Just in Time for the Beijing Olympics

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an online exhibition about the 1936 Nazi Olympics:

In August 1936, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship scored a huge propaganda success as host of the Summer Olympics in Berlin. The Games were a brief, two-week interlude in Germany’s escalating campaign against its Jewish population and the country’s march toward war. This site explores the issues surrounding the 1936 Olympic Games—the Nazis’ use of propaganda, the intense boycott debate, the history of the torch run, the historic performance of Jesse Owens, and more.

Change a few names and nouns and the above description fits the 2008 Olympics rather closely, no? Congratulations to the USHMM on its fine sense of timing. Let’s hope that the Chinese government benefits less from the 2008 games than Hitler did from the ones in 1936.