China Struggles to Fend Off Talk of Nazis

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A newly reopened museum exhibit and a spate of anti-China opinion columns have left China struggling to fend off unwelcome comparisons between the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing and the 1936 Olympics hosted by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

On Friday, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington put on display “The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936,” which gives particular attention to Hitler’s efforts to harness the propaganda value of the games. The exhibition, which also highlights the lackluster attempts at a boycott, is scheduled to run through August 17, just after the Beijing games get under way.

“There’s just a lot of resonance given what’s going on in the discussion today. We think, obviously, this will help inform the discussion,” the exhibit’s curator, Susan Bachrach, said when asked about the timing. She stressed that the displays were first developed in connection with the Atlanta games in 1996 and do not refer to China.

“Germany in 1936 and China in 2008 are two totally different places and two different contexts in the world,” Ms. Bachrach said. “It’s not the same situation, but there are obvious parallels.”

Calls for boycotts of the Beijing games because of China’s record in Tibet and Sudan are running up against what Ms. Bachrach noted are many of the same responses given in the lead-up to the 1936 Olympics. “The big argument was, ‘We need to keep sports separate from politics. The games are for the athletes, not the politicians,'” she said. The exhibit observes that the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, urged athletes not to take sides in what he called “the Jew-Nazi altercation.”

Some rabbis are now directly invoking the Berlin example as part of arguments that it is “not kosher” to go to the Beijing games. “We remember all too well how Nazi Germany sought to attract visitors to the 1936 Olympics in order to distract attention from its persecution of the Jews,” rabbis Irving Greenberg and Haskel Lookstein wrote recently in the New York Jewish Week. “Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, called the 1936 games ‘a victory for the German cause.’ The Chinese government is hoping for a propaganda victory of its own. Beijing would like to attract Jewish visitors to this year’s games as part of its broader strategy of improving its image and deflecting attention from its complicity in severe human rights abuses at home and abroad.”

Asked whether he views the Chinese regime as akin to Hitler’s, Rabbi Lookstein told The New York Sun last night: “I don’t want to say the Chinese are analogous to the Nazis. The Chinese government is doing some terrible things.” He said China could instantly curtail the genocide in Darfur by leaning on Sudan, but has not.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington had no immediate comment on the Jewish Week article or the exhibit. However, last month, a former Cabinet minister in Britain, Michael Portillo, provoked an angry reaction from the Chinese government by drawing parallels between the 1936 and 2008 Olympics. “In Berlin, the anti-Jewish notices were taken down in the weeks preceding the games. In Beijing, the use of cars has been restricted to reduce air pollution,” Mr. Portillo wrote in a column in the Times of London. He also predicted the Olympics might end up giving China an unexpected black eye, much as Jesse Owens’s victories in Berlin rebuked Hitler.

“By comparing the Beijing Olympics with the 1936 Berlin Games, the Times and its journalist insulted the people of China and the world,” a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, Qin Gang, declared at a news conference. “The Olympic torch represents the good will of human beings. It also casts light on the true face and the gloomy and despicable mentality of some people.”

The Nazi comparisons kicked off last year when an actress active on the Darfur issue, Mia Farrow, asked in the Wall Street Journal whether a Hollywood director tapped to consult on this summer’s Olympics, Steven Spielberg, could “go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games?” In February, Mr. Spielberg announced that his conscience would not allow him to participate.

Americans who support close relations with China said they are taken aback by the Nazi comparisons. “To me, that’s a stretch,” the president of the U.S. China People’s Friendship Association, Robert Sanborn, said. “I have a hard time even thinking about the parallels with Germany.”

Mr. Sanborn noted that China served as a refuge for tens of thousands of Jews fleeing persecution by the Nazis. “China was the only country that would allow people in,” he said. “Even our own country told people not to come. If you’re going to throw bricks, the windows are open pretty wide.”

The president of a Jewish group organizing against the genocide in Sudan, Ruth Messinger of the American Jewish World Service, said she avoids direct comparisons between the Darfur violence and the Holocaust. “In general, we would not use that language,” she said.

“The situations are really quite different.”

Ms. Messinger called Beijing an “enabler” of the genocide in Sudan. Her group wants President Bush to stay home from the games, but has not endorsed an all-out boycott.

“As a Jew, I think the comparison is going a bit too far,” an Olympic historian who also compiles an annual list of the world’s worst dictators for Parade magazine, David Wallechinsky, said. However, he added, “The cultural revolution and the purges of the Chinese Communists killed more people than the Nazis did.”

Mr. Wallechinsky said nonviolent protests at the games would probably be more effective than a boycott, which he said was “so easy to spin” in the state-controlled press. In Parade’s latest ranking of worst dictators, President Hu of China came in fifth, just behind King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and just ahead of President Mugabe of Zimbabwe.


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