Today I read some comments against boycotting this year’s Olympic Games. The president of the Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund and vice-president of the International Olympic Committee Thomas Bach thinks that the 2008 Summer Olympics will create people-to-people contacts in China and that boycotting the Olympics would be the wrong way. This is nonsense! It is already more than evident (even without the unfortunate events in Tibet) that China has been setting up a surveillance state where the freedom of information does not exist. All media, including the internet, are censored. The language barrier alone will help to avoid direct face-to-face contacts between Chinese people and foreigners, and those Chinese people that will be allowed to contact foreigners directly will be everything but dissidents. All this is done for the profit of international corporations that sponsor the Olympics. This is simply not acceptable any more! China is setting up an almost perfect surveillance and censor state to make the Olympics a success for their sponsors and in 2012 some of the Chinese concepts of “safe Games” will certainly be reimported into the Western world where the surveillance technology has come from. I remember the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, where some substantial rights were temporarily suspended for security reasons.
All things considered, I’m fed up! I will definitely boycott the 2008 Olympics: I will not watch any television reports (which is easy for me, since I do not have a television set) and I will not buy products of the sponsors until the end of the year. I hope other people will do the same. You can always drink Club Mate when it comes to caffeinated soft drinks, eat healthier fast food from an oriental or North-African fast-food restaurant and get your sports equipment from a less expensive non-olympic label, and be proud of it. This is the only way to stop the suppression of freedom in China and all places where freedom will be “reduced” in the name of the perverted “olympic idea” of commercial profit.
ich bin dabei …
und … möge dein post eine welle lostreten, eine „I’m fed up!“ – welle …
All this should not come as a surprise at all. I somehow expected this to happen when they elected Beijing in 2001.
@janwo: you are right! China’s behavior could have been expected, but I thought that the IOC, the sponsors, and the international community would exert more pressure on China. And I got angry about the IOC representative’s hollow phrases about international understanding and personal contacts at the 2008 Olympics.