Holocaust Denial

Sir, - Living in Ireland, we can console ourselves with the comforting thought that we did not know the real nature of the Jewish…

Sir, - Living in Ireland, we can console ourselves with the comforting thought that we did not know the real nature of the Jewish Holocaust at the time it was happening. We can afford to watch David Irving get the reward he "richly deserves", in the words of your Editorial of April 13th. We may indeed affirm the Holocaust, but we should hardly be smug.

How would we have dealt with the evils of the Nazi obscenity had we known? How would we deal now with such events, the persecution and decimation of a people "simply because of its religious belief and culture"? Look at the reception planned for the Chinese Vice-premier, Li Lanqing, who is to visit Dublin next week. There's your answer.

Make no mistake, the Chinese Communist Party and its totalitarian regime have been directly responsible for more deaths and human misery than Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot combined. China still maintains the largest existing forced labour camp complex in the world. China openly espouses a eugenics policy, the notorious 1989 "Mother and Child Health Scheme", which enforces the sterilisation of genetically substandard and inferior peoples, mainly identified among "ethnic minorities". China's decimation of the Tibetan people includes the routine sterilisation and enforced abortion of Tibetan women. Recent figures suggest that as many as 25 per cent of all Tibetan women have now been sterilised. There is no Tibetan family that has not lost many members in their own tragic holocaust - a holocaust many currently deny.

The fact that the Communist regime has frequently turned its barbarous attentions on its own people for dissenting beliefs (currently such as Falun Gong, and other "heretical" or "superstitious" sects), does nothing to excuse its evil. Consider that to be conceived female in China is a virtual guarantee of abortion or infanticide, thanks to the loathed `'one-child policy".

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What kind of people would torture a 60-year-old grandmother with electric batons, like Mrs Chen Zixiu, who was beaten to death on February 21st after a mere four days in a Chinese police cell, for practising Falun Gong meditation? The leading Chinese dissident Harry Wu calls them Nazis. It appears we prefer to call them trading partners. - Yours, etc.

Anthony O'Brien, Tibet Support Group Ireland, Ailesbury Road, Dublin 4.