Olympics Watchers Assisting Chinese Torture

-By Warner Todd Huston

Do you like your silly little Olympic games? Well, I hope you are really, really enjoying it because your support, your watching of this garbage makes you a direct, unequivocal party to the torture, imprisonment and oppression of the Chinese people. So, you, Mr. Olympics watcher, get a gold medal in torture. Congratulations. Feel proud.

It’s so easy to just shut your eyes and pretend that you are innocent, of course. After all, you didn’t send thousands of storm troopers through the streets of Beijing to round up homeless people, prostitutes, the elderly, or unwanted races like black immigrants from Africa and have them sent to interment camps a mere 30 miles from where the games are being held, right? Why you just bought a ticket to attend, or merely turned on your TV to watch the games. You can console yourself that you had nothing to do with these torture camps being filled up with less than telegenic Chinese people that wouldn’t look good on TV. You just want to see some guy swim, some girls play volleyball or some people running.

You’re innocent, right?

Wrong. You are directly responsible for thousands of people being beaten, displaced, tied to a bench for days on end, forced to go without clothing as punishment, and told that “re-education through labor” is the ideal… just like the Nazis used to tell their victims that “work makes you free.”

Yes, be very proud of yourself.

Oh, you didn’t know? You weren’t aware that during the year before the Beijing Olympics made its fraud filled opening (what with lipsyncing girl singers, fake fireworks and fraudulent “ethnics”) that the Chinese government marauded through the area to rid it of “undesirables”? You didn’t know that torture camps and forced labor camps were set up mere miles away from where the wondrous new buildings and media enclaves were so grandly erected? You didn’t know that immigrants were rounded up and imprisoned merely because they weren’t of Han Chinese ancestry? You say you didn’t know that thousands of China’s least protected people were rounded up, forced to work unhealthy hours through the night, beaten, forced to live in cramped cells of squalor, and tortured constantly?

Well, it doesn’t really matter if you knew about this specific and newest spate of imprisonment and torture. Because if you’d have paid any attention to China at all since the 1940s you’d have known that many billions of its people have been imprisoned, tortured, oppressed and ultimately murdered by its government.

But, the problem is, you don’t want to know. You want to blindly enjoy some fun and games while people were tortured to make your experience as enjoyable as possible. Your hedonism is responsible for torture and murder, but you’d don’t want to be faced with it.

In fact, your selfish fun makes you a traitor to liberty and freedom. Every last western athlete, every last western leader, and every single western attendee as well as all the media are guilty. And so is every TV watcher, newspaper reader, and radio listener who bothers with these murderous games.

But, wait. You say that in the Greek tradition of these grand games that the Olympics are supposed to be a time when war and politics are left at the door and all are to come together in the spirit of healthy competition? Fist of all, the games ended in Greece exactly because even they, the originators of the games, could not live up to that ideal. But even the modern history of the reconstituted Olympics games never excised world politics.

Some foolishly point to the 1936 Olympics held in Nazi Germany as proof that the games are meaningful. They say that when Jesse Owens, an American black man, won his little footrace that it showed the world that Nazis were less than glorious.

To that I say Bull hookie.

After the Nazi games were held, Germany was thought to have created the perfect modern nation. Most people were awed by Hitler’s Germany and he was viewed favorably by most of the world after the games because of his theatrics there. Even more to the point, Jesse Owens little jaunt around that stadium in front of Adolph Hitler did not change one tiny thing of the horror that was then being visited on Germany and would soon be unleashed upon the world. Not one soldier was spared, not one Jew saved from the ovens because Jesse Owens got to run around in his pointless exercise. NOTHING was positively affected by the 1936 Olympics but Hitler’s burnished and shining reputation, a reputation that was only tarnished by his later actions in WWII.

The Olympics meant nothing in 1936 but the legitimizing of a murderous regime in Nazi Germany. And the same is happening here in 2008 for the murderous Chinese.

And now let’s anticipate the self-loathing left’s argument of why this all doesn’t matter. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. They will say that these two famed places will make the USA “just like” the Chinese. And they will then question my outrage. But, let me say to them that their faux outrage over the two aforementioned places is even more questionable. After all, if the tiny, isolated, and completely unsanctioned actions of abuse that might have happened at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are grounds for outrage, the generations of torture perpetrated by the Chinese is even more so. And, if you excuse the Chinese because of abuse that barely registers as such perpetrated by America, then you really have no business bringing up torture as a concern at all. You are a hypocrite. The gold for hypocrisy goes to you, too.

So, yes. Pop the tab on another beer and settle back to enjoy these fetid games. But know that you are responsible for torture and murder. Know that your support of this Olympics is responsible for mass imprisonment. Realize that your hands are red with the blood of the most vulnerable.

Congratulations. The gold is yours.

(Photo credit: telegraph.co.uk)

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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston