Beijing Olympics
There are increasing media indications that any organization with any kind of grievance against the Chinese government in Beijing, is going to use this year's Olympic games to press home their concerns The Olympics are the perfect place for a protest. - By Anne Applebaum - Slate Magazine. They will disrupt, interrupt and replace the message and news of the day with their own. They will not stand beside the scoreboard with their bill of particulars. Their passion will dictate they throw the scoreboard over and settle their own scores. I do not know what to make of this now obvious inevitability. I imagine the soapbox of Olympic attention must seem an enormous and delectably high podium. Broad and lonely boards, crying out for viewpoints of integrity to be shouted from them. China is a very large nation. It is a rather repressive nation. No especial offense is meant by that, with a read-through of the speeches and public comments of the leadership you will hear them say that themselves, as a point of pride. It is a nation that generates stark winners and losers. Leaving the unsettled latter adrift in its wake. Tibet is one of the aggrieved, they are not even voluntarily part of the Chinese nation, run as a internal colony, an imperial dumping ground. The Tibetan people have been around for thousands of years diffused beyond the borders of the administrative unit China would mark out for them. Tibet; additionaly, has the Dalai Lama; a noble spiritual gravitas-weighted reminder of the claim that Tibet is a God defined independent nation. Or at least an autonomous region. "Free Tibet" is a celebrated cause world wide, no less an inspiration to its own people. On this account and for what other affairs that can get organized well enough fast enough the Beijing Olympics will be fought. Fought through campaigns for public opinion. This is fine, PR is the world's Lingua Franca. Propaganda the only real mode of intentional communication between those without personal connections. Between states and publics. Corporate's and publics. Between publics. Among this debate I have begun to hear calls for the pinnacle statement that could be made for such an event. That the US and other nations should boycott the Beijing Olympics. I disagree. So far these calls are coming mostly from the left and will probably be ignored. It will become a concern if they spread to that distempered land where the neo-Wilsonians meet the neo-conservatives. They remind me of the calls mostly from the right that we boycott the 1980 Olympics in Moscow
1980 Summer Olympics boycott - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, which we did by order of the President Carter. The Russians had invaded Afghanistan. There could be no thought of play, it was decided, and there was none. Four years later a communist-and-alientated-nation block boycotted the summer games in Los Angeles, in turnabout fashion
1984 Summer Olympics boycott - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (no-one missed them). The PRC being only recently in the Olympics stayed away from Moscow but came to Los Angeles. Most of the wailing and bemoaning on that occasion came from the right, over what black and godless heart would stoop to spoiling games come to Ronnie's own promised land. The question was examined in several books following this
Power, politics, and the Olympic Games [WorldCat.org] and consensus to emphasis the neutral internationalism of the games seem to gain, but that may only have been interregnum
Olympic turnaround : how the Olympic Games stepped back from the brink
of extinction to become the world's best known brand [WorldCat.org] . I think it is a mistake also to say that that these are Beijing's Olympics. The Olympics belong to the Olympics. To the set of athletes participating most of all. To the International Consortium and Bureaucracy that organizes them. Beyond that to the Olympic ideal of international non-pecuniary athletic competition which forces a path however indistinct on even the Olympic committee
Sally Jenkins - IOC Needs to Step In Or Perhaps Move On - washingtonpost.com. The host nation stands to gain great prestige and honor if they can bring about successful games, but faces great risks to the same if they cannot, and enormous costs. If their society and the culture which forms it, can be only just so open only so natural (not showing the seams and gunmetal beneath). If their industry and wealth can provision the Potlatch feast. If the air of their cities can be clean enough for men and women to run and jump at the highest human ability.
The Olympics at end posits and asks whether or not we believe there is even the mere idea of pan human endeavor, of recognizable human excellence. If there is a plane of humanity call it human being which sits above the localized and angry strife of everyday fear and worry from which all things emanate. Something we witness and create together which admits universal aspiration universal acclaim. If we carry the burden of all our concerns with us at all times even to the games, and insist that we turn our backs from the gathering for their sake, then we deny this and deny at the same moment the possibility that any claim or concern we have can ever be seen by all as beautiful, rightful or just. For we have just denied that part of our world.
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