The Mexican regime escaped international sanction in 1968 through a combination of extreme and swift repression and by putting on a great show at the Mexican Olympics and thereby winning international support. Thanks, in part, to that continued international support, it managed to hold on to power for another 35 years. We must not let the regime in China pull the same trick. We should boycott the Beijing Olympics.
Steven Spielberg resigned as an artistic adviser to the Olympics because of China's silence over Darfur. Before he quit, Mia Farrow drew parallels with the 1936 Berlin Olympics, saying he "could be the Leni Riefenstahl of the Olympic Games". Farrow had a point.
But perhaps there are other Olympic parallels we can draw. The Mexican state in 1968, like the present day Chinese state, was corporatist. There was one-party rule indivisible from the government; no independent judiciary, trade unions or employers associations; the media was completely controlled by the government and foreign companies could only operate in Mexico under strict controls by grace of the country's ruling elite.
Inspired by the student protests in Paris in March 1968, the university preparatory school students in Mexico City arranged for a demonstration to take place on October 2 in Tlatelolco Square, 10 days before the Olympics were due to kick off. The students, mainly teenagers, were asking for democracy and reform and specifically for the Granaderos, a repressive and violent arm of the police, to be disbanded, and for a law dating from the second world war law which prohibited demonstrations to be abolished.
Most accounts of the events prior to the 1968 Olympics are based on Elena Poniatowskaya's book La Noche de Tlatelolco. In the weeks before October 2, fearful of the impact the students' protests would have on its Olympic propaganda efforts, the government sent the Granaderos into the preparatory schools to take out the leadership of the student movement. Granaderos raided classrooms and all those students who were snatched from their classrooms disappeared.
In spite of the intimidation, the demonstrations went ahead. As the students gathered to protest in Tlatelolco Square, president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz is presumed to have ordered the interior minister Luis Echeverra to shoot the students and completely eradicate any possibility of an embarrassing protest before the games.
According to the eye-witness testimonies gathered by Elena Poniatowska, the action looked very well planned and organised. Hundreds of students were shot dead. When some of the students took refuge in the flats surrounding Tlatelolco square, the military and police went into the flats and killed all the students they found there, as well as any teenagers they found.
During the night of October 2, many of the bodies of the hundreds of young people are thought to have been buried buried in Campo Marte, the military parade ground in Mexico City. Others were taken in lorries to unknown destinations outside the capital to be disposed of. Mexico City residents say Campo Marte was quickly turfed over and by dawn, when the rest of Mexico City woke up there was no evidence of the massacre, just rolling grass on a parade ground.
There were also unconfirmed reports at the time that after the demonstrations a group of 15 mothers with placards went outside Los Pinos, the residence of the Mexican president to ask for their children back. They too were immediately killed and their bodies disposed of. as well.
Elena Poniatowska's account of the October 2 demonstration, which she wrote in 1971, was circulated clandestinely and was only legally published decades later because following the massacre there was a complete media blackout.
In the case of Mexico 1968 the international community turned a blind eye to the repression and instead happily went along with the celebration of the Olympics. With its failure to boycott the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the international community is in danger of making the same mistake, sanctioning the repression of the Tibetans and helping entrench the authoritarian Chinese regime.
Miliband and Brown and the other representatives of the western political classes are deluding themselves if they think that the Chinese government will respond positively to their remonstrations and diplomatic hand-wringing by stopping the repression of Tibetans, liberalising and introducing democratic reform. Moreover, let's remind ourselves that most democratic rights, like universal suffrage, were not given to the people by the British ruling class. Our parents and grandparents and their parents fought for these rights. What real possibility of reform is there in China with a government that represses all possible expression of dissent?
Where does the optimism come from that suggests that capitalism will "open up China" and change it into a liberal democracy? According to the Chinese people I have talked to, it is only on the eastern and southwestern coastal fringes of China where the state has allowed capitalism to develop and prosper. Most of the interior of China is still firmly under the boot of the regime.
The argument that the Beijing Olympics will provide a platform for protesters is specious. Few British people participating in the Berlin Olympics dared or bothered to say anything against Hitler and even in the age of the internet and mobile phone cameras, protest will be very limited. The Chinese government is taking preventative measures even as I write.
The truth is that the 2008 Olympics will not be a platform for dissent and human rights. It will be a platform for nationalism, and particularly Chinese nationalism.
In 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos bravely held up their hands in a black power salute to protest against the treatment of their community in the US. However, no one in Mexico dared to say anything against the massacre of the students in Mexico City that had taken place barely three weeks before the 1968 games. Given the attitude of the Chinese government, few if any will dare do so in 2008 either.
Steven Spielberg resigned as an artistic adviser to the Olympics because of China's silence over Darfur. Before he quit, Mia Farrow drew parallels with the 1936 Berlin Olympics, saying he "could be the Leni Riefenstahl of the Olympic Games". Farrow had a point.
But perhaps there are other Olympic parallels we can draw. The Mexican state in 1968, like the present day Chinese state, was corporatist. There was one-party rule indivisible from the government; no independent judiciary, trade unions or employers associations; the media was completely controlled by the government and foreign companies could only operate in Mexico under strict controls by grace of the country's ruling elite.
Inspired by the student protests in Paris in March 1968, the university preparatory school students in Mexico City arranged for a demonstration to take place on October 2 in Tlatelolco Square, 10 days before the Olympics were due to kick off. The students, mainly teenagers, were asking for democracy and reform and specifically for the Granaderos, a repressive and violent arm of the police, to be disbanded, and for a law dating from the second world war law which prohibited demonstrations to be abolished.
Most accounts of the events prior to the 1968 Olympics are based on Elena Poniatowskaya's book La Noche de Tlatelolco. In the weeks before October 2, fearful of the impact the students' protests would have on its Olympic propaganda efforts, the government sent the Granaderos into the preparatory schools to take out the leadership of the student movement. Granaderos raided classrooms and all those students who were snatched from their classrooms disappeared.
In spite of the intimidation, the demonstrations went ahead. As the students gathered to protest in Tlatelolco Square, president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz is presumed to have ordered the interior minister Luis Echeverra to shoot the students and completely eradicate any possibility of an embarrassing protest before the games.
According to the eye-witness testimonies gathered by Elena Poniatowska, the action looked very well planned and organised. Hundreds of students were shot dead. When some of the students took refuge in the flats surrounding Tlatelolco square, the military and police went into the flats and killed all the students they found there, as well as any teenagers they found.
During the night of October 2, many of the bodies of the hundreds of young people are thought to have been buried buried in Campo Marte, the military parade ground in Mexico City. Others were taken in lorries to unknown destinations outside the capital to be disposed of. Mexico City residents say Campo Marte was quickly turfed over and by dawn, when the rest of Mexico City woke up there was no evidence of the massacre, just rolling grass on a parade ground.
There were also unconfirmed reports at the time that after the demonstrations a group of 15 mothers with placards went outside Los Pinos, the residence of the Mexican president to ask for their children back. They too were immediately killed and their bodies disposed of. as well.
Elena Poniatowska's account of the October 2 demonstration, which she wrote in 1971, was circulated clandestinely and was only legally published decades later because following the massacre there was a complete media blackout.
In the case of Mexico 1968 the international community turned a blind eye to the repression and instead happily went along with the celebration of the Olympics. With its failure to boycott the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the international community is in danger of making the same mistake, sanctioning the repression of the Tibetans and helping entrench the authoritarian Chinese regime.
Miliband and Brown and the other representatives of the western political classes are deluding themselves if they think that the Chinese government will respond positively to their remonstrations and diplomatic hand-wringing by stopping the repression of Tibetans, liberalising and introducing democratic reform. Moreover, let's remind ourselves that most democratic rights, like universal suffrage, were not given to the people by the British ruling class. Our parents and grandparents and their parents fought for these rights. What real possibility of reform is there in China with a government that represses all possible expression of dissent?
Where does the optimism come from that suggests that capitalism will "open up China" and change it into a liberal democracy? According to the Chinese people I have talked to, it is only on the eastern and southwestern coastal fringes of China where the state has allowed capitalism to develop and prosper. Most of the interior of China is still firmly under the boot of the regime.
The argument that the Beijing Olympics will provide a platform for protesters is specious. Few British people participating in the Berlin Olympics dared or bothered to say anything against Hitler and even in the age of the internet and mobile phone cameras, protest will be very limited. The Chinese government is taking preventative measures even as I write.
The truth is that the 2008 Olympics will not be a platform for dissent and human rights. It will be a platform for nationalism, and particularly Chinese nationalism.
In 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos bravely held up their hands in a black power salute to protest against the treatment of their community in the US. However, no one in Mexico dared to say anything against the massacre of the students in Mexico City that had taken place barely three weeks before the 1968 games. Given the attitude of the Chinese government, few if any will dare do so in 2008 either.
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