Passing the Torch

It’s Olympic time. Think gold medals, flags, and Old Spice ads. Think China and dead monks. Think boycotts, but not; because a boycott of the Olympics will only hurt the athletes. And we care about the athletes. Right?

There was a time when South Africa deluded itself with the idea of separate but equal. You know: We are all the same, just different. We called it Apartheid and no-one was fooled, not even us. We had the gold and the diamonds, the platinum and the uranium. Shit, we had Table Mountain, which was fantastic on postcards. So we were forgiven, until the rest of the world, read people, not governments, by the way, caught on and started to call for sports boycotts. And we heard the same thing then. No. Don’t boycott sport. It will only hurt the athletes. They aren’t doing anything wrong. But eventually there was a sports boycott, and the rest of us non-sports people suddenly had nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon, so we started to take notice.

A sports boycott does hurt the athletes. It hurts everybody. It’s supposed to hurt, dammit. That’s the point. It’s supposed to cause discomfort.

China is a superpower. It holds enough foreign currency to bankrupt the US, if it so desires, though I won’t pretend I know enough about economics to understand how. But the Chinese government is repressive. It cannot, by any standards, be considered democratic. It’s actions against political dissidents, be they Tibetan monks or Falun Gong practitioners, is brutal.

European governments, excluding the British who have in recent times developed a reputation for servility, have mentioned, in passing, that they might, if pushed, consider boycotting the Olympics. There has been little support from the US. Ms Condoleezza Rice (remember the WMDs?) rejected an Olympic boycott to avoid "insulting the Chinese people'. Screw the Tibetans (who are, by her definition, Chinese people). We should be boycotting these Olympics. We should be boycotting Chinese products – probably more difficult. We should be. We aren’t.

After years of social, political, and economic isolation South Africa crawled out of the dark ages into a golden age of peace and love (just like a John Lennon song) and became the darling of the international community. It wasn’t only because of the sports boycott, but it helped, and it can only help in China.