Those who know me are aware that my views are hardly those of a right-on, Guardian-reading liberal.
However, to turn on the television today and see Gordon Brown whoring out the city of London to the single most murderous regime in the world today - China - in order to run propaganda for their brutal state and its oppression of Tibet live on rolling BBC news was sickening.
I knew Dr Brown, the father of our current Prime Minister. He was a quiet, caring and principled minister in the Church of Scotland. And while I am sure that he would be tremendously proud of his son's achievements, I wonder just what he would have thought of Brown's decision to give his stamp of approval, grinning on the steps of Downing Street, to an oppressive state run by geriatric killers and corrupt military-industrial concerns. A decision informed not by principle but by import-export agreements, political prestige and by mutual back-scratching over London's 2012 chance to feed at the same trough.
And useful idiot after useful idiot is wheeled out to stand against a background of dancing morons in fancy dress to proclaim that "politics shouldn't interfere with the Olympics." No politics, please... while Prime Ministers and ambassadors for murderers bare their teeth in ugly smiles for the cameras. And a team of tracksuited Chinese Ministry for State Security thugs are allowed to parade throught the heart of our capital, while their colleagues round up monks and peasants in a small, faraway country of which, it seems, Brown knows little. And cares less. While the BBC - the
BBC - tightens the focus of its cameras each time crowds of protestors would otherwise be in shot on this jolly tour of old London town.
Never forget that the Chinese communist party has killed tens of millions of its own citizens since taking power. Hitler was a lightweight pretender next to the Communist Party of China. Even the Holocaust pales compared to what Mao and his successors have done. Does that seem like hyperbole to you? Then your historical knowledge is lacking. Does it seem tangential? Then you must love sports a very great deal to wish to banish all thought of how they are being used.
And how fitting, therefore, that the "eternal Olympic flame", like the tradition of the relay of the Olympic torch, was invented not by Greeks but
by Hitler's National Socialists.
I'm a Scot, and one of my countrymen once spoke about far away trouble, using China as an example. Read what economist Adam Smith said, and each time he speaks about an earthquake in China, think instead of state-run murder in Tibet. And each time he talks of losing a finger, think of Brown worrying about his precious 2012 Olympics:
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.