SKorea: Pundit Likens Beijing Olympics to Nazi-Era Games

The Chinese students mobilized by the embassy to "protect the olympic torch" have gone wild since the leg in Australia. In South Korea, it got extremely nasty, as protesters were
literally lynched by angry mobs, as this video shows--watch it here. One guy being attacked by plenty of red flag holders.

Chosun Ilbo Korean: Pundit Likens Beijing Olympics to Nazi-Era Games
Jin Jung-kwon

A political commentator renowned for his sharp tongue has likened the Beijing Olympics to the 1936 Berlin Olympics under Nazi rule after Chinese mobs ran rampant here during the Seoul leg of the Olympic torch relay on Sunday. “China seems to have no intention of making the Olympics a festival that people around the world can enjoy together,” Jin Jung-kwon, a lecturer in German language and literature at Chung-Ang University, said in a radio program on Monday. “Instead, it seems it’s trying to use it as an opportunity to display its power and bring the whole world under its red flag.” Jin said it was “in keeping for people with such thinking to cause open violence in the streets.”

“The Berlin Olympics did not aim to promote world peace but to propagandize the Nazis’ imperialism,” he said, and it was significantly also a period when street violence against minorities was rampant. He added the violence in Seoul caused him to realize how “terrible” the climate in China itself must be, considering that the violent protesters here had already been exposed to a freer society. “It makes me shudder to imagine what is happening in Tibet,” he said. The Chinese mobs on Sunday surrounded and beat up Koreans protesting China’s violent crackdown on independence protests in Tibet.

Asked whether some critics were muddying waters by linking the Tibet issue and the Olympics, Jin answered the matter should be judged based on universal human values. “The global modern mindset requires breaking away from a totalitarian way of thinking,” he said. “China should be able to take an objective look at itself if it wants to be respected in the world.”
(englishnews@chosun.com )