My Take | A Uygur at the Winter Olympics

The New York Times described Dinigeer Yilamujiang, one half of the Chinese Olympic torch-lighting team, as having a “Uygur-sounding” name, as if she might actually not be one. Other publications have speculated that it might not have been her real name or that if she were a Uygur, she must have been forced to take part in the opening ceremony.

It must have been something like, “Either you take part in this highly prestigious international event that would make you world famous and define your career, or else we will jail and torture your entire family, you hear me.”

But, as of this moment, a centrepiece from Slate, the popular online magazine, takes the cake.

“It was a jaw-dropping moment, as if Germany had chosen a Dachau prisoner to light the cauldron at the 1936 Berlin Olympics,” wrote the journalist Justin Peters.

No doubt many Western pundits would have thought of the Nazi analogy, though no one, as far as I know, has dared to say it out loud, yet. I could be wrong, however, by the time you read this. After all, Godwin’s Law of Nazi analogies says that the longer a heated online debate goes on, the higher the probability someone will cite Hitler or the Nazis. As soon as Dinigeer appeared on stage, pundits knew they would have to exercise some brain power to spin it in a negative light.

Slate just grabbed the first chance it had, when the televised opening was barely over, and applied the most obvious Nazi trope. But isn’t the Slate piece inadvertently proving Beijing’s point? However politically useful or convenient using a Jew or a concentration camp inmate to light the cauldron, the Nazis would never have allowed it because someone of an “inferior” race could not possibly represent Germans at the most prestigious sports event of the world.