The important thing to remember here is that the Olympics aren’t in a real communist country, they’re in China. The Chinese have always been like this, and the communist rulers are really just emperors in different clothes. There was a brouhaha the other day when it was discovered that the little girl who sang in the opening ceremony was lip-singing to the voice of *another* little girl, who was judged insufficiently cute. The Chinese do this sort of thing because they are obsessed with the idea that they need to present themselves to the rest of the world as perfect. The dissent issue is a similar one. The American athlete who was kept away because he’s brought up Darfur would be an embarrassment to the government, and you don’t embarrass the emperor. The Chinese government isn’t totalitarian because it’s communist…it’s communist because that allows it to be totalitarian. The emperor needs power to ensure his own safety and prosperity, and he needs to exert authority unilaterally to keep chaos from overtaking the country.
The facet of this issue which has always fascinated me is that the Chinese leadership thinks they’ve fooled the world by doing this. They believe that no one notices when they dub one voice and let another girl sing, and when they get caught they assure one another that the people will understand this was in the national interest, or something to that effect. The government types over there seem to have never met a skeptic, or someone who looks at things critically or objectively. Facade and pretense are everything, reality meaningless. Strangely, not even the Democrats are buying that, for the most part, but the Chinese government, emperor and all, persevere.
