As for the US, there will be no calling out of the dire condition of America’s migrant camps on the border with Mexico (including disease and sexual abuse), or how California has its prison population – mainly racial minorities – performing “slave-like labour”, or its grisly use of torture (a human rights abuse) at Guantanamo Bay. No commentators will cite the fact that the US has been at war 226 out of 244 years since 1776, or the war crimes it has committed during its invasions including most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor will there be talk about the tens of thousands of Iranian children who died due to sanctions imposed by the US, which flout international law.
Nor will there be a righteous examination of America’s history of systemic racism against its sportspeople — still alive and well — or its suppression of journalism and freedom of speech, for example the decade-long attempt at extraditing Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, to the US to face trial, which was just granted by the British Court of Appeal.
Yet the topics of racism and freedom of speech are fervently placed under the microscope when international sporting events are held in non-Western nations. Imagine the media frenzy this week if Assange was Chinese and had released reports on China — he would be hailed as a global hero by governments and media alike. It was interesting to see how mainstream Western media like the BBC and CNN did not take the side of a fellow journalist, but instead toed the line of their governments and even insinuated that Assange was involved in espionage.
Lastly — to draw comparisons to the case of Chinese tennis player Peng Shuai, which was a trigger for the diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics — there will be no mention of the fact that US and French presidents have a history of womanising and affairs, and some even of sexual abuse (former US president Donald Trump has faced 25 accusations of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment alone), and that no other country responded to these allegations with boycotts of international sporting events despite how the victims were treated and silenced. Instead, everything will be calm and the Western media will be in celebration mode.
There is always place in sport for politics and social justice. But there is a pattern to the Western boycotting of international sporting events, and it is another example of global inequity and how global white privilege works. What is also most interesting — and has never been so clearly on display — is the apparent “collusion” between Western governments and the Western media, who seem to put their political differences aside when it comes to demonising their public enemy number one: China.
