Calls for boycott fall on deaf ears

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This article was published 04/01/2022 (1391 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and members of his inner circle have repeatedly demonstrated their harsh authoritarianism. Among many examples are the contrived imprisonment of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, the almost certain coercion of professional tennis player Peng Shuai, who has now suspiciously recanted her allegation of sexual assault against former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli, and the brutal treatment of Uyghurs and other minorities.

Nonetheless, in early February Beijing will host the some of the world’s top athletes at the Winter Olympics — providing the Omicron variant does not force the rescheduling or outright cancellation of the games. (Fears about COVID-19 have already led to the NHL’s decision not to allow its players to participate.)

In response to calls for a boycott of the event, the best governments in Canada, the U.S., U.K. and Australia could come up with was a diplomatic boycott, really nothing more than a snub, while leaving their athletes free to compete and fend for themselves.

In defending the awarding of the Winter Olympics to China in 2015, Canadian Dick Pound of the International Olympic Committee reiterated the organization’s long-standing position that sports are separate from politics. “When we award the Games to a country, we don’t do it as an indication that we support the political objectives of that country,” he said in a recent interview with a German radio station. “It’s done on the basis of the importance of the country as a sporting nation and its ability to organize Games at the level that the world now expects.”

That questionable rationale echoes what IOC officials, as well as officials from the Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) and the American Olympic Association (AOA), as it was then called, claimed about holding the Winter and Summer Olympics in Germany in 1936, in Bavaria and Berlin respectively (at the time it was not uncommon to have both Olympics in the same country).

The 1936 Olympics were awarded to Germany five years earlier, when the Weimar Republic federal constitutional government was in power. The IOC and the various Olympic organizations did not expect that by the time the Olympic torch was lit, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime would be ruling the country. Nor did they think they would have to consider the ramifications of anti-Jewish legislation and violence in Germany.

Yet after the Nazi government’s enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, which deprived German Jews of citizenship rights and outlawed intermarriages and sexual relations between Jews and “Aryans”, or people “of German or related blood,” there was no denying the Nazis’ malevolent intentions.

At least two years before that happened — soon after Hitler became chancellor early in 1933 — there had been protests and calls for an Olympic boycott in both Canada and the U.S — especially for the Summer Olympics, which was the larger of the two events.

These objections came mainly from Jewish organizations. Leaders of the Canadian Jewish Congress, for instance, wrote letters appealing to newspapers’ sports editors to support the boycott, though most were either cool or apathetic about the idea. (One of the lone voices in the Canadian press who immediately condemned the Nazi regime was Winnipeg Free Press editor John W. Dafoe.)

The boycott debate in both Canada and the U.S. was permeated by the accepted anti-Semitism of the era. The common refrain among Olympic officials was that the Jews were complaining too much. Avery Brundage, the head of the AOA (and the president of the IOC from 1952 to 1972), frequently noted in his correspondence during the early 1930s with other AOA members that “the Jews have been clever enough to realize the publicity value of sport.”

Like officials today who dismiss China’s human-rights abuses, Brundage argued that Nazi policy “was wholly separate from Olympic concerns, since the Games belonged to the IOC and not to any host country.” Privately, he praised Nazi success in ridding Germany of Communists.

(This “it’s not about politics” argument was conveniently ignored when the U.S. initiated a boycott — supported by Canada — of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.)

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Determined to ensure American participation, Brundage, as well as the IOC, accepted Hitler’s assurances that Nazi propaganda would be absent from the games and Jewish athletes from Germany and elsewhere would not be discriminated against. Neither pledge was fulfilled. The Americans and the Canadians, however, willingly sent their athletes to Germany.

Only a small number of Jewish and African American athletes from Canada and the U.S. competed in Berlin. Among the Americans was Jesse Owens, an African American track star who won four gold medals.Pressured by Jewish community leaders across Canada not to participate, the only Jewish athlete who represented the country was Irving “Toots” Meretsky from Windsor, a member of the Canadian basketball team, which won a silver medal.

In 1936, the heads of the IOC and the Canadian and U.S. Olympic organizations were wilfully blind about Nazi actions and the way in which the regime manipulated the Olympics as blatant propaganda.

Assuming the games proceed, expect the Chinese to do the same with the Beijing Olympics.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.