As if starvation, the Cultural Revolution, and then infanticide, the laogai, the social credit system and sex-selection abortions were not enough, here's the latest from our trading partners the Chinese: China is now harvesting the organs of political prisoners of conscience on a wide scale for medical transplants against their will - and with the unwilling 'donors' still alive.

According to an important Fox News report:

It's the stuff of nightmares. And it has been buried from public view, hard to prove, and shrouded beneath the cloak of silence for almost two decades. But anecdotes and evidence are slowly bubbling to the surface that the organs of members of marginalized groups detained in Chinese prisons and labor camps are unwillingly harvested. Most affected is a spiritual minority, the Falun Gong, who have been persecuted for adhering to a Buddhist-centric religious philosophy grounded in meditation and compassion. After 12 months of independent assessment of all available evidence, the seven-person China Tribunal panel — which was initiated by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), an international human rights charity — delivered its final findings in June. The tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC who led the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic in the International Criminal Trial for the former Yugoslavia, stated with "certainty" that "in China, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time." "Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years, and Falun Gong practitioners have been one — and probably the main — source of organ supply," the report concluded, pointing to the growing transplant industry already worth more than $1 billion.

The Voice of America has an earlier and equally outrageous report (with photos of the nightmarish act) here.

You have to wonder why we trade with these people at all. This represents a new low. How sick does it have to get? Where do we draw the line?

What we have here is another manifestation of socialism, the materialistic philosophy that views all human beings as putty, commodities, worker ants, righted to live not because they are human beings with human rights, but conditioned on their service to the state. That's what makes it easy for socialists to treat human beings as mere matter, valued only through its usefulness to the state.

With no God-given human rights as seen in the West, immutable in themselves, the slippery slope begins. First these socialists started with the criminals, since nobody likes that bunch, then they moved on to the political prisoners of conscience, another marginal group whose loyalty is to something higher than China's state or its communism.

Soon it will be someone else they want to exert control over. It's a sick as heck system and bound to leave social ruin in its wake once the dictatorship, as all dictatorships, eventually falls. Human life means nothing to socialists observing their ideology, because only the state matters.

Not only do they create the terror that holds their hellhole state together, but they move farther and farther down the food chain of human rights violations, getting increasingly horrific in their deeds as they keep getting away with it. They not only get away with it internationally, but amass power from it. They answer to no god but socialism to give them a tinge of conscience, so they put all such factors together, and the road is open.

Again, why are we trading with these people? Why isn't every hoity-toity European Union official blasting these Chicoms as maggots? Why are Google, Yahoo, and others cooperating with them to strengthen their state, and why aren't they being stopped?

They all should be blasted for enabling this sick practice, halted and shunned.

Nothing justifies this sick behavior, a clear sign of not some aberration, but the design and effect of socialism itself.

Image credit: William Murphy via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.