Allowing China to host the Olympics would be a mistake
It worked for Hitler. The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin provided the Nazis with propaganda and legitimacy. Opposition within Germany was weaker after the Olympics than it had been before them. In fact, while the games were underway, the Nazis were using slave labor to build a huge new concentration camp in nearby Sachsenhausen.
And now, the 2022 Winter
Olympics in Beijing offer a perfect opportunity to repeat this mistake.
China today under Xi Jinping is more than a little like Hitler’s Germany in 1936. We have the dictator with no term limit. We have the arbitrary incarceration of political enemies. We have the bans on religion. We have an aggressive—even vengeful—foreign policy. The Chinese Communist Party secretary described Uyghur terrorists as “rats that needed to be chased and ‘beaten down.’” But while Germany in 1936 was on the verge of the genocide of a people the Nazis described as vermin, China is already in the middle of one. And President Joe Biden has already openly and publicly acknowledged that.
Since 1948, genocide has been considered a crime under international law. Nearly 150 countries have, by signing the UN Convention on Genocide,
▶ Todd L. Pittinsky is a professor at Stony Brook University and a distinguished senior fellow of the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County. His most recent book, with Barbara Kellerman, is “Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy.”
accepted an obligation not only to punish genocide but to prevent it. The U.S. is one of those countries. There is no exception for sporting events. Yet somehow China has the privilege of hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics and Biden doesn’t seem inclined to deny them that privilege.
Of course, there are reasons for going through with the Beijing Olympics. They just aren’t anywhere near good enough.
For example, the Olympics are viewed by some as a kind of gateway to liberalization. As International Olympics Committee member Dick Pound wrote in his book, “Inside the Olympics”: “The decision to give the 2008 games to China was made in the hope of improvement in human rights and, indeed, the Chinese themselves said that having the games would accelerate progress in such matters.” I think we can drop that point right there.
It can also be argued that the Olympics simply are not and should not be about politics or even human rights. That might have been true in the Chariots of Fire days, but it’s not now. China seeks the Olympics for explicitly political reasons and can therefore rightly be denied them for political reasons. In any case, those 150 signatories of the UN Convention on Genocide have accepted an obligation that surely overrides any “duty” to send their dedicated and hard-working athletes to the Olympics.
Another argument is that the U.S. has its own human rights issues and has no business getting so high and mighty with China. Of course the U.S. has its own human rights issues, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have the opportunity and obligation to make moral choices.
Politics is a world of compromises and international politics even more so. That’s actually often one of its selling points—compromises are most often better than violence and warfare. But there has to be a limit, and if genocide isn’t over that limit, what is? We can make do with politicians promising “no new taxes” and then raising taxes. We can make do with politicians promising us we can keep our doctor and then finding out we can’t. Can we make do with the slaughters to date, the involuntary sterilizations, and currently more than one million ethnic Uyghurs in China interned in “re-education camps”—not to mention what else China has in store for its various “vermin”? We can, but we surely should not.