RFI Excecutive Vice President Eric Patterson recently authored an article published in WORLD titled, “Beijing’s Berlin Moment.” In it, he draws parallels between the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and the 2022 Olympics in Beijing and asks what should have been done differently in the lead-up to the current games, and what should be done now as they begin, to avoid letting “the Olympics overshadow China’s human rights abuses.”

Patterson writes:

Should the United States have participated in Hitler’s Olympics in the first place? Similar questions have been raised about U.S. participation in Beijing’s 2022 Winter Olympics, which begin on Friday. The United States’ diplomatic boycott sends an incomplete message. But the real problem is that totalitarian China is hosting the Olympic games in the first place. Our focus now should be on how to prevent a similar scenario in the future.

After insisting that “the International Olympic Committee should ban China from participating in 2024 and future Olympics until there is a dramatic improvement in the plight of China’s Uyghurs and Hong Kong,” Patterson goes on to consider ways that governments, corporations, consumers, individual families, faith communities, athletes, cultural influencers, sportscasters, and others can speak and act forcefully against the kinds of grave injustices taking place in China.

“Sadly,” Patterson observes, “the run-up to the 2022 Winter Olympics has been far from a clarion call on human rights and justice. “

Read the full article: “Beijing’s Berlin Moment.”