Remember during the cold war, how we could always count on the judge from some Soviet bloc country to lowball American athletes? Perhaps in framing this as an extension of the battle between American and Soviet powers we missed the real battle, which appears to be between political cultures with different beliefs about the meaning of truth. What makes me think about this is the recent Olympic figure skating controversy, in which a Russian pair defeated a Canadian pair, despite the fact that the latter skated a technically perfect routine.

I'm no skating expert, so I can't speak to which side is right in this dispute. What's interesting about this spat is the breakdown of the voting: the judges who scored the Canadians higher were from the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Germany, while the judges who scored the Russians higher were from Russia, China, Poland, Ukraine, and France.

Notice that the first group contains countries where speech is relatively free, where academics are largely unfettered to pursue research, and where elections are generally open. The second group, on the other hand, consists of two states that brutally suppress their citizenry, two with a history of doing so, and one that has spawned a host of hateful anti-rational thinkers ranging from Derrida to Ho Chi Minh. While truth is treated as something to be independently sought in the former group, truth has long been undermined in the latter.

This leads me to a second, related thought. It is clear that totalitarian states are characterized by their politicization of everything, from the names of towns to the personal faiths of their citizens. So nobody is surprised when representatives from these countries do nasty things in international bodies, like vote to include Sudan and Libya on the U.N. Human Rights Commission while ousting the U.S., or unfairly scoring athletes from communist countries higher than athletes from relatively free countries.

Given that we know these things, it makes sense to alter the Olympic (if not the U.N.) rules to account for this bias. One simple method might be to deny countries representation on Olympic committees or judges panels so long as their countries receive a failing grade from Freedom House. Of course this wouldn't eliminate the French, but no method is perfect.