Symbol of Peace? You’re Doing It Wrong

The Olympics are meant to be a symbol of peace, or so we’re frequently told by Jacques Rogge of the International Olympic Committee. The Games are supposed to be a moment where the world comes together, focused on sport and not politics. I think it’s a pleasant fiction that the Olympics are not political, but it must be hard for even the most ardent believers in the peaceful symbolism of the Olympics when you have stories like this connected to the Olympic torch’s ascent of Mount Everest:

Nepalese soldiers and police guarding the slopes of Mount Everest are authorized to shoot to stop any protests during China’s Olympic torch run to the summit, an official said Sunday.

Chinese climbers plan to take the torch to the summit of Everest – the world’s highest peak on the border between Nepal and Tibet – in the first few days of May. During that time, other climbers will be banned from the mountain’s higher elevations.

Police and soldiers “have been given orders to stop any protest on the mountain using whatever means necessary, including use of weapons,” Nepal’s Home Ministry spokesman Modraj Dotel said, adding that the use of deadly force was authorized only as a last resort.

Giving security forces permission to shoot Olympic protesters is about as far as you can get from a symbol of peace.

I wonder if this is what they have in mind when it comes to protests that must be stopped through the “use of weapons”?

Tenzin Dorjee and other Tibetan independence activists protest the Olympic torch on Mount Everest in April, 2007.

I simply cannot understand why any government working alongside the Chinese and the IOC would think it is a good idea to authorize deadly force against those who would protest the Olympic torch. I wonder what Jacques Rogge has to say about Nepal’s willingness to shed blood to defend his flame.

Update:

Buckaroo Banzai at Tibet Will Be Free has more.

China’s Crackdown in Tibet Continues On

100 monks were arrested for protesting the detention of other monks.

As many as 100 Tibetans were arrested in northwest China on Thursday after they demonstrated against the earlier detention of monks from a nearby monastery, witnesses and a Tibetan human rights group said Friday.

Local residents reached by telephone on Friday said that the police beat and arrested people at an open-air market in Tongren, a town in Qinghai, a western province bordering Tibet, after they refused orders to leave.

The residents said the town was the scene of several disturbances in recent months, including an unauthorized gathering in February involving 300 monks who were dispersed by tear gas as they tried to make their way to a government building.

Few things more clearly exhibit the lack of freedom in Tibet than the phrase “unauthorized gathering.”

Coca-Cola & Tibet

Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet, has a great quote in a New York Times piece today about the pressure Tibetan support groups are placing on Coca-Cola regarding their sponsorship of the Olympic Torch Relay.

“We’re not asking Coke to solve Tibet’s problems,” Lhadon Tethong, the director of an organizing group called Students for a Free Tibet, told Mr. Isdell at the shareholder meeting on Wednesday. “We’re not asking you to do anything else but tell the I.O.C. this is not the time for the torch to go to Tibet.”

Ms. Tethong added, “You have influence, and you know you have influence. Please don’t hide behind a spin.”

You can take action and tell Coke to oppose the torch going through Tibet.

Smell the Harmony

Well, I suppose you have to smell China’s “Harmonious” torch, because you couldn’t see the Olympic Torch Relay if you were in Delhi.

The Olympic torch made a strange and lonely procession through central Delhi on Thursday, with the event so overshadowed by fears of the anti-Chinese protests that marred its appearances in other cities that no members of the public were allowed close enough to witness it.

The 70-odd Indian athletes and celebrities who carried the torch down Delhi’s widest avenue were outnumbered by thousands of watchful members of India’s security forces, who managed to stamp out any pomp and excitement, transforming the occasion into a tense security operation.

The authorities cordoned off much of the heart of New Delhi for hours before the event, anxious to avoid the disruption that plagued earlier stages of the torch relay and concerned that protesters from India’s large Tibetan community would seize the opportunity to sabotage the occasion. [Emphasis added]

What a joke the Olympic Torch Relay has become.  The only solace that the International Olympic Committee and party elites of the Chinese government can take is that the Relay has become such a humiliating mockery of past Olympic festivities that it’s almost impossible to imagine a situation where the Games themselves are worse than the Relay itself. As much as I might revel in schadenfreude in similarly disastrous Beijing Olympics, I don’t think it’s possible to have a more shameful production of any event than this has been.  What a joke.

Debate Blowback

I didn’t watch last night’s Democratic presidential debate on ABC. Judging from the blogospheric reaction, I didn’t miss much. You know the debate was a disaster when the Washington Post’s TV critic Tom Shales rips ABC and their moderators like he does in this piece, “In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC.” Shales writes:

At the end, Gibson pompously thanked the candidates — or was he really patting himself on the back? — for “what I think has been a fascinating debate.” He’s entitled to his opinion, but the most fascinating aspect was waiting to see how low he and Stephanopoulos would go, and then being appalled at the answer.

I honestly wonder what ABC’s internal goal for the debates was. I doubt it’s something direct like “Make Clinton and Obama talk about trivialities so McCain will look great in comparison.” I’d guess it was something more like, “Have the sort of debate that gets praise from Serious People.” No doubt winning over David Brooks will be seen as a sign of the sort of success ABC likely sought last night.

As I said above, I didn’t watch the debate so I can only marvel from afar at how bad it was. But while this may have been a triviality driven debate, I remember quite a few debates with seven or eight Democratic candidates that failed to seriously discuss the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and completely skipped any discussion of issues connected to the rule of law. So while this may represent a new iteration of how low the media will go in their substance-free Democratic debates, it’s not as if we suddenly arrived here after having departed from Socrates’ agora just weeks ago.