Thursday, September 30, 2010

Where Have We Heard This Before?

People treated as garbage to be swept up and gotten rid of as their government puts on a lavish display of games for elite amusement and profit.



flashback - Olympic construction in Beijing leaves thousands homeless

"Governments and human rights organisations across the world are hoping that the Olympic Games will open up China and further the progress of individual freedom, but behind this facade lurks a sinister element to the Olympic hysteria that is getting little attention.

The demolition and relocation of homes to make way for the city's Olympic village has been occurring at a staggering rate, leaving hundreds of thousands of Chinese people homeless and frequently without sufficient compensation."

flashback Mexico City 1968 - "In October 1967, in the lead-up to the 1968 Summer Games, thousands of Mexican students mounted a mass protest against the government’s lavish Olympic spending, with millions of dollars moved from the social services budget to urban and national “re-imaging” projects. The student protest was violently suppressed by Mexican army and paramilitary, with hundreds of students massacred and thousands more arrested and beaten."

flashback Seoul 1988 - "For purposes of Olympic “beautification”, huge numbers of the city’s poorest residents had their homes destroyed. Traditional working-class communities were demolished to make way for middle-class high-rise residential buildings. The Asian Coalition for Housing Rights documented millions of forced evictions – the most extensive any city had experienced in the 1970s and 1980s. Displaced people, as “urban squatters” in central Seoul, had their shelters torn down because they were near the Olympic torch route and therefore visible to the international media. Using the same rationale, the government demolished “slum” housing that was in sight of main roads, Olympic facilities and hotels."

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