The 1936 Olympics in Beijing
There's a genocide happening. Should we even be watching?
It’s a deceptively simple question. Were you—the person who you are today—alive in 1936, knowing what we know now, would you have watched the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin? The immediate answer, of course—or, at least, I hope—would be, “Never!” We’d be (rightly) horrified. The Nazi Party was in power and, although the Final Solution was still some years away, the anti-Semitism, militarism, and hate were already clear for anyone who cared to see. It wasn’t hard to see the writing on the wall. So why are we watching the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing?
The concentration camps have already been built and filled. The persecution and torture, the sexual abuse and rape, are happening. Have been. While there’s no reason to believe that the Chinese Communist Party will build death camps, the fact is they’re already eliminating the Uyghur—just more (literally) clinically: They’re performing forced sterilizations. (In the many articles I’ve read about how China faces an unprecedented demographic crisis, exactly zero have noted that one of the few populations in China that’s naturally growing is being generationally destroyed.)
Oppression. Persecution. Ethnic cleansing. Settler colonialism. Genocide.
So, I ask you again. Would you have watched the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin? And if not, should we be watching the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing?
What are our obligations—as Muslims? Yes, ummah is a moral obligation. That it is rarely honored is true. But that does not eliminate the injunction, any more than the fact that racism is widespread in the Muslim world absolves us of the need to reject and oppose it. And as human beings? Concern for our fellow human beings is likewise a moral obligation, even if likewise it is rarely honored by too many. (And I do not exclude myself from this judgment.)
NBC has found itself in quite the quandary, caught between, on the one hand, COVID restrictions, and on the other, an increasingly militant, belligerent, and intolerant Communist dictatorship, escalating tensions with the United States. To its credit, NBC’s coverage featured a panel last night, including Yale Professor Jing Tsu, who I mentioned in yesterday’s post for the book she’s just written—she’s the author of The Kingdom of Characters, which, I’m excited to say, F has agreed to read with me!—talking about many of these very issues.1
Tsu made a good point. (Well, several, but one of which I’m focused on here.) If we were to ignore, isolate, and sideline China, then “China would go dark,” as she put it; in other words, in the absence of any engagement, would China’s victims be somehow more secure? Do we imagine that denying human exchange somehow leads the world to a better place? And, anyway, as many others before me have pointed out, how do we dissociate from the world’s only other superpower, with whom we are so economically implicated? I’m writing this on a MacBook. I use an iPhone.
But this is only compelling if our morality is so black-and-white, so crude and unsophisticated, that we can only imagine that our choices are ever and only between accomplishing all our goals and realizing none of them. The world doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t work that way. Human nature doesn’t work that way. Several months ago, my wife and I decided to supplement our weekly reflection on Islamic theology and ethics with a halaqa especially for our teenage girls, which would focus on the diversity of the Muslim experience globally. We decided to start with the Uyghur.2
Speaking of which, you can start here.
AMERICA IS NOT THE GREAT SATAN
Several months ago, I came across a great podcast, The Experiment, featuring Aséna Izgil, daughter of a famed Uyghur poet and activist, Tahir Izgil, who was himself featured prominently in The Atlantic.3 Aséna’s a teenage girl, an immigrant to America, one who came here seeking refuge from persecution; in some respects, though, she is not so unlike our daughters. She sounds very much like an ordinary teenager—until she starts talking about her family, history, and identity. We thought it’d be a powerful way to introduce a really uncomfortable subject.4
Genocide.
The deliberate attempt to eliminate a population based on, among other things, its racial, religious, ethnic, and/or linguistic identity. We met several times, shared numerous further resources, asked the girls to find good content too—they turned to, among other things, the BBC and The Economist (the YouTube video embedded above was F’s contribution)—and so we had really intense, wide-ranging, complicated, and challenging conversations about what’s happening in East Turkestan (the proper, accurate, and preferable name of the occupied territory sometimes called “Xinjiang”).
With the Olympics now underway in Beijing, it’s up to you, of course, if you’d like to watch, and how you’d like to watch.
Some people may find it too problematic to watch and I get that.
For one thing, I concur with our country’s decision to diplomatically boycott the Games. I’m not too keen on adventurist foreign policy, though I do agree with The Liberal Patriot here—and I’m cautious of our simply backing away from the world, as if a planet run by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping would be some kind of paradisiacal wonderland brown Muslims would joyfully frolic through. Though that’s not my point. This is. You and me, we’re not governments. We’re private citizens.
Watching—even just watching a little—may be an occasion to talk about something that needs to be talked about but all too often tragically isn’t.
We can use these moments as points of entry, as invitations to harder conversations, and encourage a critical approach to our consumption and engagement. Maybe that then opens the door to asking our kids: Do you think we should watch? Where do you think we should draw the line?
And why?
Because there’s always going to be engagement with the rest of the world. There should be, as Jing Tsu said.5 As we listened, my wife pointed to international scientific collaborations—like the ISS, for example—as well as the need to work together on climate change. And they’re both right. So I don’t have an easy answer here.
What I do think, however, is that if you must engage with a government—as opposed to people—you should do so in a way that honors the gravity of the policies otherwise left in the background. Our government should work with the Chinese government. But that can’t mean we must check our moral commitments.
And the framework that informs them.
What I’ve tried to emphasize in these halaqas is that evil runs through human beings, not between them. Some systems are manifestly unjust. Some are less so. Democracy should be superior to dictatorship: Maybe it doesn’t make the trains run on time, but human dignity is more valuable to God than temporal efficiency. Though just because a country is a democracy doesn’t mean it’s perfect on every measure. Still, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can accept that we’re flawed, and need work—look at the history of settler colonialism and racism in this country—and at the same time understand that other countries might commit horrific crimes.
Because all human beings are tempted to evil.
There’s this strange belief, among some Muslims, that the only ills in the world are American, or Israeli, or Western. (We heard a lot of this during Bashar al-Assad’s horrific war on his people—outright denialism, because of course if America’s enemy was doing it, how could it be bad?) Here’s an important lesson, however: One of the reasons political Islam was, and is, so foolish is because it maps morality onto geopolitics. America is not “the Great Satan.” Neither is Iran. Satan is Satan. And Satan’s not American. Or Persian. Satan’s not even human. We are all the Children of Adam, and Adam erred. Even in the Garden, lacking for nothing, he erred.
We are flawed. We are weak. We always need work.
Even if all we do is sit down a few minutes a day and reflect on the fact that we are in fact not the center of the universe, that’s better than nothing.
Because if we don’t remind ourselves everyday, we will fast forget. And act like it.
We should have the courage to call out oppression, wherever it happens. We should also look into ourselves. Not just at the country we live in, but we ourselves, personally and literally. What more can we do? Maybe we can’t stop the genocide of Uyghurs. Maybe China is too powerful. Maybe the rest of the world is too weak, too disinterested, or too eager for a profit.6 But we won’t answer for the rest of the world. Or even the country we live in. We answer for ourselves. How can we make ourselves vehicles and vectors for good? We can’t successfully oppose all evil. But we can still make heroic choices, day in and day out.
We can educate ourselves. We can educate others. We can raise money. We can support a more responsible foreign policy. We can vote to build out our economic self-sufficiency, so that we are less vulnerable to the belligerence of aggressive foreign powers. We can vote to invest in rebuilding democratic alliances instead of cozying up to terrible regimes. We can pursue more just and compassionate governance at home, not least so that we live in a fairer, kinder, better country, and also so that we can be a model, instead of a cautionary tale. We can worry less about ourselves and more about the people we love. If we can’t stop all harm, we don’t have to forfeit all good.
Because, in the end, we all face judgment. You, me, and even Xi Jinping.
Good luck with that, Mr. President.
During the protests following George Floyd’s murder, China’s government made much of how the racial injustice proved American perfidy. But here’s the thing. We had a national conversation about it. We still are. Is it perfect? No. Are we where we should be? Of course not. But just because we are not perfect does not somehow mean China isn’t committing genocide.
I suppose one could make an argument that, because they are facing genocide, their circumstances are among the most urgent of any Muslim population in the world. But that is not the argument I’m making. Starting with the Uyghurs was neither to confirm nor deny any hierarchy of moral priority (and I have no idea how we even do that where human dignity is concerned); rather, I came across a podcast shortly after my wife and I agreed on a supplemental halaqa—we nicknamed it the PG-13 halaqa, both because it was for our 13+ girls and because it was on more fraught topics. Namely, it’s the podcast mentioned in this post, featuring Aséna Izgil.
This is also a good resource.
We thought it’d be less overwhelming than an article, let alone a book—they already have so much on their plates, from school to sports—and because it’s a podcast, and they’ve got phones, they can listen whenever is convenient for them, without having to stare at a screen.
NBC will include Jing Tsu, as well as Andrew Browne, an editorial director at Bloomberg and formerly the China editor at The Wall Street Journal, as regular onscreen commentators, providing expert analysis on and of China throughout its Olympic broadcasts. I appreciate the decision and especially the commitment not to avoid, elide, or deny the ugly background of these Olympic Games.
As this post at TrueHoop makes clear, the NBA has a lot to answer for.