A dictatorship persecutes a minority but secures a propaganda coup by hosting the Olympics. The US Olympic committee plays along, the athletes say politics is none of their business and US corporations look the other way so they can make money.
But the 2022 Beijing Olympics are not the 1936 Berlin Olympics. They’re worse — and not just for the democracies, who are caught flatfooted once more.
The legend of 1936 is largely true. Jesse Owens really did outpace the master race in the foot race. The Nazis really did pull off a propaganda coup. They had Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl on their agitprop team, and Joseph Goebbels, the inventor of the Big Lie training technique, as head coach.
Speer’s stadium designs and Riefenstahl’s camerawork remain the unacknowledged templates of modern bread and circuses. To this day, budding dictators who dream of going for gold in the autocracy Olympics start their day with the Goebbels workout.
But that’s as far as it goes for the parallels between Berlin then and Beijing now.
The Nazis’ health and fitness schlock went over big with the global audience. But they were also pumping the blood and iron to pacify the German public. The 1936 circus was a win-win for Adolf’s athletes. The foreigners went home praising the Germans for being so hospitable (they were only following orders: The Führer had told them to be friendly).
And the International Olympic Committee, in its wisdom, granted Germany the 1940 Winter Olympics. The Germans got the message that sport is war in shorts and prepared to storm the podium — until they stormed Poland instead and the games were canceled.
Compare that with Beijing’s lose-lose this winter. The Chinese aren’t massing in the streets to greet the foreign talent. They’re not massing anywhere at all: Their government won’t let them leave their homes.
The trains might run on time in China, but China’s COVID vaccines are failures. The domestic audience for these games is in permanent COVID camp. In the race to exit COVID, China is winning the wooden spoon, on track to running it until 2023. You don’t get gold for breaking the record for the longest lockdown — and drawing the world’s attention to your failures is an Olympic-sized own goal, perhaps the biggest since Jesse Owens broke the tape in Berlin.
Foreign audiences aren’t falling for it either. Sure, we’ve seen echoes of 1936 in the inability of our dimwitted sportspersons to realize when they’re being played for propaganda, the hypocrisy of corporations like Coca-Cola and Nike, who patronize us with wokery while they flatter the proprietors of the biggest captive market in history, and the cowardice of a Democratic administration that issues a “diplomatic boycott,” which is a great way of insulting the hosts without actually achieving anything.
But look at the viewership: The Winter Olympics are a turn-off. On Wednesday, NBC admitted that this ordeal on ice has scored the lowest viewing figures in Olympic history, down nearly half from the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Unlike in 1936, Americans aren’t buying this. And while 1936 was all about masking the nature of Nazi Germany, this year, what we see is what we’re about to get.
The main event at these Olympics was Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping ending their long grudge match and agreeing to tag-team President Joe Biden. Xi and Putin upstaged the opening ceremony by issuing a marathon, 5,000-word communiqué. It’s a blueprint for sweeping the board and driving the United States and the other Western democracies out of the global running. The last time two dictators agreed to share the winner’s spoils like this, it was Hitler and Stalin joining forces in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.
The Russian president has a black belt in judo, and he’s certainly thrown the Americans off-balance in his warm-up bout in Ukraine. The Chinese president is an accomplished mixed martial artist too: In January, he broke his own record for throwing jet fighters into Taiwan’s airspace.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden can’t get off the starting blocks, and Kamala Harris talks a good game but doesn’t turn up for the heats. Our leaders are setting new records in incompetence and they’re just not putting in the hard hours of training. They snooze, we lose.
Dominic Green is the editor of The Spectator’s world edition.
