to the effect of: Is is possible to lead a fulfilled life as a Moonie? They’ll have to make the case for it, not me. However, if the “mainstream” and “normal” life resulted in happiness, fulfillment, and provided answers to the deep questions that vex people, none of these cults would succeed in people giving them the time of day. Let them deliver a little bit before they condemn everyone else. 
 I might even prefer committed religionists to the vanilla people of today because you can “talk shop” with them. You are not faced with, as we are here in the US, people in a panic over discussing a Bible verse, people scared of going off the mainstream of conventional goals for fear of where that might take one, people who do not roll their eyes when you speak of what a verse might mean, and people who do not distrust your explaining a verse by appealing to another one—as though they already indulged you by listening to one, and what more do you want?
As far as I can see, joining one of these “cults” is getting off the “broad road leading to destruction,” in favor of the “narrow road that leads to destruction.” They both lead to destruction, one no more than the other. I don’t view “cultists”  as a threat to people any more than the “normal” life is a threat to people. 
Broad road or narrow road, the one factor that indicates they “lead off to destruction” is their rooting for various leaders of the world to succeed and for other ones to fail. They are part of the world when they do that. The “cramped and narrow road that leads to life” is marked by not being part of the world—not claiming that this or that human is God’s gift to humanity, not claiming that this or that leader must go down, but taking a neutral attitude towards them. “Pray for the king,” Paul writes to Timothy. “That way maybe he’ll keep out of our hair.” That is as “involved” as the religion that is true to God gets with regard to this world’s political structure of good guys and bad guys. Anything else, be it FG or conventional media, is equally part of the world in my eyes. Your “eyes may be opened” when you leave the FG, but it is only so they can be blinded by another source rooting for this world.

Here is a supposed ex-Falun Gong experience that has about ZERO credibility, and seems to be written by a person who has no knowledge of the appeal of religion at all. Probably a CCP attempt:
http://www.facts.org.cn/c/2020-07-02/1224591.shtml
It's so bad, it reminds me of the Onion. I won't print it out here.
On that same Chinese site, however, there is a fairly good rebuttal to a BMC article that claimed organ harvesting in China:
http://www.facts.org.cn/c/2019-12-15/1036896.shtml
It's written with an obvious bias, and imperfect English. But it still appears to be correct. Here is a portion taking up the rest of the post:
-----------------------------
Wang also demonstrated to more than 100 specialists from over 30 countries, including Germany, Vatican, the US and Australia, how the system works, in order to show its transparency and equity in organ donation and allocation. Once a donor's name is typed into the system, his/her personal information, ID number, consent of organ donation and other information would pump up. And the allocation process of the system were real-time and supervised by multiple institutes, such as transplant hospital and the Red Cross.
He warned that all specialists and scientists should be aware of the trend that political intention is gradually permeating into academic circles.
Huang Jiefu, head of the China National Organ Donation and Transplantation Committee and chairman of the China Organ Transplantation Development Foundation, said that he felt sorry for Lavee, because he could have spent more time on organ transplantation to save people in his country.
"I was invited by the Israeli ambassador in China several times to introduce China's experience on organ donation and transplantation reform, which I believe is the best rebuttal for Lavee," said Huang.
http://www.facts.org.cn/Facts/201912/15/W020200321479383227187.jpg
Foreign specialists at the Symposium on Development of Organ Donation and Transplantation held in Kunming, capital of Southwest China’s Yunnan Province on Saturday. Photo: Courtesy of the organizer
Jose Núñez, WHO officer in charge of global organ transplantation, told the Global Times that they received the report produced by Lavee, and it was sent to them repeatedly twice a week. "But we didn't respond," said Núñez, noting that China has already provided efficient data with Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation.
Núñez said there's nothing to cast doubt on China's data, those data are efficient. "So anything that comes from the magazine or the scientific journal is just his or her opinion," he said.
Bjorn Nashan, former president of German Transplantation Society and now working at First Affiliated Hospital, University of Science and Technology of China in East China's Anhui Province, referred to Lavee's paper as "scientific misconduct," saying that if the authors have questions about Chinese data, they should first of all ask China to provide such data, but they did not. 
But working here in China since 2016, Nashan said his Chinese patients have various ways of getting advise on organ transplantation. But he was never aware there are secret Chinese hospitals performing illegal forced organ retriaval; and such rumors were being circulated only outside China by those who never visited China.
Except from fabricating rumors about China's organ donation and transplantation achievements, anti-China forces also tried to harass foreign experts; for instance, they tries to stop them from visiting China, and prevented them from voicing support for China in this field.
Campbell Fraser, a professor with Griffith University, told the Global Times that anti-China forces "tried three times to stop me from coming to China, they made representations to my university to stop me. But all they did just made me want to come to China more." 
Fraser said that China's organ donation and transplantation work aims at saving lives, a deity duty that people of the anti-China forces don't really care about. He also urged transplantation specialists worldwide to pluck up and resist anti-China forces, so international cooperation on organ donation and transplantation could be enhanced.
"Chinese model" praised worldwide
Huang said that those malicious attacks also proved that China's organ donation and transplantation work is achieving great success worldwide; otherwise, no one would bother to attack it. 
According to the latest data, from 2015 to 2018, the number of organ donations completed in China each year was 2766、4080、5146、6302 each year, with a rapid growth, and the number of organ donations in 2018 ranked second in the world.
Since the establishment of the green channel for organ transportation three years ago, the transfer time of organs has been shortened by an average of 1 to 1.5 hours, the overall organ sharing rate in China has increased by 7.3%. The utilization rate of organs has increased by 6.7%. The sharing distance of donated organs has been greatly expanded, and thousands of patients with end-stage organ failure have been cured.
The Chinese express was praised by participants during the conference. Núñez, WHO Representative, told the meeting: "China's organ transplant reform has achieved remarkable results in a short period of time, and China's experience can serve as a model for the entire Asian region and the world."
"The biggest feature of the Chinese experience in organ transplantation is the strong support from the Chinese government, which is an example that many countries should follow." These words were from Francis Delmonico, Chairman of organ transplantation task force of WHO.
Huang vowed that in 2021, China will became one of the biggest countries on organ donation and transplantation. To achieve that goal, there's yet something to be done, said Huang.
He noted that it is important to raise people's awareness on organ donation and transplantation. Because China's reform in this field still remain unknown for many people.
Huang also said that China is completing its legal system on organ donation and transplantation; and hopefully a revised law will come out next year.
He also said that at the key point of our organ donation and transplantation development, government departments should form better coordination to enhance law-enforcement, consolidate our efforts and dismiss outside rumors.
 

After seeing so many FG reenactments on NYC sidewalks, I can't help it when I look at pictures like this one, to wonder if this is really two policemen taking down an FG member in Tianmanmen Square in 2000. Or is it completely staged by FG members, with a couple of them grinning in the background (and one woman on the right going off to buy groceries?).
https://www.businessinsider.com/dragon-springs-falun-gong-upstate-new-york-compound-photos-2019-9#according-to-the-dragon-springs-website-many-of-those-living-in-the-compound-escaped-from-china-4

I'm sure there were arrests, and I'm sure that there was violence. Policing tends to invite persons who try to get away with brutality and torture, and that can't just be in the United States. Perhaps these are "secret police" above. But I can't help but notice that none of the pictures of those who look more police-like depict the level of violence shown above:
 

A more recent investigation published this year in Australia is reported here:
https://www.abc.net.au/foreign/the-power-of-falun-gong/12492696
Plenty of politics, but nothing about organ harvesting. Here's a portion:
---------------------------
The movement first gained global attention when its members became the target of ruthless persecution by the Chinese Communist Party, triggering widespread sympathy and support in the West.
The Falun Gong’s creed is Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance, but former practitioners now speaking out are accusing it of practising dangerous and divisive teachings.
This joint ABC Foreign Correspondent-Background Briefing investigation shines a spotlight on this global movement, revealing how Falun Gong has morphed from a fringe quasi-religious group into a powerful player in America’s conservative media landscape, working to ensure another term for Trump so he can continue his war of words with China.
Background Briefing’s podcast series also investigates the movement’s Australian operations, uncovering powerful political collaborators closer to home.
From Australia, to Taiwan, to Los Angeles and the movement’s “Dragon Springs” headquarters in upstate New York, Foreign Correspondent’s Eric Campbell and Background Briefing’s Hagar Cohen explore the opaque world of the Falun Gong and its mysterious leader Master Li Hongzhi.
This investigation reveals how the group has harnessed social media, spending millions through made-up groups and fake identities to promote Donald Trump and his anti-Beijing policies.
“This is a matter of cosmic importance to them that Trump gets re-elected”, says one member of nearly ten years, who has now left the Falun Gong.
Another former insider says the movement promotes intolerant teachings which are racist and homophobic.
“I’m mixed race. I am quite possibly just homosexual. And those are the two kinds of people that are purportedly causing the end of the world,” says ex-devotee Anna, now in her 20s and living on the US west coast. 
As a child, “Anna” was taken by her mother to Falun Gong’s US headquarters, ‘Dragon Springs’, a sprawling but secretive 160-hectare compound in New York State.
It was, she says, a world of strange beliefs and intolerance.
“The leader of Falun Gong claims that race-mixing in humans is part of an alien plot to drive humanity further from the gods.”
Background Briefing follows Sydney resident Shani May as she tries to find out the truth about her mother’s relationship with the Falun Gong.  
Following the death of her famous jazz singer father Ricky May, her mother Colleen sought solace with the group. Soon Colleen stopped taking her blood pressure tablets, putting her faith in Falun Gong to cure her. Three years ago, Colleen died, aged 75.
“If it wasn’t for Falun Gong, she’d still be with us”, declares Shani.
Former followers allege there’s a cult-like abhorrence of modern medicine that’s claimed lives.
“In Falun Gong the teachings are, you don’t acknowledge illnesses”, says one ex-devotee.
According to Shani May, whose mother Colleen became so deeply involved with her beliefs that she lost touch with family and friends, “They're manipulating and they do it slowly…And as time goes on, you get further and further down the rabbit hole and they don't let you come back out.”

@JW Insider  I found some more articles by former member of FG, Ben Hurley, and he confirms what you talked about a few posts back about the involvement of FG in several so called "independent" organizations. This is apparently only an 11 minute read 🙂
https://medium.com/@Ben_D_Hurley/the-agenda-that-drives-falun-gongs-media-organisations-62201ddeff66
The agenda that drives Falun Gong’s media organisations
Understanding the spiritual mission of Falun Gong can help us clearly identify which organisations they control.
Anyone who vaguely follows Falun Gong knows about organisations like The Epoch Times, New Tang Dynasty TV and Shen Yun. They’re not open about the extent they’re controlled by Falun Gong (completely 100%), but they don’t deny a connection.
But what about the other organisations that either hide or deny their connection to Falun Gong in order to reach a different audience? I’ve met progressives who would abhor Falun Gong’s conservative social teachings, but who love Chris Chappell’s China Uncensored.
TheBL.com has had some recent coverage for its close ties to The Epoch Times. But a quick glance at the outlet’s About Us section gives it away immediately as a Falun Gong media, as it contains the words Truth, Compassion and Forbearance (these are the three core stated principles of Falun Gong).
Similarly, the newspaper Vision China Times has carved out a niche for itself in Australia. No mention of its connection to Falun Gong in any of its material, despite this media outlet pushing Falun Gong’s agenda to a tee.
I don’t know the exact connection myself, and it’s beyond my ability right now to look into how it all works behind the scenes in terms of ownership structures and the hierarchy of power and control.
But these organisations promote Falun Gong’s agenda down to the most minute detail, and this is something I’m able to talk about due to my own experience working for Falun Gong media organisations, mostly The Epoch Times, when I was a Falun Gong believer. This article is about how to identify the message that Falun Gong wants to convey to the world’s people by various means, and how to identify the nuances of an organisation that is connected to Falun Gong.
Independent?!
One of the most common words I see Falun Gong media using to describe themselves is ‘independent’. This description doesn’t really hold under scrutiny.
Their coverage of Falun Gong is absolutely positive without exception, even though that organisation has some very negative traits including a slew of hushed up deaths due to teachings against taking medicine, and a cult-like compound in Cuddebackville, New York state.
Their coverage of the Chinese government is absolutely negative without exception, even though that organisation has some positive traits.
Their coverage of figures deemed supportive of Falun Gong (The Trump family, supportive Republicans) is absolutely positive, their coverage of figures deemed enemies (Hillary Clinton, Jacky Chan, Zhang Yimou, any CCP official who likes his or her job) is absolutely negative.
And their coverage of social phenomena like homosexuality, abortion, and pop music completely accords with Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi’s teachings.
I believe these media are less independent than those with a clear political bias or social agenda, because they aren’t transparent about their agenda.
Teachings about ordinary people
Key to identifying a Falun Gong organisation is knowing a little about the teachings. Most Falun Gong teachings are available on minghui.org, but there are a lot of secret ones that aren’t available, existing teachings are frequently revised or altered or completely disappeared, and the volume of teachings is just so massive that sifting through them is too big a task for most people. I read all of them multiple times when I was a Falun Gong believer up until around 2013.
Falun Gong teachings say that non-believers–called ‘ordinary people’–are pitiful, don’t know what they really need in life, are lost among desires, are covered in karma (a negative, black substance in another dimension) and are dirty. I’m not exaggerating, this is what the teachings say. All people who don’t believe in Falun Gong are going to hell unless Li Hongzhi saves them because there is no way for them to bear the suffering required to burn through all that karma and turn it into a good substance called virtue. Only the omnipotent Li has the power to do this, as he has done for his followers.
This is relevant because Falun Gong practitioners really can’t trust non-believers with the task they believe they have of saving sentient beings. Even though the organisation is getting richer and has experimented with hiring outside professionals such as dancers and musicians for Shen Yun, and young media graduates for The Epoch Times, this still poses a challenge because the organisation is unwilling to give non-believers a deep look into the workings of the organisation, or trust them with positions of responsibility. Almost all the work has to be done by Falun Gong practitioners, which means they are drawing from an already over-stretched group of believers. Resources are tight. There is often a crossover of resources with other Falun Gong projects, and you can find the same staff members popping up in a lot of them.
Falun Gong media sometimes refer to the handful of non-believers working for them in order to mislead people into thinking these organisations aren’t part of Falun Gong, but rather completely independent corporate entities with a few Falun Gong practitioners on their staff. But in all the examples I’ve seen, these non-believers are locked outside the fortress. A group of young graduates The Epoch Times hired in 2016, for example, were kept in a room separated from the rest of the editorial team by a locked door, according to NBC.
A good example is The Epoch Times commentator Ronald J. Rychlak, a Catholic who jumps whole-hog on board with The Epoch Times’ counter-attack of NBC News over NBC’s meticulously-researched articles which are critical of the Falun Gong media.
The Epoch Times isn’t trying to topple the Communist Party, Rychlak asserts. Workers at The Epoch Times aren’t mostly volunteers working there as part of their spiritual practice, he claims. Li Hongzhi “is not associated with the newspaper”, he says.
This last one–that Li isn’t associated with the newspaper–is a real clanger. Li has delivered lectures directly to Epoch Times workers and NTDTV workers, he refers to these media as “our media” and back around 2007 he directly fired their editorial teams–evidence of which can be found in his 2007 video lecture to Australian practitioners which is unfortunately now a secret teaching and hard to find.
The basis for all Rychlak’s inside knowledge? “I have toured the building that houses the Epoch Media Group and met several of the people who work there,” he writes. “They all seemed happy and friendly.”*
Perhaps Rychlak should ask some of those people about their belief that the god in charge of his own religion is evil. But if he did, he would get a sanitised response. There are strong teachings about fitting in with society, getting normal jobs, not coming across as over-zealous and not talking about “high-level teachings” with ordinary people. Falun Gong practitioners will do their best to hide these beliefs and won’t talk about them openly. And that applies also to the few non-believers like Rychlak that they have working on their projects.
Saving people from Communism
Most of Falun Gong’s teachings aren’t very palatable to non-believers, but there are some key messages Falun Gong practitioners are trying to get across as part of their core mission. This mission is saving people from an impending apocalyptic judgement day where people will be judged on two criteria — their positive thoughts towards Falun Gong and their negative thoughts towards the Chinese Communist Party which is seen as the embodiment of all evil in the cosmos. Positive thoughts towards the CCP and/or negative thoughts towards Falun Gong both bode very poorly for peoples’ futures, they believe.
These beliefs are strong and absolute. So what this means is you should find an absolutely, 100 per cent positive attitude towards Falun Gong in their media, and an absolutely 100 per cent negative attitude towards the CCP, and Communism more generally. There isn’t any room for grey areas in the teachings, so I think the presence of any kind of nuance towards Falun Gong or the CCP suggests the media is not purely a Falun Gong media and there is some arrangement that I don’t know about or understand.
This report by Chris Chappell gives the gist of just how black-and-white the attitudes of these media are towards Falun Gong. He’s a very likeable, funny guy, but unfortunately his coverage of Falun Gong is very censored indeed.
Rychlak, the above-mentioned commentator for The Epoch Times, simply refuses to believe that Falun Gong practitioners and their media are motivated by a spiritual mission to save people from Communism–which they see as a kind of evil possessing spectre. And he refuses to believe they see Donald Trump as sent by heaven to destroy the Communist Party.
They do believe this. The widely distributed Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party (published in 2004 and since superseded by other publications with a similar purpose) is seen by Falun Gong practitioners as a spiritual weapon that cleanses the spectre of Communism from peoples’ bodies, thereby saving them from the impending apocalypse. For years after it was published, excerpts from the Nine Commentaries were printed in every single edition of The Epoch Times, English and Chinese.
The Nine Commentaries was a key part of the Tuidang or “Quit the CCP” movement, launched by The Epoch Times and promoted directly by Falun Gong practitioners around the world, which encourages people to renounce their membership to any and all Communist organisations. Records of withdrawals are published at the domain tuidang.epochtimes.com.
And regarding Trump being a kind of angel sent from heaven to kill the CCP, a lot of people in the growing community of former Falun Gong practitioners have told me this is now widely believed in the community, no doubt due to a secret teaching that has been passed around but not published.
Ultra conservative beliefs
The attitude towards modern social phenomena is also very telling. You could look at the attitude towards homosexuality or abortion, which Falun Gong warns against, or evolution which it teaches is rubbish. Speaking negatively about these topics is controversial, so they’re usually just completely ignored.
Falun Gong also believes that while religion was good in the past and helped maintain human morality, the gods behind all religions are evil now, which is a relatively recent development, so you probably won’t find positive references to religions and religious experiences. Falun Gong practitioners don’t regard their belief as a religion, and their own belief is exempt from this policy.
However you will find coverage of persecuted religious groups in China like house Christians as this aids Falun Gong’s political motives. And sometimes the distinction between religion and traditional culture–which Falun Gong supports–might be ambiguous.
Shen Yun performances–also believed to cleanse the communist spectre from people’s bodies–are usually promoted where possible.
Enemies and friends
Another telling trait is the attitude towards certain specific people. Hillary Clinton, Kofi Annan, Jackie Chan, Zhang Yimou are some names I know Falun Gong has a specific gripe with and you are unlikely to find anything positive on them. It’s likely if they HAVE to cover them due to a specific news event they will do it very matter-of-factly. If it’s news wires that they’re using they will be edited from the originals to take out any positive prose. Falun Gong media are very careful not to accidentally promote someone who is perceived as anti-Falun Gong or pro-CCP.

Thanks @Anna. Long, but worth the read. It reads like a lot of ex-cult writings, but with a lot of clarity and insight, and leaves me with the impression that it is real. You always should wonder if it can be coming from a CCP member to discredit Falun Gong, for example, but it wouldn't make sense to hurt the reputation of the CCP at the same time. Also, it takes a long time to grow out of a cult, and this has all the earmarks of a true experience in that regard. (I once had several months of studies with a "Moonie" and got nowhere, and to get some of their hard-to-get publications, I once played along with the Scientologists in NYC who wanted to "study" with me. The mindset is clearly spelled out here.)
This person might even believe the organ harvesting happens, but it's odd that he would mention other specifics and "forget" this one which has been the standard narrative for several years before the above was written.
Without saying so directly, I think he does provide several credible reasons why Falun Gong might have felt justified in using that narrative dishonestly. Also, I notice that he implies that it is tied to the way people are converted. If he didn't believe it was true in China, then this was his opportunity to say so:
He admits that Falun Gong members lie to themselves and to others about their own beliefs that probably kill thousands of them. Teaching its members that the CCP itself kills thousands is a counter to this potential cognitive dissonance.
Also, why would Master Li be concerned with persons still having the "sin" of thinking good thoughts about the CCP? Who could have good thoughts about them if they had already bought into the narrative of organ harvesting?
To overcome the danger of being scrutinized, they would need to try to find medical professionals who will join them in promoting the organ harvesting narrative. The human rights narrative is necessary and useful for converting new practitioners.
I do believe the CCP campaign against FG is violent in that it probably jails proselytizing members and my guess is that hundreds or thousands have ended up in jail in China. Claiming that the government is the equivalent of Satan surely doesn't help their cause. This persecution creates the initial us/them narrative that is very useful to keep the group "tight-knit" and well controlled by a spiritual leaders. When the CCP lies about them, which invariably happens when local authorities don't quite understand the religious or psychological nature of the group, then the FG leadership (Master Li, living in the United States) now has supposed justification for fighting back with escalated lies. To a degree, it's happened with Moonies and Scientologists, too, as far as I can tell.

Not sure if it's OK but I am posting the story here. If not, the moderator can just delete it. There is a link to it in my previous comment. 30 minute read.
Me and Li — Why I left Falun Gong after being a devoted believer for a decade
by Ben Hurley
*"I wrote this story about three years ago, shortly after I made the decision to have nothing more to do with the meditation group Falun Gong. It’s taken me some time to summon up the courage to publish it. My apologies if some of the references are a little dated. I have published fiction on this blog but want to clarify that this particular article is completely true, except for the names of people which I’ve removed.
I think it was Lynn’s* death that finally made me realise it was time to leave. I’d seen the writing on the wall about a year prior when I saw her at a yearly “Fa conference” for believers of Falun Gong, otherwise known as Falun Dafa, to exchange experiences and grow spiritually together. An executive assistant at a Queensland valuation firm, I’d gotten to know her over the years in various events as a warm and level-headed lady who had time for everyone. But I’d noticed she had developed a bulge on the side of her head and I was trying not to look at it when I talked to her. I saw, or at least I believed I saw, some pain in her smile. She was probably questioning herself over and over again what “attachments” she hadn’t let go of that were causing this sickness to spread through her body and endanger her life. I wanted to tell her to just go to a hospital, although I wasn’t at this stage resolute enough in my gradual return to logic. Another part of me feared that by looking at it I was acknowledging it — something you don’t do with illnesses in Falun Gong because Master Li Hongzhi teaches that his pupils don’t get illnesses. He can cure you but only if you don’t have any loopholes in your belief in him and his teachings. Some people with solid beliefs can actually die due to others around them having flaws in their thinking, Li says. Just thinking the wrong way is perilous when you’re a Falun Gong practitioner.
I later heard through the grapevine of Lynn’s death. The cancer went into her brain and she passed away in extreme pain, probably believing to the end that it was her fault she was in this awful predicament. In a way, I guess it was.
She wasn’t the first Falun Gong practitioner I knew who died from an illness after refusing medical treatment. Another, Sarah*, did some gardening for my mother in Sydney for a while. She got along well with my mum and did a great job with the garden until her breast cancer became too severe. A staunch believer, she took on a number of big roles in Falun Gong organisations in Australia, including president of Free China and spokesperson for the Celestial Marching Band. She held out against medical treatment, finally accepting treatment when it was far too late. She had been spending her days not in a hospital but in pain in the living room of a family of practitioners, unable or unwilling to explain to the outside world why she hadn’t sought professional help. One of her last hurrahs was singing at a Falun Gong event, seated on a wheelchair on the stage. I listened to a recording and the music was cheery and full of hope. Quietly grieving her death, I called her mobile phone and listened to her answering message one last time, her calm and soothing voice, before deleting her contact number. I never told my wife or friends the truth about her death.
That Falun Gong practitioners frequently die from treatable medical conditions is one of Falun Gong’s dirtiest secrets. A lot of Falun Gong practitioners have died this way. I heard about deaths often when I was involved in the community, typically middle-aged or older practitioners dying of cancers they didn’t treat. These cases would come up in group “sharings”, where we would meet regularly and study scriptures together then talk about them. And they would come up on the email lists I was on. Usually it was a request for practitioners around the world to “send righteous thoughts” to “eliminate evil interference” that was causing this person to become ill. Word would quietly circulate later that the person hadn’t made it.
This was one of the Chinese government’s earliest criticisms of Falun Gong — that thousands of Falun Gong believers had died because they had refused medical help for treatable conditions. The Chinese government then went on to launch a whole range of more dubious accusations about self-immolation, murder and terrorism to justify its brutal campaign against the group — a campaign that continues to this day and has killed thousands. Falun Gong practitioners have continually countered that these claims are nothing but Communist Party propaganda. They have come up with ways to explain away Master Li Hongzhi’s very clear teachings against taking medicine. In fact, the Party was right about this phenomenon although I wouldn’t trust their numbers. Even in a more recent lecture, published on Falun Gong website Clearwisdom.net in May 2015, Master Li acknowledges the “many” deaths in the group and lays the blame squarely on those practitioners’ thoughts:
I can say confidently that anyone who has been involved with Falun Gong for more than a short length of time will have heard of — or directly witnessed — cases like this. But it’s an extremely delicate topic, uncomfortable even when there are only practitioners in the room. Any believing Falun Gong practitioner will hide this secret from non-believers. They’re not just hiding it because they don’t want their friends and family to know what a bizarre belief they have. They genuinely fear that by revealing it they will be giving someone a bad impression of the practice and damning them to hell.
A lot of medical professionals actually know about this, but for some reason it has escaped wider public scrutiny in the Western world. Maybe the noisy arguments between the Chinese Communist Party and Falun Gong have drowned out a more nuanced discussion of the half-truths and half-lies coming from both sides. I once met a nurse who had directly witnessed a dying Falun Gong practitioner refuse medication in hospital. And a while back when I sought some counselling on a few topics including this one, it turned out my counsellor, who was Taiwanese, had lost an aunt this way. She rode her cancer out to the end without palliative care.
Falun Gong dominated a decade of my life. It began innocently enough with a flier from a Chinese man in the Sydney CBD, which outlined some basic principles of the practice and talked about the situation in China. I went home and read more. I decided to join a local meditation site which went from 5am to 7am each morning, in a park only a block away from where I was living, overlooking Blackwattle Bay in Glebe beneath two giant fig trees. The people who taught me the exercises were friendly, interesting and unimposing. No money exchanged hands, and the materials were available online for free. It resonated with me deeply. In it I saw the spiritual guidance I had craved for so long, seemingly without the evangelical, charismatic bent that turned me off a lot of religions. I was wrong on these points, it turned out, but I guess by the time these aspects became obvious I already was quite devoted to the teachings. The intense workload demanded of every practitioner in promoting Falun Gong isn’t really discussed in the main book Zhuan Falun, but rather gradually unveiled bit by bit in later articles by Li.
I pushed myself with the exercises, eventually working up to being able to sit in full lotus position for a full hour — the desired length of time in Falun Gong exercise tutorials. Unfortunately after a few years, those people who taught me the practice those first days were either no longer practicing or still believing on some level but shunned by the community.
After a while I became involved with the community of Falun Gong practitioners in Thailand while travelling, which is where I deepened my belief. We’d exercise together at Lumpini Park in Bangkok, eat some delicious food, then some would leave for work while others stayed to read for a while.
The reading groups, usually in someone’s living room in the evening, were particularly warm in those early days. I’d cram into a room with mainland Chinese, Thais and visiting foreigners from various parts of the world. We’d all take turns to read paragraphs from Falun Gong teachings aloud in various languages while others followed along in their own languages. We’d chat for an hour or two afterwards about our lives and the problems we were facing.
But perhaps I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses here. When I returned to Australia, my family and friends were struck by how different I had become. I was intense and evangelical, and devoting most of my spare time to Falun Gong activities. My former curious interest in the many experiences the world had to offer had vanished. My social beliefs had transformed from those typical of a left-leaning family to take on a very conservative hue. I had a lot of explaining to do before people reluctantly came to accept the new me. I later observed other new Falun Gong practitioners go through a similar process. They would begin by shocking their family at their sudden change, then gradually learn to live the kind of double life typical of most practitioners. Many would get normal jobs. Most would find they had little in common with non-practitioners (“ordinary people” in Falun Gong parlance) but would maintain cordial relations with friends and family nonetheless, and think of various ways to explain the edge off some of Falun Gong’s less palatable teachings about aliens, how heaven views gay people, the inferiority of other religions and Master Li’s role in saving the universe.
During my time in Falun Gong I was involved in some of Falun Gong’s public outreach projects, with my biggest contribution being to The Epoch Times newspaper. Falun Gong practitioners have launched a range of media companies as part of what they see as their spiritual mission, including New Tang Dynasty Television, Sound of Hope Radio, and the Vision China Times. Their purpose is purely evangelical, although perhaps not in the way evangelical Christians might understand. Converting people to Falun Gong is not a priority right now — that will happen in the future, according to Master Li’s teachings — after an apocalyptic “weeding out” takes place where anyone who holds bad thoughts towards Falun Gong, or good thoughts towards the Chinese Communist Party, will come to a grisly end.
(Clearwisdom has published some very graphic descriptions of this day where practitioners describe visions that Master Li has given them of people being weeded out. “People were screaming in terror,” reads one [Last accessed 23/10/2017). “Mangled, dead bodies were everywhere. Next, the ground split open. Monsters were attacking people.” It goes on to describe the survivors being grateful to Dafa for sparing them.)
So the spiritual mission of all of Falun Gong’s projects is a kind of giant PR campaign to warm people to Falun Gong but not necessarily to convert them, and turn people away from the Communist Party — a representation in the human world of all that is truly evil in the cosmos. This intention is clear in any article in these media that is related to these topics, whether it be the satirical banter of Chris Chappell’s China Uncensored or the more stiff-collared serious journalism of The Epoch Times.
The Epoch Times Australia, English edition, began in the small Summer Hill living room of a Falun Gong couple, where a bunch of followers pieced it together with laptops while sitting on the floor. Somehow our ragtag army, with hardly any media experience among us, managed to put out a weekly newspaper that way. Later the English version joined the more successful Chinese-language paper in an upstairs office by the train tracks in Hurstville — a Chinese-dominated suburb of Southern Sydney. Some of the first editions had some laughable errors. But others weren’t that bad, considering the scant resources. I have no idea where the money came from to print thousands of newspapers a week, or to pay for the Reuters and AAP articles that filled them. Even less to pay for another media company, New Tang Dynasty Television — a satellite TV station. This was understandably kept a secret, since the Chinese Embassy was particularly active at that time in seeking out and pressuring any public supporters of Falun Gong. I was told it was a few wealthy benefactors. Some Falun Gong critics believe it came from the US government. I honestly don’t know, although I do know the editorial guidelines of The Epoch Times were very clear about being sympathetic to the US government.
It was hard work, with many late nights and red-eyed arguments as disagreements emerged over how the paper should be run. But there was warmth and camaraderie as well, particularly in the kitchen where volunteers would cook dinner and make tea for the team.
The prestigious editor position was a dubious promotion. It basically involved giving up your entire life for The Epoch Times, such was the time commitment. Without time to work, have a relationship or raise a family, the editor was typically a single person living off his or her own savings. One editor was a warm-natured and gentle guy who became a good friend of mine. He managed to hold this position for several years and I saw directly what a toll it took on his life, he was just tired all the time. At one point the then heads of The Epoch Times Australia decided to start paying him a very basic wage to meet his living expenses. Later Master Li directly intervened and ruled that it wasn’t OK for Epoch Times staff to be paid with the money that other practitioners had volunteered. My friend was suddenly in debt, and had to pay back the money he had been paid which totalled a significant sum that he didn’t have. Somehow his belief survived, despite this slap in the face after all the sweat and blood he had put into the paper. A few years later it became OK again for workers in Falun Gong media companies to receive a basic payment to allow them to do their work. Unilateral decisions like this were unquestionable, unchallengeable. Heaven had spoken. Continuing to follow Falun Gong involved a kind of slow murder-by-a-thousand-cuts of my free will, my independent logic. They were like tests from Master Li, sifting out the moderates and solidifying the zealots.
Master Li’s fingerprints were, in fact, all over the paper. There was one time when Master Li directly sacked a large number of Falun Gong media workers and appointed new people to take their place. But most of his influence was through a select few close followers who would then transmit his directives through the broader Falun Gong network. It was rarely made clear what, exactly, he had said, and whether it was, in fact, a Master Li directive or rather simply a decision of The Epoch Times board in New York. It was usually just described as a decision from New York.
There were so many examples of this, where any sense of the public’s right to know was trumped by Falun Gong dogma. In the early days of The Epoch Times Australia, we formulated the editorial code after a conference call with the head office in New York. It specified that we should report positively on public figures who had spoken positively of Falun Gong, and avoid negative coverage of these people if they were involved in scandals. We also should avoid positive coverage of people who had spoken badly of Falun Gong or were seen as too close to the Chinese government. Later when the Iraq War broke out we weren’t to question the United States’ involvement. We were to completely avoid coverage of anything to do with homosexuality. There were also some specific people who we absolutely weren’t to cover. One was Hillary Clinton, who was seen as having sold herself out to the Chinese government. Another was Kofi Annan, then head of the United Nations, which had something to do with him being a ghost or devil in another dimension. Jackie Chan and movie director Zhang Yimou were similarly seen as having sold out to the Communist Party. Due to the highly changeable nature of these kinds of directives, and my distance from the group now, I can’t say whether they are still in place today.
One email circular in particular made my blood boil. It dictated to all global Epoch Times staff how they should describe The Epoch Times, be it to the general public or their friends or family. We were not to reveal we were volunteers, as this would project an unprofessional image of the paper. And we were not to draw any association between The Epoch Times and Falun Gong. Rather, we should describe ourselves as staff, and there were suggestions about how we should answer the question about whether or not we were paid, while still adhering to Falun Gong’s teaching of “Truth”. I wrote an angry email over this and ignited something of an email controversy — not my first and not my last. How dare they tell me how I should describe something I was involved in to my own friends and family? And why was it necessary to deny a connection between Falun Gong and its media organisations? The Christian Science Monitor, for example, has shown it’s possible for a sometimes controversial religious group to openly run a respected media publication. Society is surprisingly open minded about this kind of thing if you have nothing to hide.
Later another circular demanded that every single Epoch Times staff member put themselves through an exhaustive grammar and writing course developed by the head office. It was weeks of work for an already highly over-worked (and mostly unpaid) team. And it taught a level of grammar that was technical to the point of being mostly superfluous for most media professionals, except perhaps sub-editors. It was irrelevant how much media experience you already had or how much time you had. It was a “one body” exercise, which is Falun Gong parlance for every believer being on the same page in thought and action. Practical outcomes (or the lack of them) took a back seat to the changes in other dimensions that we were bringing about through these kinds of actions.
One argument I never made in response to these directives might have been: How dare you give me orders when I’m giving you so much of my time for free and asking for nothing in return? But I knew that would have fallen on deaf ears. We were all being paid in “virtue” — a white substance in another dimension that you gain when you do good things and that leads to blessings in this life and the next. We would all later be paid with glorious futures. We all believed that, deeply.
Over time the control over content became increasingly detailed and iron-clad. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the reportage of dance group Shen Yun, which tours the world and performs in some high-class venues like New York’s Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts and London’s Royal Festival Hall. In terms of racking up blessings for your eternal existence, participating in the Shen Yun reporting team was about as good as it got. Every Shen Yun performance was viewed by Falun Gong practitioners as a monumental battle between good and evil in other dimensions, with the manifestation in this physical dimension being a little more mundane. A media team would assemble in a hotel room or apartment somewhere nearby the venue, ready to work through the night. Several reporters would go to the venue and do short interviews with audience members as they came out during intermission and after the show. Positive comments were taken down or recorded on video and then quickly written into articles and broadcast on various Falun Gong media outlets. Each outlet had its own set of standards which had presumedly come straight from Master Li. The Epoch Times had to get one article published online within half an hour of each show finishing, otherwise the battle in other dimensions had basically been lost for the night, and Shen Yun’s entire tour of that country was jeopardised. There was also a quota of articles that had to be written each night, which rose every year. High priority people were written up first — people who were well-known or esteemed in society — with the remainder written up through the night.
Whenever Shen Yun came to town, another team was devoted solely to taking care of the cosmic battle side of things. This team would sit in a room somewhere nearby with crossed legs and right hand held erect in front of their chests, “sending righteous thoughts” non-stop, day and night, to clear away the evil in other dimensions. People with full-time jobs would drop in for an hour or two after work, others would stay much longer, coming in day after day for hours on end. The local “assistant centre”, which was basically the satellite office for the central Falun Gong organisation in each city, would also stipulate that all that city’s Falun Gong practitioners should send righteous thoughts for 15 minutes at certain set times — typically three times each evening. This was in addition to the four global times that had been in place for years, corresponding to Beijing times of 6am, noon, 6pm and midnight.
I would dread the arrival of Shen Yun in Australia every year, because of the expectation that all practitioners there would basically put their lives on hold for the weeks or even months leading up to it to meet all these demands. I became increasingly angry that Falun Gong practitioners, who were already putting in so much of their time, were spending so much additional time sitting in rooms sending righteous thoughts rather than activities with more practical outcomes. I hoped Master Li might eventually inject some reason here in one of his talks, and sure enough in a July 2011 lecture in Washington DC he did address this issue. The problem, according to Master Li, was people like me:
In other words, people who thought it was a waste of time and were resentful while doing it were the problem. Another little piece of my faith died that day. We were talking about a cumulative 100 minutes every 24 hours that we were expected to do this, in addition to the hours of scripture reading and meditation that were crucial for anyone who considered him- or herself a true Falun Gong practitioner. And then on top of this the various projects that every Falun Gong practitioner had a cosmic responsibility to be part of. It was already impossible to get a good night’s sleep, and was getting harder and harder to maintain normal relations with society. This nagging voice deep in my mind became a little stronger — Master Li just wants to keep us all busy and tired.
It became increasingly clear to me as I worked on these media projects how hamstrung they were in achieving any real traction in society. Unable to trust non-believers with the spiritual mission of saving people, and unwilling to allow outsiders an inside view into the machinations of Falun Gong, these media could do nothing but continually draw from a very small pool of Falun Gong practitioners, typically with little or no media experience. And whatever good content they produced (I still feel the Shen Yun dances are beautiful to watch and the original orchestral music is lovely) it was overshadowed by the genuine weirdness of the Falun Gong propaganda inserted throughout, and the eccentricities of the practitioners themselves who had very few societal relations outside the Falun Gong community. In group sharings, for example, groups of Shen Yun ticket sellers would describe sneaking into office buildings without authorisation and working their way through floor-by-floor, desk-by-desk, handing out Shen Yun flyers and pressing people to buy tickets while ignoring requests from security to leave.
I don’t mean to represent Falun Gong as a rigid dictatorship. Some decisions like the above were made in assistant meetings that anyone could attend, although attending them meant giving up additional hours of my already scarce time each week and enduring the guilt trips that often pervaded them about how practitioners weren’t doing well enough and so many of the world’s people were doomed.
But a lot of them came from higher up, and the restrictions and time demands became more and more iron clad. Master Li’s authority was always there — elusive, ever-changing, unchallengeable.
This control extended into the personal lives of the broader Falun Gong community, and gradually I became locked out of the community for not participating to the extent demanded.
Twice when I was involved with Falun Gong, the entire global community was told to switch mobile phones. The first came after a number of practitioners around the world received anti-Falun Gong propaganda messages on their mobiles. The Chinese secret service knew all our numbers, we were told, and could listen in on us at any time. We would disrupt their database if we all changed numbers at the same time.
I did this the first time, and went through the inconvenience of telling all my friends and contacts my new mobile number. A year or so later we were directed to do the same thing again and this time I refused. It doubled as my work number and changing it was simply too much trouble. No problem, I was told, just carry two mobile phones — one for your dealings with the everyday world and one for your dealings with Falun Gong practitioners. Not to mention the expense and the annoyance of constantly having the weight of two phones in your pants, this was anathema to me as Falun Gong had previously promoted itself as a transparent and open group with nothing to hide. Naturally those communicating with practitioners in China should be cautious about security since those people faced threats and arrest if caught…but people like me, really? What on earth did I have to hide? For refusing to change my number, I was no longer welcome to call practitioners on their new numbers and did most of my communicating via email. Some Falun Gong practitioner friends of mine even adopted this strict policy with me, making it very hard for us to catch up.
Changing mobile phones en masse might seem extreme, but here, as in many areas of Falun Gong, there were shades of reasonableness underpinning the decision. It was true that frequently at Falun Gong events we would see stern-faced Chinese men follow us with cameras, monitoring our activities. They would often react angrily or run away when confronted. My mother once received a phone call from a Chinese-sounding woman telling her to stop me from practicing Falun Gong — who was she and how had she got hold of our home number? And then there were the propaganda messages that appeared all at once on practitioners’ mobile phones. And of course the allegations of widespread monitoring from Chinese government defectors like former Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin. There was little doubt the Chinese government and its embassies abroad were monitoring the activities of Falun Gong, but it was impossible to say to what extent. Uncertainty bred fear, confusion and zealotry.
Another way I became edged out was through the “experience-sharing conferences” held by various cities and countries each year becoming much harder to get into, and not just because the seats were full. To get a ticket to attend, your local assistant had to vouch that you were a diligent practitioner who regularly attended group readings and sharings. I was extremely busy with my corporate job and looking after my mother who suffered from a degenerative disease. And I saw a lot of these sharings as unstructured, inefficient and wasting large amounts of already scarce time. Attending less than once a week made it hard for me to attend these conferences since I wasn’t deemed diligent enough. By that time I didn’t really care, but it did show to me how far Falun Gong had come in its shift towards an insular and controlling group that demanded a large time commitment, increasingly isolated its members from society and hid its inner workings from outside scrutiny. For the first few years I was involved with Falun Gong, these Fa conferences were open to anyone, whether they were practicing or not, giving a transparent, warts-and-all insight into Falun Gong for anyone who wanted it.
Falun Gong lurched closer and closer to being a structured organisation with an increasingly rigid heirarchy. In a July 2010 article called “Be More Diligent”, Master Li introduced a new directive that nobody was to challenge decisions by those higher up — be they heads of projects or people with positions of responsibility in the Falun Gong organisation — which upturned a previously loose and largely democratic organisational structure.
Falun Gong shifted in many other ways. It began as a group that made no claim against the validity of other major religions, but later Master Li asserted that the gods in charge of other religions had become evil and were interfering with his cosmic mission. He also specified rules for interacting with social groups like Chinese democracy advocates, which Falun Gong practitioners had some dealings with due to a common opposition to the actions of the Chinese government. In the heavily edited 2007 video lecture he released, called Teaching the Fa to Australian Practitioners, he chided his followers like children for opening up and sharing their problems with ordinary people. It’s very difficult for ordinary people to understand us, he said.
And then there was just simply the time commitment which became harder and harder to meet. As I said before, practitioners around the world were required to send righteous thoughts for 15 minutes four times a day — at 6am, 12pm, 6pm and 12am Beijing time. This meant getting up at 2am to do it every night, which disrupted my already insufficient sleep. In fact for years I consistently slept around five hours a night, often less. Master Li also frequently made alterations to his past works — often simply changing a few characters to others with slightly different meanings. It wasn’t ok to throw sacred texts like these in the rubbish, so practitioners were expected to go through their books page-by-page and use a razor blade to scratch out the now incorrect characters and glue the new ones over them. Hundreds of character changes in a 300-plus page book meant many, many hours of work. Another impractical and time-intensive directive that we were meant to spiritually grow through.
There was also a list of unofficial precepts that grew, in addition to the official ones like don’t drink alcohol and don’t kill anything. We had to finish all food on our plates or we’d have to eat it all as rotten food after we died. We shouldn’t eat raw meats like sashimi because that would cause resentful living entities to build up in our stomachs. We shouldn’t eat custard apples because they’re shaped like the Buddha’s head.
All up it pretty much ruled out doing things for the sake of doing them, which is where so much of the world’s creativity comes from. Hobbies, exercise, reading, travel — all became hard to justify when time and energy were so stretched. And as I started to gradually distance myself from Falun Gong and began taking these things up again, I battled with a lot of personal guilt and didn’t dare talk about them to other Falun Gong practitioners. Such innocent activities were frowned upon because it was wasting time that should be spent doing the “three things” that all Falun Gong practitioners should to — study scriptures, spread Li’s teachings and send righteous thoughts. Every interaction with someone, even just a chance encounter with a stranger on the street, is a chance to talk about Falun Gong, Li says.
Whether Master Li was living up to his own high standards for practitioners is hard to say. One practitioner who also left the group, William*, went to The Mountain and saw Li for himself. The Mountain is a large piece of land at Cuddebackville in the mountains near New York where Falun Gong-related temples have been built — again a departure from the earlier Falun Gong which claimed it wasn’t a religion for a range of reasons including that it had no temples or places of worship. Li spends a lot of time there overseeing the Shen Yun dancers who live there — mostly kids and young adults. Word has it The Mountain is a place where a wave of new disciples will go to learn Falun Gong after the apocalyptic weeding out.
But William was upset by a couple of things, and this story is interesting because genuine depictions of interactions with the reclusive Li are hard to come by. Firstly, Master Li was drinking a can of Coke. This was an affront to William since Li had always described himself as a man without any worldly attachments or desires, to the point that he was unable to find conversation interesting and couldn’t even tell whether or not food tasted good. Secondly, William saw Li berate the young dancers with a level of anger and intensity that shocked him, which was totally out of line with Li’s own teachings that we deal with people and each other using compassion. (Li’s videoed lecture to Australian practitioners, who had apparently been arguing too much, talked a lot about being compassionate to each other. He delivered it in an extra calm, smiling, slow- and soft-spoken, follow-my-example kind of way.)
Other people have attempted the topic of whether Falun Gong is a cult, so I’m not going to do that here. It’s kind of like a swearword that doesn’t actually mean anything specific to most of the people who use it. But I will make the point that Falun Gong is a much more secretive and controlling organisation than many people realise, it’s not a transparent group. While most of the core teachings are accessible for free on the websites, there are secret teachings and directives that are passed down verbally, and the discussions and forums that were once open to the public are now tightly controlled. Master Li’s published lectures and recent video are not simple transcriptions from the original talk, but rather are highly edited and redacted. All of Falun Gong’s websites, notably Clearwisdom.net which claims to be a forum for practitioners, are tightly curated. Master Li has made it clear that anyone who transcribes or records his talks and spreads them without his approval is undermining his practice which is a grave sin. And he has savagely criticised online Falun Gong-related forums like the Qingxin Discussion Forum where conversations among practitioners took place beyond his control.
While Falun Gong practitioners are technically free to come and go as they please, social pressures and deep spiritual fears become a strong staying force, in addition to social ties like marriages and children with other devout practitioners. Many, having given so much to Falun Gong, have little ties to society anymore and transitioning back would be a scary prospect. And then there is the shame, which I’ve felt deeply, of acknowledging to your friends and family that this thing you’ve talked up for so long has a darker side that you’ve said nothing about.
It’s taken me a long time to pluck up the courage to write this article. It’s a story I haven’t told in full to anyone. It’s not that I feared for my physical safety in writing this, the Falun Gong community isn’t like that. But I feared the judgement from the friends I have who still do it, and I feared being seen as an idiot by non-practicing people I’ve known all this time. I’m not a stupid guy — I’m well educated, I’ve got a good career and generally take a nuanced view of the world around me. This experience shows a childish, naive side of me; how rationality and dogma can exist side-by-side in one person’s head. And I have trouble explaining that to people.
But more than anything I deeply feared that by facing up to what I was seeing and feeling in Falun Gong I would face unimaginable punishment in this life and the afterlife. It was a heavy burden that ate away at me every hour of every day, and I think it can only be understood by others who have held a spiritual belief as deep as mine. The only time I truly felt safe from the consequences of a long list of sins I committed daily by simply going about my life was when I was sitting in meditation or reading Li’s writings. It’s a kind of blood debt Li has carefully cultivated in all of his followers and regularly reminds them of.
Falun Gong and the confusion I felt when I departed from it was probably the main factor that ended my marriage, even though my wife was not a Falun Gong practitioner. I felt like I was starting my life again and re-forming my worldview from scratch. I had to re-evaluate a lot of big choices I’d made. I saw no other way but to leave my old life and live overseas to do this quietly in my own time. I abandoned some relationships and rekindled others. I listened to music I used to like, took up pursuits I used to be into, got in touch with people I used to be close to. It was like re-connecting to a lifeline or a narrative that started to die when I took up Falun Gong.
But it wasn’t a total waste of time. One of the best things I got from my time in Falun Gong was to experience meditation and the clarity and warmth that can come from sitting with your eyes closed and calming everything down. Li doesn’t own that. Meditation makes me feel grateful, small, and motivated to salvage as much attention as I can garner to experience life. You could say I have my own religion now. It has only one follower and I don’t have to explain it to anyone.
Sometimes I wonder how these people think — the many Li Hongzhis that have appeared over the years as gurus, or charismatic salesmen, or just straight-out cons. People who can go at a goal with zero regard for the people they hurt along the way, including their staunchest believers. Li’s writings leap from glowing adulation to ‘stick warnings’ which in essence warn his followers they face eternal damnation if they don’t do what he says. When he delivers them to his followers the ensuing fear and self-recrimination really hurts. I wonder to what extent he actually believes his own teachings. If he hasn’t deluded himself into believing what he propagates, then he must know the extent of the fallacies he is peddling, and that would make him a cynical, nasty person indeed. His flawless confidence creates a kind of safe zone for people who struggle with the many shades of grey in the world. But in reality it’s not a safe zone at all.
It’s hard to explain, and hard for me now to understand, why I believed in such a crazy ideology, and for so long. In the same way it’s hard for me to understand why young people from around the world would give up everything they know and care about and join a repulsive group like ISIS. Their ideology makes no sense to me, the things they do make me sick. But I think I can relate a little to what’s going on in those young mens’ minds: the yearning for clarity, the search for meaning, the desire to belong, the willingness to make immense personal sacrifices for a cause bigger than they are. It’s a very deep place to snag someone, and potentially very dangerous. Logic, education, knowledge, human connection — all these things change from being moderating forces into tools for furthering the cause.
This article is in no way an attempt to justify the Chinese government’s ridiculous and violent campaign against Falun Gong. The many outright lies the Chinese government has told about the group have in some ways helped Falun Gong by giving the organisation a human rights narrative that allows it to not focus too closely on its own practices and beliefs. If only the Chinese government had just stuck to the facts. Falun Gong in many foreigners’ minds is associated with other freedom movements abroad, when in reality Falun Gong doesn’t give a stuff about other groups or about reform in China. In the world view of most Falun Gong practitioners, any movement that is trying to achieve an outcome in the human world — apart from Falun Gong’s various projects, that is — is engaging in dirty human politics.
Unfortunately the sympathy that many uninformed Westerners have towards Falun Gong has led to a kind of exasperated stand-off with a lot of Chinese people who justifiably feel that Falun Gong is just plain silly and that Westerners can never really understand China. This kind of thing drives a wedge between China and the rest of the world which is the last thing we need in an increasingly tense geopolitical climate.
The way Falun Gong defines itself to the public and to its own followers — as a health-focussed spiritual group concerned about human rights — is just not true. It made me less healthy, less happy, less kind, less compassionate. And it made me less truthful — to myself and others. Any spiritual growth that it may once have offered was left by the roadside as it morphed into a giant PR machine for a bullshit cause, exploiting a free labour force of exhausted zealots. Its goal now has nothing to do with meditation, spirituality or improving health. It’s just a political machine — Li’s project to amass power and influence and then shoot for whatever bizarre goal he thinks of next.
Finally I’ve left that sad little man in the dust. Me and Li are finished. And I’ve never been happier".

They harvest young peoples organs. Heart and lung transplants - i cannot imagine that they survive after this.

Credible? It's Falun Gong. My opinion of Falun Gong is that they are laughably and ridiculously and incredibly incredible.
I have already expressed some of those opinions here, and we have never even gotten into most of their other incredible claims. But I will quote someone who has done some of the legwork here on the "China Tribunal" statement read by Hamid Sabi.
There are many sources and pieces to this, but they have been most clearly stated here on a website called the TheGrayZone.com :
The rest of this post will be quotes of large portions of the article, below, and I will highlight the portion related to the UN presentation, but the whole thing is here: https://thegrayzone.com/2019/09/30/reports-china-organ-harvesting-cult-falun-gong/
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Reports on China ‘organ harvesting’ derive from front groups of far-right cult Falun Gong
Ryan McCarthySeptember 30, 2019 ChinaMedia A wave of corporate media reports on Chinese organ harvesting rely without acknowledgement on front groups connected to the far-right Falun Gong cult, whose followers believe “Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the Communist Party.”
By Ryan McCarthy
Western corporate media outlets have gone wild with claims that the Chinese state is “harvesting” the organs of ethnic minorities and political opposition figures. But an investigation by The Grayzone has found that these allegations originate from front groups run by the far-right opposition cult Falun Gong.
Falun Gong, whose devotees can often be seen clad in yellow and performing coordinated qi gong routines in crowded city centers, runs an ultra-conservative, staunchly pro-Donald Trump media network that has been compared to Alex Jones’ Infowars.
According to a former member of the fringe religious group, Falun Gong believes that an apocalyptic judgement day is soon approaching and “that Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the [Chinese] Communist Party.”
In order to understand, then, how heavily politicized rumors from an obscure far-right cult found their way into the headlines, it is essential to trace the roots of the story through an elaborate network of front groups.
In June 2019, a London-based organization called the China Tribunal published a report claiming that the Chinese government has been systematically executing and harvesting the organs of members of Falun Gong, a leading force of opposition to Beijing in the diaspora.
The China Tribunal describes itself as an “independent tribunal into forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China.” Most Western journalists took the organization at its word.
Up to and after it published the report, the China Tribunal received scattered coverage from various mainstream media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The Guardian. In September, the coverage ramped up considerably after the China Tribunal presented its case to the UN Human Rights Council, with major outlets like The Independent and Reuters joining in.
One thing all this reporting has in common is that it assumes the China Tribunal is truly “independent.” On its website, the China Tribunal says that it was “initiated by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), an international not for profit organisation, with headquarters in Australia and National Committees in the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.”
So what is ETAC, really?
On ETAC’s website, one finds a “management” page with a list of people, devoid of any information except their names, photographs, and positions in the organization. The executive director and co-founder is Susie Hughes; Margo MacVicar is named as the New Zealand national manager; Rebecca James is the UK national manager for outreach, and so on.
Where do these figures come from, and what brought them together? The website has no bios. But follow the names, and it soon becomes apparent that there is another connection apart from ETAC — the Epoch Times.
A far-right anti-China propaganda network run by a cult
The Epoch Times, which uses the slogan “Truth and Tradition,” has marketed itself as just another conservative, pro-Trump media outlet.
But NBC News published a major exposé in August revealing it to be the media arm of the opposition cult Falun Gong. The report details the bizarre workings of the Falun Gong organization, showing how the Epoch Times is carving a place for itself in American right-wing media.
NBC News found that the Falun Gong website spent more than $1.5 million on roughly 11,000 pro-Trump advertisements on Facebook in just six months, “more than any organization outside of the Trump campaign itself, and more than most Democratic presidential candidates have spent on their own campaigns.”
[removed Falun Gong's swastika symbols, and their explanation] So where do the ETAC managers fit in with Falun Gong? Susie Hughes has photographer credits on several Epoch Times articles (her name seems to have been scrubbed, the photos merely credited to “The Epoch Times,” but the credit still shows up on Google searches at the time of writing). Margo MacVicar has numerous articles gushing about Shen Yun, Falun Gong’s traveling dance show. Rebecca “Becky” James shows up organizing a Falun Gong art exhibition in Bristol and sharing vegan drink recipes.
ETAC’s UK national manager for initiatives, Andy Moody, is credited by Epoch Times as a reporter for its sibling NTD, or New Tang Dynasty Television, Falun Gong’s TV arm. (Concerned Canadians have noted that the cult’s propaganda network has received millions of their tax dollars worth of disproportionate funding.)
ETAC’s UK communications coordinator Victoria Ledwidge appears in another Epoch Times article, coming to greet Shen Yun performers in London and, of course, acclaiming the “amazing” performance.
As one goes down the list of ETAC management, these Falun Gong connections spring up for almost everyone. ETAC is very clearly a Falun Gong front group.
Neither ETAC nor China Tribunal discloses these connections, but it hardly takes an intrepid investigative journalist to find them. So why was this level of basic research a step too far for, say, Owen Bowcott at the Guardian, who does little more than transmit ETAC’s talking points?
In fact, Falun Gong itself is actively spreading this “organ harvesting” rumor in major North American cities. The Grayzone’s Ben Norton saw some of the cult’s activists standing in central Toronto next to a giant banner titled “Stop Forced Live Organ Harvesting in China.”
They handed out pamphlets to passers-by declaring that the “Chinese Communist Regime Is Slaughtering Innocents” (using a painting as supposed evidence), while preaching about the “great health benefits” of Falun Gong.
The far-right cult is clearly using these rumors to proselytize and recruit new supporters.
‘Research’ overseen by a cult that sidelines real doctors
Turning to the China Tribunal’s report itself, it is apparent that, despite the authors’ claim to “have maintained distance and separation from ETAC in order to ensure their independence,” they rely heavily on information curated for them by ETAC.
The introduction, after describing ETAC as “a not-for-profit coalition of lawyers, medical professionals and others”, goes on to state that “ETAC’s main interest has been the alleged suffering of practitioners of ‘Falun Gong’, a group performing meditative exercises and pursuing Truthfulness, Compassion, and Forbearance, but regarded by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1999 as an ‘anti-humanitarian, anti-society and anti-science cult’.”
It is understandable that critics might hesitate to take the PRC’s characterization of Falun Gong at face value. But it is easy to make a fair evaluation of the group’s true character simply by perusing their own publications, where one will learn, for instance, that modern science was invented by aliens as part of a scheme to take over human bodies; or that feminism, environmentalism, and homosexuality are part of Satan’s plan to make us into communists; or that race-mixing severs our connection to the gods.
. . .
The report summary goes on to state: “Evidence was submitted by ETAC for the first hearing, amplified by further evidence following the first and second evidence hearings.” So despite framing their investigation as separate and independent of ETAC, the authors admit that they began with evidence fed to them by ETAC.
Their reliance on ETAC is further highlighted later when several doctors are named who expressed skepticism about the Falun Gong organ harvesting narrative. These doctors are listed as “doctors speaking favourably of the PRC.”
The report then states:
“All of these doctors were invited by the Tribunal to participate in the Tribunal’s proceedings. Their participation would have greatly assisted the Tribunal in its work; they all declined the invitations. Further, although each did contribute in person to a recent report by an Australian Government Committee their contributions have been subject to review by ETAC that reveals that they produced no hard evidence to support what they said and could be criticised for their methodology or their experience in transplant surgery.”
In other words, the China Tribunal didn’t see any need to consider their testimony, because ETAC had already looked at it and declared it to be bogus.
One of these doctors, Francis Delmonico, was contacted by the science journal Nature for its article on the China Tribunal’s report — a rare case of a dissenting opinion being registered, however grudgingly.
Delmonico was asked specifically for his opinion on a research paper cited by the China Tribunal, which was published on the scientific archive, SocArXiv, by Matthew Robinson – a research fellow of the famously impartial Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation:
“But Francis Delmonico, a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, says that although there is evidence that organs were taken from prisoners in the past — which he condemns — he is not convinced by the SocArXiv evidence because it is not direct. Delmonico is chair of the World Health Organization’s Task Force on Donation and Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues and has been supporting organ-donation reform in China for more than a decade, although he made his comments to Nature in a personal capacity.”
Lobbyists for an anti-Iran cult go to bat for an anti-China one
The China Tribunal’s report is not the first alleging that the Chinese government is murdering Falun Gong prisoners en masse to harvest their organs. It relies heavily on an earlier document, known as the Kilgour-Matas report, which was initially released in 2006 and updated several times since then, with the title “Bloody Harvest.”
This previous report was commissioned by the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong in China. Unlike ETAC, CIPFG plainly states that it is a Falun Gong organization.
More interesting connections arise when probing the backgrounds of the co-authors of the report, David Kilgour and David Matas.
David Matas is the senior legal counsel for B’nai Brith Canada, a right-wing pro-Israel lobby that works hard to tar any critique of the occupation of Palestine as anti-semitism. He was also . . . [4 paragraphs removed here]
So both authors of “Bloody Harvest” advocate on behalf of, not one, but two cults that also happen to be darlings of regime-change enthusiasts in and around Western governments. (The latest edition of “Bloody Harvest” includes a third co-author, Ethan Gutmann, who, notably, has been affiliated with the Gulf monarchy-funded Brookings Institution and the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)
. . .
A few reporters notice Falun Gong’s seamy side
In March, Jia Tolentino published her impressions of Shen Yun in the New Yorker. Like the aforementioned NBC piece on the Epoch Times, Tolentino ‘s article shows that more and more people are noticing that there is something very odd about Falun Gong.
From the “baroque and surreal” Shen Yun dance-propaganda show, which bills itself as a last bastion of genuine Chinese culture, she moves to consider some other very troubling aspects of the Falun Gong organization, such as their penchant for resisting journalistic inquiry and harassing critics.
Tolentino also mentions a 2017 Washington Post investigation by Simon Denyer, which, while hardly a pro-PRC puff piece, casts serious doubt on the claims of the Kilgour-Matas report on organ harvesting.
Denyer may be the only journalist in the mainstream US press who conducted an independent investigation on organ harvesting in China and seriously questions Falun Gong’s organ harvesting narrative. Naturally, Ethan Gutmann felt compelled to run a rebuttal to Denyer’s report on ETAC’s website — and one can only imagine the kinds of emails and phone calls Denyer has been getting since he dared to publish that piece.
For most of the Western corporate media, the “Bloody Harvest” horror story is too ghoulishly titillating to subject to serious scrutiny, especially when the “Yellow Peril”-style villain is an increasingly powerful state threatening the old hegemonies.