I feel conflicted. There is absolutely no question that the United Staes is infinitely better than China when it comes to human rights. I don’t think anyone can argue against that.
Still, when I see people protesting the torch relay because of the treatment of Tibet by China, I can’t help but think of the human rights violations commited by this administration. Like it or not (and I hope it’s “not”), the official policy of the United States is to violate human rights when it sees fit. Yes, the majority of the citizens of this country are disgusted by it, but it IS official policy.
So, when I see the protesters, I support them. But at the same time, while I know we’re better, I feel like there are people in other places looking at the United States and saying to themselves, “Who are they to protest against human rights violations?”
I would love to see the politics kept out of the Olympics. It does nothing but hurt the athletes. Also, I am anxiously anticipating China’s response when the first person goes into Tiananmen Square and unfurls a Tibetan flag. The Olympics will be good for the Chinese people, I think. The event will put China in the spotlight – for better and for worse. Personally, I believe the Chinese government didn’t quite understand what they were getting themselves into. I don’t have high hopes that the Olympics will change China for the better, but I also don’t think it’s going to be a bad thing.
scarshapedstar
Who are we to protest anything? We torture. We kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people each year in Iraq. We read every email, listen in on every phone call, and Bush even asserts the right to open up our mail. We have more people in prison in both relative and absolute terms compared to a country 4 times our size.
And the media is aghast at the nerve of the people protesting in San Francisco. All because the Chinese socialize the profit and we only socialize the losses (unless you’re poor and black, in which case you’re on your own.)
Jay B.
But at the same time, while I know we’re better, I feel like there are people in other places looking at the United States and saying to themselves, “Who are they to protest against human rights violations?
Of course you’re right — but at the same time, that’s not reason to stop doing it. Millions of Americans are, right now, organizing, protesting and trying to stop the Bush Administration, whether its campaigning for Democrats, supporting the ACLU’s lawsuits, the EFF, filing in courts, writing in magazines, agitating from farther on the left, whatever, even if we’re ‘not in the streets’ (and even though we have been, by the millions) there IS a widespread and important dissent going on.
And to date, we haven’t been successful. Some small victories, but no overwhelming wins.
But that’s not to say we’re doing nothing here and then complaining about other people elsewhere. That’s a false choice.
4tehlulz
>>the Chinese socialize the profit
LOL no
Jay B.
All because the Chinese socialize the profit
Uh, what?
Tim (the Other One)
I saw one of the torchbearers ( a little girl in London I believe) physically accosted by some protesters and that completely turns me off to the cause.
I understand it, but I hate to see the Olympics used as a context.
Incertus
I think it’s fairly safe to assume that the people protesting China’s treatment of Tibet spend a fair amount of time protesting our own government’s human rights record. You’re certainly not seeing much in the way of “Yay, US” from people protesting the Tibetan occupation.
Michael D.
Tim (the Other One): I feel the same way. The people running the relay are not the people doing the bad shit. They are proud to be involved. So when, like you, I see stuff like that, it makes me sick.
Delia
“We” are not the US government. I expect a lot of us have been in anti-war marches here and there around the country (for all the good they do, at least they’re a statement and apparently earn you some sort of Homeland Security file.) It’s not hypocritical for American citizens who are concerned about the human rights abuses of their own government to be concerned about the abuses of another government.
I read somewhere that the Chinese authorities in Tibet were telling the monks they arrested that nobody else in the world cared anything about them and were completely ignoring them, so their demonstrations were completely in vain. So I really hope that the news of the protests in Paris, London, and, yes, San Francisco, too, somehow reaches the people of Tibet. That the Tibetans know that many people in the world are aware of their suffering.
Wilfred
And are prepared to do what, exactly, to help them? I’d send them money to buy weapons to fight the Chinese, if that’s what they wanted.
JR
As has been noted elsewhere, saying we should keep politics out of the Olympics is nice, but I think that ship sailed around 1936.
calipygian
Don’t blame the protesters for injecting politics into the Olympics – blame Hitler and the 1936 games. Come to think of it – he invented that fucking torch relay too.
So fuck the torch relay.
sleepy
“There is absolutely no question that the United Staes is infinitely better than China when it comes to human rights. I don’t think anyone can argue against that.”
i am completely dumbfounded. absolutely no question? INFINITELY BETTER????
we have less than a third of china’s population, and twice as many prisoners. further, we have secret prisons everywhere! hundreds of thousands of people detained without charges, flown all over the world to be tortured by, us, syria, uzbekistan, etc. aggressive wars, well-armed allied tyrants on every continent, a war on drugs that has demolished scores of nations, the list goes on…
even if you fail to see how this makes us quite a bit worse than china, you should at least understand that such issues of human rights are matters of PRINCIPLE. you cannot think the american government legitimate and simultaneously criticize others for human rights abuses. pot, kettle, yuk, yuk, yuk.
Tax Analyst
Michael…I hate to be the one to tell you this, but “politics” have been in EVERY Olympics that I can recall.
You are, after all, talking about an event that has the attention of a good part of the world, at least those with more than minimal air-wave reception capabilities.
Host-countries use it to try and polish their Foreign Trade image. They sure as hell don’t want it tarnished by a bunch of Tibetans – or any other type of protestor’s – I’m sure the repressive bunch that run China would just love to snuff those folks right out…and they might…if no one else were watching – but that might be bad for trade, after all.
China isn’t the first to be in this situation and most likely won’t be the last – think Mexico City in 1968…Mexican students attempted to protest during those Olympics. As I recall they were suppressed by government soldiers…many protester’s were jailed, injured, even killed.
Frankly, I’d just as soon see the Olympics, as currently configured, eliminated. The athletes would still have their various annual World Championship competitiions – actually a truer mesasure of their abilities and talents than a once-in-four-years extravaganza boosting nationalistic-jingoism and commercialism.
Aw, but we’d lose all the televised hoopla and flag-waving that we get to see and perhaps join in now. And how would we live without those insipid “hearts & flowers” featurettes on various AMERICAN competitors?
I won’t be watching the Olympics this year – haven’t watched them since at least 1996.
Feel free to have your own Hoopla & Flag-Waving parties at the annual World Championships, if it floats yer boats.
Tax Analyst
Hmmm…guess I wasn’t “the one to tell you this”…several other folks beat me to the punch.
I was gonna mention the ’36 Olympics & Hitler but decided to go with the more (relatively) recent example of the ’68 fiasco, which also featured several protests by black American track & field athletes. BTW – they were severely punished by that Asshole, Avery Brundidge and castigated by many back here at home – they had the temerity to try and point out that black Americans were still getting the sort & dirty end of the stick in many ways.
Yup, shoeless (to represent “poverty”, I believe) and with “Black Power” salutes.
Tim in SF
I went down to watch the torch pass a few hours ago. There were so many protesters down there on Embarcadero that they changed the route at the very last minute, going up Van Ness.
Got a lot of pictures. I may post a link later. My coworker took these.
Still, to see (mostly white) people gnashing their teeth and interfering bodily in what should be an absolutely apolitical event is disheartening. I feel very badly for the athletes, who have trained many many hard years for this one moment, only to have it ruined by selfish assholes intent on stealing the limelight for their own cause.
Fuck those people. I don’t care what their message is. Not anymore.
The Moar You Know
I’m sure that the 1980 U.S. boycott of the Olympics, and the 1984 Soviet boycott, also had nothing to do with politics.
Of all the arguments against the protestors and their actions, this one is by far the most dishonest. The Olympics has always been, first and foremost, about national/international politics and prestige.
Every one of the torch “relay runners” is involved in an overly political act, whether they’re old enough to realize it or not.
shirt
Spot on JR!
As has been noted elsewhere, saying we should keep politics out of the Olympics is nice, but I think that ship sailed around 1936.
I’ve been turned off for years because of nationality based cheering.It’s not the USA or UK or whatever nationality involved was out there sweating bullets to be able to compete, it was the athelete. The fact that that he represents a “country” is only secondary to their performance. It’s the athelete who has earned the accolades and the dumf*ck duffus chanting USA is a crude boor at best and represent the WORST of our society! It’s an absolute turnoff!
(damnit I got steamed)
Tax Analyst
Yeah, it’s “sad” that the athletes are having the limelight “stolen” from them.
But not as sad as what the Chinese have been doing (and may continue to do) to the Tibetans.
Sporting Events do not exist in a vacuum – the Olympics and all the hoopla leading up to them are a very attractive forum for folks with an axe to grind and you can and should expect them to use them. No, they shouldn’t abuse the athletes, particularly a child. People strongly committed to a cause sometimes do things that go well beyond what most of us find acceptable.
But the organizer’s of these events ARE adults and they need to consider the risks when the decide to run them through city streets. It’s truly negligent if they fail to do so. If they can’t adequately protect the runners then the cities need to exercise their authority and refuse the let them go pass through.
Zuzu
Anywhere from 200 to 2,000 killed, by most accounts … except the government’s.
Tlatelolco massacre
Dennis - SGMM
Politics entered the Olympics around 285 A.D. when the Romans were allowed to compete in the games.
Little known historical facts: victors in the original Olympic games were allowed to drive a chariot through a breach in the walls of their home town. They also received a lifetime pension.
oh really
“There is absolutely no question that the United Staes is infinitely better than China when it comes to human rights. I don’t think anyone can argue against that.”
I’ll be more than happy to argue against that.
The US is finitely better than China when it comes to human rights.
jake
Two minds. One skull.
johninpt
I stopped caring about the Olympics as a teenager, when I realized they were nothing more than a platform for jingoistic nationalism and corporate shilling. Any idealism and integrity was pushed aside by politics and consumerism long ago.
Herb
Of all the arguments against the protestors and their actions, this one is by far the most dishonest. The Olympics has always been, first and foremost, about national/international politics and prestige.
How about this one? These protests will have NO effect on the status of Tibet or China’s human rights policy.
I hate to point this out, but if you want to free a country or change a government, harassing the people holding the Olympic torch will not accomplish your goal, no matter how much you close your eyes or how many times you tap your ruby slippers.
calipygian
calipygian
Fixed.
Cassidy
Spoken with the naive mindset, only an American can muster. Sometimes I wonder if people don’t realize how truly good they have it.
I’m willing to be the irony is completely lost on you.
Cassidy
Oh for crissakes….
Whatever happened to watching the sport and just enjoying the pure athleticism? Every couple of years we get to see some of the best trained athletes in the world compete. If you can’t enjoy that by itself then you are missing something.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
I would love to see the politics kept out of the Olympics. It does nothing but hurt the athletes.
The torch relay is an overtly political act – guess who started it?…
Cassidy
(Rolls eyes)
The Commander Guy
This is a really good post.
It’d be nice to beat up China over obvious transgressions and moral imperfections, but our country has dropped the ball big time of late. China deserves the beatdown. But how do deliver the beat down, claim moral high ground and penalize the athletes at the same time.
It just doesn’t work. There is no moral high ground here. We made our bed. So there it goes.
Psycheout
A bash America open thread on Balloon Juice? I can’t believe it. /sarc
Hey, anyone who thinks that The United States of America is worse than China using any measure can hop on the next plane to that communist paradise. I insist.
Be sure to turn in your passport on your way out, ingrateful scumbags.
If you don’t like it, get the heck out. All good Americans who actually love and respect their country are sick to death of your foul whining and hand wringing.
You want to do something to make it better, go ahead. I dare you. But stamping your feet and trying to outdo each other with your attacks on America and idiotic public display of impotent loathing only then to park your fat behinds on your couch to watch American Idol or some other rubbish, thinking you’ve accomplished something, is just so stupid and pathetic. So typical of the left: useless to the core.
Bob In Pacifica
What was very weird was that the news coverage by local SF news was pro torch, and one of the reporters was joyfully describing all the Red Chinese flags festooned around AT&T Park at the start of the race.
It was also weird because Mayor Gavin Newsom was taken to court by the ACLU in order for the torch’s route to be released to the public in order for people to protest. He agreed to it, then switched the route anyway.
The only Olympic sport I care about is the one with the cross-country skiing combined with target shooting. But that one’s in the winter.
Herb
Calipygian, sorry, buddy, but your comparison doesn’t hold up. If you thought about it a little more, you might even agree.
If the authorities say you have to ride in the back of the bus, refusing to give up your seat in front or refusing to ride the bus at all is a direct confrontation and as such, was quite effective.
This Olympics thing, at best, is an indirect confrontation and will have little to no effect.
Here’s a challenge:
Draw me the causal line that connects disrupting the Olympics with change in China’s policies. If you can, that is.
GSD
Turns out Condi England and the rest of the ghoul kidz were sitting around brainstorming on how best to torture detainees.
Hoping for a Pinochet style arrest for Darth Cheney one of these days.
-GSD
calipygian
Eh. (annoyed grunt). Ugh.
Herb
So I take it you don’t want to be buddies…
Brachiator
I was lucky enough to be able to see a number of 1984 Olympics contests with my family. I will probably not watch a second of these upcoming Olympics.
NBC and other media outlets have already capitulated to the Chinese government, agreeing not to broadcast from Tiananmen Square. The Chinese are also threatening to impose broadcast delays to make sure that no local spontaneous protests are seen. Dissidents have been arrested and imprisoned.
I am not seeing how the Olympics are going to be good for the Chinese people. It certainly will do nothing for Tibetans either in their own country or those who are still warehoused in refugee camps.
And as I watch the recent ABC news reports detailing the results of a 5 month investigation revealing how the most senior Bush advisors (Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Powell, Rice, among others) sat in the White House and signed off on torture, and when I read how the US had detainees shipped to Jordan so that White House officials could play word games by denying that the US was engaging in torture, I have to acknowledge that right now, today, despite any who want to boast about opposing it, the United States of America is as guilty of human rights violations as any government we can point out for condemnation.
Olympic athletes don’t just represent themselves, but their countries. While I would not want to stamp out any participant’s Olympic dream, I don’t think I could enjoy these games at all.
We have come a long way from such touching moments as the Sydney, Australia Olympics, which included an apology to the Aborigines in the closing ceremonies. Instead we will have authoritarianism, new and improved with corporate sponsorship. Or is that just business as usual?
TenguPhule
Fixed.
Given the geometric growth of suck and fail that Republicans in power generate, there’s still plenty of time to wrest China’s Abuse of Human Rights Crown from it.
empty
I don’t think Pelosi is thinking of cutting of funding for the war anytime soon. Now, if only this was not an April Fool’s day joke.
Delia
I thought that was a Nobel Prize. Won’t we have to wait a bit longer for that one to be given out?
AnneLaurie
… unlike, say, the various pharmaceuticals used by those athletes (the majority of them well over the age of consent) to keep themselves “competitive”. Hey, it’s not coercion if you do it to yourself, right? And it’s not like the bad old days in the 1970s, when the Evil Empire was taking little kids with Olympic-level potential away from their parents and raising them as wards of the state — no fair mentioning Yao Ming, because after all he’s made a dam’ fine profit for himself in the aftermath, and the other kids in his sports cadre probably wouldn’t have been any better off regardless. (/snark)
Seriously. Lots of people have already pointed out, quite correctly, that the modern Olympics have always been at least as much about “politics” (a subject I once heard defined as “the question of who eats — and who gets eaten”) as they are about “sport”.
Let me try an analogy, Michael: You’ve mentioned spending your Saturday afternoons cleaning up at the local dog shelter. Lots of Reasonable People would tell you that this is a pointless, self-aggrandizing waste of your precious time, because they’re only *dogs*, and by definition not even valuable/valued dogs, and the modicum of attention you spare out of your busy life doesn’t weigh very much against all the suffering and misery most of those shelter dogs have known. Some of those Reasonable People (like Ingrid Newkirk) think that the very concept of “companion animals” like dogs is so vile and human-centric that their very existence should be legally banned. Heck, the purely libertarian viewpoint might be that you should spend those hours doing more paid labor and passing a portion of it to some minimum-wage serf to do the actual poop-scooping and stray-patting. And yet, you not only go to the shelter, you even encourage your readers to volunteer at our local shelters!
That’s how most of the torch protestors feel about their own form of civic participation. (Of course, the people with the Free Tibet banners don’t get to pet any adorable Tibetans, but on the other hand the welfare of fellow humans is usually ranked a little higher than the welfare of non-human animals.) From everything I’ve seen reported, there are a number of Tibetans who feel that the various torch protests have refuted the Chinese contention that “nobody (important) cares” about the fate of a few thousand monks and a few million people at the arse-end of the planet. If they have any sense, the people holding protests in Greece and London and San Francisco are well aware that their efforts aren’t going to impress the ChiCom government to the point where they stop trying to destroy the very concept of Tibet as a separate nation, any more than your Saturdays with the scooper are going to significantly reduce the number of dogs put to death for the crime of being “surplus”. The protestors are doing what (very little) they can, just as you are doing what you can.
Rick Taylor
I missed this link earlier. Looks like we’ve found the ‘bad apples‘:
Brachiator
Fixed. Thanks so much for the link. Who’d have thunk that Condoleeza Rice would have been so gung ho on the administration of torture in order to “keep America safe.”
It is also interesting to note that some Bush Administration apologist recently claimed that history would vindicate Dubya’s policies. According to the ABC news report, apparently John Ashcroft had posterity in mind as well:
Indeed.
protected static
OTOH, if you look at who’s actually bankrolling the Free Tibet movement, you’ll see a lot of neocon faces… After all, this is just another front in their Cold War struggles against the PRC.
Tim in SF
At risk of siding with the protesters, who really ruined my lunch hour, I’ll try to make a connection.
It was up to the Olympic Committee where the games should be held. They had several choices, only one of which drives tanks over its citizens. The Committee picked China, the country with one of the worst high-profile abuse of its citizens. Why? Who knows. Money, probably (when is it not?).
As a result, the torch is not going to make it through SF without subterfuge, misdirection, protests, the heavy hand of law enforcement, omnipresent police and all manner of idiocy in the streets (my video coming soon).
My old intern in France emailed me to tell me it was just the same there. Those frogs weren’t having it any more than us San Franciscans.
It’s the Olympic Committee which sown the wind, putting these games in China. I don’t know where the causal line starts—maybe Tiananmen Square, maybe in the Tibetan Monastery. I don’t know where it starts but I believe it ends with egg on the faces of the members of the Olympic Committee who, if they have any sense, regret their bad decision.
Bedlam
Can we at least agree to wait till 2013 to cancel the Olympics.. we brits are still building that bloody great swimming pool in Stratford for 2012!!
I find the fact that we still do the whole ‘torch’ thing created by Hitler bloody funny, but would point out to those here that were stating how much better USA was in comparison to China, you really should talk to someone other than your neighbour. I’m British, and I discuss politics with friends including other Europeans ( my partner is Lithuanian ) and its surprising the change in attitudes to America.
People used to critisize US for being arrogant and overly influential, and I always understood that to be jealousy of your country, especially from the brits harking back to when we ruled the world.
Now the critisism is mostly shock and horror. and a little bit of pity.
We suffer from your recession, we get terrorist attacked from the continued war even though we are 1% of it, we see your torture camps and civil rights abuses. Your illegal officials and cronyism ( something brits really suffered from before, and now hate )
I used to bump into Americans in London and see the pride and arrogance in their strut, and really they deserved it, they were part of the leading country in the world.
Not any more.
(and if you wonder why the Iraqis are getting nostalgic for Saddam watch Life of Brian – ‘what have the romans ever done for us…’.
He may have tortured, but he gave them sanitation / electricity, you walked in and kept the torture, but destroyed the sanitation and electricity. )
The trouble with protesting against China is that implies a moral high ground. I dont think America has that anymore.
Lisen
Liu Jingmin, Vice-President of the Beijing Olympic Bid Committee, said in 2001 that allowing Beijing to host the Games would “help the development of human rights”. Seven years on, China’s human rights record shows little sign of improvement, according to an Amnesty International report.
Boycotting the Olympic Games for Human Rights Is Not Politics. It is a HUMAN RIGHTS issue. The games are being politicized by the government of China. If the Olympics can produce this much scrutiny, the IOC should think about giving the Games to countries like Iran, North Korea, and Cuba.
The near total media blackout on Tibet and the surrounding areas has not only made it difficult to confirm reports, but is a betrayal of official promises to ensure “complete media freedom” in the run-up to the Olympics.
“The crackdown on activists has deepened not lessened because of the Olympics,” said Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
In and around Beijing, the Chinese authorities have silenced and imprisoned peaceful human rights activists in the pre-Olympics ‘clean up’. In Tibet and the surrounding areas, the police and military crackdown on demonstrators has led to serious human rights violations in recent days.
“The Olympic Games have so far failed to act as a catalyst for reform. Unless urgent steps are taken to redress the situation, a positive human rights legacy for the Beijing Olympics looks increasingly beyond reach,” said Irene Khan.
“With just four months to go, the IOC and world leaders should speak out strongly: a failure to express concern and demand change publicly risks being interpreted as a tacit endorsement of the human rights violations perpetrated by the Chinese authorities in preparation for the Olympic Games.”
richard
No, America lost its moral high ground when the Abu Ghraib photos were released, and it’s been all downhill from there.
The issue of China and Tibet is much more complex than it appears on the surface, and its important not to get sucked into the Lost Horizon image of a peaceful Shangrila with chanting monks and love everywhere. As much as I detest Chinese oppression, censorship and corruption I do feel bad for them in regard to the torch protests. For some beautifully written perspective, I recommend you have a look at this excellent post.
scrutinizer
Cassidy asked:
In response to:
Well, I think the second quote explains the first. I stopped watching the Olympics ages ago, for that very reason. Yes, there are some remarkable athletic performances at the games. Occasionally, we even get to see some of them, if they are in the approved subset of sports that make broadcast, sandwiched between zillions of commercials, peons to the greatness that is US, and “a bazillion “human interest stories” mostly about people we’ve never heard about, thrown in to make the games more interesting, and, oh yes, to sell commercials.
Meh.
jake
I’ve got the real reason we should cancel the summer-o-lymics. China has more terrists than Afghan:
Sorry China, but according to your completely factual and not at all made up as a pretense to arrest people reports, it would be too dangerous for international athletes to come to your country.
Here’s an idea. Tell your citizens the games are still on, release daily reports about the games, and arrest anyone who asks why there aren’t any pictures.
jake
“-istan”
Coffee. Naow.
jprice vincenz
Using the expression “hurts the athletes” is really not that far from saying “supporting the troops”: both are vague and nebulous concepts essentially. They bring about the same outcome: no action, no protest. Also your ethical paralysis arises, it seems, from your inability to state firmly that we are equally as bad in human rights as China (and having said that, you could then act on both) or even marginally better than China, which would also allow action.
There’s a concern troll element to your most recent post here, Michael.
RSA
That is, the important thing is not to win but to participate. It’s impossible to extricate politics from a high-profile international competition, unfortunately. It’s sad that so much attention is given to medal-counting. Liechtenstein, with the highest medal count per capita by far, should really tone down its rhetoric.
Steve
The sad thing is that the news programs provide coverage of people protesting Chinese human rights abuses, but do not cover people protesting known U.S. human rights, privacy, and civil liberty abuses. Add to that the mockery of cable new anchors towards legal protestors and you have a media system that is as censored and Chinese state television.
Dennis - SGMM
Anyone else old enough to remember the US-USSR final at the 1972 games? Politics at the Olympic Games, oh say not so!
The impression I get is that the Olympics are largely a business for almost all who are involved. In most nations, the athletes are not just a bunch of sports-crazy kids working out in the back yard or swimming in the quarry and then thumbing their way to the games – they’re employees of their country or their sponsors or both.
My jaundiced view may be influenced by the fact that my High School sport was Cross Country. Four years and not a single damned pom-pom girl.
Soliton
Psychout sez:
Damn, I haven’t heard “America, love it (exactly as it is) or leave it” in ohhh.. hours.
Objective fact: The Land of the Free has the highest incarceration rate on the planet, bar fucking none.
Objective fact: The Land of the Free has private, for profit prisons who lobby for ever more draconian punishments for ever more trivial “crimes” in order to boost their profits.
4tehlulz
Hey Psychout, if you go on an extended visit to Baghdad, I’ll go to China. I’ll even bring fellow America hater John Ashcroft with me.
jenniebee
Bedlam: yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel about us, and I live here.
Xenos
America hater John Ashcroft has been placed at the White House meetings where specific violations of the Geneva Convention, including torture, were discussed, planned, and authorized.
I don’t think Ashcroft will be doing much international travel in the foreseeable future.
ntr Fausto Carmona
Probably the same reason they awarded the ’68 Olympics to the Mexican banana repubilc and the ’80 Olympics to Brezhnev, the Liberator of Prague. China, for better or worse, is one of the premier powers of the world and it would be Mighty West of the IOC to withhold the Olympics from them until they become more like us.
ParagonPark
Protesting is as American as glorifying violence and war.
Everyone has an inalienable right to engage in public protest. The problem is only that some of our protesters have the same tendencies toward use of intimidation, force and violence as those against whom they protest.
ntr Fausto Carmona
You mean we didn’t lose it at My Lai, Bloody Sunday, Manzanar, the Moro Wars, Wounded Knee, Johnson’s Island / Andersonville, or the Trail of Tears?
Hey, we’re not perfect – who is, really. At least there are enough of us who recognize that we have problems and have the tools to make this a better nation.
Svensker
Personally, I think other countries should protest U.S. involvement in the Olympics, since we are brutally occupying a country, are disappearing and torturing people, holding thousands in prison, etc., etc.
Yes, psycheout, if you’re a white American, living in America, the U.S. government is better than China’s government. If you’re black, Muslim, or live in a Muslim Middle Eastern country, not so much.
God, and I used to be a Republican. George Bush has turned me into a radical liberal. No joke.
Dennis - SGMM
You have plenty of company. Nowadays, anyone to the left of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy is considered a liberal.
w vincentz
Will there be “free speech” zones at the next GOP convention?
joe
That’s what makes these protests so great – they’re NOT being orchestrated or carried out by the U.S. government, but by private individuals and groups, most of whom despise the human rights violations of our government, too.
Dennis - SGMM
Yes. They will be located in Duluth.
4tehlulz
Fixed.
joe
No, the protests won’t get China to change its policy towards Tibet and its human rights violations as a whole, at least not in the short term.
But, on the other hand, these Olympics were supposed to be China’s big coming out part, the symbol of their ascention into the ranks of respectable nations, like South Korea’s in 1988. They spend hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars to make that happen.
Well, so much for that. They just couldn’t stop themselves from jailing dissidents, slum-clearing poor people’s homes, and intruding on the Tibertans, so now, their big moment in the sun is going to be an embarrassment for them. Good. These protests are hitting the Chinese government right were it hurts them most.
scarshapedstar
America Held Hostage, Hour 3: When will Psycheout agree to visit the Indiana-like, flowers-and-candy-strewn city of Baghdad?
The Other Steve
Not far off. They’re actually look at using Brainerd.
Zifnab
A-fucking-men. I wouldn’t mind a few international voting agencies over here monitoring our elections, or a few UN sanctions on our country for acting like transcontinental assholes. Shame that France, England, Germany, China, and Russia can’t grow some balls and lay down the law. If we had more people willing to pick a fight over human rights and less people throwing up their hands, saying, “Who am I to judge?” perhaps we’d see a bit more progress.
Couldn’t have said it better. China wanted to step into the international spotlight and burst onto the world stage in full glory. Well, happy birthday. Welcome to the shin-dig. Here’s your wetsuit.
If pride and dignity mean so much to them, perhaps this year-long eyeballing of their foreign and domestic policy will encourage them to develop some of it.
joe
China, like South Korea, made all sorts of promises of political reform as a condition of getting the games. South Korea then proceeded to follow through on them, converting their quasi-dictatorship into an honest-to-goodness democratic republic. In return, they were showered with glory, embraced by the world community, saw significant foreign investment, and generally became a real player on the world stage. Good for them.
China? No, not so much, really. And they really, really wanted it.
4tehlulz
lulz. Like they would took care of that wall o’ smog in Beijing amirite?
NonyNony
As mentioned above – I’d argue against that. I’d also agree that the US is finitely better than China when it comes to human rights. As in measurably better – substantially so when it comes to the human rights of our own citizens, less substantially so when it comes to the human rights of folks who are not citizens but still fucking human beings. But still – measurably better but finite.
What the Chinese elite is going to “learn” from this whole thing is that international condemnation matters not in the slightest if you have the largest potential economy on the planet. There will be some protests. China will be “embarrassed” by the protests. They will crack down harder on dissidents in outlying areas – and you can be damn sure that the only dissent in the area around the games will come from foreigners – not locals – who will be painted on the newscasts by Xenhua as “barbarians who seek to mock Chinese culture” or something.
Meanwhile their economy will continue to grow as foreign investors continue to flock to China to invest in factories. Exports may decline to the US due to the weak dollar, but Europe doesn’t look to be any more ready than the US to really DO anything to get the Chinese to change their internal policies. Not that they could – we’re reaching a tipping point where the Chinese economy is not only going to be fully modernized by also self-supporting – capitalism without the messy Enlightenment ideals of inalienable human rights or democratic self-governance.
So while I sympathize with the protesters, things will only change in China when the Chinese want to make changes for the better. And, as has been the case in every, single, goddamn example in the history of the world up until this point, that will only happen when the elites of the country see the move to more recognition for human rights and democratic governance as a net gain for themselves. Sometimes outside pressure can lead to that “ah-ha” moment for the elites, but if they continue to get all of the benefits of being a modern nation without any of the downsides of running a repressive, totalitarian society, then what incentive do the elites have to change?
Tim in SF
As promised earlier, here’s the video of the protesters I made with my little Canon camera yesterday. This was done at just South of Ferry Building on Embarcadero looking to the South West. At the end of it I pan around and you can see the Bay Bridge.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Me, too. I just want to see America kick every other nation’s ass in sports. I want us to trounce them. Crush their athletes, to remind them that America has the best athletes in the world, and that any nation disputing this fact deserves to have its athletes humiliated in front of the entire world, while our champions drape themselves in our flag and receive all the gold medals while publicly discoursing on how America’s freedom is what enables us to win so many medals and have such superior athletes.
This is my utterly apolitical hope. Keep politics out of sports, people!
joe
When people apply a literal reading to phrases like “infinitely better,” rather than understanding that it is a turn of phrase intended to mean “much better,” and not a statement that involves a mathematical impossibility, my head literally explodes.
BLAM!
Kynn
Does Michael D believe in protesting for anything?
I’m just curious.
Don
Shooting and running people over is a big space-saver in prisons. Personally I’m glad that our insane drug policy (for the moment) stops at long prison stays for offenders rather than offing them.
While ‘infinitely better’ is easy to pick on from a mathematical sense, I think it’s a pretty fair statement overall. In almost any circumstance you can name, in the cases where you run up against the government in a conflict you’re an order of magnitude better off here than in China.
That’s not an apology for the things that need changing in our country, just a straight-up comparison. Last year I got to help organize a protest over how a private business was (mis-)managing public land, and after the peaceful protest I stopped and had a beer with some friends. Nobody shot me or arrested me, I didn’t get fired from my job or harassed, and in the end we got action from the local government.
People in Tibet can be imprisoned or killed for carrying a picture of the Dali Lama.
Personally I’m comfortable with the hyperbole involved in saying that’s infinitely better.
bernarda
Sure the Chinese government is brutal, corrupt, and authoritarian. But, the U.S. has a higher percentage of its citizens in prison and simply a higher number. No country in the world jails as many of its citizens as the U.S.
The Chinese government may be more direct in repressing dissent and jailing people on trumped up charges. The U.S. uses rather sophisticated laws, many of which don’t seem to serve any purpose other than finding a reason to arrest someone. It combines that with absurd minimum sentencing laws.
Some dissidents in China have their lives ruined by persecution. In the U.S. millions have their lives ruined by unjust laws and unjust sentencing.
eric
Hey all. I hang with a lot of native Chinese grad students who went to SF yesterday for the torch relay, and let me tell you, they (even as the more educated Chinese) don’t agree with you at all. In fact, most of the native Chinese in SF don’t agree either. From what I understand, there were essentially two competing protests in SF yesterday, which essentially broke down into the Chinese vs. the Whites/Tibetans.
Frankly, until we get the plank out of our own eye with all of our own human rights violations lately, and start opposing all authoritarian governments on principle instead of as cover because we’re afraid of them (China) or want something they have (Iran/Iraq), that shit isn’t going to change at all. And even if we do those things, they aren’t going to start seeing the world from a Western POV.
Zuzu
Not to mention the Phil Silvers problem:
But when a British tourist visited the Tibetan city of Gyangste in 1987 and walked the streets wearing a T-shirt with a photo of Sgt. Bilko, Chinese guards immediately assumed it was a photo of the Dalai Lama and tried to arrest her.
Post-Gazette
HyperIon
much like Cisco and Google have capitulated, making the chinese government special versions of their hardware/software to assist in keeping info away from the chinese population. i don’t hear a lot of protest against those two companies. and what THEY are doing is not just some 2 week gambit, it’s 24/7/365.
i watched the last winter olympic coverage on canadian TV. it was 100 times better than the shit on american TV. the canadians covered everyone and pointedly did not favor their athletes. it was almost enjoyable.
Tim in SF
That’s what I saw yesterday. If you watch the video I linked to a few posts up, every so often you can see a woman walk by in a traditional Tibetan dress. The chinese dancers on the sidelines were banging drums cheering China-this China-that (it was in Chinese).
I can post pics of both groups if people are interested.
none given
Anybody who thinks this will be a net positive for China and “open the eyes” of typical Chinese does not spend much time around typical Chinese.
The “typical Chinese” reaction is rail about the ingratitude of the Tibetans, the hypocritical and uneductated Western protestors (who are all under the sway of the highly influential Richard Gere), and the evils of the slave-holding feudalist society in pre-revolutionary Tibet.
The irony is that the vast majority of Han Chinese have similar complaints to those being made by the Tibetans,
but the crude protests dominated by White Western Hippies make for easy external-hate-targets.
The protestors are useful idiots to the Chinese government, providing a scapegoat of “international meddling” upon which the Chines masses focus their angers and frustrations.
Bedlam
@ none given
The protestors are useful idiots to the Chinese government, providing a scapegoat of “international meddling” upon which the Chines masses focus their angers and frustrations
People are always willing to stick their noses into something from afar and without relevence to them with self-righteous arrogance, when really people should try cleaning their own house before critisising others.
Ho hum, its easier to point than it is to change .