No, there are no openly displayed swastikas on Everest. The symbol in
question is the Olympic Torch. One copy of it reached the peak of Mount
Everest today:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7389102.stm
During the Ancient Olympics, a flame was kept burning throughout the
games. This tradition was revived with the 1928 Summer Games in
Amsterdam. But the Olympic Torch and its relay across the globe from
Greece to the current host site was the invention of Carl Diem and Joseph
Goebbels for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. The whole affair was
designed to display Nazi Germany's technological superiority, while
linking the Third Reich to the Ancient Greeks. The materials the torch
was made of, and lit with, were all German made and intended to show of
German superiority. The procession showed off German athletes, and the
route from Greece to Berlin was one long Nazi pep-rally on a path eerily
foreshadowing the coming Nazi expansion.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7330949.stm
Given China's activities in Tibet and Sudan, its rising world power
(Germany was a rising power in 1936), the similarities are striking. And
once again, the Torch's route from Greece to the site of the Games is
being used as a publicity and propaganda tour-de-force. The symbolism of
taking the torch to the highest point on Earth should not be over looked.
On orders from China, Everest was cleared for the occasion. Guards in
Nepal are authorized to shoot anyone trying to sneak past. On climber was
expelled from the country after a search of His bags found a Free Tibet
flag.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90259941
What are the Olympics supposed to mean? What are they supposed to be? If
they are supposed to have anything to do with peace and international
fraternity, is not allowing them to be used as a propaganda piece for a
brutally oppressive regime counter to those aims? If they are really
about nothing more than s****t, why to do they get so much more attention
than any other set of games? (the Pan American Games for example.) Which
in turns allows them be used as a propaganda piece to make others turn a
blind eye to the host's nations behavior and tacitly accept that behavior
despite rhetoric about it being 'unacceptable'?
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