Cross posted from Edgeofsports

China's
brutal crackdown against Tibetan protesters ahead of the Summer
Olympics in Beijing carries with it a terrible echo from the past.
Scores of people, including school children are reported dead and
more repression has been promised. The
People's Daily, the official newspaper of the ruling Communist
Party of China (CPC), said "[We must] resolutely crush the 'Tibet
independence' forces' conspiracy and sabotaging activities."

Even
after decades of occupation, the ruthlessness of the crackdown has
shocked much of the world. It happens the week after the US State
Department removed China from its list of the world's worst human
rights offenders.

Yet
the concern expressed by world leaders has seemed less for the people
of Tibet than the fate of the Summer Games, with Olympic cash deemed
more precious than Tibetan blood. The Olympics were supposed to be
China's multibillion-dollar, super sweet sixteen. Britain's Minister
for Africa, Asia and the United Nations, Mark Malloch-Brown told the
BBC, "This is China's coming-out party, and they should take
great care to do nothing that will wreck that."

Other
countries hankering after a piece of China's thriving economy have
rushed to put daylight between the crackdown in Tibet and the
Olympics. No surprise, the Bush's White House, underwriting their
war in Iraq on loans from Beijing, headed off any talk that President
Bush would cancel his appearance at the Olympic Games when
spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush believed that the Olympics "should
be about the athletes and not necessarily about politics."
Earlier, the European Union said a "boycott would not be the
appropriate way to address the work for respect of human rights,
which means the ethnic and religious rights of the Tibetans."

While the nations of the West have ruled out the idea of boycotting
the games, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Tuesday that
the EU should at least consider boycotting the opening ceremony if
violence continues. Later Kouchner backtracked, saying "We're not in
favor of it. When you're dealing in international relations with
countries as important as China, obviously when you make economic
decisions it's sometimes at the expense of human rights. That's
elementary realism.''

Whatever
happens next, China's crackdown is not happening in spite of the
Beijing Olympics, but because of them. It is a bold play by China to
set a tone for the remainder of the year. Since its occupation of the
country in 1951, China has suppressed its Buddhist faith and made
Tibetans a persecuted minority in their own country via the mass
migration of millions of Han Chinese. As monks and young Tibetans
took their grievances to the streets over the weekend, the government
made clear it would brook no protest and tolerate no dissent.

But
it's helpful to remember that in many countries, including our own,
pre-Olympic repression is as much of a tradition as lighting the
torch.

In
1984, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates oversaw the jailing of
thousands of young black men in the infamous Olympic Gang Sweeps.
Gates also sent the LA Swat Team to Israel and West Berlin for
special training.

The
1996 Atlanta games were supposed to demonstrate the gains of the New
South, but the New South ended up looking much like the old one, as
public housing was razed to make way for Olympic venues, homeless
people were chased off the streets and perceived trouble-makers were
arrested. As Wendy Pedersen of the Carnegie Community Action Project
recently recalled in Vancouver, BC, another city poised to crack down
on crime, drugs and homelessness in preparation for the Winter
Olympics in 2010, Atlanta officials "had six ordinances that
made all kinds of things illegal, including lying down. Lots of
people were shipped out, and lots of people were put in jail. [The
Olympic Planning Committee] actually built the city jail. Activists
there called it the first Olympic project completed on time."

Repression followed the Olympic Rings to Greece in 2004. As the
radio program "Democracy Now," reported at the time, authorities in
Athens "round[ed] up homeless people, drug addicts and the mentally
ill, requiring that psychiatric hospitals lock them up." The
pre-Olympics "cleanup" included detaining or deporting refugees and
asylum-seekers. Being the first Olympics after 9/11, police
surveillance of immigrant Muslims and makeshift mosques in Athens
greatly increased.

But
the worst example of Olympic repression--and the most resonantto the
current moment--came in 1968 in Mexico City, where hundreds of
Mexican students and workers occupying the National University were
slaughtered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas on October 2, 1968, ten
days before the start of the games. Recently declassified documents
paint a picture of a massacre as cold and methodical as President
Luis Echeverría's instructions.

Echeverría's
aim was the same as China's: a pre-emptive strike to make sure that
using the Olympic games as a platform for protest would not be on the
itinerary. The irony, of course, is that while Echeverría
succeeded in crushing the protest movement outside the games, on the
inside US athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their
black-gloved fists in an expression of Black Power, cementing the
1968 games as a place defined by discontent. It's a lesson the 2008
athletes might remember. Officials may try to smother dissent on the
streets of Lhasa and elsewhere in China, but in the games
themselves--from the path of the Olympic torch up Mount Everest to
the opulent venues constructed in Beijing--the risk for protest, and
the opportunity, is real.