Human Rights are an Olympic Sport
By Simon J Black
Published: 06/14/2008
In his latest sports column for Canadian Dimension, Simon Black discusses the politics surrounding the upcoming Beijing Olympics.
The call came from people and places as varied as Perez Musharraf and Vladimir Putin to the International Olympic Committee and Buenos Aires’ Chinatown: “Don’t politicize the Olympic Games!” a futile cri de coeur if ever there was one. As we on the Left never tire of reminding those who are not, everything is political. Beijing 2008’s defenders would be better off demanding: “depoliticize the Olympic Games!” but then a call to depoliticization is a political act in and of itself, a bit like voter abstention.
Word games aside, protest and politics have, and will continue to follow the Games wherever they go: the Black power salutes and student uprising of Mexico City 1968; the Munich massacre of 1972; the cold war boycotts of Moscow ’80 and Los Angeles ’84 – the Olympics and politics are intimately linked. We can expect – and should be in solidarity with – First Nations protests at Vancouver 2010. London 2012 will bring activists to the streets shining a light on the city’s failed promise of social housing and jobs for the urban poor. And when the Games hit Sochi in 2014, I’m sure radicals armed with an atlas will find something to protest about; when they find Sochi that is.
The spark for all this latest talk of “politicizing” the Games has been the Olympic torch relay. Protests have followed the flame from Paris to London and onto San Francisco and South America. The sight of pro-Tibetan protestors, fire extinguishers in tow, desperately trying to snuff out the flame was a reminder of the Olympics oft forgotten political history. Canada’s doyen at the IOC, Dick Pound, argued passionately against a global relay, preferring the flame take a domestic route along China’s back roads where murmurs of dissent could be swiftly dealt with. Either unbothered or unaware of the relay’s origins in the Nazi propaganda machine of the Berlin Games in ‘36, Pound was aghast that “a vulnerable and peaceful symbol such as the Olympic flame” should become the target of protest. For in these neoliberal times, when the world has reached universal consensus on the rule of the market, the Games were to move on from being political spectacle to something more meaningful: corporate spectacle. Now silly things like human rights are getting in the way of Ethiopian runners sipping Coca-Cola along their smoggy marathon route.
Tibet isn’t the only point of contention; Chinese relations with Sudan have been sucked into the vortex of Olympic protest. Citing Chinese complicity in the ongoing human rights abuses in Darfur, Stephen Spielberg withdrew from his role as artistic consultant to the Beijing 2008 organizing committee, leaving China with 3000 ET costumes and in desperate need of a new Olympic mascot. Now world leaders are jockeying for the moral high ground. The war criminal George Bush and his poodle’s successor Gordon Brown, have both expressed their intent to attend the opening ceremonies, although with “reservations”; however, German chancellor Angela Merkel will not. France’s new emperor Nicolas Sarkozy has stated that “all options are open” and will likely follow Merkel’s lead in boycotting the opening ceremony. For his part, Stephen Harper said he won’t attend, but appears yet to have decided why: moral conscience, scheduling conflict, or just a phobia of crowds.
So what’s the Left to do when human rights are beyond becoming a political football, but truly an Olympic sport? States are not ethical subjects, but people and movements are. We must realize that the new politics of human rights engaged in by the big powers is simply geopolitical power play and no substitute for the good old fashioned internationalism of the socialist movement i.e. standing in solidarity with the exploited and oppressed wherever they may be, from Beijing to Vancouver, London to err... Sochi.
Published in Canadian Dimension July/Aug