Seeing the Opening Ceremonies Changes Your Perspective

It's not only the staged event, with the amazing pageantry, technology, and sense of hope for the future.

It's seeing the athletes from all countries wave to the cheering Chinese crowds. No sense of national rivalry or hatred. Everyone is welcomed -- everyone is celebrating the diversity of humanity.

It's just striking me how important this is for a sense of the planet and how we're all connected. Even if it's only twice every four years. This is where people live, on an individual level. There is no other opportunity like it.

Given a chance, people don't hate each other unless they're told to. This is a chance to bypass the bullshit and political problems in the world and celebrate what we have in common. It is worth shedding the rivalries and political burdens we carry about. That is what world peace is being built on.

oppressor of the Tibetan people, of China's own workers, sponsor of the violence in Darfur, masse killer of dogs and cats, unfair trading partner.

Yeah, beautiful. :eyes:

...but the athletes and spectators truly stage the games.

I loved watching the parade of nations and seeing the excitement on the marchers and crowd's faces--the government didn't force those people to smile.

...the government builds the athletes and stages the spectators.

but I could not help but think of all the cruelties perpetrated by the government of China, some JUST FOR THIS EVENT, such as JAILING dissidents, as well as the ongoing cruelties to Tibetans...

I had to turn it off.

when the Olympics were held in Los Angeles?

I mean, what good liberal could stomach that show while we were starving and killing Iraqis with sanctions and bombings?!

;)

could actually take their head out of the political realm long enough to participate in something that's about peace, unity, and internationalism.

I wasn't talking about Iraq or slavery. Since WWII, the US is probably responsible for more innocent deaths than any other country. None of it should prevent anyone from watching or coming to Lake Placid or Salt Lake City. And there's certainly no basis for Americans to avoid the Beijing games.

I was also a lot younger then too, and not aware of the reason NOT to watch.

It all sickens me. This should never have happened.

This is not about approving or disapproving politics. It an event that is about the people, the countries, and the athletes. It is of necessity hosted by governments. Because it is international, the governments are of all different stripes. Restricting it to governments you and I are taught to approve of makes it parochial and robs it of universality.

There is a world of good that comes about from an event like this where politics can be forgotten. It is difficult to think of any good that has come from boycotting or other restrictions on the games.

All of those countries, some of them sworn enemies under one roof. I am definitely a fan of the spirit of the Olympics.

Right on.

:applause: for your post.

It is depressing to see the inability to appreciate something sublime like the opening ceremonies because of political sentiments.

it's just that i prefer to watch it the way the gods intended: THE WORLD CUP!

It will be a hard Opening Ceremony too follow.

I know about all the politics of China and the BBC commentry team didn't hold back on it either.
However there are thousands of competitors that have worked so hard to earn their place at the Olympics, the swimmers,
divers and woman gymnasts start between 3 and 6 years old. They deserve their chance to be there and they would have been the ones
to have paid a heavy price if there was a boycott and it makes little impact on the politics.....Moscow 1980 and LA 1984 achieved little accept to destroy the hopes of men and women, that had trained so hard and long only to be court up in political games.

An arena full of 2012 upper class twits, all doing synchronized silly walks...

That would be awesome.

With some scenes from Shakespeare plays and renactments of our History, regional dancing and a concert with the likes of ColdPlay, Leona Lewis, Paul McCartney, Katherine Jenkins etc.... People are seriously worried about the cost here.

I was starting to think I was a shitty person for still wanting to watch these games (well, I'm a shitty person for far different reasons :P). I hate the Chinese government with a passion but I love Chinese people and culture. I'm so conflicted about these games but ultimately I'm watching them because it's not about politics, it's about the athletes. Most of those athletes won't ever see a medal but they're there to represent their country on the world stage. The Opening Ceremonies are always my favorite part of any Olympics because I love seeing a great sea of humanity from all corners of the globe. I love the tiny countries that have like, the flag bearer and two other people. You know they're just happy to be there.

In my perfect world there would be no war and all differences would be settled on the sporting field (or through Extreme Frisbee, Yahtzee, LAN parties, or any kind of competitive event where no actual shots are fired and no women and children are raped). Yes, the Olympics have been tarnished by doping scandals, admission of pro athletes and increasing corporate bullshit and shitty TV coverage, bribery and all that. I am not a pollyanna koolaid drinker and I know there's a lot of fucked up things about any Olympics, much less this one built on the backs of people losing their homes and shit. But despite all that sometimes the Olympic ideal still comes through in spite of attempts to choke the life out of it. Like Kerri Strug in Atlanta, or that one swimmer in Athens who barely finished the 100m but the crowd was cheering him like he was after gold.

It's easy to be cynical and call it bread and circuses. But sometimes people just need it. All I could think of was the Georgian delegation and what was going on in their home country even as they were marching in the stadium. Will they have a home to go back to? It's so goddamn depressing. Humanity is fucked up and by all rights should have been wiped out like the dinosaurs a long time ago, but sometimes the Olympics can make me feel a little better about it despite all that bullshit. I don't know how anyone could look at the in-field last night after the Parade of Nations was over and not feel just a teensy bit of hope for this fucked up species.

Jesus even Kobe Bryant, who I loathe probably more than anyone else in sports, made me tear up a little. Some starstruck athlete whose country I forget at the moment asked if he could take a photo with Kobe, who obliged. And then he immediately asked how to say "thank you" in the guy's language.

Seems to me a lot of the bullshit on this planet could be alleviated if we all did that.

If the idea of thinking of ourselves as one planet is ever going to get off the ground, there has to be a nonpolitical meeting ground in which this can take place. It's hard to think of a better one.

make way for the Olympics. Houses torn down, people told to stay out of town...

As I watched the Ceremony last night and saw thew smiles on the faces of those athletes, I realized that we are all people and we shouldn't blame the people for their governments. I think it is ridiculous to think that by "protesting" the Olympics we are making any kind of statement at all except, "I don't know what I am talking about".

I also see a lot of people going on and on about China as a whole and how bad they are. The people are just people. You want to see some fucked up country? Look at this one. China has thousands of years under their belt, we can barely keep our shit together in just over 200 years. Hell, it took us just under 100 years to go into a civil war.

I was not talking about Iraq and I was certainly not condoning what our country has done. I am just pointing out that when you watch those smiling faces be aware of the human suffering that made the whole thing happen. That's all.

But I don't think that it is the athletes fault that the government in China did that.

There are 1.3 billion people in that country. Yeah, 1.5 million is a lot of people, but if you take the amount of people that have been displaced in this country for football and baseball stadiums in the last ten years, it probably would be pretty close proportionally. Hell, just here in Cleveland, they built 2 separate stadiums and they weren't built on deserted land.

Once again, I am not standing up for the government in China, but I don't think it is much worse than what this government has done to it's people in the last 230 years. We can sit here all day and whine about what has gone on in the last few centuries to the people of this world, but I don't think it will do any good at this point.

We all need to move on and think of the "common" people and how we can do what we can for each other. The Olympics at Beijing can actually be a good start for the Chinese people and bring some good to those people.

the entire modern city of Beijing and every other Chinese has been done by demolishing the original buildings. Look at Shangahai -- those hundreds of high rises were all built by displacing something else.

People get displaced in all countries as cities modernize. In the US, private owners sell old buildings for profit or because of eminent domain. The results are not necessarily better for the residents. Thousands were displaced to make way for the South Bronx Expressway, and it split up and destroyed the surrounding neighborhoods. The city government's role was limited, and it basically shrugged in helplessness at the unintended results.

That would never have been allowed to happen in a Chinese city. Due to centuries of strong central control, the government out of necessity has responsibility for a much wider range of things. There is a greater sense of responsibility for people's lives under this government than under the emperors or the nationalists. The result is that when a neighborhood is modernized, it works.

Condo owners are supposed to be compensated when they are bought out and I understand that doesn't always happen. That is indeed an outrage. It is probably due to corrupt local officials, and shows the needs for a better court system and more expanded individual rights.

The centuries of despotism in Chinese history is very depressing. Tn no way should that ever be endorsed. But those are the institutions the current government is working with. They seem to have done a pretty good job. It does not constitute an outrage that should spoil the Olympics.

I don't get people's urge to rationalize or justify the blatant evil of the Chinese government. In this instance, you're suggesting that the Chinese government is simply working with the institutions that it inherited, which is utter nonsense.

This is a government which invaded Tibet--which had been an independent kingdom since the 7th century. This is a government that profits from the sale of deceased prisoners' organs, regardless of what their next of kin want. It's a government that sent tanks in to quash a democracy protest in Tiananmen square, some estimates putting deaths and injuries of the protesters in the thousands.

It's one thing to enjoy the Olympics. It's another to use the Olympics as a way to whitewash China's past and current crimes.

People who think this is 'above' politics are mistaken. For China, it's all about politics. First they charm you, then they make you think, well, they're not so bad. I'm referring to the government, not the people.

Because people are whipping themselves into a misguided moral frenzy like a bunch of freepers. Also because when similar propaganda comes both from the right and the left, it is more insidious.

I know dozens of Chinese people, and none of them would even remotely recognize the country from the depiction on DU. Most ordinary Chinese people are patriotic these days and support the government. They may not agree with all its decisions any more Americans do.

China is centralized and authoritarian. As you point out, the government killed hundreds in Tienanmen Square. That was an outrage and a gross violation of human rights. It is not true that the government simply slaughtered innocent peaceful protesters. As evidenced by eyewitnesses like a Granta reporter, the crowd became violent before the tanks moved in. Soldiers were seized and hung from bridges. It does not justify the slaughter, but makes it a less convenient morality tale.

Similarly, the protests in Lhasa had little to do with independence and more with the Tibetans harassing the Han moving into and opening up businesses. The Chinese are settling Tibet from more densely populated regions the same way they settled Heilong Jiang in previous decades (or somewhat like the Moroccans in Western Sahara or the Scots in Northern Ireland). The protests are understandable, but is a more complex situation that does not fit easily into the frame it's being presented over here.

Aspirations for statehood have to be taken seriously, but they are not absolute and it is often difficult to know when a population "wants" independence. The Dalai Lama himself does not support making Tibet an independent nation, and if I interpret his website correctly, agrees that Tibet was part of China for centuries. His own informal showed 64% support for remaining part of China.

The reasons given for Tibet's status as an independent state are not really very good, As an autonomous part of the Chinese empire, they had subordinate officials that, depending on how it's presented, did and said things that resemble heads of state. But if Tibet were an independent country until 1949, why did Rand McNally in 1914, and the German Meyer's in 1890 show them as an intergral part of China?

are the best source for settling Asian territorial disputes. I mean, they also carved up the Middle East and that's worked out well.

If soldiers were "seized and hung" from bridges, somebody should tell wikipedia. It's very odd that the Chinese government, normally so conscious about its image, didn't flood the airwaves with that story when it was being criticized for the crackdown.

You're dismissing people's complaints as propaganda. Yet the arguments you're presenting about Tibet and Tiananmen Square read like they're straight out of the Chinese state media's mouth.

The use of them to create a certain image of China is propaganda. Like all propaganda, their goal is foster hate. Because it coming from both political wings, it has been very successful in this country.

One advantage for the propagandist, as Chomsky is good at demonstrating, is it minimizes faults of the critic. During the Cold War, the demonization of the Soviet Union was used as a cover for supporting dozens of violent authoritarian governments, some of which were worse than the Soviets.

Propaganda occasionally leads to violent overreaction -- boycotting the Olympics is the least of it. During the Cold War, Americans worked themselves up about the Soviet Union to the point where a nuclear first strike was taken seriously.

People seem to have the impression that China is some kind of North Korean hellhole, when life in Beijing is a lot closer to life in America than you might think.

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About Tienanmen Square: At the time of the protest, my girlfriend was a pediatrician in Beijing. The protesters saw Gorbachev and wanted glasnost and perestroika in China, goals that she sympathized with. She gave the protesters supplies from the hospital that could be used as gas masks. She considered joining the protests, but felt it was irresponsible to put herself in danger because she had a small child. She was even going to travel through that part of the city the night of the crackdown but was warned that it was too dangerous. Afterwards, she was so upset by the violence that she started to think about leaving the country, and eventually got a scholarship to study in Japan.

SHE is my source when I say that soldiers were attacked and killed by the crowd. It was known by the people there, at the time, and it doesn't always make it onto Wikipedia. On the other hand, to you I'm just a poster on a message board, so don't take my second-hand account at face value either. Sometimes it's hard to get a clear picture of things, and

The crowd violence doesn't justify the hundreds of people that were killed. It was an authoritarian government that overreacted and committed an atrocity. There was nothing wrong with the outrage in the West against Tienanmen Square. On the other hand, it a very good thing that that incident did not result in China being forced back into North-Korea-like isolation. That would have been a perverse outcome.

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On Tibet, I would just encourage you to read both sides of the debate and see who has the more compelling arguments. That's what I did. I don't know what you personally find convincing. It's too much material for an internet post. Just trying to sow a seed of doubt with the maps.

Pay attention to two things, though:

(1) Proponents of independence concede that Tibet was part of China during the Mongol and Manchu periods, but claim that those dynasties don't count because the emperors were foreign. The Chinese see the Yuan and Qing dynasties as an integral part of their history.

(2) Some of the argument is semantic. Those who claim Tibetan independence describe it as a protectorate. Those who argue against independence describe it as an autonomous region like Xinjiang. That puts the two sides a lot closer together.

it isn't unique.

The Olympics are underway and the competitors have worked all their lives for this, it is them that deserve our support no matter what nationality, that includes the Chinese.

but the goose stepping soldiers broke the fantasy for me.

Goose-Stepping is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is "Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me", like the bully who makes faces at his victim… Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army. (George Orwell)

because of his involvement in a Darfur peace campaign, and despite his promise to observe an Olympic truce. Chinese government yanked his visa anyway. So much for bypassing political problems.

But hey, what a super happy fun opening ceremony!

are getting increasingly divorced from reality.

China has only invaded Tibet and Vietnam, lately.
And, Hitler never passed a law prohibiting more than one child per family.

They haven't invaded anyone in centuries. They do want control of their own historical territory, including Tibet, and the slice of India the British carved out during colonial days.

Yes, China sent troops into Vietnam thirty-one years ago in response to Vietnam's invasion of occupation of their neighbor. They withdrew a month later. Quite a comparison to the Nazis.

The one-child policy was indeed the act of a totalitarian government, but one that was determined to address poverty. The Chinese had a very serious population bomb. Controlling population growth raised the standard of living for everyone in the country. Without it, it is likely that China would have closer to two billion people and a standard of living closer to Bangladesh.

There are all kinds of legitimate criticisms of the Chinese government. The way it's depicted by both right-wing and left-wing propaganda in the US has very little to do with the actual conditions in the country.

...and because no one would have recognized a Mao or Stalin smiley, those three being the universal symbols of totalitarian tyrants. (The fact that they were also murderous maniacs wasn't really my point.)

My point was, that despite grudging reforms, and sham "opposition" parties, the Chinese people are still ruled by a totalitarian government.

Believe me, Bush and his friends truly hope that these games serve to bring us all together, so to speak.

China is their wet dream; a place where one party rules, and dissidents are jailed, a place where there are weak to non-existent labor and environmental regulation, and a place in which the state regulates what can be seen, or read, and that monitors it's citizens.

The people who are running the United States these days like nothing better than the portrayal of such a political system as normal and happy, as they move us closer to that model daily.

I don't shop at walmart for chinese goods and I don't watch chinese olympics.

RL

1. We held the Los Angeles Olympics under the Reagan administration, which was sponsoring brutal right-wing military governments in much of Latin America, invading Grenada, and building up nuclear weapons in Europe against the wishes of the local population. Oh, and we had homeless people living on the street. The Salt Lake City Winter Olympics were held under the Bush administration. Need I say more?

2. Ever since 1980, crowds at U.S.-based Olympics have been obnoxiously nationalistic, all those chants of "USA! USA!" and "We're No. 1!" only encouraged by the TV coverage, which sometimes goes so far as to block pictures of non-U.S. medal winners.

3. I'm no fan of the Chinese government, but China is more than its government. The Chinese people are proud of their 4,000 years of continuous cultural tradition, something no one else can match, and of the way their country has modernized and of the way that they have survived all those bad governments. They feel that the West has looked down upon them, and they love showing Westerners what they are capable of. (On the question of Tibet, even anti-government Chinese are genuinely puzzled by the whole Tibetan independence movement, since in their eyes, Tibet has been under Chinese rule since imperial times.)

4. I think the one-child policy is a recipe for demographic disaster, BUT I can understand why they instituted it, even if I think it was the wrong approach. If you have been to China and seen the CROWDS everywhere, you can see why they thought they had to do something.

5. I'd be willing to bet that all those "automatons" participating in the opening ceremonies felt that it was one of the proudest moments of their lives. Many, if not most of them, were paid.

6. I've known people who participated in the Olympics. They all say it was a highlight of their lives, even if they didn't win anything.

7. I've been watching, since I hate all the sports that are typically shown on American TV. This is one of the few chances I get to see swimming, gymnastics, and track and field. There were some real moments yesterday: the Latvian (yeah my people!) beach volleyball men defeating the U.S., the anything-can-happen finish of the cycling road race, and young man who won South Korea's first-ever medal in swimming.

So yeah, I'm watching, at least when they show sports that I like.

We don't go about denying ourselves the pleasures and celebrations of our lives and our cultures because we have several idiots running this country into the ground and killing innocent people in others. Anyone who criticizes this needs to immediately have everything they enjoy and are proud of doing come to an immediate halt until we leave the Middle East, and leave other countries to get a really fair trade deal on all of their resources.

And goose-steeping soldiers taking the flags? I'm so glad there are never any military under or over-tones to any of our national celebrations. :sarcasm: :crazy:

I'm not watching the actual competitions coz they're not my thing but those opening ceremonies were incredible from both an artistic and technical aspect. The man who developed the whole program and all of those who joyfully participated have a right to feel good. Their beautiful culture and wonderful achievements have been in spite of their governments, not because of them.

:hi: