The Winter Olympic Games are coming to a close. The final day will be February 18, and the galling fact that China was allowed to host the Olympics is a mockery of all that the Games stand for. We leave these disgraceful Olympics with a meditation on the people suffering all across China — those in concentration camps, those in forced slave labor, and those under house arrest.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), under the tyranny of Xi Jinping, has reached new heights of depravity. It will arrest people off the street, have them meet with “accidents,” or have them be subjected to the mercies of one of the 260 concentration camps around the country (and that’s only what’s been discovered via satellite). These political prisoners are detained for having the wrong religion or wrong ethnicity, fighting for democracy, or simply fighting for basic human rights of their fellow citizens.

What can be expected in these prison camps is incessant torture, brainwashing, and even death. Rape is a regular form of punishment. As one Swedish activist who had the misfortune to know put it, “These facilities are built to break you.”

Prisoners include foreigners and even children. It’s demented and evil.

Chinese Americans who fled from the CCP regime have been telling the American people for years about this human rights outrage. This ranges from calling out ignorant college students to simply telling their story.

National Review has an article by Jianli Yang. He is the founder and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China, an organization that seeks to facilitate a transition from communism to democracy in a tranquil manner. Jianli Yang experienced the CCP firsthand, having participated in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and being in prison in China for five years. He had many thoughts on the International Olympic Committee colluding with the CCP. He writes, “The CCP, enabled by the IOC, is engaging in sportswashing the blood that it has spilled and that stains the five rings.”

The IOC naïvely assumed that by giving the Chinese this opportunity to host the Games again, they would clean up their act. Or the IOC was bribed an outrageous amount of money. Who can say? Jianli Yang points out: “Either way, it turned out that the Chinese government wanted only to use the IOC to change the world’s image of China — a thuggish country whose evil nature, the government insists, the rest of the world just has to accept.”

His voice is far from alone, but some Americans feel that this is a much lesser crime against humanity than, say, racism or climate change. That’s because fighting something with an ever-changing agenda is easier than confronting actual evil.

Our government has been aware of the extent of brutality since 1981. Currently, there are 1,438 people known to be imprisoned by the CCP for political reasons. And yet the free countries of the West are willing to overlook the regime’s atrocities for financial and political reasons.

As we bid farewell and good riddance to an unpopular Olympic Games, it is a sad state of affairs to remember the thousands of lives that are enduring actual oppression.