In the wake of China’s crackdown on civilians and Buddhist monks and priests in Tibet, its links to Myanmar’s military rulers and genocidal juntas in Sudan’s Darfur region, this year’s Olympic Torch Run is meeting with anti-PRC protests along its route. Protests last week in London and Paris turned violent and were met with crackdowns of their own. The flame arrived in San Francisco Wednesday morning, a city with the largest number of Chinese residents in the US, and it was met with protesters.

The Dalai Lama told reporters outside Tokyo on Wednesday that he supports China’s hosting of the Summer Olympic Games, but insisted no one has a right to tell protesters “to shut up.”

The torch run seems a particularly good target for protest of China’s dismal record on human rights. The run was invented for the 1936 games in Berlin by Carl Diem, leader of the German Olympic Committee as a favorable propaganda vehicle for Hitler’s Third Reich.

So don’t be fooled by right-wing denunciations of the ongoing protests as the torch makes its way across the globe. It is a spectacle that never occurred in ancient Greece, but was invented to serve Adolph Hitler and announce him to the world he was about to throw into massive, murderous turmoil with his dreams of conquest and hatred of ethnic minorities and Jews. Linking the torch run to its notorious beginnings is apropos as a vehicle of protest against China’s brutal policies and involvement in ethnic and religious violence across the globe.

REMINDER: Don’t forget, kiddies – This is Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, brought to you again this year by the David Horowitz Freedom Center!

So it was with interest that I read a report from the Denver Research Group dated 9-15. In which they report things that should definitely be of concern to Americans. The gutting of both intelligence capabilities and diplomatic standing during the Bush-II presidency have been significant, and may prove difficult to rectify when they’re gone (scheduled for January 20, 2009).

The Denver Group’s report lists eight factors that have contributed to the crisis. I’ll repeat those because they make it easy to see how bad the situation has become…

• The loss of US influence as a result of the Iraq war.
• A view across the globe resulting from Abu Ghraib and range of missteps that the US has lost the moral high ground it had enjoyed for decades.
• A feeling among global leaders that the US is without a coherent foreign policy strategy… a belief that has started feeding on itself and has emboldened US adversaries.
• China’s rise, its smooth diplomatic technique, its re-alignment with Russia and its aggressive, clever drive to form new alliances with nations extending from Asia and Africa to South America.
• Russia’s recent rise combined with Russian President Putin’s domestic popularity and his reputation for effectively standing up to the West.
• The rise of non-aligned nations emboldened by the inability of the US to effectively use the extraordinary power it possesses.
• A view among key global leaders that the US will be bogged down in Iraq for many years (a view heightened significantly by President Bush’s September 13 Iraq speech), thus distracted and unable to respond effectively to key political moves by the range of international players.
• A recognition by the international community that the Bush Administration not only hasn’t been able to deal effectively with non-state actors (e.g. terror groups like al Quaeda) but they are holding their own or starting to win.

Scary.

Links:

PostGlobal: Global Power Barometer

WaPo Confirms: Bush Losing the Soft-Power War Badly