Newsletter April 2008 #72

Table of Contents:

From Berlin to Beijing

Worth Repeating

The following is a column that our President wrote for the Ottawa Citizen just after Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympic Games back in 2001. He sees no reason to change his opinions. While normally fond of watching the Olympics, this summer his television will be tuned elsewhere.

Should Canada go to a Beijing Olympiad?

Adolf Hitler turned the 1936 Olympics into a showpiece for Nazi propaganda. Moscow held the games in 1980, only to find out that much of the World refused to show up on account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – an invasion which helped add another million corpses to the USSR’s leading score in the 20th Century’s Totalitarian games.

Hitler’s bronze-medal placing with 21 million murdered civilians and POWs is well remembered, it was a short and very violent performance that also killed about 15 million soldiers and civilians during the fighting to get him off the podium. The Soviet Union played a longer game – from 1917 to 1991 -- and so turned in a clear gold medal score of over 60 million people in purges, death-camps, deliberate famine and other instances of progressive social engineering.

Now the silver medal finalist is putting in a bid for Olympic glory in the hopes that the glitter of the games might hide the tarnish of its history. Canada was among the many nations to boycott the Moscow games and, had we been the least bit prescient, we probably would have boycotted Berlin too.

In China’s defence it must be said that the first half of the 20th Century was not kind to her people – foreign exploitation, revolutions, protracted civil wars, a ruthless (and incompetent) dictator, a genocidal invader and a final round of civil war. The stability China has experienced since Mao marched into Beijing has not been easy either. While Mao was alive, the most reasonable estimates (those of Nobel Peace Prize nominee Professor R.J. Rummel) placed the human cost of his rule at 34.4 million deaths. These include mass-murders, deaths by culpable negligence through deliberate famine and in gulags.

Since 1975, the rate of mass-murder slowed down enormously, but Mao’s heirs are far more interested in stability than in alien concepts of human rights and democracy. Rummel estimated that about 80,000 Chinese people died during the average year between 1976 and ’86 in gulags, repression in minority regions, as a result of the enthusiastic suppression of riots and disorders, and through other causes. The total from draconian birth control policies, whatever it may be, probably means that the figure of 80,000 annual ”deaths-by government” still holds true.

At any rate, China has long passed Nazi Germany to clinch the silver medal spot.

For all the antiquity and splendor of China and the greatness of its people, China’s history as a nation is quite recent and Beijing finds itself in an awkward position. The maturity of China’s culture has not been reconciled with the immaturity of its governing institutions – which in turn cannot balance Beijing’s desire for stability at any cost with its craving for international respectability.

In China, if everything is not in harmony, then disharmony is the unhappy result. Bejing’s desire to keep its people firmly under thumb while getting an international thumbs-up is going to lead to disharmony.

Olympic games bring respectability and – like Hitler’s Berlin and Soviet Moscow -- the Beijing government is trying to put its best face on. The results can be safely predicted. Reporters will be welcome to shoot ‘wonderful place’ stories in Beijing and China’s major cities, with ample supplies of happy children and cheerful elders to show how good life in China really is. Journalists who wander off the beaten track will helpfully find themselves levered right back on to it by polite policemen – and if they don’t take the hint, by less polite policemen.

It is safe to say that the camera lights in Beijing will not reach the Sinkiang labour camps or into Tibet. But then, the camera lights in Berlin didn’t reach Dachau, and those in Moscow didn’t reach the dissidents imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals or the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

The entire point of the Olympiad is to honor the human spirit. The Games shouldn’t go to those who try to crush it. For the most part, the games have rightly had their home among people who nurture the human spirit – the citizens of liberal democratic nations. Excepting the 1936 Games and Moscow in the summer of 1980 (and Sarajevo in the winter of 1984), free peoples have always hosted the Olympics.

Giving the games to Beijing might ‘complete’ the triad of ultra-lethal totalitarian hosts for the Olympiad, but it is an honor that the Peoples Republic of China should go without. But if Beijing does get the games, they should go without Canadian representation.

Democracy? The games shouldn’t have a home without it.

- JT

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca