Beware, Sacred Dogs

Newcastle Herald

Thursday April 24, 2008

Joanne McCarthy

QUITE possibly the most unbelievable statement made by any person in the past few weeks as Australia has prepared to host a lightning quick tour by the Olympic torch today, came from ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope this week as he lamented security measures required for the event.

Those measures included the erection of a Great Wall of Canberra out of temporary steel fences.

"It's quite a blow to the innocence of our city, but we must do it," he said.

Spare me.

Leaving aside that Canberra is the porn film capital of Australia, has Mr Stanhope noticed what goes on in the big building in the centre of town with the giant flapping Aussie flag on its lid?

Jon, pet, the age of innocence died whenever someone decided Canberra was far enough away from anywhere else to put a large bunch of politicians in one place without tainting major population centres. Deal with it.

There's been a lot of weird, wonderful and worrying statements made about the blessed Olympic torch since it started its journey from Beijing a few weeks ago.

There's the pious gushing by the International Olympic Committee about what the torch represents the "purity" of the "sacred" flame, the "positive values man has always associated with fire" (although what those "values" are is anyone's guess), and its "message of peace".

There's the kind of stuff from China that we hoped might disappear in its march from straight Communism a few decades ago, to Communism-lite, where you become a capitalist superpower and let your people have mobile phones, but shut them down when they get the hang of the idea that capitalism and consumerism means always wanting more, even from Communist governments.

Thus we've had a return of "running dogs", "foreign dogs", "white ghosts" and Tibetans as "splittists" and members of the "Dalai clique".

There have been nasty anti-Chinese sentiments expressed in Australia, a country that is happy to keep its tertiary education system afloat on the tens of millions of dollars pumped into universities by full fee-paying Chinese students. We like the dough, but the second those students talk about protesting to support their country's version of the Olympic Games, good old Aussie racism is itching for a fight.

It's OK for Tibetans to protest against the torch, but not Chinese students in support of it, seems to be the message in newspaper letters pages and on radio talkback. This does seem to be missing the point about protest, which I thought was at the core of what a lot of this torch stuff was about.

There's been a lot of urging from all sides about hopes for peaceful protests, despite columns of police, hulky torch support "athletes/crack Chinese paramilitary squad members" in tracksuits and passionate agitators from the pro-Tibet and pro-China camps. As usual, it's always the other guy who's going to be violent.

The Aussie torch relay people have done us proud with some great quotes. My favourite is from torch relay organiser Ted Quinlan on the subject of smuggling the torch on to a bus if protests today get out of control.

"The flame has to be mobile. Any major disruption could kill it," he said.

Suddenly the torch has morphed from a symbol of sacredness, purity, faith, hope, love and all the rest of it, to some kind of living creature on life support being rushed to the nearest hospital.

The relay has become a debacle, which is unfortunate for the Chinese people, regardless of your views on Tibet.

But that's what happens when myth, lies, hypocrisy and big dollars are thrown together.

The torch relay is not some ancient ceremony revived for the modern Olympic Games. It is not symbolic of a glorious moment in history when humanity was at its best and finest.

The torch relay comes from Adolf Hitler's Germany, from the master propagandists who gave us World War II. Maybe at some point between 1936 and a few years ago the torch relay meant something, but save us from the "sacred flame" blather now.

The Olympic Games is about international politics and finance, with sport as its front. That's why China got the Games. That's why we should be as offended by "purity of the flame" nonsense as by a return of the phrase "running dogs".

jmccarthy@theherald.com.au

© 2008 Newcastle Herald

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