Games — the world sorely needs them. As French President Emmanuel Macron stated at Lausanne last July, when he made the case before the International Olympic Committee for Paris to host of the 2024 Games, “The Olympic movement represents the values of peace and tolerance that we badly need in a divided world where tensions are on the rise.”

North Korea in 2018 represents these values the same way Nazi Germany did in 1936. Yet it is about to be welcomed to the Games, as Nazi Germany was thanked for hosting them back then. North Korea’s athletes, pom-pom girls, secret agents, spies, police watchers, officials will all enjoy the Games and will show the world they represent a country like any other.

Seoul, which is paying the full tab ofthe North Koreans’ visit, asked for nothing in exchange: not even that the people in the North get the news of the Games and some information on life in the South.

As the Games go on, the torture will continue, the prison camps will stay full and locked, kids will starve, hygiene and sanitation will be as disgustingly inadequate as ever, and the technicians in the underground compounds will refine their nuclear arsenal. Kim Jong-un will not stop until he is forced to. On December 12, 2017, he announced North Korea would become the greatest nuclear and military power in the world.

Now that’s worthy of a gold medal!

Pierre Rigoulot is Director of the Institut d’Histoire Sociale in Nanterre and the author of North Korea: A Rogue State (2007). He