The sports pages over the last week have been filled with the latest on the strange story of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai. That this whole saga has led to some reckoning as to whether or not the 2022 Winter Olympic Games should go ahead in Beijing is good. The fact that it took this to get support for a boycott to swell a little is an indictment on us as a collective human race. Let us not pretend that there were not enough reasons to boycott before all of this began. Are we seriously saying that China's concentration camps, organ harvesting, thuggish intimidation of its neighbors, Orwellian surveillance state etc. were insufficient reasons to move the games? Why did it take the nuzzling (and who knows what else) of a star athlete for ears to be raised? In a few months time, the Olympics will return to a country where just in the last seventy years or so cultural identities have been ruthlessly stamped out, millions have been starved to death through disastrous policies, religious groups persecuted and their organs harvested and dissidents thrown into mental asylums.
The IOC doesn't care. It's been down this road before. The summer games were held in Beijing, at a time where China's regime felt it needed to be more careful with its image making. They were held in the USSR with its own murderous and oppressive regime. And most notoriously, they were held in Hitler's Germany. Peng's hostage call with the IOC was just the latest example of IOC officials being useful tools in the hands of tyrants. You see principled stances may make sense to you and me and they don't make dollars and cents for Thomas Bach and the IOC. The same was true of Avery Brundage in 1936. The IOC is happy to allow itself to be used as a political pawn against the WTA whose stance has been much more stout. They only care that the games go through without a hitch. The stacks of yuans weigh heavily on the conscience of Herr Bach.
They also appear to weigh heavily on other athletes, not just the former fencing medalist.
Do you remember the Daryl Morey saga and the eerie silence from the usually loudly opinionated players, coaches and executives? I do. How long is Enes Kanter going to be the lone voice speaking out on the 2022 Olympics and how morally reprehensible it is to proceed as if all was well? How long until silence becomes violence here as well?
And what to say of the NHL who spurned the Olympics in free and democratic South Korea but looks forward with great excitement to the genocide games in Beijing? Can we really expect much from the same league that was just recently outed for covering up numerous sexual assaults within its ranks? Given that there are clearly creeps in high places within the NHL perhaps there is some understanding of Zhang Gaoli. Perhaps there is sympathy for the devil. You see, the NHL has deep seated cultural issues. If you have yet to see the Urinating Tree video on the NHL's cultural issues, I highly recommend you do.
Back to Beijing 2022. To boycott the games is so much more than a token gesture. You see, the Chinese regime has invested enormously in these games. That is why they are so caught up in trying to do damage repair regarding the Peng case. They know what a PR gaffe it was. Hosting the Olympic Games allows the brutal, totalitarian regime of Communist China to dress itself in a veneer of responsibility. The goal is to obfuscate, to distract from the regime's crimes. It is to be the propaganda coup of the ages where China sells the world (including a number of potential client states) an image of grandiosity. Much like Putin's Russia, Xi's China looks to use the Olympics to further geopolitical goals. Hosting the games is another tool in China's informal war against the west just like the Global Times and Tik Tok are. To take away the games would deprive China of a propaganda coup to patch up its heavily damaged international image. CCP officials have seen the same polls you and I have, suggesting that in many countries, the public view of China is overwhelmingly negative.
Perhaps more important than striking a blow in the new Cold War is what going or not going to the Olympics says about us and our societies. In 1936, going told the world that we were fine with Nazi oppression of Jews. After all, in our own countries, Jews were a politically uninteresting (ie: not numerous) and largely powerless minority (like Uyghurs and Tibetan today). We were ok to ignore their plight. They were Jews after all. (same reason why a rapid rise in antisemitic hate crimes is largely ignored today) And so we went. In due time, Hitler got his propaganda coup, his carte blanche to annex, to oppress and to build up for war. Not even a decade later, we found out that by going, we had made ourselves accessories to millions of deaths, not to mention the traumas of the survivors. It was not just Avery Brundage who was all too happy to remain credulous. It was all of us. And the price was paid in the blood of innocents.
We did better by boycotting the 1980 in the face of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that has led to four decades of unremitting bloodshed there. How will we do in 2022? Will we hand the CCP the rebuke it so richly deserves or are we handing it a carte blanche to say … launch an invasion of Taiwan provoked solely by the refusal of the Taiwanese to exchange for Maoism the liberal democratic system for which their parents bled in the streets. If they do, and the world finds itself at war, or if the true extent of the Uyghur genocide becomes apparent soon, will we be able to tell our great grandchildren that we stood firm against this, or will we become accessories to murder once again?
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