The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin has passed into history as a grotesque totalitarian spectacle, thanks partly to Leni Riefenstahl’s memorialization of the games in her propaganda film “Olympia”.
Less remembered is the fact that Nazi Germany also hosted the 1936 Winter Games, at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps, between Feb. 6 and Feb. 16. Just five months before this snowy athletic jamboree, the Reichstag had promulgated the anti-Jewish Nuremberg race laws.
And three weeks after the closing ceremonies, on March 7, 1936, Adolf Hitler ordered his army to occupy the Rhineland, in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Both the Winter and Summer Games went on despite calls for a boycott from activists concerned that the Olympics would help legitimize Hitler’s regime.
So it’s par for the historical course that today’s People’s Republic of China, which hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics, should be scheduled to put on the Winter Games a year from now — while building concentration camps for Muslim Uighurs, trashing democracy in Hong Kong, imprisoning dissidents and threatening Taiwan. Beijing is also detaining, under harsh conditions, two Canadian expats in retaliation for Canada’s lawful and transparent extradition proceedings against an executive of China’s flagship tech firm, Huawei, accused by the United States of violating sanctions on Iran.
Historical analogizing about such matters is inherently difficult. But you don’t have to see exact moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and Communist China to wonder whether today’s international Olympic panjandrums are capable of learning anything from their predecessors’ experience.
“Our perspective on all of this is that no matter how complex and how conflicting views may exist among countries, we’re trying to steer a middle course here using sport as a means of communication even in the worst of times”, Dick Pound, vice president of the International Olympic Committee, recently told the BBC, in response to calls from human rights organizations for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Games. Such a gesture, he argued, would “have no impact whatsoever” on China’s conduct.
Maybe — or maybe not. Democratic governments have more leverage over the Winter Games than they would over the summer competition: The overwhelming majority of top-flight winter athletes come from the United States, Canada and Western Europe.
Athletes from just 10 Northern Hemisphere countries have won 748 of the 1,060 gold medals in the 23 Winter Games so far. Of these, two — Russia and its precursor, the Soviet Union — were not democratic historically or now. The others are Norway, the United States, Germany, Canada, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands, all of which, whatever their past or present flaws, qualify as liberal democracies today.
If they and other democracies pulled out, Beijing would be left to host a hollow, uncompetitive farce, instead of the glorification-fest the Communist Party has in mind.
Fortunately for the People’s Republic, there is not much chance, at least for now, that any countries will take a stand.
Like the Chinese, they are interested in national glorification and corporate profits, which are the real purposes of the Olympic Games — contrary to Pound’s blather about “sport as a means of communication”.
Pound and other Olympics apologists play whataboutism, noting that no country has a perfect record on human rights.
“Where would you celebrate the Olympic Games if you take that kind of attitude?” he asked the BBC.
He has a point. Democracies would be hypocritical for sending athletes to Beijing, contrary to their professed political ideals; yet they would also be hypocritical for not sending them, given all the other business they still do with the People’s Republic despite its repressive record.
But this simply proves how China has succeeded in using international institutions — from the World Trade Organization to the United Nations to the Olympics — to enrich itself and gain global influence without modifying its authoritarian political model, contrary to what the architects of “engagement” with China forecast a quarter-century ago.
Yes, individual athletes would bear the costs of a boycott; this is the main reason, or excuse, that governments offer for not supporting one.
Realistically, though, many Olympic athletes are professionals who enjoy abundant other opportunities to prove themselves in international competition.
Given the chronic corruption, political and economic, of the Olympic Games, maybe it’s time to reconsider whether we should teach young people to “go for the gold” in the first place.
That thinking has inspired many young achievers — but also ensnared others in a dark world of steroid use or worse, such as the training facility for U.S. women gymnasts on an isolated ranch in Texas where a team doctor subjected teenage athletes to sexual abuse.
If the United States and other democracies boycott the 2022 Winter Games, China could respond in kind, triggering a tit-for-tat cycle that ultimately puts an end to the Olympics altogether. Or so one hopes.
Charles Lane, Editorial writer and columnist specializing in economic and fiscal policy.