The Turbulent Ride of the 2008 Olympics Torch

Aby April 13th, 2008

The charged political atmosphere in the torch relays of the Beijing Olympics of 2008 should cause the founder of modern international Olympics, the French nobleman Pierre Fredy roll in his grave. The sporting event revived with ideals of promoting peace, harmony and international cultural exchange has eventually grown to turn to to a background of violent political events. Over the last 70 years, there have been several instances where propaganda machinery tried to hijack the Olympics to their political games. However it is significant in the history of Olympics that a pre-sport event such as the Torch relay was mired in so much violent poltical protests, that the security for the torch is much as that a top foreign dignary from a hostile country would require.

Violent anti-China protests at London in April 6, 2008. Note the exaggeration of numbers by the protesters

The Beijing Olympics of 2008 has been turned into political theater for several reasons, right from a percieved threat of a rising China to the issue of Tibetan independance. The loudest protests in UK, US and France have been for the reason that one can be most self-righteous and moralistic about, the cause of Tibet’s freedom. One wonders, had London or San Francisco hosted the 2008 Olympics, would there have been as much widespread and violent protests? We are talking in context of the Anglo-US invasion of Iraq, of course. For those among us who are experienced in media bias and public attention trends in these countries, the answer is already obvious…

 

A violent anti-Iraq War protest in an Olympic event hosted by UK or US would most likely have been met with nationalistic outrage. The media and public would have had a field day with frenzied disgusts at the protesters with statements like, “How could they politicise an international sporting event like that?”. While the Chinese crackdown on Tibet killed a few hundreds of Tibetan protesters, the civilian death toll of the Iraq War (since 2003) is over 0.6 million and counting. In comparision to China’s crackdown on the Tibet revolution, the human rights abuses of Iraqis by US forces is much more perverted and brutal in nature. Yet the plight of the Iraqi people is far less likely to be a cause for concern, especially in an Olympic ‘run up’ event.

 

In contrast to the protests in London or San Francisco, the torch relay in the Tanzanian capital Dar Es Salaam met with a warm welcome and cheers from the local people. There were no ‘free Tibet’ protests or attempts to snatch the torch from the people as reported by BBC Afrique. BBC also reports that the torch passed a 20 km run through Muscat, Oman in the Persian Gulf without incident. It seems the violent protests against Beijing Olympics are limited only to a few countries, particularly the Anglo-US group of nations. This leaves us a question to ponder about, is the West European and American protests against Beijing Olympics a self-righteous expression of popular brewing anti-China sentiments? More on that in the coming articles….

Spread the Word: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • StumbleUpon
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • Netscape
  • NewsVine

We are back

Aby February 26th, 2008

Hello Readers and Visitors,

First and foremost, our heartfelt apologies for the long break we took from posting. To unwind you from the long suspense, we will explain the reason behind this 4-month posting gap.

 

To cut a long story short, our military author Dmitri Pavlov was promoted to quite a few ranks higher in his job. Hence we had to deal with the departure of one of our best sources of authentic news and information. This was followed by a few official trips of mine to the Reunion (French Islands in the Indian Ocean) and Eastern Europe that took up most of my time and energy. I could have continued with the site, yet I decided to forgo it to prevent the loss of quality and informed articles that you and some media houses have started to associate us with.Tiredness and the time constraints of travel do have an effect on the mind and I did not want the fallout of this effect on this site. Hence I cut off the updates till I could get enough time to post and publish new articles with the abudance of informed analyses as we have been doing in the past.

 

For those who missed our updates, thank you very much for your continued support, wishes and visits to our site. I have replied back as many emails as I could and I dedicate this post to those who wanted to know when our next update is on the cards. For those who (ehm..) hoped that we were gone, well, my apologies that we are back. Dmitri will help us as often and as much as he could, as his job and position allows - I will have to do most of the translating and editing at present. We have a new techie to maintain and manage the site, an long time friend of mine who agreed to do me a friendly favour. We also welcome any contribution from readers, due credit of which will be given to the contributing author, if published.

 

Posting and updating the site will be resumed very soon once the necessary upgrades are done, which should take no more than a couple of days.

 

Aby McDaniel

Spread the Word: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • StumbleUpon
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Technorati
  • Netscape
  • NewsVine

Next »