Tag: International Organizations

Boycott Beijing’s Genocide Games

Mike Coté2 Comments

The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing are starting; Americans who care about human rights or geopolitics should join me in skipping them.

The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games live in infamy as a terrible example of how a genocidal authoritarian regime can use international media and sport to serve as propagandists for its evil cause. Despite our appropriate modern appraisal of the Nazi Olympics, the Games were a clear success at the time and greatly legitimized the Hitler regime in the eyes of the wider world. Newspapers around the world largely covered the events as though they occurred in a free nation, only occasionally touching on authoritarian Nazi policies in between race results and medal tables. Some papers even promoted the ceremonial aspects of the Games – obvious and direct Nazi propaganda – with wide-eyed admiration. There were those brave few who pushed boycotts of the Berlin Games for the very abuses we see today as blatantly immoral, but their pleas mostly fell on deaf ears. We must not make that same mistake again.

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The Disgrace of the WHO

Mike Coté2 Comments

Rejoining the World Health Organization (WHO) was a mistake. The Biden administration should revoke their promise to do so, post-haste.

Throughout the past year of the global pandemic, the World Health Organization has been negligent and has routinely gotten things wrong. From their wholesale reliance on China’s word when it came to the early outbreak to their stance against masking and long-time claims that the virus was not airborne, the group failed at its mission of global public health. These failures are not unrepresentative of the WHO’s general approach, as the body seems to focus more on international politics than it does health these days. The organization is led by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian public health figure whose candidacy to lead the body was mainly supported by the Chinese government in opposition to a Western-backed figure. Tedros has come through in a big way for his Chinese Communist Party backers, taking the Chinese government line as the gospel truth and pushing against any and all parties who blame China for this plague year. The WHO has been inconsistent on nearly all aspects of its coronavirus approach, but for its constant support of the CCP. This should be unacceptable in a global public health organization.

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