Author Topic: The Beijing Olympics are not the Berlin Olympics — they’re worse  (Read 58 times)

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Offline Kamaji

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The Beijing Olympics are not the Berlin Olympics — they’re worse

By Dominic Green
February 10, 2022

A dictatorship persecutes a minority but secures a propaganda coup by hosting the Olympics. The US Olympic committee plays along, the athletes say politics is none of their business and US corporations look the other way so they can make money.

But the 2022 Beijing Olympics are not the 1936 Berlin Olympics. They’re worse — and not just for the democracies, who are caught flatfooted once more.

The legend of 1936 is largely true. Jesse Owens really did outpace the master race in the foot race. The Nazis really did pull off a propaganda coup. They had Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl on their agitprop team, and Joseph Goebbels, the inventor of the Big Lie training technique, as head coach.

Speer’s stadium designs and Riefenstahl’s camerawork remain the unacknowledged templates of modern bread and circuses. To this day, budding dictators who dream of going for gold in the autocracy Olympics start their day with the Goebbels workout.

But that’s as far as it goes for the parallels between Berlin then and Beijing now.

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Source:  https://nypost.com/2022/02/10/the-beijing-olympics-are-not-the-berlin-olympics-theyre-worse/