I’ve been hearing the human rights crowd calling the Winter Games in Beijing in February the “genocide games” because the world seems to be celebrating the brutal regime of Xi Jinping. But the mainstream media has largely avoided the unpleasant comparison between Beijing 2022 and Hitler’s 1936 Olympics in Germany.
Now, however, the New York Times, in its infinite majesty, has broken the taboo in this article because of the apparent detention of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai. The frontpage article was written not by one of the newspaper’s China-watching correspondents who could be suspected of personal animosity because the regime kicked some of them out of the country. No, it was written by a sports guy, Matthew Futterman. The fact that the 1936 Berlin comparison has worked its way into the heads of sports reporters is revealing.
The key paragraph was low in the story but it nonetheless appeared. Here it is:
“Now it (the International Olympic Committee) is taking its marquee winter event to China, a move that many critics are now comparing to one of the darkest chapters in the history of the modern Olympics — the staging of the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin, an event that Adolf Hitler leveraged as propaganda for his fascist Nazi rule of Germany.”
