A fascist regime plans to host the Olympic Games. Critics call for a boycott, but the Games come off as planned. And on the field of world opinion, the host scores an enormous victory.

In 1936, serious movements urging an outright boycott of the Berlin Games were mounted in the United States, Britain, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands. Adolf Hitler had come to power two years after the International Olympic Committee had awarded Berlin the Games as a symbol of Germany's emergence from its post-World War I isolation.

Now that the Winter Olympics are over, all eyes will soon turn to the Summer Olympics. And that's just what the Chinese want. Like the Germans of the '30s, they will use the Olympics to showcase their economy -- and hide their repressive behavior.

But the rest of us don't have to help. Lest we repeat the errors of 1936, the United States should lead a boycott of the 2008 Olympics. Anything less will give the Chinese the same kind of propaganda boost that the Nazis enjoyed. picked by buddha 5 months ago