SA Footy

As I've said elsewhere whether or not I watch the Olympics will have no effect whatsoever on the Chinese political system and certainly does not mean that I support it in any way. I watch the Games because I support the athletes not the location that the Games happen to be held in.

Look hard enough and you will no doubt find a reason to boycott every Olympic Games ever held including Sydney.

Regards
JAS

The ABC TV Show Foreign Correspondant have snuck in cameras into China and have been filming the various human rights abuses that are occuring there. My concern is that people in the western world have no real idea on what really happens to people in China. I can list various examples, yet a quick search on the terms will give the full details better.

It is also worth remembering that China itself boycotted the Moscow games because of the invasion of Russia into Afghanistan. So its some surprise that they themselves expect other nations to be there considering there own occupation and displacement ot Tibet and its people.

The Beatles are remembered as heros for there rejection of meeting with the Marcos family in the Phillipine Islands who later were discovered to have been siphoning away millions of dollars from an impoverished nation. I suspect that the countries that do boycott China may well be seen in the same light in the future, for not giving the leadership of China the right to have their human rights abuses accepted by the western world by participating in the games. China should have been awarded the honour of hosting the games when they were in a position to show the world that they really had changed things, not the current facade of shutting down local factories so that they cant be seen by the world that is currently occuring.

JAS wrote:As I've said elsewhere whether or not I watch the Olympics will have no effect whatsoever on the Chinese political system and certainly does not mean that I support it in any way. I watch the Games because I support the athletes not the location that the Games happen to be held in.

Look hard enough and you will no doubt find a reason to boycott every Olympic Games ever held including Sydney.

Regards
JAS

Spot on JAS a hand full of people in Australia not watching the games isn’t going to make one little bit of difference to human rights in China. A billion people glued to TV in China is what the Olympic sponsors wanted and they will get just that. Did these same people not watch the Sydney Olympics because of Australia’s human rights violations against aboriginal Australia?

Countries boycotting the games will also have very little affect maybe make news for a week and that’s about it. The boycott of Moscow in 1980 worked really well the Soviets didn’t withdraw for another 8 years.

Will running over people with tanks be a demonstration sport?

What people need to know about that incident in Tiananmen square is that two people were arrested over that, the chap that stood in front of the tank and the driver of the tank who refused to obey an order to drive over the protester.

It is not known what happened to either of them. It is believed that the protester was hung sometime after the incident and that the driver of the tank recieved an imprisionment term. Although either case can be proven. If the protester was still alive then it would have been an appropriate thing for China to have released him as a part of their bid for the games to show that they deserve to host the games. Yet just like 1936 its happening all over again.