Berlin 1936. Beijing 2022. Must China's Uighurs play the role Jews did in Hitler Olympics?

It should be evident to all paying attention that the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics will proceed as planned. Forget the meager protests against China’s cruel and immoral treatment of its own. The bad guys appear to be on the verge of another power-play victory.

Never mind the plight of China’s Uighur Muslims, underground Christian churches, Tibetan Buddhists and all the other groups the Beijing government labels a political threat. They’re of no lasting concern to the international elite who are quick to issue public condemnations, but oh so slow when it comes to follow up.

China’s political power — a byproduct of its enormous economic strength — is just too much to counter. And Beijing’s despotic leaders darn well know it.

This recent Associated Press article — “Beijing Olympics open in 4 months; human rights talk absent” — underscores the point. These opening graphs summarize the story quite well. They're also a reminder of the efficacy of traditional wire journalism’s inverted pyramid style. This piece of the story is long, but essential:

When the International Olympic Committee awarded Beijing the 2008 Summer Olympics, it promised the Games could improve human rights and civil liberties in China.
There is no such lofty talk this time with Beijing’s 2022 Winter Olympics — the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Games — opening in just four months on Feb. 4.
Instead, there are some calls for governments to boycott the Games with 3,000 athletes, sponsors and broadcasters being lobbied by rights groups representing minorities across China.
IOC President Thomas Bach has repeatedly dodged questions about the propriety of holding the Games in China despite evidence of alleged genocide, vast surveillance, and crimes against humanity involving at least 1 million Uyghurs and other largely Muslim minorities. Tibet, a flashpoint in the run up to 2008, remains one still.
“The big difference between the two Beijing Games is that in 2008 Beijing tried to please the world,” Xu Guoqi, a historian at the University of Hong Kong, said in an email to The Associated Press. “In 2022, it does not really care about what the rest of the world thinks about it.”

Despite China's vast religious and political repression, 2022 Olympic boycott still unlikely

We’re rapidly approaching the inflection point on whether China will get to stage the 2022 Winter Olympics without some sort of concurrent international protest — such as a major boycott — prompted by Beijing’s often outrageous treatment of its Muslim Uighur, Tibetan Buddhist and underground Christian religious minorities, as well as its secular pro-democracy movement.

The question for me is: Will the international community — and in particular the United States and other democracy-espousing nations — punk out as it did with the Nazi-run 1936 Berlin Olympics. Or will the International community find some righteous backbone and either boycott the 2022 winter games, or make its opposition to Beijing’s policies known in another significant and unmistakable manner?

China, of course, has threatened retaliation against any nation that dares to challenge it by linking the Olympics and human rights.

When I last posted about the possibility of an international boycott of the upcoming China Games, — back in 2019 — I wrote off any boycott possibility as an extreme long shot.

As of this writing, I think a widespread boycott is still highly unlikely. But it’s no longer a completely dismissible long shot, I believe, because of changed circumstances — not the least of which is the ongoing coronavirus crisis and China’s oblique explanations of the pandemic’s Wuhan region origins.

Why still unlikely? Ironically, for the very same reason a protest is now slightly more conceivable, the coronavirus.

The U.S., without which no boycott can succeed, as well as its major pro-Western democratic allies, are all still deeply engaged in trying to halt the coronavirus.

We don’t know how much longer this fight will go on or what surprises are ahead. Regardless, the effort has left them economically vulnerable and politically drained. I’d say they lack the necessary additional emotional and intellectual bandwidth to take on another international crisis. Certainly not one they can avoid without triggering immediate dire consequences for their own citizens.

Forget the morality of the situation. Moral avoidance is a well-honed government strategy with a global heritage.