A great Rex Murphy commentary from the Great White North, via Ezra Levant’s blog. Wait for the line about Gandhi (from 1:15 to 1:53).
Meanwhile, at the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum discusses some Olympic fallacies:
"The Olympics are a force for good." Not always! The 1936 Olympics, held in Nazi Germany, were an astonishing propaganda coup for Hitler. It’s true that the star performance of Jesse Owens, the black American track-and-field great, did shoot some holes in the Nazi theory of Aryan racial superiority. But Hitler still got what he wanted out of the Games. With the help of American newspapers such as the New York Times, which opined that the Games put Germany "back in the family of nations again," he convinced many Germans, and many foreigners, to accept Nazism as "normal." The Nuremburg laws were in force, German troops had marched into the Rhineland, Dachau was full of prisoners, but the world cheered its athletes in Berlin. As a result, many people, both in and out of Germany, reckoned that everything was just fine and that Hitler could be tolerated a bit longer.
(Hat tip to Instapundit for that last one.)
I’d say that’s a pretty accurate summation of the ’36 games. The Jesse Owens story was largely ignored at the time (America being what it was back then), and was resurrected during the civil rights era.
On the one hand, I think an outright boycott of the games would backfire. All countries see the games as a source of national pride, but totalitarian ones carry it even further. Those who advocate a boycott need to realize that the Chinese would be deeply hurt and would lash out in response. The leadership might even fall and hotheads put in place. A war over Taiwan could even result.
On the other side, those who say “keep politics out of the games” are equally wrong, as your post shows.
So what to do? I saw that we should go go the games but do things that would show our displeasure. No elected officials from any Western country should attend. The athletes could engage in a number of symbolic protests. This would get the point across without risking a backlash.
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I tend to agree, but I don’t see the harm for people to at least talk about Olympic boycotts. Circumstances have provided the world with unique, though temporary, leverage over Chinese behavior. Kind of a shame for people to just throw that opportunity away.