More on the Beijing Olympics

Across at Epics and Chronicles, Sean has a follow-up to the post of his I discussed here yesterday. It shows that I misunderstood his boycott proposal. I took Sean to be arguing for an Irish national ban on participation in the Beijing Olympics, or a withdrawal of the whole Irish contingent, when what he has in mind in fact is a boycott from the bottom up, so to speak, with the choice left up to each athlete:

The idea is to make credible the idea of deciding... not to go to Beijing for political reasons - but that decision is for each individual athlete to make, just as it will be for every viewer to make when they decide what to watch on TV this coming August. To take away that choice is not what advocating a boycott is about, but to make the choice real, and to (hopefully) show that it has consequences, both good and bad.

If this wasn't readily apparent in the Times piece, its perhaps because I used the catch-all "Ireland" when I should have said "Irish athletes"...

In the same connection, see this excellent piece by Lawrence Donegan:

Consider this: in June 2004 the organisers of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing announced that the Games' slogan would be "One World, One Dream". Now consider this: on Tuesday this week at the No1 intermediate people's court in Beijing, the Chinese political activist Hu Jia stood trial accused of "inciting subversion of state power and the socialist system".

Hu's real "crime" has been to spend much of his adult life exposing the brutality of the Chinese government towards those who oppose it - a campaign which reached its ultimate expression in the publication last September of a letter.

"The Real China and the Olympics" (it can be found at tinyurl.com/37efpf) offers more evidence than any reasonable person would need to be convinced that the suggestion that awarding the Games to Beijing would "enhance human rights" was as mendacious as it sounded, when it was made by Chinese officials as they scrambled for the votes of IOC members in 2001.

A few weeks after Hu Jia's letter was published he gave evidence by video link to the European parliament and a few days after that he was removed from his home by police officers. He now faces up to five years in prison.

Some world, some dream.

And also this:

If the IOC [International Olympic Committee] doesn't move to put pressure on Beijing consistent with its obligations, it risks this Olympics being remembered like the 1936 Games in Berlin.