NOR DICITY
Al Pope, August 8, 2008
Beijing 2008. Outrage is dead
As Beijing opens its doors – or at least a few of its state-approved doors – to the world, one thing becomes increasingly obvious. China hasn’t turned out the way Chairman Mao planned. McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Coca Cola are on greater display than the trappings of the communist state. To all appearances, the dictatorship of the proletariat has become just another dictatorship.
In fact, there is some doubt that the Chinese Communist Party still exists, except in name. True, certain features remain – the old men in charge, the brutal suppression of dissent, the total lack of press freedom. But the marriage of absolute state control with corporate power we see in China today has often traveled under a different name. Benito Mussolini, among others, called it fascism.
When that most infamous of all fascists, Adolph Hitler, came to power, Berlin had already been assigned the 1936 Olympics. Hitler’s racism and his government’s brutality were well known by then, and there was serious talk of a boycott in several countries. By contrast, in the lead-up to Beijing any suggestion of boycott has been dismissed with little more than a wave of the hand.
Chris Rudge, CEO of Canada’s Olympic Committee, summed up the general mood when he told the press there were “no circumstances” under which Canada would boycott the games. The Olympics, we are told, are all about sport, and have no political context. In 1936, they were all about context. African American runner Jesse Owens’s record medal count was widely seen as a slap in the face to Hitler’s Aryan supremacy.
The greatest Nazi atrocities were still to come, but already Hitler was held in deep suspicion. He had outlawed political dissent, suspended civil liberties, created a one-party state, and sent Germany down the path of expansionist militarism.
In short, Germany in 1936 was not entirely unlike China in 2008. When the U.S. decided after a great national debate to send a team to the Olympics, it was done in a spirit of defiance of fascism. Where is this spirit today?
Could it be that the public capacity for outrage is exhausted? Political prisoners, slave factories, suppression of the press, state-sanctioned murder, torture, – we know China is guilty of all these and more, but then we know these facts about so many nation states. How long can you keep raging against the same crimes, when they keep springing up all over the world?
Outrage exhaustion is an insidious plague. As countries from China to the United States defy international law and the Geneva Conventions the public is co-opted by cheap consumer goods made under questionable conditions, and the increasing difficulty in finding anything else to buy.
You may be outraged the first time you can’t find a made in Canada widget, and have to accept one from a country you know to be guilty of child slave labour, maybe even the first hundred times. But how long can you keep railing against what’s become perfectly normal?
In the same week that the world flocked to Beijing to help celebrate the rise of fascism, Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur, Salim Hamdan, was convicted at Guantanamo Bay of supporting terrorism. His jury was appointed by his accusers, the Pentagon, and the prosecution made no bones about the fact that its evidence was gathered using “coercive techniques”. This too has become normal.
But America, it would appear, is sick of the normalization of war crimes at Guantanamo. Barrack Obama, the unquestioned front-runner in the presidential election, wants to shut the place down and replace the military tribunals with civilian trials. In the meantime however, the Bush White House goes ahead with its illegal prosecutions, to scant public outcry. America has so much to be sick of. We all do. We have only so much outrage to go around.
The movement to boycott the 1936 Olympics failed, and Hitler scored a great propaganda victory, despite the success of the African American athletes. This year, with all the hoop-la of 21st Century mass-communications, Chinese fascism will score a much larger propaganda victory.
Let’s hope the consequences aren’t proportionately disastrous.
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