A chill swept through me as I read Charles Moore’s recent article on the Beijing games1.
Media images of hard, cruel-faced bodyguards accompanying the Olympic torch around the world now slotted into place. ‘As the choice of Berlin for the Olympic Games in 1936 marked Hitler’s success and international acceptance, so the choice of Beijing for 2009 marks China’s’. In other words the global community was being treated to a massive con exercise. An emblem of peace masks a system of despotism.
The juxtaposition — Berlin and Beijing — is uncomfortable, to say the least. And recent reports of secret nuclear submarine bases in south China, not to mention America’s unprecedented financial indebtedness to the Asian giant, make it the more so. It will be dismissed out of hand by some as ill-timed and uncharitable scare-mongering from an envious and declining West. But what struck me most about Moore’s comment was his historical and comparative analysis for, as well as being true, it provides a helpful introduction to what I want to say about Richard Dawkins. ‘We have spent much time in recent years complaining about America’s abuse of power. Sometimes the criticism is justified, but we have hardly begun to consider the alternative and how appalling it would be. Whenever we attack America we do so in the knowledge that it has a visible system of self-correction that might listen to us. It has a constitutional structure which is built to accommodate differing views. China has nothing of the sort, and never has had.’
