By his own account, Steven Spielberg only rediscovered his Jewish identity during the making of Schindler's List. You might think that odd: who on earth grows to educated adulthood, as a conspicuously powerful Hollywood mogul, without even a useful inkling of European Judaism's premeditated torture in the mid-twentieth century? Mr Spielberg, apparently.

Yet give the man credit. Since he filmed Thomas Keneally's novel, Spielberg has invested a great deal of time, effort and money in documenting the testimonies of the survivors of the Shoah, the ritual burning of a people, his people. Late or soon, he has borne witness, deployed his cash and his talent, stood up and insisted that he, too, should be counted. For that, I'll even forgive him ET.

I could forgive him, too, for agreeing to "produce" the ceremonials planned for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Why not? There is a vague, unstated scheme to introduce the old men of Beijing and their seamless sensibilities to the delights of globalised media culture. Give them the Olympics, runs the notion, and with the Games the world's undivided attention. Then the icy monolith of state communism will begin to thaw. That would be the theory.

The heirs of the Middle Kingdom tend to take a different view. They have seen off the "impudent" Rupert Murdoch. They have induced western internet search engines to accept a self-censorship liable to gladden Mao's dead, dusty heart. And their sovereign funds are deployed, even now, in buying up each useful scrap of Africa's resources. Spielberg quits as a producer for the sake of his conscience? Big, if slightly humiliating, deal. The director says that he cannot continue to accept a producer credit for the Olympics if China refuses to exercise its "unique influence" over Sudan, and, therefore, over the abomination that is Darfur.

A bunch of Nobel laureates, US Congress-persons, entertainers and sports folk have entered the fray. It isn't in me to differ. I wonder, though, about this sudden discovery of China.

Darfur is important: please do not mistake me. If, in the approach to the Beijing "showcase", the old men can be cajoled into leaning on the Sudanese creeps to call a halt to rape and murder, Mr Spielberg will be due a plaque and a scroll. But Darfur is not the only reason for protest and nor is it the sole cause to ask why we should question the export of young people to Beijing for the sake of the Olympian ideal.

Tiananmen, for one. China has yet to reform its habits, redeem its ignoble past or excuse itself for a wholesale massacre of its own young people. Tibet, for another. I wouldn't want to hand an entire country back to a bunch of parasitic monks, necessarily, but I am not Tibetan. In any recognisable version of communism, free national choice is a right. So, then, we have rights, generally, for a third. China's people have their big TVs and their shiny new cars, these days, but rights, civil and political? Or even the hope that a truly free vote might ever secure such rights? Not lately; not likely.

Tessa Jowell, rejoicing in the title of "Olympics Minister", suggests that a boycott of the August Games would be counter-productive. That would depend, I think, on the end you hope to produce. Nevertheless, Ms Jowell adds that it would be a "great pity" if Britain obliged its conscience and chose to ignore the $40bn jamboree planned by the old men in their high-security compounds.

Corporate sponsors, being corporate sponsors, have lined up to voice their agreement. "Politics will not affect the organisation of the Games," adds Sir Craig Reedie, Britain's member of the International Olympic Committee.

The riff is familiar: keep politics out of sport, keep sport out of reality. Who could despoil the pristine morality of the Olympic movement, after all, with grubby thoughts of Tiananmen, Tibet, Darfur or incarcerated human rights activists? I am tempted to reverse the question: who couldn't?

The British Olympic Association has already made one attempt to assert, in the form of a contract, that our superfit boys and girls have no entitlement to brains.

Until adverse publicity and lawyers took a hand, the idea was that our Olympians should hear, see and certainly speak no evil concerning their Chinese hosts. The clause has been withdrawn, for further committee pondering, but our athletes must have got the message. Transpose Beijing and shots of Hitler's Berlin Olympics and you might, just, get the idea.

British sports folk are only worried, for now, by the lawyer-enforced rehabilitation of Dwain Chambers, the time-served "drugs cheat". This is an issue, I grant. It matters to athletics. It will become more of an issue, though, if the IOC summons the nerve to bust some of those suspiciously successfully Chinese heroes this August. You want odds?

Why did China want these Games? Call it a designer accessory. These are the trinkets you get when the rest of the planet wants your trade, when the world's embrace is more profitable than the world's disdain and when you have metric tonnes of greenbacks in your vaults. China coveted the Olympics as a quick route to national self-esteem and international rehabilitation for the old men in the compounds. And everyone chose, deliberately, to look the other way.

Mr Spielberg was one, for a time. It surprises me that Darfur has only just occurred to him. It astonishes me that other aspects of the Beijing regime have only now crossed his mind. Charity says, however, that he has picked his moment, and his opportunity. This Hollywood mogul knows how a big-budget publicity campaign is best handled. And good for him, more or less. Logically, therefore, he is calling for a general boycott. That would make sense. You do not, as a matter of principle, Jewish or not, treat with totalitarian regimes.

Unless you are Tessa Jowell, you do not for an instant confuse sport with trade imperatives, even when the trading partner in question is a 500lb panda with a tendency to grow huffy over criticism.

China has become bold, and therefore dangerous. To put it parochially: I would not, this evening, be thinking of uploading much of the foregoing to my local server if that server happened to be in downtown Shanghai.

That's the difference and it is not insignificant. Rich, shiny, hyper-growth, "capitalist" China is inimical to all notions of democracy. We should say so.

The Beijing Olympics will go ahead, of course. The old men in the compounds have made another of their implacable choices. Adidas, to name one, has found $200m in the marketing budget merely to underwrite the Olympic ideal.

Come August, young people from around the planet will arrive in the Middle Kingdom to do battle with a treacly, emerging-economy smog and with their peers. That's predictable.

Still, the IOC, and the corporate sponsors, and the Beijing gangsters, and the international networks, share one desire.

Mr Spielberg has made his gesture. We could, if inclined, make the same adjustment, if couch and stale potato are ever separated. Don't watch. Don't tolerate another totalitarian-zombie display.

Without TV, the charade collapses in an undignified, squabbling heap. So tune it out.