Not that it will matter much in the great scheme of things, but I’m boycotting the Beijing Olympics. I’ve had a bellyful of despots and tyrants this year. From the Chinese themselves and their initial reluctance to let foreigners in to assist with their earthquake disaster, regarding outside aid as an admission of communist failure.

To the vile Burmese regime, propped up by the Chinese, consigning thousands of their own to death by persisting in isolationism. To the genocidal atrocities of Darfur at the hands of a lunatic in charge of Sudan — one again propped up by China. To the monster of Harare who has defied international opinion and continues to run Zimbabwe with the support of fellow African ‘leaders’. I’ve had enough.

We’re living in the Age of Hypocrisy and we should take a good look around, because it’s not often there are so many clear examples of how our Western rhetoric diverges from our Western politics. The decision to award this year’s Olympics to Beijing was unbelievable to begin with. That nation has easily the worst human rights record on the planet. The vicious repression and colonisation of Tibet is just the most visible of its crimes. That and its 60-year bullying of Taiwan, a nation to which China and the rest of the world have conspired to deny official status.

But China’s repression of its own people is the crime least noticed — so much so it’s not even referred to any more. We take that kind of brutality for granted. Hey, it is China, after all.

The spectacle of tens of thousands of handpicked Chinese ‘fans’ packing the auditorium in the kind of spontaneous show of enthusiastic acclaim totalitarian regimes specialise in was asking too much of my fragile constitution. And the spectacle of BBC reporters ‘interviewing’ these lackeys billing and cooing over the wonderful achievement of China in wasting billions on its Nuremburg fantasies really isn’t my cup of tea.

What we have here is called ‘appeasement’. These games are the exact equivalent of the 1936 Games in Hitler’s Berlin. They were awarded for the same reason. There was profit to be made from Hitler, just as there’s profit to be made from China.

Yes, Bush and Sarkozy don’t particularly ‘like’ the Chinese regime. But that won’t stop them climbing over the corpses to get their national hands on whatever industrial contracts the tiny Party cadre has to dispense.

What we’ll get for weeks is the grovelling of those western media granted press passes. They’ll manage to wallow in the wealth and gore of the meaningless Olympics while pretending they are somehow helping to ‘open up China ’.

In fact, the vast majority of Chinese will continue to be completely illiterate, in a poverty which belongs to the Stone Age. China may go from Jurassic Park to Blade Runner, but most of it is Jurassic Park. The earthquake exposed the truth about this fraudulent ‘modern’ economy.

Most of it — all the important bits, like the schools and the hospitals and the houses — are actually all made out of cardboard. It’s the pastry — all those new pointless stadia — that’s well built and an engineering triumph.

It’s the big benefit of a huge and completely powerless population — one needn’t be as careful of one’s citizens. Execute, drown, kill them through poor construction and disease ? who cares? There’ll be another along in a minute.

So, I won’t be watching this Chinese Circus. In a fortnight, the lights go off again on that sprawling bog of misery which covers so much of the earth’s surface.

The Olympic legacy will be an orgy of propaganda mounted in the kind of frenzy we would switch off if it were in Zimbabwe or in support of goons like Kim Jong-II in North Korea. I’m going to save time and do it now.