It would be hard to imagine a more troubled Olympics than the Beijing 2008 Games. Not even the Munich 1972 Games, in which Arab terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view) kidnapped Israeli athletes and killed some of them. (The others died from friendly fire from would-be rescuers)..
Not even the Moscow 1980 Games, which the US and its satellites boycotted, in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, a country which the US in turn invaded in 2001. Or the Los Angeles 1984 Games, which the Soviet Union and its satellites boycotted in retaliation for the US boycott of Moscow in 1980.
If political correctness and liberal hearts bleeding for poor downtrodden peoples had been in vogue in 1896, there would have been no Modern Olympics, then and now.
I do not know what people the Greeks oppressed in 1896, when the Modern Olympics began, but since Greece was occupied by the Ottoman Turks for four centuries, there must have been recorded instances of Greeks beheading Muslim Turks, no more, no less than instances of Turks beheading Orthodox Greeks.
There would have been no Paris 1900 Games, given the French record of governance in Africa and Indo-China, as well as their infamous prison facilities on Devil's Island off the coast of French Guiana in South America.
There would have been no Antwerp 1920 Games if bleeding heart liberals had dug up what were then still fresh memories of human rights abuses in the Belgian Congo, which was known even for decades later as King Leopold II's private shooting gallery, where he used live (and soon dead) Black African natives for target practice .
And no Amsterdam 1928 Games if the world had been made aware of Dutch violations of political rights in the Dutch East Indies, later to be known as Indonesia, whose political leaders began their fight for independence from Holland at around that time.
And where were the bleeding heart liberals when Adolf Hitler hosted the Berlin 1936 Games, while his Nazi extermination machine was preparing for the Final Solution against Jews, gypsies, Slavs and other untermenschen.?
No bleeding heart liberals apparently took the British Empire, on which the Sun never set, to task for its share of human rights abuses, in the runs-up to the London 1906 and the London 1948 Games.
Did any bleeding heart liberals protest against Japanese atrocities in China and Southeast Asia during the Pacific War, less than 30 years before Japan hosted the Tokyo 1964 Games?
But before and during the Barcelona 1992 Games, which coincided with the 500th anniversary of Columbus' accidental discovery of the Americas, politically correct liberals demanded an apology from Spain for its exploitation and policies of exterm- ination against the indigenous peoples of Latin America.. But no one complained about the human sacrifice practiced ritually by the ancient Aztecs and Mayans when Mexico hosted the Mexico City 1968 Games.
Australia hosted the Melbourne 1956 Games and the Sydney 2000 Games, but it was only in 2008 that the Australian government, under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, apologized for the Anglos' racist treatment of the Aborigines in the past 200 years..
My point is that it should be in this historical context that the campaign of western liberals against the Beijing 2008 Games should be taken. All the crocodile tears for the poor Tibetans and the starving Sudanese have some basis in fact, but so what? Which host country was ever without genocidal sin? Perhaps only Sweden (1912) and Finland (1952) ...
The US still had fresh Filipino blood on its hands when it hosted the St. Louis 1904 Games, and Vietnamese and Latin American blood when it hosted the Los Angeles 1984 Games and the Atlanta 2004 Games. And the USSR had the bloodiest hands of them all when it hosted the Moscow 1980 Games.
And western liberals are notoriously selective. They shed copious crocodile tears for the docile Tibetans and acrimoniously disrupted the passage of the Olympic torch on its way to Beijing, in a campaign that bore all the hallmarks of a well-funded, well-orchestrated public relations demolition job, complete with Hollywood icons like Richard Gere and Mia Farrow weeping all over the place.
But, significantly, not a single word on behalf of the Turkic Uyhgurs in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, which is right next to Tibet, who have been fighting for a similar cause: independence from Han Chinese rule.
Why so? Because the Uyghurs are Muslims. With whom western liberals find it hard to make common cause because of Islam's medieval attitude towards women and Islam's preference for a theocratic state under Sharia law. Which is probably no different from the theocratic state under the Tibetan Buddhist lamas.. (See my articles Free Tibet…later of April 07, 2008 and Manipulating Tibet of April 21, 2008)..
And since no western liberals wept crocodile tears for them, the separatist Uyghurs took matters into their own hands. Two or three days before Beijing 2008 began, they attacked with bombs and knives a platoon of Chinese policemen doing their morning jog in the capital city of Kashgar, killing 16 of them, and promising more terrorist attacks in the coming days.
Human mischief is not all that the Chinese have had to suffer in the run-up to 8/08/08.
First there was unusually heavy snowfall last February that stranded 5.2 million passengers in airports and train stations as they vainly tried to go home in time for the Chinese New Year.
Then there was the catastrophic 7.9 magnitude earthquake last May that devastated towns and cities in Sichuan Province, killed more than 70,000 people and destroyed millions of homes. Followed by heavy floods in central China the next month that made another million people homeless.
And, as if that was not enough, the coastal waters off Tsingdao, site of the Olympic yachting events, was suddenly covered last July by a mantle of algae bloom that took more than two weeks to remove by hand.
The sky is indeed falling, some Chinese Chicken Little may understandably feel. Not just falling, but actually blanketing Beijing itself with a pall of environmental doom that would not go away despite all the best efforts to shut down factories and reduce the motor vehicles on the road during the Games.
But the show must go on. And it did, with all the spectacular panache that $43 billion could buy, from glittering new buildings of daring architecture, to a massive display of precision extravaganza highlighting the contributions of China to world civilization, to a humongous fireworks orgasm which, of course, merely added to the pollution already in the air.
But never mind. It is the coming-out party of China and they have earned every minute of it. Go, Beijing, go! *****
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