Letters to the Editor
-
Cultural Boycott of the Olympics
China's enablement of the Darfur genocide should at least compel a cultural boycott of the Olympics, but only the new French prime minister and one of the low-polling Dems (Richardson?) will speak that out loud. It will never happen, because we can't even pretend that we think black Africans are as human as we are.
-
Boycotts won't work
The Chinese government isn't afraid of anyone backing out the Olympics, or anyone pulling the rug out from under them. Now, with just under a year left before the opening ceremonies, can you imagine any city preparing to host the games under a last minute change?
Barring a last minute invasion of Taiwan, the games will be held in Beijing, and all countries will be in attendance.
The Chinese aren't afraid of boycotts, but they are afraid of being embarrassed by protesters, which is why they are cracking down now, and why the city will be a virtual police state. Hu Jintao was running Tibet in 1989, and was promoted because he did a better job of cracking down on student protests then the folks in Beijing did. Beijing is savvy to the potential media power of a protester staring down policemen on a basketball court. With all of the media there, and very little way of stopping the instant satellite transmissions going around the globe, China does not want to look bad.
A better analogy than Seoul, then, is the Berlin games of 1936, the games used to announce the return of Germany to the world stage. Only one problem: Jesse Owens had something to say to the folks who talked about Aryan superiority.
I don't think we're going to get a Tibetan Owens, but we may well get a Tibetan protester running amidst a crowd of sprinters, being beaten and drug away, all on global television.
Could the world maintain its silence on the human rights crisis in China after that? I hope not.
-
I'm waiting for the obligatory
Building collapse from slapped up substandard bribe taking construction standards. That and the permanently brown air.
-
A Disgusting Corporate Bonanza--China is Open for Business
The 2008 Olympics will go on with all countries in attendance, especially the ones like the US, where giant corporations are treating this as their chance to dramatically expand their presence in China. As much as we all want it to be a peaceful, cultural exchange, the reality is that in this case it's all about money. Not that it's anything new. For the last twenty-five years the Summer Olympics have been a messy, quasi-athletic competition that is really a showcase for multinational corporate marketing...but expect China to take that to a new level.
Multinational corporations are already in China, but now is their chance to get even bigger and to use the Olympics as proof that China is just another country ready to deal. (Instead of what it actually is: a repressive regime responsible for genocide in Sudan, destroying Tibet and imprisoning its own people for insisting on freedom of expression and individuality. China's human rights record is abysmal.)
This is a country who regards the Dali Lama as a terrorist on par with Osama Bin Laden. He is not allowed to set foot in Tibet.
Did you see those pictures of the Chinese military shooting dead a young Buddhist nun who was taking children to Nepal? Awful stuff. It happens all the time, but this one was photographed by horrified European climbers in the area.
And where exactly is the Panchen Lama? China took this five year-old and his family prisoner in 1995 and his whereabouts are unknown. He is the world's youngest political prisoner.
I am sure that NBC will have its sports anchors like Bob Costas do little puff pieces noting the "controversy" over China's human rights abuses. You know, like there is any doubt that they are brutal murderers.
Yes, China is Open for Business.
Visit Beijing 2008: Race for Tibet (http://www.racefortibet.org/).
-
Beijing 08
I am not posting as a defender of Chinese policies in Tibet or Sudan. I am more troubled by Sudan than Tibet, as that situation is flat out client-state imperialism, whereas Tibet, as bad as it is, at least is a geographical and cultural extension of historical Chinese empires.
But as to the Olympics, when you think about a country that 30 years ago was as ass-backward as a major civilization has ever been in modern history, to be able to pull this off is truly amazing. Will China ever 'live up to its promises'? No. There is one party in power and they have to govern 1.4 billion people undergoing the most radical population shift from rural to urban and collective to individual in the history of the world. In order for that to happen, our sense of individual rights is going to lose out to what is necessary to keep the great majority of people gainfully employed and decently housed, fed, and educated.
This is not Nazi Germany espousing an ideology of racial or religious superiority. This is about the Mainland Han Chinese wanting to take their seat at the cultural table with the Japanese, Koreans, and Russians who have used lack of Chinese cultural advancement against them for the last two centuries.
I agree completely that we need to do an equally in-depth look at what is going on in 2009, when Bob Costas, Matt Lauer, and the crew have gone home.
-
Mini-Analogy In Detroit
When I moved to Detroit Proper a very few years ago, Downtown Motown looked like Falujah, because they were renovating, getting ready to host the All-Star Game, and then the Super Bowl.
By the time the Super Bowl rolled around, very few homeless guys were left on the streets. Maybe zero homeless guys. I noticed. I had gotten to know some of them.
We had local reports in the big Detroit papers that the city had set up special shelters with big-screen TVs, and that the city had rounded up all the homeless, and sent them there.
Now, it is a year and a half later, but only a few of them are back. I ask, "What happened to Darcy?" And people say they do not know.
I believe the All-Star Game and the Super Bowl had a very good effect. Maybe these poor guys got rounded up, but it appears that many of them got help as a result.
I hope so. I hope they are not all down in Guantanamo now.