The United States is diplomatically boycotting the Beijing 2022 Olympics due to concerns of human rights violations in Xinjiang China. Other countries such as India, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom have followed suit as well. How does this impact international and foreign relations? Will this lead to more division in our global community? What can we do as a Brandeis community to bridge that gap going forward?   

In the end, the diplomatic boycott of the Olympics, dubbed by some as the “Genocide Games,”  on part of  some of the world’s leading democracies, will do little to impact the relations of countries who already disagree on so much.  A largely symbolic event that is no stranger to being hosted by authoritarian, genocidal regimes, the Olympics, time after time, amount to nothing more than a whitewashing and legitimizing of tyranny in favor of sports and prestige. The International Olympic Committee, which selects the sites of the Games, is a notoriously corrupt organization run by aristocratic grifters that care for nothing other than appealing to the highest bidder. The fact that Almaty, Kazakhstan, recently the site of a brutal suppression of protests against an autocratic government, was the runner-up in the voting process, losing to Beijing by only four votes, tells us all we need to know. Turn off the TV. 

Gabriel Frank ’22 is a Associate editor for the Justice majoring in Philosophy .