At the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics, spectators will watch as athletes from the worst regimes on the planet parade by. Whether they are from dictatorships of the left or right, secular or theocratic, they will have one thing in common: the hosts of the games that, according to the mission statement, are striving ‘for a bright future for mankind’ will support their oppressors.

The flag of Sudan will flutter. China supplied the weapons that massacred so many in Darfur. As further sweeteners, it added interest-free loans for a new presidential palace and vetoes of mild condemnations of genocide from the United Nations. In return, China got most of Sudan’s oil. The Burmese athletes will wave to the crowd and look as if they are representing an independent country. In truth, Burma is little more than a Chinese satellite. In return for the weapons to suppress democrats and vetoes at the UN Security Council, the junta sells it gas at discounted rates far below what its wretched citizens have to pay.

With Steven Spielberg citing China’s complicity in the Sudan atrocities as his reason for withdrawing as the Olympics’ artistic adviser, comparisons with the 20th century will soon be flowing. Will Beijing be like the 1936 Berlin Olympics Hitler used to celebrate Nazism? Or the 1980 Moscow games the Americans boycotted in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? I suspect the past won’t be a guide because the ideological struggles of the 20th century are over. China’s communists are communists in name only.

David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary, showed he understood the dilemmas of the new century when he gave a lecture in honour of Suu Kyi in Oxford last week.

He described how the great wave of democratisation, which began with the fall of Franco’s dictatorship in the Seventies, moved through South America, the Soviet empire, South Africa and the tyrannies of East Asia, was petering out. The Foreign Secretary was undiplomatic enough to continue that the economic success of China had proved that history was not over and he was right.

The only justification for the Beijing games is that they will allow connoisseurs of the grotesque to inspect this ghoulish hybrid of the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism close up. The march of China’s bloodstained allies round the stadium will merely be the beginning. The International Olympic Committee and all the national sports bureaucracies will follow up by instructing athletes not to say a word out of place.

The free-market CEOs of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, General Electric and all the other sponsors who have made money out of China will join the communists in insisting that outsiders have no right to criticise.

Any Chinese dissident who hasn’t been picked up before the world’s journalists arrive will face terrifying punishments if he speaks to them. I know sportsmen and women are exasperated by demands to boycott events they have dreamed of winning for years.

Why should they suffer when no business or government is prepared to turn its back on the vast Chinese market? For all that, they still should not go. The hypocrisy of the 2008 Olympics will make all but the most hard-hearted athletes retch. They will not look back on it not as a high point of their careers, but a nadir. — The Guardian