Olympic Torch Protests 72 Years Too Late
I love how this whole Olympic debate has blown up in recent days. Should Konnie Huq have stuck to her principles and refused to carry the torch? Should she have just fucked off back to kids TV?! Fair enough Steve Redgrave and Dame Kelly Holmes - but Peter Kenyon? The Sugababes? ON A BUS?!
The whole thing was a great example of how to fuck things up in a way only the British could. A £2m price tag for security that amounted to Rick and Jim from the Met rugby tackling anyone not wearing a shellsuit. A corporate jolly where Coca Cola and Samsung picked some runners (because the aforementioned Kenyon and Denise Van Outen do so much for track and field athletics, and are keen supporters of synchronised swimming I expect). Check the route - Wembley (a year late, £200m over budget), O2 Dome (remember that shambles, symbolism I tell you, of an empty political party with “no politik”) - in fact they could only have made it worse by flying it into Terminal 5 at Heathrow (fingers crossed it didn’t get buried under hundreds of lost bags).
Don’t even start on the politics - China is bad. Fine and accepted by everyone who isn’t within China’s vast borders. People in China, I’m not so sure they all hate the regime as much, although obviously the BBC will only ever give air time to the dissenting voices - there’s no fun in balance. But the point is, its all irrelevant.
The Olympic Torch relay was started by none other than spectacular Nazi fascist tosspot Adolf Hitler (well credit where credit is due, it was Goebbels idea). The idea was a flame travelling from Athens to Nazi Germany would symbolically link the blossoming Nazi regime with Olympian ideals. What utter horseshit! We shouldn’t have even crossed the water for that moral catastrophe but go we did and we even stood tall when Hitler refused to shake hands with black athletes.
So the best way to erase the whole sorry prelude to a gigantic war which left hundreds of millions of innocents dead? Bring on the flame! Good PR for the Nazi party = good PR for the International Olympic Committee. See, Hitler was closer to the cretins at the IOC than he could ever have possibly imagined.
So far the only nation to have picked up on this were the Australians in ‘56 - a student managed to hand over his own Olympic torch made of a tin can a chair leg and a pair of pants to the Mayor of Sydney. Suffice to say everyone was pretty embarrassed midway through the party when the real torch arrived.
Anyway, if current world ideals are anything to go by, in 2012 China may relax its rules of free demonstration and possibly even encourage civil unrest on its streets for once. The reason? Chinese campaigners speaking up for the British peoples freedom under the tyranny of a government who have taken it upon themselves to invade two countries in recent years and who shoot immigrants on underground trains.
Filed by Kieran at April 8th, 2008 under Blog, Complaint!, Topical?