China Cleans House in Beijing

If nothing else, Republicans could always be counted upon for one thing: Standing up to Communist aggression. At worst, Republicans were guilty of wanting to keep things in the same stagnant state year after year.

In these times, especially over the last seven and a half years, we’ve seen a frightening trend that deviates from the classical Republican mold: Neoconservatives unaccountably allowed to hang onto power while sucking up to a resurgent Communist China, taking extraordinary steps toward strengthening the yuan while weakening the dollar, allowing Chinese exports to kill our citizens then apologizing to them for the embarrassment and creating the largest trade disparity between any two nations in human history.

In other words, doing their level-headed best to turn the United States into a capitalist slave state while kowtowing to a China that's become the new Saudi Arabia and telling us, as always, that it's all for our own good, comrades.

As China makes its torturously slow progression toward a capitalist economy that’s about to make that of the United States’ at the turn of the 20th century look like a bump in comparison, we’ve been playing witness to a Republican deference given to one of the most brutal and repressive governments of all time. We seen China’s president, Hu Jintao, standing on the front lawn of the White House standing next to George W. Bush while the Secret Service arrested and detained Falun Gong protesters. In the days of the Red-baiting Reagan and HW Bush administrations, such a scenario would’ve been absolutely unthinkable.

Now, with the Olympics just five days away, China is busy cleaning house by arresting those pesky, embarrassing dissidents and tidily tucking them out of sight in the 16 days the Olympics will be showing the world what a wonderful nation is the world’s last Communist superpower, with the leaders of even non-Communist nations jittery about embarrassing that self-same, oppressive and even murderous regime that’s guilty of far more than just embarrassing dissidents and critics of the government.

We saw the same prettification 72 years ago in Berlin when the Olympics came to a Nazi Germany that would invade and annex neighboring Poland under false pretexts in barely more than three years (a joint venture also carried out by the Soviets.) Anti-Semitic posters were taken down and kept down until the western journalists covering the Olympics turned their backs to go back home.

Here’s the difference: The Nazis slowed down, if not completely suspended, the roundup of the usual Jewish suspects until the Olympics ended. China’s doing the exact opposite: They’re accelerating the roundup of dissidents while the rest of the world turns a willfully blind eye, jittery about even thinking of causing the Communist government the slightest chagrin.

And we’re one of the worst offenders. We’re not supposed to point out the hypocrisy of a totalitarian regime trying to make themselves respectable in the international community by hosting the Olympics in one of the most polluted cities on earth. George W. Bush even rejected the idea of avoiding the opening ceremonies and of an American boycott of the Games.

A boycott, as I’d pointed out months ago, would achieve about as much as Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games and the USSR’s own tit-for-tat boycott of the 1984 Games in LA. Since the world’s leaders cannot be counted upon to call China for its brutal, Orwellian oppression, especially in its spousal abuser relationship with Tibet, it may have to fall upon the individual athletes to rightly embarrass this dictatorship. If any successful protest is to be made, it will have to be done by the same people who make the Olympics possible, the very kind of protest that even the Communist government cannot defend themselves against.

A Tibetan flag unfurled at the podium by a gold medal-winning athlete, hopefully an American, a juicy act of rebellion so audacious that even the somnolent media cannot ignore. Let’s see the Chinese authorities put that person under house arrest under the watchful gaze of over a billion people.