And the Chinese government, rattled by the possibility of public criticism from Olympians, has been applying crude pressure to the international community to keep quiet. "If at each Olympics people stood up and used politics to attack the host nation, where does that leave the Olympic spirit?" argued the official newspaper, The People's Daily, last month. This idea that to criticise totalitarianism is a breach of the Olympic spirit is as wretched a perversion of logic as even the Nazis ever attempted.