Bashing Beijing: The Shame Game Olympics

[Matilda]

"A broad coalition of professional activists, anarchists and freelance stirrers is rolling out a series of shaming campaigns intended to fuel the cacophony of complaint against China's hosting of the 2008 Olympic Games.

In addition to the usual physical displays of opposition, the groups are ramping up a powerful online presence that includes the use of the big three social networking sites - MySpace, Facebook and YouTube - plus an array of widgets, podcasts, blogs and other web-based weapons of persuasion and subversion.

The agitators include long-time China critics such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Free Tibet Campaign plus a host of smaller activist groups covering the entire gamut of anti-Beijing causes including Darfur, Burma, workers' rights, animal rights, pro-democracy and the death penalty.

Their common aim is to drown out China's attempts to use the Olympics as a celebration of its coming of age as a modern economic powerhouse and refocus international attention on the many skeletons that rattle around in the regime's closets."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/beijing-bash-shame-game-tactics-target-olympics/2008/04/02/1206850964942.html


Some of the logos found by clicking on the icon on the right-hand side are both inventive and
powerful. The IOC should have seen this coming - the decision to award the Games to Beijing was
ill-considered, especially given that the Games are no stranger to politics, however Jacques Rogge
might choose to spin it.

The campaign probably won't change a thing inside China, but there's a possibility that the negative
images will outweigh any positives for China, and next time, the IOC might think about principles
when making their choice of host city.

[tomreedtoon]

1. This Olympics is nasty and getting nastier.

It's looking like some kind of catastrophic incident - a protest with violent repression, or just a sudden loss of all electronic communication with China - is going to happen. And everyone knows it. Follow the link in the OP to the photo gallery in the Sydney paper; more people than Steven Spielberg are remembering Munich and what international sports really means.

[Matilda]

2. A lot of people are expecting something to happen.

Whether it would be internal or from the outside, who knows?

There's an old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times" - it seems particularly apt.