If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever
— George Orwell, 1984

Is this the Genocide Olympics? There are already people claiming that this year’s Games, to be held in Beijing, are a rerun of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin – the Games that were a glorification of Hitler and Nazism; by extension a glorification of a genocidal regime.

Steven Spielberg and Richard Vaughan are an unlikely double act. Vaughan is Britain’s top badminton player. Spielberg has, I believe, made a few films. Spielberg resigned as artistic adviser to the opening and closing ceremonies in Beijing because of his reservations about China’s involvement in Darfur; Vaughan (“I think I can kiss my funding goodbye”) has signed up for Team Darfur, a group that aims to persuade China to end the crisis there. Suddenly we have heard of Darfur. Suddenly we are all experts. Already, this has been a bravura exposition of the power of sport, for this is not a conflict that makes daily headlines, just one of those endless, hideous, unrolling disasters that don’t affect our own lives.

Until something such as the Olympics changes that. So now we learn that Darfur is in Western Sudan and that in a conflict between government-backed militia and rebel groups more than 200,000 people have died, with many more maimed and sexually brutalised. Two million have had to leave their homes.

China has a warm relationship with Sudan, one based on oil. According to figures from Amnesty International, by 2005 Sudan had imported $24 million of arms and ammunition from China, along with tanks, helicopters and fighter planes.

It is impossible to assume anything else other than that these weapons are being used for this growing conflict. In other words, China is getting its oil by investing in death, misery and human rights violations – that is the burden of the message conveyed to us by Spielberg and Vaughan.

So what do we do about it? That is a big question. The British Olympic Association (BOA) characteristically decided that the smart move was to force athletes to sign a self-gagging contract. Ooher, we’re going to a repressive country. These people are frightfully sensitive about being repressive, so we’d better be repressive ourselves.

In the same way, the Football Association forced the England team to give Nazi salutes before a match against Germany at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin in 1938. It doesn’t look so good in retrospect, does it? The BOA was rightly shouted down; it is apparently “looking again at the wording” of the athletes’ contracts.

The Chinese are crying foul and saying that Sudan is nothing to do with them (and before you ask, nor is Tibet, not really) – and anyway, isn’t this all supposed to be about sport, pure and simple? But sport is never pure and rarely simple.

No more is fame. Beijing and China have just learnt a hard lesson, one that London and Britain will no doubt be learning as 2012, the year of the Games here, approaches. You don’t get the Olympic Games on your own terms. You don’t get any kind of sporting fame on your own terms.

Take the job of England football manager. When Sven-Göran Eriksson was merely a successful club manager, few of us had heard of him and those who had thought, well, jolly good manager, clever sort of a chap. Then he became England head coach and all at once the women he bedded and the company he kept became a national obsession. Fabio Capello, the new manager, is learning the same lesson: we already know more about his tax problems than is comfortable for him.

And when it comes to the larger issue of the nation of China, suddenly we find ourselves – entirely because of the Olympic Games – looking at other things than the nation’s ability to construct vast stadiums and finish them on time. People are asking about Darfur, about China’s internal affairs, wondering if the figure of 6,000 judicial executions a year is correct, about the numbers imprisoned without trial under this scheme called “reeducation through labour” and so on and so on. (Have these people not read Orwell, or do they think 1984 is an instruction manual?)

All at once, then, we are in a situation of moral chaos. Well, that is nothing new, not in a democracy.

Nothing is obvious, nothing is clear-cut. The ethics are as perplexing as the politics.

Does enjoying the Olympic Games mean that you are backing the slaughter in Darfur, or is sport nothing to do with anything except sport? Should Britain withdraw its athletes in protest? Does the question of Darfur affect the participation of an individual of conscience? If you take part, are you supporting genocide? Should you go and resolve to say your piece if anyone asks, or should you go and make some sort of a fuss, make yourself a martyr? If you do, will it do any good? Does it matter whether or not it does any good, as long as your conscience is square?

It’s not a simple issue. For the individual it is a matter of conscience and courage. But there is one thing that matters here: if the Olympic Games had not been awarded to China, these matters would not have come to widespread public attention.

China gave all sorts of guarantees about improving its record on human rights as part of its Olympic bid. Now it is learning a strange fact – that official organisations (such as national Olympic associations and governments) may make decisions, but individuals may not go along with them. Individuals can make their own minds up about China’s record on human rights.

Because in a democracy individuals can do a lot of things. We can disagree, dissent, refuse to conform, make our own decisions. And it is not only the specific areas of disagreement that matter, it is the entire fact of disagreement.

Disagreement is a vital aspect of our culture. It is the keystone of democracy. I can slag off Gordon Brown, the BOA and the Queen. I can even criticise Jonny Wilkinson. You may disapprove of what I say, but you will defend to the death my right so say it. In 1977, Jubilee Year, the Sex Pistols gave us the bitterly subversive, almost pedantically offensive God Save the Queen. They did so without being executed, imprisoned or requiring reeducation through labour.

By wishing the Olympic Games on itself, China has come into greater contact with the Culture of Disagreement than would otherwise have been possible. Beijing will be stuffed full of athletes and journalists who disagree with all kinds of things, a matter that will be plain from our very appearance. Some will make a fuss bout Darfur and executions and reeducation and so on, others will not. It’s an individual decision.

And it’s not the protests or the issues that matter so much as the fact that the Culture of Disagreement exists. Many, many Chinese individuals will see for the first time that this is the way we live in the nonrepressive world. If the 2008 Olympic Games have a political purpose, it will be in planting the seeds of Disagreement, the seeds of a real cultural revolution.