“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Op-Ed Commentary

Don’t mess with China.

I can’t help but think this every time I hear another diatribe in the media about boycotting the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing, China.

The Middle Kingdom is much in the news these days as foolish, but well-intended commentators work themselves up into a righteous lather about the coming Games scheduled for Feb. 4, 2022 in and around Beijing and its neighbouring city of Zhangjiakou when 109 gold medals will be up for grabs. Don’t listen to them. Instead, do what the minions of the media don’t want you to do – think for yourself!

And why are so many people so worked up at the prospect of a Chinese Olympics? China is an evil empire, they say. They are practising genocide against the ethnic Uyghur people in northwest China. They are taking away democracy from the people of Hong Kong and holding two innocent Canadians in a gulag somewhere who have the great misfortune of being used as bargaining chips in a so-called trade war between the US and Iran.

Let’s unpack this one-by-one.

China is committing “genocide” against the Uyghurs. There is no doubt that China is treating the Uyghurs badly. But genocide? I’ve heard no allegations about smoking ovens and the Uyghurs being thrown in a la Nazi Germany. Yes, they have imprisoned vast numbers of Uyghurs and appear to be indoctrinating them to become more Chinese. But that’s ethnic cleansing and not mass murder like the Nazis committed.

Genocide is what Stalin did to the Ukrainians prior to the Second World War; what Turkey did to the Armenians prior to the First World War and what the US is often accused of doing against its aboriginal people when it conquered the “Wild West,” not to mention what they did and are still doing to the Blacks. Remember what the Bible says: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Hong Kong is another matter.

There is no doubt China is trying to destroy democracy as we know it there but consider the fact that democracy is unfortunately a minority form of government in most of the world today. The Economist Magazine Democracy Index says there are 23 countries with full democracies in the world today including Canada. Some 52 countries have flawed democracies, which includes the US and 57 totally authoritarian regimes in the world which includes China.

Not a pretty picture is it? And do we think we will make the situation better by poking China in the eye with a hot poker? I don’t think so.

As for the two Michaels sitting in a Chinese prison for more than two years, you can blame that on Justin Trudeau as far as I’m concerned. There are ways and means around extradition treaties like the one between Canada and the US and Trudeau didn’t use them because he wanted to suck up to China to preserve our trade relations with the world’s second biggest economy.

And there’s another crucial factor in the great Chinese Winter Olympics debate that almost everyone is ignoring – the Olympic athletes.

Yes, the poor – and they are poor in financial terms – Olympic athletes who work their bodies to the bone to compete in the world’s greatest games only to have their chance cruelly taken away from them by a bunch of greasy politicians and their naïve supporters. Think about that the next time you argue against the Chinese games.

Finally consider this. If ever there was an Olympic Games that deserved to be canceled it was the 1934 Summer Olympics in Berlin, which Adolph Hitler was using as a propaganda tool for his twisted theories about the superiority of the Aryan race and whites in general. Hitler dearly wanted his Olympics to be irrefutable proof of his white supremacist notions.

Instead, the great American black Olympian Jessie Owens competed and won four gold medals and sent Hitler and his entourage scurrying to the exits in a snivelling racist snit.

Never underestimate the human condition. Let the Games begin. In China!

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist, who absolutely believes in Cities, Altius, Fortius. Faster, higher, stronger.

Article Share