Beijing --Blog 5

The question of whether Beijing should be able to host the Olympic Games is a tough one, especially considering the cities that have historically hosted the games. Take for instance the 1936 Olympic Games, hosted by Berlin. At that time, Hitler and the Nazi’s had already been forcing human rights violations on the Jewish population for over three years, including stripping Jewish immigrants from Poland of their citizenship and prohibiting Jews from owning land. And Hitler was officially named Fuhrer in 1934, two full years before the games were hosted in Berlin. The fact that German Jews were consistently falling victim to human rights violations didn’t seem to affect the decision to hold the most important global sporting event in Berlin. Take any city that has hosted the games, and you could find some human rights violation that had taken place in that country. The difference between most of those countries, however, and the decision to host the games in Beijing, is that those problems were not occurring literally at the same time as the games. I think, however, that if we’re going to prevent one country from hosting the games based on their global policy, the decision of where to host the games would become a far more difficult one. For instance, the debate over holding the games in Chicago in 2016—whether you are in support of our position in the middle east, it would absolutely have to be taken into consideration that we did, in fact, occupy a country. America waged a very unpopular war, and that information would have to be taken into account. The war in Iraq is not the same thing as China’s violations toward Tibetans, but the difficulty with establishing any standard of this type is that it is all or nothing. There would have to be some kind of agreed-upon standard for what violations are bad enough to warrant stripping a country of the privilege of hosting the games.