Is the Enlightenment Over?

The Age of Enlightenment is seen as roughly the period from about 1688 to 1778/1789/1815 in which there was a shift away from superstition and belief in magic to a greater faith in rational thought and experimentation to determine how the world worked. Behind this were developments in philosophy with its emaphsis on 'reason' and also a move from seeing society as properly based on hierarchy. Out of this we get the first moves to democracy as we know it in the modern sense and also the sense of 'rights of man' (application to women took longer) and that everyone was equal under the law, no longer were nobles and monarch exempt. It did not achieve everything over night and things such as the French Revolution (1789) which began based on these precepts soon ran off the rails and turned to violence. The Enlightenment did begin to break down prejudices and in countries like Britain legal discrimination against Catholics and Jews began to be reduced and then abolished in the mid-19th century. However, as we know that did not stop religious intolerance and anti-Semitism persisting. The important thing about the Enlightenment was that it gave the intellectual basis (and in the case of France and the USA examples of constitutions and bills of rights) for a lot of the things that people aspired towards in a liberal demoncracy in the 20th century and so we saw things like votes for all people, civil rights for minorities, equality for women and welfare states. All of this took decades, but without the Age of Enlightenment we would be in an age in which we would think most things were controlled by magic and that it was right that nobles should pay no taxes and have the right of life and death over those lower down the hierarchy (the bulk of the population) who would be squeezed for taxes with no protection if they fell ill or lost their jobs.

My view is that the post-Enlightenment phase in which the ideas put forward slowly and painfully were put into reality, is coming to an end. Why do I think this? You might say that the mass wars of the 20th century, the Holocaust, racist killings, etc. showed that the Enlightenment was not well established. I agree that the Second World War was certainly the period when Enlightenment values were put on the line. In 1938 very few countries in the world had democracy. However, it was Britain, the USA, France that won the war and their values became dominant in large chunks of the world. Their ally was the USSR which of course had a Communist system which though rational (in contrast to the Nazis who had emphasised things like occultism) was totally opposed to the human rights aspects of the Enlightenment through purges and prison camps and with a very hierarchical system. Of course the societies of Britain, USA and France were not perfect, there was privilege, but generally people living in these countries and those that they influenced after 1945 had better conditions than at any previous time in history. We are never going to have Heaven on Earth, but there are degrees of quality of life and we should be able to get better ones than worse ones.

I believe, however, that sixty-three years after Enlightenment values won in about half the world they are being snuffed out and that when I die, it will be in a World that is far less liberal, equal and certainly less rational than the one I was born into forty years ago. On what basis do I make this judgement? Let us look at the broad facts. A quarter of the World's population lives in China a country without democracy, with a very hierarachical society in which free speech and free association (key tenets of the Enlightenment) are banned. The country has never really had democracy bar a few attempts in the 1910s almost a century ago. Torture and execution are common place. Around a third of all the executions in the World each year (about 900) are carried out in China and these are the ones we know about. Censorship is extensive and sophisticated. Despite greater internet access coming to almost every small village across China blocking of particular sites is handled very successfully as journalists covering the Olympics soon found out. In additional internet providers and browser companies seem quite happy to comply with China's steps to block access. A couple of decades agon China was seen pretty much as a backwater, but its vast economic growth cannot be ignored now and companies and countries are falling over themselves to collaborate with the Chinese dictatorship because it is so profitable. I have commented on how the US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics but was happy to attend the 2008 Beijing Olympics even though China's behaviour is as bad probably worse than the USSR's was.

China has a relativist view of human rights. This argues that in certain societies 'rights' have a different meaning. In China they talk more about duty to the society as a whole. They argue that things like free expression and free association, freedom from torture, the freedom to have a fair trial, are not actually appropriate rights for their society. This is just utter rubbish. You cannot say that the people of China do not suffer pain and deprivation any differently to the people of the UK or USA. There are absolute freedoms which have been articulated by the West but in fact are about being a human and having nerve endings and a brain and having emotional connections to loved ones and wanting to be able to express ourselves. China's line, saying that somehow the Chinese are not engineered to want or have these things, is in fact an extreme form of racialism on the part of the Chinese government. Chinese people are no different to any other person on the planet in needing these things. Unfortunately rather than arguing that the UN Declaration of Human Rights has universal application to every single human, places like the USA are undermining this severely saying, that 'well, US citizens might have these rights but not people we have abducted and are currently torturing'. Rights do come with duties, but then again the US wants its troops exempt from war crimes indictments. If the most powerful democracy in the World is pandering this line, how can we not expect the world soon to be all adopting a relativist position on human rights, one that suits the powerful and not the ordinary people?

In 1986 the concept of state-backed terrorism was when US President Ronald Reagan sent aircraft to bomb targets in Libya. Similarly US President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because the country was supposedly harbouring Al-Qaeda operatives. China we know is going out of its way to support harsh regimes: Sudan where there has been attempts at genocide in Darfur, Zimbabwe - where Robert Mugabe has long ran a harsh dictatorship, Iran - a theocracy which the USA is concerned about in terms of its nuclear developments and threats to stability in the region. All of these things are ignored in the rush to capture more Chinese trade. The USA is another side to the problem. Since 1941 the USA portrayed itself as the leading defender of democracy and Enlightenment values, though this often led to it backing dictatorships particularly in Latin America, South-East Asia and the Middle East. However, it was a functioning democracy that seemed to allow opportunity for people and after the bitter battles, its apartheid-style laws were dismantled. Now internally and externally it seems to have a different position. I have noted before how President Bush has felt the ultra-wealthy to be his core constituency and John McCain who looks likely to be his successor is no different. His vice-president Sarah Palin loves shooting things and believes in creationism being taught in schools. Fundamentalism since he rose in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 has been feared, but of course it has been bubbling up in the Christian world as well as the Islamic. Since Ronald Reagan came to power you have seen the Christian fundamentalists get stronger and stronger. This leads to policies such as teaching creationism (which believes the World and its life were created in six days in 4004 BCE, so after the start of Ancient Egypt, let alone the dinosaurs) and abstinence in sex as a form of contraception in a country with record levels of teenage pregnancies. The US welfare provision that there was has been neglected and means 40 million Americans are likely to be turned away from a hospital if they turn up with an emergency case. The last couple of decades have seen the chance of advancing in US society if you come from an ordinary background decrease. The USA is no longer a land of opportunity except for the very rich.

Like China, the USA does not believe in the rehabilitative nature of imprisonment it believes in punishment. Though the US population is about a fifth of China's, a quarter of all the prisoners in the world are held in US prisons (about 1 in 100 Americans are in prison). The number of US executions has risen steadily since the 1980s. The USA quite happily uses torture now in its supposed war on terrorism, even torturing foreign citizens it has abducted. How is this any different from China? Oh, the main difference is that China tends not to abduct people and also tends to only torture its own population. So, with the two most powerful countries in the world having no interest in Enlightenment values where does that leave the rest of us? Well of course a lot of the world is under military dictatorship of one kind or another. These flicker in and out of life as in Pakistan at the moment, but even when democracy can take hold it is often far from a true democracy and still works on the basis of corruption and hierarchy power. Other strong states such as Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia seem to have no interest in liberty and a willingness to use methods in terms of politics and legal processes which are abhorrent and originate from before the Enlightenment.

What about closer to home? Well the UK always follows US examples in preference to any other. We fly people to be tortured in US camps and seem to quite like the information the torture brings. Christian fundamentalism is catching on slower in the UK, primarily because the British loathe doing anything in a group bar for very short periods such as 90 minutes for a football match. About 4% of the UK population goes to church, we would rather queue up at a DIY store. In Britain we are Consumerist Fundamentalists and feel any constraint on our consumption as an assault on our 'religion'. However, faith schools are growing in number and the teaching of creationism is on the increase. Ironically the school at the end of my road teaches creationism but then gives dinosaur figurines to the boys as end-of-term gifts! Prejudice especially aimed at Poles is on the increase. We are set to have a government which like the American ones, is based on hierarchy and privilege. It is becoming almost impossible for ordinary people to afford to go to university and so many are being barred from getting what is now seen as the minimum for entering a decent job. If there was a referendum on these things we would have the death penalty, all police armed, use of torture for court cases, castration for sex offenders and repatriation of even third-generation immigrants immediately, the BNP which now has councillors in the Midlands, wants these things. It is only the politicians in Westminster brought up in the spirit of Enlightenment who are holding back this desire to return to the barbarity of the past. What happens when they retire and MPs who have only known the bigotry and violence of the 21st century come into office?

In my view we are seeing the end of the process which started with the Age of Enlightenment and are moving into a Dark Age. As in the early medieval period in Europe, we are going to see suffering, prejudice, persecution, violence, superstition, fear being the norms of our societies. No-one will have a 'right' to anything that they lack the power to snatch. We will be pushed around by the rich and the powerful in the way medieval peasants were. Life will be capricious and we will have nothing to defend us from it. We will all be potential victims of arbitrary law and terrifying punishment. All of these things are in place in China and are growing in Russia and the USA, that covers over 1.6 billon people, more than a quarter of the world. Many of the rest are not much better off. By 2038 it is quite likely that democracy and the rights that go with it will be as rare as they were in 1938.

Why Are Countries Still Going to the Beijing Olympics?

Last month I expressed surprise that there seemed to be no efforts by countries to boycott the Olympics being held in Beijing, China, this year. This is despite China being a dictatorship, occupying Tibet and having an appalling human rights record. Since then we have seen violent repression of protests in Tibet and neighbouring provinces in China and the ongoing arrest and sentencing of human rights campaigners, Hu Jia was sentenced yesterday and Yang Chunlin a fortnight ago for apparently 'subversive' activities, in fact simply communicating human rights abuses to the Chinese people and abroad. The Chinese regime is going out of its way to back regimes which many countries have condemned for their dictatorial rule and violence towards their people, notably the governments of Sudan and Zimbabwe.

The behaviour by Chinese authorities is beginning to contaminate other countries due to the carrying of the Olympic flame through other countries. When the flame set off from Greece protests in Greece against the Chinese regime there were suppressed by assaults on protestors. So far the only reaction from the international community is that Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, has said she will not attend the opening ceremony; Nicolas Sakorzy, President of France is considering a boycott. No-one is yet barring their athletes from going as was the case with the Moscow Olympics of 1980 and certainly no-one in the UK from the government or sporting bodies seems to be expressing any disapproval of what is currently going on in China or how inappropriate it is that the Olympics with all their ideals are being held (and attended by competitors) there.

There is a clear signal that China can continue to behave how it wishes because it is so economically important to all Western countries in a way the USSR never was. It also says that sportspeople should be oblivious to the torture, wrongful imprisonment and murder of their fellow humans and just concentrate on sport which is supposed to be about peaceful competition. All governments should boycott China not only in terms of the Olympics, that should be a given, but also economically and politically, to begin to force it to live up to civilised behaviour. If that is not done, it simply reinforces the view that you are free to have a free economy and all the rewards of capitalism, but there is no obligation to behave decently to your people. China's arrogance is astounding, even Hitler toned down his repression when Germany hosted the 1936 Olympics. China knows how powerful it is, and is waving that power in our faces, showing everyone, us included, that we are powerless to oppose its barbaric behaviour. This is a crunch point in international relations for the next decades and the UK government like so many others shows no willingness to stand up for the values it says it supports. By implication, Western support for democracy and free speech is actually a lie and they are happy that such things are being opposed in China because in such a context (i.e. that one fourth of the world's population lives under such a system) it will make it easier for them to erode democracy and free speech here. This is already happening in the UK and the unwillingness to oppose even more extreme curtailment of human rights in China, shows the British government's true face and true aspirations for their rule over us.

For the sake of democracy and free speech, all must boycott the Beijing Olympics immediately.

The Olympics and Dictatorships

The modern Olympics started in 1896 and so far, since then have been held only twice in non-democratic countries:

1896- Athens
1900- Paris
1904- St. Louis
1908- London
1912- Stockholm
1920- Antwerp
1924- Paris
1928- Amsterdam
1932- Los Angeles
1936- Berlin
1948- London
1952- Helsinki
1956- Melbourne
1960- Rome
1964- Tokyo
1968- Mexico City
1972- Munich
1976- Montreal
1980- Moscow
1984- Los Angeles
1988- Seoul
1992- Barcelona
1996- Atlanta
2000- Sydney
2004- Athens
2008- Beijing
2012- London

Now you could argue about Seoul in South Korea in 1988 could count as it had only had had democratic elections restored in 1987. To some extent this shows the power of the Olympics. In 1980 the USA and some British teams boycotted the Moscow Olympics over the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan the previous year at the height of the so-called Second Cold War. The USSR at the time was clearly a one-party dictatorship, but of course the Olympics are planned well in advance as you can see from the list regarding London and back in the mid-1970s when the location had been established it had seemed that the Cold War had been thawing with detente and Ostpolitik. The other, probably more (in)famous Olympics were those held in Berlin in 1936 at the height of the Nazi regime. These had been allocated to Germany in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. Adolf Hitler attended the games but was humiliated by the success of the Black US athlete Jesse Owens who won four gold medals seemingly disproving Hitler's beliefs in the superiority of Whites. Hitler left so that he did not have to present the medals to Owens. The Olympics for both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were about showing the best of the country to the democratic media and trying to demonstrate that they were people that could be done business with despite all the human rights abuses going on behind the scenes. China is using them in the same way. Hitler released a number of political prisoners before the games, only to have them re-arrested afterwards. China, as I have noted, is busily doing the opposite, seemingly fearful that dissidents will have freer access to outside media during the Olympic period.

The reaction of democratic countries to the Olympics hosted by dictatorships has varied. In 1936 whilst there were no national boycotts of the Olympics though Barcelona hosted the so-called People’s Olympic Games (Olimpiada Popular) in July 1936, the week before the official one in Berlin, and 22 nations signed up to it. It particularly attracted competitors from workers' sports clubs which were common at the time. The Spanish Government was a centre-left Popular Front and wanted to provide an alternative to the games in Berlin which were emblazoned with Nazi insignia. Unfortunately the coup which triggered the Spanish Civil War broke out before all the competitors had arrived and these alternative games had to be abandoned.

In 1980 the USA still under Jimmy Carter boycotted the Moscow Olympics in protest at the invasion of Afghanistan. Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Norway, South Korea, West Germany and many others barred their athletes from attending. The UK, France and Greece supported the boycott but allowed their athletes to make up their own minds and most from the UK went (though notably none of the horse jumpers); four athletes from New Zealand defied their country's boycott to attend. There were the so-called Olympic Boycott Games in Philadelphia. For the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics there was rather a tit-for-tat reaction and the USSR and 14 Communist states bar Romania which was pursuing an independent line, did not attend. The Soviets blamed anti-Soviet propaganda in the USA, which had actually been very prevalent in the previous three years since Ronald Reagan had come to power in 1981 and started talking about the 'evil empire'. The Soviets put on the so-called Friendship Games in Moscow. Since these tense days of the late Cold War things have settled down.

Political issues have not been confined to tension between states. The one incident that the media is currently pointing to is the Black Power salute given by US sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. They wore black gloves and black socks rather than shoes to reference Black poverty in the USA. This was at a time of sharp battles in US society over civil rights for Blacks. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, the Palestinian terrorist organisation, Black September shot dead eleven members of the Israeli team and one West German police officer. There intention had been to draw the world's attention to the Palestinian situation in Israel and surrounding countries.

Boycotting of sports activities in apartheid South Africa began in 1956 and stepped up from 1963 onwards as more sports bodies came on board. South Africa was barred from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and thrown out of the IOC the Olympic organising body in 1970. Some bodies took more persuading, but there was an increase in the face of public protests through the 1970s, of those sports cutting ties to South Africa. These boycotts were not lifted until the disassembling of the apartheid system in 1991. Thus, despite people constantly saying that sport and politics should be separate in fact they often inter-mingle.

So, what is the response to China. It has not actually invaded anywhere since 1979 invasion of Vietnam. The Chinese have, however, occupied Tibet since 1951 and surely this is as worthy of protest as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a country they left in 1989 whereas China remains in Tibet. The number of Chinese political prisoners is uncertain but over 800,000 people were arrested in 2004 alone for crimes that threatened the state. It is likely that millions of people in the country are held for what are called 'crimes of conscience', some on religious grounds, others for political reasons including pro-democracy and pro-human rights protests. China has over 700 prisons and other prisoners are detained, as they used to be in the USSR in psychiatric institutions. Torture and the death penalty are commonly used in China. As we know from Tianamen Square in 1989, the Chinese government will suppress pro-democracy movements brutally. We only hear about a fraction of protests in China and it is estimated there were over 10,000 local protests in China last year, not all aimed at political change, but at altering economic and environmental aspects too. So why is not the USA boycotting the 2008 Olympics? Why have British athletes had to sign a document saying they will make no comments on China's human rights record? South Africa in the 1970s and the USSR in the 1980s were weak economically whereas China is rapidly becoming the dominant economy in the world. Germany in 1936 was seen as strong and a bastion against the threat of Communism, so like China today, it was fine to go there. Attending the Olympics in China gives credibility to the dictatorship which persecutes millions of its people. Ordinary people will think, 'well if all those athletes are going it must be an alright country'. This is what China wants.

So, you can conclude, yes the Olympics and politics have nothing to do with each other, what it is about is the Olympics and money, as money and trade deals suppress any qualms about the kind of society that generates them. Come on athletes, recognise that China's policies are an anathema to the Olympic spirit: there is no equality for ethnic groups there and there is no opprtunity for any athlete to succeed who does not bow down before the will of the Chinese Communist Party. Boycott Beijing 2008.