The Olympics mess

[HT:MD].
It is hard to avoid the role of spoilsport when talking about the Beijing Olympics. We all love to hear the National Anthem played as American athletes step up onto the middle podium to receive their gold medals.

Then the knowledge of where this is all taking place intrudes and undercuts much of the pride. From there, thoughts then drift, or at least should drift in any morally developed soul, to all the brave Chinese dissidents who are languishing in dungeons as a result of the Chinese government’s pre-Olympics cleanup or simply its broader, routine beastliness.

For only the third time, the Olympic games are being held in a nation governed by a brutal dictatorship. This time might be the worst for a number of reasons... [snip]

... the Chinese government has killed somewhere between 50 million and 60 million of its own people since coming to power nearly 60 years ago, making it by almost any reckoning the most bloodthirsty in history. While it is true that most of that body count could be laid at the feet of the gruesome Mao Zedong, it staggers the mind to realize that the party and regime that he created are the same ones hosting our athletes in Beijing today.

Imagine that the Nazi Party had somehow survived World War II intact and that as a consequence Hitler’s acolytes were still running things in Germany. One needn’t go very far to intermix the policies at play, or that morality should have prevented the Olympic games from being presided over by thugs who can too smoothly trace their lineage back to the likes of Josef Stalin, Hitler or Mao...

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