Iain Macwhirter on the Olympics

Steven Spielberg, withdrew his "artistic services" from the Chinese last week because he didn't want to become the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Olympics. Riefenstahl, director of Triumph of the Will, glamorised the Nazis' 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Times change and today's Games are no longer about master races but pharmaceutical ingenuity. Triumph Of The Pill, you might call it, since as we all know it's drugs wot win the medals.

Communist regimes have always excelled in chemical-assisted sporting prowess, and the Chinese athletes will no doubt be up to their eyeballs in the best steroids money can buy.

But if I were the Olympic authorities, I'd also check Chinese athletes for operation scars in case they're surgically assisted, too. All those organs the Chinese military have been harvesting from thousands of executed prisoners have to go somewhere.

Mind you, we're all implicatedin that trade. The Guardian recently reported that skin from executed Chinese prisoners is being used to develop beauty products sold to the West. So some of us might have Chinese dissidents on more than just our conscience.

But, the Chinese know our concern for human rights is only skin deep and that, in the interest of business, we'll avert our TV cameras from the jails filled with dissidents, the torture of prisoners, the suppression free speech, the censorship of the internet, the oppression of Buddhist Tibet After all, what's a few disagreements between friendly nations? At the Olympics, we come together to celebrate sporting achievement, not politics. My money's on the Janjaweed team in the track and field, where they'll literally murder the opposition. Tibetans will be for the high jump, and British athletes will be competing blindfold because, as Tessa Jowell said, "it doesn't serve any purpose" "there's simply no point" to make an issue of human rights.

Our own Great Helmsman, Chairman Gordon, has issued a decree on the matter. Anyway, the Chinese could decide to boycott the London Olympics in 2012.

Well bring it on, say I. Put an end to this tasteless, overblown exercise in international self-promotion. Why not spend the £15 billion on something worthwhile - peace-keeping in Darfur, or saving the planet?

The Chinese are opening a new coal-fired power station every week. The air is so bad in Beijing that American athletes are being advised not to arrive until the very last moment, so they don't inhale too much of the toxic soup they call air.

Well, how did you think they made all those cheap toys and laptops we buy in the West? In the hypocrisy Olympics we're all going for gold.

After all, America has killed more civilians in Iraq than the Sudanese have killed in Darfur. Perhaps Spielberg should be boycotting himself.