the Right Angler
Have you ever heard of a Potemkin Village? In 1787, the Russian minister, Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, erected fake villages and settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River so that the Empress Catherine II, on her tour of Crimea and the Ukraine, would see the facades and place a higher value on the region thus improving his standing with The Empress. Now a days, the term Potemkin Village is used to describe a “pretentiously showy or imposing façade intended to mask or divert attention from an embarrassing or shabby fact or condition.” With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at China’s Potemkin Olympics.
We’ll start with the infrastructure for the Games. Marvelous, right? Well, the Chinese Government expelled 1.5 million men, women and children to make room for the Olympic facilities and urban beautification. The Geneva-based Center on Housing Rights and Evictions reported that the Chinese Government used: “harassment, repression, imprisonment and even violence” to accomplish this purge. According to Boston Globe columnist, Jeff Jacoby: “demolitions and evictions frequently occurred without due process. Many dispossessed residents were not compensated; those who were usually received a fraction of the amount needed to make them whole.” They could apply for a permit to protest, but none were approved and some were imprisoned.
Speaking of infrastructure, there was an impressive building in downtown Beijing…impressive on camera that is. If you approached the building, you realized there was just a façade on all sides with stretched vinyl covering the surface. Transposed onto the vinyl was a computer-generated picture of an impressive building. There were even two fake people standing in one of the fake windows. Beneath the façade there was hardly a building at all.
Did you notice those 10 foot high walls that lined the marathon route? They hid the slums and the repressed from the television cameras.
How about those opening ceremonies? Impressive, right? 2000 drummers and 2200 martial artists performing in unison, it was both amazing and chilling. Once again, Jeff Jacoby reports the truth: “the ceremony’s 2,200 martial artists…drilled 16 hours a day, seven days a week, for months and were forbidden to leave the army barracks where they were quartered…one grueling, rain-drenched rehearsal lasted 51 hours, with little food and rest and no shelter from the night’s downpour.”
What about that beautiful nine year old girl that sang “Ode to the Motherland” at the opening ceremonies? Wait...no…that beautiful nine year old girl only pretended to sing “Ode to the Motherland” at the opening ceremonies. She was lip-syncing. The real singer, a seven year old girl with crooked teeth, was deemed too ugly for the cameras and sang from behind a curtain.
How about that fireworks display? I’d never seen anything like that live, and there’s a good reason for that because the most impressive of the fireworks displays were computer generated graphics created for the benefit of the world-wide television audience.
What about the games themselves? At least the competition was pure, right? Not quite. Even though previous documents indicated three of the Chinese female gymnasts were only 13 or 14 years old, their passports were falsified to show they were 16, the minimum age for Olympic gymnastic competition. They won the gold by the way.
What about the crowds? They looked relaxed and certainly seemed to enjoy themselves. Well, they better have. The seats were filled with government-trained, professional fans that made the venues look full when they were not. After all, they couldn’t risk letting just anyone into the arenas. You never know what protests could be captured on camera.
At least they left the media alone to report what was going on. Sort of. They censored the internet in the Media Center by blocking access to websites about Taiwan, Tibet, Darfur, Tiananmen Square Revolt, Amnesty International and other words and phrases like democracy.
Yes. The Olympics were a great success for NBC, millions of viewers, the advertisers and the Communist Chinese government. Many around the world will walk away from the games believing China is modernizing, thriving economically and an all around swell place to live. Of course, they didn’t see the other side of those marathon walls or the re-education camps where political dissidents are held. They didn’t hear about the brutal population control measures, namely the forced abortions and sterilizations necessary to maintain a population level that can barely be fed.
Still, some of us know the truth. Some of us see behind the façade and are driven by the belief that all are born with certain unalienable rights, namely: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is up to us to pull the red curtain back and reveal the truth because so many are blinded by this propaganda.
Including, for instance, Democrat Presidential Candidate Barack Obama, who had this to say in a speech last Thursday: “everybody's watching what's going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics; think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business you're starting to think Beijing looks like a pretty good option”
Let me ask you because I can’t figure it out. What is his point here? Does he want our country to be more like China? Does he want more government control in America? Are his massive tax hikes going to be spent on infrastructure? Maybe if we all watch his Potemkin Convention this week, we’ll find out.
