JEFF JACOBY: Move the Beijing Olympics — or shun them.

Beijing is scheduled to host the 2022 Winter Games. It should not be allowed to do so — not while China’s communist regime is engaged in grotesque violations of human rights and systematic crimes against humanity, including genocide, torture, slave labor, compulsory abortions, religious persecution, cultural oppression, and a brutal antidemocracy crackdown. In an open letter last month, a coalition of 180 human rights organizations implored world governments to boycott the 2022 Games and not let them be used to “embolden” the Chinese government in its “unrelenting crackdown on basic freedom.”

That was what happened in 2008, when the IOC, spurning the pleas of dissidents and activists, permitted Beijing to stage the Summer Games. China, which had never before been awarded the Olympics, avidly sought the propaganda bonanza of hosting the world’s foremost sporting event. The communist regime promised that the games would be a catalyst for internal reform, and international Olympic officials took (or pretended to take) those assurances at face value.

“We are convinced that the Olympic Games will improve human rights in China,” the IOC’s then-president, Jacques Rogge, told an interviewer. They “will have definitely a positive, lasting effect on Chinese society.”

The ghosts of 1936 Berlin laugh sardonically at that last sentence.