2008 July 08 | Between Asgard and the Western Paradise

Archive for July 8th, 2008

Jul 08 2008

The Beijing Olympics

Posted by: 阿偉 in Current Events

A few visitors have asked me if I would do a short segment on the Beijing Olympics, and I am responding to that request. Remember, if you’d like to suggest a topic to appear on this blog, simply send an e-mail at lin.dewei1@gmail.com with your name, city of residence, age, and desired topic, and I or the managers of this blog will attempt to write an article.

With the Games of the XXIX Olympiad to be held in Beijing just a month away, groups such as Students for a Free Tibet and Amnesty International are still calling for a boycott of the games. Nearly every aspect of the games has come under intense criticism from ‘activist’ groups. As early as 2005, Students for a Free Tibet had proposed a boycott of the Olympics games. More recently, others have been concerned with the ‘involvement’ of the Chinese in Darfur; still other human rights groups in the West have drawn comparison between the 1936 Olympics in Germany and this year’s event. The London Times has even run an article criticizing the hiring of Albert Speer, Jr., as an architect for the Olympic Complex.

To complicate matters worse, the March riots in Tibet once again thrust China into the spotlight and exposed some of the problems, both real imagined in the TAR. Former Socialist Party member, and current Foreign Affairs Minister Bernard Kouchner was the first in the said country to openly call for a boycott, with Sarkozy following shortly after. Likewise, in the United States, the well-timed riots gave more grievance to the Free-Tibet crowd and, combined with what seems to be biased media coverage of the riots, was enough to nudge many people in favour of an boycott. Celebrities have also been quick to voice their opinions, from Mia Farrow to Steven Spielberg. And who can forget Sharon Stone’s infamous “karma” comment in the wake of the Sichuan Earthquake?

The Chinese government has been rather vocal on the matter of not politicizing the Olympics, and this seems to be a key point. One should ask if the left-liberals who so adamantly oppose the Olympics in China would be opposed to holding the Olympic games in Venezuela, a country, which like China is also communist and has documented cases of human rights abuses. To rebut the accusation that they are politicising the Olympics, the left-liberals have claimed that “the Olympics have always been political”. If this is true, then what distinguishes these Olympics from any other “political” Olympics? If anything, it shows the incompetence and double-standards of liberals when dealing with political issues.

In reality, though, we must ask ourselves what an Olympic Boycott might accomplish. The US boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow did nothing to stop the Soviets from invading Afganistan, for example. Likewise, there is no real indication that a boycott of the Chinese Olympics will do anything to help ethnic Tibetans or dissidents within China. Instead, a boycott could worsen the conditions for the very people the pro-democracy evangelists are attempting to help.

There must be at least a few people who realize this. However, I suspect that there are people with an ulterior motive, that ulterior motive being to embarass or humiliate China. For months now, a few activist groups have been discussing amongst themselves how best to sneak into Beijing and stage a protest. The drive to humiliate China has also been quite evident in the liberal-biased Western media. For example, a few media outlets were quick to cherry-pick discriminatory comments towards Tibetans on Chinese forums, but made no mention about far more copious anti-Chinese comments on phayul.com (although most of them by Westerners who support the Tibetan cause), a website dedicated to Tibetan independence.

What we must ultimately realize, is that if everything is political, then nothing is. And while we may have our political disagreements, the Olympics is a chance for all people to put aside those agreements. Is it then too much to ask for a peaceful Olympics?