Olympic protests' history of futility
Boycotts, other gestures have done little to alter the offending behavior of host countries.
Poetry, as Auden famously instructed us, changes nothing -- and neither, despite all the predicted turmoil in San Francisco today, do the Olympics.
Still, the city's entire police force and half the rest of the cops in the Bay Area, along with the Highway Patrol and the FBI, will be out today, attempting to protect the Olympic torch as it makes its ceremonial passage along the Embarcadero on its way to Beijing and this summer's Games.
Thousands of protesters opposed to Chinese oppression in Tibet already have attempted to block the ceremonial run through London and Paris. In San Francisco, pro-Tibet activists are likely to be joined by others who believe that China's close relationship with Sudan encourages Khartoum's murderous policies in Darfur.
Tibet and Darfur are particularly popular causes in Hollywood, and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger endorsed the protests Monday. (West of La Cienega, the Dalai Lama has higher approval ratings than Tom Hanks.) Sen. Hillary Clinton called on President Bush to boycott the opening ceremonies in Beijing. Many protesters are urging athletes to do the same; some are urging a blanket boycott not just of the opening but of the Games themselves.
Chinese conduct in Tibet and Sudan is reprehensible, so all this drama is cathartic in the way protests tend to be. But whether it will have much effect on China's behavior is another question altogether. If history is any guide, the answer is no.
Essentially, the arguments over Olympic protests -- of which boycotts are the most extreme -- break down into two camps. One (call them the pragmatists) holds that the value of "engaging" oppressive regimes far outweighs the benefits of isolating them and that, over time, close contact with democratic societies in as many areas as possible will persuade the oppressors to change their ways. Another group (the one to which the protesters belong) argues that contact is complicity. Human rights violators, they argue, need to be forcefully confronted in every available forum.
When it comes to the Olympics, the fact of the matter is that both approaches have been tried in the past -- with precisely the same negligible results. In 1936, serious movements urging an outright boycott of the Berlin Games were mounted in the United States, Britain, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands. Adolf Hitler had come to power two years after the International Olympic Committee had awarded Berlin the Games as a symbol of Germany's emergence from its post-World War I isolation.
