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Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister of Poland has decided to boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games in an act of protest against Chinese actions in Tibet. This is a fact that few people through out the world are aware of and perhaps even fewer actually care about for at the end of the day neither us nor Tusk should delude ourselves in to believing that Tusk's absence from the opening ceremony of the Olympic games is going to make any difference what so ever to anybody. Let alone to the people of Tibet in whose name Donald Tusk is supposedly doing it for. If we may be realistic the Chinese government which granted has an appalling human rights record not only with regards to Tibetans but all its citizens will not change anything simply because one person fails to turn up at a ceremony even a big one.

If we go back to the year of 1980 when the Olympic Games were due to take place in Moscow, it was Jimmy Carter; then president of United States who took the monumental choice of not sending our American Olympic team to compete in the Moscow games in protest of Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Carter's actions naturally achieved the goal of
hurting those American athletes who had trained so hard for that moment of glory in their lives but apart from this what else did his efforts amount to? Well let us think for a minute. The Olympic Games were not shown on American television not that I myself missed them given that I spent this summer in Madrid where I witnessed how not even the UK; our closest ally in any war did not follow in our footsteps of boycotting the Moscow games in the nave hope that it would make the Soviets withdraw their troops from Afghanistan. Naturally if even the UK would not go along with us on this one, it is needless to say that neither would some of our less American influenced allies such as France, Spain, or Italy who like the UK did not fail to make their presence felt at the Moscow games.

Carter's drive to get the nations of the world to join us in our boycott obviously failed miserably as did his bid to be reelected President when in November of the same year he would go on to suffer a landslide defeat at the hands of ex-actor, Ronald Wilson Reagan. Carter however had other "brilliant ideas" on how to assist the people of Afghanistan and one of them being a grain embargo of the Soviet Union. This tactic contrary to the first one had stronger effects. One of them being hurting our farmers while not helping the

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