A Torch Job on Liberty

Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins has a hard-hitting column attacking the I.O.C. and those that would have the global community cease their criticism of the Beijing Olympics under the guise of peace and sports. It’s from last Friday, but it’s definitely worth a read.

Sam Nunn, a former senator who is on the board of not one but two Olympic sponsors, Coca-Cola and GE, also declined to be interviewed. But during last week’s tumultuous torch relay through Paris and San Francisco, Coke spokeswoman Kerry Kerr issued the following statement:

“We firmly believe the Olympics are a force for good.”

In fact, the Beijing Olympics are a force of direct, demonstrable malignity. The government has not softened its stance on human rights, as promised, but hardened it in the run-up to the Games. Censorship has increased, not decreased. Some of the poorest communities have suffered — razed to make room for stadiums, and forced migrant labor used to build them — not prospered. Peaceful dissidents such as Hu Jia and Yang Chunlin, who merely protested on the Internet, and ethnic minorities in Tibet have been treated more harshly, not less.
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It’s one thing to be considerate of the host — the Chinese people are different from their government, and are surely entitled to consideration. But it’s another to willfully blind and gag oneself to the obvious circumstances in China for the sake of a mass commercial circus. To say that the dissidents behind bars should not distract from the performances on the parallel bars, to divorce athletic performance from the fraught circumstances in which stadiums were built, is to perpetrate a lie. No event held in China can be apolitical. A Beijing Olympics begs the question: How does a totalitarian government with a capitalist economy intend to behave as an international partner?

The answer is obvious in the absurdly choreographed, foreshortened, censored, route-altered torch run: Chinese paramilitary groups and massive security enforce a “journey of harmony” by pushing and shoving through demonstrators.
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The way to deal with blackmail is to call it out publicly. If Chinese officials don’t want mouthy outsiders to go off script and address the uncomfortable questions raised by a Beijing Games, they shouldn’t have invited us. It’s the deal they made. And on which they are now trying to renege. They shouldn’t be allowed to.

Damned straight Sally.