Maura Moynihan: The Battle with a China Apologist Continues

Maura Moynihan: The Battle with a China Apologist Continues

Outspoken human rights advocate Maura Moynihan is engaged in a battle of letters with Paul Heer, a former National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the CIA from 2007 to 2015. In an op-ed published in The Washington Times on 18 July, she blasted him for a 14 July article he had written for the National Interest entitled, Engagement with China Has Not Failed, which advocated continued engagement with the Chinese communists despite their ongoing persecution of ethnic and religious minorities in China.

Subsequently, Heer penned a defensive follow-up article also for the The National Interest on 25 July entitled, Condemning the Chinese Communist Party is Not Enough. Ms. Moynihan’s open letter response to that article was posted here at AFNN on 29 July. Heer’s response to that letter being deemed wholly inadequate, Ms. Moynihan has provided the following open letter to pressure him into a more complete response.

Here is her open letter.

Dear Mr. Heer,

Thank you for replying to my open letter about your article in The National Interest replying to my open letter about your article in The National Interest entitled, “Condemning the Chinese Communist Party is Not Enough.”

Your response to me was but one line: “We shall have to agree to disagree.” May I ask you to be more specific about what precisely we must “agree to disagree” about?

Do we agree that genocide is a crime? Genocide is defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”

Do we agree that communist states slaughtered over 100 million human beings in the 20^th Century, and thus communist states, the UUSR, The Khmer Rouge, North Korea and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are guilty of the crime of genocide? This has been well documented by historians; last month I visited the newly opened Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, DC – here is the link.

Do we agree that the CCP committed the largest genocide in human history by murdering 60-80 million of their citizens in an engineered famine during Chairman Mao’s 1958-1962 Great Leap Forward? This has also been well documented by historians, notably Jasper Becker in his book “Hungry Ghosts” and in many film documentaries, including this one entitled, “The Human Cost of Mao’s Great Leap Forward”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHR15JxckZg

Do we agree that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is at present committing genocide against millions of Uyghur Muslims in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) western Xinjiang Province? This has been well documented; here is a link to the Uyghur American Association.

Do we agree that the CCP is guilty of multiple crimes against humanity, including forced organ harvesting, now a multibillion-dollar industry in the PRC, also well documented by such authors as Ethan Gutman, in his book “The Slaughter.”

Do we agree with Mikhal Gorbachev, who wrote in his memoir, ”On My Country and the World”: In the end, the ‘model’ that came into existence in the USSR was not socialist but totalitarian. This is a serious matter to be reflected on by all who seriously aspire to progress for the benefit of the human race…As a young man, I really took to heart the Communist ideals. A young soul certainly cannot reject things like justice and equality. These were the goals proclaimed by the Communists. But in reality that terrible Communist experiment brought about repression of human dignity. Violence was used in order to impose that model on society. In the name of Communism we abandoned basic human values. So when I came to power in Russia I started to restore those values; values of “openness” and freedom.

Do we agree that the United States, Britain and the Allied powers had just cause to go to war with Hitler and the Third Reich when the German state was committing genocide upon the Jewish people, murdered 6 million Jews, leaving large swaths of Europe “Juden Frei” – German for Free of Jews?

Do we agree with General Eisenhower’s assessment of the Nazi concentration camps, when he wrote: The same day [April 12, 1945] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at firsthand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that `the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’ Some members of the visiting party were unable to through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening, I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.

Do we agree that all accounts of conditions in the CCP’s massive, industrialized horror camps are equal to the Nazi’s “brutality and ruthless disregard for every shred of decency,” to quote General Eisenhower? As a reporter for Radio Free Asia in India and Nepal, I spent years interviewing Tibetan political prisoners who described the methods of torture, slave labor and slaughter in CCP horror camps, and I also worked at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and I brought several Tibetan political prisoners to the museum, and they testified that the Nazi horror camps were as cruel and terrifying as the CCP horror camps, but the CCP horror camps have been operational for 7 decades, and not only has engagement with the CCP failed to close these camps, engagement has facilitated the growth of these horror camps, encouraging US companies to move their factories to the PRC, and exploit prison labor? This has also been well documented, including here.

Do we agree with Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, who wrote this in The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956? In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

Thus, do we agree that the policy of engagement with the CCP has been an abject failure, for it has neither prevented the CCP from committing multiple genocides and operating massive slave labor camps, nor has it punished the CCP for committed multiple, ongoing genocides and expanding their vast network of slave labor camps?

Do we agree that the policy of engagement with the CCP has failed to create “peace and stability” as the CCP is beating the drums of war across Asia: pummeling Taiwan with air strikes and military blockades, amassing PLA battalions on the Indian border from the high ground of the Tibetan Plateau, deploying spy ships to the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka, gleefully celebrating the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Nara on July 8, 2022?

Do we agree that the CCP’s 2019 declaration of their People’s War against the United States of America has brought chaos and ruin to our homeland?

Do we agree with Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn’s assessment of communist states: Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty?

Do we agree with this Solzhenitsyn statement: It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions – which in my view, is what America’s vaunted China hands who perpetually justify engagement with the CCP’s genocidal totalitarian dictatorship have done for decades, despite irrefutable evidence of the failure of appeasement, because they seek to preserve the copious funding they have enjoyed from CCP entities?

Is your passionate defense of engagement with the CCP founded in your belief that the CCP’s totalitarian model of governance is in fact superior to our “messy democracy” – that is a direct quote from Larry Fink of Blackrock, an architect of appeasement, who continues to invest billions of US pension funds into CCP military companies, while we are in Year 4 of the CCP’s People’s War on the USA?

Or is your passionate defense of engagement with the CCP based on your refusal to examine the hard facts and admit that the appeasement bloc got it wrong? What positive change can you point to that has resulted from US-China engagement over the last 40 years? After 40 years of failure to normalize CCP behavior, do you mean to suggest that the CCP will change if we give them another 40 years?

And once more, I request that you disclose the amount of funding in US dollars that you have received from CCP entities and the United Front Work Department. If you have not received funding from CCP entities and the UFWD, surely you should he proud of this and would have no issue in saying so.

I await your timely reply.

Sincerely,

Maura Moynihan

New York City

Maura Moynihan is an outspoken human rights advocate, author, film producer, and artist. The daughter of former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), she has been a journalist and researcher in Asia for many years while specializing in Tibet, Nepal, China, Thailand, and India. Now based in New York City, she concentrates on supporting Tibetan, Uyghur, Falun Gong, and other persecuted Chinese minorities, which efforts frequently involve confronting those who advocate for continued engagement with – and appeasement of – the communist Chinese. More on Maura Moynihan, including her blog postings, can be found at mauramoynihan.net

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