They May Be Games, but Where’s the Fun?

I guess it would be easy for us Americans to take the high moral ground, such as Lisalee Anne Wells did in Saturday’s [July 14] Viewpoint Letters, concerning Beijing being named host city for the 2008 Olympics.

I wonder just how high that ground is, in reality. It doesn’t take any more than a cursory look at American history, politics and international conduct to find that we, as a nation and a government, have turned our heads when it came to civil and human rights on too many occasions to count.

Oh, I guess we moral Americans should make sure China is punished for lost lives executed, but who, internationally has punished us for Native American genocide, slavery, police brutality, the hiding of the homeless and the institutionalized starvation of our own citizens? For FBI tactics in Texas and Idaho?

Overly dramatic, you say? I haven’t even touched the surface of what our covert operations have done domestically and internationally. Yet, we can host Olympics in some fashion nearly every decade.

Remember, this is just the Olympics. And, remember what our high moral ground accomplished in Moscow in 1980? We punished ourselves.

As it was once said: Do not concern yourself with the speck in your brother’s eye, remove the plank from your own first.

Dennis Schroeder

Lake Forest

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Beijing already has the 2008 Summer Olympics locked up. But if the Russians keep up their human-rights violations in Chechnya, they could well be on their way to being awarded the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

Robert H. Williams

Monterey Park

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While I agree with Randy Harvey’s outrage over the selection of China as the host for the 2008 Olympic Games, his analogy that the International Olympic Committee supported the Nazi Olympics in 1936 is inaccurate.

Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, two years after the Games had been awarded to Germany. The IOC had no choice but to support those Games, even though the signs were already ominous.

Dick Bank

Los Angeles

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Seven years from now, the Olympics will be held at Beijing. That’s how it will be. It’s only a game. Let the Games begin.

Joyce and Dwight Cates

Ventura