| Loyalty oaths to china would definitely cross the line, because declaring loyalty to China gorces the athletes to abandon loyalty to their own countries. If the Chinese did that, sure that's a reason to boycott.
Your analogies about provocations fail because you're comparing very different degrees of provocation. And indeed, we didn't enter WWII because of anyone's internal activities - not even when that was genocide of the Jews. We entered WWII because Japan BOMBED Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on us after that as Japan's ally.
Boycotting South Africa and Cuba were about nuclear weapons initially, south Africa's program and cuba's hosting of soviet missiles. Again, not due to internal laws only.
Taiwan, I don't think we could defend conventionally today if China decided to take it at all costs. And again, if we prepared to go nuclear against China over that, I wonder if our allies' nukes would be pointed our way. At the very least I think our NATOI allies would shit a brick if we were going to start a general nuclear war with China over Taiwan. I think we would capitulate if that happened today. So I dispute that we are in any position to fight a war with China today, conventional or otherwise. We can't properly deal with Iraq and Iran at the moment, or are prevented from doing so by world opinion and the threat of allies abandoning us.
How much worse would it be if WE were seen as PROVOKING a war with China? We would only have allies if CHINA started it.
I just don't see this as important enough to start a pissing match that could lead to war. And Asian cultures are different than we are as far as being willing to squander millions of soldiers' lives to make their point and save face. Westerners can't handle huge casualties and will give up quickly. So I don't want to prov0ke a war that's not necessary to survive, and which we'd then lose due to lack of will to sustain casualties, or plain lack of manpower.
So the Chinese lose 30 million to wipe out the 2 million military personnel we have. what then? "Hey China! Time out while we draft and train another 10 million!" Not gonna happen.
My view on the glass? Let's not break it, we only have one!
And to address Mikael's post,, if you're a devout enough Christian to miss your Bible over the course of 2 weeks during which you'll mostly be eating, sleeping and competing, I think you should have enough of it memorized that each person in your prayer group should be able to quote some readings from memory. Christians have been persecuted through the years and have had to do without Bibles and other outward signs of their faith, to practice in secret.
Hey, there was a time When BRITAIN, A Christian country, forbade the practice of Catholicism on pain of death. The Chinese ban seems mild by comparison, and if they catch someone with a Bible they'll probably just deport them.
It sucks, but it's not worth starting shit with them over it that could escalate. to the Chinese the Olympics are a rare sign of respect from the Western world toward the Chinese government. They still remember things like the European powers pushing their government aside in the 1800s to create the opium epidemic in China, Britain taking Tibet away from them in 1905, europe doing nothing while Japan raped china in the 1930s. All these things they remember and resent. Finally we show them some respect, but they remind us that China is THEIR country and THEIR terms - exactly because we pushed them around before, and we can't do it now.
Will, it's not just the Communists - Chinese people are proud. If there was still an Emperor, or even if there were a republic, they still might do this, because they want to protect their culture from dissolution by Western influence. Even though that influence is growing, All Chinese want China to REMAIN China in character.
I will go so far as to say that if the rest of the world organizes a boycott, and is then asking the US to take a stand, I might consider it a good idea then. What I think would be very bad for us is if the Chinese saw us as leading or instigating such a boycott. If we came onboard to such a worldwide boycott late in the game, we wouldn't be singled out by China as its instigator.
To be honest, though, I don't think the rest of the world cares that much about a Bible prohibition at the Olympics; just the US. |