StrictConstruct

With the Beijing Olympics nearing, many people are left to grapple with how exactly you should handle the fact they are occurring in a nation with an atrocious human rights record, rampant censorship, and a history of atrocities against it’s own people. It’s quite possible that China should not have been chosen as the location for the Olympics, but it was. So now what?

It isn’t as though it’s the first time that the Olympics have been held in a questionable place. Though Germany was not yet seen as the threat that it would come to be recognized as, anyone who paid attention to their anti-semetic, master race rhetoric would at least have an understanding of their ideology. And yet the 1936 Berlin Olympics were attended just the same as any. Further, it was our attendance that led to some of the most memorable events to ever occur at any Olympics, when the German athletes belonging to the alleged “master race” were shown to be the same as anyone else, and as Jesse Owens showed, certainly beatable. If we had boycotted that event, that moment would never have happened.

So while some people are calling for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics, they are perhaps missing an aspect of the Olympics which is not always recognized. It does not glorify it’s host nation - it is nothing more than a spotlight, a magnifying glass. What is there will be seen, whether great or terrible. While China is hoping that this opportunity will usher in a new age for their nation on the world stage, hosting the Olympics doesn’t do that. In preparation for the Olympics they have further cracked down on dissidents, re-ignited strife with Tibetans, cranked up the censorship, and done nothing to address concerns that they are enabling the Genocide in Darfur to continue. Rather than usher in a new age, the Olympics are showing to the world that China, for all it’s talk, is still very much in it’s last.

All of this, and the Olympics have not even begun. What opportunities for shedding light on China will the games themselves bring? For that, we will simply have to wait and see.

(Photo credit to andymiah.)