How can we know whether the Chinese Communist Party has succeeded in its propaganda aim for the Beijing Olympics? Ratings are one indication, and NBC’s aren’t great. As Jim and Jack have each recently written, the Olympics are a ratings dud.
Another indication is the extreme lengths to which party propagandists have gone to push back against international criticism of the Olympics. Government officials and human-rights advocates, including Elisha Wiesel — the son of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel — have loudly condemned the Beijing Olympics and the human-rights atrocities that they’re intended to whitewash. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, meanwhile, posted a video comparing CCP propaganda at the games to tactics the Nazis used in 1936.
Last night, China Daily columnist and malignant Twitter troll Chen Weihua replied to the Holocaust Museum’s post in a particularly revealing way: “Shame on the Holocaust Museum,” he wrote, reiterating the party’s lies about its concentration camps in Xinjiang and saying that the museum should be appreciative of Shanghai’s role in hosting Jewish refugees during World War II (and before the party swept to power).
Shame on the Holocaust Museum. Are you saying Nazi Holocaust of Jews was nothing but vocational training? More than 30,000 Jews sought refuge in Shanghai during the war and this is now your appreciation to the Chinese people?
— Chen Weihua （陈卫华） (@chenweihua) February 8, 2022
That video is only the latest work product from the museum’s critical work on mass-atrocity-prevention efforts. The Holocaust Museum last year took an admirable stand against the modern day atrocities the party is perpetrating in Xinjiang. In November, it released a report that concluded Beijing is carrying out crimes against humanity in the Xinjiang region and that it “may be committing genocide.”
It’s not particularly surprising that the party’s Twitter-focused propagandists would stoop to such a craven campaign against a Holocaust memorial museum — after all, these are the same people who mocked such tragic accidents as the Surfside building collapse as examples of American decline. But this incident may say something about whether they consider the Winter Olympics phase of their genocide-denial campaign a success.