A Modest Proposal

Last week, I read an article on a Slovak blogging website about involuntary organ donations in China. After reading it I have to conclude that what is going on in the world nowadays is worse even than the events of the WWII. Although, maybe we are just better informed...

The article outlines how they kill prisoners in order to use them as organ donors. It is not only those sentenced to the capital punishment or the victims of accidents. Often, people in labour camps disappear under mysterious circumstances.

A year ago, when I visited Oxford, I saw a Chinese exhibition about the Falun Gong. It is a movement associated with meditation and the philosophy of harmony and independence, and its growing popularity is a needle in the eye of the establishment. The members are being persecuted, tortured and executed, and their organs are offered for transplants. There was a painting of an organ harvesting ‘operation' (above)...pretty awful.

The author of the blog was reproached about being oriented too much against the Chinese regime. Well, it is not only a problem of communism. Recently, I read on the Daily Telegraph website that bodies of aborted and miscarried babies were incinerated as clinical waste in the UK. Some were even used to heat the hospitals. 

Whatever economic rationale it might have, I reckon that most of the public would be outraged. Comments such as "Dear God, what have we become?" prove me right. In the last two years they "utilized" about 15,500 remains!

In 1729, Jonathan Swift published the satirical pamphlet A Modest Proposal, where he addressed the bad economic situation in Ireland. He suggested to the poor that they should sell their children as food to be eaten by the rich. Almost 300 years later, we are working up to this solution.

Now, in April we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, where over 800,000 people lost their lives. That we do not value the human life at war has been known for a long time. It looks like that we do not care even at times of peace, not even in the ‘developed' countries.

There is a lesson to learn for everyone. We should take care of ourselves even if it might come across as egoism or selfishness. Unfortunately, we can't completely rely on help from the above. We see what the value of a human life is.

Erik Redli is a university graduate from Slovakia who lived in London for much of his graduate life. Read more of his posts here.

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