I hate to ask you to read old pieces. But sometimes what’s old is new again. Today, on the homepage, we’re republishing a longish piece I wrote for the magazine in the summer of 2008: “The Road to Beijing: The perils and possibilities of holding the Olympic Games in a police state.” Why is this “new again”? Because, once more, the International Olympic Committee has awarded Games to Beijing, i.e., to the Chinese Communist Party: the Winter Olympics for 2022. This is a very important issue.

I’d like to give you a little excerpt from my ’08 piece. You might find the following surprising, as I did:

As a rule, Americans are taught that the ’36 Games were a failure for the Nazis, given the fabulous performance by Jesse Owens: The black American trackster won four gold medals. And that was supposed to have refuted Nazi race theories. Unfortunately, the Games were a huge success for the Nazis — enhancing their legitimacy, cementing their power. And Leni Riefenstahl made that stirring film, Olympia.
In his book Hitler’s Games, Duff Hart-Davis relates that Berlin was turned out nicely and benignly. This created the illusion that Nazi Germany was “a perfectly normal place, in which life went on as pleasantly as in any other European country.” Of course, Beijing has been engaged in the same Potemkinization — as was perfectly predictable.

In less than a decade — nine short years — Nazi Germany lay in smoldering ruins. The CCP has not been so stupid as to start a world war. Instead, it maintains a chokehold on more than a billion Chinese, in addition to aiding tyranny elsewhere (Sudan, for example).

My ’08 piece is longish — a real mag piece, rather than a breezy Web job — but I think and hope you’ll find it interesting. That the Olympic Games are held in police states is disgusting.