The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was a stunner, wasn’t it? Dazzling images of gorgeously dressed synchronized masses, all dancing and drumming and spinning and dangling from wires. It was amazing, and beautiful.
Congratulations, Chinese Communist Party! You’ve given the world a glorious spectacle that no feeble democracy will likely ever match.
How could we equal it? No democratic government could evict a million urbanites and bulldoze their dwellings to make way for glittering new Olympic structures, the way the Chinese have.
In no free society could bureaucrats mandate the mass closure of factories to provide clean-ish air to the world’s athletes, the way the Chinese have.
No police force accountable to elected civilian leaders could simply round up and detain indefinitely anyone who might make a fuss by peaceably demonstrating, or holding up a complaining sign, or by expressing anything but giddy enthusiasm to a foreign reporter, as the Chinese have.
Truly, there is no power on Earth better suited to putting on a phenomenal Olympic spectacle than an authoritarian state.
It worked in Berlin in 1936. The grounds for those Games were designed by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer.
Almost unbelievably, the layout for the Beijing Games was designed in part by Speer’s own son, Albert Speer Jr.
The Berlin Games, as these ones, served the purpose of demonstrating the legitimacy of the host government to its own people.
Those Games, like the present ones, were contrived to extrude respect for the host government from an uneasy world. We didn’t much like Nazis and we don’t like Communists, but, man, do they know how to put on a show.
It’s ruthlesslessness combined with power aesthetics that does it — a willingness to ignore any amount of human suffering for the cause of the glory of the state.
Out come the flags, stamp go the feet, thousands of throats roar, and amid the exciting fireworks the cameras show us the spectacle we’re supposed to see.
In Beijing, we’ve been seeing and hearing false, concocted things, such as the gigantic footprints that appeared to be flashing through the skies over Beijing on opening night, but which turn out to have been illusions painstakingly generated by computer.
We saw ponytailed 9-year-old Lin Miaoke singing a patriotic Chinese song, except it wasn’t her voice we heard. She was miming to a recording done by 7-year-old Yang Peiyi.
Poor Miss Yang was chucked out of the proceedings at the last minute after a member of the Communist Politburo saw her in rehearsals and decided she wasn’t pretty enough.
So lovely Miss Lin lip-synched, and the fake footprints didn’t appear in the actual skies, and the whole thing looked marvelous.
Two thousand and eight drummers — what a brilliant, thrilling touch.
And then the Games themselves! Who could fail to be moved by the precision of those gymnasts (however old they are), the surging magnificence of the swimmers, the delicacy of the equestrians?
Watching the world’s most superb athletes, it’s tempting to believe that the Olympics really are only about sports, not politics, as the International Olympic Committee always insists.
Perhaps it is tedious, therefore, to run again through the litany of those whose bodies were broken and whose freedom, and even whose lives, were confiscated so that China would be ready for its Olympic close-up.
There are so many of them, and we’ve heard it all so often: Displaced Beijingers, repressed Tibetans, besieged Uighurs, labor camp inmates, faithful Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, irate farmers, those who post inconvenient photos on the Internet, and on and on. These people are not dressed in rich silken garments, they are not smiling, and they are not available for interviews.
The Chinese Communist Party is putting on an astounding show at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
In some ways, this is unsurprising. Authoritarian regimes have always been good at putting on mass demonstrations of state power.
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
