By Brian T. Kennedy | RealClearPolitics | Jan 18, 2022
The American way of life has been nearly destroyed over the past two years by a virus that came from communist China. Politically, economically, and socially, America has been devastated. As of this writing, 850,000 Americans have died. Why, then, is the U.S. Olympic team preparing to head to Beijing to participate in the Winter Olympics? If ever there was an Olympics that should be boycotted, this is it.
The purpose of the quadrennial games is, or ought to be, to promote goodwill among nations while allowing athletes a stage where they can test their skills against world-class competition. No one believes that is the purpose of the Beijing Olympics. In the opening ceremony, President Xi Jinping could apologize to the world for allowing the coronavirus virus to spread from Wuhan throughout the planet while authorities hushed it up and worked hard to prevent its spread to the rest of China. That would be a demonstration of goodwill and a modicum of decency, given the millions globally who have died. That is not going to happen.
For China’s leaders, the purpose of these Olympics is purely political. It is to celebrate China’s way of life. That includes the Chinese Communist Party and its repression of 1.4 billion people and the establishment of China as a global superpower capable of engaging in biowarfare against any nation it chooses with impunity. Having paid billions to the regime to air these Olympics, that won’t be a message that NBC (and the American corporations that have also paid dearly to advertise during event coverage) will convey over two weeks’ time.
Despite ubiquitous “social justice” advocacy by Americans corporations, religious leaders, and the mainstream media — notably MSNBC and CNBC, the political arms of the parent company presenting the Olympics — there is a moral indifference to what the American people have suffered from the Wuhan virus and to the grotesque human rights abuses committed by the Beijing regime.
The NBC executives who made this Faustian bargain would argue that the China of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward — previous regimes responsible for the deaths of an estimated 100 million Chinese citizens — is a different country from the one we find today with its growing cities and technological advancements. Different, perhaps, in body count, but not in its cruelty.
The Chinese Communist Party of today has mastered the political repression of the Chinese people with its social credit scoring and has focused its punishment on those that are either not ethnically Chinese, such as the Uyghurs, or are politically isolated, such as the Falun Gong, or are politically dangerous, such as the growing Christian population. Their harsh mistreatment is a warning to the rest of the Chinese population to behave.
What has happened to the 12 million Uyghurs, who live in Xinjiang province, is especially gruesome. The Uyghurs are ethnically of Turkic descent and practice Islam. Today, up to 3 million of them are believed to be confined to internment camps that are euphemistically termed “vocational training camps.”
What is life like in these camps? Slave labor and fear are the common themes. The most grisly fate is forced organ harvesting, in which Uyghurs are killed so their bodies can be cannibalized for sale on a macabre global market operated by the government. There is some evidence that members of the Falun Gong religious sect are suffering the same fate.
There are also reports of Uyghur women being used as sex slaves for the People’s Liberation Army.
In the waning days of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo officially classified all this mistreatment as genocide, a designation that has not changed under the Biden administration’s State Department and Secretary Antony Blinken. For its part, the Biden administration announced a “diplomatic boycott” of the Olympics. This toothless response generated little more that scorn in Beijing. Even the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act recently signed into law by President Biden is likely to have little effect on the behavior of the Chinese government.
As for the athletes, and they are not an insignificant part of this, it is often said that they would pay the price if the United States were to boycott the games. This is not an insignificant sacrifice, and shouldn’t be glossed over, but it’s nothing in comparison to the human rights horrors suffered by the millions of victims of this regime.
Hitler in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 was trying, it was said, to prove the racial superiority of the Aryan race. This was self-evidently nonsense, as Jesse Owens and his American teammates demonstrated. But Germany still won the most gold medals and most medals overall, and Adolf Hitler used the games to demonstrate both to the world and those within Germany the Nazis’ commitment to building a new world order.
The communist Chinese are not trying to prove their racial superiority. That’s an attitude they have firmly established in their own minds, and they couldn’t care less what barbarian nations such as the United States believe. What the CCP wishes to establish is that the Western way of life — America in particular and democracy in general — is morally bankrupt, not to mention ineffectual. They wish to prove that there is a new world order and that they are the vanguard. And they will have as eager allies the propaganda machine of Western media such as NBC and its affiliates, who will present China in the best possible light.
Americans are better than that. There is an American way of life that is worth defending and it does not include kowtowing to the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party. Boycotting these Beijing Olympics would be an affirmation of both our basic decency and our basic sense of justice. Whether it is done for the over 850,000 Americans who have been killed by the Wuhan virus, or for the Uyghurs, or just to show the CCP that we will not idly let war be waged against us, it is not too late to do what is right.