The 2024 Paris Olympic Games, promoted as a grand celebration of international unity and athletic prowess, revealed themselves to be nothing more than a grotesque display of imperialist decadence and capitalist hypocrisy.
In a city that once stood as a symbol of revolutionary ideals, the games served as a cheap veneer, unable to mask the systemic rot at the heart of a global order sustained by racist exclusion, imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation. Far from being a unifying event, the Olympic spectacle exposed the hideous grimace of the capitalist and imperialist systems, which dictate who is included in a society of criminal complicity to exploitation and who is cast aside for ‘not belonging’ to this parody of ‘Western democracy’.
Weaponisation of the games
Despite repeated assertions that sports should be a ‘politics-free zone’, the imperialists, and particularly the USA, have continually sought to weaponise sport to further their hegemonic agenda. Back in 1920, as the Allied invasion raged, the Soviet Union was excluded, and the exclusion continued after peace had been restored to its territory.
Instead, through the auspices of Red Sport International, the USSR created a workers’ alternative to the imperialist-dominated Olympics in the Spartakiad, which was expanded from a national into an international movement in 1928 and held four tournaments in Moscow (1928), Berlin (1931) and Oslo (1928 and 1936).
The Spartakiad’s name, derived from that of rebel slave leader Spartacus, was intended to symbolise proletarian internationalism. As a classical figure, Spartacus also stood in direct contrast to the aristocratic essence of the ancient Olympic Games on which the modern ‘capitalist’ Olympics were based.
The USSR had intended to attend the People’s Olympiad in Barcelona (1936), which was conceived as a mass protest event against the Olympics being hosted by fascist Berlin but was cancelled following the outbreak of the civil war. The Soviets were present at the Spartakiad-sponsored 1937 Workers’ Summer Olympiad in Antwerp, Belgium. They began to compete in the Olympic games in 1952 (the last year of the Stalin period).
From the cold war-era boycotts against the Soviet Union to today’s exclusion of Russian and Belarusian athletes, the imperialists have continually used their control of international sporting events to maintain their global dominance in a field they consider not only to be diplomatically important, but which has also become very big business.
Meanwhile, despite all the bluster about defending ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’, the west’s double standards are glaringly exposed when we see them welcoming and whitewashing regimes with appalling human rights records, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, whose genocidal and anti-democratic activities are entirely forgivable since they align fully with western interests.
The participation of Israel in this summer’s Olympics, despite its brazen and ongoing perpetration of genocide in Palestine, which has been repeatedly highlighted and condemned by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, underscored with particular emphasis the rank hypocrisy of the so-called ‘international community’.
While Russian and Belarusian athletes were banned, supposedly because their governments had ‘broken the Olympic truce’ (did anyone tell the Iraqi, Afghan, Syrian, Yugoslav, Somali, Yemeni, Syrian, Lebanese or Palestinian people there was an ‘Olympic truce’?), there was apparently no objection to the inclusion of an Israeli team – despite its members hailing from a society whose systematic project of extermination of the Palestinian people is undeniable and in which almost every member of that society has actively participated.
All of which merely serves to highlight how the ancient Olympic spirit has been transformed into a parody of itself. Today, what remains of it is just about enough to provide make-up to the western drag queen; a ‘pretty’ and ‘delicate’ mask behind which bloodthirsty nations try to portray themselves as benevolent bearers of humanist values.
All while asserting their dominance of a supposedly ‘inclusive’ and ‘competitive’ sporting platform whose parameters are under their full control. Not unlike the way hedge fund managers today place mega-‘bets’ in the rigged stock-exchange casinos of the western imperialist centres of finance capital.
Bemused and outraged reactions from the global majority
But despite the scandalous sums of money squandered, the spectacle of the Paris Olympics ended up falling decidedly flat. Indeed, for most of the watching world, it seemed that the imperialists were intent on broadcasting not their cultural and artistic predominance but their utter decadence and depravity.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova delivered a blistering critique of the opening ceremony and the whole event, which she described as a “massive failure”. Pinpointing a series of shortcomings, from logistical failures to cultural insensitivity, Zakharova’s condemnation extended beyond mere organisational issues (no provisions were made for sheltering either crowds or visiting dignitaries from the pouring rain, for example) to touch on the broader political and ethical implications of the games.
How could an event be advertised as ‘promoting global unity’ that bans competitors from Russia?, she asked. And what hypocrisy for the organisers to use the pronoun ‘we’, usurping the notion of global humanity, whilst excluding millions of people in order to pursue the imperialist goal of isolating and punishing the entire Russian people!
The opening ceremony itself was a disaster, she pointed out, not least because of the arrogance of the organisers in insisting on an open-air ceremony, which forced guests to endure hours of discomfort when the weather turned unseasonably bad. So much for inclusion and safety; it seems that providing such mundane essentials as awnings is a measure only to be insisted on when ‘lesser’ nations take on hosting duties.
As for security and logistics, the ceremony suffered a transport collapse following three arson attacks on the rail system, which the French authorities of course blamed on ‘sabotage’, hinting darkly at Russian forces in play behind the scenes.
Zakharova accurately described the cultural aspects of the opening ceremony as a “mockery”. In particular, she focused on the segment of the ceremony that featured a parade of drag queens; a section interpreted by the majority of viewers as a blasphemous parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting.
Given how many western leaders claim to be devout christians, it was strange indeed to see how christian symbols were upheld not by the collective west (the self-proclaimed ‘christian world’), but by leaders and commentators from outside these decadent heartlands.
Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke for much of the muslim world when he pointed out that Jesus Christ was revered in Islam as a great prophet. For its part, his country was resolute in condemning “any insults directed at the holy figures of divine religions, including Jesus Christ”.
Whether or not one holds religious beliefs, it is a strange sort of ‘cultural inclusion’ which, given free rein to express itself, opts for imagery which cannot but alienate and disgust the vast majority of its global audience. And not only for religious reasons, but also for reasons of common human decency and artistic taste.
Da Vinci’s great work, with its unprecedented skill, its groundbreaking realism and its genuinely humanist content (the product of a time when the bourgeoisie was rising and its art was both optimistic and engaging), has something to communicate to all who behold it, whether they be christian, muslim, jew, buddhist, hindhu or atheist. To turn this rightly revered painting, one of the treasures of humanity, into a mockery of itself, celebrating not universal human themes but a fringe sexual fetish, all apparently in order to make some kind of ‘clever’ postmodern joke, reveals nothing so much as the vast gulf that separates the lives of the imperialist elites and their mandarins from the those of the rest of suffering humanity.
It seems that the imperialists, while encouraging the spread of every kind of superstition for the consolation of the downtrodden, cannot help laughing in their faces as they do so. The gratuitous blasphemies they commit against the religious feelings of those they seek to subjugate are as legion as they are self-defeating.
For most of us, whether religious or not, the themes of common humanity and earthly suffering are no joke. For most of us, life’s struggles are very real, and we are too busy raising our children and paying the rent to engage in drug-fuelled orgies, no matter how insistently such activities are promoted to workers in the decadent, decaying and demoralised west.
Of course, this particular piece of ‘art’ must also be seen in the context of the western campaign to promote the newest and most absurd and divisive form of identity politics: ‘LGBTQI+ rights’. This is the latest permutation of the ‘human rights’ mantle behind which the imperialists try to conceal their profit-seeking motivations and by means of which they try to turn their home populations into ceaselessly warring tribes.
The promotion of ‘sexuality as identity’ and the creation via the nonsense of the ever-expanding initialism ‘LGBTQI+’ of innumerable ‘sexualities’, and ‘identities’, whose members are then presented as ‘oppressed minority groups’ in need of western protection, has become a convenient way not only of fragmenting and diverting populations and forcing them into distracting culture wars, but also of justifying the vilification of states that are in the crosshairs of imperialism.
Instead of complaining that Russia won’t allow itself to be colonised and plundered, one of the narratives promoted by western politicians and media is that our governments are waging war to bring down its anti-democratic, dictatorial, homophobic and transphobic government – all for the greater good of the Russian people, of course, whose societies would be vastly improved by the imposition at gunpoint of ‘western values’ (ie, colonial subjugation and cultural subservience).
Yet many of us inside the imperialist heartlands have been shocked over recent years at the increasingly disgusting images captured at so-called ‘pride parades’ on the streets of western cities. These ‘marches’ have been steadily shifting from the original (always confused) idea that walking down the street to proclaim your sexual orientation (ie, homosexual as opposed to heterosexual) is an important way to overcome social discrimination into ever more outrageous and obscene public displays of every kind of sexual fetish – each one of which is sought to be ‘normalised’ and catered to by a capitalist marketplace keen to deliver people the accessories and ‘community’ that will match their proclaimed ‘identity’.
The net result of all this was the transformation of the once-revolutionary French capital and the once-respected Olympic games into “one giant gay parade”, in the apt expression of Ms Zakharova. And yet there will be plenty on the self-identifying ‘left’ who really consider this a ‘progressive’ act, so totally has this ideology been allowed to capture the direction of workers’ organisations in the west.
Truly Lenin was a thousand times right when he told German communist Clara Zetkin in 1920 how shocked he was to hear how communist women in her country, which was then in the midst of a fierce revolutionary struggle, were making it a priority to hold meetings discussing the ‘sex question’ and forms of marriage ‘past, present and future’ … With the world’s first socialist state under brutal attack by 14 countries, and the revolution in Germany on a knife-edge, what was needed, he said, was not abstract theorising but practical, fighting unity against the imperialist onslaught.
Moreover, the content of their discussions was not only an unnecessary distraction but ended up by promoting an ideology that was positively harmful to working-class consciousness: “Freud’s theory has now become a fad. I mistrust sex theories expounded in articles, treatises, pamphlets, etc. In short, the theories dealt with in that specific literature which sprouts so luxuriantly on the dung heap of bourgeois society. I mistrust those who are always absorbed in the sex problems, the way an Indian saint is absorbed in the contemplation of his navel …
“No matter how rebellious and revolutionary it may be made to appear, it is in the final analysis thoroughly bourgeois. Intellectuals and others like them are particularly keen on this. There is no room for it in the party, among the class-conscious, fighting proletariat.” (Lenin on the women’s question, our emphasis)
