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The opening ceremony of the Olympics is not short on inspiring imagery for the many millions who tune in around the globe. As the host country provides the spectacle and entertainment, athletes representing their respective countries march one after the other to cheers of the crowd. With such cooperation in the name of athletic competition, the Olympics can’t help but be a large step towards worldwide transparency, peace and equality. Right?

In a recent New York Times editorial, David Clay Large, a professor of history at Montana State University, suggests otherwise. Drawing on analysis of the 1936 Berlin Games, Large explains that there is little evidence that the Olympics works to open up repressive regimes. In fact, the inspiring tales of the Olympics taming Hitler’s Nazi regime are mostly myth.

The Olympics gave the Nazis a lesson in how to hide their vicious racism and anti-Semitism, and should offer today’s International Olympic Committee a cautionary tale when considering the location of future events.

While few would argue that the Berlin Olympics transformed Nazi Germany into the ideal international partner, it is commonly said that Hitler did reduce persecution of Jewish people during that time.

But the truth is more nuanced. Although the regime did discourage open anti-Semitism, this directive pertained only to Berlin. Outside the capital, the Nuremberg Laws remained in full effect.

Large explains that through employing deceitful tactics throughout the Olympics the Nazis learned how was easy it was to mislead the global public through superficial changes.

The article continues with Large deconstructing other pervasive myths about the value of the Berlin Games, including the well-told stories about the impact of Jesse Owens’ dominance. According to Large, the black American track-and-field athlete, did not simply force the Germans and people everywhere to rethink negative views towards black people; rather, the victory simply led to the group in power using the success to enforce negative views.

[T]he publicity surrounding black athletes’ success simply taught the Nazis how to refine existing stereotypes. Instead of arguing that those athletes were physically inferior, they disparaged them as freaks who, because of their “jungle inheritance,” were able to jump high and run fast.

Large’s presentation of “the truth behind the 1936 Games” effectively calls into question many of the underlying assumptions about the positive impacts of holding the Olympics and other large international sporting events in countries with questionable governance and a history of mistreating citizens. And, as Large points out,

there is little evidence so far that the 2008 Beijing Olympics did anything but show the Chinese government how to maintain its clamp on freedom while supposedly opening its doors to the world.

Large concludes with a critical but potentially positive suggestion:

This is not to say that the Games should be held only in politically “clean” countries. But instead of blindly celebrating the alleged openness of repressive regimes that host the event, the international community should use it as an opportunity to hold them to the values that the Olympics claim to represent.

NPR explores why the familiar “Made in China” print may be less common in the future:

Factory workers demanding better wages and working conditions are hastening the eventual end of an era of cheap costs that helped make southern coastal China the world’s factory floor.

A series of strikes over the past two months have been a rude wakeup call for the many foreign companies that depend on China’s low costs to compete overseas, from makers of Christmas trees to manufacturers of gadgets like the iPad.

Where once low-tech factories and scant wages were welcomed in a China eager to escape isolation and poverty, workers are now demanding a bigger share of the profits. The government, meanwhile, is pushing foreign companies to make investments in areas it believes will create greater wealth for China, like high technology.

Or, perhaps, manufacturers will shift their operations to other areas of the country:

Given the intricate supply chains and logistics systems that have helped make southern China an export manufacturing powerhouse, such changes won’t be easy.

But for manufacturers looking to boost sales inside fast-growing China, shifting production to the inland areas where many migrant workers come from, and costs are lower, offers the most realistic alternative…

Massive investments in roads, railways and other infrastructure are reducing the isolation of the inland cities, part of a decade-old “Develop the West” strategy aimed at shrinking the huge, politically volatile gap in wealth between city dwellers and the country’s 600 million farmers.

Gambling that the unrest will not spill over from foreign-owned factories, China’s leaders are using the chance to push investment in regions that have lagged the country’s industrial boom.

One sociologist sees this as potentially a large-scale shift:

Many of today’s factory workers have higher ambitions than their parents, who generally saved their earnings from assembling toys and television sets for retirement in their rural hometowns. They are also choosier about wages and working conditions. “The conflicts are challenging the current set-up of low-wage, low-tech manufacturing, and may catalyze the transformation of China’s industrial sector,” said Yu Hai, a sociology professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University.

The Sydney Morning Herald discusses the Copenhagen climate talks:

Polls have suggested that more than 80 per cent of Australians accept the fact of man-made climate change, and more than 70 per cent of people around the world want governments to give it greater priority.

With such a consensus, you would think we would all be on red alert, citizens and elected officials mobilised to do whatever necessary.

Yet global support for action has been described as “a mile wide but an inch deep” (a phrase first used to describe support for foreign development assistance). The majority may be concerned, but that’s where it stops.

Here comes the sociology:

Sociologists wouldn’t be surprised about what, in many ways, is classic “tragedy of the commons” inaction. The late American sociologist, Garrett Hardin, described the ecological damage done when herdsmen sharing pasture act in their own self-interest by putting too many cattle on the land, thereby destroying it for everyone, including themselves. In the case of climate change, shared ownership of the planet has to metamorphose into a sense of shared responsibility or we all stand to lose.

In Hardin’s pasture, it would be understandable if more were expected from the herdsman with the greatest number of cattle — in our case, the countries responsible for most emissions.

But there are sociological factors working against a sharing of responsibility. Countries fear they may end up taking too many risks; that the cost to them may be disproportionate; that “free-riders” will avoid doing anything. Such fears have dampened the political will to act on a threat viewed as global rather than national.

Moving ahead…

Hardin’s solution to the commons problem was ‘mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected”. But macro-level measures such as emissions targets, carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes may ultimately depend on changing personal attitudes and behaviour.

It’s all about hearts and minds. Leaders with foresight can legislate, but the biggest change will come if they can bring the people along with them; a shift in the public mindset inevitably reinforcing change in government and business.

The article also discusses the pyschology of climate change, so read more.

The North County Times reports that there is a “convergence in values” between Mexican and American people:

In fundamental attitudes about work, religion, sex, politics, the free market and the like, we are becoming more like each other, according to polls during the last 30 years, and the melding is only likely to continue. The growing economic integration under the North American Free Trade Agreement, an explosion in travel and communication, and the fact that 10 percent of Mexicans now live here and that many Americans are retiring there help push the trend.

Recent survey and poll data provides insight:

Half of all Mexicans in 2005 supported actually abolishing the border, a doubling since 1980, according to the latest World Values Surveys, done by a global association of sociologists.

This is consistent with a September Pew study showing that a third of Mexicans would “say yes” to moving to the U.S., and 18 percent would do so “without authorization.” They are pulled by jobs and relatives here, helping reverse what historically had been a deep suspicion of the U.S.

Indeed, the World Values survey finds that the number of Mexicans who distrust Americans as a people plummeted from 52 percent in 1990 to 31 percent, while those who trust us grew. Mexicans overwhelmingly look favorably on President Barack Obama, Gallup and other polls show, but that is a more fickle political measure.

Far fewer Americans —- 18 percent in the World Values survey —- favor union with Mexico. But until the recent drug violence along the border, nearly two-thirds of Americans have supported closer ties and had favorable views of Mexico, according to various polls from the last 20 years.

Americans remain righteous about maintaining national identity, but so do Mexicans. In fact, the World Values survey shows that Mexicans have more national pride than Americans, by a margin of 83 percent to 66 percent.

Even the gap between individualist versus collective orientations seems to be narrowing:

In the 1950s, the celebrated sociologists David Riesman and William Whyte lamented the decline of individualism in America, and they were partially right, as Americans have steadily placed higher emphasis on what polls coincidentally show are Mexican values oriented toward community, family and group.

At the same time, Mexicans in 1980 placed little emphasis on encouraging children to be independent, imaginative or determined, but now do so almost as much as Americans, according to World Values.

So…

The list goes on, and what such convergence on broad values means, at the very least, is that mutual understanding becomes easier.

The Boston Globe explores the economic effects of religion, and reports:

Fox News reports, “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez wasn’t the first to discover the book he gave to President Obama last week in an attempt to ease diplomatic tensions — college students in the U.S. have been turning its pages for years.” The book the story refers to is the 317-page Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano.

In the article, academics were called upon to explain the fervor surrounding the book, and how its use among college professors in numerous undergraduate courses highlights its importance. Including historian Paul Ortiz…

Associate Professor Paul Ortiz at the University of Florida said he most recently used Galeano’s book while teaching a class on African and Latin American history last fall.

“The way I present him is that he himself was an oppositional scholar,” Ortiz said. “He was writing against the mainstream economic viewpoint of the development of the Americas.”

University of Minnesota sociology graduate student Ryan Alaniz was also asked to comment on the book…

Ryan Alaniz, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, said he requires students to read portions of the book’s introduction for a sociology class he teaches called “Sociological Perspectives of Race, Class, and Gender.”

“The story of global capitalism is often told from a U.S. viewpoint often without the recognition that people in other parts of the world may have a very different explanation,” Alaniz wrote in an e-mail. “To gain a more holistic understanding of the consequences of capitalism, a critical student must be exposed to different interpretations of those consequences. Galeano’s book offers a critical Latin American perspective.”

Read more.