Munich 1936 & Beijing 2022: Our Inability To Learn From History Is Our Greatest Undoing
It’s simply unacceptable
In 1931, the decision was made to allow Germany to host the 1936 Olympics.
It didn’t matter to the IOC that Germany’s economy hadn’t fully recovered nor did it matter that reparation payments had stopped, everyone, it seemed was anxious to appease the vanquished nation.
Even when the Nazis took over power in 1933 and had turned their backs on democracy and its democratic institutions, you would think that the International Olympics Committee would rescind its decision?
No chance.
We all know what happened subsequently when Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Belgium, France and Romania were invaded and captured by the Germans and Europe became a fascist enclave. That Britain didn’t fall to the Nazis owed more to luck than anything else, despite arguments to the contrary from the natives.
We also know that centuries of anti-semitism in Europe found great expression in Hitler’s Germany, when six million Jews were rounded up from all over the continent and taken to the gas chamber in Auschwitz.
We musn’t forget the complicity of the IOC, the United States of America and its wealthiest citizens, the British royal family and its government, which made the worst crime against humanity possible.
To those who are mindful of history, these events are forever seared into our subconscious and rightly so.
And despite our knowledge of seminal events of the recent past, the IOC chose to award the 2022 winter Olympics to Beijing, armed with perfect information that the People’s Republic of China was (and still is) committing genocide on its soil, in this day and age.
Genocide, in the twenty-first century, I hear you ask?
Yes indeed.
The Uyghurs are the second largest Muslim minority group in the People’s Republic, situated in the North-West region.
Over the course of the last seven years, we have seen the state clamp down quite heavily on this group of people by performing forced abortions and sterilizations, detaining well over 1 million people and forcing them to work in sweat shops for next to nothing.
This inevitably has led to huge reduction in their numbers.
Rushan Abbas, the executive director for the campaign for Uyghurs, had the following to say:
China tries to media-watch its crimes against humanity, but every government leader knows the truth. Reputable new organizations debunk China’s myths. At one time, we said we did not know the full extent of what was happening in Germany; with the Uyghur genocide today, we have no such thing.
In the lead up to the Olympics, there has been a concerted government push to promote Xinjiang as a snow sport destination, accelerating the removal of the indigenous Uighur to make way for the ski lifts, slopes and foreign brands ready to build showrooms atop razed mosques and bull dozed communities.
Given what we know, It is truly extraordinary that there aren’t more people lining up to condemn China’s atrocities.
Is it because the persecuted are people of colour or is it because they are Muslims?
Why aren’t we on the streets denouncing China’s genocide, in greater numbers?
And this is why I strongly believe that our inability to learn from history is the reason why our world is such a huge mess, today.
It is why the Siberian tiger is seriously itching to invade Ukraine, a sovereign nation and a democracy, which is also a full member of NATO and we have the party of Lincoln and Reagan egging Vladimir Putin on.
It was why the mob of exclusively white men very nearly succeeded on the 6th of January 2021 in making America a fascist state.
It was why Whoopi Goldberg made that exceedingly stupid statement about the holocaust not being about race but about two sets of white folk fighting each other.
And for all of the trauma that humanity has faced, we seem hell bent on bringing about our own destruction.
Only God knows how it will all pan out.