Ioana Lupea: "He decorated postmortem Alexander Soljeniţân, the great denouncer of the totalitarian-communist lies, but he takes part to the farce of the regime in Beijing."
Who imagines that the Olympics means sport is naive. Traian Băsescu is not. He will stand together with Hu Jintao, the patron of a regime who dispizes its citizens, so that around two million voters will see him supporting the national team. Sport is the new opium of the people. Basescu has problems with consistency. He decorated postmortem Alexander Soljeniţân, the great denouncer of the totalitarian-communist lies, but he takes part to the farce of the regime in Beijing, the postmodern child of the communist totalitarianism. He joined the hypocritical theory of China and the International Olympic Committee - the defense of all abusive regimes - that human rights are a political instrument. The reply should have sounded familiar from the "Golden Age". Who is politicing the olympic games and who uses their athletes for political purposes, if not China? "New York Times" informed that the athletes are forced to represent China even seriously injured, failure being considered by the Communist Party as a betrayal of the people.
Basescu is not the only leader who, for popularity or for business, is participating to legitimization of the regime from Beijing. Olympic propaganda is the last frontier of the political PR. George W. Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy are also coming to the opening, despite protests from U.S. and France, the actual chairman of the EU ignoring even the suggestion of the EU Parliament to boycott the opening ceremony. The two have made minimum gestures of disapproval: Bush condemned the braking of human rights, and Sarkozy promised that he will be meeting with the Dalai Lama. UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown did not allowed themselves to be put in the showcase Chinese Communist Party, preferring their own sofa to the red tribune.
Although calls to boycott the opening ceremony were numerous, as in 1936, before the Berlin Olympics, they were ignored. Let us remember that Adolf Hitler, who had started his Nazi and arian campaign, transformed the Olympics into a propagandistic show. The panels with anti-Semitic messages were disabled, and newspapers have lowered the tone against Jews, for Germany to show the world it is peaceful and tolerant. Hu Jintao wants to show not only the economic force of China, its future as a large power, but also the full internal consensus. Amnesty International shows that, once the Olympics approached, the authorities have intensified the persecution against journalists and dissidents.
The Olympics Games represent not only politics but also money, very much money. Just the torch relay has cost Samsung, Coca-Cola Company and the Chinese company Levono around 50 million U.S. dollars. According to "Foreign Policy", Coca-Cola, McDonald's, General Electric and nine other major sponsors have invested an average of 74 million U.S. dollars each for the access to the 4 billion of watchers-consumers. And the green eurodeputy Daniel Cohn Bendit accused the president of France that he will go to Beijing "to sell nuclear power and Airbus airplanes." What is worth in fromt of these political, geopolitical and economic big stakes a poor population, several dissidents in jail and hundreds of killed Tibetans? Polluted rain water.