By the way, the 610 Office comes from June 10, and that's why they call it the 610 Office. It's all over China. There's an office in Hong Kong, actually, too, which we encountered when we were there. They were trying to disrupt our meeting. I can maybe drive it home with an example.
By the way, we've been in about 50 countries now talking about this. I guess it was in Melbourne where I ran into a former policeman from China who told me that he'd worked for 610, and that if, as David mentioned, somebody was being forced to give up their Falun Gong beliefs, he told me that the police were authorized to shoot the person if they thought he or she might go back to being a Falun Gong practitioner.
That gives you a sense of how totalitarian, how corrupt, and how appalling this whole system is, and it's hard for us as Canadians or for anybody to understand how the 610 Office works, but it's in every university, city, village, business. It's throughout the country. It was started by Jiang Zemin, who came out of the party headquarters in Beijing and saw, as David mentioned, about 10,000 people protesting. He could see people from the party, people from the army, diplomats, academics: it was right across all walks of life. He went back and he wrote a ridiculous letter asking who was going to prevail, Falun Gong or the Communist Party? Since that day, basically, the war has been going on against Falun Gong.
I'm happy to tell you that I don't think either of us has seen a case of a Falun Gong practitioner responding with violence to the incredible violence that they suffer 24/7, and of course, there's the demonization that goes on in the media 24/7.
Here's one more tiny anecdote. A friend of mine went to Tiananmen Square a couple of years ago with her mother. They were looking around and had a guide. Somehow the Falun Gong came up in discussion, and the guide said, “Oh, Falun Gong. They eat their children.” That's the level of demonization.
David has written about the Holocaust and has said that genocides don't start with acts: they start with words.