CultNEWS101 Articles: 9/2/2025

Malaysia, Falun Gong, China, Nazism, Anthroposophy, UK, The Kingdom of Kubala

Free Malaysia Today: Falun Gong exhibits allegedly seized by 'China police' near National Monument

"A Falun Gong practitioner claims that seven men, identifying themselves as policemen from China, removed her group's exhibits near the National Monument in Kuala Lumpur last Friday."

" ... The woman, who wanted to be known only as Yong, told FMT she had set up the booth there three months ago to educate the public about Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China.

"I chased after them and asked for the items to be returned. One of them said, 'We are policemen from China'. They ignored my pleas and drove off," she said.

Yong claimed the men left in a van accompanied by a local tour guide and driver.

In May, then Kuala Lumpur police chief Rusdi Isa said the arrest of more than 70 Falun Gong followers ahead of Chinese president Xi Jinping's visit to Malaysia was lawful as "Falun Gong is an illegal organisation".

"As such, it is not permitted to carry out any activities," he was quoted as saying at a press conference."

Between Occultism and Fascism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race and Nation in Germany and Italy, 1900-1945 by Peter Staudenmaier

"The relationship between Nazism and occultism has long been an object of popular speculation and scholarly controversy. This dissertation examines the interaction between occult groups and the Nazi regime as well as the Italian Fascist state, with central attention to the role of racial and ethnic theories in shaping these developments. The centerpiece of the dissertation is a case study of the anthroposophist movement founded by Rudolf Steiner, an esoteric tendency which gave rise to widely influential alternative cultural institutions including Waldorf schools, biodynamic agriculture, and holistic methods of health care and nutrition. A careful exploration of the tensions and affinities between anthroposophists and fascists reveals a complex and differentiated portrait of modern occult tendencies and their treatment by Nazi and Fascist officials.

Two initial chapters analyze the emergence of anthroposophy's racial doctrines, its self-conception as an 'unpolitical' spiritual movement, and its relations with the völkisch milieu and with Lebensreform movements. Four central chapters concern the fate of anthroposophy in Nazi Germany, with a detailed reconstruction of specific anthroposophical institutions and their interactions with various Nazi agencies. Two final chapters provide a comparative portrait of the Italian anthroposophical movement during the Fascist era, with particular concentration on the role of anthroposophists in influencing and administering Fascist racial policy.

Based on a wide range of archival sources, the dissertation offers an empirically founded account of the neglected history of modern occult movements while shedding new light on the operations of the Nazi and Fascist regimes. The analysis focuses on the interplay of ideology and practice, the concrete ways in which contending worldviews attempted to establish institutional footholds within the organizational disarray of the Third Reich and the Fascist state, and shows that disagreements over racial ideology were embedded in power struggles between competing factions within the Nazi hierarchy and the Fascist apparatus. It delineates the ways in which early twentieth century efforts toward spiritual renewal, holism, cultural regeneration and redemption converged with deeply regressive political realities. Engaging critically with previous accounts, the dissertation raises challenging questions about the political implications of alternative spiritual currents and counter-cultural tendencies." 

Independent: Exclusive: A missing Texas mom was found living with a lost 'African' tribe. Now, her family speaks out

"A missing Texas woman found living with the self-proclaimed leaders of a lost "African" tribe in a Scottish forest insists she is there by her own free will, despite her family's fears she is lost to the sect forever.

Kaura Taylor was recently found living in the woods with the group after vanishing from her home three months ago, leaving relatives distraught.

"It is very stressful, and difficult. It breaks our heart. We're overly concerned about Kaura, but she doesn't think anyone is concerned about her," Taylor's aunt Teri Allen told The Independent.

In a message posted to Facebook after 21-year-old Taylor, mother to a one-year-old child who she took with her to Scotland, said that she was not missing and lashed out at reports she "disappeared."

"I'm very happy with my King and Queen, I was never missing, I fled a very abusive, toxic family," Taylor wrote, following up with a video message telling U.K. authorities to leave her alone in the woods in Jedburgh, 40 miles south of Edinburgh. She added that she is "an adult, not a helpless child."

However, Allen on Thursday pushed back stridently against those assertions, describing her niece's younger years as "very sheltered and protected."

She said Taylor "was brought up in church, but not their religion. Not this thing that they got going. It's a bunch of hogwash."

Speaking to The Independent from her Dallas-area home, Allen said Taylor kept it "totally hidden from the family" when she began communicating in 2023 with so-called Kingdom of Kubala leader King Atehene, a former opera singer and PR agent from Ghana whose real name is Kofi Offeh, and his wife Jean Gasho, who now goes by Queen Nandi.

Queen Nandi did not respond to a request for comment. An email seeking comment from King Atehene bounced back as undeliverable.

The Kingdom of Kubala claims to be a lost Hebrew tribe that aims to retake the land they say was expropriated when Queen Elizabeth I expelled native black Jacobites from England in the 1590s.

The trio in Jedburgh hope to add to their numbers by bringing other supposedly lost tribes back to their purported ancestral homeland."

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'Shen Yun' slides anti-Beijing message into colourful dance

France 24
March 13, 2024

The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicoloured visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an internet meme in recent years.

Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to "persistent persecution" in China, according to a January 2024 European Parliament resolution.

Shen Yun aims to "revive 5,000 years of traditional Chinese culture", which the group says Beijing has nearly succeeded in destroying.

Atheism, evolution, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are just some of the topics targeted during the show's roughly two-hour run time.

China banned Falun Gong, which it calls an "evil cult", in 1999 after 10,000 members peacefully demonstrated outside a government building in Beijing.

But the movement has found a global audience, performing Shen Yun in cities across the world every year and generating revenues of $46 million in 2022 alone, according to the ProPublica investigative news site.

– 'Greater forces at work' –

In front of some 2,000 spectators in the French city of Tours, a soprano sings to a divine power, castigating "modern thoughts" that are "corrupting" humanity.

The audience then watches as Chinese police chase peaceful demonstrators before one of the officers has a change of heart, becoming "aware that greater forces may be at work", according to the programme.

The demonstrators portrayed in the scene are members of Falun Gong -- but adverts for the performance do not spell this out.

"Shen Yun is obviously a facade to promote Li Hongzhi's ideas and recruit new members," said Marc Lebranchu, a researcher in traditional Chinese practices at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.

Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong, is a controversial figure who fled China in 1998, seeking political asylum.

In a 1991 Time magazine interview, Hongzhi portrayed himself as the saviour of humanity and claimed aliens were trying to replace humans.

French anti-cult association Unadfi said the movement's leader has made racist remarks about those with multiracial backgrounds and in a 2017 report accused Falun Gong of having "less than tolerant views of homosexuality".

However, Unadfi spokesperson Pascale Duval said no similar accusations have been levelled in France "for at least five or six years".

The group has also been criticised for its proximity to the ultra-conservative movement in the United States.

Between 2018 and 2019 a Falun Gong-affiliated media outlet called The Epoch Times paid more than $1.5 million for around 11,000 pro-Trump ads on Facebook over a six-month period, some of which peddled conspiracy theories, according to NBC News.

AFP made several attempts to contact Falun Gong's French-based branch but did not receive a response.

– 'Systematic persecution' –

Beijing initially saw the movement's promotion of qi gong -- a gentle exercise from traditional Chinese medicine -– as a low-cost way to maintain public health, but the Chinese regime banned the group when it started to threaten the CCP's dominance.

Since then, "tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been arbitrarily detained, many of them tortured", according to Amnesty International.

In January 2024, the European Parliament accused the CCP of engaging in "systematic persecution to eradicate the Falun Gong religious movement".

China has repeatedly faced accusations of forced organ harvesting from prisoners and in particular, members of Falun Gong.

The Chinese consulate in France's southern city of Marseille called these claims "fabricated" and urged French audiences to "stay away" from Shen Yun last year, calling it a "political tool".

Chinese authorities have made several attempts -- some successful -- to force the cities to cancel Shen Yun performances.

In 2008, the Chinese Embassy in Sweden lobbied the city of Stockholm to ban the show, but the city told AFP that the attempt was unsuccessful.

They had more luck in South Korea in 2016 when a court issued an order cancelling shows over financial threats from the Chinese embassy.

Edouard, a 67-year-old retiree, was too "dazzled by the juxtaposition of the dancers and visuals" to notice any controversy during the show in Tours.

He told AFP that he had never heard of the persecution of Falun Gong, but after seeing the show, he seemed convinced.

"It's a reality, and it needs to be known," he said.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240312-shen-yun-slides-anti-beijing-message-into-colourful-dance

US: Chinese agents paid bribes in plot to disrupt anti-communist Falun Gong movement

Michael R. Sisak
National Post
The Associated Press
May 26, 2023

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. authorities have arrested two suspected Chinese government agents in connection with an alleged plot by Beijing to disrupt and ultimately topple the exiled anti-communist Falun Gong spiritual movement.

John Chen and Lin Feng were charged in an indictment unsealed Friday with scheming to revoke a New York-based Falun Gong organization’s tax-exempt status and paying bribes to a undercover officer posing as a U.S. tax agent.

The undercover officer recorded multiple conversations with Chen, and investigators obtained a wire tap to record phone calls in which Chen and Feng discussed instructions they purportedly received from Chinese government officials, prosecutors said.

In one recording, prosecutors said, Chen referred to Chinese government officials as akin to “blood brothers” and, in another, he said Beijing would be “very generous” in rewarding the undercover officer’s help cracking down on Falun Gong’s non-profit status.

Chen, a 70-year-old U.S. citizen, and Feng, a 43-year-old lawful permanent resident, are charged with acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government, bribing a public official and conspiracy to commit international money laundering.

Chen and Feng were both born in China but now live in the Los Angeles area, where they were arrested Friday. Information on an initial court appearance or lawyers who could speak on their behalf was not immediately available.

Messages seeking comment were left with the Chinese Embassy in Washington and with the Falun Gong movement.

China banned the Falun Gong movement in 1999, classifying it as an evil cult and one of the “Five Poisons,” or chief threats to its rule. Since then, Falun Gong practitioners have found refuge at a 400-acre compound called Dragon Springs in upstate New York.

In the U.S., the Falun Gong movement is known mostly for its ties to Shen Yun, a touring performing arts group, and The Epoch Times, a newspaper that has been marketed as an alternative to traditional U.S. media while also coming under fire for amplifying misinformation and conspiracy theories.

The Justice Department has made a series of prosecutions in recent years to disrupt China’s efforts in the U.S. to identify, locate and silence pro-democracy activists and others who are openly critical of Beijing’s policies. Such practices by foreign governments are known as “transnational repression.”

“The Chinese government has yet again attempted, and failed, to target critics of the (People’s Republic of China) here in the United States,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

The U.S., Garland added, will “continue to investigate, disrupt, and prosecute” China’s efforts to “silence its critics and extend the reaches of its regime onto U.S. soil.”

In seeking to undermine Falun Gong, federal prosecutors allege, Chen and Feng’s urged the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the organization’s non-profit tax status. In a whistleblower complaint to the tax agency in February, Chen described Falun Gong as a “gigantic mega cult” — echoing language China’s government uses to describe the movement.

Chen and Feng then turned to the undercover officer to make sure the IRS acted on the complaint, offering a $50,000 reward — and handing over $5,000 in cash as a down payment — if the tax agency conducted an audit, prosecutors said.

Chen met with the officer at a restaurant north of New York City on May 14, prosecutors said. A few days later, the officer sent Chen a letter on fake IRS letterhead that stated the agency had opened a case on Falun Gong, prosecutors said. Chen relayed the news to Feng in a wire tapped phoned conversation, indicating that he was planning to update Chinese government officials on their progress, prosecutors said.

Chen and Feng’s arrest comes a month after the Justice Department charged two men with establishing a secret police station in New York City on behalf of the Chinese government. Around the same time, federal prosecutors charged about three dozen officers with China’s national police force with using social media to harass dissidents inside the U.S.

In 2020, the Justice Department charged more than a half-dozen people with working on behalf of the Chinese government in a pressure campaign aimed at coercing a New Jersey man wanted by Beijing into returning to China to face charges.

—-

Associated Press reporter Eric Tucker in Washington contributed to this report.



https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/us-chinese-agents-paid-bribes-in-plot-to-disrupt-anti-communist-falun-gong-movement

3 Religions That Are Banned In Some Countries Around The World

Banned Beliefs: 3 Religions That Face Restrictions in Certain Countries


Andrei Tapalaga
History of Yesterday
May 17, 2023

Religious freedom is a fundamental human right, yet in some parts of the world, certain religions face severe restrictions and even outright bans. Today, we will explore three religions that have been banned or heavily persecuted in various countries: Falun Gong, Ahmadiyya, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. These religions have faced significant challenges in their practice, with restrictions imposed by governments based on political, social, or religious grounds.

Falun Gong: A Spiritual Movement Suppressed

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice that emerged in China in the early 1990s. Combining elements of meditation, qigong exercises, and moral teachings, Falun Gong attracted millions of followers within a short span of time. However, its rapid growth and popularity raised concerns among Chinese authorities, leading to a ban in 1999.

The Chinese government labeled Falun Gong as an “evil cult” and launched a massive crackdown on its practitioners. Thousands of adherents were detained, tortured, and subjected to forced labor and re-education programs. The authorities justified their actions by claiming that Falun Gong threatened social stability and national security.

Ahmadiyya: A Sect Targeted for Its Beliefs

Ahmadiyya is a sect within Islam that originated in India in the late 19th century. It emphasizes the belief that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a messiah and prophet, which has been considered heretical by mainstream Islamic sects. As a result, Ahmadi Muslims have faced persecution and legal restrictions in several countries, particularly Pakistan.

In Pakistan, Ahmadiyya Muslims have been declared non-Muslims by the state, which severely restricts their religious practices. They are prohibited from calling themselves Muslims, reciting the Islamic declaration of faith, or engaging in Muslim religious practices. Ahmadiyya mosques have been targeted, and violence against Ahmadiyya community members has occurred.

Jehovah’s Witnesses: A Faith on the Margins

Jehovah’s Witnesses is a Christian denomination known for its distinctive beliefs and practices, such as refusing military service, blood transfusions, and participation in political activities. Their non-conformity has led to bans and restrictions in various countries around the world.

Russia has been one of the countries where Jehovah’s Witnesses have faced significant challenges. In 2017, the Russian Supreme Court labeled the organization as extremist and banned its activities. Jehovah’s Witnesses’ properties were confiscated, and their members faced arrests and imprisonment for practicing their faith.



The Impact of Religious Bans: Human Rights and Freedom of Belief

The bans on these religions raise important questions about human rights and religious freedom. Restricting or banning a religious group’s activities not only infringes upon individual freedom of belief but also undermines broader principles of human rights. These restrictions stifle religious diversity and pluralism, hindering the free expression of one’s faith.

Despite facing bans and persecution, followers of Falun Gong, Ahmadiyya, and Jehovah’s Witnesses have engaged in advocacy efforts to seek change and challenge the restrictions imposed on their religious practices. They have utilized various avenues, such as legal challenges, international pressure, and raising awareness through media and human rights organizations.

The banning and persecution of religious groups like Falun Gong, Ahmadiyya, and Jehovah’s Witnesses highlight the challenges faced by believers seeking to exercise their religious freedom. These restrictions not only violate the principles of human rights but also hinder religious diversity and the expression of individual beliefs. As we strive for a world that embraces tolerance and respect, it is essential to recognize and address the barriers faced by these religious communities in their quest for freedom of belief.



https://historyofyesterday.com/3-religions-that-are-banned-in-some-countries-around-the-world/

Canada's Oscar Entry Is About Chinese Censorship. So Why Does It Peddle Another Propaganda?

Jason Loftus' animated documentary tells a political story about a group of Falun Gong members who hijacked China's state TV in 2002, but that’s only part of the story.


Jude Dry
IndieWire
October 21, 2022

In the strategic maneuverings of Oscar season, betting on primacy in recency is always smart. Hoping to capitalize on last year’s immense love for “Flee,” the first film to be nominated for Best Animated Feature, Best International Feature, and Best Documentary at the Academy Awards, Canada chose a politically bold animated documentary as its official entry. Apparently, nobody at the National Film Board of Canada knows about Wikipedia.

Directed by Jason Loftus, “Eternal Spring” uses beautiful 3-D drawings to animate the story of a 2002 state TV hijacking by members of Falun Gong, a religious group that was brutally censored in the late-’90s/early aughts. Drawing from childhood memories, artist Daxiong imbues the story with an emotional heft as he reframes his feelings about the religion.

Taken on its own, it’s a stirring portrait of political dissidents fighting for religious freedom — but the film makes no mention that the religion currently peddles a host of far-right conspiracy theories including QAnon, anti-vaccine misinformation, and disparages evolution, atheism, and homosexuality. Unfortunately for the film’s creative merits, art does not exist in a vacuum.

Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa) originated in the Northeastern city of Changchun, where Daxiong was born and raised. Classified as a new religious movement, the meditation-based practice blends Buddhist and Taoist traditions with qigong-style exercise (though it would later quarrel with qigong groups). Initially embraced by the Chinese government, attitudes changed as the movement gained widespread popularity at home and abroad. By 1999, the full weight of China’s state-sponsored media and government surveillance came down on the practice, causing many members to eventually flee the country.

“Eternal Spring” tells the story of the TV takeover. On March 8, 2002, a group of practitioners based in Changchun hijacked state TV to broadcast footage of Falun Gong being practiced around the world and praised as a positive religion based in love. After setting the stage for Daxiong’s personal connection to the religion, the film follow the artist as he interviews surviving members of the TV takeover, sketching their likenesses with swift accuracy. Loftus introduces the various players like avatars in a video game, which replay when their voices are heard, making it simple to follow and connect with each character. Daxiong’s drawings are then transposed into sweeping 3-D animation to tell the story, which unfolds at an engaging heist thriller clip.

Shifting seamlessly from present day interviews to lyrical animation, “Eternal Spring” offers a neat window into the making of the film while stirring empathy and connecting the story to today, with some obvious caveats. A man cries after seeing an animated version of the home he can never return to, highlighting the human toll taken in the brutality of the Chinese government. Sadly, many of the key players in the TV takeover did not survive their long prison sentences or tortures. With Daxiong’s detailed faces and the descriptive narration, the animation is able to bring them back to life, though their absence in the live portions is a somber warning.

One figure who stands out is called Big Truck. Described as a former ruffian who changed his ways after finding Falun Gong. His hulking frame fills the story with a gentle giant humility, and his heroic tale of escaping from prison is inspiring. Liang is dubbed The Mastermind, a respected local leader who organized the hijacking. A beautiful scene arises from one of his more creative protests, as banners proclaiming “Falun Gong is good” float high above the city on helium balloons. When an official pops a balloon, yellow paper flyers sprinkle down like confetti.

The film ends with a mournful postscript detailing how and where these figures perished, mostly in prison or from injuries sustained there. As their photos appear alongside their fates, it is striking to think how easily names and numbers fade into oblivion. How many people are currently suffering in Chinese prisons, and who will tell their stories? Enacted with the utmost care, “Eternal Spring” feels like a sacred reckoning, salvaging a courageous act of political protest from the obscurity of time and propaganda. But that was then.

Today, Falun Gong is known for owning and operating The Epoch Times, “a multi-language newspaper that opposes the Chinese Communist party, promotes far-right politicians in Europe, and has championed former President Donald Trump in the U.S.,” according to Wikipedia. “The Epoch Media Group’s news sites and YouTube channels have spread conspiracy theories such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation, and false claims of fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election. In 2020, The New York Times called it ‘a global scale misinformation campaign.'”

“Eternal Spring” would not be the first time that Falun Gong used art to peddle its messages. Falun Gong also operates its own TV station, New Tang Dynasty, and Shen Yun Performing Arts, a U.S.-based entertainment company. All of these entities are overseen by Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi, whose appears in the film as a trusted interview subject, despite publicly espousing views that aliens walk the earth.

The story of “Eternal Spring” deserves to be told, but truthfully — Loftus’ film, however, is a victim of the very kind of insidious propaganda the members of Falun Gong once tried to fight.

Grade: D

“Eternal Spring” is now in select theaters.





https://www.indiewire.com/2022/10/eternal-spring-review-canada-oscar-chinese-censorship-1234774943/

CultNEWS101 Articles: 2/28/2022 (Greg Locke, Northridge Church, Clergy Sexual Abuse, Legal, In Sinu Jesu, Spiritual Abuse, Shen Yun, Falun Gong, China)

Greg Locke, Northridge Church, Clergy Sexual Abuse, Legal, In Sinu Jesu, Spiritual Abuse, Shen Yun, Falun Gong, China

RNS: Tennessee preacher Greg Locke says demons told him names of witches in his church

Controversial Tennessee preacher Greg Locke has turned from claims of election fraud to conversations with demons.

" ... In recent years Locke has used his sermons to attack LGBTQ people, accuse Democratic politicians of child abuse, spread claims about election fraud, denounce vaccines and claim that the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax. During Sunday's sermon, he blamed witchcraft for an outbreak of illness in the church."

" .... Two of the witches were in his wife's Bible study, '' said Locke, who warned the alleged witches not to make a move during his sermon. He then retold the New Testament story of Jesus casting a demon out of a man and into a herd of pigs, turning it into an extended monologue about witches in the church."

The Roy's Report: Minnesota Pastor Resigns As Accusations Mount That Family Covered Up Abuses

"The senior pastor of a rural Minnesota church and his wife have resigned amid mounting allegations of abuse and cover-up by family members on the church staff.

Mark Perryman reportedly resigned last Sunday from Northridge Church, an Assemblies of God congregation in Owatonna, Minnesota. His resignation came less than a week after his son-in-law, former associate pastor Sean Masopust, was charged with criminal sexual conduct."

Where Peter Is: Silverstream Priory, one-sided narratives, and spiritual abuse

"On Friday of last week, Irish blogger Pat Buckley reported that four men have come forward with allegations including boundary violations, spiritual abuse, and sexual harassment against Dom Mark Kirby of Silverstream Priory, the author and alleged visionary behind the popular devotional book In Sinu Jesu. These new allegations follow a lengthy August 2021 interview with Fr. Benedict Andersen in the Pillar.

Fr. Andersen is a Silverstream monk who is currently in canonical limbo, unable to minister as a priest after his complaints of inappropriate behavior and spiritual abuse by Fr. Kirby resulted in an apostolic visitation of the priory. Formerly the sub-prior of the community, Andersen was the first person to publicly bring forward allegations against Kirby, although stories about Kirby's past and his allegedly abusive treatment of his subordinates had been circulating for years.

If these new allegations are true, it appears that Fr. Andersen has been vindicated. Not only was he mistreated by Fr. Kirby, but his treatment by the diocese has been unjust."

People's World: Shen Yun: The Falun Gong cult's anti-communist propaganda roadshow

" ... This dance company, whose name roughly translates to "Divine Rhythm," performs under the auspices of Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, a spiritual practice drawing on the Chinese Buddhist and Daoist traditions. Followers practice qigong, meditation, and moral philosophy with the aim of achieving spiritual enlightenment. Uniquely among qigong practices, however, this school incorporates apocalyptic and messianic elements centered around founder Li Hongzhi—a battle for human consciousness between the enlightened and space aliens (!) to be followed by an impending judgment day.

While practitioners are instructed to be opaque about Li's teaching with the uninitiated, what can be found about Falun Gong's beliefs is a bit concerning. Li has claimed that alien life forms intend to displace humanity with clones and that scientific development is the result of alien interference. He has further claimed that race-mixing in humans is an alien plot to drive humanity further from God and that heaven is racially segregated. Li apparently so despises miscegenation that he has been recorded as saying: "When a child is born from an interracial marriage, that child does not have a heavenly kingdom to go to."

Among other regressive tendencies, anti-communism is a central tenet of Falun Gong. Shen Yun performances have regularly incorporated explicitly anti-communist and anti-Communist Party of China messaging. In 2019, Shen Yun's performance even included an act in which "Chairman Mao appeared, and the sky turned black; the city in the digital backdrop was obliterated by an earthquake, then finished off by a Communist tsunami. A red hammer and sickle glowed in the center of the wave."

As Shen Yun so campily demonstrated, Falun Gong has a long and strained history with communism. Since being banned in China in 1999, the organization and its media outlets have lambasted the Communist Party there, claiming severe and unjust religious persecution, backed up with ample help from Western media until recent years."

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CultNEWS101 Articles: 2/14/2022 (Jehovah's Witnesses, Russia, Religious Freedom, Legal, Falun Gong, China, Plymouth Brethren, Alpha Men Assemble, Sovereign Citizens, UK)

Jehovah's Witnesses, Russia, Religious Freedom, Legal, Falun Gong, China, Plymouth Brethren, Alpha Men Assemble, Sovereign Citizens, UK

Eurasia Review: Kremlin Behind Moscow Patriarchate's Crackdown On Dissent Churchmen And Movement - OpEd

"The Kremlin is behind the Moscow Patriarchate's crackdown on dissidents among the clergy and among Orthodox social movements, Aleksey Makarkin says; but the Russian church in some cases has gone ever further than the state because it fears that the state will begin to use its organs against the church and undermine popular support for the faith.

The Russian church was enthusiastic about the state's intervention against Jehovah's Witnesses and other groups, the leader of the Moscow Center for Political Technologies says; and it welcomes the state's help against Orthodox clergy and activists who step out of line but also fears where that could lead (ng.ru/ng_religii/2021-12-14/9_521_exile.html).

What this has meant, Makarkin says, is that now "church structures try to be careful even on those issues where earlier they displayed great activity." They are uncertain just where the red lines for church behavior are as far as the Kremlin is concerned; and the most subservient are simply avoiding doing anything that might cause a problem for them.

"The government starts from the proposition that the church must control itself and not allow declarations which contradict the policies of the powers," he continues. "If these things arise, then the church itself is required to address them. And when that doesn't happen, then the state is forced to intervene and advance demands on the church leadership."

One aspect of the situation is becoming especially fraught, Makarkin says. That concerns the role of elders to whom "many people from the government and force structures go," a behavior the powers had accepted but are now seeing as a threat given the increasing outspokenness of these prominent features of the Orthodox landscape."

The Christian Post: When your faith makes you an enemy of the state

"The Christian Post's [four-part] series on China's human rights abuses under the spotlight of the Olympic Games details the accounts of Falun Gong practitioners who fled the country following the government's crackdown on the popular spiritual practice."

The Times: Billions in Covid deals given to firms linked to Plymouth Brethren sect

"Dozens of companies with connections to a tiny fundamentalist Christian sect were awarded as much as £2.2 billion in government coronavirus contracts, The Times can reveal.

Firms with links to the insular Plymouth Brethren have been handed contracts for PPE, masks, visors, aprons, tests and ventilators without other companies being given the chance to bid for the contracts.

It can be revealed that PPE worth millions of pounds supplied by firms linked to the group were cleared for use by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) despite being declared substandard by the Health & Safety Executive (HSE).

The evangelical group, likened to a "cult" by some former members, has connections with the Conservative Party, and MPs have previously lobbied for it to be given charitable status.

The first Brethren assembly in England was established in Plymouth in 1831 by a group who had become disillusioned with the Anglican church and felt it had become too involved with the secular state. The majority of members are born into the church, though on rare occasions those without a family connection have joined by meeting a local group. Members are encouraged to set up their own businesses.

This week it emerged that the DHSC had written off PPE worth £8.7 billion last year, admitting to a "significant loss of value to the taxpayer".

Unispace Global, an office interior design company that suddenly became a PPE provider at the start of the pandemic, was awarded seven PPE contracts worth almost £680 million by the DHSC in 2020.

The group that owns the company belongs to two Australian brothers, Charles and Gareth Hales, whose father is Bruce Hales, the worldwide leader of the Plymouth Brethren sect."

BBC Monitoring: Anti-vax protests: 'Sovereign citizens' fight UK Covid vaccine rollout

"Some groups have even held training camps for their members. Images have emerged of black-clad men being coached in "direct action" techniques.

No basis in law

Followers of "sovereign citizen" and "freeman on the land" conspiracy theories wrongly believe they possess the legal power to bring leading politicians, civil servants and scientists before so-called "common law courts".

They allege "crimes" over Covid restrictions and vaccinations, even though such claims have no basis in law.

But that has not deterred a newly-formed group calling itself Alpha Men Assemble, which combines anti-vaccine and sovereign citizen beliefs.

It has been holding training sessions in several UK locations where volunteers prepare for "direct action", such as breaking through police lines, marching formations and sparring.

Alpha Men Assemble members are trained in various confrontation techniques

Launched on the Telegram chat app in mid-December, the group has amassed 8,000 members, and posts footage of training sessions online.

According to the Daily Mail, at a recent training session in Staffordshire activists were urged to "hit vaccine centres, schools, head teachers, colleges, councillors and directors of public health in every area".

The group has described itself as "free thinking men and women living as sovereign beings under common law". They say that they reject violence and are in favour of "body autonomy".

Its training events, it says, are "non-combative and are in no way to be linked to any militia or extremism".

We asked the Alpha Men Assemble group for comment, but have not yet received a response."

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When your faith makes you an enemy of the state

Leonardo Blair, Senior Features Reporter
The Christian Post
February 06, 2022

Part 4 of The Christian Post's series on China's human rights abuses under the spotlight of the Olympic Games details the accounts of Falun Gong practitioners who fled the country following the government's crackdown on the popular spiritual practice. Read part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here.

NEW YORK — It was July 20, 1999. Michael Yu, an accountant and Falun Gong practitioner, remembers well what happened in China.

Then-President Jiang Zemin had declared millions of Yu’s fellow Falun Gong practitioners a threat to the government. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Li Hongzhi, who founded the spiritual movement only seven years earlier, in 1992.

Thousands of Li’s followers, including officials in the Chinese Communist Party, were arrested that day, too, while millions of Li’s books and cassette tapes were destroyed, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.

Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne, the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions, explains in Bitter Winter, a magazine covering religious liberty and human rights, how the CCP branded Falun Gong an evil cult after the 1999 crackdown. Things haven’t improved much since then.

As of September 2017, Falun Gong was listed as the No. 1 most “dangerous” cult by the CCP, along with a number of church groups. Criminal law in China allows persons belonging to groups branded as cults to be punished with sentences of up to life in prison. Religions deemed to be cults are monitored by an office called the Public Security Anti-Xie Jiao Organization. The office is informally known as the "610 Office."

One freezing afternoon in January, while sitting inside the New York Food Court in Flushing, Queens, where the cuisine of the borough’s Asian heartland collides in a lavish display, Yu told The Christian Post how his practice of Falun Gong made him an enemy of the Chinese government and forced him to flee his homeland.

The 49-year-old remembered how he stumbled upon the practice in 1995 when he was a college student in Shanghai. At that time, “there wasn’t persecution of the practice.”

“Since I was young, I was interested in qigong and martial arts for health and fitness and supernatural phenomenon,” he said through interpreter and fellow Falun Gong practitioner Scott Li.

Qigong and Falun Gong

For about 20 years spanning the 1980s and ’90s, qigong had grown popular among hundreds of millions of Chinese in the officially atheist country. Qigong is described as a hybrid of traditional medical and self-cultivation practices developed in the early 1950s by members of the Chinese medical establishment to promote traditional Chinese medicine.

While some members of the CCP in modern China had criticized it as “superstitious” with links to religion and spirituality, defenders of the practice managed to make room for it and similar therapies alongside biomedicine.

In his writings, Li Hongzhi, who lives in upstate New York after fleeing China, compares qigong to “magic.”

“Qigong is not exclusively a product of our country. It exists in foreign countries as well, but they don’t call it qigong. Western countries, such as the United States, Great Britain, and so on, call it magic,” he explained.

Falun Gong is an offshoot of qigong, which Li Hongzhi describes as “one of the Buddhist system’s special qigong methods,” which “has its own distinct qualities that set it apart from the usual ways of Buddhist cultivation.”

“This cultivation system is a special, intense cultivation method that used to require that cultivators have extremely high character and great spiritual aptitude,” Li wrote.

Falun Gong claimed up to 100 million followers during the 1990s, but only about 7 million to 10 million remain in China out of a population of more than 1.39 billion, according to a 2020 report from the United Kingdom's Home Office. But some sources suggest Falun Gong's population in China could be as high as 40 million.

Yu described how he started a qigong club in college with another student to introduce more people to qigong for health and fitness.

“One of the student's parents was practicing Falun Gong and found out that they were more into the traditional arts, so the mother gave them the introduction to Falun Gong book. That’s how he came into Falun Gong,” the translator explained as Yu spoke.

Yu, who was around 22 at the time, did further reading on Falun Gong and realized that it answered a lot of his questions about life. He soon fully committed to the practice.

Persecution

He never imagined he would face a time when his faith in Falun Gong would become a liability.

The day after the mass arrests, on July 21, 1999, Yu said he went to a government office in Shanghai to ask why Falun Gong practitioners were being arrested. He said the police responded by arresting him too.

“Then the next day, July 22, they [the CCP] started broadcasting defamations and false things about Falun Gong to try to make it look bad. And they pretty much forced all the employees throughout the country to watch it," he recalled. "And asked them, 'Are you still going to practice?'” he recalled.

At the time, Yu was working as a financial manager at a company where government regulators held a position to monitor the workers' behavior to ensure they were compliant with the laws of the state.

“They used all kinds of tactics to try to pressure him to give up [his practice of Falun Gong], including asking his mother and family members to plead with him. They threatened him with firing and arrest,” Scott Li said.

When Yu resisted the pressure, he was quickly ostracized at work, which forced him to quit.

A few months later, in May 2000, he went to Tiananmen Square to do Falun Gong meditation in Beijing in protest. He was arrested on the spot.

“It was to send a message to the Chinese government that they should stop the persecution,” Yu said, noting that he also wanted them to “clear the name of Falun Gong.”

The police released him the same day after his arrest because he had not traveled with any identification. In July that year, he was arrested in Shanghai and detained for 28 days for meditating with other Falun Gong practitioners.

His refusal to give up the practice and refrain from engaging in any public display of Falun Gong landed him in a re-education camp from June 2001 until December 2002.

“Their intent is to make you give up the practice. If you don’t give up, they put you through extreme torture where you don’t want to live,” he said.

Even though there were times when he felt like giving up at the camp, Yu said he held on.

He remembers being beaten and made to sit on a tiny chair until his underwear was stuck to his flesh. He added that he was tortured in other ways in which he could barely walk afterward.

While he didn’t give up Falun Gong, the experience inside the re-education camp made him more careful with his practice after he was released.

In 2011, when he got the chance to come to the U.S. for a business conference for accountants, he decided not to return to China. He now enjoys practicing Falun Gong without fear.

Tom Tang

When Tom Tang, 45, was in high school in Guangzhou, China, he was a student leader who was so smart that everyone in his community expected him to end up at one of China's top universities.

His high hopes were dashed in 1996, however, when his scores on national exams turned out to be only good enough for a lower-ranked school called Zhaoqing University.

In China, explained Scott Li, performance on the college entrance exam is a “huge thing,” and Tang’s underperformance was a “big heartbreak.”

Tang became so depressed he began experiencing physical pain in his body. He also started contemplating the meaning of life.

One night, as he was leaving a class at the college, he noticed a group of people practicing meditation. It shocked him that people in the high-pressure society in which he lived could be so tranquil.

A classmate who was studying Falun Gong told him that the people who were meditating were Falun Gong practitioners and loaned him a book about the practice.

It took him a while to read the book because of his depression, but once he was done, Tang found purpose in life again and embraced Falun Gong as a way of life.

“He was just moved, you know,” Scott Li said, interpreting his response. “After reading this book and the principles, he was a completely changed person.”

By about May or June in 1999, Tang began hearing rumors that the Chinese government was planning to ban the practice. On July 20, 1999, he was stunned when a local coordinator for Falun Gong practitioners told him that the practice had been banned.

He didn’t understand why the government would ban a practice that had given him peace and purpose in life. So that night, he went to the capital of his province to get answers from government officials.

When he got to the government office, he found a long line of Falun Gong followers looking for answers also.

Local government officials told the group that there was nothing they could do to reverse the ban and rounded all of them up and took them to a school nearby, where they were detained for about half a day. Police collected their personal details. And once Tang was processed, he went back to his college.

On July 22, 1999, Tang said he went outside to meditate at his college and the police quickly arrived. He said they took his identification and told him he could not practice Falun Gong.

After he graduated from college, Tang went back to his hometown in Guangzhou, where he and other Falun Gong practitioners were monitored by the 610 Office.

Tang said a police officer told him that as long as he practiced Falun Gong quietly and not in public, he didn’t care. He was also advised not to go to Beijing.

The zealous Falun Gong practitioner, however, didn't listen.

In July 2000, Tang went to Tiananmen Square and held up a banner protesting the Falun Gong ban. He and other protesters were immediately swarmed by police who took them to a local precinct and locked them in steel cages.

Later that night, they were rounded up and transported to another city nearby.

To protect themselves, Tang and the protesters left their identification at home. But the police still managed to find out who some of them were. Five days later, someone from the 610 Office in Guangzhou took him to a detention center, where he was held for 15 days.

During that time, he was beaten and told to stop practicing Falun Gong. But Tang replied that he couldn’t because Falun Gong is his life. He was later released to his family and warned not to protest.

A few days later, Tang was detained again and taken to a labor camp, where he spent two years, from 2001 to 2003.

For a while, Tang kept up his protest by going on a hunger strike, which prevented him from working. He was eventually forced to eat and build a range of products, like Christmas lights and trinkets similar to those found at a dollar store.

“It’s extremely painful to the point where you don’t want to live, but they don’t let you die,” Tang recalled from the experience.

Tang spent another four-and-a-half years in prison for refusing to stop practicing Falun Gong.

After he was released from prison in 2008, Tang took over the management of his sister’s handbag business, which became wildly successful even as he continued sharing his Falun Gong practice with clients quietly.

As the government continued to monitor him, he filed a lawsuit against a former CCP leader for the persecution he suffered in 2015.

That year, while he was in the U.S. on a business trip, government agents went to his business and took the machines he was using to print information about the Falun Gong.

He decided it wouldn’t be safe to return to China after that. He distanced himself from the business for the sake of his family still there.

Contact: leonardo.blair@christianpost.com Follow Leonardo Blair on Twitter: @leoblair Follow Leonardo Blair on Facebook: LeoBlairChristianPost



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