KEY POINTS:
At the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics, spectators will watch as athletes from the worst regimes on the planet parade by. Whether they are from dictatorships of the left or right, secular or theocratic, they will have one thing in common: the hosts of the games that,
according to the mission statement, are striving "for a bright future for mankind" will support their oppressors.
The flag of Sudan will flutter. China supplied the weapons that massacred so many in Darfur and vetoes mild condemnations of genocide from the United Nations. In return, China got most of Sudan's oil. The Burmese athletes will wave to the crowd and look as if they are representing an independent country. In return for the weapons to suppress democrats and vetoes at the UN Security Council, the junta sells China gas at rates far below what its wretched citizens have to pay.
There will be no Tibetan contingent, of course. Athletes from half-starved Zimbabwe, whose senile despot props himself up with the Zimmer frame of Chinese aid, will be there. As will teams from the Iranian mullah-ocracy, grateful recipients of Chinese missiles and the prison state of North Korea.
Comparisons with the 20th century will soon be flowing. Will Beijing be like the 1936 Berlin Olympics Hitler used to celebrate Nazism? Or the 1980 Moscow games the Americans boycotted in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? But the ideological struggles of the 20th century are over.
China's communists are communists in name only. They have no ideology beyond national self-interest and a well-warranted desire to stop outsiders insisting on standards in Africa or Asia they do not intend to abide by.
Campaign groups and governments that want to promote the spread of democracy have been slow to realise that the emerging power of the 21st century will be every tyrant's first customer and banker of last resort.
The European Union has imposed sanctions but Western energy companies ask with justice why they should be told not to compete for gas contracts the Chinese will snap up.
More seriously, they face a problem familiar to anyone who campaigned against 20th-century dictatorships: where to find allies.
David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary, showed he understood the dilemmas of the new century when he gave a lecture in honour of Suu Kyi. He described how the great wave of democratisation, which began with the fall of Franco's dictatorship, moved through South America, the Soviet empire, South Africa and the tyrannies of East Asia, was fading.
The Foreign Secretary was undiplomatic enough to continue that the economic success of China had proved that history was not over and he was right. Its combination of communist suppression with market economics is being seen as a viable alternative to liberal freedoms not only by Putin and his cronies but also by anti-democratic forces across Asia.
Why should athletes boycott events they have long dreamed of winning when no business or government is prepared to turn its back on the vast Chinese market? For all that, they still should not go. The hypocrisy of the 2008 Olympics will make all but the most hard-hearted athletes retch.
- OBSERVER