The Chinese Olympics are an attempt by an odious political regime to buy global respectability. They are as political as Hitler's Games in 1936. So it is splendid that the propaganda campaign is now coming unstuck. Steven Spielberg's resignation as artistic adviser for the opening ceremony and Mia Farrow's denunciation of "the genocide games" will infuriate the Chinese satraps. Excellent! Dictators shouldn't be able to buy off the world with a bout of circuses.
How disgraceful it is, then, that New Zealand is being so craven towards Beijing. The government refuses to oppose the gagging clause that requires New Zealand Olympians not to make statements or demonstrate about "political, religious or racial matters". This is a deplorable attack on the fundamental right of free speech by the New Zealand Olympic Committee. But the government's backing of the clause is even worse. Sports Minister Clayton Cosgrove, says: "We all support freedom of speech" except, apparently, for athletes. And apparently this fundamental issue of human rights is "entirely a matter for the NZOC, an independent body". No government has the right to hive off such important questions to any "independent body", especially one as blinkered and myopic as the NZOC. This was exactly the argument that British politicians and bureaucrats used when taxed about the Berlin Games. It was apparently up to the British IOC to decide whether it was OK to play along with a murderous Nazi tyrant and say nothing.
Olympic committees are founded on the fallacy that sport and politics don't mix. The committees think only about sports. That is why great political questions of human rights and freedom cannot be entrusted to them: they will always be clueless in this area. The NZOC claims, for example, that athletes will be free to make political comments in Beijing. It is impossible to see how they can do this without contravening the gagging clause they have signed.
The Olympic Charter trumpets "the joy of effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles". How can a mute participation in the 2008 Propaganda Games "promote respect for universal fundamental ethical principles"? The unelected clique that runs China daily shows its contempt for such principles. The Chinese people are locked in a police state. Beijing oppresses the people of Tibet, the independent state it invaded and conquered. Beijing does business with a range of horrible client states such as the murderers of Darfur.
Beijing has seized this unique opportunity to present the human face of tyranny to the world. The world should respond by refusing to swallow the lie. In these circumstances, Olympians who criticise China are to be congratulated, not condemned. It is ridiculous for Cosgrove to claim that the gagging clause is to protect the athletes, so that "they are not treated as political pawns and can concentrate on their sport". It is not the athletes who are being treated as political pawns. It is lickspittle governments like Cosgrove's.
Everyone knows the Clark government will do almost anything to get its free-trade deal with China. The Labour left-wingers who fought so hard against racist sport New Zealand's insistence on playing rugby with apartheid led to the great African boycott of the 1976 Olympics have long since given up the struggle. Now it's all about bread and circuses. Shame on them.
