Olympic Nausea

[pwwka]

I'm doing what might be called "boycotting" the Olympics. I'm not watching it, and letting people know why. I've very little idea about who's leading, though I'm sure it will remind us of the USA-USSR showdowns of old, only with a different communist nation of similar moral decrepitude. I do know Finland got a gold medal. Ain't that cute?

I play

Comments

[pwwka]

Justifying a mistake by citing other mistakes seems counter-productive to me, and I'm sure certain Jews who attempted to attend the Olympics in Nazi Germany would have agreed. If we must look at the past, I should note that Germany did not get better until there was an armed intervention. Yes, this is only the second time the Games are being held in Asia. I could name a dozen places it could have been held, all with better human rights records than China. And certainly I could name places that aren't violating the Committee's own code.

Brain size and intellect, I have also found, have little to do with compassion or taking a moral stand. Often the supposed smartest of us end up justifying horrible cruelties -- as in the eugenics movement popular in the US, Great Britain, and Germany amongst the educated elite. I refuse to condone the idea that the Ivory Tower and we members of society with IQs above 150 must therefore be best for humanity.

China not racist? Possibly, although the vibe I got from my Chinese history classes was that the Han Chinese could be quite so at various periods of history. The government now is certainly very controlling and biased against personal freedoms of religion, art, opinion, and apparently, beauty. To be fair, one class was taught by a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, so he may have had a particular bias. But the other members in my classes -- two of them from Shanghai -- didn't appear to think China anything other than unfree. They loved China and its traditions -- I too am an enthusiast of Chinese culture. But rewarding a country who has flagrantly disregarded even the tiny slap on the wrist the Committee gave it before the Games -- what does this teach? Should we have the games in Sudan, too, over the corpses of warring factions? We can celebrate China without giving that government what amounts to a modern mandate of heaven.

Hissing from the sidelines may be all I can do. But at least I can take a stand, even if the sound of is less than lovely to others' ears.

As you asked for my sources, here’s a bit --

Human Rights Watch

Amnesty International

Persecution.org

Voice of the Martyrs

Human Rights in China

US State Department