Knowing what you know now about the Holocaust, if you were given a chance to go back in time and attend the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, would you?

Would you willingly support the propagandistic rebranding efforts of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime?

Or would you do everything in your power not only to signal your own disapproval of the regime, but to urge lawmakers, corporate stakeholders, and individual members of your community to join in your act of resistance?

Unfortunately, this is not a thought experiment.

Nearly a century after what would come to be known as the Nazi Olympics, these questions are alarmingly contemporary as a global superpower prepares to host the Games despite widespread awareness of its use of re-education camps, forced labor, and sexual violence against its own ethnic minorities.

As Beijing prepares for the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, nearly two million Uyghurs and members of other ethnic Muslim minority groups in Western China toil in concentration camps amid an ongoing and sustained campaign of persecution decried by the White House as genocidal.

“Don’t watch the Olympics,” said Christopher Martz, Executive Director of the Syrian Accountability Project (SAP; the Project) — a group of law students-turned-investigative reporters based out of Syracuse University’s College of Law. In the leadup to the Olympics, SAP released a damning report accusing the International Olympics Committee (IOC) of profit-driven complicity in crimes against humanity and drawing parallels between past Olympics mired in human rights controversies and the Beijing Games.

“The athletes are going to be skiing in snow stained in the blood of Uyghurs, and we need to change our habits in terms of how we consume, and we need to exert pressure on states and corporations alike, in order to avoid utilizing these cheap logistics and supply lines that are predicated on the exploitation of the Uyghur people,” Martz said in a recent JURIST interview.

Political pressure has mounted on Western governments to actively oppose Beijing’s persecution of the Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups. And while the US and several other governments have elected to diplomatically boycott the Olympics, a move that effectively curbs their official presence at the Games, they haven’t gone so far as to keep their athletes at home.

For Washington’s part, not only will its athletes participate; many major US corporations will profit handsomely from the event. Accordingly, the diplomatic boycotts have been criticized as little more than empty gestures.

“More has to be done related to the world ignoring a genocide in western China. And yet, we’re all going to show up and celebrate sport under the mantle of the IOC, which essentially puts cash and profit over sport. China will keep moving forward, aided and abetted by the IOC, which has a long history in the modern era of giving the opportunity of tyrants and dictators to showcase themselves — a trend that began with Berlin hosting the 1936 Olympics,” said Professor David Crane, Former Chief Prosecutor for the Special Court of Sierra Leone, and the faculty leader of SAP.

The Project’s deputy director, third-year Syracuse Law student Kanalya Arivalagan, echoed the sentiment. “What the international community needs now are political will and political courage. Diplomatic boycotts like those initiated by [US President] Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, and by [US President] Joe Biden now, are not enough. We need to be willing to pull out of the Olympics; we need to be willing to say that we’re not going to go through with it. We don’t want a repeat of the Olympics in Nazi Germany,” she said.

These words fall all the more forcefully against the backdrop of an October 2021 statement by Biden, in which he highlighted China as evidence that human rights atrocities didn’t end with World War II. “[The Nuremburg trials] forced us to look closely at the evil of humankind and what we’re capable of perpetrating, to see mass atrocities, crimes against humanity do not happen by accident. … They result of choices — choices made by individual human beings and world leaders. And sadly, when we look around the world today, we cannot say that the specter of atrocity is behind us. We see today the patterns, the choices playing out around the world even as we speak: the oppression and use of forced labor of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang…”

In many respects, we know more now than we did in 1936.

At that point, it had been three years since Nazi Germany had established its first concentration camps, though the detainees at that point were mostly political prisoners — not individuals targeted solely for their ethnicities. The Nazi regime had already implemented a series of anti-Semitic policies, signaling its morally repugnant views on human rights, and had remilitarized the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, signaling its disregard for international agreements. Taken together, these actions were viewed as reprehensible enough to inspire talk of boycotting the Olympics. But Germany had not yet invaded Poland, it had not yet started World War II, and the millions of people who would be killed in Nazi extermination camps in the coming years were still alive — albeit under increasingly grim circumstances. So the Olympics went on.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know more broadly what humankind is capable of. Much of what we now recognize as international criminal justice is rooted in the horrors of World War II.

We also know concretely what China is doing to the Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang.

A bill passed by Congress in December 2021 states: “In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, the Government of the People’s Republic of China has, since 2017, arbitrarily detained as many as 1.8 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and members of other Muslim minority groups in a system of extrajudicial mass internment camps, in addition to arbitrarily detaining many in formal prisons and detention centers, and has subjected detainees to forced labor, torture, political indoctrination, and other severe human rights abuses.”

The latter abuses reportedly extend to forced sterilization, sexual violence and forced separation of children from their parents — a spate of policies that, combined, lead to what the SAP report describes as “slow genocide.”

And we know that China is going to great lengths to punish and denounce governments, corporations, and individuals who speak out against Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs.

And yet the Olympics will go ahead with full US athletic participation, as well as a bounty of US corporate sponsorship.

“It was easy to find a lot of open-source documents supporting our legal analysis in terms of how jus cogens norms are being violated through this slow genocide, which has been aided and abetted by the IOC,” Arivalagan said.

Martz added: “Throughout its history, the IOC has been pretty consistent in the way it approaches political disruption and allegations of crimes against humanity. Their standard response is to claim that they’re an apolitical organization, and that they don’t want to do anything that would harm the athletes. But as this paper points out, silence is the language of the oppressor. And the IOC stands right beside China in terms of instigating and propagating the ability of authoritarian states to assert their violent will on minority groups such as the Uyghur people. … Ultimately, the IOC is creating a product for consumption, and it will try to cash in on that, even if a couple hundred miles away, a genocide is occurring.”

In addition to the IOC, the report takes to task the corporate sponsors who are lining their coffers with Olympic profits.

“For years, China has been engaged in a concerted effort to destroy, in whole or in part, the Uyghur people. And yet the world is locked in China’s death grip. China isn’t just a major military power; it has slowly but surely economically infiltrated many countries around the world. And as a result, no one wants to face China over a human rights issue,” Crane said.

With respect to the corporate sponsors, he did not mince words: “We need to be able to make it commercially costly for corporations to support authoritarian regimes during the Olympics. In this context, it’s appropriate to smear these corporations with the blood of the Uyghur people. If we could instigate change in South Africa, where Apartheid had been entrenched for decades, we can certainly have an impact on corporations whose sponsorship of the Olympics fuel authoritarian regimes.”

Martz agreed, noting: “So long as we have an economic environment that that is predicated on the exploitation of free labor — of cheap consumer products produced in concentration camps, of cheap logistics lines, of exploiting the relationship between human and consumer, the problem will persist.”

Top corporate sponsors singled out in the report include Airbnb, Alibaba, Allianz, Atos, Bridgestone, CocaCola, Intel, OMEGA, Panasonic, Proctor & Gamble, SAMSUNG, TOYOTA, and VISA.

“There’s so much money involved, and so much money being made, and that washes out the righteous indignation of atrocity accountability,” Crane said.

For those who are resolute in their answers to the introductory questions about support for the Nazi Olympics, and who wish to act meaningfully on Beijing’s human rights atrocities, SAP urges institutional and individual action.

On an institutional level, Crane believes a straightforward and effective solution would be to establish permanent locations for the Olympics, thereby curbing the lure of the Olympics as a means of autocratic rebranding. “The Summer Olympics, for example, could take place in Greece, and another neutral country could be the permanent host of the Winter Olympics. Other countries could participate by donating funds to build cutting-edge training and showcase facilities. But ultimately, this initiative would move us away from the commercialization and politicization of the IOC,” Crane said.

Corporations also need to continue and expand their drives to push goods sourced from forced Xinjiang labor out of the supply chain. “Whether we’re talking about cotton products, or tech, or pharmaceutical industries, or the Olympic games — these are all consumer products that are utilizing the ability of the Chinese state to exploit minority groups through human trafficking, slavery, and forced infertility. It’s a travesty of political courage, and of political will on the international level, particularly by the leaders of supposedly democratic nations,” Martz said.

On an individual level, in addition to simply not watching the Games, concerned global citizens should contact their lawmakers to voice their concerns and push for legislative and political action, join the campaign to end the reliance of global fashion chains on Xinjiang cotton, and support Uyghur advocacy groups.

“It’s easy to get disillusioned with the power we hold as individuals. But there are actually a lot of actions individuals, as well as countries, can take in response to companies that are profiting from atrocities. There’s a solution here and our goal in publishing this paper is to convey that point,” said Arivalagan.

The authors emphasized that this is not a problem that can be solved immediately, that the global community must brace for the long game. “I accept that we can’t resolve this issue by 2022. But past human rights interventions have taken time. We should be thinking in terms of what we can accomplish in a few years with persistent global effort. By 2030, perhaps we can assert consistent global pressure on China, thereby creating political courage, and political will, both of which are going to need to be present in the international discourse,” Martz said.