Far be it for me to tell a guy with a PhD in history about his business, but this is the second column that Dr. Hung has gone on to talk about the 1940 BERLIN Olympics:
On the other hand, China knows full well that the Beijing Olympics won’t be boycotted. The United States did not boycott the Olympics in Berlin in 1940. [emphasis added]
Of course, the Berlin Games were in 1936, not 1940. Didn’t mention it the first time because I assumed it was just a typo or a misprint. But in this second column, Hung tries to tell us America separated sports from politics, and sent athletes to Germany some time during the Battle of Britain:
What China wants is the esteem of the wider world as a peacefully rising power. Chinese President Hu Jintao is doing what Adolf Hitler did shortly after Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The world withheld respect to the Nazis, but refrained from linking the Olympics to foreign policy issues just to snub Germany.
Hey, to err is human. But that got me to thinking: Where WERE the 1940 Olympic Games supposed to be held? Wikipedia had the answer:
The anticipated 1940 Summer Olympics, which were to be officially known as Games of the XII Olympiad and originally programmed to be celebrated between September 21 and October 6, 1940 in Tokyo, Empire of Japan, were cancelled due to World War II. The Games were retracted from Tokyo by the IOC due to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. They were awarded to the runner-up Helsinki, Finland, and were scheduled to be celebrated between July 20 to August 4, 1940. When World War II broke out, the Summer Games were cancelled indefinitely – resuming in London in 1948. [emphasis added]
Interesting, no? The International Olympic Committee and the People’s Republic of China all lecture us up and down that the Olympics are "a sporting competition" which "shouldn’t be turned into a political forum."
Yet in 1937, the IOC, on POLITICAL GROUNDS, found it within itself to WITHDRAW Japan’s right to hold the Games!
(Which makes sense – the Olympics weren’t intended to be merely "a sporting competition," but a celebration of peace as well. A little hypocritical to pretend you’re celebrating peace when the host country has just started a major war. Perhaps the IOC should have found the guts to do the same to Moscow back in 1980.)
And so we find that Joe Hung’s incorrect formulation:
The world withheld respect to the Nazis [during the 1940 Games], but refrained from linking the Olympics to foreign policy issues just to snub Germany.
Should actually read:
The world withheld respect to the Imperial Japanese, AND linked the Olympics to foreign policy issues to snub Japan.
Sounds like a precedent there.
If ever one needed an example of how bad the China Post is then this is it. On the rare occasion that I read it I think it must be published in a parallel universe. And the rare occasion I read it serves to remind me why I don’t read it!
*
*
Halfway through, I started to feel it was a little bit cruel to point all this out.
Then I wondered if it wasn’t deliberate. Kind of like when a P.O.W. is forced to read a statement denouncing his own country, and then he deliberately mispronounces some of the words — as a kind of code.
(“Hey, I’m doing this under duress, so please don’t judge me too harshly for what I say.”)