By Dan Goldbloom
National Post, August 18, 2008
In 1938 Sammy Luftspring, once a poor boy from Kensington market, became
Canada’s welterweight boxing champion. In 1985 he was inducted into Canada’s
Sports Hall of Fame. Those who take interest in the pugilistic arts remember him
fondly, as did my late uncle, who was an amateur boxer during the 1920s and ’30s
and travelled in Sammy’s social circle.
But that is not all that
Luftspring is famous for. Sammy was raised in the Jewish ghetto in Toronto
during the early ’20s. In an age before the Internet he had figured out what was
going on in Germany, and he had a clear vision of the shape of things to come
there.
In 1936 he refused to represent Canada at the Olympic Games in
Germany that were hosted by Adolph Hitler. Years later he said, "No one had
really listened to me when I said the Nazis were bad guys. Now they were going
to spend the next five-and-a-half years fighting them." He was one of the first
Canadians to challenge Hitler’s "big lie" that all of Germany’s problems were of
other people’s making.
Despite the embrace of capitalism that has
recently transformed China, its government does not tolerate internal dissent or
external criticism. Anyone who finds fault with the government can be labelled
an "enemy of the state," and those citizens who dare cross the line end up in
prison. Like the Nazis did in 1936, the Chinese Communists are hosting the
Olympic Games in Beijing to demonstrate the strength of their regime.
Yet
Canadians are celebrating. In the press we read about Canada’s young tennis
marvel Frank Dancevic who proclaims, "It’s an honour to compete for Canada at
the Olympics … this will be an experience of a lifetime. I look forward to
representing our country with the rest of the Canadian Olympians."
Is it
really an honour, or are Canadian athletes, their trainers and supporters
fooling themselves and unwittingly giving credibility to one of the world’s most
cruel and powerful regimes, as was the case during the 1936 Olympics? If they
had asked Harry Wu, they might have thought twice.
Harry Wu is the
founder of the Laogai Research Foundation. Harry was a political prisoner in a
Chinese work camp (laogai) for more than two decades. He was never given a free
and fair trial; in prison he was starved, tortured, beaten and "re-educated" and
witnessed countless concentration-camp style atrocities during his years of
illegal detainment.
When he finally reached the United States and
regained his freedom for the first time since 1949, he began to speak about his
experiences and collect documentation on China’s 1,200 known forced labour
camps, which have imprisoned up to 7 million inmates. Conditions in these camps
resemble those in German slave labour camps during the 1930s and ’40s and in the
Soviet gulags of the post-war period, except for the fact that these Chinese
camps are still in existence — their prisoners making many of the items that we
buy in our supermarkets.
In a recent address to the President of the
United States, Harry Wu pointed out some basic facts about China: China is still
a regime where the basic rights of citizens are violated daily. The government
probably executes between 8,000 and 10,000 prisoners each year, and these men
and women are not given fair trials.
The latest and perhaps most grisly
aspect of this modern form of slavery (apart from arbitrary execution and
beatings once in jail) is the harvesting of organs for profit from both living
and executed prisoners. Wu and his colleagues estimate that 95% of the organ
trade comes from executed prisoners and that China’s one child policy of birth
control includes forced abortion and sterilization sponsored by state
authorities on a massive scale.
Wu emphasizes that there is no freedom of
religion in China and that the government has infiltrated all denominations by
sponsoring "patriotic committees" whose job it is to spy on the faithful and
subvert their independence. This is paralleled by over a quarter of a million
government-employed Internet monitors who censor any criticism of the
government. Ironically, a "concern" for the security of Olympic athletes has
allowed the Chinese government to increase their surveillance of both "hosts"
and visitors.
You may have now realized why the products in those dollar
stores in downtown Toronto are so cheap. No doubt some of the material is
produced by slave labour in China. Laogai factories provide Western consumers
with everything from tools and foodstuffs to bracelets, Christmas tree lights
and Christmas trees.
In the year 2003 the word "Laogai" officially
entered the Oxford Dictionary. Although the Chinese government routinely accuses
its critics of lying in order to besmirch the good name of China and the Chinese
people, the government’s denial of the conditions in their slave labour camps is
identical to the tactics of Hitler and Stalin. They also denied their critics
and blamed the inventions of malicious "enemies." It is the usual strategy of a
totalitarian state that enslaves its own people, claims that its critics are
liars and simultaneously hosts mass spectacles such as this summer’s Olympics
where Canada’s best athletes are now competing for medals. It is the latest
version of the "big lie."
The Canadian sports establishment is full of
praise for our athletes who are competing in Beijing. No major Canadian sports
organization has suggested that our athletes should not take part in the Games.
There is no ban on their participation. Clearly they have forgotten what one of
their own heroes, Sammy Luftspring, taught them in the 1930s. Sammy would have
agreed with the late Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who once wrote that in countries
like the former Soviet Union and contemporary China, "the lie has become not
just a moral category, but a pillar of state." Unfortunately Sammy Luftspring
died in 2000. He is no longer around to remind us of this simple truth.
National Post
[Photo: Children in minority costumes carry China's national flag during the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games at the National Stadium on August 8. Organizers of the Games acknowledged on Friday that the children dressed in ethnic costumes from around China who carried the Chinese flag at the ceremony were not actually from those ethnic groups, some of which have tense relations with the government. Mike Blake/Reuters.]