By the time you read this, you would have enjoyed the spectacular opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games. You would also have perhaps marvelled at the magnificent structures built for the Games: the main stadium The Bird’s Nest; the opera house, which is an oval dome rising out of a man-made lake; and the what-the-hell-is-that! headquarters of the state-run television corporation, which looks like a three-dimensional optical illusion. Each of these edifices is a true masterpiece.

It will be a grand Olympic: records will be broken, terrific feats will be performed, heroes will be born. Except. Except that Beijing should never have been allowed to hold the Games.

There are only two other non-democracies which have ever hosted the Games: Germany under Hitler (Berlin 1936), and the Soviet Union (Moscow 1980). The US and many other countries boycotted Moscow. The Berlin Games gave global legitimacy to the Third Reich and what it stood for (By then, persecution of Jews was in full swing: German laws already excluded Jews from the civil services, medicine and law, even agriculture.).

The Beijing Games will give global legitimacy to another evil regime.

China’s contemptible human rights record is well known, but what is not so well-known is that human rights violations have actually escalated over the last few years, precisely because of the Olympics. Instead of being a force of good and world peace, the Games have been a calamity for thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of upright, ordinary and innocent Chinese men and women.

... contd.