Shedding Light on the Torch

April 15, 2008
By: Dave Zirin

China and it’s cronies in the International Olympic Committee are bemoaning the way the running of the Olympic torch has turned into a site for international protest. But anyone who knows the tradition of the Olympic torch, would find protests all too appropriate.

The journey of the Olympic torch was supposed to be a 58-day celebration of the Beijing Olympics. Through 21 countries and across 85,000 miles, the flame was meant to spotlight the way 21st century China was ready to claim its place as modern economic superpower.

Instead, the journey has been a public relations apocalypse, and an obstacle course for unsuspecting athletes and dignitaries, confronted by an international gauntlet of agitators. In France, police alongside Chinese security officers had to use tear gas to keep protesters at bay and officials had to extinguish the torch five separate times. In London, 37 people were arrested trying to impede the torch. In San Francisco last Wednesday, thousands turned out to demonstrate, which led to a bizarre situation where the torchbearers ran a few yards, disappeared into a warehouse, and then reappeared on a city bus. This isn’t the esteemed expedition of the torch. This is Planes, Trains, and Automobiles go to the Olympics.

China has blamed the protests on "a few Tibetan separatists." That would be news to the protester Charles Altekruse, who as a member of the U.S. Olympic rowing team, was forced to sit out the 1980 Moscow Games because of the U.S. boycott. "Today, my voice is the voice for thousands of people whose voices cannot be heard," said Altekruse, who lives not in Lhasa, but Berkeley.

China's recent crackdown on Tibet has opened a view on a host of abuses throughout the Chinese mainland, as well as the complicity of the International Olympic Committee and the West embedded in every abuse: the 2 million people displaced for Olympic facilities, the violation of labor standards so Western nations have an endless army of cheap labor, mass jailing of dissidents who dare to complain, and the environmental degradation of the country.

But the protests have been also aimed at the IOC and their efforts to shamelessly promote China's titanic economy. Juliana Barbassa of the Associated Press could not have been clearer writing, "The torch's global journey was supposed to highlight China's growing economic and political power."

IOC president Jacques Rogge lamented the protests, saying that the journey of the torch was supposed to be "a Journey of Harmony, bringing the message of peace to the people of different nationalities, cultures and creeds." Would that it were.

The first torch run was actually the brainchild of Dr. Carl Diem, the organizer of Adolf Hitler's 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He convinced Hitler's propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, that 3,422 young Aryan runners should carry burning torches along the 3,422 km route from the Temple of Hera on Mount Olympus to the stadium in Berlin. The event would be captured by the regime's filmmaking prodigy, Leni Riefenstahl, and broadcast over radio.

In fact, Rogge's dream that the torch be a symbol of "peace, harmony and global unity" is reminiscent of Hitler's own words in 1936. "Sporting chivalrous contest," Hitler proclaimed before the torch's inaugural lighting, "helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore, may the Olympic flame never expire."

As Chris Bowlby wrote for BBC News, "...it was planned with immense care by the Nazi leadership to project the image of the Third Reich as a modern, economically dynamic state with growing international influence."

China today, with the IOC's backing, wanted the torch to travel through the nations of Western Europe and the United States, as well as Tibet, as a way to spread the gospel of China's global reach. In 1936, Diem also planned the route with political considerations in mind. The torch was carried exclusively through European areas where the Third Reich wanted to extend its reach.

When the flame made its way through Vienna, it was accompanied by mammoth pro-Nazi demonstrations. Two years later, Austria would be annexed.

Today, without question, there are people with dubious motives calling for a boycott of the Summer Games. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has hedged on attending even though Britain's Olympic Committee has already laid down the law that its athletes are forbidden from any political acts on Chinese soil. The reptilian Sen. Hillary Clinton has said President Bush should boycott, even though she and her husband in the 1990s fought to make China a part of the World Trade Organization, and repeatedly granted China Most Favored Nation trade status. Barack Obama just joined Clinton in the “me too” chorus to see who can blame China for the ecoomic maladies facing the U.S. Republican Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan lamented in a commentary that President Bush and the Republican Party is "coddl[ing] Communist China."

None of these critics existed before people started protesting. And none of them will refrain from doing business with China in the future.

Protesters have held a light to the present hypocrisy of the Olympic torch. In expressing concern about the San Francisco protests, USOC President Peter Ueberroth said, "The only concern is our reputation as a country." Perhaps, as this debacle runs its course, Ueberroth should be more concerned with the reputation of the International Olympic Committee and the quadrennial orgy of sporting nationalism and corporate greed.