Blood, bullets, rape, genocide and the 2008 Olympic games, can you guess which one doesn’t fit? If you said the Olympics you’d be wrong – this year they all fit. The Olympics will be held in Beijing, China, and athletes at the peak of their careers will all be heading out to achieve their dreams of Olympic gold – but maybe they could do the world a service and stay at home. China, who is not known for being the most humanitarian country, sends weapons to Sudan, a country that is in great turmoil (dreamfordarfur.org). The Sudanese are persecuting the region of Darfur and slaughtering their people. This not the only bad thing China has ever done, but it stands out among the rest. It’s not that they’re the only country committing atrocities, but they are the country hosting the Olympics, an event that used to represent unity, freedom and most importantly, peace, but now has been bought by corporations like Pepsi and used for advertisements. China can learn from its mistakes, but it hasn’t yet and until it does, the U.S. should boycott the Olympic Games.
This is not the first Olympics to be questioned; others include Munich (where 11 members of the Israeli team were brutally murdered by a terrorist cell called “Black September”), and Berlin in 1936 with Jesse Owens, but the only Olympics that the U.S. actually boycotted was the 1980 games in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan(Yardley 8). The Soviets at the time were also exploiting their constituents, something that China has been doing more and more. The Chinese have set up a police state in the once quiet region of Shenzhen where cameras are everywhere in the hopes of destroying freedom for the middle-class workers there (Klein 7). Shenzhen is completely controlled and manipulated by the government. The people there are being treated like an experiment, people are arrested (and sometimes even murdered), for protesting and speaking out; it’s almost like taking every movie or book showing a horrible future (1984 by George Orwell comes to mind), and using it as a building block for a civilization.
Shenzhen is not the only instance where China has violated human rights. Tibet is one of the best examples of evil towards a country. The Chinese attacked Tibet and took over; they are now encouraging Chinese to move to Tibet for higher wages. This makes the Tibetans a minority in their own country and prevents their voice from being heard. The Tibetan monks and the common Tibetans who try to live a peaceful life are being slaughtered (freetibet.org).
The U.S. overlooked 11 murders in Munich, but we cannot overlook the murders of more than 200,000 and to do so is a step against everything our founding fathers have taught us. This is a tough image, but just imagine your mom, dad, sister, brother, and everyone else you know being savagely beaten, raped and murdered. To top that off, the people who gave the killers their weapons with a smile on their face, held a ceremony honoring peace and unity – how would you feel? I can’t even imagine how I’d feel, but Darfurians feel it every day and the Chinese government won’t stop making money off their tears and blood.
By boycotting the Olympic Games, we might be able to wake the Chinese government up and maybe stop them from sending more weapons to the Sudan. This may even push them to treat the Tibetans with more compassion. The only way to find out is on August 8th tell everyone you know to turn off their televisions, turn off their radios and turn off the “patriotism” instilled in us by the Olympics because not doing so is endorsing genocide and a blockage of rights. Remember this: even though we live in the land of the free, not everyone else does.