AP

Lisa Van Dusen

January 10, 2022

“I am convinced that the American people do not want their athletes cast as pawns in that tawdry propaganda charade.”

Vice President Walter Mondale addressing the United States Olympic Committee in Colorado Springs, April 12, 1980, hours before the USOC voted to support a full boycott of the Moscow Olympic Games in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan four months earlier.

It is impossible to look back at the international Olympic boycott of 1980 — including the full athletic embargo joined by the Canadian government of Pierre Trudeau — for context on next month’s Beijing Games without confronting a cascade of ironies.

First of all, tawdry propaganda charades aren’t what they were before the world was subjected to a four-year tawdry propaganda charade disguised as an American presidency. In that same speech Mondale made exhorting the USOC to endorse Jimmy Carter’s boycott, he cited the 1936 Berlin Games, also known as the tawdriest propaganda charade ever to co-opt the Olympic rings as cover. “As Joseph Goebbels boasted on the eve of the Olympics,” Mondale recalled, “the Reich expected the games ‘to turn the trick and create a friendly world attitude toward Nazi political, economic, and racial aims.’” In the lifetime since Jesse Owens delivered an eloquent, one-man rebuke to those aims in the form of four gold medals, the free world has come to view the 1936 Olympics as, shall we say, a lost optics opportunity.

China — today’s aggressive, non-democratic aspirational superpower — values next month’s Olympics as a timely and potent propaganda opportunity, especially since the 2008 Beijing Summer Games were prefaced by an international torch relay so disrupted by pro-Tibet protests that the International Olympic Committee (IOC), per its unfailing moral compass, discontinued international torch relays before, in 2015, awarding China the 2022 Winter Games.

That was one year after Beijing publicly launched its institutionalized persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang — now widely labelled genocide, including by the Canadian House of Commons — under the Orwellian title of Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism. By 2017, mass arrests and forced sterilizations had begun and internment camps officially labelled “vocational educational and training centers” were appearing. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Xinjiang Data Project has mapped more than 380 detention camps and facilities across Xinjiang, where as many as 1.8 million Muslim Uyghurs are held against their will. I’d connect you to the ASPI’s research on the globalization of Beijing’s re-education technologies pioneered in Northwest China where “Chinese technology firms have received billions of dollars in Chinese state capital” to create “a wide range of computer vision and data analysis tools which have the potential to change forms of policing and incarceration in many places around the world” but that URL is currently indisposed (have a go if you like … it may be back up by the time you read this).

The second grand irony; the justification for the 1980 boycott was the Soviet Union’s hubristic, fin-de-régime adventurism in a country whose reputation as the graveyard of empires has lately been reanimated in aspiring-new-world-order circles following the O. Henry ending of a frictionless, highly cinematic Taliban takeover 20 years after America’s own consensual, post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan. Whether such a stunning reversal in the country with what was surely the highest concentration of US intelligence operatives — on and off the books — in the world in this century represents its own irony is beside the point that Afghanistan can now be dropped into the column of post-democracy countries, many of which neighbouring China has helped to flip with coercive diplomacy, debt-trap domination and corruption capture.

While Xi Jinping is using propaganda and narrative engineering in an attempt to obfuscate the present and define the future, Vladimir Putin is using propaganda and narrative engineering in an attempt to rewrite history.

The third irony is that, even as the world prepares to witness, from February 4^thto 20^th, what we can assume will be a propaganda charade, tawdry or not, the brazenly pro-democracy current American president, Joe Biden, is dealing with the threat of another Russian invasion, this time of Ukraine. In other words, while Xi Jinping is using propaganda and narrative engineering in an attempt to obfuscate the present and define the future, Vladimir Putin is using propaganda and narrative engineering in an attempt to rewrite history. In 21^st-century warfare terms, it’s an industrialized-BS, aspiring-new-world-order pincer movement with a dash of weaponized domestic treason by key American players of both parties and parts beyond thrown in for added monstrosity value.

The fourth irony is that the same regime that covered up the trajectory of the COVID origin story and obstructed all subsequent efforts to investigate it is now facing a propaganda-charade threat not from a full Olympic boycott, though Beijing is not pleased with the diplomatic boycott of the Games by the US and Canada, among a dozen countries at this writing. Having imposed a “zero-tolerance” COVID policy ahead of the Olympics, the most serious threat to the Games at this point would be, as Canadian IOC veteran and notorious disarmingly-candid-quote generator Dick Pound put it to USA Today: “The concern is about all the people who are not yet in China. If, one by one, they get picked off and you lose a bobsledder here, a skater there. If you got to the point where there were only Chinese athletes, then no, these aren’t the Olympic Games and they wouldn’t be recognized as such.” The likelihood of that happening seems all-but nonexistent which, given that the dye was cast on these games by the IOC years ago and more human suffering will not help anyone at this stage, is fortunate.

The fifth irony of the 1980 vs. 2022 contexts is that human rights, like propaganda charades, are not what they used to be. In 1980, the Moscow boycott lobbying effort was backed by Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and fronted — controversially but successfully — by Muhammad Ali, based in part on the human rights argument that the Soviet Union had invaded a Muslim country and, as a Muslim, Ali felt he had an obligation to take a stand. While touring Africa, the most famous man in the world balked at being portrayed as a political pawn, but the boycott was ultimately joined by 65 nations. The Soviet Union remained in Afghanistan for another nine years, pulling out in February 1989, nine months before the Berlin Wall came down. The 1980 boycott still rankles among the athletes forced to forgo the Games, but of the six boycotts in modern Olympic history — including China’s boycott of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics over disqualification of athletes who’d competed in the 1963 New Emerging Forces Jakarta games, and the 1976 boycott of the Montreal Olympics by 28 African countries over New Zealand’s defiance of the international embargo of apartheid South Africa — it remains the most coherent.

Today, the combination of technological innovation in non-state and state-sponsored covert cruelty, strategic corruption and global democracy degradation has created a borderless human rights depletion that includes so many ostensibly rule-of-law protected rights — from freedom of the press to privacy to voting rights to free and fair elections to mobility rights — that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is beginning to read like an aspiring new world order target list.

Finally, the irony we won’t be able to gauge until the full scope and scale of the “propaganda charade” aspect of these games becomes clear; the moral conundrum of a geopolitical player that seems to have decoupled its behaviour from the cost-benefit calculations of authentic public approval going to great lengths to earn that approval by leveraging an event whose first governing principle is “to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.”

These games have been dubbed by some, for shock value, the Genocide Olympics. They are most definitely the Irony Olympics.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.