An Olympian Stench
I don't like mixing politics and sports and thought that our boycott of the USSR and their boycott of our Olympics were useless gestures. No country is pure enough not to be worthy of protest. And yet, I'm ill at ease with Peking.
The Olympic tradition of accommodation to dictators and their own institutional corruption are nearly as bothersome as China's flagrant disregard of human rights, openness and keeping promises. While the Olympic committee is merely hypocritical, the Chinese regime is brutal and murderous.
Hitler's Olympics come to mind--as does this question: Would we have stayed away in 1936 if we'd only known of Hitler's brutality? Today we know of China's violence and abuse of people foreign and domestic. We have no plausible deniability.
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