Berlin 1936 and Beijing 2022: Legitimizing genocidal totalitarian regimes through sports is a profound immorality with bad outcomes

 "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."- George Santayana

 

Legitimizing genocidal totalitarian regimes through sports is a profound immorality with bad outcomes

The 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing were a human rights disaster for China with scenes of Tibetan demonstrators gunned down by Chinese soldiers. 

14 years later, and the world has suffered over 5.6 million deaths due to COVID-19, and the Chinese Communist dictatorship of  Xi Jinping bears responsibility. The Chinese government did not reveal for weeks what it knew about COVID-19, allowing it to spread into a worldwide pandemic. The Frontline Documentary "China's COVID Secrets" is required viewing to understand what happened.

#NoBeijing2022 has listed some of the other outrages committed by the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.  "The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics is set to happen amid one of the world’s worst crackdowns against freedom, democracy, and human rights."

• At least TWO million Uyghur, Kazakh, and Uzbek Muslims are detained in “re-education camps” undergoing systematic torture, rape, and political re-education.
• 80% of Tibetan children – as young as 4 – are forced away from their parents and housed in China’s colonial boarding schools, cut off from their families they face intense political indoctrination.
• In Hong Kong, the Chinese government has implemented a draconian National Security Bill that effectively criminalises protest and curtails any remaining human rights.
• Protests by Southern Mongolians, whose rights, language and culture being eradicated, are put down with force
• Detention & disappearance of countless Chinese lawyers, feminists & activists
• Intimidation and geopolitical bullying of Taiwan and aggression and expansion across borders – in the South China Sea and India-Tibet border – present a clear threat to regional and global security.

A second Frontline Documentary from April 2020, "China Undercover" examined the systematic crackdown on Chinese Muslims.

Despite this the International Olympic Committee (IOC) chose China once again to host the Olympics in 2022 in the midst of the historic crimes of the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.  

As was the case in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics friends of a free China need to increase scrutiny on the Chinese regime and boycott these Olympics. The consequences of  the IOC legitimizing such a regime cannot be overstated. If you are in the Washington DC area on Thursday, February 3rd at 12 noon please join the #NoBeijing2022 Rally at Union Square 3rd Street SW.

The 1936 Olympics held in Berlin and hosted by the Nazi Third Reich with the ceremonies formally opened by Adolph Hitler should serve as a cautionary example. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum described the impact of the games as follows:

On August 1, 1936, Hitler opened the XIth Olympiad. Musical fanfares directed by the famous composer Richard Strauss announced the dictator's arrival to the largely German crowd. Hundreds of athletes in opening day regalia marched into the stadium, team by team in alphabetical order. Inaugurating a new Olympic ritual, a lone runner arrived bearing a torch carried by relay from the site of the ancient Games in Olympia, Greece.
[...] Concerted propaganda efforts continued well after the Olympics with the international release in 1938 of "Olympia," the controversial documentary directed by German film maker and Nazi sympathizer Leni Riefenstahl. She was commissioned by the Nazi regime to produce this film about the 1936 Summer Games. Germany emerged victorious from the XIth Olympiad. German athletes captured the most medals, and German hospitality and organization won the praises of visitors. Most newspaper accounts echoed the New York Times report that the Games put Germans "back in the fold of nations," and even made them "more human again." Some even found reason to hope that this peaceable interlude would endure. 

The 1936 Olympics whitewashed the brutality of the Nazi regime in Germany and led to acceptance of Hitler's criminal regime. The 2008 Olympics whitewashed the brutality of the Communist regime in China further legitimizing that criminal regime.

In 2022,  returning the Olympics to China and making this decision in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the destruction of Hong Kong's democracy, threats against Taiwan, and the Uyghur genocide creates a historic moral hazard.

This is why I will not watch the Olympics, and encourage others to join me in this boycott, instead I will stand with Hong Kong, and Taiwan, share documentaries and films that reveal the facts of the genocidal regime in Beijing, and calls to nonviolent protests against the Chinese Communist dictatorship, and their enablers.

Below is a documentary about the 2019-2020 protests in Hong Kong titled "Do Not Split." Please share it with others.

Martin Luther King Jr. on film

"I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear." - Martin Luther King, Jr
 

 There are numerous documentaries about Martin Luther King Jr. but dramatic interpretations focused on the man and his life are few and far between. However there are three that you should seek out and see. The first, Selma, is now and theaters and the other two Boycott (2001) and King (1978) are available on Amazon. These films show a Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who is nonviolent but not passive before injustice. The three movies may also help explain why both the FBI and KGB sought to discredit the man.


The film Selma, now in theaters, shows Martin Luther King Jr. the political strategist and Nobel laureate contesting power nationally with nonviolence. The movie shows the tactical and strategic considerations leading up to the decision to march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama in March of 1965.

However, this is not the first film to focus on a nonviolent campaign by Martin Luther King Jr. HBO Films released the film Boycott on February 24, 2001 that explores the campaign that began King's involvement in the civil rights movement in December of 1955 following the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat and go to the back of the bus in Montgomery Alabama.

Ten years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination the Emmy award winning miniseries King was broadcast on February 12, 13 and 14, 1978 presenting a dramatic overview of the civil rights leader's life beginning in the early 1950s as a Southern Baptist Minister taking the viewer right up to his assassination on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.

Rosa Parks and the nonviolent moment that initiated the destruction of racial segregation

"I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear." - Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks, mugshot 1955

Before the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. there was Rosa Parks. In the video below she recounts the events surrounding her arrest. On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama sitting in the back of the bus [the area reserved for African Americans during Segregation] the "white" section having been filled to capacity with a white man standing the bus driver told Rosa Parks to stand up and give her seat to him.

Rosa Parks refused and a nonviolent moment that would generate a movement that would tear down legal segregation was mobilized. She was arrested, finger printed, photographed, jailed and fined $14 dollars for refusing to give up her seat.

Rosa Parks finger printed in December of 1955 following her arrest. Below her finger prints.

She appealed the ruling. The next day the Women’s Political Council called for a bus boycott in Montgomery on December 5, 1955 but seeing the huge turnout and intensity the decision was made to expand it and on that day the Montgomery Improvement Association formed to coordinate the boycott with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. elected the chairman of the organization. Carpools were formed and African Americans stopped riding the buses in Montgomery.

Rosa Parks and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

On January 30, 1956 Martin Luther King Jr.'s home was bombed but the boycott continued and remained nonviolent. On November 15, 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court rules that bus segregation laws were unconstitutional. The boycott ended on December 21, 1956 when the Montgomery City Lines desegregated. The bus boycott had lasted 382 days, and turned both Rosa Parks and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. into national figures. Civil disobedience had triumphed over brute force and terror.

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Although 55 years have passed since that day that changed the United States forever and five years have passed since the civil rights icon passed on, Rosa Parks continues to have an impact around the world. Today in Cuba, Iris Tamara Pérez Aguilera heads the Rosa Parks Women's Civil Rights Movement and is a living reminder of an observation made by Rosa Parks: "Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others."

Iris Tamara Pérez Aguilera