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Beijing 2008: The Totalitarian Games
Ever wonder why Western athletes aren't defecting to the Communist paradise?
Just to be on the safe side, those lovers of freedom in the Party started rounding up prickly dissidents well in advance of the Games. Starting back in 2006, a systematic purging of possible troublemakers took place all over the land. It simply would not do for ordinary Chinese citizens to show up at fancy Olympic venues, begging for safe drinking water or basic human rights.
It’s even harder to keep those Jesus freaks under wraps. So, the benevolent leaders decided to play it safe and start early rounding up those underground, home church leaders and preachers.
Despite China’s formal pretense otherwise, it operates one of the most anti-religious and brutal anti-Christian dictatorships in history. Even though the Chinese Communists established and control “state” churches, they merely represent a false façade for the propagandists of the atheist Party.
As John W. Whitehead writes:
Thus, a growing underground house church movement has sprung up, numbering between 50 and 100 million Christian Protestants. This, of course, has been labeled illegal by the Chinese government. Consequently, Chinese authorities routinely swoop into home churches, dragging worshipers out in the streets in some instances and beating them. Some have even been killed.
These efforts to squelch the growing home church movement have been ramped up in anticipation of the Summer Olympic Games. The China Aid Association has reported that many house church pastors in Beijing have been “visited” and “requested” to leave the city before the Games. Others have been arrested, beaten, and tortured.
While the folks at the IOC may have thought their hearts were in the right place when they granted Communist China the prestige of the Olympic Games, one must wonder whether their heads were on the same planet at the time. Rather than worldwide attention encouraging the Communists to loosen their grip, the opposite has indeed occurred.
Real families have been split apart by the sudden roundups. Real children have lost fathers and mothers, perhaps for life. Repressed people have been dealt yet another forceful blow.
And in a couple of weeks, the rest of the free world will go back to business as usual, while Chinese citizens, without simple human rights, remain jailed.
Defection, anyone?
Of the myriad problems surely encountered by the Communists in creating a grand show of their peaceful and prosperous land for the entire world to feast upon, it is truly doubtful that they will need to deal with massive defections of Westerners seeking political asylum.
While it can be easy to ignore the obvious in the interest of world-class athletic competition, it would take a ninny to want to stay in Communist Beijing.
One may buy from them, wine and dine with them, and play innocent games with them, but at the end of the festivities, normal folks just want to get the heck out and plant their feet back on free ground.
But, hey, it’s the apolitical Olympics.
The 2012 Games are already taken, but I’m starting a write-in campaign to the IOC to go for political broke in 2016 and give the Olympic Games to Tehran. The Iranians can make a show of banning the Israelis and the Americans, showcase their new nukes for the opening ceremonies, and perhaps hold a few public beheadings and amputations along with the passing of the torch.
A perfect Islamo-fascist, apolitical Olympics. It ought to be a really splendid show, the kind for which the whole world has waited, with seemingly bated breath.
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Kyle-Anne Shiver is an independent journalist and a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at www.kyleanneshiver.com.
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29 Comments
1. Emmett Flatus:I keep expecting Baghdad Bob to appear as a spokesman for China.
Aug 14, 2008 - 8:13 am 2. Saltherring:If you think China’s government is totalitarian, wait until you see what Obama, Pelosi, et al. have in store for Americans….
Aug 14, 2008 - 8:20 am 3. pch1013:“If you think China’s government is totalitarian, wait until you see what Obama, Pelosi, et al. have in store for Americans….”
But look on the bright side — no more immigration, illegal or otherwise!
Aug 14, 2008 - 9:35 am 4. China Cheated « Tai-Chi Policy:[...] Beijing 2008: The Totalitarian Games. [...]
Aug 14, 2008 - 9:51 am 5. Beijing News » Blog Archive » Beijing 2008: The Totalitarian Games:[...] Kyle-Anne Shiver wrote an interesting post today on Beijing 2008: The Totalitarian Games. Here’s a quick excerpt: [...]
Aug 14, 2008 - 10:29 am 6. Gusbenz:Hey, China just wants the world to know that they’re here and ready to cure the ills which plague us all. I would really enjoy seeing China take over the U.S. role throughout the world for a week and see how they handle things: “Destroy dissent! Let the flower of socialism with Chinese characteristics bloom!”
Aug 14, 2008 - 10:45 am 7. Mikey:Another great column, Kyle-Anne Shiver!
It speaks volumes, that despite all the Chinese propaganda and hoopla, no athletes have defected during the Olympic Games.
Aug 14, 2008 - 10:51 am 8. Susan Katz Keating:I think that this must be the first non-defection Olympics since the 50s.
You know things must be bad in China when even the Cubans and North Koreans decide to stay put.
I vote for holding the 2016 games in Riyadh. Of course, women won’t be allowed to compete, but that inequity won’t stop the IOC. They’re all about tolerance and suck-up. To compensate for the loss of events, the Saudis could even introduce new sports, such as Wife Beating, and the ever popular Team Wife Beating.
Aug 14, 2008 - 11:05 am 9. Concerned Citizen:Things in China are at a tipping point; once the noise of the Olympics have come and gone, this will be apparent. The change in the rate of growth has now gone negative. This is a statistical early indicator that works for stock prices and economies because it almost always precedes a similar move in the underlying statistic, the rate of growth. Like any economy, the bad investment decisions of the past ten years that were covered up by growth will come festering up to the surface. Now, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a difficult choice. Do they care more about the welfare of their people or their own power?
The CCP already demonstrated their willingness to do the greatest evil to gain and hold power by murdering 80 million people since 1947. Land reform (kill all the landlords, 1950-2, 2.5-5 million killed), The Great Leap Forward (1959-61, 30-40 million starved to death), The Cultural Revolution (1966-76, 7-8 million killed) and other purges have led to the largest mass murder total in human history – even worse than the Nazis, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Pol Pot or any other ruthless despot from history hellbent on their own power over innocent people.
Today, you have the vicious persecution of Falun Gong and Christians in China. Falun Gong is a Buddhist school of spiritual practice that focuses on personal character, using meditation exercises to help develop their mind, body and spirit. By 1999, seventy million people in China practiced Falun Gong, by the government’s own internal estimates. These innocent and peaceful people have had several million practitioners rounded up, jailed, tortured and sent to “reeducation” camps for brainwashing. I have personally spoken with many of these survivors who are now in the U.S. and they consist of elderly men and women whose only crime was believing in Truth-Compassion-Tolerance and meditating in the park, or meeting with several others in their home to share experiences in their belief system. I have been very impressed by the personal character, honesty and integrity of Falun Gong practitioners.
Here is a short video my 12 year old daughter made about the persecution:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUuyjc1mtUs
This persecution is now moving to Christians in China. A Chinese friend told me of a person she knows who was Christian and visiting China recently. She went to a church to do a bible reading with about 100 others when everyone was rounded up. This person spent a month in jail — for reading the Bible. Chinese Christians are going to be the next target of persecution because the CCP knows it can’t control a human heart that has decided to follow a righteous path.
Why does the CCP insist on doing this? The CCP is the opposite of “Truth – Compassion – Tolerance” and they only care about maintaining absolute power. They liked the fascist “free market” economy because party officials could line their pockets from real estate development done on stolen land, improper bank “loans” and other kinds of corruption. This has generated untold wealth for the well connected party members and their cronies.
Now that the growth is slowing they have a big problem on their hands. The majority will put up with some amount of corruption and lack of freedoms if they benefit economically — but with less cash to spread around, there is a looming social problem with the 700 million people who got nothing from the economic boom. The CCP are also getting desperate now that electronic technology like cell phones and the internet have enabled real time communications and unorganized “organization” completely out of their control. Forty million people have quit the CCP and its affiliated organizations to date and more quit every day.
The CCP is about to learn a truth once the Olympics conclude. Many people want to be good and to serve a higher purpose than the CCP. The evil ways of the CCP are being exposed. Once a person truly decides to cultivate their heart, there is no stopping it.
Aug 14, 2008 - 11:10 am 10. Steve:The one evening I was unable to escape the Olympics coverage, the woman’s gymnastics was on. The multi-cultural, moral equivalency trained NBC announcer said “The girls are taken away from their parents when they are three years old. They are allowed to see their parents once a year.”
As if that was perfectly normal… the sky is blue… grass is green… and children are taken away from their parents by the government at the age of three to serve the state.
What a disgrace.
Aug 14, 2008 - 12:45 pm 11. glc:I agree.
China is openly communist.
Obama is covert communist–until elected.
Pelosi is already communist. She is acting like a dictator in Congress. She forbids a vote? Who is she? She’s acting like a dictator.
Dictator. Elitist. Leftist. Socialist.
Wealth redistribution.
Disenfranchisement of voters (look at what Obama, Howard Dean and Pelosi tried to do to Florida and Michigan voters–ignore them…..)
Go Hillary.
(And I’m voting for McCain–he’s the only candidate who sees the world for what it is and who has the balls to take it on.)
Aug 14, 2008 - 1:20 pm 12. Kevin:The IBD August 8th Cartoon sums it up completely:
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/CartoonPopUp.aspx?id=302992658338233
Aug 14, 2008 - 3:24 pm 13. Steynian 224 « Free Mark Steyn!:[...] BEIJING 2008: The Totalitarian Games– “Ever wonder why Western athletes aren’t defecting [...]
Aug 14, 2008 - 3:47 pm 14. Morton Doodslag:I thought the Chinese displayed their fascist contempt for humanity very vividly, and I watched the opening ceremonies in horror. Humans as particles. Humans as pixels. The outlandish architecture exploited as an apparatus of state dominance, used to show the smallness of humanity. And that handoff of the Chinese communist flag from the “ethnic” chinese children (were the Tibetans represented. One wonders…) to the goose-stepping soldiers. Does anyone else remember soldiers from the national army of any other nation taking such a prominent role in the opening ceremonies? I don’t remember ever seeing such a thing. The only mention of the fact on NBC came from a cringing apologist who explained everything away just as the Chinese would have wished — he explained the “symbolism” of soldiers as the “guarantors” of the future of the children. Did anybody else practically barf like I did?
Aug 14, 2008 - 4:03 pm 15. Zbigniew Mazurak:This is a good article, Kyle-Anne, but there’s one factographic error in it:
“When Moscow was chosen to host the 1980 Games, just a short time before the Ruskies invaded Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter decided that staging a boycott of the Olympics” – wrong.
Moscow was chosen to host the Games in 1974, 5 years before the Soviet military invaded Afghanistan. Jimmy Carter wasn’t even a president back then. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, the Olympics were staged in the summer of 1980.
My proposal is that, for future Olympiads (from 2016 onwards), a permanent host city should be elected (e.g. Paris, LA, or Atlanta). Every participating NOC should contribute some cash to a common budget that would be spent on the Quadrennial Olympiads from 2016 onwards. This would be an undisputably better solution than reinventing a wheel in a new city every 4 years and burdening host cities with large debts. It would also prevent the OGs from being awarded to totalitarian states like China or Russia or Iran.
Aug 15, 2008 - 1:02 am 16. DavidN:The important thing to remember here is that the Olympics aren’t in a real communist country, they’re in China. The Chinese have always been like this, and the communist rulers are really just emperors in different clothes. There was a brouhaha the other day when it was discovered that the little girl who sang in the opening ceremony was lip-singing to the voice of *another* little girl, who was judged insufficiently cute. The Chinese do this sort of thing because they are obsessed with the idea that they need to present themselves to the rest of the world as perfect. The dissent issue is a similar one. The American athlete who was kept away because he’s brought up Darfur would be an embarrassment to the government, and you don’t embarrass the emperor. The Chinese government isn’t totalitarian because it’s communist…it’s communist because that allows it to be totalitarian. The emperor needs power to ensure his own safety and prosperity, and he needs to exert authority unilaterally to keep chaos from overtaking the country.
The facet of this issue which has always fascinated me is that the Chinese leadership thinks they’ve fooled the world by doing this. They believe that no one notices when they dub one voice and let another girl sing, and when they get caught they assure one another that the people will understand this was in the national interest, or something to that effect. The government types over there seem to have never met a skeptic, or someone who looks at things critically or objectively. Facade and pretense are everything, reality meaningless. Strangely, not even the Democrats are buying that, for the most part, but the Chinese government, emperor and all, persevere.
Aug 15, 2008 - 3:03 am 17. B Shah:What really amazed me was the absence of Mao from the celebrations. Silence on the communist ear of Chinese history spoke louder than any words or actions. Even the Chinese gov (!!!!) wants to keep silent about the communist history !!!!! Chinese emperors were celebrated, raised into the night sky, but not a single portrait of the venerable leader graced the stadium – not even at the end !!
This really does prove that the communists are just mini-emperors in drab clothes.
Indeed, throughout Chinese history of over 3000 year, it doesn’t matter who rules, they are all equally totalitarian and equally brutal to the masses.
Aug 15, 2008 - 4:22 am 18. Jarhead68:To Zbigniew:
Read Kyle-Anne’s sentence again.
“When Moscow was chosen to host the 1980 Games, just a short time before the Ruskies invaded Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter decided that staging a boycott of the Olympics”
The games were HOSTED just a short time before the Soviets invaded not CHOSEN a short time before. That was the intent of her language. Could have been phrased a bit better but, as usual, Kyle-Anne is spot on.
I especially liked the suggestion about Iran hosting the games. That, alone, is worth the read.
Aug 15, 2008 - 7:41 am 19. Zbigniew Mazurak:To Idiot68:
You are flat wrong, as is Kyle-Anne herself if what you wrote was really what she intended. You wrote:
“The games were HOSTED just a short time before the Soviets invaded not CHOSEN a short time before. That was the intent of her language. Could have been phrased a bit better but, as usual, Kyle-Anne is spot on.”
and you’ve claimed that Kyle-Anne intended to write so, too. (Whether she did is an issue that only she could clarify).
But you are flat wrong.
The Games were HOSTED several months AFTER the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Not BEFORE. AFTER.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan occured in December 1979. The Games began in July 1980 and ended in August 1980. Therefore, the Games began 7 months AFTER the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
Moscow was CHOSEN to host the Olympics BEFORE the invasion, but firstly, that’s not what you were talking about, only KA mentioned the selection, secondly, Moscow was elected in 1974, i.e. 5 years before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. That’s a long period of time.
THE BOTTOM LINE: The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan occured in December 1979, that is, several months AFTER the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Since you’ve claimed otherwise, you are flat wrong, and so is KA if she claimed so too. But your obsession (it cannot even be called love) for Kyle-Anne will never allow you to see her mistakes, you are blind and deaf because of that obsession. Not to mention that Kyle-Anne herself never claimed infallibility.
Aug 15, 2008 - 8:01 am 20. Zbigniew Mazurak:Too bad that history is no longer taught in American schools. Jarhead68 is yet another proof (if any proof were needed) that American education sucks, despite costing much. Here in Poland, everyone who bothers to learn can get free, decent education.
Aug 15, 2008 - 9:13 am 21. Bugs:“The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan occured in December 1979, that is, several months AFTER the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.”
Too bad coherent writing is no longer taught in Polish schools.
Aug 15, 2008 - 9:40 am 22. Zbigniew Mazurak:Duh, sorry, I meant, “the Moscow Olympiad occurred in the summer of 1980, that is, several months AFTER the Soviets invaded Afghanistan”. No need to be extremely piccayune.
Aug 15, 2008 - 10:03 am 23. ProgMeister:How many of you have ever actually been in China?
it’s like the US in the 50s … blowin and goin … wide open; they have their problems with dissent to be sure … and we had Joe McCarthy …
Aug 15, 2008 - 10:45 pm 24. Zbigniew Mazurak:Wow, we’re 2 days down the road and Kyle-Anne’s article is STILL among the 5 most popular. Congrats, Kyle-Anne!
Aug 16, 2008 - 12:53 am 25. CPTKevin:So why did our President decide to legitimize this by going to the opening ceremonies? What our President does and says is big news in the world and the fact that he chose to go to these opening ceremonies really legitimized China in the world.
Further, WE MADE CHINA. The wide open trade policies of the far right wing have made China into what it is today. Honestly, I am not concerned about the olympics too much because it is just sport. But we, as a Country, and Bush as a President, have supported China and propped them up. In fact, we have told OUR workers to “find new jobs” or “retrain” so that their jobs can be shipped to China.
Aug 17, 2008 - 3:00 am 26. Gusbenz:“How many of you have ever actually been in China?”
I’ve been to Xinjiang and I can tell you for certain that mainland China is horrid. The people are hindered by the Central Government and hints of disgusting socialist tendencies seep through how time is kept. Now, Hong Kong and Macau (the SARs) are much better, but in a few more decades the Central Government will tighten it’s insidious grip.
Aug 18, 2008 - 9:54 am 27. Merry:What?? I LIVED in China, and it is most certainly not horrid, and anyone with any Chinese at all can tell you that the people are very creative in how they choose to debate and discuss issues that are supposedly banned. But I’ve observed that most people around here have long ago decided what China is and isn’t, so the reality of the situation or anything below the surface (i.e. “evil Chicoms,” etc.) doesn’t seem to matter.
The first sentence made me laugh: “When I first heard the news that Mao’s workers’ paradise, China, was chosen to host these Summer 2008 Olympic Games…” Um, you do realize Mao has been dead since 1976, right? That modern day China bears absolutely NO resemblance to the worker’s paradise he envisioned? You should have heard the public anti-Mao rants of my neighbor there. (And no, she was not imprisoned for them.) There’s a lot to criticize about China, and I think there is a fair argument to be made against them hosting the games, though surely by now this is a moot point. This article fails to do anything to rehash the same-old stuff.
Aug 19, 2008 - 6:37 am 28. Mahou Meido Meganekko » Blog Archive » Probably the Only Olympics Post:[...] comment I’ve seen so far: I think that this must be the first non-defection Olympics since the 50s. You know things must be [...]
Oct 5, 2008 - 4:57 pm 29. ooopinionsss:How you think when the economic crisis will end? I wish to make statistics of independent opinions!
Dec 3, 2008 - 7:12 am