A Stitch in Haste

It’s so rare for me to agree with a New York Times editorial that I feel compelled to take advantage of the occasion:

Beijing got what it wanted out of this globally televised spectacular. It reaped a huge prestige bonanza that it will surely use to promote its international influence and, we fear, further tighten its grip at home.

It pocketed these gains without offering any concessions in return. When it increased repression — rather than loosening up — a supine International Olympic Committee barely offered a protest. Most world leaders, including President Bush, were nearly as complicit.
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To win the right to host these Games, China promised to honor the Olympic ideals of nonviolence, openness to the world and individual expression. Those promises were systematically broken, starting with this spring’s brutal repression in Tibet and continuing on to the ugly farce of inviting its citizens to apply for legal protest permits and then arresting them if they actually tried to do so.

Along the way, government critics were pre-emptively rounded up and jailed, domestic news outlets tightly controlled, foreign journalists denied full access to the Internet and thousands of Beijing’s least telegenic residents were evicted from their homes and out of camera range. On Friday, the Chinese police confirmed that six Americans protesting China’s rule in Tibet had been sentenced to 10 days of detention.

Surely one of the signature events of these Games was the sentencing of two women in their late 70s to “re-education through labor.” Their crime? Applying for permission to protest the inadequate compensation they felt they had received when the government seized their homes years ago for urban redevelopment.

A year ago, the I.O.C. predicted that these Games would be “a force for good” and a spur to human-rights progress. Instead, as Human Rights Watch has reported, they became a catalyst for intensified human-rights abuse.

Shame on China. Shame on the blind, deaf and very very dumb I.O.C. Shame on Bush. Shame on us all.

It is certainly not too late for the I.O.C., whether of its own epiphany or in response to the unified outrage of the free peoples of the world, to strip that other great thugocracy, Russia, of the 2014 Olympics. But that assumes that there is now or ever will be a “unified outrage of the free peoples of the world.” Judging from our absurd collective mindset with the Beijing Olympics, that is highly unlikely.

(And don’t get me started on the United Nations.)

These international warm-fuzzy-feeling megalo-bureaucracies — the U.N., the I.O.C., etc. — only exist the way they exist and function the way they function (or, to be precise, malfunction) because we allow it. We are, all of us, unindicted co-conspirators in the single greatest, and most lethal, farce in the history of humanity.

So if you missed the show in Beijing, don’t worry: There’ll be reruns.