My Biggest Olympic Hope

Based on a comment I made at Right Wing Nut House earlier this morning:

It should not be news to anyone that the People's Republic of China is a repressive, brutal regime which is the largest and most dangerous relic of the twentieth century's sad history of bloody political extremism. Its lead-up to the Olympics, as Rick Moran chronicles in the link above, has been brutal, bloody, and akin to Hitler's preparation for the 1936 Olympics. Political dissidents have been jailed, their families threatened. Internet and media access have fallen under stricter-than-usual controls from government censors. Stray dogs and cats have been rounded up and put in pens to starve to death. Rivers have been diverted to make whitewater rafting runs, causing farmers up country to lose their supply of water and causing a season of starvation and triggering a decade-long cycle of poverty for them. To make the Olympics appear "green," few people but party elites are allowed to drive cars on the freeways anymore (but Beijing's smog isn't going away) and no meaningful environmental protection laws have actually been implemented. In short, the Chinese have tried to create a Potemkin village of peace, harmony, progress, and prosperity -- unfortunately for the government, in this age of massive information distribution, it is no longer possible to rapidly industrialize without the rest of the world getting a glimpse of what's really going on.

It should also not be particularly surprising to anyone that the Olympics Committee, with its unique and intense blend of foolish idealism and tawdry corruption, would delude itself into thinking that it could have made things better somehow. So the Olympics are there this year and the Chinese have performed exactly as we would have feared, demonstrating competence only in the brutal suppression of dissent.

The question is, what can and should we do about it? China has become too important economically, and is too strong militarily, to be confronted directly about changing its murderous ways. As I see it, we have the following options:

A) Boycott the Olympics entirely. That did us a lot of good back in 1980.

B) Attend but have our government put public political pressure on the PRC to reform itself in the form of trade sanctions and statements of political condemnation. This would embarrass and anger the PRC, but not directly change anything. And why should we wait for the Olympics to do this if it's the right thing to do anyway?

C) Attend but the athletes make some spontaneous protests, like entering the opening ceremony with the athletes putting on black armbands and carrying the flag upside down as a signal of distress and danger -- which the rest of the world would see as a protest. This too would embarrass and anger the PRC, but it wouldn't be seen as coming from the government.

D) Accept that the Olympics are nothing but a showpiece event and resign ourselves to the idea that no meaningful change is going to result from them, other than new answers to trivia questions in the Guinness Book.

Personally, I kind of favor answer "C." It's a nice poke in the eye that would not disrupt the events in any way. And it would render the Big Brothers in Beijing impotent. What exactly would the PRC do in the middle of the opening ceremonies if our athletes walked out in their uniforms and all at once put on black armbands and raise their fists in protest? What would they do if we restrung the flag and flew it upside down? Would they shut down the cameras and the feed to the Olympics' largest media market? Would they arrest the entire U.S. team on the spot? Would they prevent the U.S. team from competing? Anything like that would only show the rest of the world exactly what a bunch of repressive despots they really are. Tolerating the protest would be the only acceptable response. But every ounce of their fibers would tell them to not tolerate it.

I hope (and frankly, I expect) that our athletes have the stones and the smarts to pull off something like this. To hell with the medal count. If our team does something like that, we'll have won.