Roger Kimball comments, with his usual astringent vigor, on the flap about Britain’s Olympic Committee trying to get athletes to guarantee they won’t offend the ChiComs at the Games this summer.

This is not an easy issue. China’s present government is a disgrace to an ancient and refined civilization. They, and the Chinese people, need to keep hearing that. They especially need to hear it this year, when the commies are using the Olympics as an international seal of approval on their horrible regime. The more voices that can be heard saying “NO WE DON’T APPROVE!” the better.

On the other hand, the British Olympic Committee, having done the administratve drudge work on the athletes’ behalf – including the selection of those athletes – is entitled to demand that, if an athlete is willing to go to China in search of glory on the Committee’s ticket, he not behave in a disruptive way while he’s there. There’s something of having your cake and eating it about an athlete who is willing to go to Peking to get a medal, but wants to sound off about his hosts’ misdemeanors while he’s there. And surely the right of a nation, even a misruled nation, politely to expel people it finds obnoxious ought to be inviolable, oughtn’t it? It’s a pity we don’t do it more often.

I’m sorry, but I think the B.O.C. was within its rights. It’s not a matter of free speech, though Roger is quite right that freedom of speech is in an endangered condition over in UKania. If you invite me to your house, I am free to criticize your choice of drapes, or wife; but if I do, I shouldn’t be surprised to be shown the door. And if the local drug baron invites me to his house and I agree to go, in hope of some benefit for myself, the same applies. And if a middleman arranges the visit on my behalf, and asks me to promise not to mention the source of my host’s wealth while I’m on his property, I think I should either assent, or call off the trip.

A counter-argument there would be that the Olympics is not a Chinese event, but an international event that merely happens to be hosted on Chinese soil; so that participants ought to be able to express the rights they have in international law, regardless of what the Chinese think. I would reply that this is a pretty fiction, but a fiction none the less. If an Olympic athlete should decide to knock over a gas station while in Peking, it will be the Chinese police who arrest him, and the Chinese authorities who decide the disposal of his case, not the International Police Authority (there isn’t one). International law is a convenience for merchants, very little more. Whatever the Wall Street Journal says, the nation-state isn’t finished yet. Thank goodness.