"The Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians," Avery Brundage, a past president of the International Olympic Committee, once said. We like to think so, don't we? Yet, the raucous rounds of "snatch the torch" that have disrupted this year's pre-Olympics festivities reveal a deeper truth: The Olympics are often politics by other means.
That's why an unusual right-left political coalition has called for President Bush to join some other major world leaders in skipping the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. Democratic presidential contenders Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois called on Bush to avoid the ceremonies. Last week Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee for president, joined in.
U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a conservative Michigan Republican, has introduced a bill that would prevent the president and other U.S. government officials and employees from attending the Aug. 8 parade.
But Bush has tended to shrug off such notions as an unnecessary mix of politics with the purity of the Games. "I'm going to the Olympics. I view the Olympics as a sporting event," Mr Bush said in February. "You got the Dalai Lama crowd, you've got global warming folks, you've got Darfur. And I just - I am not going to go and use the Olympics as an opportunity to express my opinions to the Chinese people in a public way."
He was referring to pressure from the same protesters against China's brutal human rights policies in Tibet and elsewhere. Their protests have led to scuffles with police and unsmiling Chinese security agents in several of the 21 cities through which China's pre-Olympic torch relay is running.
Whether you support torch-snatching as a pre-Olympic event or not, this international embarrassment could hardly be aimed at a more deserving target than China. The country's list of offenses against humanity is long: political prisoners, jailed journalists, religious persecution - you name it, they do it. On the world scene, they have offered aid, weapons and comfort to a variety of human rights abusers. As Sudan's leading oil customer, they have given passive support to that country's genocidal policies in Darfur.
And as their eager trading partner and debtor, we, the United States, have been among China's leading enablers.
History shows Olympics to be more than just a "sporting event," as Bush calls it. Japan in 1964, South Korea in 1988 and the Soviet Union in 1980, among others, have used the Olympics to elevate their stature on the world stage.
The most memorably notorious example is Nazi Germany in 1936. Those were the games that created the torch relay as an international pageant to help polish the image of Adolf Hitler's murderous regime.
Ominously, Susan Bachrach, curator of an exhibit on the 1936 Olympics that opens at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington on April 25, observed, "the Nazi torch ran through countries that Germany was about to conquer."
Brundage argued vigorously against calls for the United States to boycott the Berlin Olympics. Hitler successfully concealed the deadliest side of his regime, including the racist and anti-Semitic Nuremburg laws and the rounding up of Jews and others for the first of his death camps.
Yet, in the long run, what is most remembered from that Olympics are the four gold medals won by Jesse Owens, the black American track-and-field star who blew holes in Hitler's theories of Aryan supremacy.
It is with that positive memory in mind that I support the call for our president but not our country's athletes to boycott China's Olympics. We should give our athletes a chance to compete, as they have been training to do, and maybe present the sort of high-achieving model of achievement to the world that Jesse Owens did.
History shows the greatest value of the Olympic games is in their ability to rise above ordinary political nationalism to a higher level of human relations: a humanitarian, egalitarian and meritorious ideal of fair play that transcends boundaries of nations, races or tribes.
In ancient times it is said that nations put down their arms and took a break from war in order to compete in the Olympics. In more recent times, the Olympics encourage us to look beyond our home countries to learn about how much we have in common with the rest of the world - and how those commonalities can bridge our differences.
That's why we should support the Olympics and our athletes. Let the politicians stay home.
Page is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist specializing in urban issues. He is based in Washington, D.C. E-mail: cptime@aol.com
Copyright 2008, Tribune Media Services Inc.作者: robbyl 时间: 2008-4-16 13:30 http://www.newsweek.com/id/131751/
WORLD VIEWFareed Zakaria
Don’t Feed China’s Nationalism
Public humiliation does not work nearly as well on the regime in Beijing as private pressure.
Apr 21, 2008 Issue
At first glance, China's recent crackdown in Tibet looks like a familiar storyline: a dictatorship represses its people. And of course that's part of the reality—as it often is in China. But on this issue, the communist regime is not in opposition to its people. The vast majority of Chinese have little sympathy for the Tibetan cause. To the extent that we can gauge public opinion in China and among its diaspora, ordinary Chinese are, if anything, critical of the Beijing government for being too easy on the Tibetans. The real struggle here is between a nationalist majority and an ethnic and religious minority looking to secure its rights.
In these circumstances, a boycott of the Olympics would have precisely the opposite effect that is intended. The regime in Beijing would become only more defensive and stubborn. The Chinese people would rally around the flag and see the West as trying to humiliate China in its first international moment of glory. (There are many suspicions that the United States cannot abide the prospect of a rising China.) For most Chinese, the Games are about the world's giving China respect, rather than bolstering the Communist Party's legitimacy.
For leaders to boycott the Games' opening ceremonies alone is an odd idea. Is the president of the United States supposed to travel to Beijing to attend the women's water-polo finals instead? (Britain's Gordon Brown, for instance, has said he'll attend the closing, but not the opening ceremonies.) Picking who will go to which event is trying to have it both ways, voting for the boycott before you vote against it. Some want to punish China for its association with the Sudanese government, which is perpetrating atrocities in Darfur. But to boycott Beijing's Games because it buys oil from Sudan carries the notion of responsibility too far. After all, the United States has much closer ties to Saudi Arabia, a medieval monarchy that has funded Islamic terror. Should the world boycott America for this relationship?
China's attitude toward Tibet is wrong and cruel, but, alas, not that unusual. Other nations, especially developing countries, have taken tough stands against what they perceive as separatist forces. A flourishing democracy like India has often responded to such movements by imposing martial law and suspending political and civil rights. The Turks for many decades crushed all Kurdish pleas for linguistic and ethnic autonomy. The democratically elected Russian government of Boris Yeltsin responded brutally to Chechen demands. Under Yeltsin and his successor, Vladimir Putin, also elected, the Russian Army killed about 75,000 civilians in Chechnya, and leveled its capital. These actions were enthusiastically supported within Russia. It is particularly strange to see countries that launched no boycotts while Chechnya was being destroyed—and indeed welcomed Russia into the G8—now so outraged about the persecution of minorities. (In comparison, estimates are that over the past 20 years, China has jailed several hundred people in Tibet.)
On this issue, the Bush administration has so far followed a wiser course, forgoing the grandstanding taking place in Europe and on the campaign trail. It has been urging the Chinese government quietly but firmly to engage in serious discussions with the Dalai Lama. Diplomacy can be scoffed at, but every multinational business that has had success in persuading the Chinese government to change course will testify that public humiliation does not work nearly as well on the regime as private pressure.
Negotiating with the Dalai Lama is in Beijing's interest as well. It faces a restive population that lives in about 13 percent of the land area of China. Many Tibetans want independence. But the Dalai Lama has repeatedly said that he does not seek independence, only cultural autonomy. Even last week he rejected any boycott of the Olympics and urged his followers to engage in no violent protests whatsoever. If there were ever a leader of a separatist group whom one could negotiate with, he's it. And once the 72-year-old Dalai Lama passes from the scene, Beijing might have to deal with a far more unpredictable and radical Tibetan movement.
So why doesn't the Chinese regime see this? Beijing has a particular problem. Now that communism is dead, the Communist Party sees its legitimacy as linked to its role in promoting and defending Chinese nationalism. It is especially clumsy when it comes to such issues. Clever technocrats though they are, China's communist leaders—mostly engineers—have not had to refine their political skills as they have their economic touch. In the past they have stoked anti-Japanese and anti-American outbursts, only to panic that things were getting out of control and then reverse course. They fear that compromising over Tibet would set a precedent for the unraveling of the Chinese nation. China has grown and shrunk in size over the centuries, and its dynasties have often been judged by their success in preserving the country's geography.
In fact, in almost all cases—Turkey, India—granting autonomy to groups that press for it has in the end produced a more stable and peaceful national climate. But that is a lesson the Chinese government will have to learn for itself; it is unlikely to take instruction from outsiders. Its handling of the protests in Tibet is disgraceful. But humiliating the entire country over it would make matters worse.作者: s030604 时间: 2008-4-17 10:37
Post by robbyl
媒体多元与公民责任
----回应本台听友
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