08.08.08
It's hard to imagine the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games as a celebration of world unity while witnessing this disastrous Olympic torch relay.
PARIS -- Paris' Olympic torch relay descended into chaos Monday, with protesters scaling the Eiffel Tower, grabbing for the flame and forcing security officials to repeatedly snuff out the torch and transport it by bus past demonstrators yelling "Free Tibet!"
The relentless anti-Chinese demonstrations ignited across the capital with unexpected power and ingenuity, foiling 3,000 police officers deployed on motorcycles, in jogging gear and even inline skates.
Chinese organizers finally gave up on the relay, canceling the last third of what China had hoped would be a joyous jog by torch-bearing VIPs past some of Paris' most famous landmarks.
Thousands of protesters slowed the relay to a stop-start crawl, with impassioned displays of anger over China's human rights record, its grip on Tibet and support for Sudan despite years of bloodshed in Darfur.
Five times, the Chinese officials in dark glasses and tracksuits who guard the torch extinguished it and retreated to the safety of a bus — the last time emerging only after the vehicle drove within 15 feet of the final stop, a track and field stadium. A torchbearer then ran the final steps inside.
Outside, a few French activists supporting Tibet had a fist-fight with pro-Chinese demonstrators. The French activists spat on them and shouted, "Fascists!"
In San Francisco, where the torch is due to arrive Wednesday, three protesters wearing harnesses and helmets climbed up the Golden Gate Bridge and tied the Tibetan flag and two banners to its cables. The banners read "One World One Dream. Free Tibet" and "Free Tibet." They later climbed down.
Beijing was announced as host of the 2008 Olympic Games on July 31, 2001.
Where was the outrage then? Where was the anger?
I understand why people are protesting, given China's horrific human rights record.
But I disagree with the method of protest. Peaceful protest is honorable, halting the torch relay is not.
Such dramatic disruption of the torch relay runs counter to the Olympic spirit. At this stage, it's unfair to the athletes.
Look back on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Although there were protests and talk of boycotting the games, they went on. The world's athletes gathered to compete in spite of the serious objections and concerns about Hitler's Nazi Germany. In the end, the accomplishments of the athletes overshadowed the promotion of Nazi ideology.
An important difference: Hitler wasn't in power when Berlin was chosen to host the games. China, on the other hand, didn't just turn into a human rights hell. This isn't a surprise.
Why was Beijing given the games in the first place if there was such opposition?
..."A symbol like [the torch], carried by young people who want to deliver a message of peace, should be allowed to pass," said the head of the French Olympic Committee, Henri Serandour. "These games are a sounding board for all those who want to speak about China and Tibet. But at the same time, there are many wars on the planet that no one is talking about."
International Olympic Committee spokeswoman Giselle Davies agreed. "We respect that right for people to demonstrate peacefully, but equally there is a right for the torch to pass peacefully and the runners to enjoy taking part in the relay," she said.
China's Foreign Ministry assailed the demonstrations. "We express our strong condemnation to the deliberate disruption of the Olympic torch relay by Tibetan separatist forces," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said in a Web statement. "Their despicable activities tarnish the lofty Olympic spirit and challenge all the people loving the Olympic Games around the world."
Jiang also disputed reports that the torch had to be extinguished several times, calling them false. "To protect the security and dignity of the Olympic torch under the circumstances there, the modes of relay were temporarily changed," she said.
Jiang also denied that authorities were in any way forced to extinguish the torch, implying it was their decision to put it out.
Keeping politics out of the Olympics is impossible. I think peaceful protests are appropriate. I have no interest in validating Beijing. I think it was a mistake to bring the Olympics there.
But that's where they'll be. Since that's the way it is, the games and the events leading up to them, like the torch relay, should be allowed to go forward without disruption.
The games aren't about Beijing. They're about the athletes, their dedication and achievement. The focus belongs on the competition. It should be. It can be.
Protesters must be careful not to victimize the athletes by ruining their Olympic experience.
The protesters' cause is noble but they shouldn't make the athletes pay for Beijing's sins.
9 comments:
As a Chinese citizen with modern political views, I totally agree. Reading that these protestors shouted "freedom for chinese people", I can't help but laughing angrily...give me a break. What do you know about what Chinese people want? Who are holding our best interests in mind, and who are simply putting a show or acting as racists or supporters for the riots? Forget about it, the majority of westerners, and please, only the sensible ones who know how to deal with our government in a productive way! If this continues, we will have to say that, Chinese people are standing firmly behind our government, and against any kind of protestors who hurt our feelings.
Interesting research report on Dalai Lama and Tibet done by western scholars. Tibetan Lamas can show you how to enjoy sex with other people's wives. Read on ..... Link below
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
The Dalai Lama may be universally admired; but he is poorly advised. His condemnation of China for alleged “cultural genocide” strengthens China’s depiction of him as a separatist, ethnic leader bent on splitting his homeland from China.
China is an incredibly vast, multiethnic, multicultural country. It will never relinquish its right to modernize and develop Tibet, which was a feudal theocracy (actually admired by Hitler and his Nazi henchmen for its swastika and brutality) before China liberated the Tibetan people from serfdom in 1951. No outside powers (not even occult-obsessed Nazi Germany, which sent emissaries to Tibet) have ever recognized it as a sovereign state. Without China, the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in 1959 after a failed uprising against China, would most likely still be Tibet’s absolute ruler, and illiteracy, ignorance, and crushing poverty would still prevail there.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, incidentally, has never satisfactorily apologized for the fact that monk-exploited, endlessly taxed Tibetans had no human rights before China intervened in Tibet’s affairs. Nor has he apologized for his life-long friendship with at least two notorious Nazis, including a major SS figure, Dr. Bruno Berger (whose photo with the Dalai Lama appears below), and shocking acceptance of a substantial donation (45 million rupees, or about 170 million yen) from Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Supreme Truth cult, which subsequently attacked the Tokyo Subway system with sarin nerve gas. A photo of the Dalai Lama and the psychotic cult leader appears above. The Dalai Lama also seems to have maintained a friendly relationship with the Chilean Nazi mystic, Miguel Serrano, whose photo appears below the Berger image.
For most Buddhists, apology is a central teaching. One would also expect the Dalai Lama to apologize for–and unequivocally denounce–the recent, un-Buddhist-like Tibetan riot that targeted innocent Chinese civilians and businesses for destruction.
With the above in mind, a recent essay by Brendan O’Neill, editor of Spiked, is a must-read. A sharp critic of China’s Communist Party (which he mistakenly calls “Stalinist”), O’Neill writes:
In many ways, campaigners and commentators in the West are projecting their own disgust with ‘the Western way of life’ on to China. They see in China everything that they doubt or loathe about modernity itself. That is why commentators frequently tell China not to make ‘the same mistakes that we made’. On everything from economic growth to sporting competitiveness, from the use of coal to the building of skyscrapers, today’s China-bashing is motivated by Western self-loathing, as well as by spite and envy towards the seemingly successful Chinese. Ironically, this means that China is now seen as ‘the Other’ precisely because it appears too Western: it is China’s ambition, growth, its leaps forward - things that a more confident West might once have celebrated - which make it seem alien to Western observers who today prefer carbon-counting to factory-building and road tolls to road construction. China-bashing is underpinned by a crisis of belief in the West in things such as progress, growth, development.
It is the sweeping consensus that China is dangerous and diseased that has attracted Western observers to the issue of Tibet. Both left and right elements in the West are exploiting the Tibet issue as a way of putting pressure on China. They are less interested in securing real freedom and equality for Tibetans, and for the Chinese people more broadly, than they are in using and abusing internal disgruntlement in China and nearby territories as a way of humiliating the Chinese government. That is why Tibetans can symbolise different things to different people. For conservative commentators, the Tibetans are warriors for freedom against a Stalinist monolith; their protests are a replay of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989. For greener, more liberal campaigners, Tibetans are symbols of natural and mystical purity in contrast to rampant Western and Chinese consumerism. As one author puts it, Tibetan culture offers ‘powerful, untarnished and coherent alternatives to Western egotistical lifestyles [and] our gradually more pointless pursuit of material interests’. Various political factions in the West are using Tibetans as ventriloquist dummies in order to mouth their own complaints against modern China. They are promoting Tibetan unrest not to liberate Tibetans but in the hope that the protests will represent their own personal disgust for China in a real-world, physical manner.
There is a long history of Western politicians and activists using Tibet as a stick with which to beat China. In his fascinating book Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, Donald S Lopez Jnr shows how, in the Western imagination, ‘the invasion of Tibet by [China] was and still is represented as an undifferentiated mass of godless Communists overrunning a peaceful land devoted only to ethereal pursuits… Tibet embodies the spiritual and the ancient, China the material and the modern. Tibetans are superhuman, Chinese are subhuman.’ Today, too, pro-Tibetan activism often disguises a view of the Chinese as subhuman. Indeed, in the current, all-encompassing right/left consensus about China, even left-leaning campaigns can employ old right tactics of demonising the Chinese. A poster for the trendy campaign group Free Tibet shows Tibetans as serene and peaceful and the Chinese as smog-producing modernisers with distinctly slitty eyes and goofy teeth.
The Washington-Hollywood embrace of the Dalai Lama fuels Chinese nationalism and refocuses attention on his well documented role as a recipient of CIA funding. During the Cold War, the US intelligence agency spent tens of millions of dollars on pro-Dalai Lama Tibetan guerrillas, set up a training camp for Tibetan fighters in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, helped the Dalai Lama to escape to India after the failed armed insurrection of 1959, and established Tibet cultural centers in New York and Geneva to keep alive the dream of an independent Tibet. The CIA also paid the Dalai Lama a personal stipend of $180,000 a year. The Nixon administration ended CIA support for the Tibetan movement while maintaining the spiritual leader’s direct subsidy. In recent years, he has criticized the US for supporting Tibet in those days for narrow political reasons; he has also argued against US retaliation against Al Qaeda and radical Islam for the 9/11 attacks.
VIDEO:
No Shangri-La: More on Old Tibet can be found here.
In feudal Tibet, torture and mutilation–including eye gouging, the pulling out of tongues, hamstringing, and amputation–were favored punishments inflicted upon thieves, and runaway or resistant serfs. Journeying through Tibet in the 1960s, Stuart and Roma Gelder interviewed a former serf, Tsereh Wang Tuei, who had stolen two sheep belonging to a monastery. For this he had both his eyes gouged out and his hand mutilated beyond use. He explains that he no longer is a Buddhist: “When a holy lama told them to blind me I thought there was no good in religion.”21 Since it was against Buddhist teachings to take human life, some offenders were severely lashed and then “left to God” in the freezing night to die. “The parallels between Tibet and medieval Europe are striking,” concludes Tom Grunfeld in his book on Tibet.
In 1959, Anna Louise Strong visited an exhibition of torture equipment that had been used by the Tibetan overlords. There were handcuffs of all sizes, including small ones for children, and instruments for cutting off noses and ears, gouging out eyes, breaking off hands, and hamstringing legs. There were hot brands, whips, and special implements for disemboweling. The exhibition presented photographs and testimonies of victims who had been blinded or crippled or suffered amputations for thievery. There was the shepherd whose master owed him a reimbursement in yuan and wheat but refused to pay. So he took one of the master’s cows; for this he had his hands severed. Another herdsman, who opposed having his wife taken from him by his lord, had his hands broken off. There were pictures of Communist activists with noses and upper lips cut off, and a woman who was raped and then had her nose sliced away.
Earlier visitors to Tibet commented on the theocratic despotism. In 1895, an Englishman, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote that the populace was under the “intolerable tyranny of monks” and the devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval Landon described the Dalai Lama’s rule as “an engine of oppression.” At about that time, another English traveler, Captain W.F.T. O’Connor, observed that “the great landowners and the priests… exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no appeal,” while the people are “oppressed by the most monstrous growth of monasticism and priest-craft.” Tibetan rulers “invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition” among the common people. In 1937, another visitor, Spencer Chapman, wrote, “The Lamaist monk does not spend his time in ministering to the people or educating them. . . . The beggar beside the road is nothing to the monk. Knowledge is the jealously guarded prerogative of the monasteries and is used to increase their influence and wealth.”24 As much as we might wish otherwise, feudal theocratic Tibet was a far cry from the romanticized Shangri La so enthusiastically nurtured by Buddhism’s western proselytes.
Well, there are two sides to every story.
I do think Western outrage over human rights violations tends to be very selective, very inconsistent.
These protests cause me concern that the athletes will be used as political pawns. It's wrong for them to be exploited like that.
At least we now know that the crushers of dissent in Tibet were responsible for the security in London.
I felt nauseated.
The torch relay has been a disaster.
I fully agree that protesters should be banned from the torch run. After all, the originator of the this tradition was none other than Nazi Germany, and in keeping with the spirit intended, banning is the least we can do. If banning turns out to not dissuade these people, then I would suggest water hoses, truncheons, and if necessary, firing squads. Sieg heil!
Who said that protesters should be banned from the torch relay?
With whom do you fully agree?
The games aren't about Beijing. They're about the athletes, their dedication and achievement. The focus belongs on the competition. It should be. It can be.
Bull, the games have long since past being about the athletes. The Olympics are totally political and commercial and anyone who thinks otherwise is naive in the extreme. The athletes are the equipment. To think that somehow everyone will just ignore the context and focus on the "show", which is manipulated to a degree that would make the leaders of the Third Reich proud, is laughable. The populace at large wasn't polled regarding giving the games to China, I would say they're having a referendum now. Personally I don't give a rat's behind where they have them, I won't be watching anyway, trying to guess who's been doping and who hasn't lost it's interest for me sometime back.
The political and the commercial aspects of the games are undeniable, but I still find the competition enjoyable to watch and the Olympic spirit inspiring.
If that's naive on my part, so be it.
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