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It is unfortunate that the Olympics has been prostituted
to politics.
—Tony
Abaya, newspaper columnist
Hitler
used the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics to showcase Aryan
superiority. Too bad Jesse Owens showed up and showed
him up.
Still,
German athletes had an impressive harvest of medals in
those games, and that helped make the Nazi Party look
good. The message of the 1936 Olympics was clear: a
fascist system produced better human specimens than
liberal democracies.
Seventy-two years later, the Chinese government,
fascist, communist, totalitarian, imperialist and
capitalist all rolled into one, is using the Olympic
Games to sell Deng Xiao Ping’s cockeyed notion of growth
and development: “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is
black or white, as long as it catches mice.”
Too bad
for Deng’s disciples, the Dalai Lama showed up and
reminded us all that the color of the cat is what really
counts. Human beings, after all, are more than just
means to make money to buy pancit and underage virgins.
The
Olympic Games cannot be separated from politics despite
the ridiculous claim of Hein Verbruggen, head of the
International Olympic Committee’s coordination
commission for the 2008 Beijing Games, that “there is a
very thick, fat, red line between the two.” History
shows otherwise.
Heracles
created the Olympic Games to honor his father Zeus, the
god-king of Olympia. That’s politics, sports and
religion all rolled into one.
The
Ancient Games also encouraged “good relations between
the cities of Greece” because wars would be suspended
while the Games were going on. In modern times, the
opposite is true. Olympic Games were suspended to allow
the world to wage two global wars uninterrupted by
goodwill competitions.
The
acknowledged father of modern Olympics, Pierre de Fredy,
Baron de Coubertin, had other reasons besides world
peace when he resurrected the Games.
Peter
McKnight of the
Vancouver
Sun:
“[D]isturbed by
France’s
loss to the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian war when he
was a child, Coubertin believed that France had become
weak because its educational system focused almost
exclusively on mental pursuits, in contrast to the
Germans and the British, who also emphasized athletic
activities.
“Sport,
therefore, represented for Coubertin a way to restore
France to its former glory. This is not to suggest that
Coubertin encouraged sport to create better soldiers—as
did many supporters of ancient Greek Olympics, including
Plato—since Coubertin hoped that the Olympics would help
lead to world peace.
“However
praiseworthy, that is an explicitly political aim, a
goal that goes far beyond the Olympic motto of Citius,
Altius, Fortius [Faster, Higher, Stronger], which,
incidentally, Coubertin proposed. And this reveals, as
sports historian Allan Guttman said in a recent lecture
at Harvard Law School, that the Olympic movement ‘really
was a social and political movement.’”
Politics
has always been at the heart of the Olympics, so China
will have to live with the consequences of hosting the
Games before learning the art of public relations.
But all
hope is not lost. There is a way for China to make the
world forget about Tibet.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, says: “During the
ancient times normally only young men could participate.
Competitors were usually naked, not only as the weather
was appropriate but also as the festival was meant to
be, in part, a celebration of the achievements of the
human body.”
Naked
Olympics!
Beijing is hot during the summer.
With
naked games,
China
can reasonably claim that politics should have no part
in the Olympics because it is purely “a celebration of
the achievements of the human body.”
The
whole world can celebrate naked men wrestling each other
to the ground, naked gymnasts swinging on uneven bars, a
naked Maria Sharapova volleying fuzzy balls to a naked
Serena Williams without giving a passing thought to
politics.
China’s
dictators can keep their body politic completely covered
and they can proclaim:
“[N]o
power on earth can block the dreams of the people of
China and the world for peace and their pursuit of the
Olympic spirit. The lighting of the Olympic flame in the
Bird’s Nest stadium on August 8 will be a moment of
pride for China and also for the whole world, as justice
will finally defeat evil.” (People’s Daily)
Because
the Beijing Olympics is really about realizing the
dreams of Han Chinese like Fan Yang and Yu Yong of ZTE
and Hu Haifeng, the x-ray manufacturer who was awarded
the $465.5-million cyber-education project because his
father, President Hu Jintao of
China,
lent Gloria Arroyo the money to do it. Justice triumphs
over evil, Beijing-style.
Let’s
liberate the people of Tibet first and then we play the
Games. Au naturel, naturally.
Buencamino is a fellow of Action for Economic Reforms (www.aer.ph). |
