China’s Triumph of the Will
China's rulers may have been politically tone-deaf in choosing Albert Speer Jr., the son of Hitler’s favorite architect and the designer of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, as the overall designer of the Beijing Games. But they wanted, above all, an Olympics that reflected their image of themselves in a bombastic architecture of power, and Speer Jr. delivered the goods.
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MOSCOW – When the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games begins in a few days, viewers will be presented with a minutely choreographed spectacle swathed in nationalist kitsch. Of course, images that recall Hitler’s goose-stepping storm troopers are the last thing that China’s leaders have in mind for their Olympics; after all, official Chinese nationalism proclaims the country’s “peaceful rise” within an idyll of “harmonious development.” But, both aesthetically and politically, the parallel is hardly far-fetched.