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The invasion of the robotic thugs
Spiked
April 9, 2008
On Sunday, as the Olympic flame made its 31-mile journey from Wembley Stadium in north-west London to Greenwich in the east, more than 2,000 Metropolitan Police officers were on duty.
The London authorities spent a whopping £1million on security. An estimated 13 miles of metal barricades were erected in order to pen in the public. Officers used Britain’s stringent new anti-terror laws – which effectively bring an end to the right to protest and severely restrict freedom of speech and association – to arrest protesters, force people to remove ‘offensive’ T-shirts (what, in that snowy weather?), and confiscate ‘problematic’ placards, pamphlets and books. In some parts of London, mini-states of emergency were imposed for the day: long rows of cops blocked access to entire streets and rifled through the bags of anyone who wanted to pass.
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Inside Downing Street, policemen wielded assault rifles; outside Downing Street, there were, in the words of one newspaper, ‘helicopter police, mounted police, motorcycle police, bicycling police, Ford Transit van police, standing police, wrestle-you-to-the-ground police in black Andy Pandy suits, and even jogging police’ (1). London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s office once infamously referred to New Year celebrations in London as a ‘public order problem’ – it seems someone in London decided the Olympic torch relay was akin to a public act of terrorism, and sent a standing army of newly-empowered super-cops to extinguish any signs of fun or enthusiasm.
And yet, what have British commentators and radical activists obsessively bleated about since the relay took place? The presence of 15 Chinese minders around the Olympic flame. These Chinese have been described as ‘vile’, ‘horrible’, ‘robotic’, ‘mysterious’, ‘retarded’ goons who tried to import their nation’s alien and tyrannical ways into England’s green and pleasant lands. Indeed, as the torch has moved from London to Paris to San Francisco, the age-old historical prejudice about a ‘Chinese invasion’ of the civilised West, bringing with it strange cultural habits and ‘sensual brutishness’, has been replayed as farce in the hysterical debate about the Chinese torch attendants (2).
The Chinese ‘flame protectors’ are security-service employees of the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee; they were reportedly handpicked to guard the torch because of their fitness and strength. They wore matching blue-and-white shellsuits, with the Beijing 2008 logo imprinted on them, baseball caps and black bumbags, which contained nothing more ominous than Zippo lighters so that the minders could re-ignite the torch if anyone managed to put it out (as protesters did, four times, in Paris).
Yet reading the press coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that these Chinese boys-in-blue were not only accompanying the torch through the West but wickedly spreading Chinese values, too. They have been described as a ‘mysterious’ presence on Western shores. ‘Questions raised over mysterious men in blue’, said the UK Independent. ‘Who let in the Chinese?’, demanded The Times of London, perhaps to the tune of ‘Who let the dogs out?’, pointing out that these ‘mysterious men-in-blue… have provoked international outcry’. One columnist said the ‘most shocking aspect of the farcical progress of the Olympic torch through London and Paris was the presence and behaviour of the squad of Chinese goons’, these ‘mysterious’ tracksuited men (3). Did I mention that commentators considered the Chinese minders to be ‘mysterious’?
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