Boycott the Beijing Olympics?
Christopher Hitchens: "Those who care or purport to
care about human rights must start to discuss this problem in plain
words.
- Is there an initiative to save the un-massacred remains of the
people of Darfur? It will be met by a Chinese veto..
- Does anyone care
about Robert Mugabe treating his desperate population as if it belonged
to him personally? China is always ready to help him out.
- Are the North
Koreans starved and isolated so that a demented playboy can posture
with nuclear weapons? Beijing will give the demented playboy a guarantee.
- How long can Southeast Asia bear the shame and misery of the Burmese junta? As long as the embrace of China persists.
- The identity
of Tibet is being obliterated by the deliberate importation of Chinese
settlers.
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a man who claims even to know and determine the sex lives of his serfs (by the way, the very essence of totalitarianism), is armed and financed by China.
- .."when
President Bill Clinton wanted the United Nations to take on Slobodan Milosevic and was stymied (by China, among others), and it was this way when President Bush asked the United Nations to live up to its resolutions on Saddam Hussein.
And now I hear human rights activists bleating about Burma and our inaction and simultaneously complaining about the only time that any U.S. president had the nerve to break the hold of China (and Russia, and sometimes France) on the possibility of
any international rescue.
.. If Beijing had had its way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. Iran is being supplied with Chinese Silkworm missiles. Most horribly of all, China buys most of the oil of Sudan and in return provides the weaponry—and the diplomatic cover at the United Nations—for the cleansing of Darfur. ("Blood for oil" would be a good description of this bargain, though I have not seen the expression employed very often.)
Meanwhile, everybody is getting ready for the lovely time they will have at the Beijing Olympics. If there could be a single demand that would fuse almost all the human rights demands of the contemporary world into one, it would be the call to boycott or
cancel this disgusting celebration.
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