Boycott Beijing

The spectacle of the England football team giving the Nazi salute at the 1936 Berlin Olympics sends a shudder of revulsion down our spines today. I wonder what we will think in seventy years time about images of the 2008 forthcoming Beijing Olympics.

Which begs the question: Bearing in mind the suppression of protest in Tibet, the continuing sale of arms to the Sudanese in Darfur, civil engineering projects of unimaginable environmental damage, the suppression of ethnic and religious groups, an appalling criminal justice system and a litany of human rights abuses against dissidents .... why was it considered reasonable to boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan , apartheid South Africa or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, but not China ?

The only reason that I can see for these double standrads is that none of those countries were/are emerging economies on the global stage. Meanwhile China is fast becoming the manufacturing sweat shop of the world, and pissing them off is bad for business.