It's disconcerting when someone writes something that's sort of like what you wrote, only dumb and wrong. This week, Anne Applebaum writes in Slate that China "wanted to use the Olympics to trumpet their success, but there is a price to be paid for those few weeks at the center of global attention." That's more or less what I said in a piece earlier this month for the Boston Globe about China's Olympic-year transformation into a public-relations pinata: "[T]he People's Republic makes an irresistible villain in the ongoing international dramas, for both fair and unfair reasons."
But Anne Applebaum was near the top of the list of the people I'd had in mind when I said "unfair." Her current piece is a follow-up to an earlier argument in favor of protests and boycotts, which lumped the Chinese of 2008 in with the Nazis of 1936. Her brief survey of Olympic political history also credited the 1980 boycott with liberating Afghanistan from the Soviets (not very quickly) and the 1984 counter-boycott with helping harden the Soviet leadership against Reagan's America (not for very long). And it added a new entry to journalism's Three Examples Hall of Fame:
There were black power demonstrations at the 1968 Mexico City Games. A Palestinian group attacked and killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Games. Australian aborigines protested at the 2000 Sydney Games.
(No hard feelings about being compared to terrorist murderers, Tommie Smith! Remember, this piece is in favor of Olympic dissent!)
So now that the Tibet and Darfur folks have turned the Olympic torch relay into a rolling protest photo-op, Applebaum is taking a victory lap. The protests, she writes, are
being followed, at least in my part of the world, with enormous enthusiasm. Over dinner in Warsaw, Poland, visitors from London brag about "their" protesters.
China's decision to have held a torch relay, she writes, is "ludicrous" and "deliberately provocative." Also, yet again, Nazi.
And the Chinese who are offended by the protests are giving in to "incoherent anger." Applebaum writes: "One posted a photograph of an anti-torch protester, along with the words, 'Remember him ... he'll die a terrible death.'" If you follow the story's own link, you discover a bit of unmentioned context: the photograph showed the protester trying to wrestle the torch away from a one-legged young woman in a wheelchair.
"[F]or all of their wealth and sophistication, China's leaders still have an extremely crude understanding of global media," Applebaum writes. Publicity lesson for the Chinese: to score points in the right-thinking expat dining rooms of Warsaw, beat up some cripples!
