“There is nothing wrong with your television.

Do not attempt to adjust the picture

We are now controlling the transmission

We control the horizontal

And the vertical

We can deluge you with a thousand images

Or expand one single image to crystal clarity and beyond

We can shape your vision to anything our party can conceive.

For the next sixteen days we will control all that you see and hear.

You are about to experience the awe and mystery that reaches from the deepest totalitarian regime to the rest of the world

Please stand-by…

- Modified opening speech from ‘The New Outer Limits’

I’d toyed with the idea of boycotting the Olympics. I’m not much into supporting Orwellian nightmares (his not yours, as I imagine, modern China would prove more horrific for him than your image of an Orwellian nightmare) proving to their people they are in fact superior. Just doesn’t ring any bells for me.

We know a little about social control here in Ireland. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times. Still, when it comes to China, we’re only learning, studying the books of the masters. The quick aside on that being the sudden drive to lower the twenty-one drinking age in America. Just, funnily enough, as we teeter on the cusp of a global recession. Nice bit of people tweaking right there.

As for the Olympics as an event itself?

By and by, in my humble yet cynical opinion,

“The Dream Is Over”

It’s time to call it quits, separate it into one Olympics where people can use whatever substances they want and another with athletes tested once every week get to compete in something real. Even if they pull clear on their tests at the actual event, I just do not believe these people aren’t juicing it up in the three and a half years prior.

Back to the Beijing Olympics though. I’m going to lose this argument right now by referencing, yet not naming certain Olympics held by other totalitarian regimes, Atlanta included. Always seems to be given to those sorts of nations just before things begin to go bad for them.

I’m not sure I’m really that surprised or upset that I was lied to during the opening ceremony. That the fireworks were CGI fakeries or that a girl with a beautiful voice was deemed too ugly to represent China. I can’t even be that mad that there was not a single non-Han in that little line-up of children in traditional ethnic dress. In this day and age it’s become the norm – don’t think the USA or England don’t use such trickery when they need to. It’s just China has the balls to say, “yep, we did it”. Because at the end of the day, they don’t care, nothing you or I or our governments can say will change anything over there.

Bar outright war of course, but then, I’d never advocate something like that, now would I?

There is definitely no Michael Caine standing beside one of my critics saying;

“Some men just like to watch the world burn.”

I do like the fact that the Party was quietly blackmailed by the other world powers. That it was so desperate to put this spectacle on, as a show of racial superiority and economic power, that to have certain endorsing heads of state present. It signed groveling treaties with countries like Russia and France. Cute.

I also approve of the fact that, while deemed an economic powerhouse by the rest of the world purely on the size of its populace. China is a still largely a poor country, rural and agriculture driven, one that has been pulled kicking and screaming through Stalinesque industrialization. Ranked 109th in world wealth, it’s sickly amusing they’ve dropped what? Thirty, Forty, Fifty, Sixty billion? On this – the Olympics. Diverting money from health, from welfare, from everything.

Don’t worry though, while we might not approve, sign this, cede us those territories we’ve been disputing for nearly a hundred years. We’ll endorse you. While murmuring our disapproval of course.

The old romantic in me, can feel only remorse for the fact that not fifty miles from the Bird’s Nest stadium, China has rounded up the people it doesn’t want the world to know exist (or at least, talk to) and placed them into camps that bear the slogan

“Re-education through labour”

As the global media explain it, the reason we’re seeing largely empty arenas, is because the Party handed tickets to party officials with the instructions not to give them out. The line in the media seems to be that they are wary of assembling large crowds. Yet there are public areas in parks specially set aside for protests. Of course, once you protest you’ll be arrested and sent for re-education. Ah Ireland, you’re only two steps away. At least here if you protest peacefully you can just expect a cop wearing no identification to try and smash your skull in. Don’t worry, after hospital you’ll still get to go home.

You can also be pretty sure no one will harvest your organs.

I am reminded once again of a New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam. I was drinking with Eritrean and Ethiopian friends in their restaurant after hours. They’d fed me, and I’d brought whiskey. Copious amounts of whiskey. All was good in the world. That is until a Chinese couple walked in looking for a drink. It seems my friends had forgotten to put the closed sign up.

It was New Year’s Eve, a time of friendship and hospitality, and really I don’t many people with more friendship and hospitality than the Eritrean. So they were allowed sit down with us and have a beer. The man has been living in Amsterdam for five years, the woman for three. Conversation turns, as it often does and we find ourselves talking politics and history. Looking back on it, it was probably me being mischievous, it usually is.

I mentioned Taiwan. That’s all I really had to do. A second later the man was pounding the table shouting, “If China does not get Taiwan, China will die.” He repeated this several times with several passionate thumps of the table. Conversation segued nicely to an argument over Mao being in his words “a great man” and the polite words of my then girlfriend “Mao was a murdering bastard who nearly destroyed China.” From this warm exchange it was only a hopscotch and a skip away from bringing up the ’Great Firewall of China”. Of everything we argued; this was the one thing that was met with absolute disbelief. I think I was even called a liar. He asked me to prove it, we exchanged emails, and I said I would forward him the relevant information as he ranted on about newspapers printing lies about China because they didn’t want China to be strong.

I never did though. I left our whole discussion on the simple point that if he had been living out of the censorship of China for five years and didn’t already know these things existed. Then there was nothing I could do for him, as there was nothing I could send him that he’d believe.

If five years of freedom hadn’t even neared to touching him, what could I do?

Here I am again though, excepted this time it’s not isolated to small after hours discussion in a restaurant. This time it’s global. This time I can see Chinese making protests en mass in Dublin. They think we want to destroy them; we want them weak, when we just want them free. When faced with such indoctrination, there is little you can do, except maybe wait for revolution or a lot of people to die.

As such, as entrancing as the Olympics can be. At the end of it all, I found the marker filled stadiums and everything that went with the Beijing Olympics vaguely sickening, though hard to turn away from. It was like watching a man being slowly cut from his car. It’s going to stay with you, but damn if it isn’t riveting. Grand illusion heaped upon grand oppression, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Though I doubt it, I am quietly hoping this “resonating success” is the chink in the armor. The beginning of the end for China’s current regime. Just as it has been for regimes of a similar ilk.