A number of sportsmen and women were this week banned for having taken illegal drugs to enable them score victories unsportingly. They remind those acquainted with Olympic history that Socrates categorised into three those who attended the Games in classical antiquity.
The first came only to sell goods, the second to compete and the last merely to watch.
The Athenian philosopher had the kindest words for the mere spectators, saying they were the only selfless and noble-minded participants. Socrates had disparaging words for those who went only to sell goods.
They were the equivalents of today’s corporate “sponsors” of and advertisers on sporting occasions. Their interest is not in sport but only to get rich. Between these antitheses were the competitors themselves.
While they were to be commended for their skills, even they were interested only in the glory of publicity.
As the Beijing event shows, these respective motivations remain with us today. Since the advent of the modern mass media, the Western corporations have invaded every sporting arena to make super-profits by exploiting the natural abilities of the world’s young people.
Thus whenever their publicists declaim about “the Olympic spirit”, they are merely licking their lips for the cash that will flow profusely into their accounts. For, from their mouths, it is clear that the “Olympic spirit” is not the same thing as sporting and international justice.
Take China. Ever since it won the privilege of hosting the 2008 games, peer states have relentlessly accused it of committing crimes against the “Olympic spirit”. Of course, China has recently committed horrendous human rights abuse internally, especially in Tibet.
And, on our continent it continues to finance many tyrannies, especially the Sudanese government’s hecatomb in Darfur. Thus China’s guilt drips like blood from all the interstices of its political skin. As usual, then, my interest is only to put such crimes in world perspective.
During the many four-year inter-Olympic periods after the Second World War, China’s main accusers today -- Britain and the United States -- have committed human rights abuses that boggle the mind in many more countries than China and, as studies now show, even at home.
The Western hostility to China has two related sources. The first is purely propagandistic. It is that China is a “communist” state. This is complete nonsense. For official China interred communism with Mao Zedong’s bones.
The second is more tangible. It is that China presents a serious threat to the North Atlantic’s traditional econo-strategic world hegemony and this threat is being posed on principles that are purely Western. China is capitalistic and militaristic through and through.
All out propaganda war
Thus, even as the 2008 games come to the end, the West continues to wage an all-out propaganda war on China. Originally, the aim was to vitiate its ability to host the Olympics and thus prevent it from making any capital from it, including through arena advertising.
China played into its adversaries’ hands by riding roughshod over Tibet only months before Beijing. The blunder is inexplicable.
But it is not lost on keen observers that the Los Angeles and Atlanta Olympics occurred in the same years that the US was committing serious acts of aggression in Latin America and Balkan Europe.
It is well known, too, that the corporations are the main spur and the primary beneficiaries of all such terroristic acts abroad. The corporations include the industries that manufacture the illicit drugs -- namely, the very people who make filthy money by selling to sportsmen and women all the energy-enhancing chemicals.
An international sporting meet should be the occasion for cultivating the spirit of comradeship and atonement. Thus the organisers should ban the Western habit of making accusations against others about crimes.
Today’s call for an Olympic spirit seems to issue from a profoundly guilty conscience by the Western corporate family, a class which — in business, politics and even sports — has shown itself utterly incapable of any form of justice.
Their “Olympic spirit” is what Wilhelm Liebknecht (referring to Bismarck’s parliament) dismissed as “the fig-leaf of absolutism” (Feigenblatt des Absolutismus), the sporting equivalent of the word “democracy” from a liberal’s mouth, the sop of economic plunder of the lower classes and weaker nations.
By Philip Ochieng, Sunday Nation,August 24th 2008
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