My Personal Olympic Boycott
In the end, it won’t matter one whit. But I plan to watch exactly none of the Olympic coverage offered by NBC this year. In granting the Olympics to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the IOC guaranteed the most political Olympic event since the 1980 Moscow games when then-President Jimmy Carter refused permission for the US to field a team.
Unfortunately for the IOC and the world, this Olympics looks more and more like the 1936 Berlin Games every day. Hitler, like the Chinese leaders today, wanted to project an image of a”New Nation” emerging on the world stage. Unfortunately for the world, Nazi Germany and Communist China share many of the same egregious characteristics:
- Labor camps for “re-education” of dissenters
- Medical Experimentation on humans against their will
- Execution of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience
- Lack of an independent judiciary with oversight capacity
- Abolition of labor unions
- Repression of a minority religion
- Restrictions on the press
- A propaganda ministry capable of generating feigned outrage
- Hypersensitivity over past aggressive actions (Germany: Annexation of the Sudetenland, China: Invasion and occupation of Tibet)
- A pathological self-confidence problem capable of injury by the smallest slight or insult
- An internal policing system with a propensity to violent overreaction resulting in mayhem and death of innocents
Interestingly, China has invented at least on new horror not available to the Nazis in 1936: the harvesting of human organs from executed prisoners. These organs are then sold, often to foreigners, enriching the regime further.
I am ashamed that our national leadership (there’s an oxymoron if ever there was one!) condones participation in these games. Therefore, I am resolved to have my own personal boycott of the broadcasts of the games. I hope others will turn their backs on these blood-soaked Olympics and remember the thousands who have perished in Chineese prisons and labor camps so that an elite few can play their little games in Beijing.
Filed under Beijing, politics : Comments (3) : Aug 8th, 2008 by muttmutt
August 8th, 2008 at 8:17 am
What a shame that the U.S. has lost our moral high ground. Now that we ignore international law and our own constitution, hold torture prisoners held indefinitely, and continue to support backwards monarchies because they happen to sell us oil, it’s pretty tough to lean on China and pressure them to reform. How sad indeed.
August 8th, 2008 at 8:21 am
It’s hard to point a finger at the Chinese for running concentration camps akin to the Nazis when we ourselves run one in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We can’t say anything about their use of slave labor to produce goods when we run similar slave labor camps in the Marianas. And it’s hard to criticize them for a lack of basic freedoms when our own, most fundamental freedom, the right of habeus corpus, is under constant assault from a reactionary and un-American right-wing party.
August 9th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Well, you missed out on a spectacular and magical opening ceremony.