03.25.08
Olympics boycotts
Boycott Beijing
The Olympics are the perfect place for a protest.
By Anne Applebaum
A boycott would, for me, almost be an involuntary reflex, effective immediately, like freezing in your tracks. I couldn’t even turn on to a TV channel to the Olympics after the recent news from Tibet.
Cocacola et al. should have thought of that before hand.
A boycott doesn’t solve anything. Well, doesn’t it? Some boycotts do help solve some things. The boycott of South African athletes from international competitions was probably the single most effective weapon the international community ever deployed against the apartheid state. (”They didn’t mind about the business sanctions,” a South African friend once told me, “but they minded—they really, really minded—about the cricket.”) The boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics helped undermine Soviet propaganda about the invasion of Afghanistan and unify the Western world against it. I don’t know for certain, but I’m guessing that from the Soviet perspective, the Soviet bloc boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics four years later was successful, too. Presumably, it was intended to solidify Soviet elite opposition to the United States in the Reagan years, and presumably, it helped.