Update: The Dalai Lama responds to the protests. I thought the Dalai Lama was a basically useless inspirational speaker, but he sounds pretty good here.

The Olympics stand for three things: idealistic Victorian athleticism, grand profits, and nationalism, all wrapped up together in a nice, clean, attractive package.

The Olympics seem to attract controversy wherever they go. More to the point, they tend to temporarily inherit the local controversies of the various places they go. Some Western countries decided to boycott the Moscow games in 1980 in protest of that country’s invasion of Afghanistan the previous winter. The Communist bloc retaliated by boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. This wasn’t new: some countries refused to show up in 1976 after international rugby protests spilled over into Olympic turf (originally sparked by the New Zealand national team’s agreement to play against apartheid South Africa), and a number of countries were absent from the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne (some from our side protesting the imperialist Soviet invasion of Hungary, some from the other side opposing the imperialist Anglo-French invasion of Egypt). The Olympics were supposed to be a friendly outlet for nationalist sentiment, but since nationalism is inherently unfriendly, the Olympics tends to pick up the baggage whenever international tensions are running a little too high.

The Olympics are also about something people seem less aware of though: a national cleansing of the poor and destitute. This tends to receive less attention, in part because the Olympics are a moving target: after staying long enough to oversee billions of dollars in the people’s money being stripped from their pockets and funneled into the private hands of profiteering robber barons like the Vancouver 2010 Organizing Committee, the International Olympic Committee picks up stakes and flees to a new destination, where it repeats the process all over again.

National cleansing is a bad word; it’s usually associated with ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, etc. But cities and states consciously engage in class cleansing for the Olympics, too. In Atlanta, for example, ten thousand or so homeless people were arrested, and some effectively deported from the city, for the crime of looking un-middle-class-ish in proximity to the Olympic Games. Sydney also announced in advance a policy to “remove” homeless people from its city. Vancouver’s doing much the same thing, not to mention conveniently forgetting its many promises to ensure affordable housing would proceed apace with Games development. (Incidentally, the Vancouver committee has also trademarked a variety of phrases in a bizarre and Scientology-ish attempt to stifle public criticism of its grand highway robbery, and like Adam Smith predicted rich people would do, they’ve tried to get extra laws passed to protect their right to suppress citizens’ free speech in advance of the Games. But that’s okay, members of VANOC: after the shit you’ve pulled, I personally don’t want to be a “friend” of the 2010 Olympic Games anyways. And speaking of which, how the hell do you trademark FRIEND anyways? Will you dare to sue the Church of the Orange Sky for proclaiming that it is a friend of 2010?)

Today’s cleansing campaign takes place in China, though, not in Vancouver, and it’s considerably more severe. Lhasa, Tibet is now in military lockdown after days of unprecedented street protests, led by Buddhist monks, in opposition to the ongoing and illegal Chinese occupation of Tibet. Chinese forces have used live ammunition against unarmed civilians, probably killing as many as several hundred, though the official Xinhua news agency admits killing only 10 shopkeepers (see also the New York Times report). The Tibetan protests are doubtless timed to draw attention to the occupation in advance of the Olympics, which have temporarily permitted an unusually high focus on the abysmal human rights situation inside the People’s Republic of China, and particularly within occupied Tibet.

The IOC usually cloaks itself in international neutrality when it comes to the crimes against humanity of its various hosts, but today they came pretty close to actively supporting the Chinese government. IOC chief Jacques Rogge, speaking from the pleasant Caribbean tourist destination of St. Kitts and Nevis, argued that it would be a mistake for any of us privileged foreigners to retaliate by not coming to the Olympics because any hint of a boycott would “penalize innocent athletes.” His vice-president admitted that violence might be “a step backwards” – backwards from what it’s not clear – but agrees the show must go on regardless.

The notion that international “athletes’ rights” trump basic human rights is fucking moronic, especially since it’s really just a convenient shield to hide behind – what the IOC is really worried about is that criticism of the Chinese might interfere with the “innocent profits” about to be reaped from the games. If Rogge and his merry band of profiteers want to be seen as something other than blatant hypocrites, they should either retreat to their usual “we don’t comment on internal affairs,” which is amoral and inhumane but at least honest; or they should take their supposed “concerns” about “backward” violence to the logical conclusion, which is that the Chinese should face consequences for their actions.

Of course, that would violate another longstanding Western doctrine, which is that, despite our excitedly pronouncing ourselves the world’s police force when it comes to “reconstructing” Afghanistan with the help of the friendly local heroin producers union (aka the Northern Alliance) and bought-and-paid-for industry chums like Hamid Karzai , or protecting civilian Kosovars from the Serbian military by bravely flying 16 000 feet over head and lobbing thousand-pound bombs at friend and foe alike, we must carefully look the other way while China massacres its own citizens and the subjects of occupied Tibet. This is because China has nuclear weapons, which usually give you much more legitimacy than keeping children’s schools open, as well as open trade with the West, which always gives you much more legitimacy than mere democracy.

Like corrupt police everywhere, the most important part of our job is to carefully turn and look the other way while our less reputable friends get their hands dirty. After all, it is much more important to protect “innocent athletes” than “innocent civilians.” Still, someone ought to protect the innocent athletes from the IOC, too.