Not only does the world cravenly looks the other way as the Chinese Communist Party commits systemic human-rights atrocities of a kind that we haven’t seen for nearly 100 years but it also abjectly honors the country by allowing the Winter Olympics to be hosted in Beijing.
What a travesty. The genocide of the Uyghur Muslims — which includes mass incarceration in concentration camps, forced sterilization and abortion, rape as a means of terror, and use in slave labor is evil enough to warrant treating China as a pariah.
Add in organ harvesting of the Falun Gong, cultural genocide in Tibet, the suppression of Hong Kong, the pernicious social-credit system that targets, among others, Christians. Also, racketeering-levels of intellectual-property theft, illegal South China Sea hegemony, menacing of Taiwan, aggressive hacking, spying, loan sharking the developing world, and lest we forget, the Great Covid Coverup.
But much of the world is addicted to the money to be made in and from China, cheap products manufactured there, and our dependence on its willingness to exploit natural resources needed for modern technological and clean-energy products that western environmentalists insist be kept in the ground here.
In the face of a call by human-rights activists and those who simply believe in basic human decency to boycott the Olympics, the most our fearless president could muster was a “diplomatic boycott,” which only means that Vice President Kamala Harris won’t travel to Beijing for the opening ceremonies. Whoop de do!
Most countries couldn’t even manage that. Worse, António Guterres, the craven Secretary General of the United Nations, is attending the Games.
Our leaders may be inert, but we can all make a simple symbolic statement of disdain. Don’t watch the Olympics. Ignore tomorrow’s opening ceremonies. Don’t record the events. Shun YouTube videos of the skiers or skaters. Boycott the whole damn thing. Make these Games the lowest rated in television history.
That symbolic protest won’t stop the genocide. But it will tell our leaders that human rights still matter to the American people.
The opposite will also prove true too. If the Games are widely watched, if most of us cheer on Team America, it will prove to Chinese leaders that the West speaks loudly about human rights but carries a limp stick.
And we will demonstrate to ourselves that most of us care more about being entertained and having access to cheap products than we do the actions of the world’s most vicious tyranny. I hope we are not that decadent.