The United States should boycott the Beijing Olympics.

A robust intellectual frame of resistance to mass slaughter is the only chance for averting a host of scenarios for collective extinction Ketels, Associate Professor of English at Temple University, 1996 [Violet B., The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science, November, p. l/n] Even though, as Americans, we have not experienced "by fire, hunger and the sword", the terrible disasters in war overtaking other human beings on their home ground, we know the consequences of human hospitality to evil. We know about human perfidy: the chasm that separates proclaiming virtue from acting decently. Even those of us trained to linguistic skepticism and the relativity of moral judgment can grasp the verity in the stark warning, "If something exists in one place, it will exist everywhere." That the dreadful something warned against continues to exist anywhere should fill us with an inextinguishable yearning to do something. Our impotence to action against the brutality of mass slaughter shames us. We have the historical record to ransack for precedent and corollaries—letters, documents, testaments, books—written words that would even "preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death." N21 The truths gleanable from the record of totalitarian barbarism cited in them may be common knowledge; they are by no means commonly acknowledged. N22 They appear in print upon many a page; they have not yet—still not yet—sufficiently penetrated human consciousness. Herein lies the supreme lesson for intellectuals, those who have the projective power to grasp what is not yet evident to the general human consciousness: it is possible to bring down totalitarian regimes either by violence or by a gradual transformation of human consciousness; it is not possible to bring them down "if we ignore them, make excuses for them, yield to them or accept their way of playing the game" in order to avoid violence. The history of the gentle revolutions of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia suggests that those revolutions would not have happened at all, and certainly not bloodlessly, without the moral engagement and political activism of intellectuals in those besieged cultures. Hundreds of thousands of students, workers, and peasants joined in the final efforts to defeat the totalitarian regimes that collapsed in 1989. Still, it was the intellectuals, during decades when they repeatedly risked careers, freedom, and their very lives, often in dangerous solitary challenges to power, who formed the unifying consensus, developed the liberating philosophy, wrote the rallying cries, framed the politics, mobilized the will and energies of disparate groups, and literally took to the streets to lead nonviolent protests that became revolutions. The most profound insights into this process that gradually penetrated social consciousness sufficiently to make revolution possible can be read in the role Vaclav Havel played before and during Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution. As George Steiner reflects, while "the mystery of creative and analytic genius . . . is given to the very few," others can be "woken to its presence and exposed to its demands." Havel possesses that rare creative and analytic genius. We see it in the spaciousness of his moral vision for the future, distilled from the crucible of personal suffering and observation; in his poet's ability to translate both experience and vision into language that comes as close as possible to truth and survives translation across cultures; in the compelling force of his personal heroism. Characteristically, Havel raises local experience to universal relevance. "If today's planetary civilization has any hope of survival," he begins, "that hope lies chiefly in what we understand as the human spirit." He continues: If we don't wish to destroy ourselves in national, religious or political discord; if we don't wish to find our world with twice its current population, half of it dying of hunger; if we don't wish to kill ourselves with ballistic missiles armed with atomic warheads or eliminate ourselves with bacteria specially cultivated for the purpose; if we don't wish to see some people go desperately hungry while others throw tons of wheat into the ocean; if we don't wish to suffocate in the global greenhouse we are heating up for ourselves or to be burned by radiation leaking through holes we have made in the ozone; if we don't wish to exhaust the nonrenewable, mineral resources of this planet, without which we cannot survive; if, in short, we don't wish any of this to happen, then we must—as humanity, as people, as conscious beings with spirit, mind and a sense of responsibility—somehow come to our senses. N25 Somehow we must come together in "a kind of general mobilization of human consciousness, of the human mind and spirit, human responsibility, human reason." Vote Con to oppose genocide and any kind of direct or indirect support of systematic racial destruction. Extend previos arguments. - UUAA