OPEN LETTER TO THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE
July 10, 2001
MARINA DEL REY, CA--It will be a tragedy for human rights if China is chosen to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, said a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in an open letter to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). "China's Communist government is a murderous dictatorship," said Dr. Andrew Bernstein, also a philosophy professor at Pace University, "and must not be permitted to use the games as propaganda to mask its evil."
Bernstein asks the IOC to look at "the endless list of China's violations of human rights: state orphanages where thousands of children are abandoned and systematically starved to death because of China's one-child-per-family laws; support of the murderous genocide of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; four to six million prisoners currently held in slave labor camps, whose only transgression is disagreeing with the ideas of their Communist rulers; the murder of 65 million of their own people."
And Bernstein asks the IOC to consider that China's sacrifice of the individual to the state contradicts Baron de Coubertin's purpose in creating the modern Olympic games: "an arena in which outstanding individuals could strive for excellence, moral, as well as athletic." A firm believer in the rights of the individual, de Coubertin said, "The Olympiads have been re-established for the rare and solemn glorification of the individual...." "The Chinese Communists want to wrap themselves in the Olympic flag to hide their evil, said Bernstein. "This is exactly what Adolf Hitler was permitted to get away with when Nazi Germany hosted the games in 1936. At least then, the IOC had the excuse that the games had been awarded to Berlin prior to the Nazis' rise to power. Today, in 2001, the evil of the Communists is blatantly obvious and there can be no excuse. Award the Olympics to a country where individual rights are protected--not to the Butchers of Beijing."
Ayn Rand Institute senior writer Andrew Bernstein is available for interviews.
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